I have called the process "deterioration," but that, of course, is matter of opinion. A Cabinet Minister, at a recent Conference in London, is reported to have congratulated the press on its progressive improvement during recent years. And Lord Northcliffe is a peer. The more the English press approximates to the American, the more, it would seem, it may hope for public esteem and honour. And that is natural, for the American method pays.

Well, the sun still shines and the sky is still blue. But between it and the American people stretches a veil of printed paper. Curious! the fathers of this nation read nothing but the Bible. That too, it may be said, was a veil; but a veil woven of apocalyptic visions, of lightning and storm, of Leviathan, and the wrath of Jehovah. What is the stuff of the modern veil, we have seen. And surely the contrast is calculated to evoke curious reflections.

V
IN THE ROCKIES

Walking alone in the mountains to-day I came suddenly upon the railway. There was a little shanty of a station 8000 feet above the sea; and, beyond, the great expanse of the plains. It was beginning to sleet, and I determined to take shelter. The click of a telegraph operator told me there was some one inside the shed. I knocked and knocked again, in vain; and it was a quarter of an hour before the door was opened by a thin, yellow-faced youth chewing gum, who looked at me without a sign of recognition or a word of greeting. I have learnt by this time that absence of manners in an American is intended to signify not surliness but independence, so I asked to be allowed to enter. He admitted me, and resumed his operations. I listened to the clicking, while the sleet fell faster and the evening began to close in. What messages were they, I wondered, that were passing across the mountains? I connected them, idly enough, with the corner in wheat a famous speculator was endeavouring to establish in Chicago; and reflected upon the disproportion between the achievements of Man and the use he puts them to. He invents wireless telegraphy, and the ships call to one another day and night, to tell the name of the latest winner. He is inventing the flying-machine, and he will use it to advertise pills and drop bombs. And here, he has exterminated the Indians, and carried his lines and his poles across the mountains, that a gambler may fill his pockets by starving a continent. "Click—​click—​click—​Pick—​pick—​pick—​Pock—​pock—​pockets." So the west called to the east, and the east to the west, while the winds roared, and the sleet fell, over the solitary mountains and the desolate iron road.

It was too late now for me to reach my hotel that evening, and I was obliged to beg a night's rest. The yellow youth assented, with his air of elaborate indifference, and proceeded to make me as comfortable as he could. About sunset, the storm passed away over the plains. Behind its flying fringes shot the last rays of the sun; and for a moment the prairie sea was all bared to view, as wide as the sky, as calm and as profound, a thousand miles of grass where men and cattle crept like flies, and towns and houses were swallowed and lost in the infinite monotony. We had supper and then my host began to talk. He was a democrat, and we discussed the coming presidential election. From one newspaper topic to another we passed to the talk about signalling to Mars. Signalling interested the youth; he knew all about that; but he knew nothing about Mars, or the stars. These were now shining bright above us; and I told him what I knew of suns and planets, of double stars, of the moons, of Jupiter, of nebulae and the galaxy, and the infinity of space, and of worlds. He chewed and meditated, and presently remarked: "Gee! I guess then it doesn't matter two cents after all who gets elected president!" Whereupon we turned in, he to sleep and I to lie awake, for I was disturbed by the mystery of the stars. It is long since the notion of infinite space and infinite worlds has impressed my imagination with anything but discomfort and terror. The Ptolemaic scheme was better suited to human needs. Our religious sense demands not only order but significance; a world not merely great, but relevant to our destinies. Copernicus, it is true, gave us liberty and space; but he bereft us of security and intimacy. And I thought of the great vision of Dante, so terrible and yet so beautiful, so human through and through,—that vision which, if it contracts space, expands the fate of man, and relates him to the sun and the moon and the stars. I thought of him as he crossed the Apennines by night, or heard from the sea at sunset the tinkling of the curfew bell, or paced in storm the forest of Ravenna, always, beyond and behind the urgency of business, the chances of war, the bitterness of exile, aware of the march of the sun about the earth, of its station in the Zodiac, of the solemn and intricate wheeling of the spheres. Aware, too, of the inner life of those bright luminaries, the dance and song of spirits purged by fire, the glow of Mars, the milky crystal of the moon, and Jupiter's intolerable blaze; and beyond these, kindling these, setting them their orbits and their order, by attraction not of gravitation, but of love, the ultimate Essence, imaged by purest light and hottest fire, whereby all things and all creatures move in their courses and their fates, to whom they tend and in whom they rest.

And I recalled the passage:

"Frate, la nostra volontà quieta
Virtù di carità, che fa volerne
Sol quel ch'avemo, e d'altro non ci asseta.

Se disiassimo esser più superne,
Fôran discordi gli nostri disiri
Dal voler di Colui che qui ne cerne;