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 ized except for material interests and self-regarding ends. In the humblest strata of society, as history blazons, it has been organized again and again for the adoration of God and the recovery of the Holy Sepulchre. Critics who sneer at the desires of the people simply do not understand the desires of the people. They do not perceive what to the candid eye is the most obvious fact in human history, namely, that the "vulgar herd," lost man everywhere and in all times, is struggling blindly, confusedly, hungrily to find his way back to that lost Eden which haunts the human heart. When the "vulgar herd" believed that theology had the best clue to the land of their heart's desire, they built the mediaeval cathedrals. When they began to suspect that the clue lies elsewhere, they established the State universities.

Church and State, we are accustomed to say, have in this country no interdependence; and ignorant persons conclude and declare that the State university is necessarily irreligious. It is a capital error. No one who reads his national annals with any attention can fail to perceive that religion is indissociably knit with the State, recognized in its courts, its senate chambers, its polling places, its public documents, its oaths of office, and, with more splendor in the


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 language of its constitution and in official utterance of its great public servants. An invisible Majesty is invoked by the religion of the State to bind its citizens to truth, justice, and domestic tranquillity, and to fortify them in their resolution to transmit unimpaired to succeeding generations their civil and political and religious liberties. A university of the State, as a central organ of its life, is unfaithful to its trust if it does not uphold this religion.

Now the very obligation to refrain from denominational religious instruction which the State universities are under should make it appear the more imperatively their duty to bring not some but all of their students into quickening relationship with those purely human traditions which preserve through secular ages a regard for beauty, wisdom, temperance, truth, justice, and magnanimity. In the secular ages these traditions are perpetuated in great part by the study of what used to be called "humane letters," and the virtues and powers developed by this study are the flowering in character of what used to be called "liberal culture." With these objects of liberal culture the democratic practice has been blindly and heedlessly in conflict, at times; the democratic ideal, never. And one may venture confidently to predict that if

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 the present organization of public education is inimical to them, if free access to them is menaced by an exclusive linking of the endowed colleges with the expensive preparatory schools, then the people through their State universities will be touched in their deepest impulses to reassert their interest in them, will be inspired by their highest hopes to reopen popular access to them, and will not cease to provide for them till they have proved their equality of devotion to them with the oldest colleges in the land.


text: Picture Show (Sassoon collection)/Prelude to an Unwritten Masterpiece


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"That maleficent word 'service'!" exclaims a critic for whom I have high respect, and tears the word from his lexicon. The cry is a protest against the disparagement of the contemplative life by the champions of the active life. Since at the present time the "practical" men display the arrogance engendered by an overwhelming predominance, I sympathize with the spirit of the protest. And yet the moment that one sets to work to justify the protest, one finds oneself in need precisely of that discarded word "service." For either one must admit that the contemplative life is indefensible or one must contend that the contemplative life is serviceable.

Words which have long exhibited a radiant energy, words and things like "God," "patriotism," "home," and "pure gold" are not to be lightly rejected in periods like our own, when their magic has fallen into temporary abeyance or when their value has suffered from mishandling. Before we abandon them to accept some


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 wretched modern substitate—a band of greyishwhite platinum, thin and fragile, for a plain ring of pure gold or "a stream of tendency" for "God"—we had better scrape the encrustations of time and base uses from the old symbols, and see whether a divine fire does not still burn at the heart of them.

Before we finally make up our minds to scoff at the whole idea of service, we had better scrutinize it rather carefully in relation to the whole idea contained in the word "vocation," which survives in the maligned phrase "vocational training." Whenever educators assemble, they begin to consult anxiously together on what can be done to impart a loftier tone and keener incentives to higher education. On such an occasion, after several of us had proposed the customary modern mechanical means of "raising the standards," a university president remarked with a kind of apologetic shyness: "I wonder whether the good old watchword which we heard in my youth, the old watchword of 'service,' has become quite obsolete. Has the thought of service quite lost its power to animate the minds of our young people?"

"No, I think not," replied a college dean. "In our graduating class, for example, there is


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 a fine group of young men who are preparing to enter Y. M. C. A. work in Poland, and there is another group who are going as medical missionaries to China. These men," he declared, "are still animated by a desire to serve humanity."

No sensible person can have the slightest wish to disparage the work of the Y. M. C. A. in Poland or of the medical missionaries in China. Yet one is constrained to say that the remarks of this good dean illustrate exactly the attitude of mind which has tended to bring the "old watchword of service" into disrepute. I mean this: that among the young generation there is a growing resentment, and I think on the whole a legitimate resentment, at the traditional identification of service with certain definitely limited activities of an obviously humanitarian character, performed for the physically or morally needy classes in foreign lands or in the slums of great cities or backward rural districts. These moral and medical missionaries are engaged, we all admit, in a great work, which demands devotion and self-sacrifice. But their champions make a mistake in tactics, they damage their own position, when they attempt to set apart these special types of activitiy under a peculiar glory of "service."


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 All good work, at home or abroad, in public or in private, of the hand or of the brain—all work that is done as it should be done—demands devotion and self-sacrifice and partakes of the nature of service. That so much of it is now done so feebly, so shabbily, so perfunctorily, is due to the fact that the inspiriting idea of service has never been extended to it.

What we want at present more than a fresh call to service is a wider conception of the field. Humanity has needed to have its moral and physical wounds looked after and has required ministrants to those needs since man appeared on the planet; and will always require them, and will always praise and reward, more or less, workers who supply those needs. But if humanity's adventure on the earth is ever to issue in anything more satisfying than mere self-preservation, humanity needs a multitude of other things. It needs, not least, satisfactions for a multitude of men and women who are not merely suffering bodies clamorous with physical wants but are also emotional, intellectual, and moral beings craving a higher and larger life for their special human faculties.

If the word and thought of service are to be rehabilitated, we must have new criterions of service. We cannot set apart the word for those


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A2198 '''43. Offences'''

(1) It shall be an offence for an employer without reasonable excuse—
 * (a) to fail to comply with section 7(1);
 * (b) to fail to comply with section 7(2);
 * (c) to fail to comply with section 7(3)(a);
 * (d) to fail to comply with section 7(3)(b);
 * (e) to fail to comply with section 7(3)(c);
 * (f) in the case where a relevant employee receives less than the minimum level of income in respect of his employment and elects to contribute to a registered scheme, to fail to remit to the approved trustee of that registered scheme the statutory minimum contribution payable in respect of that relevant employee;
 * (g) in the case where this Ordinance confers upon a relevant employee an option to contribute to a relevant scheme, to impose upon that relevant employee, as a condition of his employment, a requirement that he shall not exercise his option to contribute.

(2) Any declaration or statement made to the Authority for the purposes of section 23 shall not be evidence against the person making that declaration or statement.

(3) It shall be an offence for a self-employed person without reasonable excuse—
 * (a) not to have become a member of a registered scheme in accordance with section 7(4);
 * (b) to fail to pay the statutory minimum contribution, or to pay less than the statutory minimum contribution, to the approved trustee of the registered scheme in respect of the business of that self-employed person.

(4) It shall be an offence for an approved trustee to pay accrued benefits to any scheme member who has not attained the age specified in Schedule 7 other than in accordance with regulations made under section 46 permitting the earlier payment of accrued benefits to scheme members.

(5) It shall be an offence for an approved trustee to fail to comply with any limitations or prohibitions on the investment of the assets of registered schemes in any restricted investments referred to in section 29.

44. Liability of directors

(1) Where an offence under this Ordinance is committed by a company and is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any director, manager, secretary, or other similar officer of the company, or any person who was purporting to act in any such capacity, he as well as the company, shall be guilty of the offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.


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 who give food to the body and withhold it from those who give food to the mind. We cannot reserve it for those who help the sick and deny it to those who help the well. Service does not cease to be service when the intelligent and the strong are assisted. We cannot consecrate the word for ministers and teachers merely because they work for a smaller wage than presidents of railroads and singers in grand opera. Service does not cease to be service when it is remunerated. On the contrary, the world, as it grows wiser, will steadily insist on rewarding more amply all those who know how to provide what it wants. Deep in the heart of the world is a passion for discovering a larger and better life for all the people in the world, not even excluding the intellectual and other privileged classes; and every one who assists in any way at that discovery does honorable service. Furthermore, whoever bends his full strength to increasing the healthy and pleasurable life of men, sooner or later will find in his work, whatever it is, something of the peace and satisfaction of religious devotion.

In the days of one's youth, however, in one's period of apprenticeship, it is of far more importance to make oneself an effective instrument than it is to know precisely how and where the


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 instrument is going to be employed. Temper the iron; sharpen the blade; and rest assured that the world will use you by and by. Good workmen eager for a part in the building of civilization will not worry much about where they are to be sent; they will desire only to be sent where they can be used most effectively. And they will not, for example, foolishly set off the "service" of a good missionary against the usefulness of a good dressmaker. A really skilful dressmaker, I fancy, could wipe away as many tears from human eyes as any sister of charity.

