On Being a Doctrinaire

The question is sometimes asked by those who devise tests of literary taste, "If you were cast upon a desert island and were allowed but one book, what book would you choose?"

If I were in such a predicament I should say to the pirate chief who was about to maroon me, "My dear sir, as this island seems, for the time being, to have been overlooked by Mr. Andrew Carnegie, I must ask the loan of a volume from your private library. And if it is convenient for you to allow me but one volume at a time, I pray that it may be the Unabridged Dictionary."

I should choose the Unabridged Dictionary, not only because it is big, but because it is mentally filling. One has the sense of rude plenty such as one gets from looking at the huge wheat elevators in Minneapolis. Here are the harvests of innumerable fields stored up in little space. There are not only vast multitudes of words, but each word means something, and each has a history of its own, and a family relation which it is interesting to trace.

But that which I should value most on my desert island would be the opportunity of acquainting myself with the fine distinctions which are made between different human qualities. It would seem that the Aggregate Mind which made the language is much cleverer than we usually suppose. The most minute differences are infallibly registered in tell-tale words. There are not only words denoting the obvious differences between the good and the bad, the false and the true, the beautiful and the ugly, but there are words which indicate the delicate shades of goodness and truth and beauty as they are curiously blended with variable quantities of badness and falseness and ugliness. There are not only words which tell what you are, but words which tell what you think you are, and what other people think you are, and what you think they are when you discover that they are thinking that you are something which you think you are not.

In the bright lexicon of youth there is no such word as "fail," but the dictionary makes up for this deficiency. It is particularly rich in words descriptive of our failures. As the procession of the virtues passes by, there are pseudo-virtues that tag on like the small boys who follow the circus. After Goodness come Goodiness and Goody-goodiness; we see Sanctity and Sanctimoniousness, Piety and Pietism, Grandeur and Grandiosity, Sentiment and Sentimentality. When we try to show off we invariably deceive ourselves, but usually we deceive nobody else. Everybody knows that we are showing off, and if we do it well they give us credit for that.

A scholar has a considerable amount of sound learning, and he is afraid that his fellow citizens may not fully appreciate it. So in his conversation he allows his erudition to leak out, with the intent that the stranger should say, "What a modest, learned man he is, and what a pleasure it is to meet him." Only the stranger does not express himself in that way, but says, "What an admirable pedant he is, to be sure." Pedantry is a well-recognized compound, two thirds sound learning and one third harmless vanity.

Sometimes on the street you see a man whom you take for an old acquaintance. You approach with outstretched hand and expectant countenance, but his stony glare of non-recognition gives you pause. The fact that he does not know you gives you time to perceive that you do not know him and have never seen him before. A superficial resemblance has deceived you. In the dictionary you may find many instances of such mistakes in the moral realm.

One of the most common of these mistakes in identity is the confusion of the Idealist and the Doctrinaire. An idealist is defined as "one who pursues and dwells upon the ideal, a seeker after the highest beauty and good." A doctrinaire may do this also, but he is differentiated as "one who theorizes without sufficient regard for practical considerations, one who undertakes to explain things by a narrow theory or group of theories."

The Idealist is the kind of man we need. He is not satisfied with things as they are. He is one

If a more perfect society is to come, it must be through the efforts of persons capable of such visions. Our schools, churches, and all the institutions of a higher civilization have as their chief aim the production of just such personalities. But why are they not more successful? What becomes of the thousands of young idealists who each year set forth on the quest for the highest beauty and truth? Why do they tire so soon of the quest and sink into the ranks of the spiritually unemployed.

The answer is that many persons who set out to be idealists end by becoming doctrinaires. They identify the highest beauty and truth with their own theories. After that they make no further excursions into the unexplored regions of reality, for fear that they may discover their identification to have been incomplete.

