It is a duty to dig, to nail the Stars and Stripes to a lima-bean pole, and plant the banner square in the middle of the garden. Profits? pleasures? Both sorts will grow, especially the pleasures, which really are part of the profits, till they fairly smother the weeds; not the least of these being your sense of living and your right to live, which comes out of actually hoeing your own row--a literal row of beans or corn or tomatoes. Somebody must feed the soldiers; but nobody must needs feed me. It is not necessary that I live, however necessary I find it to eat; eating, like sleeping and breathing and keeping warm, being strictly a private enterprise that nobody but I need see as necessary or be responsible for. The soldier must carry a shovel nowadays, but he will require a hoe, too, and a pruning hook, and a ploughshare, before he will be self-supporting. With such a kit war could support war forever, which is the Rathenau plan of war, with everything German left out, consequently everything of war left out. The soldier cannot feed himself. The crew of a battleship cannot be expected to catch their own cod and flounders. They must leave that to the trawlers, those human boats, with human crews who fish for a living. Men of the navy must die for a living. The captain of a United States destroyer, writing to his wife, says, “I think that the only real anxiety is lest we may not get into the big game at all. I do not think that any of us are bloodthirsty or desirous of glory or advancement, but we have to justify our existence.” So does every human being; yet an existence that can be justified only by fighting and dying is too unproductive, too far from self-supporting, to warrant the sure calling and election of many of us. No Grand-Banker ever wrote so to his wife, though he might be returning with all his salt unwet; no college professor ever wrote so--not if he could get into his garden--in spite of his pupils, his college president, the trustees, and Mr. Carnegie’s Efficiency Board. Teaching may not justify a professor’s existence, though it ought to justify his salary; so, every time I start for the University, I put a dozen or two of eggs into my book-bag, that I may have a right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city. I am not independent of society. I do not wish to be independent. I wish to be debtor to all and have all debtors to me. But we buy too much and sell too much of life, and raise too little. We _pay_ for all we get. Sometimes we get all we pay for, but not often; and if we never did, still life has so thoroughly adopted the business standard, that we had rather keep on paying than trying to grow our way.