And Conquest is dragged captive through the deep.
Love, from its awful throne of patient power
In the wise heart from the last giddy hour
Of dread endurance, from the slippery steep,
And narrow verge of crag-like agony, springs,
And folds over the world its healing wings.
Gentleness, Virtue, Wisdom and Endurance-
These are the seals of that most firm assurance
Which bars the pit over Destruction's strength;
And, if with infirm hand Eternity,

Mother of many acts and hours, should free
The serpent that would clasp her with his length,
These are the spells by which to reassume
An empire o'er the disentangled doom.
To suffer woes which hope thinks infinite;
To forgive wrongs darker than death or night;
To defy power which seems omnipotent;
To love and bear; to hope till hope creates
From its own wreck the thing it contemplates;
Neither to change, nor falter, nor repent;
This, like thy glory, Titan, is to be

Good, great and joyous, beautiful and free; This is alone Life, Joy, Empire and Victory!" I have sought in this brief essay to point out the most probable interpretation of the meaning of Prometheus in the Eschylean thought. Of Shelley's meaning there can be no doubt; and, starting from his drama and running back through Eschylus we find the thread unbroken. Taking Eschylus alone, I see no difficulty in the interpretation; for Prometheus' own catalogue of what he had done for man, with the consequences to himself, show me conclusively that Eschylus meant to show the trials and hardships of all discoverers and reformers in the face of the ignorance, bigotry, conservatism and superstition of society. He could, not speak his thought fully without danger to his life; he suffered and smarted under the scourge of the priesthood and withered under the tyranny of the whiffle-minded Athenian democracy, until his soul was sick of longing, striving and defeat. Like all great souls, misunderstood by his age, he looked to the future for vindication; and he merely put into the mouth of Prometheus his own trials and hopes.

But there is a still larger view of the Prometheus idea as developed by Eschylus and Shelley. It is a favorite idea of the prophets of antiquity all over the earth, that sometime a liberator of the

souls of men from all bondage and tyranny is coming. India, China, Persia, Egypt, Palestine, Scandinavia, Mexico and so on, have furnished their prophetic vision of the Coming One. Why not Greece? I believe we have it here. In the hope, faith, certainty of coming deliverance, Eschylus was a Christian before Christ. Shelley disgusted with the tangible, visible body of so-called Christianity, was yet a prophet of higher Christian truth and a fuller spiritual redemption.

The Logos Doctrine or Purpose of God in the creation of Man and in the progress of the world is another idea involved in these poems. According to this doctrine, there was planted in the first man born into the world the likeness of God or the germ of the highest spiritual manhood. This Logos or Man-Spirit constantly drives men on toward the realization of the purpose of creation the evolution of the highest type of being. It dwells in some more richly than in others and places them in advance of their age. It is a universal truth seen by Plato, no less clearly than by Isaiah, that when a man comes who is approximately perfect, i. e., relatively to his associates, they at once proceed to impale or crucify him. Eschylus also saw it and painted it for us in Prometheus, making Jove stand for the ignorance and bigotry of society.

And the last feature of these dramas I shall call attention to as marking them a part of universal religious thought or instinct, is the plain unwavering hope they contain and faith, they exemplify in a coming kingdom of God among men. For this instinct is universal; except in the bigoted brains of a recreant Church that will not have it so because they do not want it so. The Sermon on the Mount is a universal sermon appealing to universal instinct and intended for universal application. Only the selfprofessed Christian Church dares or wills to call it unpractical. The native

instinct of the common human heart receives it gladly and believes in it. This Kingdom of Heaven was the battlecry of Eschylus and Shelley, and the modern world will make it the slogan of victory over all human wrong and

oppression. It is the watchword of that higher liberty which knows no law because it needs no law-except the Law of Love! F. H. GILE.

Boston, Mass.

"It's strange to me," said Ignaty with a skeptical but embarrassed smile.

"What's strange?" "This: at one end they beat you in the face; at the other they wash your feet. Is there a middle of any kind?"

The door of the room was flung open, and Nikolay, standing on the threshold, said:

And in the middle stand the people who lick the hands of those who beat you in the face and suck the blood of those whose faces are beaten. That's

the middle!"

Ignaty looked at him respectfully, and after a pause said: "That's it!"

(Maxim Gorky in Mother. Chapter XXVI.)