The Doctrinaire is like a mason who has mixed his cement before he is ready to use it. When he is ready the cement has set, and he can't use it. It sticks together, but it won't stick to anything else. George Eliot describes such a predicament in her sketch of the Reverend Amos Barton. Mr. Barton's plans, she says, were, like his sermons, "admirably well conceived, had the state of the case been otherwise."

By eliminating the "state of the case," the Doctrinaire is enabled to live the simple life—intellectually and ethically. The trouble is that it is too simple. To his mind the question, "Is it true?" is never a disturbing one, nor does it lead to a troublesome investigation of matters of fact. His definition of truth has the virtue of perfect simplicity,—"A truth is that which has got itself believed by me." His thoughts form an exclusive club, and when a new idea applies for admission it is placed on the waiting list. A single black-ball from an old member is sufficient permanently to exclude it. When an idea is once in, it has a very pleasant time of it. All the opinions it meets with are clubable, and on good terms with one another. Whether any of them are related to any reality outside their own little circle would be a question that it would be impolite to ask. It would be like asking a correctly attired member who was punctilious in paying his club dues, whether he had also paid his tailor. To the Doctrinaire there seems something sordid and vulgar in the anxiety to make the two ends—theory and practice—meet. It seems to indicate that one is not intellectually in comfortable circumstances.

The Doctrinaire, when he has conceived certain ideals, is not content that they should be cast upon the actual world, to take their chances in the rough-and-tumble struggle for existence, proving their right to the kingdom by actually conquering it, inch by inch. He cannot endure such tedious delays. He must have the satisfaction of seeing his ideals instantly realized. The ideal life must be lived under ideal conditions. And so, for his private satisfaction, he creates for himself such a world into which he retires.

It is a world of natural law, as he understands natural law. There are no exceptions, no deviation from general principles, no shadings off, no fascinating obscurities, no rude practical jokes, no undignified by-play, no "east windows of divine surprise," no dark unfathomable abysses. He would not allow such things. In his world the unexpected never happens. The endless chain of causation runs smoothly. Every event has a cause, and the cause is never tangled up with the effect, so that you cannot tell where one begins and the other ends. He is intellectually tidy, and everything must be in its place. If something turns up for which he cannot find a place, he sends it to the junk shop.

When the Doctrinaire descends from the homogeneous world which he has constructed, into the actual world which, in the attempt to get itself made, is becoming more amazingly heterogeneous all the time, he is in high dudgeon. The existence of these varied contradictorinesses seems to him a personal affront.

It is as if a person had lived in a natural history museum, where every stuffed animal knew his place, and had his scientific name painted on the glass case. He is suddenly dropped into a tropical jungle where the animals act quite differently. The tigers won't "stay put," and are liable to turn up just when he doesn't want to see them.

I should not object to his unpreparedness for the actual state of things if the Doctrinaire did not assume the airs of a superior person. He lays all the blame for the discrepancy between himself and the universe on the universe. He has the right key, only the miserable locks won't fit it. Having formed a very clear conception of the best possible world, he looks down patronizingly upon the commonplace people who are trying to make the best out of this imperfect world. Having large possessions in Utopia, he lives the care-free life of an absentee landlord. His praise is always for the dead, or for the yet unborn; when he looks on his contemporaries he takes a gloomy view. That any great man should be now alive, he considers a preposterous assumption. He treats greatness as if it were a disease to be determined only by post-mortem examination.

One of the earliest satires on the character of the Doctrinaire is to be found in the Book of Jonah. Jonah was a prophet by profession. He received a call to preach in the city of Nineveh, which he accepted after some hesitation. He denounced civic corruption and declared that in forty days the city would be destroyed. Having performed this professional duty, Jonah felt that there was nothing left for him but to await with pious resignation the fulfillment of his prophecy. But in this case the unexpected happened, the city repented and was saved. This was gall and wormwood to Jonah. His orderly mind was offended by the disarrangement of his schedule. What was the use of being a prophet if things did not turn out as he said? So we are told "it displeased Jonah exceedingly, and he was angry," Still he clung to the hope that, in the end, things might turn out badly enough to justify his public utterances. "Then Jonah went out of the city, and sat on the east side of the city, and there made him a booth, and sat under it in the shadow, till he might see what would become of the city."

