_Mrs. Alving._ Oswald, you spoke of the joy of life; and at that word a new light burst for me over my life and all it has contained.... You ought to have known your father when he was a young lieutenant. He was brimming over with the joy of life!... He had no object in life, but only an official position. He had no work into which he could throw himself heart and soul; he had only business. He had not a single comrade that knew what the joy of life meant--only loafers and boon companions----.... So that happened which was sure to happen.... Oswald, my dear boy; has it shaken you very much? _Oswald._ Of course it came upon me as a great surprise, but, after all, it can't matter much to me. _Mrs. Alving._ Can't matter! That your father was so infinitely miserable! _Oswald._ Of course I can pity him as I would anybody else; but---- _Mrs. Alving._ Nothing more? Your own father! _Oswald._ Oh, there! "Father," "father"! I never knew anything of father. I don't remember anything about him except--that he once made me sick. _Mrs. Alving._ That's a terrible way to speak! Should not a son love his father, all the same? _Oswald._ When a son has nothing to thank his father for? has never known him? Do you really cling to the old superstition?--you who are so enlightened in other ways? _Mrs. Alving._ Is that only a superstition? In truth, a superstition--one that is kept like the sword of Damocles over the child who does not ask to be given life, and is yet tied with a thousand chains to those who bring him into a cheerless, joyless, and wretched world. * * * * * The voice of Henrik Ibsen in "Ghosts" sounds like the trumpets before the walls of Jericho. Into the remotest nooks and corners reaches his voice, with its thundering indictment of our moral cancers, our social poisons, our hideous crimes against unborn and born victims. Verily a more revolutionary condemnation has never been uttered in dramatic form before or since the great Henrik Ibsen. We need, therefore, not be surprised at the vile abuse and denunciation heaped upon Ibsen's head by the Church, the State, and other moral eunuchs. But the spirit of Henrik Ibsen could not be daunted. It asserted itself with even greater defiance in "An Enemy of Society,"--a powerful arraignment of the political and economic Lie,--Ibsen's own confession of faith. AN ENEMY OF SOCIETY Dr. Thomas Stockmann is called to the position of medical adviser to the management of the "Baths," the main resource of his native town.