Nothing but a general increase of interest in the aspect of common things would explain to us the great masters. A revival of interest in the way the world looks is the precursor of painting: the perceptions of every one are quickening. And so we may be sure that we are upon the edge of a better era when the old moral commonplaces begin to glow like jewels and the stones to testify. You cannot expect any one but a scientist to be startled at the movement of a glacier. But if you distribute a few micrometric instruments upon that gloomy ice-field, the American civic consciousness, and if you take observations not oftener than once in three years, you will be startled. The direction of the general movement is absolutely right. But it all moves together. Special signs of progress imply general progress, and hence comes the extraordinary and scientific interest in the awakening of this community. It is like a man lapsed into the deepest coma who is beginning to stir. Watch him, take his pulse, surround him with every apparatus of experimental physiology, and you will find the laws of health, the norm of progress. Art and literature, and that moral atmosphere which makes a society worth moving in, lie on the other side of the great reaction, the spiritual revival which we see now faintly beginning; and it is because these things can be got at only by stimulating American character that these reform movements are of value. Here at least the circulation throbs. Political reform--that is to say, a political life in which men who are personally honest predominate, a politics run by ideas--will come in as fast as the public develops ideas, and not before. But an idea is something very different from what you who read this think it is. An idea is a thing that governs your conduct all the time. For instance, you assent to the notion of independence in politics; you understand the lost-cause theory, but you won’t vote the ticket. Why? You don’t want to get out of your class. The relations between thought and action in you are not normal. Half of your brain has never functioned, and the paralysis shows in your politics. You have no idea. It is not this sort of idea that expels rascals or makes books or music. What passes for political thought in your vocabulary is like the phantasma in the brain of the Indian priest who is buried with the corn growing above him. The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.