the hearts of the people to feel the throbs beneath their boldly
carried exteriors, the whole would seem naught but such a maddening rush
and senseless-looking crushing. "We are but children of a larger growth"
after all, and our ceaseless pursuing after the baubles of this earth
are but the struggles for precedence in the business play-ground.

The football is money. See how the mass rushes after it! Everyone so
intent upon his pursuit until all else dwindles into a ridiculous
nonentity. The weaker ones go down in the mad pursuit, and are
unmercifully trampled upon, but no matter, what is the difference if the
foremost win the coveted prize and carry it off. See the big boy in
front, he with iron grip, and determined, compressed lips? That boy is a
type of the big, merciless man, the Gradgrind of the latter century. His
face is set towards the ball, and even though he may crush a dozen small
boys, he'll make his way through the mob and come out triumphant. And
he'll be the victor longer than anyone else, in spite of the envy and
fighting and pushing about him.

To an observer, alike unintelligent about the rules of a football game,
and the conditions which govern the barter and exchange and fluctuations
of the world's money market, there is as much difference between the
sight of a mass of boys on a play-ground losing their equilibrium over a
spheroid of rubber and a mass of men losing their coolness and temper
and mental and nervous balance on change as there is between a pine
sapling and a mighty forest king--merely a difference of age. The
mighty, seething, intensely concentrated mass in its emphatic tendency
to one point is the same, in the utter disregard of mental and physical
welfare. The momentary triumphs of transitory possessions impress a
casual looker-on with the same fearful idea--that the human race, after
all, is savage to the core, and cultivates its savagery in an inflated