Another great source of worry is _our failure to distinguish essentials from non-essentials_. What are the essentials for life? For a man, honesty, truth, earnestness, strength, health, ability to work, and work to do. He may or may not be handsome; he may or may not have wealth, position, fame, education; but to be a man among men, these other things he must have. For a woman,--health, love, work, and such virtues as both men and women need. She might enjoy friends, but they are not essential as health or work; she would be a strange woman if she did not prize beauty, but devoted love is worth far more than beauty or all the conquests it brings. What is the essential for a chair?--its capacity to be used to sit upon with comfort. A house?--that it is adapted to the making of a home. You don't buy a printing-press to curl your hair with but to print, and in accordance with its printing power is it judged. A boat's usefulness is determined by its worthiness in the water, to carry safely, rapidly, largely as is demanded of it. This is the judgement sanity demands of everything. What is essential--What not? Is it essential to be a society leader, to belong to every club, to hold office, to give as many dinners as one's neighbors, to have a bigger house, furniture with brighter polish, bigger carvings and more ugly designs than anyone else in town, to have our names in the papers oftener than others, to have more servants, a newer style automobile, put on more show, pomp, ceremony and circumstance than our friends? By no means! Oh for men and women who have the discerning power--the sight for the essential things, the determination to have them and let non-essentials go. They are the wise ones, the happy ones, the free-from-worry ones. Later I shall refer extensively to Mrs. Canfield's book _The Squirrel Cage_. She has many wise utterances on this phase of the worry question. For instance, in referring to the mad race for wealth and position that keeps a man away from home so many hours of the day that his wife and child scarce know him she introduces the following dialogue: One of them whose house isn't far from mine, told me that he hadn't seen his children, except asleep, for three weeks. 'But something ought to be done about it!' The girl's deep-lying instinct for instant reparation rose up hotly. 'Are they so much worse off than most American business men?' queried Rankin. 'Do any of them feel they can take the time to see much more than the outside of their children; and isn't seeing them asleep about as--' Lydia cut him short quickly. 'You're always blaming them for that,' she cried. 'You ought to pity them. They can't help it. It's better for the children to have bread and butter, isn't it--'