The best minds of our day behold that Pericles was as sublimely great in his love-affairs as he was in his work as architect and statesman. Life is a whole, and every man works his love up into life--his life is revealed in his work, and his love is mirrored in his life. For myself I can not see why the Parthenon may not have been a monument to a great and sublime passion, and the statue of Athena, its chief ornament, be the sacred symbol of a great woman greatly loved.

So far as can be found, the term of "courtesan" applied by the mob to Aspasia came from the fact that she was not legally married to Pericles, and for no other reason. That their union was not legal was owing to the simple fact that Pericles, early in his career, had caused a law to be passed making marriage between an Athenian and an alien morganatic: very much as in England, for a time, the children of a marriage where one parent was a Catholic and the other a Protestant were declared by the State to be illegitimate. The act of Pericles in spreading a net for his rival and getting caught in it himself is a beautiful example of the truth of a bucolic maxim, "Chickens most generally come home to roost."

Thucydides says that for thirty years Pericles never dined away from home but once. He kept out of crowds, and was very seldom seen at public gatherings. The idea held by many was that a man who thus preferred his home and the society of a woman was either silly or bad, or both. Socrates, for instance, never went home as long as there was any other place to go, which reminds us of a certain American statesman who met a friend on the street, the hour being near midnight. "Where are you going, Bill?" asked the statesman. "Home," said Bill. "What!" said the statesman, "haven't you any place to go?" The Athenian men spent their spare time in the streets and marketplaces--this was to them what the daily paper is to us.

In his home life Pericles was simple, unpretentious and free from all extravagance. No charge could ever be brought against him that he was wasting the public money for himself--the beauty he materialized was for all. He held no court, had no carriages, equipage, nor guards; wore no insignia of office, and had no title save that of "First Citizen" given him by the people. He is the supreme type of a man who, though holding no public office, yet ruled like a monarch, and, best of all, ruled his own spirit. There is no government so near perfect as that of an absolute monarchy--where the monarch is wise and just.

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Greece is a beautiful dream. Dreams do not endure, yet they are a part of life, no less than the practical deeds of the day. The glory of Greece could not last; its limit was thirty years--one generation. The splendor of Athens was built on tribute and conquest, and the lesson of it all lies in this: For thirty years Pericles turned the revenues of war into art, beauty and usefulness.

England spent more in her vain efforts to subjugate two little South African republics than Pericles spent in making Athens the Wonder of the World. If Chamberlain and Salisbury had been the avatars of Pericles and Phidias, they would have used the nine hundred millions of dollars wasted in South Africa, and the services of those three hundred thousand men, and done in England, aye! or done in South Africa, a work of harmony and undying beauty such as this tired earth had not seen since Phidias wrought and Pindar sang.

And another thing, the thirty thousand Englishmen sacrificed to the God of War, and the ten thousand Boers, dead in a struggle for what they thought was right, would now nearly all be alive and well, rejoicing in the contemplation of a harmony unparalleled and unsurpassed.

During the last year the United States has appropriated four hundred million dollars for war and war-apparatus. Since Eighteen Hundred Ninety-seven we have expended about three times the sum named for war and waste. If there had been among us a Pericles who could have used this vast treasure in irrigating the lands of the West and building Manual-Training Schools where boys and girls would be taught to do useful work and make beautiful things, we could have made ancient Greece pale into forgetfulness beside the beauty we would manifest.

When Pericles came into power there was a union of the Greek States, formed with intent to stand against Persia, the common foe. A treasure had been accumulated at Delos by Themistocles, the predecessor of Pericles, to use in case of emergency.

The ambition of Themistocles was to make Greece commercially supreme. She must be the one maritime power of the world. All the outlying islands of the AEgean Sea were pouring their tithes into Athens and Delos that they might have protection from the threatening hordes of Persia.

Pericles saw that war was not imminent, and under the excuse of increased safety he got the accumulated treasure moved from Delos to Athens. The amount of this emergency fund, to us, would be insignificant--a mere matter of, say, two million dollars. Pericles used this money, or a portion of it at least, for beautifying Athens, and he did his wondrous work by maintaining a moderate war-tax in a time of peace, using the revenue for something better than destruction and vaunting pride.

But Pericles could not forever hold out against the mob at Athens and the hordes abroad. He might have held the hordes at bay, but disloyalty struck at him at home--his best helpers were sacrificed to superstition--his beloved helper Phidias was dead. War came--the population from the country flocked within the walls of Athens for protection. The pent-up people grew restless, sick; pestilence followed, and in ministering to their needs, trying to infuse courage into his whimpering countrymen, bearing up under the disloyalty of his own sons, planning to meet the lesser foe without, Pericles grew aweary, Nature flagged, and he was dead.

From his death dates the decline of Greece--she has been twenty-five centuries dying and is not dead even yet. To Greece we go for consolation, and in her armless and headless marbles we see the perfect type of what men and women yet may be. Copies of her Winged Victory are upon ten thousand pedestals pointing us the way.

England has her Chamberlain, Salisbury, Lord Bobs, Buller, and Kitchener; America has her rough-riders who bawl and boast, her financiers, and her promoters. In every city of America there is a Themistocles who can organize a Trust of Delos and make the outlying islands pay tithes and tribute through an indirect tax on this and that. In times of alleged danger all Kansans flock to arms and offer their lives in the interest of outraged humanity.

These things are well, but where is the Pericles who can inspire men to give in times of peace what all are willing to give in the delirium of war--that is to say, themselves?

We can Funstonize men into fighting-machines; we can set half a nation licking stamps for strife; but where is the Pericles who can infuse the populace into paving streets, building good roads, planting trees, constructing waterways across desert sands, and crowning each rock-ribbed hill with a temple consecrated to Love and Beauty! We take our mules from their free prairies, huddle them in foul transports and send them across wide oceans to bleach their bones upon the burning veldt; but where is the man who can inspire our mules with a passion to do their work, add their mite to building a temple and follow the procession unled, undriven--with neither curb nor lash--happy in the fond idea that they are a part of all the seething life that throbs, pulses and works for a Universal Good!

England is today a country tied with crape. On the lintels of her doorposts there linger yet the marks of sprinkled blood; the guttural hurrahs of her coronation are mostly evoked by beer; behind it all are fears and tears and a sorrow that will not be comforted.

"I never caused a single Athenian to wear mourning," truthfully said Pericles with his dying breath. Can the present prime ministers of earth say as much? That is the kind of leader America most needs today--a man who can do his work and make no man, woman or child wear crape.

The time is ripe for him--we await his coming.

We are sick and tired of plutocrats who struggle and scheme but for themselves; we turn with loathing from the concrete selfishness of Newport and Saratoga; the clatter of arms and the blare of battle-trumpets in time of peace are hideous to our ears--we want no wealth gained from conquest and strife.

Ours is the richest country the world has ever known. Greece was a beggar compared with Iowa and Illinois, where nothing but honest effort is making small cities great. But we need a Pericles who shall inspire us to work for truth, harmony and beauty--a beauty wrought for ourselves--and a love that shall perform such miracles that they will minister to the millions yet unborn. We need a Pericles! We need a Pericles!

MARK ANTONY