Some accuse politics or business; others social problems or militarism. We meet only an embarrassment of choice when we start to unstring the chaplet of our carking cares. Suppose we set out in pursuit of pleasure. There is too much pepper in our soup to make it palatable. Our arms are filled with a multitude of embarrassments, any one of which would be enough to spoil our temper. From morning till night, wherever we go, the people we meet are hurried, worried, preoccupied. Some have spilt their good blood in the miserable conflicts of petty politics: others are disheartened by the meanness and jealousy they have encountered in the world of literature or art. Commercial competition troubles the sleep of not a few. The crowded curricula of study and the exigencies of their opening careers, spoil life for young men. The working classes suffer the consequences of a ceaseless industrial struggle. It is becoming disagreeable to govern, because authority is diminishing; to teach, because respect is vanishing. Wherever one turns there is matter for discontent. And yet history shows us certain epochs of upheaval which were as lacking in idyllic tranquillity as is our own, but which the gravest events did not prevent from being gay. It even seems as if the seriousness of affairs, the uncertainty of the morrow, the violence of social convulsions, sometimes became a new source of vitality. It is not a rare thing to hear soldiers singing between two battles, and I think myself nowise mistaken in saying that human joy has celebrated its finest triumphs under the greatest tests of endurance. But to sleep peacefully on the eve of battle or to exult at the stake, men had then the stimulus of an internal harmony which we perhaps lack. Joy is not in things, it is in us, and I hold to the belief that the causes of our present unrest, of this contagious discontent spreading everywhere, are in us at least as much as in exterior conditions.