Poor grumpy old Jonah! Have we not sat under his preaching, and read his editorials, and pondered his books, full of solemn warnings of what will happen to us if we do not mend our ways? We have been deeply impressed, and in a great many respects we have mended our ways, and things have begun to go better. But Jonah takes no heed of our repentance. He is only thinking of those prophecies of his. Just in proportion as things begin to look up morally, he gets low in his mind and begins to despair of the Republic.

The trouble with Jonah is that he can see but one thing at a time, and see that only in one way. He cannot be made to appreciate the fact that "the world is full of a number of things," and that some of them are not half bad. When he sees a dangerous tendency he thinks that it will necessarily go on to its logical conclusion. He forgets that there is such a thing as the logic of events, which is different from the logical processes of a person who sits outside and prognosticates. There is one tendency which all tendencies have in common, that is, to develop counter tendencies.

There is, for example, a tendency on the part of the gypsy-moth caterpillar to destroy utterly the forests of the United States. But were I addressing a thoughtful company of these caterpillars I should urge them to look upon their own future with modest self-distrust. However well their programme looks upon paper, it cannot be carried out without opposition. Long before the last tree has been vanquished, the last of the gypsy moths may be fighting for its life against the enemies it has made.

The Doctrinaire is very quick at generalizing. This is greatly to his credit. One of the powers of the human mind on which we set great store is that of entertaining general ideas. This is where we think we have the advantage of the members of the brute creation. They have particular experiences which at the time are very exciting to them, but they have no abstract notions,—or, at least, no way of expressing them to us. We argue that if they really had these ideas they would have invented language long ago, and by this time would have had Unabridged Dictionaries of their own. But we humans do not have to be content with this hand-to-mouth way of thinking and feeling. When we see a hundred things that strike us as being more or less alike, we squeeze them together into one mental package, and give a single name to the whole lot. This is a great convenience and enables us to do our thinking on a large scale. By organizing our various impressions into a union, and inducing them to work together, we are enabled to do collective bargaining with the Universe.

If, for example, I were asked to tell what I think of the individuals inhabiting the United States, I should have to give it up. Assuming a round eighty million persons, all of whom it would be a pleasure to meet, there must be, at the lowest computation, seventy-nine million, nine hundred and ninety-nine thousand, three hundred and seventy-five people of whose characters I do not know enough to make my opinion of any value. Of the remaining fragment of the population, my knowledge is not so perfect as I would wish. As for the whole eighty million, suppose I had to give a single thought to each person, I have not enough cogitations to go around.

What we do is to stop the ruinous struggle of competing thoughts by recognizing a community of interests and forming a merger, under the collective term "American." Then all difficulties are minimized. Almost all our theorizing about human affairs is carried on by means of these symbols. Millions of different personalities are merged in one mental picture. We talk of a class even more readily than we talk of an individual.

This is all very well so long as we do not take these generalizations too seriously. The mistake of the Doctrinaire lies not in classifying people, but in treating an individual as if he could belong to only one class at a time. The fact is that each one of us belongs to a thousand classes. There are a great many ways of classifying human beings, and as in the case of the construction of tribal lays, "every single one of them is right," as far as it goes. You may classify people according to race, color, previous condition of servitude, height, weight, shape of their skulls, amount of their incomes, or their ability to write Latin verse. You may inquire whether they belong to the class that goes to church on Sunday, whether they are vaccinationists or anti-vaccinationists, whether they like problem plays, whether they are able to read a short passage from the Constitution of the United States, whether they have dyspepsia or nervous prostration or only think they have; or, if you will, you may make one sweeping division between the sheep and the goats, and divide mankind according to location, as did the good Boston lady who was accustomed to speak of those who lived out of sight of the Massachusetts State House as "New Yorkers and that kind of people."

