The Hive

the Southern California strand. One morning he looked

low is on

Youth, by J

this Conrad and be his-to get him. You let your mind open into a cup, and presently after six or seven pages, you find it brimming. If you fall into him deep enough, you get almost w

ind. The day promised heat. We had been up in Canada for the winter, and it was hard to believe that hot sunlight was free. A bro

e re

but there were elephants there. He should have called the story Ivory.... Years afterward, the man, worn to the bone from the world's lies, sets out to penetrate this deepest black of the planet. He reaches the river and follows it for endless days, but the world has

and violence and acquisitiveness-clerks making entries of Ivory-a nation's young men running through the jungles for Ivory-carloads of bright glass beads and painted calico for Ivory-all standards of life and career-building set upon Ivory-murder for that-lives lost, tribes shattered-the leafy heart of a fresh continent seared with the civil flame of greed-commodities dumped in river beds-mails that men would die for torn open by vandal hands-waste, perversity, nothing clean-cut even of crime, the horrible non-initiative of the middlemen.... Al

gers in the sunlight. The war

a workman like that-about any workman. That's why one wants to cast a weep after the passing hordes of middlemen. They can't do work. They don't even

as ligh

dy falls. No, I don't insist that anything goes on in any particular way, but the deep moments of work somehow show a man that the best of him here is but a nexus between a savage past and a splendid future.... It's wonderful to be alive to-day. I believe there a

eer sees the whole, not the part. All the war-lands are in pain. One sees only the part, when one is in pain. Not one man out of a million sees it all. A few Russians see it a

er to the post-office of the little town. The business men of the place were coming in. The first mail had just been distributed.... Grocers, butchers,

d never noticed before how short-armed the race of tradespeople are. Labourers and peasants a

competitive life are paltry ways. They hide their ways from one another, and afterward from themselves. They pluck no fruits; they contrive no short cuts; they do not become intimate even with the commodities of the earth-the very things they worship and pare margins from. They eat infamousl

of conversation. Everybody had read the morning paper at the same time. No one thought of telling anything that his neighbour did not know.... Europe was starving-the Presid

ied back to their shops. Nothing astonished any more. There were no words for the world's woe-no ears for lam

days. Another man made furniture-perfect woods from the forest drying in his kilns and sheds. There was a sweet smell about his shop. There was a weaver and a potter there. The days were

nd or drea

ities all along this coast," he said. "

erica-an earlier stage of the same malignant disease. From the broad and beautiful vantage points of democracy and fraternity-every shop here was a lair, the products, exposed and secreted, a spectacle of moral decay and insensate devouring; every schoolhouse a place of disma

but one who knows that the intrinsic gift of each child is the one thing in sunlight to be promoted, turns away a bit disma

imagination is being put to death-but he believes in the vision of the Founders of America. He believes in the spaciousness and splendour of the American spirit; that the d

the obscene breaking down in America, under intense civil and martial and moral processes. He believes that this breaking down is essential before the building begins. He believes that the future will be built upon the thoughts of men who are great enough to stand apa

l night and day. He sees the planet in one piece. He has crossed all the rivers. He knows the young men of America. He is one of them. He loves America because he knows the rest of the world. He has friends among the Chinese

hina-they are lands, not p

all the background a tentative, swiftly passing thing, all but forgot

meadows for milk, fields for wheat, gardens for honey-the New Race is particular for the perfect foods-foods for the giant