From such conditions not only individuals but all society suffers. As a spot of unnourished, inactive tissue in a human body is a host ready to receive any one of many forms of disease, so, in the body politic, individuals not fulfilling their utmost best are soil made ready for all manner of social and political ills.
The time may come when society will recognize that many social and political ills are partly caused by its own neglect, and call not for more restrictions, for more stringent laws and severer sentences, but rather for more carefully and universally given opportunity.
Listen once more to the philosopher.
"The more highly differentiated the individuals composing a society, the more complete becomes the social bond between them. A man who feels that he is rendering to the community a service at once indispensable and only to be performed by himself, will have come near to fulfilling his part in the highest attainable scheme of social harmony."
If this be true, then there seems clear warrant for saying that the community, for its own sake, has a vital interest in trying to secure for each individual the most effective opportunity not only for discovering what his distinct contribution may be made, but also for developing his power to render that contribution most completely.
Does the community anywhere concern itself to give such opportunities? Democratic society has recognized its necessity to give a certain amount of knowledge and training by means of its schools. It is beginning to make the experiment of giving a certain amount of skill to earn a livelihood. This teaching is done in classes and a class is made up of individuals of similar knowledge and attainments, and to them is given general and identical information which tends to produce like results. The community has need for unlikeness, for individuals who can render unique service.
The community can never decide what the special individual aptitude may be. No living soul can discover for another. The "power to become" is innate and must make its own response to the stimulus which is capable of affecting it.
It is true that the universe is a great battery incessantly sending an infinity of calls of infinitely varied messages. But the receiving operator may be asleep, he may never come within range. The universe is very wide. The range of experience of all is narrow, of some pitifully narrow.
Because of lack of opportunity to see, to do, to know, to feel, it is not exaggeration to say that multitudes live a half-alive existence, never useful to their possible limit, never happy to their full, for happiness is "felt perfection."
From the beginning of time, some men have received their messages, found their work, given their service, lived life to the full and laid it down with a will. The record of these men and their accomplishment, of man's great adventure to find himself, has been written by many hands, and that record is literature.