“There are such men among Americans. Hercules did it. How? Certainly not by licensing Cerberus to remain chained down in Pluto’s regions. What Hercules did do, was this: he brought Cerberus a morsel fresh from the feast of the ‘gods of Olympus’; and Cerberus, at the taste, aflame for more, burst his chains, and willingly he went away with Hercules to the upper air, where such feasts awaited him.
“Men of America, the trouble with our nation is, there is a dearth of deities at our Capitol! There is still a lack of Herculean power! We want more there at the moral-feasts of our Olympus, the flavor of which would be new to our desiring, fighting, frenzied Cerberi! It is not that our ‘masses’ are so greatly degraded. It is that our superiors are so little superior; are, in fact, so much at one quality with the chained Cerberi, that, for the gift of Cerberus, no man has yet been able to bring him to the upper air. Worse than that, faith is nearly gone, that there is any upper air, or that there are at our Olympus any Capitolian gods.”
“No. The smoke of hades and the ‘sop’ flung up by Pluto are there; and the snapping of the jaws of the Cerberi-congress, as they jump this way and that to catch ‘the sop.’ These things are there,” said Elkhorn.
“Plus—some men who are to be honored,” said Paul Palmer. “Still, that is only partly the fashion of that place,” continued he; “the smoke of the torment still ascends. But the question there honestly today is, What is to be done about it? There is an upper air somewhere, and there are men in the Congress of the United States, and in the parliament of Britain, and in the legislative bodies among the peoples of every country in the world, who are seeking for these heights.” He halted, then looking out from under his deep brows, in intensity of upflaming hope, he said with ferocious directness:
“Ethel Daksha, I ask you, what can be kept restrainingly before the masses, if (according to your idea of liberty) we take away from them fear of punishment? If no man or woman is amenable to any other, will it not be grab, tear and carnage, by the hundred-headed-monster?”
“What is it now?” said Ethel, “when everyone is presuming to frighten and to dictate to everyone else? But I will ask a better question than that. I will ask if you are kept up to duty by fear of punishment? If not, by what?”
It was long before he spoke, and no one thought of breaking the silence, for it was a solemn one.
“Whatever rectitude there is in me,” he said, “comes from an inherent repugnance to making chains for myself by forming habits that would fit me to dwell in Pluto’s region. Yes, it is a repugnance to the smoke, stench and torment of the Pluto-cratical domain, which was graphically and practically explained to me in earliest childhood, by my most vigorous mother. It is this deep-seated repugnance to moral smoke, stench and torment, which keeps me up to my idea of duty. And then, Miss Ethel, I certainly am not better than other men, but I surmise I was vastly better taught than some men are, from babyhood, and before birth. For, like thousands of men everywhere today, there comes to me a sort of homesick, perplexed feeling, at having to sojourn amid such ‘hell-let-loose’ conditions as (so-called) society today represents. But we all seem to be chained, paralyzed, hypnotized,—heaven knows what, and unable to break up the influence, which has its grip on the church, and which the church wants to clamp on to the state.”
“Paul Palmer,” said Ethel, with Quaker-like simplicity, “if thy mother had been at the Capitol, those who now conduct like Cerberi would have long since known themselves for what they are—not brutes, but interiorly pure spirits—perplexed and homesick at having ever to breathe the miasma of the Plutonic shores.
“Look at this picture.” Ethel showed one of Flaxman’s engravings of Psyche in the lower regions: a fair spirit, standing in a dark defile, gazing upward in a maze of wonder, as with hope astrain. “Believe me, brothers, that is the spirit of the new age. A beautiful thing, intelligently expectant of soon being itself. We are all immortal men, and those whom Pluto seems to have chained, are not chained except by the fetters of one delusion—they deludedly think themselves beasts. But they are inherently of the so-called Dios Kouroi. And the Dios Kouroi know there is food in the upper air, and place and pleasures there convenient for the hundred-brained Cerberi who are but undeveloped gods.