Sunlight streamed in through the open doors of the post-office. Motors going by drowned the soft rustling from the sea. The hell of the outer world trickled in through bits of conversation. Everybody had read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving--the President was ill--railroads in strike, coal famine, prohibitive cost of staples--France cracking with the dry-rot of exhaustion--England ... a voice--Germany choking in her own blood. The tradespeople of the little town by the sea gathered in their bills and orders and advertisements and hurried back to their shops. Nothing astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe--no ears for lamentations--no mind but to buy cheap at the right time and sell dear all the time. We walked back to the shore. * * * * * "I once saw a little town on a hill-side," Steve said. "A grand boot-maker was there, and a man who made clocks with such tools as he had--big noble clocks that ran unvaryingly eight full days. Another man made furniture--perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver and a potter there. The days were long and singing, full of labour and peace. No one multiplied by mechanical means. Every artisan had his apprentices. The age of the apprentices will come back--with a new dimension added----" "Switzerland or dream?" said I. Steve smiled. "They are starting communities all along this coast," he said. "Many are on the quest of the town I saw." We sat down upon the sand again. The sun was higher. White clouds brooded in heaven's own daylight; white wings moved upon the sea, I was thinking about Steve and all he had said. What Conrad pictured in the dark continent existed here in one of the cleanest small towns of America--an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity--every shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of dismal enchantment where competition was not only taught but enforced. Steve knew deeply well when he spoke, that the creative artist, the producer of every real and true and beautiful thing, comes into the power to express himself, in spite of such education, not because of them. One can laugh at all mediocre men occupying seats of the mighty and calling their dead gods to witness that they are right--but one who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit dismally from the spectacle of the standardisation of the child mind--from the wholesale manufacture of middlemen by school system.