to wish that the significant individual will always appear and will always do what his instincts tell him to do. On the other hand if one feels, as so many of the less well-equipped do, that in the long run and in the plan of Nature itself the individual is nothing, the type all, and that mass conditions favoring the production of many of the best type are most important, then the airs and dreams of the individual in regard to his personal satisfaction and satiation will not seem so important, the general welfare of each individual of the mass more important than anything else. And this will mean that always the special individual, the genius of any kind, will be curbed and restrained if not actually pushed into the background. And, in the main, life proves this nearly all the time. Attempts at world domination on the part of one individual and another have proved failures, as witness Darius, Alexander, Hannibal, Napoleon, the Kaiser. Yet theories and doxies wear thin with the course of time, and the “still, small voice” of one age is not the “still, small voice” of the next, strange as it may seem. At best, all we have is the individual, not always financial, by any means, or artistic, but one who has dreamed out something: music, a picture, poetry, a machine, a railroad, an empire--anything, in short, that man as race or nation can use or rejoice in. If to have a Woolworth Building, a transcontinental railroad, a Panama Canal, a flying machine, to say nothing of literature and art, means that we must endure a man who is dull, greedy, vain, ridiculous in many ways or even an advocate of every conceivable vice in order to twist his brain into some strange phantasmagorical tendency, the result of which will be some one of these things, there are many who would enthusiastically say, “Then let us have him along with all his lacks or vices, in order that this other may be.” If it is a question of having a Villon or not, provided we cannot have him without having a thief at the same time, then the same or another group would cry, “Let us have the thief and the poem concerning the ‘Snows of Yesterday.’” For my part I am convinced that so-called vice and crime and destruction and so-called evil are as fully a part of the universal creative process as are all the so-called virtues, and do as much good--providing, as they do, for one thing, the religionist and the moralist with their reasons for existing. At best, ethics and religion are but one face of a shield which is essentially irreligious and unethical as to its other face, or the first would not exist.