A few summers ago I spent a happy week at the famous Assembly Grounds on the borders of Chautauqua Lake.  The moment one treads that sacred enclosure, one feels one’s self in an atmosphere of success.  Sobriety and industry, intelligence and goodness, orderliness and ideality, prosperity and cheerfulness, pervade the air.  It is a serious and studious picnic on a gigantic scale.  Here you have a town of many thousands of inhabitants, beautifully laid out in the forest and drained, and equipped with means for satisfying all the necessary lower and most of the superfluous higher wants of man.  You have a first-class college in full blast.  You have magnificent music—­a chorus of seven hundred voices, with possibly the most perfect open-air auditorium in the world.  You have every sort of athletic exercise from sailing, rowing, swimming, bicycling, to the ball-field and the more artificial doings which the gymnasium affords.  You have kindergartens and model secondary schools.  You have general religious services and special club-houses for the several sects.  You have perpetually running soda-water fountains, and daily popular lectures by distinguished men.  You have the best of company, and yet no effort.  You have no zymotic diseases, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police.  You have culture, you have kindness, you have cheapness, you have equality, you have the best fruits of what mankind has fought and bled and striven for tinder the name of civilization for centuries.  You have, in short, a foretaste of what human society might be, were it all in the light, with no suffering and no dark corners.

I went in curiosity for a day.  I stayed for a week, held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear.

And yet what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again, to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying:  “Ouf! what a relief!  Now for something primordial and savage, even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre, to set the balance straight again.  This order is too tame, this culture too second-rate, this goodness too uninspiring.  This human drama without a villain or a pang; this community so refined that ice-cream soda-water is the utmost offering it can make to the brute animal in man; this city simmering in the tepid lakeside sun; this atrocious harmlessness of all things,—­I cannot abide with them.  Let me take my chances again in the big outside worldly wilderness with all its sins and sufferings.  There are the heights and depths, the precipices and the steep ideals, the gleams of the awful and the infinite; and there is more hope and help a thousand times than in this dead level and quintessence of every mediocrity.”