Under the direction of this devil, real or abstract, the world has gone rainbow chasing and fallen deep into the Slough of Despond. Conditions have become so desperate that it were well for you and I, who are in the world and of it, to abate somewhat our partisan rancor, our sectarian bitterness, and take serious counsel together. Desperate, I say, meaning thereby not only that it becomes ever more difficult for the workman to win his modicum of bread and butter, to provide his own hemlock coffin in which to go to hades--or elsewhere; but that honor, patriotism, reverence--all things which our fathers esteemed as more precious than pure gold--have well-nigh departed, that the social heart is dead as a salt herring; that all is becoming brummagem and pinch-beck, leather and prunella; that a curse hath fallen upon the womb of the world, and it no longer produces heaven-inspired men but only some pitiful simulacra thereof, some worthless succedona for such, who strive not to do their god-given duty though the world reward them with a gibbet, but to win wages of gold and grub, to obtain idle praise by empty plausibility. They aspire to ride the topmost wave, not of a tempestuous ocean which tries the heart of oak and the hand of iron, but of some pitiful sectarian mud-puddle or political goose pond. Under the guidance of these shallow self-seekers we have abandoned the Ark of the Covenant with its Brotherhood of Man, its solemn duties and sacred responsibilities, and are striving to manage matters mundane on a basis of brute selfishness, with a conscience or a creed of following the foolish rainbow of a fatuous utilitaria and getting even deeper into the bogs. . . .