Let me live in a house by the side of the road,
And be a friend to man.
Sam Walter Foss.
OURS is a distinctly democratic age, in which the aspirations and unrest of the great human body have become portentous. Had the ruling thought of the past century not encouraged general education, the multiplication of books and other means of intellectual awakening, it might have been otherwise; but the public schools, the newspapers and magazines, the ever-increasing intercommunication and fellowship of the nations, and the world-wide declaration of that possibility of freedom and happiness for every man which is embraced in the Christ-teaching,—all these things have begotten in the commoner a discontent with the unideal, an ambition for better things which is no less irrepressible than legitimate. The fruitage of the implanting and stimulation of intelligence, and of the sense of universal brotherhood, is ripening in all lands, and having put our hands to the plow there is no looking back.
