trouble and disaster before we put our imagination seriously to work on the problem and try to find some more complete solution?

 Of all the dangers of the use of the imagination, perhaps the greatest
 of all is the neglect to use it, the denial of it and its consequent
 starvation.

 E.M.  COBHAM.

 [16] Mrs Book sees an allusion to this danger, as well as to the
 first, in the warnings against covetousness in the Tenth Commandment.

 THE PLAY SPIRIT[17]:  A CRITICISM.

 [17] See the article, “The Play Spirit,” in the November issue.

With your contributor’s description of the play spirit, that happy leisure from self and its responsibilities in order that time and thought and heart may be filled with wider inspiration, most of your readers will, I think, entirely agree, and all of us will be grateful for the spirited claim on behalf of “play.”

 The one criticism that occurs to the mind is that a touch of
 professionalism, of patronage towards the ordinary person, has crept
 into the author’s thought and peeps out through many of the sentences.

“Common men” ... “ordinary everyday people” ... “average humanity,” ... “a worker” who ... “cannot play”; does the writer of the Play Spirit really show us what is in their hearts?  He is an artist in words, he is a keen admirer of other arts, he is interested in thinking; it seems all but impossible to him that anyone can have “freedom” without the power of expressing it, without even the consciousness of its possession.

We are all too apt, I think, to imagine that our own discoveries of the mystery and magic of life are peculiar to ourselves, or shared only with a sympathetic few, passed on sometimes (by the very few who have both will and power to do so) to such of the outsiders as are interested enough to enter into that enchanted garden and take gifts from it.  But has not the supreme discovery of the greatest artists, philosophers and teachers been that the “everyday people” do live as deeply and broadly as the thinkers and artists?  They are inarticulate and cannot tell what they see, but to them life is made amusing, or interesting, or consecrated according to their temperament.

 Who can say what the Cornish sea means to that tired worker?  At least
 it seems a boldness that is almost insolence to decide what it did
 not mean to her!

 Has not every life its revelations?  Is it not because we do not see
 as God does that some one particular life which strikes across our
 path cannot reveal its revelation over again to us?