socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay
in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his
dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the
unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others
in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and
excessive development of individualism in a few. Now I do not mean that
this training was by any means all bad. On the contrary, the insistence
upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime
necessity. Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and
my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which
by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would
finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose. It also keeps
alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual
no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone. But
such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence
in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as
destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism
of the Dark Ages. I left college and entered the big world owing more
than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own
home; but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted
to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans
to which I belonged.



CHAPTER II

THE VIGOR OF LIFE

Looking back, a man really has a more objective feeling about himself