'And when her arms have sunk down, wearied with the heavy dumb-bells, the sly masseur omits to rub down no part of her person. Meantime, perhaps there are a number of guests assembled for dinner at home. They wait, overcome with drowsiness and hunger. At last the lady comes, flushed, and declaring that she is thirsty enough for a whole 'magnum.' As soon as she is seated at the table, the footman brings her a bucket of ice, packed about her own special quart of champagne. She drinks half of this before she tastes any food-calling it an appetizer. She drinks so much that it won't stay down, but returns as a cascade on the floor'-and Montague had to stop Mrs. Billy in her too vivid description of the sights which a certain unhappy banker, the husband of this lady, had to witness at his dinner-parties. Said Mrs. Billy, with her usual vividness of metaphor: 'It is like a snake that has crawled into a cask of wine; it takes in and gives out again.'

Mrs. Ogi interrupts. "There is one thing I want to make plain-that you weren't married to me when you published that disgusting stuff.”

"All right," says Ogi; "it shall be entered in the record. But you must understand that I am not to blame for Mrs. Billy's stories."

"You were to blame for the company you kept," declares Mrs. Ogi. "I call that sort of writing inexcusable." "Well, I'll try again," says her husband. "On page 351 of 'The Metropolis' you find a glimpse of the underworld of New York:

"So far had the specialization in evil proceeded that there were places of prostitution which did a telephone business exclusively, and would send a woman in a cab to any address; and there were high-class assignationhouses, which furnished exquisite apartments and the services of maids and valets. And in this world of vice the modern doctrine of the equality of the sexes was fully recognized; there were gambling-houses and pool-rooms and opium-joints for women, and drinking-places which catered especially to them. In the 'orange room' of one of the big hotels, you might see rich women of every rank and type, fingering the dainty leather-bound and goldembossed wine cards. In this room alone were sold over ten thousand drinks every day; and the hotel paid a rental

of a million a year to the Devon estate. Not far away the Devons also owned negro-dives, where, in the early hours of the morning, you might see richly gowned white women drinking.

"Montague was told by a certain captain of police a terrible story about the wife of our very greatest railroad magnate, who lived in a colossal marble palace on Fifth Avenue. As soon as she perceived that her husband was asleep, she would put on a yellow wig as a disguise, and wearing an overcoat which she kept for this purpose, she would quit the palace on foot, with only a single attendant. She would enter one of the brothels in the 'Tenderloin,' where she had a room set apart for herself. There she took her stand, with naked breasts and gilded nipples, bearing the name of Zaza, and displaying the person of the mother of one of our most magnificent young lords of society and finance. She would receive all comers with caresses, and when the madame dismissed her customers, she would take her leave sadly, lingering, and being the last to close the door of her room. Still unsatisfied in her desires, she would retire with her sullied cheeks, bearing back the odors of the brothel to the pillow of her mighty railroad magnate. And shall I speak of the love-charms"

"Most emphatically you shall not!" cries Mrs. Ogi, "I think we've had enough of "The Metropolis,' and I won't hear of its being reproduced in this new book. It's your crudest Socialist propaganda-"

"You're quite sure it's propaganda?" says Ogi.
"Of course. Who would question that?"

"Well then, I've proved one point!" says the other.
"I don't understand."

"I have made you the victim of a mean little trick. Each of those passages starts out as 'The Metropolis'; but then it slides into Juvenal-the sixth satire, dealing with the ladies of ancient Rome. The point of my joke is that you will have to consult the books in order to be sure which is Juvenal and which is me. Of course I've had to change names and phrases, replacing Roman things with New York things. And I've had to tone Juvenal down, because there are some of his phrases I couldn't reproduce

"There are some you have tried to reproduce, and that

you're going to cut out," says Mrs. Ogi. And as always, she has her way, and so it is a Bowdlerized Juvenal you have been reading!

CHAPTER XXV

THE AMERICAN EMPIRE

"You had your fun out of that," says Mrs. Ogi. "But of course I can't judge; somebody who knows about Rome may come along and show that it's all nonsense."

"Those who know about Rome," says Ogi, “don't always know about capitalist America. There has never been such a parallel of two civilizations in all history. I could write, quite literally, a whole book of mystifications -quoting American poets and statesmen and journalists, and mixing in passages from the same kind of people in Rome, and unless you knew the different passages you couldn't tell which was which."

