And does there not lie contiguous to these ancient lands of rest that pagan Garden of Proserpine of which Swinburne sang:
"Here, where the world is quiet,
Here, where all troubles seem
Dead winds' and spent waves' riot
In doubtful dreams of dreams,"
It is a garden sought of those who "thank whatever gods there be"
"That even the weariest river
Winds somewhere safe to sea."
Beautiful as apocalyptic vision, but dangerous as a way of life, is the social state which for centuries men have accepted more or less literally as the summum bonum of eternal life, as a just recompense for a variety of good deeds ranging from the ascetic renunciation of "the heavy and the weary weight of all this unintelligible world," to a complete sacrifice of self in some one of the world's lost causes. It is a society of conspicuous leisure and conspicuous waste, idleness, soft white raiment, and the fine arts, wherein the Children of the Heavenly King toil not, neither do they spin, and evince no sympathy for those who do. It is a community such as might tempt a complacent aristocracy and a well-nourished clergy of the Middle Ages, and a little later the materialist, the fanatic dreamer, and (paradoxically enough) the morbid, conscientious, Puritan woman, at the same time that it stirred the primitive imagination of a negro camp-meeting. But less and less does it seem likely to attract in even figurative guise the self-respecting worker of to-day. Nearer to our time are Kipling's jolly mariners who reply:
"Must we sing forevermore
On the windless, glassy floor?
Take back your golden fiddles and we'll beat to open sea!"
So, when we finish making the world safe for democracy, can we not invade our traditional heaven, and dethrone the hierarchical aristocracy of that Kingdom? When on earth we have beaten our swords into ploughshares, having broken down economic barriers and
