The only wretchedness in this utopia comes out of the essential human tragedy--the disparity between one’s aims and one’s attainments, between one’s desires and the circumstances that clog their fulfillment. How can unhappiness be altogether wiped out as long as maids are fickle and sexual passion strong? The boatman, for example, has been mated with a beautiful girl who leaves him for another man; but she tires of her new love, and under the eyes of the Guest her uncle brings the pair together, and the drama of courtship and mating goes on all over again; for there are no laws to bind people together when every fibre of their being drives them apart; and in a civilization that deals kindly even with its adults there is no difficulty about giving the children all the care they need. For the most part, those who suffer in love bear their burdens manfully, without wailing over imaginary wrongs which are associated with the worship of impossible chastities and reticences; and they turn their balked impulses into the channels of work and poetry as completely as they know how. Is this the arcadian age of innocence all over again? Are brutality and lust forever wiped out? Not at all. In sudden passion even murders occur, no matter how good and helpful the social order; but instead of compounding murder with an additional murder, the guilty person is left to his own remorse. Use and wont are more powerful than law, and the whole guild that earns its living from the frictions and dissidences of our social life has dropt into limbo. By the same token, the game of the ins and the outs, which we call political government, has disappeared; for the only matters in which our community is interested are as to whether a new field is to be laid under the plow or a bridge thrown over a stream or a townhall built; and about such things the local community is competent to decide, without lining up in a purely fictitious antagonism. 5