Such divisions do no harm so long as you make enough of them. Those who are classed with the goats on one test question will turn up among the sheep when you change the subject. Your neighbor is a wild radical in theology, and you look upon him as a dangerous character. Try him on the tariff, and you find him conservative to a fault.

I have listened, of a Monday morning, to an essay in a ministers' meeting on the problem of the "Unchurched." The picture presented to the imagination was a painful one. In the discussion that followed, the class of the Unchurched was not clearly differentiated from the other unfortunate class of the Unwashed. In the evening I attended a lecture by a learned professor who, as I happened to know, was not as regular in church attendance as he should be. As I listened to him I said to myself, "Who would have suspected that he is one of the Unchurched?"

Fortunately, all the disabilities pertaining to the Unwashed and Unchurched and Uncultivated and Unvaccinated and Unskilled and Unbaptized and Unemployed do not necessarily rest upon the same person. Usually there are palliating circumstances and compensating advantages that are to be taken into account. In a free country there is a career for all sorts of talent, and if one fails in one direction he may reach great dignity in another. I may be a mere nobody, so far as having had ancestors in the Colonial Wars is concerned, and yet I may be high up in the Knights of Pythias. A good lady who goes to the art class is able to talk of Botticelli. But she has no right to look down upon her husband as an inferior creature because he supposes that Botticelli is one of Mr. Heinz's fifty-seven kinds of pickles. He may know some things which she does not, and they may be fully as important.

The great abuse of the generalizing faculty comes in the arraying class against class. Among the University Statutes of Oxford in the Middle Ages was one directed against this evil. Dire academic punishments were threatened to students who made "odious comparisons of country to country, nobility to ignobility, Faculty to Faculty." I sympathize deeply with rules against such "unhonest garrulities." It is a pity that they cannot be enforced.

The mischief comes in reducing all differences to the categories of the Inferior and Superior. The fallacy of such division appears when we ask, Superior in what? Inferior in what? Anybody can be a superior person if he can only choose his ground and stick to it. That is the trick that royal personages have understood. It is etiquette for kings to lead the conversation always. One must be a very stupid person not to shine under such circumstances.

Suppose you have to give an audience to a distinguished archÆologist who has spent his life in Babylonian excavations. Fifteen minutes before his arrival you take up his book and glance through it till you find an easy page that you can understand. You master page 142. Here you are secure. You pour into the astonished ear of your guest your views upon the subject. Such ripe erudition in one whose chief interests lie elsewhere seems to him almost superhuman. Your views on page 142 are so sound that he longs to continue the conversation into what had before seemed the more important matter contained in page 143. But etiquette forbids. It is your royal prerogative to confine yourself to the safe precincts of page 142, and you leave it to his imagination to conceive the wisdom which might have been given to the world had it been your pleasure to expound the whole subject of archÆology.

I had myself, in a very humble way, an experience of this kind. In a domestic crisis it was necessary to placate a newly arrived and apparently homesick cook. I am unskilled in diplomacy, but it was a case where the comfort of an innocent family depended on diplomatic action. I learned that the young woman came from Prince Edward Island. Up to that moment I confess that Prince Edward Island had been a mere geographical expression. All my ideas about it were wrong, I having mixed it up with Cape Breton, which as I now know is quite different. But instantly Prince Edward Island became a matter of intense interest. Our daily bread was dependent on it. I entered my study and with atlas and encyclopÆdia sought to atone for the negligence of years. I learned how Prince Edward Island lay in relation to Nova Scotia, what were its principal towns, its climate, its railroad and steam-boat connections, and acquired enough miscellaneous information to adorn a five-minutes personally conducted conversation. Thus freshly furnished forth, I adventured into the kitchen.

