nation of ideals with active virtues you have a rough
standard for shaping your decision. In any case, your imagination is
extended. You divine in the world about you matter for a little more
humility on your own part, and tolerance, reverence, and love for
others; and you gain a certain inner joyfulness at the increased
importance of our common life. Such joyfulness is a religious
inspiration and an element of spiritual health, and worth more than
large amounts of that sort of technical and accurate information which
we professors are supposed to be able to impart.

To show the sort of thing I mean by these words, I will just make one
brief practical illustration and then close.

We are suffering to-day in America from what is called the
labor-question; and, when you go out into the world, you will each and
all of you be caught up in its perplexities. I use the brief term
labor-question to cover all sorts of anarchistic discontents and
socialistic projects, and the conservative resistances which they
provoke. So far as this conflict is unhealthy and regrettable,--and I
think it is so only to a limited extent,--the unhealthiness consists
solely in the fact that one-half of our fellow-countrymen remain
entirely blind to the internal significance of the lives of the other
half. They miss the joys and sorrows, they fail to feel the moral
virtue, and they do not guess the presence of the intellectual ideals.
They are at cross-purposes all along the line, regarding each other as
they might regard a set of dangerously gesticulating automata, or, if
they seek to get at the inner motivation, making the most horrible
mistakes. Often all that the poor man can think of in the rich man is a
cowardly greediness for safety, luxury, and effeminacy, and a boundless
affectation. What he is, is not a human being, but a pocket-book, a
bank-account. And a similar greediness, turned by disappointment into
envy, is all that many rich men can see in the state of mind of the
dissatisfied poor. And, if the rich man begins to do the sentimental act
over the poor man, what senseless blunders does he make, pitying him for
just those very duties and those very immunities which, rightly taken,
are the condition of his most abiding and characteristic joys! Each, in
short, ignores the fact that happiness and unhappiness and significance
are a vital mystery; each pins them absolutely on some ridiculous
feature of the external situation; and everybody