"When a man's Christmas presents to his wife consist of boot-jacks, shirts, and gloves for himself. "When the watchword is, 'Each for himself.' "When dinner is not ready at dinner-time. "When 'he' snores his loudest while 'she' kindles the fire. "When 'father' takes half of the pie and leaves the other half for the one that made it and her eight children. "When the children are given the neck and back of the chicken. "When children are obliged to clamor for their rights. "When the money that should go for a book goes for what only one side of the house knows anything about. "When there is too much latch-key. "When politeness, fine manners, and kindly attentions are reserved for company or visits abroad." CHAPTER XIII. "The greatest friend of truth is time." WHAT WE INHERIT FROM THE PAST. The world moves only through the constant accumulation and conservation of force--the force of mind. We are not capable of conceiving the immense wastage of this force from year to year and from century to century. If we produce a great inventor we are ignorantly proud of him. We wonder at him as if he were a miracle. A great thinker in mechanics, in art, in science, in letters, astonishes as if he were a prodigy, when he is really only an approach to what all men have the right to be, to what all men may become when the right mind has applied to it the right compelling power of suggestion from the force of other minds. As surely as the plant is involved in its seed, so surely is all the progress of the future involved in the thought of the past, recorded in books as far as it is possible to record it at all. The telephone, the telegraph, the phonograph, the steam-engine, the power loom--every result of the application of mind in the subjection of matter--existed in the minds of men and was recorded in books years before the thought gave suggestion to the mind which applied it practically. Back of the mind of the great thinker in poetry, in statesmanship, in science, in mechanics, is the conserved force of the minds preceding him. But what does it all avail if it is wasted? We may have now a thousand Edisons, Fultons, Morses and Maurys, inert and practically useless because of force unapplied that might set them in motion to make the lives of millions, born and unborn, easier and happier. We have poets, statesmen, scientists, and inventors as unknown and unproductive as the worms which change them into productive forms of matter in country church-yards, where some Gray finds them and touches us with a sense of their loss to us without suggesting the remedy. What remedy is there if it is not this of making the suggested possibility of the past the endeavor of the present and the achievement of the future? How is that possible, if we regard our capable men as miracles, when our own incapacity to understand is the only miracle when we leave the great possibilities of mind in unnumbered