Sometime, if I can get my stub pen limbered up I shall try my hand at writing a bit of a composition on the subject of “The Inequality of Equals.”  I know that the Declaration tells us that all men are born free and equal, and I shall explain in my essay that it means us to understand that while they are born equal, they begin to become unequal the day after they are born, and become more so as one changes his mind and the other one does not.  I try, all the while, to make myself believe that I am the equal of my neighbor, the judge, and then I feel foolish to think that I ever tried it.  The neighbors all know it isn’t true, and so do I when I quit arguing with myself.  He has such a long start of me now that I wonder if I can ever overtake him.  One thing, though, I’m resolved upon, and that is to change my mind as often as possible.

CHAPTER XVII

THE POINT OF VIEW

Just why a boy is averse to washing his neck and ears is one of the deep problems of social psychology, and yet the psychologists have veered away from the subject.  There must be a reason, and these mind experts ought to be able and willing to find it, so as to relieve the anxiety of the rest of us.  It is easy for me to say, with a full-arm gesture, that a boy is of the earth earthy, but that only begs the question, as full-arm gestures are wont to do.  Many a boy has shed copious tears as he sat on a bench outside the kitchen door removing, under compulsion, the day’s accumulations from his feet as a prerequisite for retiring.  He would much prefer to sleep on the floor to escape the foot-washing ordeal.  Why, pray, should he wash his feet when he knows full well that tomorrow night will find them in the same condition?  Why all the bother and trouble about a little thing like that?  Why can’t folks let a fellow alone, anyhow?  And, besides, he went in swimming this afternoon, and that surely ought to meet all the exactions of capricious parents.  He exhibits his feet as an evidence of the virtue of going swimming, for he is arranging the preliminaries for another swimming expedition to-morrow.

I recall very distinctly how strange it seemed that my father could sit there and calmly talk about being a Democrat, or a Republican, or a Baptist, or a Methodist, or about some one’s discovering the north pole, or about the President’s message when the dog had a rat cornered under the corn-crib and was barking like mad.  But, then, parents can’t see things in their right relations and proportions.  And there sat mother, too, darning stockings, and the dog just stark crazy about that rat.  ’Tis enough to make a boy lose faith in parents forevermore.  A dog, a rat, and a boy—­there’s a combination that recks not of the fall of empires or the tottering of thrones.  Even chicken-noodles must take second place in such a scheme of world activities.  And yet a mother would hold a boy back from the forefront of such an enterprise to wash his neck.  Oh, these mothers!