seem rather the dictates of a stern necessity than the products of
anything resembling free choice.

He who is lashed by hunger and haunted by fear, who cannot provide for
the remote future, but must accept good or ill fortune as the accident of
the day precipitates his lot upon him, lives and must live a life at but
one remove from that of the brute. In such a life the instincts of man
attain to a certain expression, but intelligence plays a feeble part. The
man remains a slave, under dictation, and moved by the dread of immediate
disaster. For an interest in what is remote in time and place, for the
extension of knowledge for its own sake, for the development of
activities which have no direct bearing upon the problem of keeping him
alive and fed, there can be little place. One must be assured that one
can live, and live in reasonable security and physical well-being, before
the problem of enriching and embellishing life can fairly present itself
as an important problem. One must be set free before one can deliberately
set out to shape one's life after an ideal.

Not that a severe struggle with physical nature is necessarily and of
itself a curse. It may call out man's powers, stimulate to action, and
result in growth and development. Where a prodigal nature amply provides
for man's bodily necessities without much effort on his part, the result
may be, in the absence of other stimulating influences giving rise to new
wants, a paralyzing slothfulness, an animal passivity and content. This
may be observed in whole peoples highly favored by soil and climate, and
protected by their situation from external dangers. It may be observed in
certain favored classes even in communities which, by long and strenuous
effort, have conquered nature and raised themselves high in the scale of
civilization. The idle sons of the rich, relieved from the spur of
necessity, may undergo the degeneration appropriate to parasitic life. In