This woman has therefore in her hands no feeling of the real relation and friendship that grow between mistress and maid who live the joys and sorrows of years together. By the less fortunate themselves, as well as by her own shallow skimming, her sympathies with the less fortunate are dwarfed. She looks upon her domestic as a serving sub-human animal, infinitely below herself, tolerated because of its menial performance, and barely possessed of the soul which her ecclesiastical tradition says is in every human form. In this deflection of her moral sense, can the hand of secular justice be punishing the wrong-doing of past centuries—the bringing in putrid slave-ships the captured, dazed, Eden-minded, animal-man—“the blameless Ethiopian”—to our shores?
She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because of lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are absurd to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern values are put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with the facts of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered the formative period of her life, there would have been no substance to project the darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is now ill-formed because of the misdirection of its elemental forces. She knows the tenor of her empire, and in truth and secretly she wonders how long her reign will endure.
“And therefore,” says Aristotle, in his Politics, “women and children must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtue of the state. And they must make a difference, for children grow up to be citizens, and half the persons in a state are women.”
Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His first striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience—a result of his optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the present, and having forgotten the values of present-day simple life, he lives in a future of fictitious money values. “All human power,” he thinks, with Balzac, “is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and wait.” He knows his power and he waits.
“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”
“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”
“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”
People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.
Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for building and controlling transcontinental railways and interoceanic fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas, cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for oil borings—he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out his plan.