But if a man flits from one curiosity to another, if for fear of being narrow and with the hope of being broad, he forsakes every occupation before it can set its seal upon him, if he is through and through dilettante, jack-of-all-trades, he is a man only less poverty-stricken than a tramp. He has the illusion of efficiency. He wonders that society generally judges that he is not worth his salt, that on every battlefield Hotspur curses him for a popinjay, that in every company of master workmen met for council he is at most a tolerated guest. The judgment upon him--not my judgment, but the judgment which the days thrust in his face--is this: that when there is important work to be done he cannot do it. He is full of versatility. He knows the alphabet of everything--chemistry, engineering, business, law, what not. But with all these he cannot bridge the Mississippi. He cannot make the steel for the bridge, nor calculate the strength of it, nor find the money to build it, nor defend its interests in court. These tasks fall to men whom twenty years' service in their several callings have taught to speak for society at its best. And while their work goes on its way, the brilliant man who refused every sort of thorough training which society could give him, can only stand full of wonder and anger that with all his versatilities he is left to choose between the drudgery of unskilled labor and mere starvation. There is another sort of man who will learn little in any occupation because he is wholly bent upon being original. The past is all wrong, full of errors, absurdities, iniquities. To serve apprenticeship is to indoctrinate one's self with pernicious orthodoxies. We must rebel. We must begin at the beginning. We must do something entirely new and revolutionary. We must rely upon our free souls to see and to do the right, as it has never been seen or done before. Some such declaration of independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present political and religious and educational institutions and get new and perfect ones. Above all, the children must grow up free from the whole array of social orthodoxies. We are to escape from the whole wretched blundering past and by one bold march enter a new Garden of Eden. There is something inspiring in this, something that stirs the youth like a bugle, and something, as I believe, that is essential in every generation for the purification of society. The past is as bad as anybody says it is, woven full of inconsistency and iniquity. We _must_ escape it. We _must_ fight it. And it is no doubt inevitable that there should be some who think that they owe it nothing but war.