A ROBUST optimism, hand in hand with the spirit of earnest investigation and an increasing altruism, seems to have ushered in this twentieth century. Politically and socially the new era has seen strenuous efforts, for the most part honestly made, to cleanse our house and put it in shining order. We have wrestled in street and hall, and even within the sacred precincts of the fireside, with the absorbing questions of tariff revision and suffrage.
In the clearer dawn of a more practical knowledge that the good of each is the good of all. our vigilance at the loophole of personal advancement has somewhat relaxed. As a nation we show perhaps less eagerness to join the ranks of the perspiring Philistine in his pursuit of wealth, and are more prone to sit down under our own vine and fig-tree in company with fewer wants (and those simpler) and the riches of a contented spirit. We are no longer convinced that a uniform inflexibility in money matters comprises the whole duty of man. There is even faintly perceptible a doubt as to whether an assiduous unrest of doing should usurp the serene dignity of being. While modestly congratulating ourselves upon our national progress thus early in the century toward the El Dorado of our hopes, it might be well, at this point, to consider whether we have not still, like Christian, some extraneous luggage of which to rid ourselves.
There are three words, peculiarly indigenous to New England, which long since should have been eliminated from the vocabulary of the American. Worn quite threadbare by constant use. squeezed dry of such juice of goodness as may once have been theirs, battered from having been worked overtime, they should be speedily relegated to the limbo from whence they came. Save, drive, hurry: these, in their merciless mill, have ground exceeding fine the youth, high ideals, health, and peace of mind which is our best birthright. Sometimes one wonders whether the passion to save, the hoarding for a dreary and loveless old age, while the man year after year hardens and narrows in a treadmill groove, may not have had its joyless origin in the struggle of the Puritans with a rocky soil, the treachery of winter's snow and skulking foes. Truly an exaggerated sense of "thrift, thrift, Horatio!" has often so warped the nature of an individual as to impede all growth in happiness, health, and morals until, aroused to its insidious influence, he has cast it out of his consciousness.
