Page:Forty years of it (IA fortyyearsofit00whitiala).pdf/385

 they had learned the wisdom that confuses demagogues, and amid the interplay of myriad forces, the democratic spirit was ever at work, performing its noble functions. You might have said that the people were inspired, since they united so readily in great constructive work, reducing to order and scientific arrangement all the manifold needs and expressions of the daily life, conquering in the old struggle against nature, providing against all that casualty and accident which make life to-day such a snarl of squalid tragedies and ridiculous comedies that it well may seem to be ruled by none other than the most whimsical and spiteful of irresponsible spirits. It was more than a city indeed, it was a realm of reason, wherein the people at last in good will were living a social life. The eternal negative, the everlasting no, had given way to a new affirmation; each morning should ordain new emancipations, and each evening behold new reconciliations among men. It was a city wherein the people were achieving more and more of leisure, that life in all her splendor and her beauty and her glory might not pass by unhailed, unrecognized even, by so many toiling thousands. It was the vision of a city set upon a hill, with happy people singing in the streets.

These words I know but vaguely express the vision that had come to those two men with the unpoetic names of Johnson and Jones. When I speak of a city where people sing in the streets I am perfectly well aware of the smile that touches the lips of sophistication, though the smile would have been none the less cynical had I mentioned