Page:Under Dispute (1924).pdf/177

 shall go no further," is his conclusion. "The less religion in the world, perhaps the better."

Humanity and its creeds being thus disposed of, there remained only the animals to contemplate with satisfaction. "Three quarters of man's misery," says the diary, "comes from pretending to be what he is not, a separate creation, superior to that of the beasts and birds, when in reality they are wiser than we are, and infinitely happier."

This is the kind of thing Walt Whitman used now and then to say, though neither he nor Sir Wilfrid knew any more about the happiness of beasts and birds than do the rest of us. But that brave old hopeful, Whitman, would have laughed his loudest over Blunt's final analysis of the situation: "All the world would be a paradise in twenty years if man could be shut out." A paradise already imaged by Lord Holland and the poet Gray: