y look out from the
windows upon a great and varied throng, as the beggar munching a crust may
look in at a banqueting hall, but the people they are forced to live with
are exactly like themselves; and that way lies not only monomania but an
ennui that makes the blessing of life savorless.

If this does not seem the plainest possible statement of fact take a
concrete instance. Can a banker in the city by any possibility come to
know what kind of an individual is the remote impersonal creature who
waits on him in a department store? Most bankers recognize with a
misguided joy this natural wall between themselves and people who are not
bankers, and add to it as many stones of their own quarrying as possible;
but they are not shut off from all the quickening diversity of life any
more effectually than the college-settlement, boys' Sunday-school, brand
of banker. The latter may try as hard as he pleases, he simply cannot
achieve real acquaintanceship with a "storekeeper," as we call them, any
more than the clerk can achieve real acquaintanceship with him.

Lack of any elements of common life form as impassable a barrier as lack
of a common language, whereas with us in Hillsboro all the life we have is
common. Everyone is needed to live it.

There can be no city dweller of experience who does not know the result of
this herding together of the same kind of people, this intellectual and
moral inbreeding. To the accountant who knows only accounts, the world
comes to seem like one great ledger, and account-keeping the only vital
pursuit in life. To the banker who knows only bankers, the world seems one
great bank filled with money, accompanied by people. The prison doors of
uniformity are closed inexorably upon them.

And then what happens? Why, when anything goes wrong with their trumpery
account books, or their trashy money, these poor folk are like blind men
who have lost their staves. With all the world before them they dare not
continue to go forward. We in Hillsboro are sorry for the account-keepers
who disappear forever, fleeing from all who know them because their
accounts have come out crooked, we pity the banker who blows out his
brains when something has upset his bank; but we can't help feeling with
this compassion an admixture of the exasperated impatience we have for
those Prussian school boys who jump out of third-story windows because
they did not reach a certain grade in their Latin examinations. Life is
not