Val sat up in the dark corner behind the chair, ready to cry "Hear, hear!"
"I admit," her father went on, "that man has defiled it and made it a den of thieves."
"Comes to the same thing in the end, although I don't agree--"
"It does _not_ come to the same thing. There's all the difference in what it "comes to" between the curable and the incurable. You and I may not live to see it, but the world will one day be a fit habitation for better men than we."
Val, peering out, saw Ethan shake his head.
"When men are truly brothers, when we have worked the ape and tiger out, when we may be fortunate without blood-guiltiness. Even _you_," his uncle went on, a swell of enthusiasm lifting up his voice--"even you may live to see men realizing that Science is the great Captain, the true Redeemer. I should envy you your chance of hailing the beginning of that bloodless revolution, except that I am as sure of its coming as my neighbor's children's children will be when they have ocular proof and daily profit of it."
"My boy, you've only to look about you. Mind, I don't say _within_. No, no"--his voice dragged--"one sees there one's own failures and defeats, and one is blinded to the larger good. I'm no sentimentalist, either." He flared up. "I'm not saying I shall reap any, or even you much, of this harvest. But come!"--he pulled his shambling figure out of the chair and stood before the fire almost erect--"life is nobler than men thought. Some men's share is to see, before they stumble into the dark, the light that other men shall walk by--see it, and tell the shorter-sighted to be of good cheer, for the light is at hand."
"And those who stumbled before the light came near enough?"
"Oh, well, at most they 'fell on sleep.'"
"Such men are no worse off than Plato, and Christ, and Buddha. The great thing was to know there was light."
"I wonder the memory of those old hopes doesn't lessen your faith in the new."
"Why? Progress isn't a passing fashion; it's the _life_ principle, another name for the power that makes for righteousness, the impulse towards the light, the force that pushes the acorn sprout out of the mould, and goads man night and day towards some ultimate good. As long as there's life, my boy, it will be better and ever better life. _It's the law._"