Take, too, that simplification of the facts, which I have mentioned as one of the essentials to modern success. Up to a certain point, and if the aim sought is worth while, it is admirable. The world is altogether too ‘full of a number of things’ not to demand their simplification for the attainment of a single purpose. Some of them must be lopped off. But the larger your majority, the more primitive the simplicity it demands, and the more drastic the pruning. It cuts off living branches along with the dead. Even so, if its aim were only significant! But what it is trying to do is to make a flag-staff out of an umbrella pine. An infinite number of instances, all richly different, capable of a hundred diverse developments--and the majority wants them all the same: one meagre jejune type that it can understand. A forest of flag-staffs! Yet drill and organize them as we may, this sorry but infinitely exciting world continues, and will continue to eternity, to be made up of some hundreds of millions of individuals, each one, if we will let him be, blessedly different from all the others. Therefore, the effect on these of our present standards of success cannot conceivably be permanent. Neither, one surmises, can the standards themselves. But for the time being, while they endure, the effect is disastrous. It is not only that the results of our civilization, by which it will be known to future generations, are essentially cheap. They, the future generations, will, it is to be hoped, accomplish other and better things. There is plenty of time. It is also that a finer, truer, if less transmittable form of success is rare to-day: I mean, the full, free, robust development of the individual, whether gifted or not. This, not objective results, is what it seems to me success should mean. If the individual is very gifted, his development will, indeed, bring with it results that may influence men even after his death; but that is by the way, the merest side-issue. It is not, in fact, about the very gifted individual that I am chiefly concerned. However unduly hampered, he will thrust his head up eventually into the free open air; he will develop somehow in his own way, despite majority opinion. But the man with one talent will go bury it in the ground. Every one will tell him he ought to, and he will readily see that he ought to himself. ‘Good Lord, man! Talents went out with the fall of the Roman Empire! Can you _buy_ anything with a talent? Just so much dead weight. Some day when you’re in a hurry, carrying it about will mean just those two seconds or difference that will make you miss the eight-twelve train to business. Has Jones got a talent? Have I got one? Go bury it quick!’