destroyed by fire, leaving only a pile of ashes and the smell of smoke? In ancient times, poets and seers longed for an ideal society. Hesiod dreamed of a lost Golden Age in the distant past but saw no brightness in the present, constant care for the morrow, and no hope for the future. Plato pictured an ideal state organized on philosophical principles; but he himself realized that his plan was too idealistic to be realized. Virgil sang of one who would deliver the world from its sufferings and by