It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they have held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions.  They have only learned discretion.  For the first time they see in its entirety what it was that they were attempting.  They are at last at close quarters with the world.  Men of every interest and variety crowd about them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and truer perspective; seem no longer so susceptible to separate and radical change.  The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were seeking to work in is revealed to them—­its intricate and delicate fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts—­and they work circumspectly, lest they should mar more than they mend.  Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide to practicable and lasting reformation; and if the reform sought be the reformation of others as well as of himself, the reformer should look to it that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those he would change and guide.  When he has discovered that relation, he has come to himself:  has discovered his real use and planning part in the general world of men; has come to the full command and satisfying employment of his faculties.  Otherwise he is doomed to live for ever in a fool’s paradise, and can be said to have come to himself only on the supposition that he is a fool.

VI

Every man—­if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage from Dr. South—­ every man hath both an absolute and a relative capacity:  an absolute in that he hath been endued with such a nature and such parts and faculties; and a relative in that he is part of the universal community of men, and so stands in such a relation to the whole.  When we say that a man has come to himself, it is not of his absolute capacity that we are thinking, but of his relative.  He has begun to realize that he is part of a whole, and to know what part, suitable for what service and achievement.

It was once fashionable—­and that not a very long time ago—­to speak of political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irritating but inevitable restriction upon the “natural” sovereignty and entire self-government of the individual.  That was the dream of the egotist.  It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and “absolute” capacities.  It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking.  As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of wishing to do without the “trammels” of organized society, for the very good reason that those trammels are in reality but no trammels at all, but indispensable aids and spurs to the attainment of the highest and