We today, possessing means of exploring the subconscious mind, understand these unbridled desires as symptoms of infantilism. Here are babies, still reaching out for the moon, and shrieking because they cannot have it; here are spoiled children, flattered by servants and fawned upon by slaves, indulged and petted, never adjusting themselves to the realities of life, but growing up to make heroes and heroines of tragedy. We no longer consider these creations sublime; we call them psychopaths, and the art which portrays them we call a bore. As economists we have explored the social causes of such raging egotisms, and also the social consequences. The plutocracy is not the only class which has unbridled desires; the proletariat has its share, and if one class is permitted to gratify them, and to flaunt them before the world, the only possible consequence is a revolution of blind and bloody revenge. Queen Phedre, frenzied and horror-smitten, saw hell looming hideous before her staring eyes; but she saw no hell compared with what Racine’s audience might have seen, had they been able to look forward a hundred years in French history, and to watch the starved and brutalized mob of Paris dancing the “Carmagnole” in the streets, while the guillotine rolled into its bloody basket the heads of the great-grandsons and great-granddaughters of those splendid, unbridled ladies and gentlemen who made up the “grand monarch’s” splendid, unbridled court. CHAPTER XLII THE HARPOONER OF HYPOCRISY In vain do kings and emperors set up the doctrine that art exists for courts; that only the great ones of the earth are the proper theme for art works, and courtiers and court critics the true judges of taste. Deeply planted in the human heart is an instinct, declaring that all human beings are of consequence; and men of genius arise who follow that instinct, and write about ordinary people, and appeal to wider and wider groups of the community. We shall now see this happening to the exclusive and haughty court of the “grand monarch.” A world genius appears, who breaks the established barriers, sets all France to arguing over his ideas, and helps to make the drama of Europe the social force which it is today.