The opposite of a life of service is not any form of happy activity, but a slack, idle, joyless, half-hearted, shrinking life. There are numerous so-called good-people who go about to do good in such a crabbed, peevish, and melancholy fashion that contact with them makes the day bitter and burdensome. There are, on the other hand, persons gay and nonchalant, who never seem to give a thought to the "still sad music of humanity"; and yet one feels in their presence something better than a sermon, better than medicine, better than alms—one feels a current of energy and joy, one feels new power and incentive within oneself. Such persons confer a favor on mankind merely by


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 being alive. They add directly to the sum of human happiness. They add to the goodness of life. Theirs is perhaps the rarest and most precious form of service, the most beautiful of vocations.

Next to those who hearten us by their natural gusto and their capacity for communicating whatever of sweetness they find in the taste of their own days, I would place in one class all those who do anything whatever excellently well. In formal ethical treatises we arrange the members of this class in a severe hierarchy with high places reserved for those who have held positions of political responsibility or who have attained eminence in science and the arts. But we are not very realistic in our ethical treatises. Outside the book, we find a different system of rating. In the frank unconventional judgment of the street, and in the tribunal of our own hearts we find a curious equality of gratitude and admiration for the best preacher and the best prize fighter, the chess champion and the prime minister, the successor of Newton and the world's supreme tenor, the man who has written the outstanding novel of the year, and the baker who makes the best Parker House rolls in town. Perhaps we even go so far as to number among the ninety-nine worthies of the


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 world an extraordinary rogue or two. Certainly few of us ever purge ourselves of a lingering fondness for such eminent villains as Richard III, Cellini, Henry VIII, Ivan the Terrible, Frederick the Great, and Napoleon.

It is not of course their criminality that we admire. Paradoxical as it sounds, we seldom show ourselves such disinterested lovers of virtue as when we feel a thrill of approbation in the presence of the great criminals. We have no weak bias of a merely personal and self-interested attachment in their favour. What we respond to in them is the pure quality of their cutting intelligence, the rare hardness of their courage, the sheer potency of their will—virtues by us for once subconsciously abstracted from their practical consequences and so valued. Whenever you find yourself saying, "I like that man—I don't know why; he has almost every trait that I dislike," you may be reasonably sure that the man has also some powerful virtue which you have overlooked, or which has as yet not been listed by the professors of ethics. For the popular and undiscriminating idolization of athletes, dancers, singers, marksmen, poets, jockeys, and supreme bakers there is this justification: each one of these heroes has demonstrated for the time the utmost capacity of the


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 human body or mind in that direction. He has established a standard. He has set us a mark which enables us to look with equanimity upon any one who does not approach it or surpass it. To throw fifty successive "ringers" at quoits is a feat requiring an almost godlike faculty. There are few services higher than demonstrating the utmost capacities of the human spirit; and it is a sound popular instinct which applauds such demonstrations, even in matters which impress the censorious as trivial.

"But suppose," objects a wary moralist, "suppose a man wishes to demonstrate the utmost capacity of the human spirit for being a tiger or a snake. Should you applaud that experiment?" No, I should not applaud that experiment. I should do mon possible to dissuade the aspirant from that, and I should proceed in this way. I should first lead him through a zoölogical garden to the cage of the Bengal tiger and the python; and I should say: "Here is a far better tiger, and here is a far better snake than you can ever hope to become by the utmost stretch of your tigerish or reptilian propensities. You will make no inspiring contribution by this experiment. You will bungle towards it and fall short. An unsurpassable mark has already been set by the framer of this


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 "dreadful symmetry." But why not go in for aeronautics? It does look as if we might eventually surpass the eagle in flight. And the desire to get above the earth has always impressed me as a very human, though a dangerous, passion. If, however, danger and difficulty really attract you, why not go in for the big experiment? It is much more difficult than becoming a python or a tiger. Why not attempt to demonstrate the utmost capacity of the human spirit for being a man?"

But let us descend from the dizzy heights where the heroes and villains dwell. Few of us can belong to that eminent class which sets new standards of human achievement. Below that high level, however, is the wide workaday world where professional competence is ever in request and ample scope is afforded for the display of a relative excellence. Educators of the Renaissance ordinarily composed their outlines of education with a prince in their mind's eye, who was to be instructed in every art and science necessary or becoming to a member of the governing class. In a democratic society, as every one knows, the assumption is that we are all peers, that we are all princes, that each one of us is to be trusted with some share of the burden of the political and social government. Under


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 the influence of that assumption, we take an ever broader view of the useful activities of men. As our humanism becomes democratic, our snobism dwindles, the number of "base" activities declines, we begin to recognize all those workmen as engaged in "gentle" or "noble" enterprise who are spending themselves for the stability and growth of the commonwealth. The circumstance makes it steadily easier for each man to choose a vocation according to his nature, and so to discharge at the same time his duty to the State and his responsibility to his own individual "genius."

Failure to recognize how near at hand and how rich and various the fields of service are is responsible for much of the unhappiness and unrest which many young people feel between the ages of twenty and twenty-five. It is customary for old people to add to the confusion of the young by talking to them about the happiness of youth. They say, amiable but sentimental grey-beards say, to a youth of twenty: "Enjoy yourself now while you can. You are now in the happiest years of your life." If I were addressing an audience on the verge of twenty, I should say: Distrust these sentimental old people. Don't believe a word of all this. In all probability your most happy and fruitful


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 days are still to come. If you gird yourselves now strictly and austerely for the tasks of springtime, it is more than likely that after the age of twenty-five you will find the years growing, for all their shocks and accidents, steadily richer and sweeter in their main substance, to the end. I think it hardly doubtful that most of you are now, in the early twenties, in your most restless and unhappy period. Why? Well, for a most interesting reason: because, as Emerson says, "All young persons thirst for a real existence for an object—for something great and good which they shall do with their heart."

You are at precisely the period when one casts about most earnestly for something great and good to do with one's heart. You have considered many possibilities, yet you hang in the doldrums of indecision. As yet, you have not found any object within your reach which seems great and good enough to command a life's devotion. You sigh for definite objects which you know are not for you, or you seethe with vague desires for dim unattainable things. You are unhappy because you still stand with arms wide-outstretched to embrace the infinite. You have not yet soberly reflected upon the elementary physical and spiritual truth that it is only by closing your arms and resolutely


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 shutting most of the infinite out that you can really embrace and keep anything. You have not yet taken to heart the great maxim of Goethe: "It is within limits that the master first shows his mastership." You are still fighting against that law of nature which fixes the pain of choice as the cost of every practical step forward.

Meanwhile you hear from men of a certain narrow intensity a disquieting summons to a self-sacrificing—life of service, a summons to precisely that form of service in which these "dreadful summoners" have themselves attained the fullest self-realization. While you are under the spell of their exhortation, the definite things at hand which you can now do well, or which you are now learning to do well, seem small and humdrum and mean. And some of you, perhaps, with a real talent for millinery or landscape gardening are considering whether you ought not to renounce these talents and go to China as medical missionaries. And some of you with a talent for chemical investigation or stockbreeding are wondering whether you ought not to renounce these talents, and, chanting the old song, "Nothing in my hands I bring," devote yourselves to spreading the gospel among


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 the Buddhists. A great many more of you, I suppose, have a beautiful genius for an occupation more various than that of Leonardo da Vinci and the many-sided men of the Renaissance. I mean the occupation of domestic managership, including in one endlessly versatile person the professions of wife, mother, nurse, dietitian, milliner, tailor, economist, artist, architect, teacher, religious guide, counsellor, and dictator—I have mentioned only a few of the activities which every competent matriarch undertakes. Yet many of you, I suspect, with a real talent for this rich life of high and varied service, in which every virtue and every charm count, many of you have been persuaded that this life is not service but servitude, and are considering whether you should not renounce your beautiful talent and devote yourselves to selling bonds or writing for the short-story magazines. "I don't want to spend all my life washing dishes," you have cried—as if washing dishes were a hundredth part of the fascinating things you are expected to do!

I suspect this unrest to be present among the


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A2200 (2) Where an offence under this Ordinance committed by a partner is proved to have been committed with the consent or connivance of, or to be attributable to any neglect on the part of, any other partner of the partnership, that other partner shall be guilty of the offence and shall be liable to be proceeded against and punished accordingly.

45. Penalties

(1) Any person convicted of an offence under section 43, other than subsection (1)(d) or (f) of that section, is liable to a fine at level 6 and to imprisonment for 1 year and, where the offence involves the failure on the part of an employer to pay a statutory minimum contribution in respect of a relevant employee to the trustee of a registered scheme, shall, in addition to the fine, pay to the trustee of the registered scheme, for the credit of the relevant employee’s account, the amount, or that part of the amount of the statutory minimum contribution not previously paid, together with interest thereon at the rate of 15% per annum or at such other rate as may be substituted from time to time by the Chief Justice by notice published in the Gazette for that purpose.

(2) Any employer convicted of an offence under section 43(1)(d) or (f) is liable to a fine at level 6 and to imprisonment for 3 years and shall, in addition to the fine, pay to the trustee of a registered scheme, for the credit of the relevant employee’s account, the amount, or that part of the amount, of the statutory minimum contribution not previously paid, together with interest thereon at the rate of 15% per annum or such other rate as may be substituted from time to time by the Chief Justice by notice published in the Gazette for that purpose.

