being would be a man born to be a king.  And there will be a race of such men.  And we must play the man that they may be raised upon our buried shoulders.  And they will tower above us, as the seers of old in Judea, Athens, India, and Rome towered above their indolent, luxurious, blind, and material contemporaries.  And with all their accelerated development, infinite possibilities will still stretch beyond the reach of their imagination.  For “men follow duty, never overtake.”

But all our analyses are unsatisfactory.  In the history of any great people there is a period when they seem to rise above themselves.  They have the strength of giants, and accomplish things before and since impossible.  We sometimes ascribe these results to the exuberant vitality of the race at this time; and their life is large and grand.  Such was England under Elizabeth.  Think of her soldiers and explorers, her statesmen and poets.  There were giants in those days.  What a healthy, hearty enjoyment they showed in all their work, and with what ease was the impossible accomplished.  The greater the hardships to be borne or odds to be faced, the greater the joy in overcoming them.  They sailed out to give battle to the superior power of Spain, not at the command, but by the permission, of their queen; often without even this.

And what a vigor and vitality there is in the literature of this period.  Life is worth living, and studying, and describing.  They see the world directly as it is; not some distorted picture of it, seen by an unhealthy mind and drawn by a feeble hand.  The world is ever new and fresh to them because they see it through young, clear eyes.

Were they giants or are we dwarfed?  Which of the two lives is normal?  They used all their faculties and utilized all their powers.  Do we?  The only force or product which we are willing to see wasted is the highest mental and moral power.  Our engines and turbine wheels utilize the last ounce of pressure of the steam or water.  The manufacturers pay high wages to hands who can tend machines run at the highest possible speed.  The profits of modern business come largely from the utilization of force or products formerly wasted.  But how far do we utilize the highest faculties of the mind, which have to do with character, the crowning glory of human development?  Are we not eminently “penny-wise and pound-foolish?” A ship which uses only its donkey-engines, and does nothing but take in and get out cargo is a dismantled hulk.  A captain who thinks only of cargo, and engines, and the length of the daily run, but who takes no observations and consults no chart, will make land only to run upon rocks.  Are we not too much like such dismantled hulks, or ships sailing with priceless cargoes but with mad captains?

But we have not yet seen the worst results of this waste of our highest powers.  The sessile animal, which lives mainly for digestion, does not attain as good digestive organs as his more active neighbor, who subordinates digestion to muscle.  Lower powers reach their highest development only in proportion as they are strictly subordinated to higher.  This may be called a law of biology.  And our lower mental powers fail of their highest development and capacity mainly because of the lack of this subordination.