Stupid beginning! Hopeless and thankless! Who can be independent and absolute nowadays? Is there any calling that can boast of standing outside life? It is a delusive dream which beckons and betrays us. We change masters only. That’s very simple. But we are far from becoming independent thereby. We have a hundred masters instead of one. The employee who has made himself “independent” has lost his master but becomes the slave of innumerable new tyrants to whose wills he must bow: his customers. Therein he resembles the so-called free professions which are in reality not free. The physician is dependent upon the whims of his patients; the lawyer woos the favour of his clients; the writer groans under the knout of the cruelest of all tyrants: the public. And, strange to say, it is this last calling that appeals to most persons as the ideal of independence. It is almost a weekly occurrence to see some discontented youngster or an unhappy girl with a thick manuscript in his or her portfolio, begging to be recommended to some publisher and thus open a writer’s career to them. They want to become self reliant, independent. It is vain to point out to them that an author’s bread is not sweetened with the raisins of independence. Others who have never written a line suddenly make up their minds to become journalists. They think that the will to become a journalist is all that is needed to be so. Evidences of adequate preparation and qualification they find in the excellence of their school compositions. They do not suspect that the journalist’s independence is a myth that is credited only by those who have never smelled to journalism. That the journalist is the slave not only of the public but also of the hour. That not a minute of the day is his, and that he would gladly exchange his pen for any other, more massy tool, if such a thing were possible. Dissatisfaction with one’s calling is also one of the factors that sets the feeling for independence in motion. Who is nowadays satisfied with his calling, or with himself?! This may be easily proved by referring to a striking phenomenon. In doing so we need not sing the praises of the “good old days.” But happiness in one’s work and contentment with one’s calling were certainly much more common than they are now. Otherwise it could never have come to pass that the father’s calling should be transmitted to the sons generation after generation. How is it with us to-day? The physician cries: My son may be anything but a physician. The public official: My son shall be more fortunate than I; under no circumstances shall he be a public official. The actor: Be what you will, my son, but not an artist; art is the bitterest bread. The merchant wants to make a lawyer of his son, the lawyer a merchant, etc.