for all to do, if all were strong and virtuous?  The answer at present seems to be in the negative; and the problem seems to be solved only by the fact that all are not capable of honest work, and that the weaklings give the strong their opportunity.  What, again, one asks oneself, is the use of contriving more leisure for those who could not use it well?  Then, too, under present conditions, the survival of the unfittest seems to be assured.  Those breed most freely and recklessly of whom it may be said that, for the interests of civilisation, it is least desirable that they should perpetuate their kind.  The problem too is so complicated, that it requires a gigantic faith in a reformer to suggest the sowing of seed of which he can never hope to see the fruit.  The situation is one which tends to develop vehement and passionate prophets, dealing in vague and remote generalisations, when what one needs is practical prudence, and the effective power of foreseeing contingencies.  One who like myself loves security, leisure, beauty and peace, and is actuated by a vague and benevolent wish that all should have the same opportunities as myself, feels himself a mere sentimentalist in the matter, without a single effective quality.  I can see the problem, I can grieve over it, I can feel my faith in God totter under the weight of it, but that is all.

July 15, 1889.

One of the hardest things to face in the world is the grim fact that our power of self-improvement is limited.  Of some qualities we do not even possess the germs.  Some qualities we have in minute quantities, but hardly capable of development; some few qualities we possess in fuller measure, and they are capable of development; but even so, our total capacity of growth is limited, conditioned by our vital energy, and we have to face the fact that if we develop one set of qualities we must neglect another set.

I think of it in a whimsical and fantastic image, the best I can find.  Imagine a box in which there are a number of objects like puff-balls, each with a certain life of its own, half-filling the box.  Some of the puff-balls are small, hard, sterile; others are soft and expansive; some grow quickly in warmth and light, others fare better in cold and darkness.  The process of growth begins:  some of them increase in size and press themselves into every crevice, enclosing and enfolding the others; even so the growth of the whole mass is conditioned by the size of the box, and when the box is full, the power of increase is at an end.

The box, to interpret the fable, is our character with its possibilities.  The conditions which develop the various qualities are the conditions of our lives, our health, our income, our education, the people who surround us; but even the qualities themselves have their limitations.  Two people may grow up under almost precisely similar influences, and yet remain different to the end; two characters may be placed in difficult and bracing circumstances; the effect upon one character is to train the quality of self-reliance, on the other to produce a moral collapse.  Some people do their growing early and then stop altogether, becoming impervious to new opinions and new influences.  Some people go on growing to the end.