And, as he watched, perhaps because he was on his vacation, perhaps
because of something in his heart awakened by the fact that he was
going to his boyhood home, the man felt, as he had never felt before,
his kinship with them all. With wealth and poverty, with culture and
illiteracy, with pleasure and crime, with sadness and joy, as
evidenced in the lives of those who passed in the crowd, the man felt
a sympathy and understanding that was strangely new. And, more than
this, he saw that each was kin to the other. He saw that, in spite of
the wide gulf that separated the individuals in the throng, there was
a something that held them all together--there was a force that
influenced all alike--there was a something common to all. In spite of
the warring elements of society; in spite of the clashing forces of
business; in spite of the conflicting claims of industry represented
in the throng; the man recognized a brotherhood, a oneness, a kinship,
that held all together. And he felt this with a strange feeling that
he had always known that it was there but had never recognized it
before.
The man did not realize that this was so because he was not thinking
of the people in their relation to his work. He did not know, that,
because his heart and mind were intent upon the things of his
Yesterdays, he saw the world in this new light. He did not, then,
understand that the force which hindered and hampered him in his
work--that denied him the full freedom he demanded--was the same force
that he now felt holding the people together. Even as they all,
whether traveling in Pullman, private car, or emigrant train, passed
over the same rails, so they all, in whatever class they traveled on
the road of Life, were guided by the Traditions--the established
customs--the fixed habits--that are common to their race or nation.
And the strength of a people, as a people, is in this oneness--this
force that makes them one--the Traditions and customs and habits of
life that are common to all. It is the fences of the family dooryards
that hold the children of men together and make the people of a race
or nation one.
So it was that the man, knowing it not, left his work behind and went,
for strength and rest, back to the scenes of his Yesterdays in
obedience to the command of the very thing that, in his work, had
stirred him to such rage. For what, after all, are Traditions and
customs and habits but a going back into the Yesterdays.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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