46. Regulations

(1) The Governor in Council may, in relation to a registered scheme, make regulations—
 * (a) for the purposes of the definition of retirement age;
 * (b) prescribing forms, including those relating to the right of election of a relevant employee to participate in a registered scheme;
 * (c) providing for the withdrawal of accrued benefits from a registered scheme and the payment thereof to a relevant employee;
 * (d) providing for the operation of a compensation fund;
 * (e) for the purposes of the compensation fund, of a levy (including the rate of levy) in respect thereof and meeting claims and expenses therefrom;
 * (f) providing for the suspension or removal of an approved trustee under section 33;


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 younger generation because I hear of it constantly. Recently one of the most interesting and intelligent members of a graduating class came to me to talk, as she said, about her future. "I have spent," she said, "four years at the University. Now they want me to go home and marry and settle down and be 'just a good woman.' My home-town will sweep over me and swallow up everything that I have learned in my years here. I don't want to be a good woman!" "What do you want to be?" I enquired. She could not phrase the answer promptly. But she had both arms extended towards the infinite. And by that token I could tell well enough that what she wanted was "something great and good that she should do with her heart."

Now, every educator who is worth his salt knows that this hungry discontent of one-and-twenty indicates in the hopefullest way that education is "taking." But it indicates also that education is still incomplete. It indicates that imagination has not yet surveyed realistically the field of service. A girl of twenty who stands with arms wide-stretched towards the infinite is usually thinking secretly of New York or Chicago, which are by no means infinite. And so the small towns and provincial


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 cities are stripped of the bright, tempered instruments necessary for their regeneration; and the great metropolis is crowded too full for elbow-room. I think the next step in our higher education must be the effective preaching of a "new provincialism." I think we need to show our graduates the field for service and the large opportunity for the increase of happiness by carrying their college and university training back to the home-town, and making the new standards prevail there. The mentally poor and needy should perhaps go to the metropolis and receive. But the essentially rich may safely remain in the provinces and give. The greater your talent, the better you can afford to strike root where you are.

Our democratic theory is that American life should taste good at all points in the States, We cannot tolerate the idea of a rich and intellectual capital of highly civilized people surrounded by an immense population of peasants and yokels. Already many conveniences of our material civilization have penetrated the remote countryside. Already one can buy as good gasoline, soap, shredded wheat biscuit, and tobacco in Gopher Prairie and Sleepy Eye as in New York City. But we want more than that. We want to be able to get as good talk, as good


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 books and magazines, as good music, as good health, exercise, and recreation, as respectable schools, and as cheerful homes with lawns and abundance of flowers and trees in Gopher Prairie and in Sleepy Eye as in New York City or Stockbridge. This object is perfectly attainable. It will be attained just as soon as the beautiful vague imaginations of our hungry young people become positive, realistic, and practical; just as soon as they clasp their wide's tretched arms and hold fast the good that is within reach.

Two girls of my acquaintance who can write a little are now looking towards going to New York as the great adventure. "If all goes well," they will soon be living in a six-by-eight bedroom on 120th Street, and they will be writing fourth-rate stories for fourth-rate magazines; and the great metropolis will sweep over them and leave not a trace to mark the place where they sink.

The trouble with these young women is not that they have "aspirations," but that they are insufficiently and unrealistically ambitious. For the sake of expressing their mediocrity, they are abandoning a chance to express their excellence. After a good course in domestic science, these same girls, let us say, might go into some


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 squalid, fly-infested, half-civilized town of the great Border; set up a clean, modern, scientific, attractive tea-room and cafeteria; and gradually teach the entire town what to eat, how to cook, how to serve meals, and how to behave at table. Or, let us say for the sake of those who savor their "idealism" more in the abstract than in the concrete: three hundred and sixty-five days in the year, they might bring something of grace, cleanliness, charm, and civility into the lives of an entire community. They might contribute permanently and substantially to the advance of civilization.

And they might actually have turned to this enterprise with imaginative gusto and practical effectiveness if work of this sort had ever been related in their minds to their "suppressed desire" for that enchanting will-o'-the-wisp, a beautiful and heroic life. The "service" as I state it here does not kindle the imagination like the thought of Florence Nightingale organizing her hospital in the Crimean War, nor like the thought of Jenny Lind contributing the glory of her voice to charity; but if there is one sound principle of human economy, it is this: To save a man from death or even to make him ecstatically happy once or twice, is a small service compared with making him comfortable


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 and contented and civilized every day of his life.

For some years I had in my house a bright young Japanese student who was preparing to be an engineer. He was not a Christian, but he had a tincture of Buddhism, and he used to come in from time to time and ask for some book "about culture." He received his degree with honors, and began his apprenticeship in one of our great electrical manufacturing establishments. From there he wrote me a remarkably interesting letter, interesting for two reasons: first, because it illustrates the deep-seated human passion to be of use; and, second, it illustrates the common human inability to recognize the usefulness of the tools within one's hand. Here is a portion of the letter:

I want to ask you the following, on which you may smile again. It is the similar question to that which I once did while I stayed yours: What is the Life? and how we have to live up in this world? Once I told you that I have to live for the sake of others, at least within my own scope. Although I think it ought to be, the idea is very vague and I am still doubting how I can go at it, in spite of the fact that I am so poor both materially and intellectually, as I have hardly help my own self. This is mainly, I think, due to the lack of any strong belief in any of the religions. Thus things do not seem very real but as virtual vision. I have inter-


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 ested in religion, philosophy, and literature, but I cannot comprehend why I do not get into enthusiastic enough to obtain from either religious belief or philosophical reason the sound composure of my own mind. . . . Engineer as I am, cannot entirely be managed away from the material environment: there is always certain contradiction between the ideal and material views, which means the fighting or uneasiness in the soul."

I said to this Japanese boy, so anxious to live for others yet so poor that he could hardly help himself, and so torn by the "fighting in his own soul" that he was losing even the capacity for self-help: "The remedy is very simple. You wish to serve the world. Well, you know one way to serve it. Japan needs electric lights. You know how to make them. Throw the full strength of your soul and body into making good electric lights, and you will have performed your best service to the world. In this material environment in which we all must work, there is no more shining avenue of 'service' open to you than to become a good engineer and to work manfully at that." Advice of this sort, I know well enough, will bring no immediate comfort to the romantic mind which yearns for "the land where I am not," and which has established no working terms with the material environment;


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 but it may lead in the long run to a fruitful reconsideration of the relation between usefulness and the special powers of the individual. And it is advice which may be given, mutatis mutandis, with just as much pertinence to a poet as to an engineer.

It is a platitude, which nevertheless each generation has to discover afresh, that one serves the world best by doing eagerly what one can do best, and not something else. Therefore Pindar gave as a rule of life this injunction: "Become what you are." It is not quite so simple as it sounds, to become what one is. Most of us are creatures moving about in worlds half-realized—only half-conscious, only half emerged from our own dullness and indolence and inefficiency. We do not know what we want or what we can do because we do not know clearly what we are. Meanwhile we play the ape and the parrot to our companions. We become creatures of convention and, careless habit. We accept the task work thrusts into our empty hands by whatever busy man passes our way. We become what our parents were or what our neighbors are. We make a virtue of our indolence, and call a lazy yielding to chance or a passive drifting with the stream, a patient acceptance of destiny. This destiny is a weak


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 hearted old-fashioned god whom educated men and women are sent into the world to dethrone. This destiny dwells in the past or lurks furtively in the environment, and is not ours. The only destiny which a man of grit will allow to influence him much is his destination. Our chance of reaching our destination does not lie in the line of what is ordinarily called renunciation and martyrdom, but rather in the discovery of our own inmost desires and our true powers and in the resolute organization of our lives around them. It ought to be a platitude that this is also the way to make ourselves the most useful instruments for the world's work.

The wary moralist, whom I have quoted before, here interjects a remonstrance against my dismissal of all those priceless virtues involved in "renunciation and martyrdom." I am glad that he does; for he gives me occasion to declare that I do not dismiss these virtues. On the contrary I propose to put them to the hardest possible use. Instead of advocating renunciation and martyrdom for the purpose of becoming a nonentity, I am advocating renunciation and, if need be, martyrdom for the purpose of becoming an entity. There is no course which demands more resolute power of abnegation than the course which leads to becoming what you


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 are. In order to become an individual, you must cease to be a crowd. You must learn the law of self-integration and loyally obey it. You must hurry past all the flowery by-paths into which the conflicting crowd of your own instincts tries to tempt you. At every fork in the road, you will find some one crying, "Come this way!" At every oasis in desert lands, you will hear a beguiling invitation to tarry there or wait awhile. And nothing will get you by—not eyes blindfolded nor ears stopped with wax—nothing but an imperative sense of "mission," nothing but a lively sense of the appointed service which you are to perform by reaching your destination.