Did she take the boat from Georgetown to Pictou? She did. Isn't it too bad that the strait is sometimes frozen over in winter? It is. Some people cross to New Brunswick on ice boats from Cape Traverse; that must be exciting and rather cold. She thought so too. Did she come from Charlottetown? No. Out Tignish way? Yes; halfway from Charlottetown to Tignish. Queen's County? Good apple country? Yes, she never saw such good apples as they raise in Queen's County. When I volunteered the opinion that the weather on Prince Edward Island is fine but changeable, I was received on the footing of an old inhabitant.

I did not find it necessary to go to the limits of my knowledge. I had still several reserve facts, classified in the EncyclopÆdia under the heads, Geology, Administration, and Finance. I had established my position as a superior person with an intuitive knowledge of Prince Edward Island. If the EncyclopÆdia itself had walked into the kitchen arm in arm with the Classical Dictionary, she could not have been more impressed. At least, that is the way I like to think she felt. It is the way I feel under similar circumstances.

One watches the Superior Person leading a conversation with the admiration due to Browning's HervÉ Riel, when,

he steered the ship in the narrow channel. It is well, however, for one who undertakes such feats to make sure that he really has an inch of way; it is none too much.

In these days it is so easy for one to get a supply of ready-made knowledge that it is hard to keep from applying it indiscriminately. We make incursions into our neighbor's affairs and straighten them out with a ruthless righteousness which is very disconcerting to him, especially when he has never had the pleasure of our acquaintance till we came to set him right. There is a certain modesty of conscience which would perhaps be more becoming. It comes only with the realization of practical difficulties. I like the remark of Sir Fulke Greville in his account of his friend, Sir Philip Sydney. Speaking of his literary labors he says: "Since my declining age it is true I had for some years more leisure to discover their imperfections than care and industry to mend them, finding in myself what all men complain of: that it is more easy to find fault, excuse, or tolerate, than to examine or reform."

The idea that we know what a person ought to do, and especially what he ought not to do, before we know the person or how he is situated, is one dear to the mind of the Doctrinaire. If his mind did not naturally work that way he would not be a Doctrinaire. He is always inclined to put duty before the pleasure of finding out what it is all about. In this way he becomes overstocked with a lot of unrelated duties, for which there is no home consumption, and which he endeavors to dump on the foreign market. This makes him unpopular.

I am not one of those who insist that everybody should mind his own business; that is too harsh a doctrine. One of the rights and privileges of a good neighbor is to give neighborly advice. But there is a corresponding right on the part of the advisee, and that is to take no more of the advice than he thinks is good for him. There is one thing that a man knows about his own business better than any outsider, and that is how hard it is for him to do it. The adviser is always telling him how to do it in the finest possible way, while he, poor fellow, knows that the paramount issue is whether he can do it at all. It requires some grace on the part of a person who is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances to accept cheerfully the remarks of the intelligent critic.

Persons who write about the wild animals they have known are likely to be contradicted by persons who have been acquainted with other wild animals, or with the same wild animals under other circumstances. How much more difficult is it to give an exhaustive and correct account of that wonderfully complex creature, man.

One whose business requires him to meet large numbers of persons who are all in the same predicament, is in danger of generalizing from a too narrow experience. The teacher, the charity-worker, the preacher, the physician, the man of business, each has his method of professional classification. Each is tempted to forget that he is not in a position from which he can survey human nature in its entirety. He only sees one phase endlessly repeated. The dentist, for example, has special advantages for character study, but he should remember that the least heroic of his patients has moments when he is more blithe and debonair than he has ever seen him.

It takes an unusually philosophical mind to make the necessary allowances for its own limitations. If you were to earn your daily bread at the Brooklyn Bridge, and your sole duty was to exhort your fellow men to "step lively," you would doubtless soon come to divide mankind into three classes, namely: those who step lively, those who do not step lively, and those who step too lively. If Aristotle himself were to cross the bridge, you would see nothing in the Peripatetic Philosopher but a reprehensible lack of agility.

