The Forbidden Trail

And as he grew older and read deeper it seemed to him that the solution lay only indirectly in any system of government. It seemed to him that until man had learned how to use directly and freely the power sources of nature, inequalities of wealth would always persist. And he had learned in one bitter lesson that unhappiness and economic inequality go hand in hand.

And so Roger dreamed his dream. For many years it was such a mad seeming dream that he was ashamed to speak of it, even to Ernest. And yet it was simple enough in its first outlines.

This was, Roger told himself, a machine age. The more perfect became man's use of machinery, the more leisure could he have and the more wealth. Ultimately man's efforts must concentrate on the effort to find power with which to drive the world's machinery. Coal was disappearing, water power was coming into its own. Was there not, however, some universal source of power that could be harnessed and given to the use of man? Some power that capital could not control nor labor misuse and destroy?

It was thus that Roger came to study the possibilities of Solar Heat utilization. It was thus that he became the world's first and greatest pioneer in a new field of engineering--a field so mighty that it was to become the dean of all other fields of power engineering.

He dreamed a dream of solving the problem of labor versus capital. He was to learn through years of heart breaking endeavor that neither capital nor labor has use for a dreamer of dreams no matter how practical the dreams may be, unless the dreamer is selfish enough, is grasping and ruthless enough to trample over other men to the top.

Roger was to learn, before he achieved success, that a man's genius can go no higher than his character permits it to go. He was to learn that only out of a man's will to conquer himself can come the finest accomplishment of his work. And he was to learn that for most of us fate works with curious indirection. So that the story of Roger's dream deals not with a struggle between capital and labor, but with a man's struggle with solitudes; it deals not so much with machinery as with nature; and not so much with scientific facts as with human passions.

Thus for most of us, if we could but see it so, life is not a matter of colorless and naked straight lines but is a rich mosaic made up of a thousand seemingly unimportant items.