Scrutinize yourself mercilessly and find out what you really are before you commit yourself. Don't lie to yourself about that. But when you have found out, insist upon it. "He that rides his hobby gently," as Emerson says, "must always give way to him that rides his hobby hard." If you are really a missionary to the Chinese, put your life on the cast of that die. China does not wish to be served by cowards. If you are really by nature and instinct and talent a toe-dancer, be a toe-dancer with all your might. If you are really that, you will probably put more of a "kick" into toe-dancing than into any-


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 thing else. Chesterfield's exhortation to his son to "shine" somewhere may be taken to heart even by a bootblack. If you are sure that you are called to be a teacher, put your entire capital into that investment. If you are a poet, by all means become one, body and soul. If you are really "domestic," put your heart into domesticity; and don't expect praise for doing even a multitude of little things ill. So far as my observation goes, young people with a modern liberal education can usually do several things fairly well. If you are in doubt which thing you do best, it is wiser to resort to an oracle than to hang in perpetual uncertainty or to flutter in eternal oscillation. Draw lots for the best of two guesses, and then abide by the lot.

Lay out the line of your own destiny. Then work faithfully on that line year after year with the zeal for improvement and the love of excellence which open the doors of a natural aristocracy; and you may rest assured that twenty years hence in your own circle, in your own community, you will be one of the "indispensable" members of your generation. When you have patiently perfected your own usefulness, you need not fear that you will not be used. Your special instrument of service and all your virtues and all your charms will be called for


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 and taken at one time or another, in one place or another, for the purposes of the better human society which we are eager to create. In the period of your apprenticeship, it behooves you to meditate upon the means of self-perfection, upon becoming what you are, rather than upon rewards or glory or even upon service. But if when you present yourselves at the door of the next age, you offer to concentrate all that you have and are upon the task which you can do best, you will not have to wait for good fortune. You yourselves are good fortune.


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According to all the critics, domestic and foreign, who have prophesied against America during the last hundred years, the great and ever-present danger of a democratic society lies in its tendency to destroy high standards of excellence and to accept the average man as a satisfactory measure of all things. Instead of saying, like Antigone in the drama of Sophocles, 'I know I please the souls I ought to please,' democracy, we are told, is prone to dismiss the question whether she has any high religious obligation, and to murmur complacently, 'I know I please the souls of average men.' I propose to examine a little the origins of this belief, and then to inquire whether it is justified by the present condition of our civilization, as reflected in our current literature. In the course of the inquiry I shall at least raise the question whether the average man is as easy to please as he is ordinarily supposed to be.


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A2202 :(g) providing for the approval of a trustee as an approved trustee;
 * (h) providing for the service of notices in writing or other documents on approved trustees for the purposes of this Ordinance;
 * (i) providing for the winding up of a registered scheme;
 * (j) for the purposes of sections 5, 7, 11, 14, 15, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 24, 27, 29, 33, 34 and 43;
 * (k) providing for the better or more effectual carrying out of the provisions and objects of this Ordinance, including incidental, consequential, evidential, ancillary and supplemental provisions.

(2) Any regulations made under this section may prescribe offences in respect of contraventions of the regulations, and may provide for the imposition of a fine not exceeding level 5 and of imprisonment for a period not exceeding 1 year.

(3) Regulations made under this section shall be subject to the approval of the Legislative Council.

47. Rules

(1) The Authority may, in relation to a registered scheme, make rules—
 * (a) providing for the administration, management, maintenance and regulation of a registered scheme and the trust in relation thereto;
 * (b) providing for the role, duties, responsibilities and obligations of approved trustees;
 * (c) providing for the maintenance of relevant employees’ accounts in respect of contributions to the trustee of a registered scheme, and the disclosure of information in respect thereof to the account holders;
 * (d) providing for the imposition of satisfactory vesting requirements in respect of contributions to the trustees of a registered scheme;
 * (e) providing for the imposition of requirements in respect of the assets of a registered scheme, including—
 * (i) requirements relating to the separation of those assets in respect of that registered scheme from other assets in the beneficial ownership of employers who are making contributions in respect of that registered scheme;
 * (ii) requirements that the first-mentioned assets shall only be applied for the purposes of a registered scheme;
 * (iii) requirements that the first-mentioned assets shall not be subject to any charge, pledge, lien, mortgage or other encumbrance, other than in such circumstances as may be specified therein or otherwise authorized under this Ordinance;


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 At the very foundation of the Republic, the menace of the average man was felt by a distinguished group of our own superior men, including Washington, John Adams, Hamilton, and many other able and prosperous country gentlemen. To them the voice of the people was not the voice of God, but the clamor of a hydra-headed monster, requiring to be checked and bridled. Thus, at the outset of our civilization, they established a point of view and they instituted a criticism, which were unfriendly to the average man and his aspirations and to all his misguided friends. They possessed, for example, certain standards of character and manners, which they applied with some austerity to what they regarded as the vulgar Jacobinism of Thomas Paine, to the disintegrating demagoguery of Jefferson, to the cosmopolitan laxity of Franklin, and to all the tendencies of French radicalism towards leveling by law the inequalities created by law and by nature.

Edmund Burke explained England's relative immunity to the equalitarian speculations of the French by this fact: 'We continue,' he said, 'as in the last two ages, to read more generally, than, I believe, is now done on the Continent, the authors of sound antiquity. These occupy our minds. They give us another taste and turn,


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 and will not suffer us to be more than transiently amused with paradoxical morality.' Now, it is insufficiently recognized that, in the third quarter of the eighteenth century, America, like England, was at the height of her classical period—I mean the period when statesmen, poets, and painters most deliberately and successfully imitated the example of the ancients. The public characters of Washington and his friends, like those of Burke and his friends, were in the grand style, were in a style more or less consciously moulded upon that of the great republicans of England, Rome, and Athens. From Cromwell and Milton, and, above all, from the heroes of Plutarch, the friends of Washington inherited the ardor and the elevation of their public spirit, and, at the same time, their lofty disdain for the vulgar herd and a conviction that the salvation of the people depended upon the perpetuation of their own superiorities.

At its best, near the source, and on its positive side, there is something very august and inspiring in the utterances of this old Roman or aristocratic republicanism. It is not far from its best in the letters of Abigail Adams.

Glory, my son [she writes to John Quincy Adams] in a country which has given birth to


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 characters, both in the civil and military departments, which may vie with the wisdom and valor of antiquity. As an immediate descendant of one of these characters, may you be led to an imitation of that disinterested patriotism and that noble love of country, which will teach you to despise wealth, titles, pomp, and equipage, as mere external advantages, which cannot add to the excellence of your mind, or compensate for the want of integrity or virtue.

It is not difficult to despise 'wealth, pomp, and equipage,' when one is adequately supplied with them; John Quincy Adams, accordingly, found his occasion for pride in the excellence of his mind and in his integrity and virtue. And, true to his breeding, he maintained, like Coriolanus, a kind of passionate and scornful opposition to the vulgar mob. In 1795, he writes to his mother that France will remain without the means to form a Constitution till she has exploded the doctrine of submission to and veneration for public opinion. A little later, he admits to his father that 'the struggle against a popular clamor is not without its charms in my mind.'

There he sounds the rallying cry of our great conservative tradition. I shall not ask here whether the creative ardor of the aristocratic spirit which we observed in the mother is not


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 already beginning to be transformed in the son to a certain ardor of repression. Nor am I concerned here to trace the evolution of this Roman-American pride from its pure high source, down through the ages, till it reappears in aristocratic republicans of our own times, who still find a charm in opposing the popular clamor. I am thinking of the railway magnate, author of the celebrated phrase, 'The public be damned'; and I am thinking of our most aggressive literary critic, a professed Federalist, who remarked the other day in language savoring a bit, perhaps, of the Roman decadence: 'I don't care a damn what happens to the Republic after I am dead.'

We must pause here, however, long enough to recall that the classical models of society, which the more conservative of our forefathers kept in their minds' eye, rested upon a slave population, and that the government which they actually set up countenanced, in opposition to the plebeian taste of Paine and the demagoguery of Jefferson, a slave population. It is a question of more than academic interest to-day, whether or not the government which they set up necessarily implies the continued existence of an illiterate peasantry.

Those who believe that the salvation of the


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 people depends upon the perpetuation of their own superiorities are likely, in the long run, to make the end subservient to the means, to grow rather careless about the salvation of the people and rather over-careful about the preservation of their own superiorities. They incline, also, to a belief that these superiorities can best be perpetuated through their own offspring—a belief which, so far as I can learn, is inadequately supported by statistics. On this assumption, however, they endeavor to make a kind of closed corporation of their own class, and seek to monopolize for it the administration of government, the possession of property, the enjoyment of higher education and culture, and the literary production of the country.

These tendencies, as we know, appeared very early in the history of the Republic. John Adams nearly ruined himself in 1787 by his frank declaration that wealth and birth should be qualifications for the Senate. Hamilton, at the same time, put forth his proposals for restraining the vulgar herd by perpetuating wealth and the leadership of established families in the nearest possible American imitation of the British monarchical and aristocratic system.

