"And what consolation have you to offer me for that?" smiled Truesdale, as he finished. He himself appeared to share but slightly the indignation that his recital aroused; after all, these doings were alien to him--like the domestic difficulties that might be distracting some ant-hill in mid-Africa. But on the others it produced the effect that the recital of specific injuries always does--and should. "This, for example," answered a sardonic young man, whose close-shaven black beard showed through his drawn and sallow skin: "that we are at last playing the game with all the pieces on the board, with all the cards in the pack; with all the elements, in other words, of a vast and diversified human nature. The simple hopes and ideals of this Western world of fifty years ago--even of twenty years ago--where are they now? What the country really celebrated at Philadelphia in 1876, however unconsciously, as the ending of its minority and the assumption of full manhood with all its perplexities and cares. The broad life of the real world began for us the very next year--" "You mean with the railroad riots?" asked Brower. --"and has been going on more fiercely ever since. Take a man who was born in 1860, and who is to die with the century--what would be _his_ idea of life? Contention, bickering, discontent, chronic irritation--a régime of hair-cloth tempered by finger-nails." "Yes," said another, "as you say, we have all the elements at last. And the elements of human nature are unchanging--like the elements of chemistry; and they combine in the same unchanging fashions. Imagine a reconstructed universe without sulphur or nitrogen; or imagine elements that combine to one purpose in this corner of the laboratory combining to another purpose in that. The same human compounds are produced through the ages, and the elements that follow one formula in the old world will follow the same formula in the new--even if they break the crucible. A generation ago we thought--poor pathetic creatures--that our pacific processes showed social science in its fullest development. But to-day we have all the elements possessed by the old world itself, and we must take whatever they develop, as the old world does. We have the full working apparatus finally, with all its resultant noise, waste, stenches, stains, dangers, explosions." "Um," said Truesdale, to whom these observations sounded disagreeably like oratory; "how does all this bear on my case? I _call_ it mine, to observe the forms," he added, with a smile to which no one responded.