all through the writing, we are shown as on a stage, the combat of two forces existing in the world to-day, the one making for the democratic community of free men, the other making against it. The free, self-reliant, self-determined individual is set over against the herd-individual, subject to the herd authorities and orthodoxies, and hemmed round with principles which are worthless in moments of crisis for the reason that they are external. The life of art and wisdom is opposed to the life of domination over the persons of others. The clear feeling and seeing which flows from life lived from the centre within, is opposed to the muddled feeling and thinking of men who have never dared trust their intuitions and live their passions out; the intellect which does not dread suspense and is not drugged with fatigue, to that which is in haste to crystallize, to find its little theory of the universe and then disregard whatever will not fit into it. Yet, what the specific ideal of life for which the author is fighting is, we are not explicitly told. Bourne had no time.
Nevertheless, not anything written by any of the new Americans makes more real than do these fighting papers, the sense of the democratic community of people, developed by standards voluntarily assumed and perfected by completest self-reliance, towards which the best minds among those who built the country have moved. The rhythm of these writings brings it again, the sense of men free of the orthodoxies and authorities of state and church, of privilege and radicalism alike; brings it as the breeze in May transports, elusively and yet unmistakably, the breath of unfolding landscapes. It flutters from every dancing line as the rag of a standard tied to a pikehead might flutter in a battle; unnoticed perhaps of the wielder of the weapon, but flaunted by every motion of the staff. It is not a man alone that is speaking. Rather, it is a plane of being demonstrating itself through the substance of words. The light of reason seems to flow from out a beautiful unrealized world, and to make that hidden sphere more real and visible by its tremulous presence; what is expressed here calls to fresher life desire for that city of the soul wherever the desire is latent. What is expressed seems to build a brave high place of stately colonnades and to extend wide and sunshot spaces around us here in the grim jumble of hard lines and shrieking metal and sombre driven hordes. For, it gives joyous sanction to all in man which moves toward
