d ever made
me? Did I not become the parent and they the children, in those
relations of teacher and learner? And so I can say that there has been
more than one birth of myself, and I can regard my earlier self as a
separate being, and make it a subject of study.

A proper autobiography is a death-bed confession. A true man finds so
much work to do that he has no time to contemplate his yesterdays; for
to-day and to-morrow are here, with their impatient tasks. The world
is so busy, too, that it cannot afford to study any man's unfinished
work; for the end may prove it a failure, and the world needs
masterpieces. Still there are circumstances by which a man is
justified in pausing in the middle of his life to contemplate the
years already passed. One who has completed early in life a distinct
task may stop to give an account of it. One who has encountered
unusual adventures under vanishing conditions may pause to describe
them before passing into the stable world. And perhaps he also might
be given an early hearing, who, without having ventured out of the
familiar paths, without having achieved any signal triumph, has lived
his simple life so intensely, so thoughtfully, as to have discovered
in his own experience an interpretation of the universal life.

I am not yet thirty, counting in years, and I am writing my life
history. Under which of the above categories do I find my
justification? I have not accomplished anything, I have not discovered
anything, not even by accident, as Columbus discovered America. My
life has been unusual, but by no means unique. And this is the very
core of the matter. It is because I understand my history, in its
larger outlines, to be typical of many, that I consider it worth
recording. My life is a concrete illustration of a multitude of
statistical facts. Although I have written a genuine personal memoir,
I believe that its chief interest lies in the fact that it is
illustrative of scores of unwritten lives. I am only one of many whose
fate it has been to live a page of modern history. We are the strands
of the cable that binds the Old World to the New. As the ships that
brought us link the shores of Europe and America, so our lives span
the bitter sea of racial differences and misunderstandings. Before we
came, the New World knew not the Old; but since we have begun to come,
the Young World has taken the Old by the hand, and the two are
learning to march side by side, seeking a common d