The irrepressible conflict provoked by such


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 attempts to check the rich fecundity and the unpredictable powers of our colonial 'populace' is ordinarily presented to us as a contention over political principles. In its most comprehensive aspect, it may profitably be regarded as rather a conflict of religions. The short interval between the adoption of the Constitution and the end of the eighteenth century is the period of antique Republicanism triumphant, dominated by the religion of the superior man. In 1800, this religion received a blow in the election of Jefferson, the St. Paul of the religion of the populace, who preached faith, hope, and charity for the masses. In 1828, the religion of the superior man received a still more ominous blow, when the fiery, pistoling rough-rider from Tennessee. Andrew Jackson, defeated John Quincy Adams. At this reverse to the sons of light, John Quincy Adams lost his faith in God, the God of superior men.

We have recently had, from the fourth eminent generation of the Adams family, Brooks, Charles Francis, and Henry, a voluminous commentary upon the effort of 'the heirs of Washington' to stand against the popular clamor and uphold their great tradition. On the whole, if we may trust their testimony, it has been a tragically unavailing effort. In Boston and


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 Cambridge and in a few tributary villages, in old New York and Washington, on a few great plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas, the civilization which the superior men contemplated obtained a struggling foothold before the Civil War. And this civilization achieved some literary expression in the classical oratory of Webster, in the fine old English gentility of Irving's prose, and in the pale provincial flowering of our New England poetry. Sanguine observers saw in this literary renascence promise that the intrenched intelligence and culture of the settled, civilized East was to take and hold the mastery in the national life.

But for Henry Adams, at least, that hope ended with his return from England in 1868. He discovered, when he went to Washington to offer his services in carrying on the great tradition—he discovered that the great tradition was broken. There had taken place, not merely a Civil War, but a far more fundamental revolution. He and his kind, bred on the classics, and versed in law and European diplomacy, were anachronisms, survivors out of the classical eighteenth century, belated revelers in the Capitol. A multitude of unknown or ignored forces had developed in his absence, and had combined to antiquate him, to extrude him from the cur-


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 rent of national life, and to incapacitate him for a place in the public councils. This singular new nation was no respecter of grandfathers. It took its superior men wherever it found them. It picked its chief statesman out of a log cabin in Illinois, its chief military hero out of an Ohio tannery, its most eminent poet from a carpenter's shop, and its leading man of letters from a pilot-house on the Mississippi. Such standards! Henry spent a life-time elaborating his grand principle of the degradation of energy, to explain to himself why the three grandsons of two presidents of the United States all ended miserably: one as President of the Kansas City Stock Yards; one as a member of the Massachusetts Bar; while one had sunk to the level of a Professor of History at Harvard.

From the point of view of these antique republicans, the period from the Civil War to the end of the nineteenth century proves the truth of all the prophesies against the average man. This is the period of triumphant democracy—meaning, of course, the triumph, not of the political party, but of the religious principle. In this epoch, the gates of opportunity open as never before to the populace, to the new men. What are the results? Throughout the period, the steadily waning influence of Eastern


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 intelligence and culture in the national life, steadily increasing immigration from the peasant stocks of Europe, expansion of the population into new western territory, prosperity of industrial pioneers, rise of the railway magnate, the iron-master, the organizer of large-scale production of material commodities—immense rewards and glory for supplying the average man what the average man, at that particular moment, wanted and had to have.

Midway in this epoch, one of its heroes. Andrew Carnegie, wrote a book which he called Triumphant Democracy—a work which exults and rejoices in the goodness and greatness of American life. It was an industrial captain's reply to the foreign critics who had flitted across the country year after year, like ravens, boding disaster. It was a reply from the point of view of a Scotch radical, a self-made man, who could compare the poor little Scotch town of Dunfermline, where the revolution in machinery had ruined his father, to the booming city of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where the same revolution had made him one of the masters of his generation.

Carnegie's point of view was inadequate. He offered no effective answer to the savage criticism which Dickens had made of our civiliza-


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 tion forty years earlier, when he pictured the democracy as brutal, boisterous, boastful, ignorant, and hypocritical. He made no effective reply to Carlyle, who had cried twenty-two years later than Dickens, 'My friend, brag not yet of our American cousins! Their quantity of cotton, dollars, industry and resources, I believe to be almost unspeakable; but I can by no means worship the like of these.'

Matthew Arnold, a critical friend of ours, far more friendly to our political institutions and to our social organization than Carlyle, dropped in upon us at about the time that Carnegie published his book. 'The trouble with Carnegie and his friends,' said Arnold, 'is that they have no conception of the chief defect of American life; namely, that it is so dreadfully uninteresting.' This dullness, he explained, was due to the average man's quite inadequate conception of the good life, which did not go beyond being diligent in business and serving the Lord—making money and observing a narrow code of morality.

The particularly hopeless aspect of our case, Arnold thought, was that we, as a people, seemed quite unconscious of our deficiencies on the human side of our civilization. We displayed a self-satisfaction which is 'vulgarizing


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 and retarding.' Nationally we were boasters, or, as we say nowadays, 'boosters.' 'The worst of it is,' he continues, 'that this tall talk and self-glorification meets with hardly any rebuke from sane criticism over there.' He cites some examples; and then he adds that, 'the new West promises to beat in the game of brag even the stout champions I have been quoting.'

Now, no Englishman will ever fathom the mystery of Uncle Sam's boasting. No outsider can ever know, as we all know, how often, out of the depths of self-distrust and self-contempt and cutting self-criticism, he has whistled to keep his courage up in the dark, and has smiled reassuringly while his heart was breaking. Still, if you look into the literature of the period, you find that there is much warrant for Arnold's strictures, though not always precisely where he found it. The little boasts of men like Lowell and Thomas Wentworth Higginson and Brander Matthews are only Yankee whistling, the turning of the trodden worm, a decent pride in the presence of 'a certain condescension in foreigners.' Lowell knew a man, he says, who thought Cambridge the best spot on the habitable globe. 'Doubtless God could have made a better, but doubtless He never did.' I myself am fond of declaring that the campus of the


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 University of Illinois is finer than the meadows of Christ Church College, Oxford. But no one in America thinks anything a whit the finer for what an academic person has said in its favor. Nor, on the other hand, does anyone, outside academic circles, think anything in America a whit the worse for what a foreign critic has said against it. The Chicago journalists, for example, with true Jacksonian hilarity, ridiculed Arnold and, after his departure, stigmatized him as a 'cur.'

The only criticism which ever, as we say, 'gets across' to the Jacksonian democracy is that which comes from one of their own number. The really significant aspects of our self-complacency in Carnegie's time were reflected in the popular literature of the period by writers sprung from the new democracy, self-made authors, who flattered the average man into satisfaction with his present state and his average achievement. I am thinking of Western writers, like Joaquin Miller and Riley and Carleton and Bret Harte and Mark Twain. I am thinking of the romantic glamour which these men contrived to spread over the hard rough life and the rougher characters of the middle-borderers, the Argonauts, and the Forty-Niners.


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 You recall the method. First, they admit certain facts—for picturesque effect. For example, these settlers of the Golden West, they say, included a few decent men, but they were in great part the riffraff of the world—foreign adventurers, offscourings of Eastern cities, uncouth, red-shirted illiterates from the Middle States, lawless, dirty, tobacco-spitting, blaspheming, drunken, horse-thieves, murderers, and gamblers. And then, with noble poetic vision, they cry: 'But what delicacy of sentiment beneath those shaggy bosoms! What generosity and chivalry under those old red shirts! Horse-thieves, yet nature's noblemen! Gamblers and drunkards, yet kings of men!' 'I say to you,' chants 'the poet of the Sierras,' 'that there is nothing in the pages of history so glorious, so entirely grand, as the lives of these noble Spartan fathers and mothers of Americans, who begot and brought forth and bred the splendid giants of the generation that is now fast following the setting sun of their unselfish and all immortal lives.'

Here is the point of view of the Jacksonian democracy in its romantic mood. This, in general, was the point of view of Mark Twain, the most original force in American letters and, on the whole, the most broadly representative


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A2204 :(f) providing for the imposition of custodial arrangements for the maintenance of the assets of a registered scheme;
 * (g) providing for the maintenance of proper books and records of account;
 * (h) providing for the formulation of proper accounting systems and independent auditing in respect thereof;
 * (i) providing for the maintenance of adequate reserves for the purpose of providing investment guarantees;
 * (j) providing for the imposition of internal controls;
 * (k) providing for the imposition of procedures for the purpose of accounting to, and filing returns with, the Authority;
 * (l) providing for the formulation of arrangements for obtaining adequate professional indemnity insurance, including insurance against misfeasance or other illegal conduct by the approved trustee of a registered scheme or any other persons in respect thereof;
 * (m) providing for the preservation of accrued benefits of scheme members until the occurrence of a specified event such as, but not limited to, the retirement, death, total disability or incapacity or permanent departure from Hong Kong of those scheme members;
 * (n) providing for the portability or transferability of accrued benefits of scheme members to, from and between registered schemes, including the exercise of any options that may be necessary by relevant employees in respect thereof;
 * (o) providing for the methods of payment of accrued benefits of scheme members;
 * (p) providing for the transfer or withdrawal of unclaimed accrued benefits to, from and between registered schemes;
 * (q) providing for the methods of payment of statutory minimum contributions;
 * (r) for the purposes of section 4 (Exemptions), the definition of an “exempt person” and the identification of such a person in relation thereto; and
 * (s) for the purposes of sections 7, 11, 12, 15, 17, 20, 21, 23 and 32.

