Those reformers, on the other hand, who have been popularly credited with sounding a pessimistic note in all their writings, by virtue of their fidelity to actual conditions and prevailing customs, are chiefly optimists in the truest sense of the word. They are men and women who believe profoundly in the triumph of right, liberty, and justice. Their faces are set toward the morning. The glorious ideals that float before and beyond the present have beamed upon their earnest gaze. They have traced the ascent of humanity through the ages; they have noted the slow march, the weary struggle from age to age of the old against the new, of dawn against night, of progress against conservatism, but they have also seen that the trend has been onward and upward, and what is far more important, they have noted that the prophets, sages, and reformers,--in a word, the advance guard, who have blazed the pathway and opened the vista to broader and nobler conceptions of justice and liberty, have been those who have assailed the popular conventionality of their times; who have been denounced as enemies to social order, as dangerous pessimists and wreckers of civilization. But they have also observed that these honest and far-sighted spirits have set in motion the thought that has borne humanity upward into a more radiant estate. Furthermore, they realize that only by a fearless denunciation of existing evils, by faithful though gloomy pictures of life _as it is_, by raising the interrogation point after every wrong or unjust condition sanctioned by virtue of its antiquity and conservatism and by appealing to the reason and conscience of the people has humanity been elevated. They have studied the problem of human progress profoundly; they have strong faith in the triumph of justice, but they realize that victory can never be attained as long as conventionalism lulls to sleep the public conscience. They know that only by bringing the truth effectively before the people, only by raising questions and stimulating the mind can reforms be inaugurated. The present calls for honest thought, for true pictures, for brave and earnest agitators. Give us these, and humanity will soon take another of those great epoch making strides which at intervals have marked the ascent of man. THE PESSIMISTIC CAST OF MODERN THOUGHT. Much of the best thought of to-day necessarily takes on a gloomy cast, because the most wise and earnest reformers keenly realize the giant wrongs that oppress humanity. They see the splendid possibilities floating before mankind, even within the grasp of the rising generation, if the heralds of the coming day are courageous and persistent; if they sink all hope of popularity, all thought of self-interest; if they are loyal to their highest impulses, regardless of what may follow.