Page:The Diothas, or, A far look ahead (IA diothasorfarlook01macn).pdf/302

 institutions is, that they pre-suppose an average citizen much superior in intelligence and public spirit to the really existing average citizen. The machine is too fine for its work. Too many of our laws seem to be the work of wellmeaning phrasolators, who waste much ingenuity in framing laws that will enforce themselves. These are the devices of perpetual-motion cranks. Others, again, are the work of knaves, who throw a sop to an indignant public in an enactment they are well aware will prove worthless before the ingenuity of quibbling lawyers and time-serving judges. These are the devices of traitors.

It was about this time that we made an excursion to the Winter Garden, of which I had previously taken only a cursory view. While going through the extensive palm-house, which covered several acres, we came to a comparatively open space. In the midst stood, raised on a suitable base, a mutilated, weathered fragment of reddish granite. The material, the shape, and especially the almost obliterated hieroglyphics, roused in me a vague suspicion. On inquiry, I found that this fragment—about one-third of the lower part—was indeed all that remained of the famous monolith whose third erection I myself had witnessed. I was strangely affected. I could not refrain from passing my hands over the very hieroglyphics I had examined with so much curiosity so many, many years ago. Then I had regarded it with awe as a venerable stranger, a survival from the time when history. was not. Now I greeted this, the only stone remaining from the New York of so long ago, the sole surviving object upon which certain eyes had once rested,—I greeted it, and it seemed to me as an old familiar friend.