(2) Any rules made under subsection (1) may—
 * (a) make different provisions for different circumstances and provide for a particular case or class of cases;
 * (b) be made so as to apply only in such circumstances as may be specified in the rules;
 * (c) prescribe forms for the purposes of the rules;
 * (d) prescribe fees for the purposes of the rules; and


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 American writer between the close of the Civil War and the end of the century. Most of us have enough pioneer blood in our veins, or in our imaginative sympathies, to love Mark Twain nowadays. But academic people, they tell us,—and they tell us truly,—had little to do with establishing his earlier reputation. He neither flattered them nor pleased them. He pleased and flattered and liberated the emotions of that vast mass of the population which had been suppressed and inarticulate. He was the greatest booster for the average man that the country ever produced. Confident in the political and mechanical and natural superiorities conferred upon every son of these States by his mere birth under the American flag, Mark Twain laughed at the morality of France, the language of Germany, the old masters of Italy, the caste system of India, the imperialism of England, the romances of Scott, the penal laws of the sixteenth century, and at the chivalry of the court of King Arthur—he laughed at all the non-American world, from the point of view of the average American, stopping only from time to time to pat his countrymen on the back and to cry, like Jack Horner, 'What a brave boy am I!' To make a climax to the bold irreverence of this Jacksonian laughter, he laughed


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 at New England and at all her starchy immortals.

In the Connecticut Yankee at King Arthur's Court, published in 1889, we hear the last full-hearted laughter of triumphant democracy. Twain himself became sombre in his later years; he became cynical, and touched with misanthropy. I cannot go here, in any detail, into the causes for the darkening of his outlook. The most interesting of these causes, perhaps, was that Mark Twain had one foot over the threshold of a new age, our present era, which I shall call the era of critical and pessimistic democracy. He had begun to emerge, as I think we are all now beginning to emerge, from the great romantic illusion about the average man, namely, that liberty or equality or any kind of political recognition or literary exploitation, or even economic independence, can make him a happy or a glorious being.

Poets and novelists, since the French Revolution, have fostered this romantic illusion in a laudable but misdirected effort to bestow dignity upon the humblest units of humanity. They liberated the emotion for a religion of democracy. They did little to give to that emotion intelligent direction.

You will recall Wordsworth's poem called


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 'Resolution and Independence.' The poet, wandering on the moor in richly gloomy thought, comes upon a poor old man, bent, broken, leaning over a pool, gathering leeches for his livelihood. The poet questions him how it goes with him. The old man replies, quietly enough, that it goes pretty hard, that it is going rather worse; but that he still perseveres and manages to get on, in one way or another. Whereupon Wordsworth falls into a kind of visionary trance. The old peasant looms for him to a gigantic stature. He becomes the heroic 'man with the hoe'; a shadowy shape against the sky; man in the abstract, clothed in all the moral splendor of the poet's own imagination.

This same trick of the fancy Hardy plays with his famous dairy-maid, Tess of the D'Urbervilles. She is but an ignorant, instinctive, erring piece of Eve's flesh. Yet, says Hardy, drawing upon the riches of his own poetic associations, 'The impressionable peasant leads a larger, fuller, more dramatic life than the pachydermatous king.' Thereupon he proceeds to invest the dairy-maid with the tragic emotions and import of a heroine of. Thebes or Pelops' line. He infers, by a poetic fallacy, that she is as interesting and as significant to herself as she is to him.


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 I will take one other case, the hero of a recently translated novel, Knut Hamsun's Growth of the Soil. Here we have an illiterate peasant of Norway, going into the public land almost empty-handed; gradually acquiring a pig, a cow, a woman, a horse, building a turf-shelter, a cowshed, a cabin, a mill—and so, little by little, toiling like an ox, becoming a prosperous farmer, owner of rich lands and plentiful flocks and herds. It is, in a sense, a very cheerful book, a sort of new Robinson Crusoe. Its moral appears to be that, so long as men stick to the soil and preserve their ignorance and their natural gusto, they may be happy. It is a glorification of the beaver, the building animal. It is an idealization of the peasant at the instinctive level.

The trick of the literary imagination in all these cases is essentially the same as that which Bret Harte played with his Argonauts, and Miller and Riley with their Indiana pioneers, and Mark Twain with his Connecticut Yankee. We are changing all that.

I chanced the other day upon an impressive new American novel, strikingly parallel insome respects to Hamsun's Growth of the Soil, but utterly different from it in the mood and the point of view. I refer to the story of Kansas


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 life, called Dust, by Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius. Here again we have the hardy pioneer, rough, dirty, and capable, entering on the new land, with next to nothing but his expectations; acquiring a pig, a hut, cattle, and a wife; and gradually 'growing up with the country' into a prosperous western farmer, with stock in the bank, and a Cadillac, and electric lights in the cowbarns, and kerosene lamps in the house. Our human beaver in America, toiling with the same ox-like fortitude as Isak in Norway, achieves the same material success. But—and this is the difference—the story is one of unrelieved gloom ending in bitter tragedy. Why this sustained note of gloom? Why has our Kansas tale none of the happy gusto of Hamsun's Growth of the Soil? Because the Kansas farmer is not content with the life of a peasant. Because our Kansas authors refuse to glorify man on the instinctive level, or to disguise the essential poverty and squalor of his personal life with a poetic fallacy. The book is written from a; point of view at which it is apparent that our civilization has failed to solve the human problem.

Since the time of The Connecticut Yankee and Carnegie's Triumphant Democracy, our literary interpreters have been gradually shift-


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 ing their ground. They are giving us now a criticism of life from a position at which it is possible to see through the poetic illusion about the average man. Making an effort now to see him as he really is, our authors are reporting that he is not satisfied with his achievements, he is not happy, he is very miserable. The most hopeful aspect of American literature to-day is its widespread pessimism. I call this symptom hopeful, because it is most fully exhibited by precisely that part of the country, and by those elements of the population, which were thought forty years ago to be most addicted to boasting and most deeply infected with the vulgarizing and retarding self-complacency of the Philistine, the red-shirted Jacksonian from Missouri. This pessimism comes out of Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois, Indiana, Missouri, Kansas, and California; from the sons and daughters of pioneer farmers, country doctors, small-town lawyers, and country editors; from the second generation of immigrant stock, German, Swedish, Scotch, Irish; from the hungry, nomadic semi-civilization of the West.

I call this Western pessimism auspicious, because it is so sharply critical, and because the criticism is directed, not so much against the political and economic framework of society as


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 against the kind of personalities which this society produces, and against the quantity and: quality of the human satisfactions which these personalities have at their disposal. It is directed against that defect in our civilization which Arnold pointed out; it is so lacking in elevation and beauty; it is so humdrum, so dreadfully uninteresting; it so fails to appease the vague yet already acutely painful hunger of the average man for a good life. 'Beguile us no longer,' cry the new voices; 'beguile us no longer with heroic legends and romantic idyls. The life which you celebrate is not beautiful, not healthy, not satisfying. It is ugly, obscene, devastating. It is driving us mad. And we are going to revolt from it.'

The manifestation of this spirit which, at the present moment, is attracting most attention is what Mr. Van Doren, in his interesting book on Contemporary American Novelists, has called 'the revolt from the village.' I need only remind you of that long series of narratives, beginning in the early eighties with E. W. Howe's Story of a Country Town, and followed by Hamlin Garland's Main Travelled Roads, Mr. Masters's Spoon River Anthology, Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, Sinclair Lewis's Main Street, Zona Gale's Miss Lulu Bett, and


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 the novel of which I have already spoken, Dust, by Mr. and Mrs. Haldeman-Julius.

But the interesting pessimistic and critical note in our current literature is by no means confined to representations of country life and the small town. Take Mrs. Wharton's pictures of metropolitan society, from The House of Mirth to The Age of Innocence, remembering only that Mrs. Wharton cannot be classed as a Jacksonian; then consider the dreary wide wilderness of Mr. Dreiser's picture of big business; Ben Hecht's story of a city-editor in Erik Dorn; Mr. Cabell's Cream of the Jest; Mr. Norris's broad picture of the California scene in Brass; Mr. Fitzgerald's account of the younger generation in The Beautiful and Damned; Mr. Hergesheimer's admirable new novel, Cytherea; and, finally, Mr. Lewis's Babbitt.

Here we are invited to consider a class of which the discontent cannot be explained by their struggle with the churlishness of the soil and the rigor and tragic whimsicality of the elements. Most of the characters, indeed, have reached a level at which even the economic struggle is as much a pastime as a necessity. They are business men and their womenkind, with a sprinkling of professional men, people who, as we say, know 'how to live,' people who


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Rh acquisition of such an improved education as will make those who possess it more useful members of society in every condition of life—should exist in every district in India.”