At the railway terminus there is an office which bears the inscription, "Lost Articles." In the midst of the busy traffic it stands as a perpetual denial of the utilitarian theory that all men are governed by enlightened self-interest. A very considerable proportion of the traveling public can be trusted regularly to forget its portable property.

The gentleman who presides over the lost articles has had long experience as an alienist. He is skeptical as to the reality of what is called mind. So far as his clients are concerned, it is notable for its absence. To be confronted day after day by the absent-minded, and to listen to their monotonous tale of woe, is disenchanting. It is difficult to observe all the amenities of life when one is dealing with the defective and delinquent classes.

When first I inquired at the Lost Article window, I was received as a man and brother. There was even an attempt to show the respect due to one who may have seen better days. I had the feeling that both myself and my lost article were receiving individual attention. I left without any sense of humiliation. But the third time I appeared I was conscious of a change in the atmosphere. A single glance at the Restorer of Lost Articles showed me that I was no longer in his eyes a citizen who was in temporary misfortune. I was classified. He recognized me as a rounder. "There he is again," he said to himself. "Last time it was at Rockingham Junction, this time it is probably on the Saugus Branch; but it is the same old story, and the same old umbrella."

What hurt my feelings was that nothing I could say would do any good. It would not help matters to explain that losing articles was not my steady occupation, and that I had other interests in life. He would only wearily note the fact as another indication of my condition. "That's the way they all talk. These defectives can never be made to see their conduct in its true light. They always explain their misfortunes by pretending that their thoughts were on higher things."

The Doctrinaire when he gets hold of a good thing never lets up on it. His favorite idea is produced on all occasions. It may be excellent in its way, but he sings its praises till we turn against it as we used to do in the Fourth Reader Class, when we all with one accord turned against "Teacher's Pet." Teacher's Pet might be dowered with all the virtues, but we of the commonality would have none of them. We chose to scoff at an excellence that insulted us.

The King in "Hamlet" remarked,

The Doctrinaire can never realize the fatal nature of the "too-much." If a little does good, he is sure that more will do better. He will not allow of any abatements or alleviations; we must, if we are to keep on good terms with him, be doing the whole duty of man all the time. He will take our own most cherished principles and turn them against us in such an offensive manner that we forget that they are ours. He argues on the right side with such uncompromising energy that we have to take the wrong side to maintain our self-respect.

If there is one thing I believe in, it is fresh air. I like to keep my window open at night, or better still to sleep under the stars. And I was glad to learn from the doctors that this is good for us. But the other day I started on a railway journey with premonitory signs of catching cold. An icy blast blew upon me. I closed the car window. A lady instantly opened it. I looked to see what manner of person she was. Was she one who could be touched by an illogical appeal? or was she wholly devoted to a cause?

It needed but a glance to assure me that she was a Doctrinaire, and capable only of seeing the large public side of the question. What would it avail for me to say, "Madam, I am catching cold, may I close the window?"

"Apostate man!" she would reply, "did I not hear you on the platform of the Anti-Tuberculosis Association plead for free and unlimited ventilation without waiting for the consent of other nations? Did you not appear as one who stood four-square 'gainst every wind that blows, and asked for more? And now, just because you are personally inconvenienced, you prove recreant to the Cause. Do you know how many cubic feet of fresh air are necessary to this car?"

I could only answer feebly, "When it comes to cubic feet I am perfectly sound. I wish there were more of them. What troubles me is only a trifling matter of two linear inches on the back of my neck. Your general principle, Madam, is admirable. I merely plead for a slight relaxation of the rule. I ask only for a mere pittance of warmed-over air."

