and then. Mastery of chess
will not help in the mastery of life. Life is a day's work, a struggle
where the forces to be used and the forces to be overcome are much more
vague and varied and intangible than are those of the chessboard. Life
is cooeperation with other lives. We win when we help others to win. I
suppose business is more often like a game than is life--your gain is
often the other man's loss, and you deliberately aim to outwit your
rivals and competitors. But in a sane, normal life there is little that
suggests a game of any kind.

We must all have money, or its equivalent. There are the three
things--money, goods, labor--and the greatest of these is labor. Labor
is the sum of all values. The value of things is the labor it requires
to produce or to obtain them. Were gold plentiful and silver scarce, the
latter would be the more precious. The men at the plough and the hoe and
in the mines of coal and iron stand first. These men win from nature
what we all must have, and these things are none of them in the hands or
under the guardianship of some one who is trying to keep us from
obtaining them, or is aiming to take our aids and resources from us.

The chess simile has only a rhetorical value. The London workingmen to
whom Huxley spoke would look around them in vain to find in their
problems of life anything akin to a game of chess, or for any fruitful
suggestion in the idea. They were probably mechanics, tradesmen,
artisans, teamsters, boatmen, painters, and so on, and knew through
experience the forces with which they had to deal. But how many persons
who succeed in life have any such expert knowledge of the forces and
conditions with which they have to deal, as two chess-players have of
the pawns and knights and bishops and queens of the chessboard?

Huxley was nearly always impressive and convincing, and there was vastly
more logical force in his figures than in those of most writers.

Life may more truly be compared to a river that has its source in a
mountain or hillside spring, with its pure and sparking or foaming and
noisy youth, then its quieter and stronger and larger volume, and then
its placid and gently moving current to the sea. Blessed is the life
that is self-purifying, like the moving waters; that lends itself to
many noble uses, never breaking out of bonds and becoming a destructive
force.

XI

I had a letter the other day from a man who wanted to know why the
meadow, or field, m