There exists, in other words, in all classes of American society to-day, just as there existed during the Revolution, during the transcendental movement, or the Civil War, an immense mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized American manhood and womanhood. No literature comes from it and no religion, though there is much human kindness, much material progress, and some indestructible residuum of that idealism which lifts man above the brute. Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating thing about these forces of reaction is that they themselves shift and change. We have seen that external romance depending upon strangeness of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmospheric distance of space or time, disappears with the changes of civilization. The farm expands over the wolf's den, the Indian becomes a blacksmith, but do the gross and material instincts ultimately triumph? He would be a hardy prophet who should venture to assert it. We must reckon always with the swing of the human pendulum, with the reaction against reaction. Here, for example, during the last decade, has been book after book written about the reaction against democracy. All over the world, it is asserted, there are unmistakable signs that democracy will not practically work in the face of the modern tasks to which the world has set itself. One reads these books, one persuades himself that the hour for democracy is passing, and then one goes out on the street and buys a morning newspaper and discovers that democracy has scored again. So is it with the experience of the individual. You may fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for you, with the passing of the square-sailed ship. If Mr. Kipling's poetry cannot rouse you from that mood of reaction, walk down to the end of the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean liner come up the harbor. If there is no romance there, you do not know romance when you see it! Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life is the butt of the newspaper paragraphers from one end of the country to the other. But does romance disappear from the farm with machinery and scientific agriculture? There are farmers who follow Luther Burbank's experiments with plants, with all the fascination which used to attach to alchemy and astrology. The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or a wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his farm are analyzed at his state university by men who live in the daily atmosphere of the romance of science, and who say, as a professor in the University of Chicago said once, that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew what was going on within its cell-structure, you would be afraid to stay alone with it in the dark."