The more one dwells on this principle of ours, the more its essential truth and beauty and sanity is revealed. It is so gloriously universal in its scope! Just in so far as man or animal can enjoy rights or suffer wrongs, just so far we demand for him protection. We deem it absurd and irrelevant to ask questions as to his faith or his morals, or his “importance”; as to the number of his legs, or the nature of his covering. It is obviously enough that he can _feel_. We do not say: “He has no friends; let us make him suffer for our good.” We say: “He is in our hands; therefore we are his guardians to a man ... and woman!” And as a result of this loyalty to the least of our brethren, we should find—if we could but make it universal—that we had made impregnable our one line of defence against innumerable dangers and evils—our Chatalga lines, we might call them, of inalienable Personal Rights. And in strengthening these for the protection of the humblest as well as the greatest of our brethren, we render increasingly possible all that makes life interesting, dramatic, and truly worth the living: all adventures of the human spirit. A vista of possibilities is thus opened which promises an enrichment in all the relations of life, an enlargement of the range of consciousness, and therefore of progress, to which we can actually set no limits. Compare this with the unspeakable boredom of the hurdy-gurdy existence of a State-dominated community! Those who have been used all their lives to the atmosphere of civilization, often do not realize how easily it can be destroyed. The curious change that comes over educated persons who have lived long in the backwoods, gives a hint of my meaning. As a rule, the man—or woman—has in some way dwindled. The consciousness and comprehension have narrowed, the perceptions are poorer, slower, less human. The companioning element has almost gone, and one feels that the common meeting-ground of civilized humanity has shrivelled almost to nothing. And so one can but realize that a certain fine flower of the human spirit—which might be still further glorified and developed—can, on the other hand, be swiftly annihilated. Humanity, so to speak, loses its level, like a traveller who has mistaken his way, and walks down hill only to have to come up again, or else to resign himself to remaining on the plains—he who had set out for the mountains! Now, what if this be the reason that civilizations blossom only to decay? I utterly disbelieve in the facile and misleading analogy of the “social _organism_.” Societies do indeed change, but they do _not_ go through an exactly-repeated series of stages after the fashion of “organisms.” It is quite unproved that there is any inherent “principle of decay.” What, in fact, _is_ a principle of decay?