The obvious thing to do, since, good or bad, the country is emptying its
population into the cities, since we cannot go back through the gates of
Eden into the garden paradise of Genesis, is to go toward the city of the
Apocalypses, not, to be sure, as the Oriental mind of John saw it, paved
and walled with precious stones and gold, but made as beautiful as the
Occidental taste and architectural skill will permit, as comfortable as
Occidental standards demand, and as sanitary as the mortal desire for
immortality can with finite wisdom make it.
I was speaking some time ago of a painting I once saw, in illustration of
the death of Eve, which represented her as on a journey in her haggard old
age, accompanied by Cain (whose son built the first city in a wilderness),
and as pausing in the journey on a height of ground, pointing toward a
little cluster of trees in the distance, and saying to her son: "There was
Paradise." But paradise is not to be realized by the masses of men in the
return of man to the forests.
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