of us she calls to her service she will lay heavy burdens of duty. "The
color of life is red." Already the fad of the drooping spirit, the
end-of-the-century pose, has given way to the rush of the strenuous life,
to the feeling that struggle brings its own reward. The men who are doing
ask no favor at the end. Life is repaid by the joy of living it.

As the century is strenuous so will it be complex. The applications of
science have made the great world small, while every part of it has grown
insistent. As the earth has shrunk to come within our grasp, so has our own
world expanded to receive it. "My mind to me a kingdom is," and to this
kingdom all the other kingdoms of the earth now send their embassadors. The
complexity of life is shown by the extension of the necessity of choice.
Each of us has to render a decision, to say yes or no a hundred times when
our grandfathers were called upon a single time. We must say yes or no to
our neighbors' theories or plans or desires, and whoever has lived or lives
or may yet live in any land or on any island of the sea has become our
neighbor. Through modern civilization we are coming into our inheritance,
and this heirloom includes the best that any man has done or thought since
history and literature and art began. It includes, too, all the arts and
inventions by which any men of any time have separated truth from error. Of
one blood are all the people of the earth, and whatsoever is done to the
least of these little ones in some degree comes to me. We suffer from the
miasma of the Indian jungles; we starve with the savages of the harvestless
islands; we grow weak with the abused peasants of the Russian steppes, who
leave us the legacy of their grippe. The great volcano which buries far off
cities at its foot casts its pitying dust over us. It is said that through
the bonds of commerce, common trade, and common need, there is growing up
the fund of a great "bank of human kindness," no genuine draft on which is
ever left dishonored. Whoever is in need of help the world over, by that
token has a claim on us.