THE

HE OLDER generation of readers will remember how Matthew Arnold, after indulging in the bitterest of Philippics upon the vulgarity and Philistinism of the English middle classes to which the vast majority of his admiring readers belonged, was wont to comfort them by solemly and graciously assuring them that "they were the best stuff in this Nation." The American middle class has long cherished a similar comforting belief. Moralists have been unwearied in pointing out that they have escaped both the enervating influences of luxury and the degrading and debasing effects of poverty, so that they furnished a congenial soil for the growth of what our Civilization has agreed to call the cardinal virtues. There has been much truth in this adulation of the American middle class in which our preachers and Fourth-of-July orators have long delighted. Down to the Civil War America

But the world moves and history is a flowing stream. The sturdy and independent middle class that was America from 1776 to 1860 has well-nigh disappeared from the world's stage. Never before has history been made so rapidly and in the making its very factors have been transformed. After the Civil War down to the early eighties the urban middle class grew in numbers and wealth with the growth of manufacturing and the miraculous spread and development of commerce. But the history of America from 1884 to the present day is simply the history of the crushing and metamorphosis of the middle class. By 1884 the capitalist mode of production in America has come to stand squarely on its own feet. At this stage in industrial development, in the words of Karl Marx, "One capitalist always kills many." So it was in America. In the intense competition within the capitalist class the smaller capitalists went to the wall. Finally we reached a stage where even men with millions were threatened with

commercial extinction, and the Trust became a necessity. This is distinctly the age of the Trust. The Trust has brought with it a new middle class made up of a host of salaried employés and people dependent in one way or another upon these vast aggregations of capital. This new middle class is essentially parasitic. The old middle class has not entirely disappeared, but who would be bold enough to say it dominates the life of the nation as it did prior to 1860? But while survivals of it still exist here and there, psychologically it has been transformed. It exists merely by sufferance. Its members tremble when they open their daily papers. If their funds are invested in railway securities, the paper may tell them that the manipulations of a Harriman have reduced or cut off their income. If they are merchants the paper may tell them of competition by the large department stores which they cannot hope to be able to meet. What analogy is there between such a class and the sturdy men who made the American history we glory in? In no real sense can they be called independent. Psychologically there is little difference between these survivals of the old middle class and the new middle class characteristic of the Trust Era.

Hard is their position. If one has pity or sympathy to bestow they need it far more than does the sturdy workingclass, the inevitable lords of To-morrow. Servility and tyranny are both essential to their existence. Servile they must be to the greater capitalists who can crush them by a word or a gesture; tyrants they must be to the poor upon whose backs they ride. It was Tolstoi who said "the rich were willing to do every thing for the poor except get off their backs." This is true, but the only way the American middle class can get off the backs of the poor is by committing financial suicide and themselves becoming members of the working class, and it must be remembered that the conditions of working-class life would be far

more galling and unbearable to them than they are to the born proletarians. Within the frame-work of society, as it is, there is no escape for them from servility and tyranny. Inexorably are they doomed to be sycophants and vampires. "In the middle stand the people who lick the hands of those who beat you in the face and suck the blood of those whose faces are beaten. That's the middle!”

In the new America which you and I have to face class lines are just as vital a reality as they long have been in Europe. On the one hand we have a few thousands of shirkers of fabulous wealth, and on the other millions of workers living in poverty and threatened with pauperism. Between stand the Sycophants and Vampires.

But there is hope. They feel the ignominy of their position, and the trait that is most characteristic of them as a class is discontent. Is it surprising? What man with red blood in his veins could be contented knowing that he was economically compelled to lick the hands of those who beat the workers in the face and suck the blood of those whose faces are beaten? Let us be thankful that the American middle class, transformed as it is, has not yet reached that depth of degradation. The habits of thought, the ethics and ideals that the American middle class formed in the days of its vigor still persist in the middle class of to-day. Hence it writhes in discontent-too often futile and impotent discontent. It supports the immense literature of destructive criticism-the literature that has been aptly labeled "muck-rake" literature. Better yet, it is more and more coming to the support of the constructive literature of the coming era of Fellowship.

