| Vol. LXXXIX | DECEMBER, 1923 | No. 3 |
EDITORS
| WALTER EDWARDS HOUGHTON, JR. | ||
| LAIRD SHIELDS GOLDSBOROUGH | DAVID GILLIS CARTER | |
| MORRIS TYLER | NORMAN REGINALD JAFFRAY | |
BUSINESS MANAGERS
| GEORGE W. P. HEFFELFINGER | WALTER CRAFTS |
Leader
“He who fills his lamp with water will not dispel the darkness, and he who tries to light a fire with rotten wood will fail.”—Buddha.
“It is impossible,” remarks Agnes Repplier, “for an American to cherish any conviction, however harmless, without at once starting a League, or a Society, or an Association, to represent that conviction, and to persuade other Americans to embrace it at the cost of $10 a year.” She goes on to point out that we have a “League for Peace”, a “League to Keep the Peace”, and a “League to Abolish War”. You cannot escape: refuse the first, and you are enrolled in the second. If you are still young, there is a “League of Youth”, proposed by Sir James Barrie. If you are an inveterate pedestrian, there is a “League of Walkers”. However dismal our future may seem, there will always be the reward of membership in the Rotary Club; or we may become an enthusiastic Kiwanian; even a distinguished Klu Klux. Throughout the country people are being urged and urging others to “get together”. He who attempts to slip away is looked at askance—there is something wrong with him. Any desire to be alone, to do anything alone, is beyond comprehension. And to seek solitude for its own sake—the man is a heretic!
Three years ago a friend of mine began to commute to the city, an hour’s trip morning and night. None of “the crowd” knew him, and efforts to get acquainted proved futile. He was cordial but firm. And after refusing repeatedly to join them at bridge, he was left quite to himself. One evening as the train came into the station, some one tapped him on the shoulder. “Say, old man, you ought to learn the game. Nothing like it for killing these boresome hours.” My friend answered that he often played, but preferred to read on the train. Yet he rarely bought a paper. If his eyes were not fixed upon some “odd” book, they were peering out of the window—at the morning mists or the first lights of the dusk. Those hours of thought and solitude gave him a serenity, a clearness of vision, which nothing else could. There he knit together the many strands of unrelated effort into definite order. He could sit back and give each day’s work a place in the Total Work. While his fellow-travellers lived day and night in their particular cogs, he stood off and saw whither the wheel was rolling. It was not that their natural endowments were different from his, or that they might not have done likewise. They merely passed him by as “hopeless”. Their eyes were narrowly focused—upon thirteen cards.
That is bridge on the train. Add to it golf on Sundays, dinners at the country club, theatres, motor trips, downtown luncheons, the ever welcome of the latest fad, and you have the outward criteria of our national crowd complex. The great principle is to spend every moment with somebody else, doing something—even if that be listening to the Chicago weather reports over your neighbor’s radio. Oh, let us not have a spare moment to think! Let us never be alone!—by ourselves!—completely at the mercy of our own ingenuity. And solitude, the greatest of torments, must be avoided at any cost—from $10 a year upward.