The race is very old and it doubtless has many aeons still to live before the cooling of the planet sends it back to its aboriginal state. Nor is there use or sense in imagining that the race might return to the simpler conditions that existed before the era of superfluous things. Things are. Hope must be seen to lie in the direction of their assimilation by the human mind. Here and there different prophets insist that the mind is on the verge of some discovery as large as Columbus’s which will establish a truer balance between it and the matter which now outweighs it. But why put trust in miracles? The madness of the age is more likely to subside gradually, under quiet counsels, as the debauch wears out its influence. Slowly the mind must lift its faith in itself up above its temporary obsession with mere things. It must learn to hold and master all of them which are capable of being held and mastered. It must become accustomed to live among the rest of them as a mountaineer becomes accustomed to live in the city streets after the panic which overcomes him when first he enters them from the high silences and pure outlooks of his native hills. “GOD IS NOT DEAD OF OLD AGE” It is a pleasant literary speculation, and not without its moral bearings, to inquire whether the disorder and discontent and chaos now ominous among men may not arise from the fact that the world has grown too large for us to manage—like a lion cub which can no longer be played with or like another mechanical monster which indeed we have created but which refuses to do our bidding any longer. A man of affairs, a financier certainly not acclimated to philosophic despair and certainly accustomed to govern wherever his hand turns, lately ventured such an explanation. It may be, he said, that there is no solution which our reason can arrive at. We look about us for authentic leaders and see none; we pass in review hundreds of counsels but find none that seem in all ways to suit—unless we are doctrinaires; assuredly of all the schemes we have tried no one has been successful. By what right do we assume that some such device for salvation exists? Plagues have come before for which there was no cure. Our crisis may be one of them. It may be that the day of solutions is over. H. G. Wells would have us search history to find our future there—or at least some track pointing to a future we can reasonably confide in. But perhaps he was just as near the truth in his younger scientific days when he gave us vivid pictures of men who travelled beyond the known areas of our kind, no longer the engineers of their own destiny but drifting about at the convenience of fate. We think of Anatole France, voluptuously contemplating the age when our earth shall have grown too cold for human habitation and men have gradually died away among the ice hummocks of a universal frozen sea. Or, bitterest of all, we remember Thomas Hardy’s fancy of the delegate sent up to God