"We still have our republic, have we not?"

"In every presidential election for the past fifty years that candidate has won who has had the campaign-funds; and he has had the campaign-funds because he was the candidate of the plutocracy. Right now we are at the critical moment-the age of the Gracchi. We are trying to rouse the people to action; and whether we succeed, or whether we are going to be slaughtered, as our industrial masters desire and intend-"

Mrs. Ogi's hand tightens upon her husband's arm. She never has this thought out of mind; and whenever in the midnight hours a cat or dog sets foot upon the porch of her home, she leaps up, expecting to see a company of bankers and merchants, clad in their new, uniform of white night-shirts and hoods. Our aristocratic party has what it calls the "Better Roman Federation," and collects lists of the proscribed, and issues secret bulletins to its mobbing parties. Last week, down at Brundisium, our naval harbor, their subsidized mob raided a meeting of wage slaves, beat some of them insensible with clubs, threw a little girl into a great receptacle of boiling coffee, scalding her almost to death, and dragged six men off into the woods and tarred and feathered them.

"What do you really think is coming?" asks Mrs. Ogi.

"There are two factors in modern civilization that did not exist in Rome. First there is the printing press, a means of spreading information. So far as the master class can control it, it is a machine for debauching the race mind; but in spite of everything the masters can do, the workers get presses of their own, and so get information which was denied the slaves of Rome."

"And the other factor?"

"The labor movement. In Rome there were some labor unions, but they were weak and the slaves were an unorganized mob; when they revolted, as they did again and again, they were slaughtered wholesale. But the modern labor movement goes on growing; it trains its members, and gives them sound ideas. So, out of the final struggle we may have, not another empire, and another collapse of civilization, but the co-operative commonwealth of our dreams."

This, of course, is outright preaching; but it happens that Mrs. Ogi has just received a letter about the child who was thrown into the scalding coffee, so her husband gets his way for once. Besides, as he explains, there is nothing more to be said about Roman art, because there is no more Roman art. The plutocracy of the empire had brought themselves to a state where they were incapable of sustained thinking or effort of any sort. The barbarian hordes, which had been besieging the frontiers, broke through and overwhelmed the Roman empire, and so came what history knows as the Dark Ages.

When I was a lad, my Catholic teachers explained to me that these ages were called dark, not because they had no culture, but because we were so unfortunate as not to know about it. I was not able to answer the Catholic gentlemen in those days, but I can answer them now. When groups of human beings kindle the precious light of the intellect, they make it into a torch and pass it on to posterity. That is always their first impulse; and so we may be sure that if an age had no art, it was a dark age.

600

CHAPTER XXVI

THE CHRISTIAN REVOLUTION

It took several centuries for the peoples of Europe to lift themselves out of barbarism and chaos. Then we find a new art developing, an altogether different art, built upon Babylonian and Hebrew foundations, instead of Greek and Roman. It meant an overthrowing of standards, and a setting-up of new values-a precedent of enormous importance to social revolutionists.

What exactly was the difference between Pagan and Christian art? The Greeks said: The human body is the most beautiful thing in the world. To which the Christians replied: All flesh is grass. The Greeks said: Because the body is beautiful, we immortalize it in statues. The Christians replied: We are iconoclasts-that is to say, breakers of marble idols. The Romans said: Material wealth is the basis of individual and national safety. The Christians replied: What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world and lose his own soul?

These Christian sayings meant that mankind had discovered new satisfactions, replacing, for a time at any rate, the customary ones of physical pleasure and domination over others. These new joys came from inside the self, and required a new word, spiritual. To the artist was set the task of making these inner qualities apprehensible, and for this he had to have a new technique. Where the Greeks had carved the body graceful, the Christians carved it with that ugliness which results from the ascetic life. Where the Romans had represented their great men muscular and mighty, the Christians represented them frail and sickly. The Christians reveled in wounds, disease and deformity, taking a perverse pleasure in defying old standards-a process known to the psychologist as "over-correction." The two favorite themes of Christian art became a man-god who accepted all suffering and humiliation, and a woman-god who allowed the erring soul an unlimited number of new opportunities.

Because this new art was trying so often to express the inexpressible, it was driven to symbolism. The painters and sculptors invented outward and visible signs of the inward and spiritual graces: the cross, the crown of