rom the time you were a little boy, did I ever give you
but one sort of advice? I have been constant in that. And as to myself,
you are unjust. I have always had one distinct object in life, and that
I have pursued. I wanted to find out about life, to have experience, and
then do what I could do best, and what needed most to be done. Why did
I not stick to teaching in that woman's college? Well, I began to have
doubts, I began to experiment on my pupils. You will laugh, but I will
give you a specimen. One day I put a question to my literature class,
and I found out that not one of them knew how to boil potatoes. They
were all getting an education, and hardly one of them knew how much
the happiness of a home depends upon having the potatoes mealy and not
soggy. It was so in everything. How are we going to live when we are all
educated, without knowing how to live? Then I found that the masses here
in New York did not know any better than the classes how to live. Don't
think it is just a matter of cooking. It is knowing how, generally, to
make the most of yourself and of your opportunities, and have a nice
world to live in, a thrifty, self-helpful, disciplined world. Is
education giving us this? And then we think that organization will do
it, organization instead of self-development. We think we can organize
life, as they are trying to organize art. They have organized art as
they have the production of cotton.

"Did I tell you I was in that? No? I used to draw in school, and after
I had worked in the Settlement here in New York, and while I was working
down on the East Side, it came over me that maybe I had one talent
wrapped in a napkin; and I have been taking lessons in Fifty-seventh
Street with the thousand or two young women who do not know how to boil
potatoes, but are pursuing the higher life of art. I did not tell you
this because I knew you would say that I am just as inconsistent as you
are. But I am not. I have demonstrated the fact that neither I nor one
in a hundred of those charming devotees to art could ever earn a living
by art, or do anything except to add to the mediocrity of the amazing
art product of this free country.

"And you will ask, what now? I am going on in the same way. I am going
to be a doctor. In college I was very well up in physiology and anatomy,
and I went quite a way in biology. So you see I have a good start. I am
going to attend lectures and go into a hospital, as soon as there is an