is important to know what to forget and
what to remember, not only in the past, but also in our daily life. Our
memories are lumbered with the things that divide us; the things which
unite us slip away. Each of us keeps at the most luminous point of his
souvenirs, a lively sense of his secondary quality, his part of
agriculturist, day laborer, man of letters, public officer, proletary,
bourgeois, or political or religious sectarian; but his essential
quality, which is to be a son of his country and a man, is relegated to
the shade. Scarcely does he keep even a theoretic notion of it. So that
what occupies us and determines our actions, is precisely the thing that
separates us from others, and there is hardly place for that spirit of
unity which is as the soul of a people.

So too do we foster bad feeling in our brothers. Men animated by a
spirit of particularism, exclusiveness, and pride, are continually
clashing. They cannot meet without rousing afresh the sentiment of
division and rivalry. And so there slowly heaps up in their remembrance
a stock of reciprocal ill-will, of mistrust, of rancor. All this is bad
feeling with its consequences.

It must be rooted out of our midst. Remember, forget! This we should say
to ourselves every morning, in all our relations and affairs. Remember
the essential, forget the accessory! How much better should we discharge
our duties as citizens, if high and low were nourished from this spirit!
How easy to cultivate pleasant remembrances in the mind of one's
neighbor, by sowing it with kind deeds and refraining from procedures of
which in spite of himself he is forced to say, with hatred in his heart:
"Never in the world will I forget!"

The spirit of simplicity is a great magician. It softens asperities,
bridges chasms, draws together hands and hearts. The forms which it
takes in the world are infinite in number; but never does it seem to us
more admirable than when it shows itself across the fatal barriers of
position, interest, or prejudice, overcoming the greatest obstacles,
permitting those whom everything seems to separate to understand one
another, esteem one another, love one another. This is the true social
cement, that goes into the building of a people.

THE END.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Simple Life, by Charles Wagner

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