That is very good reasoning, if you grant the premise—which I do not. I think the old authority is just as apparent as ever; its methods and nature have merely changed. Mr. Lippmann lives among the small minority—the people who have ideas. They represent about one tenth of the population. Of the rest, five tenths have no ideas and the other four tenths have something they call ideas: the rock of ages. It is still there. The new authority is quite as strong as the old, and more insidious because it is more subtle. Young people used to be disinherited when they disagreed with their parents; now they are argued with. The former method left their minds clear; the latter befogs them—and they disinherit themselves. That is the difference. One worked from without in; the other works from within out. Of course it’s much better this way. But this is not the most important problem—this of the old rock of ages. The horrible joke of modern life is that _we have been presented with a new rock of ages_! The rebel program is stated—exactly. More than that, it is in action. The difference between the new issues and the old, to Mr. Lippmann, is that we have now learned what we must do; to me, it is that we must learn to do something else. The battle lies not against the chaos of a new freedom, but against the dangers of a new authority. Before I define, let me illustrate. About two months ago I spent four days in one of our second-large cities—a place of about two hundred thousand people. If I could only describe those four days and their stimulation—to fresh rebellion! The people I saw belonged to the supposedly enlightened inner circles—the representative upper middle class: the ones that still loom very large in comparison to the thinking minority from whom Mr. Lippmann draws his conclusions. Well, I had not forgotten how ignorant people can be, but I had forgotten how cruel they can be. I had not expected their knowledge to have increased, but their hypocrisy to have lessened. I had not looked for vision but at least for a beginning of sight; not for Truth, but perhaps for a willingness to stop lying. And I found scarcely a glimmer of these things. It was ghastly! But the strange part was this: all the time I found I was thinking not of the great faults of their opinions but of the great barrenness of their lives. Over and over the thought kept running through my head: There is no poetry of living in this place!