It is scarcely too much to say that the dominant note of the intellectual life of the middle class is still Idealism. It has persisted in refusing to recognize its own doom; it dauntlessly hopes and strives for better things. Hence it has

enthusiastically supported the myriads of ephemeral reform movements that have flitted across the American stage. But the best brains in the middle class are now seeing all too clearly that their class is doomed; that as a class they have no hope; that their only salvation is to abandon their class hopes and aspirations, and join the workers in their struggle to wipe out all class lines by absorbing all men in the Universal Brotherhood based on common ownership of the means of life. One of the best proofs that this process is actually going on is the increasing frequency with which we see the phrase "parlor socialist" in the columns of the daily newspapers. The parlor socialist has come, and come to stay; but as parlor socialists become more numerous they will attract less notice individually in the papers.

While the best elements in the middle class are tending to join forces with the workers in the socialist movement, the Capitalists, alarmed for the institution of private property, are endeavoring to frame programs and policies that will be acceptable to the farmers as the largest body of voters who have a direct economic interest in the conservation of private property. President Roosevelt is the great protagonist of this farsighted capitalist policy. It seems likely that this combination of intelligent capitalists and farmers will control the political power for some years to come. Opposed to them will be a small and negligible party of ultra-conservatism the Bourbons of Capitalism-and the ever-swelling party of the workers-the Socialists. The middle class will divide; its parasitic part will join the party of the impotent Bourbons and furnish the majority of the few votes it will muster; its virile part will join the Socialists.

But nothing less than the necessity of escaping from a state of involuntary sycophancy and vampiredom could drive a man with the typical middle-class psychology into Socialism. His mental

habits rebel. The belief in the sacredness of private property dates back to a civilization based on handicraft when property was usually the reward of individual industry. This handicraft civilization gave rise to the Natural Rights philosophy. This belief in Natural Rights, including the right of private property, still persists in the middle class. The great capitalist who has grown rich by trampling on the property rights of his competitors has lost all respect for private property, though he is willing to pay hirelings well to preach its sacredness to those who do not possess it. For the great mass of the propertyless toilers the epigram of Proudhon, "Property, it is theft," has long been an axiom. The middle class is the only class in America in which the Family and the Home are still to be found. The men of the upper capitalist class are, to all intents and purposes, polygamists, while the ease and frequency of divorce has made marriage for the women of that class merely trial marriage. To those who know anything of the statistics of female and child labor it is a mockery to talk of the Home or Family of the Proletarian. Hence the middle class man is repelled by a movement which seeks to make women truly independent and the undisputed mistresses of their own minds and bodies.

Religion still persists in the middle class. The Church has no attractions for the Socialist workingman, who always looks with suspicion upon priest and clergyman as hirelings of his oppressors.

But in spite of all these obstacles the Idealism and the sturdiness and independence which many of the middle class still retain are driving them into the great movement for world-wide Fellowship. Competing with each other to the death, the very conditions of their lives make them heart-hungry for the comradeship and human solidarity which are the very essence of the Socialist movement.

The Socialist movement needs the

Idealism which the Parlor Socialists are bringing to it, and the workers will welcome them eagerly and trustingly. Will the Parlor Socialists prove worthy of this confidence? Probably not for the first few years of their Socialist activity. The mere acceptance of the Socialist goal has no power to work a miraculous change in one's whole psychological make-up. It is but natural that one who thinks he comes from a higher social altitude to join a movement of his inferiors should fancy himself called upon to be a teacher and a leader. But the man who has the courage to leave his own class in the first instance will pretty surely develop the higher and finer courage to humble himself and become a learner at the feet of those he came to teach. When once the Parlor Socialist has done this, he ceases to be a Parlor Socialist and becomes a Comrade of the 30,000,000 men and women who march behind the Red Flag of the International working class.

be said, "Except ye be born again, ye cannot become a worthy comrade of the working class." So long as the middle class Socialist feels that he has a message for the working class or that he is called upon to improve and broaden the tactics of the Socialist movement, his influence (if he has any) on the movement is likely to be harmful. But, just so soon as he changes his rôle from teacher to learner, literally limitless opportunities for useful service to his fellow men and women open out before him.

"In the middle stand the people who lick the hands of those who beat you in the face and suck the blood of those who are beaten," but the men and women who to-day are in the middle can, if they will, become valiant soldiers in the mighty army of workers which is fighting all over the world to make it impossible henceforth for anyone to be beaten in the face. To them goes out the cry of the workers: "Come join in the only battle wherein no man can fail,

Where whoso fadeth and dyeth his deeds shall still prevail."

ROBERT RIVES LA MONTE.
New Canaan, Connecticut.