Towards democracy, str. 62

48 Towards Democracy

heard no tidings of what health is; the parson opens his mouth, but no intelligible sound comes forth; the merchant distributes evils just the same as goods.

Do you suppose it is all for nothing that disbelief has gone out over the world; that weariness has taken possession of the souls of the rich, and that fatal darkness enfolds the head of wealth and education; :

That men disbelieve in the human heart and think that the source of power is set otherwhere than in its burning glowing depths: that the powers which they worship are but so many withered emblems of power—dead scorize nodding and jostling over the living lava-stream ?

Do you suppose it is all for nothing that the eyes of brothers avoid in the street, and none sees what is before him ; that the heel is upon the head, and Earth alone regards the faces of them that are oppressed—that the stones in the wintry fields are become confidants, and the ground is sown with compressed thought, like seeds?

[When yet there is peace over the world, as of the Sea swooning away into its hollows; and differences are sullen like rocks at ebb-tide, and brackish dismal mudflats lie between, and the sun stands motionless overhead, and Contempt trickles malarious, and Avoidance and Negation and Fear loom up against the sky, and men cling like rotting weeds about their bases, and the soul stifles for the swingeing life of the waves and the breath of the wind that blows from one end of the world to the other.]

Do you suppose it means nothing that that which satisfied once satisfies now no more (not till the whole round has