This point was again strongly enforced by the Home Government in 1863 in a Despatch from Sir C. Wood:—

"“I have noticed with some surprise the remarks of the present Chief Commissioner of Oude and of the Director of Public Instruction in Bengal with regard to the principle on which Government should proceed in its measures for the promotion of education in India. It would appear to be the opinion of these gentlemen that Government should, for the present, limit its measures to providing the means of education for the higher classes, and that the education of the lower classes should be left to be effected hereafter, when the classes above them shall have not only learnt to appreciate the advantages of education for themselves, but have become desirous of extending its benefits to those below them. Without entering into a discussion on the question here involved, it is sufficient to remark that the sentiments of the Home Authorities with regard to it have already been declared with sufficient distinctness, and that they are entirely opposed to the views put forward by Mr. Wingfield and Mr. Atkinson.”"

Again, in 1864, Sir Charles Wood wrote—

"“Those principles are that, as far as possible, the resources of the State should be so applied as to assist those who cannot be expected to help themselves, and that the richer classes of the people should gradually be induced to provide for their own education.”"

These extracts seem to show that, until the State has placed the means of elementary Vernacular Education within the reach of those who are unable to procure it for themselves, an annually increasing Government expenditure in any Province upon “the higher classes who are able, and willing in many cases, to bear a considerable part at least of the cost of their own education,”is not in accordance with the main object of the Educational Code, nor with the subsequent views of the Home Governments.

Howell, in his Note on Education, 1867, published by the Government of India, puts the following questions:—

"“It may perhaps, therefore, be asked, in the words of the Despatch of 1854, how far does the Bengal system tend ‘to confer those vast moral and material blessings which flow from the general diffusion of useful knowledge?’ There is ‘satisfactory evidence of the high attainments in English literature and European science in the few,’ but how does the system ‘provide for the extension to the general population of those means of obtaining an education suitable to their station in life which had theretofore been too exclusively confined to the higher classes’?

“Do Native gentlemen, like English gentlemen, return to their Zemindaries from a University career, to spread around them the reflex of the enlightenment they have received themselves? Does the process of highly educating a few, and leaving the masses, tend to increase, or to diminish, the gulf between class and class? Are there any indications of a decrease in crime, or of a dawn of intelligence in the agricultural classes of those districts where the mass Schools ‘have not been taken up by Government or by any Society,’ and where education only ‘filters’?"


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 live expensively, purchasing with free hand whatever gratifications are available for the senses. Nevertheless, if we may trust their interpreters, these people, too, are dreadfully uninteresting to one another, alternating between a whipped-up excitement and a stifled yawn. Their entire stratum of society is permeated by a terrible ennui. Jaded with business and cardparties, Mr. Hergesheimer's persons, for example, can conceive no relief from the boredom of the week but to meet at one another's houses at the week-ends and, in a state of half-maudlin tipsiness, kiss one another's wives on the stairs. Even when the average man is sheltered on all sides, weariness, as Pascal says, springs from the depths of his own heart and fills the soul with its poison. Our 'bourgeoisie,' no less than our 'peasantry,' are on the verge of a cultural revolt; they are quarreling with the quality of their civilization.

Now, at the time when a man quarrels with his wife, either one of two interesting things may happen. He may elope with his neighbor's wife for Cuba, fancying for the moment that she is the incarnation of all his unsatisfied desires, the divine Cytherea. Or this man and his old wife may turn over a new leaf and put their relations on a more satisfactory basis.


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 Which course will be followed depends on the power of self-criticism which the interested persons possess.

This is a parable, with wide possibilities of social application. Our average man, in town and country, is quarreling with his wife, that is to say, with our average American civilization. If he listens to certain counselors who appeal to certain of his instincts and to his romantic imagination, his household, the material civilization which he has slowly built up out of the dust by faithfully working on certain traditional principles—this household will be in danger of disruption. If, on the other hand, his discontent with himself and his human conditions is adequately diagnosed, and if an adequate remedy is accepted, then he will look back upon this period of pessimism as preliminary to the redintegration of the national spirit and its expression in literature. Which course will be followed depends in no small measure upon our power of criticism, which, in its turn, depends upon an adequate point of view.

The elder critics in the academic tradition have in general not dealt sympathetically, or even curiously, with the phenomena. Fixed in an inveterate fidelity to the point of view established by the early classical Americans, they


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 look with a mingling of disdain and abhorrence upon our impious younger world, as upon

The critics, on the other hand, who are endeavoring to deal sympathetically and curiously with the phenomena, are utterly unorganized; are either without standards of judgment, or in a wild state of confusion with regard to their standards. They are making efforts to get together; but they have no principle of integration. I have not time to do more than mention some of their incongruous points of view.

A man whose hearty geniality touches the affections of us all, Mr. William Allen White, proposed the other day, as an integrating principle, the entire abandonment of all standards and a general adoption of the policy of live and let live. His theory of universal sympathy, which he miscalls 'the democratic theory in criticism,' would, if applied, destroy both criticism and democracy.

Our journalistic critics in general, conscious of the incompatibility between their private beliefs and the political and economic interests which they serve, tend at the present time, I should say, to adopt the point of view of universal cynicism.


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 In order precisely to escape from the troublesome clashes of political, social, and moral judgment, in order to escape, in other words, from the real problem of critical redintegration, another group has adopted the æsthetic point of view, and has made a feeble effort to revive in America, with the aid of the Crocean philosophy, the doctrine of art for art's sake.

I will mention, finally, one other point of view, to which an increasing company of the younger writers are repairing, which we may call for convenience the Freudian point of view. The champions of this point of view attempt a penetrating diagnosis of all the maladies of American civilization, with the assistance of the new psychology. To sum up their findings briefly, they hold that the trouble with American life is, at the root, due to age-long and cankering inhibitions, attributable to our traditional Puritanism. The remedy is a drop to the instinctive level; the opening of the gates to impulse; a free and spontaneous doing as one pleases in all directions.

Popular Freudianism is, perhaps, the most pestilential of all the prevailing winds of doctrine. Yet its champions have penetrated, I believe, nearer to the heart of our difficulty, they are nearer to an adequate point of view


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 and an integrating principle, than any of the other seekers. They at least recognize that the kingdom of disorganization is within the individual breast. The fact that they approach so near to the true destination, and yet fall short of it, renders their counsels peculiarly seductive and peculiarly perilous.

They are right when they attribute the central malady of our civilization to suppressed desires. They are tragically wrong if they believe that this malady is due to the suppression by religion of any specific isolable physical instinct. They are tragically wrong if they think that this malady can be cured by the destruction of religious restraint and the release of any specific isolable physical instinct. When they prescribe, as many of them do with as much daring as they can muster, giving a new and large license, for example, to the sexual impulses; when they prescribe, as if with the countenance of fresh scientific discoveries, the restoration of the grand old liberative force of alcohol; when they flatter any of the more or less disciplined instincts of our animal nature with the promise of happiness in emancipation, they are offering us intoxicants, anodynes, opiates, every one of which has been proved, by the experience of innumerable generations, hopeless


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 even to accomplish any permanent alleviation of the malady which they profess to cure. And when they attack the essential religious principle of Puritanism,—its deep human passion for perfection,—they are seeking to destroy the one principle which can possibly result in the integration of the national life.

Now, as I talk with the members of the beautiful younger generation which comes through my class-room year after year, I find that the Freudians are profoundly mistaken in their analysis of human nature. The deepest craving of these average young men and women is not to be unbound, and released, and to be given a license for a free and spontaneous doing as they please in all directions. They recognize that nature and environment and lax educational discipline have made them beings of sufficiently uncoördinated desires and scattering activities.

What they deeply crave is a binding generalization of philosophy, or religion, or morals, which will give direction and purpose, which 'will give channel and speed, to the languid diffusive drift of their lives. The suppressed desire which causes their unhappiness is a suppressed desire for a good life, for the perfection of their human possibilities. The average unreflective man does not always know that this


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 is, in fact, his malady. And in the blind hunger and thirst of his unenlightened nature, he reaches out eagerly for opiates and anodynes, which leave him unsatisfied. But what the innermost law of his being demands, what his human nature craves, is something good and great that he can do with his heart and mind and body. He craves the active peace of surrender and devotion to something greater than himself. Surrender to anything less means the degradation and humilitationhumiliation [sic] of his spirit.

This is the tragedy involved in any surrender to subordinate passions or instincts. I think that our current pessimistic literature indicates that our average man is discovering this fact about his own nature, and that, therefore, like the sinner made conscious of guilt, he is ripe for regeneration; he is ready for the reception of a higher culture than he has yet enjoyed.

Democratic civilization suffereth long, because it is always waiting for the hindmost to catch up with the middle. It is always reluctant to consign the hindmost to the devil. But, in the long run, I do not believe that the history of our civilization is going to verify the apprehensions entertained by our old Roman-Americans regarding the average man. To one whose measure of national accomplishment is not the


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 rich flowering of a small aristocratic class, but the salvation of the people, the choices of the average man in the past do not conclusively prove the danger of giving him what he wants. In his first period, he wanted a stable government; and he got it, and whole-heartedly glorified the political and military heroes who gave it to him. In his second period, he wanted a rapid and wide diffusion of the material instruments of civilized life; he got them, and whole-heartedly glorified the industrial heroes who provided them. In his third period, the average man is growing almost as scornful of 'wealth and pomp and equipage,' as John Quincy Adams. The captains of industry are no longer his heroes; they have communicated to him what they had of virtue for their hour. What the average man now wants is the large-scale production and the wide diffusion of science, art, music, literature, health, recreation, manners, human intercourse, happiness—the best to be had; and he is going to get them and to glorify whole-heartedly the heroes of culture who provide them for him.

