It is quite certain that the evils said to be afflicting the people of the earth can never be cured by optimistic fancies, no more than can the racking pains and galling sores of the bedridden be healed by their concealment, or by covering them with a blanket of joy. Financially, the man pressed by dire want, fancies the earth is ready to come to an end, whereas, the man with substantial wealth treads in a garden of flowers. The pangs of hunger find a lodging place in the stomach of a pessimist, while a royal good dinner is the joy of an optimist. The man in jail looks through a darkened glass, but his jailer sees all things bright and clear. Optimism is a comparative virtue; pessimism a relative vice. Love is the destroyer of pessimism, while bankruptcy withers optimism at a touch. The contest between the two is like a perpetual game of tenpins, in which the pins are constantly overthrown to be as constantly re-set, and the score of the game is always a tie. Our modern extreme optimists bewilder us with vain ideals. They flatter themselves with high sounding words and vague and dreamy utterances that entangle many, but which mitigate no evils, redress no wrongs, soothe no pain, cure no wounds. “I am so sorry,” said a gentle optimist over a man who had just been run over by an automobile and both legs broken, and she wrung her hands in pity. “I am sorry five dollars worth,” said a rough old heathen pessimist in the crowd as he passed his hat for money to relieve the poor man’s family. Whenever a human wrong has been righted, an enslaved nation freed, a sinner brought to salvation, there has always been a pessimist at the beginning of the work, while the optimist came in later and realized the profits from the work. There is a philosophy practiced by the optimist to be found in the lines of a great poet: “One truth is clear, whatever is, is right.” A philosophy that plunges men down into a gulf of despair, without hope of relief, without power to defend himself and his against oppression and injustice. It is a philosophy which, carried to its ultimate optimistic length, leads to the depths in which are sunk all those who bear upon their banner the legend: “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die.” There is less hope for those who climb to dizzy heights of optimistic congratulation, than for those plunged in the dark gulf of pessimistic woe, for to the latter there shall come a new heaven and a new earth, and former things shall pass away. But the former have forestalled their future abiding place by a creation out of their own presumption. Here we have it—“presumption.” This is a worse condition than the despair of the pessimist, for the latter is constantly striving to get out of the slough of Despond, whereas the former is so puffed up with pride at his own achievements, that he is hidebound in the thralls of his own goodness and perfection.