either that his conception of the nation is illusory or that both he and they inhabit a world of illusions—a world of dreams, violences, toils, cruelties, and despairs, in which nothing really matters, after all.
Mr. Sandburg is not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. To take a similar case, even Mr. Oswald Garrison Villard, a man who habitually insists upon the hopeless condition of the Republic and the brainlessness and heartlessness of all our public men—even Mr. Villard, insensitive as he is to the "antique symmetry," is apparently not completely unconscious of the problem which he has created. At least jonce or twice every year Mr. Villard drops the muck-rake with which he harries Washington, and/writes an editorial in behalf of the New Testament and the character of Christ, as if to prove to his anxious readers that he really has a definite standard in mind for the administration of the War Department. Mr. Sandburg does likewise. When he has me all but persuaded that he himself is at heart a barbarian, that he feels a deep and genuine gusto in violence and brutality, that his talk about building a "city beautiful" is for the consumption of ladies who actually bore him, that in fact he chafes at the slight discipline which our civilization as yet imposes, and that we are all callous "galoots" and may as well acknowledge it and act accordingly—then he brings me to a pause by his sympathy for the "insignificant" private life, by the choking pathos of his
