ocial relations--this has never come into their
minds. Others go much farther. To certain wives, their husbands are
strangers, and conversely. There are parents who do not know their
children: their development, their thoughts, the dangers they run, the
hopes they cherish, are to them a closed book. Many children do not know
their parents, have no suspicion of their difficulties and struggles, no
conception of their aims. And I am not speaking of those piteously
disordered homes where all the relations are false, but of honorable
families. Only, all these people are greatly preoccupied: each has his
outside interest that fills all his time. The distant duty--very
attractive, I don't deny--claims them entirely, and they are not
conscious of the duty near at hand. I fear they will have their trouble
for their pains. Each person's base of operations is the field of his
immediate duty. Neglect this field, and all you undertake at a distance
is compromised. First, then, be of your own country, your own city, your
own home, your own church, your own work-shop; then, if you can, set out
from this to go beyond it. That is the plain and natural order, and a
man must fortify himself with very bad reasons to arrive at reversing
it. At all events, the result of so strange a confusion of duties is
that many people employ their time in all sorts of affairs except those
in which we have a right to demand it. Each is occupied with something
else than what concerns him, is absent from his post, ignores his trade.
This is what complicates life. And it would be so simple for each one to
be about his own matter.

* * * * *

Another form of simple duty. When damage is done, who should repair it?
He who did it. This is just, but it is only theory, and the consequence
of following the theory would be the evil in force until the malefactors
were found and had offset it. But suppose they are not found? or suppose
they can not or will not make amends?

The rain falls on your head through a hole in the roof, or the wind
blows in at a broken window. Will you wait to find the man who caused
the mischief? You would certainly think that absurd. And yet such is
often the practice. Children indignantly protest, "I didn't put it
there, and I shall not take it away!" And most men reason after the same
fashion. It is logic. But it is not the kind of logic that makes the
world move forward.

On the contrary, what we must learn,