He further said that this was an individual case and purely the result of my condition. "We do not seek, as a rule, knowledge of individualities in the outside world, but confine our inquiries to matters of general moment. We know of the steps of progress, retrogression, of savagery and butchery and wrong and oppression which dominate an embryotic civilization. Amuse yourself for a time with the pictures and tapestries, and I will give you a record of the outer world's important matters of yesterday."
He opened a cabinet, and assumed the mien of expectant inquiry and meditation. Soon his hands began to move with rhythmic rapidity over the curiously inlaid center of the flat surface of the open cabinet. At the end of ten or fifteen minutes his manipulations ceased, a compartment above noiselessly opened, and eight beautifully printed pages, four by six inches, bound in the form of a booklet, fell upon the table.
It was printed in characters more graceful than our own Roman letters, from which they might have been evolved, or the Roman Alphabet might have deteriorated from what appeared before me. The English language was not used, and yet I could readily read and comprehend the lines. The pages before me comprised a compendium of yesterday's doings of the entire world, and included a note of my own case.
They told of all the military operations in China, in the Philippines, in South Africa, in the far East and in the remote West; of labor troubles in the mining districts of America; the strike of the textile operatives on our Atlantic border; the unrest of the Finns and Slavs; of plots and counterplots, and political assassination and revolution, attempted or accomplished, and the full catalogue of such happenings, with now and then a flash of loftier civilization.
"What you read is being reproduced in every divisional municipality of the Commonwealth, with such a number of instantaneous duplications as may be required for the perusal and study of all who desire to compare tinseled and ornamented barbarism with true civilization.
"Selfishness, oppression, slaughter, pride, conquest, greed, vanity, self-adulation and base passions make up ninety-nine one-hundredths of this record. What a commentary on such humanity! To it love, brotherhood and mutual helpfulness are too trivial for serious consideration.
"The nations and their rulers, differing somewhat as to degree, stand for organized and dominant wrong, based primarily on selfishness—the exact reverse of the conditions that should exist."
"This," said I, still contemplating the pages, "compares with our newspapers."
"As two objects may compare with each other as to bulk or form, but in no other respect. This is to promote wisdom. The newspaper to feed vicious or depraved appetite, as well as to convey useful information. This is the cold, colorless, passionless record of facts and information, from which knowledge and wisdom may be deduced to some extent. Your newspaper is the opposite, taken in its entirety. It consists of the inextricable mingling together of the good and the bad, of the useful and the useless, and the elevating and the degrading, the latter always in the ascendant.
"It foments discord instead of promoting profitable discussion, which is the bridle-path leading into the highway of wisdom. It is built upon the cornerstone of selfishness, the other name of commercialism, and is thoroughly imbued with the spirit of greed.