Alas! Thus in the eighteenth period of our era had Authority cleared the ground. It had burned, hanged, shut up in the Bastille all cavillers, and just as the scheme had a chance to work it crumbled suddenly to pieces in the blood and smoke of revolutions. Democracy had no fear of tragedy from the very nature of its principles, but it had decreed liberty, and liberty began to be taken to doubt its conclusions. There began to arise voices bewailing the flesh-pots and the lentils of the ruined House of Bondage. Democracy had brought much good: that was not denied, but alas, what of the old dear things it had swept away, the sweet loyalties, the ties between server and served. The enormous social and political edifice reared by feudalism had had black dungeons, noisome cloacæ, no doubt, but what of its rich carvings, of its dim, tender lights filtered through flowered traceries? Where was its romance, its pageants and revels? The rectangular, ugly, wholesome building, which democracy had substituted as a dwelling for the soul of man, with its crude, broad light flooding every corner, failed to satisfy many who forgot all the bitter inconvenience of the ancient castle, remembering in homesick longing only its ruined beauties and hoary charm. Science in its hard unsentimental fashion commenced to demonstrate the fallacy of the heart's ardent reasoning. She stripped the lovely veil from nature's face, and showed the tender springing grass of the fields, the flushed orchard blossoms, the nesting bird, the painted insect floating in the breeze,--all, all engaged in a ferocious battle for life--trampling on the weak, snatching the best food, always either devouring or devoured. It had been decreed with thunderous finality that the feeble should be by law placed on equality with the strong, and this was announced as the evident intention of beneficent nature. Science, however, relentlessly demonstrated that nature was not beneficent; that in fact she was a heartless snob, and that to "Nature's darling, the Strong," she ruthlessly sacrificed multitudes of the helpless. Democracy had made itself the champion of the humble, had cursed the greedy and powerful; science proved that the humble and unaggressive were doomed, as was proved by their not surviving in the terrible struggle for life that was raging in all forms of nature, and of which the human mélee was but an articulate expression. The conviction that humanity had once known perfect equality, and that freedom had been filched by the unscrupulous, was shown to be quite unfounded. Rousseau's Contrat Social was made absurd by Darwin's Descent of Man. All research tended to prove that from the earliest Pliocene it was not the weak or the humble, but he who "Stole the steadiest canoe, Eat the quarry others slew, Died, and took the finest grave,"