Roscoe’s fine young face lighted up with a laugh at his old college chum’s seriousness.

“You’re mistaken, Ranny,” he said.  “I’m not a socialist but a sociologist.  There’s a distinction, isn’t there?  I don’t believe that my series of books will be at all complete without a study of socialism as it exists in its crudest form, and as it must exist up here in the North.  My material for this last book will show what tremendous progress the civilization of two centuries on this continent has made over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood.  That’s my idea, Ranny.  I’m an optimist.  I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love.  This trip of mine among your wild people of the North will give me a good picture of what civilization has gained.”

“What it has lost, you will say a little later,” replied Ransom.  “See here, Roscoe—­has it ever occurred to you that brotherly love, as you call it—­the real thing—­ended when civilization began?  Has it ever occurred to you that somewhere away back in the darkest ages your socialistic Nirvana may have existed, and that you sociologists might still find traces of it, if you would?  Has the idea ever come to you that there has been a time when the world has been better than it is to-day, and better than it ever will be again?  Will you, as a student of life, concede that the savage can teach you a lesson?  Will any of your kind?  No, for you are self-appointed civilizers, working according to a certain code.”

Ransom’s weather-tanned face had taken on a deeper flush, and there was a questioning look in Roscoe’s eyes, as though he were striving to look through a veil of clouds to a picture just beyond his vision.

“If most of us believed as you believe,” he said at last, “civilization would end.  We would progress no farther.”

“And this civilization,” said Ransom, “can there not be too much of it?  Was it any worse for God’s first men to set forth and slay twenty thousand other men, than it is for civilization’s sweat-shops to slay twenty thousand men, women, and children each year in the making of your cigars and the things you wear?  Civilization means the uplifting of man, doesn’t it, and when it ceases to uplift when it kills, robs, and disrupts in the name of progress; when the dollar-fight for commercial and industrial supremacy kills more people in a day than God’s first people killed in a year; when not only people, but nations, are sparring for throat-grips, can we call it civilization any longer?  This talk may all be bally rot, Roscoe.  Ninety-nine out of every hundred people will think that it is.  There are very few these days who stoop to the thought that the human soul is the greatest of all creations, and that it is the development of the soul, and not of engines and flying machines and warships, that measures