dividuals of a small community of people, if
one has the eye to detect it, as there is between nations.

I remember once talking with a famous anthropologist. All men were to
him simply representations of ages, nations, or families. No man was a
man in himself; he was simply a specimen. It gave to a little everyday
person a very keen sense of the vastness of humanity in general, past
and present, to hear this scientific man talk. He had the habit of
swinging all the nations of the world into his conversation as easily as
if he lived with them every day, as in his habitual thought he truly
did. Whenever I would speak to him of a friend or a relative he would
characterize him by his national and family tendency. To talk with the
Professor for an hour or two was most enlightening and expanding; but a
long acquaintance proved that a man, even in the region of large
anthropological and geographical ideas, could be just as narrow and
provincial as the self-appointed moral censor of a country town. The
human body and the human mind, in general, seemed to mean a very great
deal to him, but man as an individual soul meant nothing at all.

Some of the greatest diplomats, who have stood out as clever in their
dealings with nations, have been limited in the extreme when their lives
took them outside of the rut of their own immediate work. Statesmen who
have dealt cleverly with nations have blundered sadly in their dealings
with individual men, blundered sometimes when their mistakes would react
upon their national influence. And yet so established were they in the
selfish rut of their national diplomacy, so provincial were they in the
knowledge of individual human nature, that they went on blundering,
until many a time their mistakes led them almost, if not quite, to
national disaster. The best lawyers know that to do their work truly
they must be able to judge particular cases and special circumstances by
standards which to the majority of minds do not exist. For want of such
clear understanding of human nature which comes from an original
instinct for truth itself,--as distinguished from the cut-and-dried
application of conventional habit,--lawyers have often failed.

Conventional standards are the common standards of the majority; but,
although they are perhaps more serviceable than any others in the
achievement of commonplace success, they are invariably inadequate on a
really high and simple plane of human endeavor. It is rar