It is my crown to mock the runner’s feet
With gentle wonder and with laughter sweet.”
and we scorn him, calling him hedonist, epicurean, indifferentist, “quitter;” but he is really less bad than the reactionary kicker who, when he has energy enough to get into the game, still hugs the side lines or keeps trotting back to the bleachers to shout needless warnings to players who know quite as much as he. Or again, we usually reckon it doubtful ethics to quarrel with another man’s job, and can see the absurdity in lack of harmony between the pot and the kettle; for we are fundamentally of the opinion that live and let live is ordinarily a good public and private motto. And yet, the strife that sometimes arises between the representatives of various activities is no more absurd than the attempt to pry down from its various pedestals the enterprise of modern times, with the levers and pulleys of past generations. The reactionary kick is, on the whole, as useful as plowing with wooden plowshares, battling with the pilum, crushing flies with a steam-hammer, repudiating the typewriter and the locomotive, or giving one’s days and nights to the volumes of Thomas Aquinas.
A word as to technic, which is in a comparatively crude state and leaves much to be desired. That is perhaps inevitable, since really skilful kicking, no matter in what direction, does not really proclaim itself as such, and is consequently not likely to be thought of at all as anything more than advice or persuasion, whereas the unskilful technician is too likely to call names to be really effective. Some of the phrases in vogue will show the crudeness of the technic: the white man’s burden, the strenuous life, a tendency toward socialism, this is an age of transition, simplified spelling is an entering wedge, let us sweep anarchy into the sea, we are up against it in life, home is the girl’s prison and the woman’s workhouse, I fear that I am too old-fashioned, we must uplift the masses, what are home and children and country if we have not the vote, America for the Americans, destroy the very foundations of our faith, threaten to overwhelm our fairest institutions beneath a wave of ignorance and despotism, to crucify mankind on a cross of gold,
“Why be this juice the growth of God, who dare
Blaspheme the twisted tendril as a snare?
A blessing, we should use it, should we not?
And if a curse, why then, who set it there?”
etc., etc., etc., etc.