“No: that was not the moral of my dream. That is what bothers me, monsieur my father. There was not any moral: and nothing seemed to be leading up to anything else in particular. I seemed to live a long while, monsieur my father, I had got to be thirty-six and over, without finding any logic and reasonableness anywhere—” “Doubtless, at that advanced age, your faculties were blunted, and you had become senile—” “—And the people that wanted things did not want them any longer once they had got them. They seemed rather to dislike them—” “From your pronominal disorder,” the Duke stated, “I can deduce fancies which are not a novelty here in Poictesme. Such was the crying, in a somewhat more poetic and grammatical version, of our reputed begetters, men say,—of Dom Manuel and of Jurgen also,—in the old days before there was ever a Puysange.” “Yes, but that was so long ago! when people were hardly civilised. And what with all the changes that have been since then—! Well, but it really seems to me, monsieur my father, that—just taking it logically,—now that we have almost reached the eighteenth century, and all the nations have signed that treaty at Ryswick to prevent there ever being any more wars, and people are riding about peaceably in sedan chairs, and are living in America, and even some of the peasants have glass windows in their houses—” “Undoubtedly,” said the Duke, “we live in an age of invention and of such material luxury as the world has never known. All wonders of science have been made our servants. War, yesterday our normal arbiter, has now become irrational, even to the most unreflective, since one army simply annihilates the other with these modern cannons that shoot for hundreds of feet. To cross the trackless Atlantic is now but the affair of a month or two in our swift sailing ships. And we trap and slaughter even the huge whale to the end that we, ignoring the sun’s whims, may loan to nights of feverish dissipation the brilliancy of afternoon, with our oillamps. We have perhaps exhausted the secrets of material nature. And in intellectual matters too we have progressed. Yet all progress, I would have you note, is directed by wise persons who discreetly observe the great law of living—” “And what is that law, monsieur my father?” “Thou shalt not offend,” the Duke replied, “against the notions of thy neighbor. Now to the honoring of this law the wise person will bring more of earnestness than he will bring to the weighing of discrepancies between facts and well-thought-of ideas about these facts. So, at most, he will laugh, he will perhaps cast an oblique jest with studied carelessness: and he will then pass on, upon the one way that is safe—for him,—without ever really considering the gaucherie of regarding life too seriously. And his less daring fellows will follow him by and by, upon the road which they were going to take in any event. That is progress.”