The people of the world have a community of interests. Sickness in the slums of a great city, for instance, breeds disease in the whole community:
A man in the city of Chicago was asked why he did not do more to better the condition of the working people in the poorer sections of the city. “What are they to me?” he heartlessly answered. A few weeks later his daughter died of typhoid-fever brought to her in clothing made in the sweat-shops which her father thought it was not his business to try to do away with. (Text.)
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See [Sensitiveness].
SOLIDITY OF OLD TRUTHS
The fine-grained old truths of religion have been deposited by the world’s best life. Its age is theirs; but, altho so many epochs and races went to make them, we use them now without a thought of their age or of the gravity of getting them well-grown; like the beautiful ivory mammoth tusk, sticking six or seven feet out of the frozen ground in Alaska, which the Indians have used for generations as a hitching-post. Tribes come and go, and generations succeed each other; but we all hitch up to the solid truths which offer their convenience, embedded in the past. (Text.)—John Weiss.
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SOLITUDE, LESSON OF
My safety (from madness) lay, as I found, in compressing my thoughts to the smallest compass of mental existence, and no sooner did worldly visions or memories intrude themselves, as they necessarily would, than I immediately and resolutely shut them out as one draws the blind to exclude the light. But this exclusion of the world created a dark background which served only to intensify the light that shone upon me from realms unseen of mortal eyes. Lonely I was, yet I was never alone. (Text.)—Mrs. Maybrick, “My Fifteen Lost Years.”
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