The great civilizations of the world hitherto have been integrated in their religion. By religion I mean that which, in the depths of his heart, a man really believes desirable and


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 praiseworthy. A great civilization begins to form when men reach an agreement as to what is desirable and praiseworthy. The leading Athenians, in their best period, reached such an agreement; and that is why, whether you meditate on their art, their poetry, or their philosophy, whether you gaze at the frieze of the Parthenon, or read a drama of Sophocles, or the prayer of Socrates, you feel yourself in the presence of one and the same formative spirit—one superb stream of energy, superbly controlled by a religious belief that moral and physical symmetry are the most desirable and praiseworthy things in the outer and the inner man.

The prospects for our American civilization depend at present upon our capacity for a similar religious integration. Our present task is, primarily, to become clear in our minds as to what is our own formative spirit. The remedy for our present discontents is indicated by the character of the malady. The remedy is, first, to help the average man to an understanding of his own nature, so that he may recognize more fully what part the things of the mind and the imagination may play in the satisfaction of his suppressed desires. It is to help him to recognize that even an intellectual and imaginative


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 life will yield him little content unless it is organized around some central principle and animating purpose. It is to give the average man what the literature of our pessimistic democracy has at last proved that he wants, namely, an object to which he can joyfully surrender the full strength of his soul and body.

But this is not the whole of the remedy. It is necessary, at the same time, to persuade the superior men that the gods of the old Roman-American aristocrats have forsaken them, and that the time has come when even they may safely accept the purified religion of democracy. To oppose it now is to oppose the formative spirit of our national life and to doom one's self to sterility. The remedy is, in short, to effect a redintegration of the national will on the basis of a genuinely democratic humanism, recognizing as its central principle the duty of bringing the whole body of the people to the fullest and fairest human life of which they are capable.

The point of view which I advocate is not, as it has been called, moralistic. It is essentially religious. And the religion of an intelligent man is not a principle of repression, any more than it is a principle of release. Religion binds us to old morals and customs so long as they help us towards the attainment of our object;


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 but it releases from old morals and customs as soon as they impede our progress towards that object. The object gives the standard. Confronted with heirlooms or with innovations, one's first question is, does this, or does it not, tend to assist the entire body of the people toward the best human life of which they are capable? Advance to this point of view, and you leave behind you universal sympathy, universal cynicism, universal æstheticism, and the black bats of the Freudian cave. You grasp again a power of choice which enables you to accept or reject, with something of that lost serenity which Socrates displayed when he rejected escape from prison and accepted the hemlock. You recover something of that high elation which Emerson displayed when he said: 'I am primarily engaged to myself to be a public servant of all the gods, to demonstrate to all men that there is intelligence and good-will at the heart of things, and ever higher and higher leadings.'


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Why apologize for literature at a time when, if we may trust our friends in the eastern provinces who supply us with our weekly reading matter, the entire country is enjoying a literary renascence, and Chicago is its centre? The great industrious city, which one of your own poets has called the "hog-butcher of the world"—this toiling giant has washed his hands of blood and dust, and now in ripe middle age, has turned, we are told, to things of the mind, grants them their full importance, and is become a friend and patron of all the fine arts. This is a very gratifying thought—tinctured only by a grave wonder whether it is true. As I turned over recently the letters of that fine poet and most interesting man, William Vaughn Moody, in whose honor this series of lectures was founded, I could not escape an im-


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 pression that for him, though he was a native son of our Middle West, his brief sojourn in the city by the inland sea was a restless exile. When he desired to write, he found the air freer in the fishing village of Gloucester. When he hungered for companionship and for recognition, he sought it in the eastern capital. "I feel convinced," he wrote as lately as 1898, "that this [New York] is the place for young Americans who want to do something." On the meridian which runs through Chicago, he felt himself obliged, before he spoke out, to lift the sheer dead weight of a vast busy multitude which attached no importance whatever to what he cared most to say.

Now when an artist is confronted by such a situation, his impulse is to escape; he cannot afford to spend his "bright original strength" in beating against stone walls. For this work, Providence created a lower order of beings, protected by a horny integument from the bruisings of an unsympathetic world: he created the professors and the critics. The first impulse of these creatures when confronted by a hostile situation is to alter the situation. Our Middle-West, in spite of our vaunted literary renascence, is not yet ready to listen very piously to the divine flute-song of "Endymion" or the


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 "Ode on a Grecian Urn." We think a little already, but not in those terms. Our imagination is beginning to stir; but we are still, as an East Indian visitor lately reminded us, "the flattest-minded people on the face of the earth."

In general, our Middle Western situation fairly represents our national situation. There are little glens of Eden along the eastern coast, there is a narrow strip of Paradise along the western coast, where nature encourages the poetic faculties of men by lavish displays of her own poetic powers. But for thousands of miles between these two oases, through monotonous wildernesses of corn, through wide wastes of grey sage-bush and sand, through ghastly white reaches of salt, one hears only the lowlands murmuring heavily, "In the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread," and the barren deserts replying, "All is vanity and vexation of spirit." Through these deserts and lowlands runs the Lincoln Highway, more popularly known as Main Street. If the pursuit of letters is to be justified to Main Street, it must be justified with reference to a standard that Main Street understands.

That is one-half the problem, but only one-half. If you are going, as the vile phrase is, "to sell" great literature to Main Street, you have got to believe in it yourself. There is the


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 other half of the problem. You have got to believe in literature against the incredulity of your practical neighbours and against the indifference of the world. You have got to believe in it, furthermore, not as a means of escape from Main Street, not as a refuge from your practical neighbours—not this at all. The task is to frame a defense for it which will decisively remove it from the list of the luxuries and the superfluities of life, and which will give it the unquestioned status of bread and butter, plows, rails, chemicals, and gunpowder. And so I intend as far as possible to abandon the high poetic justification of letters, and to attempt establishing their importance by a plain matter-of-fact consideration of their utility. I shall, however, employ the word utility in a somewhat more fundamental sense than that which is ordinarily attached to it, and I shall touch upon certain elementary philosophical matters. Contrary to the opinions of many editors and publishers, this will not be a deterrent to the Main Street mind. There is nothing at the present time which Main Street so hungrily craves as a philosophy.

So far as I know, the philosophers have never discovered any thoroughly satisfactory final object for human activity, except happiness.


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A2206 :(e) be made generally for the better or more effectual carrying out of the provisions and objects of this Ordinance.

(3) Any rules made under this section may prescribe offences in respect of contraventions of the rules, and may provide for the imposition of a fine not exceeding level 4 and of imprisonment for a period not exceeding 6 months.

(4) Rules made under this section shall be subject to the approval of the Legislative Council.

48. Amendment of Schedules

(1) The Governor in Council may, by notice published in the Gazette, amend the Schedules.

(2) Amendments made under this section to Schedules 1 to 8 shall be subject to the approval of the Legislative Council.

49. Consequential amendments

The enactments specified in Schedule 9 are amended as set out in that Schedule. Rh

PART I


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 The perfect human activity has not yet been discovered. The best that can be said for even the most highly commended pursuits, for the study of science or philosophy or for the practice of beneficence—the best that can be said is, that they are thought useful because they are thought to lead their devotees in the general direction in which happiness has just disappeared over the edge of the horizon.

If I could testify honestly and prove convincingly that the pursuit of letters fills one constantly with pure unalloyed happiness, I should have completed my philosophical justification; and those of you who are bent upon other and competing activities—such as politics, moneymaking, and marrying—should sell your all and live in a library. I shall avoid the extravagance of testimony so exciting. And yet I think it is part of my duty to say, that the pursuit of letters is in my opinion beyond comparison of all human activities the most delightful. To those who are philosophically minded, this will seem to be the most interesting and important thing that I can say about the subject.

Most people, however, are not minded very philosophically; or rather their philosophy fails to include a frank and courageous consideration of the final object of human endeavor. I think


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 this is a pity. I think our society is the poorer because so few of us make intelligent provision in our lives for happiness or even for pleasure—because so few of us pause to inquire whether our hearts are keeping time with the rhythm of pain or with the alternating rhythm of joy which pulses through the universe. Our dear fellow citizens, indeed, many of them, take a kind of sullen pride in doing without pleasure. Now, the man who does without pleasure himself, rarely gives pleasure to anyone else.

What is still more serious, the man who prides himself on doing without pleasure and on doing without happiness, is likely to listen with a sort of sour disdain and contempt to the claims of an activity which proposes as its end the increase of pleasure, the increase of happiness. I go to him and say: "Let us do what we can to encourage the pursuit of letters; for this pursuit is of all human activities the most delightful." He looks at me with a deep puzzled frown of disapprobation, and says: "Yes, yes, my dear man, no doubt. Delightful, no doubt. Delightful—but of what use is it? Of what practical use is it?"

The sort of man who always asks, "Of what practical use is it?" is called a utilitarian; and our American society abounds in him. The