Page:Tyranny of Shams (1916).djvu/308

292 no hedonist. Thirty years of assiduous study, of much severe trial, of stoical endurance have left me more or less insensible to what men and women usually call happiness. My personal desires are sated in that I may, in circumstances of peace and modest comfort, devote myself to intellectual labour and the employment in the cause of progress of such influence as I have. I see no purpose imposed on life, and I therefore conclude that men and women are free to put such purpose on their collective life as they deem advisable. No purpose seems to be wiser, grander, or more inspiring than that they should seek to assuage the last pang of remediable pain and bring sunshine into the dark places of the earth. For me there is no heaven; and therefore the spectacle of those thousands passing daily and nightly into the silence, after lives of pain, misery, or brutality, while we cling to the barbaric traditions or ill-devised institutions that have come down to us, is an intolerable goad. Let us have criticism and scrutiny of all that we do and all that we believe; and let us have courage to reject all that we think false and purify all that we find corrupted. Let us assert that mighty power of which we are conscious; and, if it take ages to undo all the errors of the past and agree upon a plan of a regenerated earth, let us at least strive to awaken men to a consciousness of their power and of the evils they have to remove. These are my suggestions of what is wrong in life and how it may be righted. It may be materialism, this plain human