The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1911-05-22
WHY WE DO NOT SURVIVE

Cob-webbed Yesterdays ago, Sidon exulted in her prOwesS; she sang of her cities, of her sculptured halls, of her majestic temples; her buildings cut into the enduring rocks for the pillars of her palaces; the suns of effulgent centuries gilded her domes and a hundred smirking kings crawl ed before her thrones.
 Drunken with domination, Egypt boasted supremacy of the universe Myraids of whipgashed slaves wasted their brutalized lifetimes to rear monuments to the vanity of the Phar- aohs.
 Greece ulu1ated her eminence: Rome haughtily chronicled her mag nificance, and the shores of the Bos- phorus rang with paeans of Byzan- tium. !a@MsE E
 And today where stood Sidon none can tell; and Egypt is pawn of men who were skin wearers and club bearers and eaters of acorns when linen and bore bronze blades; and Greece is marked by snaggled stone heap on hilltop; and Rome is a tomb; and the infidel crescent-and- star glisten in the moonbeams which once bathed the Byzantine cross.
 And now our cities sweep across four thousand miles; two oceans wash our gates; our homes are as many as the trees of the forest; our towers nestle in the clouds ;and we too, in turn, sing the defiant hymns of the proud.
 Thus, Time perpetually stages the comedy of mans presumption and the tragedy of its futility.
 Cycle by cycle, we rise, We totter, and we fall; we toll up the slopes of Civilization; We pause a moment upon the peaks, and are dashed into his- toried crumbs.
 We build badly and so our works are always in the dust. Race by race, we march out of the horizon; we are Iordly for a few drips of the sand-glass; we challenge Destiny. and become whispers of legend.
 We do not survive because we do not deserve. We toll solely for our own selfish hour, and so, at its pass ing our achievements are swept into the maw of Chaos.
 So long as individualism is the motif of earthly mbitions, the course of all empires will be measured.
 So long as you think that someone else will do what you neglect-So long as you rail against misrule yet fail to defend your civic rights-so long as you believe that your inf1u. ence is not needed, and that without you there will be a majority sufficient 
 continue to drag us into the chasm. When every soldier in the ranks fears that his loss means the fall of the cause,' an army is resistless each mason lays his stone as though the walls cannot stand except through his skill-When every woman bleeds at the vail of grief and the moan of hunger, convinced that her hand alone can ease, and her loaf alone can succor then, and only then, shall our mastery endure.
 You do count-your charity does count-your patriotism does count. No good deed can be spared.
 Where of old the saber-toothed shark lunged through the deeps, only a random fang on the ooZe records his existence, while the coral insect as old as the aeons, but born to serve until death, today as when the stars awoke, adds its mite for the might of the multitude, until by the focused labor of immeasurable generations an eternal offering to the God o1 Creation lifts above the slashing spuning pillows to take the bene- diction of the sun.
 And always the reefs keep rising Herbert Kaufman in April Woman's World.