"My boy, you've only to look about you. Mind, I don't say _within_. No, no"--his voice dragged--"one sees there one's own failures and defeats, and one is blinded to the larger good. I'm no sentimentalist, either." He flared up. "I'm not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of this harvest. But come!"--he pulled his shambling figure out of the chair and stood before the fire almost erect--"life is nobler than men thought. Some men's share is to see, before they stumble into the dark, the light that other men shall walk by--see it, and tell the shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand." "And those who stumbled before the light came near enough?" "Oh, well, at most they 'fell on sleep.'" "Ah-h-h!" "Such men are no worse off than Plato, and Christ, and Buddha. The great thing was to know there was light." "I wonder the memory of those old hopes doesn't lessen your faith in the new." "Why? Progress isn't a passing fashion; it's the _life_ principle, another name for the power that makes for righteousness, the impulse towards the light, the force that pushes the acorn sprout out of the mould, and goads man night and day towards some ultimate good. As long as there's life, my boy, it will be better and ever better life. _It's the law._" As he stood with arm extended, girt about with sudden authority, Ethan had a vision of Moses on Mount Sinai. This was too old an aspect of her father for Val to be much impressed. She watched the effect on her cousin, however, with feverish interest. "You're an incurable optimist, uncle," he was saying. "Ah, don't mistake me. I'm not one of those who drug themselves with dreaming." No Hebrew prophet now; it was the keen, practical-minded American who spoke. "The new order won't be brought about by idle optimism any more than by prayers, or politics, or private magnanimities." "How, then?" "It will be the direct result of a higher standard of public health." He spoke briskly, as one making a business proposition. "_Health!_" echoed Ethan sharply--"health of the public conscience, I suppose you mean." "Health of the body first of all," growled the prophet. "Health mental and moral as the natural result. But since the Maker of the world established the physical basis æons before he bothered about the soul, the first thing _we_ have to do is to make strong our foundations, since for ages we've systematically neglected them, when we haven't occupied ourselves in actively undermining them. The halt, the blind, the diseased, are not for this New Jerusalem. Its first condition of citizenship will be _mens sana in corpore sano_. And the beauty of it is that, to attain this health, no one man's welfare will avail. All men must share it, or all men are menaced. It means a perfect Socialism." "Ah, Socialism!"