s one pays a
price for pleasure; and those children which come from their stolen
pleasures are either murdered or marked with shame. Their idea of love
is made indefinite by desire, and their love of children has to do with
the sense of possession.

They are not significant men in their own fields; rarely a good mason, a
good carpenter, a good farmer. The many have not even found the secret
of order and unfolding from the simplest task. The primary meaning of
the day's work in its relation to life and blessedness is not to be
conceived by them. They are taught from childhood that first of all work
is for bread; that bread perishes; therefore one must pile up as he may
the where-with to purchase the passing bread; that bread is bread and
the rest a gamble.... They answer to the slow loop waves which enfold
the many in amusement and opinion, in suspicion and cruelty and
half-truth. To all above, they are as if they were not; mediocre men,
static in spiritual affairs, a little pilot-burner of vision flickering
from childhood, but never igniting their true being, nor opening to them
the one true way which each man must go alone, before he begins to be
erect in other than bone and sinew.

They cover their bodies--but they do not cover their faces nor their
minds nor their souls. And this is the marvel, _they are not ashamed!_
They reveal the emptiness of their faces and the darkness of their minds
without complaining to each other or to the police. From any standpoint
of reality, the points of view of the many need only to be expressed to
reveal their abandonment.... But this applies to crowds anywhere, to the
world-crowd, whose gods to-day are trade and patriotism and
motion-photography.

The point is, we cannot look back into the centres of the many for our
ideals. There is no variation to the law that all beauty and progress is
ahead. Moreover, a man riding through a village encounters but the mask
of its people. We have much practice through life in bowing to each
other. There is a psychology about greetings among human kind that is
deep as the pit. When the thing known as Ignorance is established in a
community, one is foolish to rush to the conclusion that the trouble is
merely an unlettered thing.

No one has idealised the uneducated mind with more ardour than the one
who is expressing these studies of life. But I have found that the mind
that has no quest, that does not begin its search among the world's
treasur