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working men lifting great burdens; you hear the driving and jostling of huge carts and your heart sinks with a sudden sense of

futility. The door opens behind you and you turn to the man who

brings you in your breakfast with a quick sense of human fellowship. You find yourself praying that you may never lose your hold

on it all. A more poetic prayer would be that the great mother

breasts of our common humanity, with its labor and suffering and

its homely comforts, may never be withheld from you. You turn

helplessly to the waiter and feel that it would be almost grotesque

to claim from him the sympathy you crave because civilization

has placed you apart, but you resent your position with a sudden

sense of snobbery. Literature is full of portrayals of these glimpses:

they come to shipwrecked men on rafts; they overcome the differences of an incongruous multitude when in the presence of a

great danger or when moved by a common enthusiasm. They are

not, however, confined to such moments, and if we were in the

habit of telling them to each other, the recital would be as long as

the tales of children are, when they sit down on the green grass

and confide to each other how many times they have remembered

that they lived once before. If these childish tales are the stirring

of inherited impressions, just so surely is the other the striving of

inherited powers.

"It is true that there is nothing after disease, indigence, and a

sense of guilt, so fatal to health and to life itself as the want of a

proper outlet for active faculties." I have seen young girls suffer

and grow sensibly lowered in vitality in the first years after they

leave school. In our attempt then to give a girl pleasure and

freedom from care we succeed, for the most part, in making her

pitifully miserable. She finds "life" so different from what she

expected it to be. She is besotted with innocent little ambitions,

and does not understand this apparent waste of herself, this elaborate preparation, if no work is provided for her. There is a heritage of noble obligation which young people accept and long to

perpetuate. The desire for action, the wish to right wrong and

alleviate suffering haunts them daily. Society smiles at it indulgently instead of making it of value to itself. The wrong to them

begins even farther back, when we restrain the first childish desires for "doing good" and tell them that they must wait until they

are older and better fitted. We intimate that social obligation

begins at a fixed date, forgetting that it begins with birth itself.

We treat them as children who, with strong-growing limbs, are