Perhaps the most discouraging thing about the Doctrinaire is that while he insists upon a high ideal, he is intolerant of the somewhat tedious ways and means by which the ideal is to be reached. With his eye fixed on the Perfect, he makes no allowance for the imperfectness of those who are struggling toward it. There is a pleasant passage in Hooker's "Ecclesiastical Polity" in which I find great comfort: "That which the Gospel of Christ requireth is the perpetuity of virtuous duties, not the perpetuity of exercise or action, but disposition perpetual, and practise as often as times and opportunities require. Just, valiant, liberal, temperate, and holy men, are they which can whensoever they will, and will whensoever they ought, execute whatever their several perfections impart. If virtues did always cease when they cease to work, there would be nothing more pernicious to virtue than sleep."

The judicious Hooker was never more judicious than in making this observation. It is a great relief to be assured that in this world, where there are such incessant calls upon the moral nature, it is possible to be a just, valiant, liberal, temperate, and holy man, and yet get a good night's sleep.

But your Doctrinaire will not have it so. His hero retains his position only during good behavior, which means behaving all the time in an obviously heroic manner. It is not enough that he should be to "true occasion true," he must make occasions to show himself off.

Now it happens that in the actual world it is not possible for the best of men to satisfy all the demands of their fidgety followers. In the picture of the battle between St. George and the dragon, the attitude of St. George is all that could be desired. There is an easy grace in the way in which he deals with the dragon that is greatly to his credit. There is a mingling of knightly pride and Christian resignation over his own inevitable victory, that is charming.

St. George was fortunate in the moment when he had his picture taken. He had the dragon just where he wanted him. But it is to be feared that if some one had followed him with a kodak, some of the snap-shots might have been less satisfactory. Let us suppose a moment when the dragon

It is a way that dragons have when they are excited. And what if that moment St. George dodged. Would you criticise him harshly for such an action? Would it not be better to take into consideration the fact that under such circumstances his first duty might not be to be statuesque?

When in the stern conflict we have found a champion, I think we owe him some little encouragement. When he is doing the best he can in a very difficult situation, we ought not to blame him because he does not act as he would if there were no difficulties at all. "Life," said Marcus Aurelius, "is more like wrestling than dancing." When we get that point of view we may see that some attitudes that are not graceful may be quite effective. It is a fine thing to say,—

But if I had been a Daniel and as the result of my independent action had been cast into the den of lions, I should feel as if I had done enough in the way of heroism for one day, and I should let other people take their turn. If I found the lions inclined to be amiable, I should encourage them in it. I should say, "I beg your pardon. I do not mean to intrude. If it's the time for your afternoon nap, don't pay any attention to me. After the excitement that I've had where I came from, I should like nothing better than to sit down by myself in the shade and have a nice quiet day of it."

And if the lions were agreeable, I should be glad. I should hate to have at this moment a bland Doctrinaire look down and say, "That was a great thing you did up there, Daniel. People are wondering whether you can keep it up. Your friends are getting a mite impatient. They expected to hear by this time that there was something doing down there. Stir 'em up, Daniel! Stir 'em up!"

Perhaps at this point some fair-minded reader may say, "Is there not something to be said in favor of the Doctrinaire? Is he not, after all, a very useful character? How could any great reform be pushed through without his assistance?"

Yes, dear reader, a great deal may be said in his favor. He is often very useful. So is a snow-plough, in midwinter, though I prefer a more flexible implement when it comes to cultivating my early peas.

There is something worse than to be a Doctrinaire who pursues an ideal without regard to practical consideration; it is worse to be a Philistine so immersed in practical considerations that he doesn't know an ideal when he sees it. If the choice were between these two I should say, "Keep on being a Doctrinaire. You have chosen the better part." But fortunately there is a still more excellent way. It is possible to be a practical idealist pursuing the ideal with full regard for practical considerations. There is something better than the conscience that moves with undeviating rectitude through a moral vacuum. It is the conscience that is related to realities. It is a moral force operating continuously on the infinitely diversified materials of human life. It feels its way onward. It takes advantage of every incident, with a noble opportunism. It is the conscience that belongs to the patient, keen-witted, open-minded, cheery "men of good will," who are doing the hard work of the world.