The shapeless struggle of the elements will begin again on the seared earth when men have slain themselves because they were slaves, because they believed the same things, because they were alike.

I utter a cry of despair and it seems as if I had turned over and stifled it in a pillow.

* * * * * *

All is madness.  And there is no one who will dare to rise and say that all is not madness, and that the future does not so appear—­as fatal and unchangeable as a memory.

But how many men will there be who will dare, in face of the universal deluge which will be at the end as it was in the beginning, to get up and cry “No!” who will pronounce the terrible and irrefutable issue:—­

“No!  The interests of the people and the interests of all their present overlords are not the same.  Upon the world’s antiquity there are two enemy races—­the great and the little.  The allies of the great are, in spite of appearances, the great.  The allies of the people are the people.  Here on earth there is one tribe only of parasites and ringleaders who are the victors, and one people only who are the vanquished.”

But, as in those earliest ages, will not thoughtful faces arise out of the darkness? (For this is Chaos and the animal Kingdom; and Reason being no more, she has yet to be born.)

“You must think; but with your own ideas, not other people’s.”

That lowly saying, a straw whirling in the measureless hand-to-hand struggle of the armies, shines in my soul above all others.  To think is to hold that the masses have so far wrought too much evil without wishing it, and that the ancient authorities, everywhere clinging fast, violate humanity and separate the inseparable.

There have been those who magnificently dared.  There have been bearers of the truth, men who groped in the world’s tumult, trying to make plain order of it.  They discover what we did not yet know; chiefly they discover what we no longer knew.

But what a panic is here, among the powerful and the powers that be!

“Truth is revolutionary!  Get you gone, truth-bearers!  Away with you, reformers!  You bring in the reign of men!”

That cry was thrown into my ears one tortured night, like a whisper from deeps below, when he of the broken wings was dying, when he struggled tumultuously against the opening of men’s eyes; but I had always heard it round about me, always.

In official speeches, sometimes, at moments of great public flattery, they speak like the reformers, but that is only the diplomacy which aims at felling them better.  They force the light-bearers to hide themselves and their torches.  These dreamers, these visionaries, these star-gazers,—­they are hooted and derided.  Laughter is let loose around them, machine-made laughter, quarrelsome and beastly:—­

“Your notion of peace is only utopian, anyway, as long as you never, any day, stopped the war by yourself!”