hest products of the struggle for existence, we are strugglers by
constitution; and when we relapse into repose we degenerate. Only on
condition of living for the morrow can we remain human. Put a sound limb
on crutches and you paralyze it; wear smoked glasses and your eyes
become intolerant of light, or wear glasses that make the muscle of
accommodation superfluous and it atrophies; take pepsin and hydrochloric
acid and the stomach will become incapable of producing them; cease to
chew and your teeth decay; let the newspaper prepare your mental food as
the cook cuts up your physical food, and you will become incapable of
thought--that is, of mental mastication and digestion. It is above all
things imperative to strive, to have a goal, to seek it on our own legs,
to cry for the moon rather than for nothing at all. And Nature teaches
us unequivocally that our purpose is ever onward--

To sail beyond the sunset, and the baths
Of all the western stars, until we die.

It is to go, and not to get, that is the glory. To be content is to have
no ideal beyond the real; we were better dead and nourishing grass. It
is part of the whole structure of life, as we can read it, whether in
the animal or in the vegetable world, but pre-eminently in ourselves,
that the very body of the individual is constructed as for purpose; nay
more, as for the purposes of the future. Every little baby girl that is
born into the world bears upon her soft surface signs and portents--not
merely promise, but the promise of provision--for the life of the world
to come. At her very birth she teaches us that she is not created for
self alone, but for what will be. Running through the whole body--and
this the more markedly the higher the type of life--we find organs,
tissues, functions, co-ordinations existing not for the present, but for
the life of the world to come. When, some day, the social organism is as
rightly constructed as the body of any woman, or even, in some measure,
of any man, when it is similarly dedicated to the real future, and as
resolutely turned away from any worship of what no longer is, then
heaven will be nearer to earth.

It is quite clear that the supreme choice for any individual or
institution or nation is between unborn to-morrow and dead yesterday. No
one who concerns himself in the current political controversies, as, for
instance, that thing of unspeakable shame which is called the "education
question," will doubt that