“But then, why has Los Angeles never had any art? I know what you are going to say--our mental energy goes into real estate advertisements. But joking aside, why?” “Because the people here have never had a struggle. They came into a country already prepared for them, inhabited by tame Indians living on piñon nuts. All the settlers had to do was to subdivide the land, and raise the price once every year. They are too polite to have an art; if anybody makes a crude effort, it is a masterpiece, and we all get together and boost. You can write one feeble book, and live a life-time on your reputation. Los Angeles is a fruit that was rotten before it was ripe.” “What are we going to do?” asks Mrs. Ogi. “We are going to take our choice between a social revolution and a slave empire.” Mrs. Ogi is not certain about her choice; she sits, watching the entrance of the cave out of the corner of her eye--the ancestral habit of expecting some hostile intruder. After a while she remarks, “I notice you didn’t say anything about slavery in Greece.” “It will be better to deal with slavery in the case of the Romans, where its effects show so plainly. The Greeks had slavery, but the force which destroyed their civilization was faction. They had their ‘world war,’ and Sir Gilbert Murray, who knows them by heart, has drawn a parallel between that war and ours; it is so exact that it makes you laugh--or weep, according to your temperament. The Greek struggle was between the Athenian empire, a democratic sea power, and the Spartans, an aristocratic, military people with no nonsense about them. The war lasted for two generations, off and on; they hadn’t developed the technique of extermination as we have. But they had all the social and psychic factors of our ‘war for democracy’--‘defeatists’ and ‘bitter-enders,’ poets and propagandists of hate, statesmen promising utopias after victory, spies and informers and provocateurs, refugees crowding into the cities, landlords raising rents, food famines, rationing of supplies, and profiteers coining fortunes out of the general misery. And of course the demagogues and haters had their way; Athens was ruined and Sparta was bled white, and the Greeks became subjects, first of Macedonia, then of the Romans, then of the Turks.” “Thus endeth the first lesson,” says Mrs. Ogi. “And now for the Romans.”