What would they think--those three hundred speech-tired boys--if some man who had been held before them as exemplary were to rise and lay bare his own life--its weaknesses, its faults, perhaps its crimes--and tell them there was weakness and there was strength in every human being, and that the world-old struggle of life was to overcome one's weakness with one's strength. The idea took strange hold on him. It seemed the method of the world--at any rate it had been the method of that afternoon--for the men who stood before their fellows with clean hands to plant themselves on the far side of a chasm of conventions, or narrow self-esteem, or easily won virtue, and cry to those beings who struggled on the other side of that chasm--to those human beings whose souls had never gone to school: “Look at us! Our hands are clean, our hearts are pure. See how beautiful it is to be good! Come ye, poor sinners, and be good also.” And the poor sinners, the untaught, birthmarked human souls, would look over at the self-acclaimed goodness they could see far across the chasm, and even though attracted to it (which, he grimly reflected, would not seem likely) the thing that was left with them was a sense of the width of the chasm. He had a sense of needless waste, of unnecessary blight. He looked down at those three hundred faces and it was as if looking at human waste; and it was human stupidity, human complacency and cowardice kept those human beings human drift. With what a smug self-satisfaction--under the mask of benevolence--the speakers of that afternoon had flaunted their virtue--their position! How condescendingly they had spoken of the home which we, the good, prepare for you, the bad, and what namby-pambyness there was, after all, in that sentiment which all of them had voiced--and now you must pay us back by being good! Oh for a man of flesh and blood to stand up and tell how he himself had failed and suffered! For a man who could bridge that chasm with strong, broad, human understanding and human sympathies--a man who would stand among them pulse-beat to pulse-beat and cry out, “I know! I understand! I fought it and I'll help you fight it too!” The sound of his own name broke the spell that was upon him. He looked to the centre of the stage and saw that the professor from the State University had seated himself and that the superintendent of the institution was occupying the place of the speaker. And the superintendent was saying: