Common folks cannot understand so-called high-class music, nor the figures of these newfangled dances, and, therefore, they are in a condition which is beautifully illustrated by a tale I used to hear before politics snatched me baldheaded. At an old-time country dance, the fiddlers rosined their bows and took their places on the platform. The floor manager rose and imperiously shouted: “Get your partners for a cotillion! All you ladies and gentlemen who wear shoes and stockings will take your places in the center of the room; all you ladies and gentlemen who wear shoes and no stockings will take your places immediately behind them; and you barefooted crowd must jig it around in the corners.”
THE PARADISE OF FOOLS
PART X
Why mourn and brood over broken fortunes and the calamities of life? Why tarry in the doldrums of pessimism, with never a breeze to catch your limp and drooping sails and waft you on a joyous wave? Pessimism is the nightmare of the world. It is the prophet of famine, pestilence and human woe. It is the apostle of the Devil, and its mission is to impede the progress of civilization. It denounces every institution established for human development as a fraud. It stigmatizes law as the machinery of injustice. It sneers at society as hollow-hearted corruption and insincerity. It brands politics as a reeking mass of rottenness, and scoffs at morality as the tinsel of sin. Its disciples are those who rail and snarl at everything that is noble and good, to whom a joke is an assault and battery, a laugh is an insult to outraged dignity, and the provocation of a smile is like passing an electric current through the facial muscles of a corpse.
God deliver us from the fools who seek to build their paradise on the ashes of those they have destroyed! God deliver us from the fools whose life-work is to cast aspersions upon the motives and characters of the leaders of men! I believe the men who reach high places in politics are, as a rule, men of sterling worth and intelligence, and upon their shoulders rest the safety and well-being of the peace-loving, God-fearing millions.
I believe the world is better to-day than it ever was before. I believe the refinements of modern society, its elegant accomplishments, its intellectual culture, and its conceptions of the beautiful, are glorious evidences of our advancement toward a higher plane of being.
I believe the superb churches of to-day, with the glorious harmonies of their choral music, their great pipe organs, their violins and cornets, and their grand sermons, full of heaven’s balm for aching hearts, are expressions of the highest civilization that has ever dawned upon the earth. I believe each successive civilization is better and higher and grander than that which preceded it; and upon the shining rungs of this ladder of evolution, our race will finally climb back to the Paradise that was lost. I believe that the society of to-day is better than it ever was before. I believe that human government is better and nobler and purer than it ever was before. I believe the church is stronger and is making grander strides toward the conversion of the world and the final establishment of the Kingdom of God on earth than it ever made before.