If you have good sight, unimpaired eyes, you go about assuming--when you think of it at all--that good sight is the rule in the world and impaired eyes the exception. But let your sight begin to fail, let your eyes become darkened, and soon you discover that you are one of thousands--that good sight is the exception, that almost everyone has something the matter with his eyes. The reason human beings know so little about human nature, the reason the sentimental flapdoodle about human virtues, in the present not very far-advanced stage of human evolution, is so widely believed and doubt of it so indignantly denounced as cynicism, lies in the fact that the average human being is ignorant of the afflictions of his own soul. This would be pleasant and harmless enough, and to destroy the delusion would be wickedly cruel, were it not that the only way to cure ailments of whatever sort is to diagnose them. What hope is there for the man devoured of a fever who fancies and insists that he is healthy? What hope is there for the man who eats pleasant-tasting slow poison under the impression that it is food? What a quaint notion it is that the truth, the sole source of health and happiness, is bad for some people, chiefly for those sick unto death through the falsehoods of ignorance and vanity! We humans are like the animal that claws and bites the surgeon who is trying to set its broken leg. But I am wandering a little. Discover that you have any ailment of body or of soul, and you soon discover how widespread that ailment is. You do not even appreciate how widespread, incessant, and poignant are the ravages of death until your own family and friends begin to die off. I had no notion of the extent of the social or domestic malady of abandoned husbands and fathers until I became one of that curious class. Among the masses there is the great and growing pestilence of abandoned wives--husbands, worn out by the uncertainties of the laboring man’s income, and disgusted with the incompetence of their wives and with the exasperations of the badly brought up children--such husbands flying by tens of thousands to escape what they cannot cure or endure. Among the classes, from the plutocracy down to and through the small merchants and professional men, I now discovered that there was a corresponding and reversed disease--the abandoned husband.