We know for what pursuit each one is best fitted and how each should occupy his spare time.  We know to what church all should go; what creed all should believe.  We know what particular traits are faults and how these can be corrected.  We know so much about other people that we often have not time to give due attention to ourselves.  We neglect our own affairs that we may unselfishly direct others, and sometimes suffer in consequence, for nobody but a lawyer makes a good living by attending to other people’s business.

[Sidenote:  Theoretically]

Theoretically, this should be pleasing to each one.  Every person of sense should be delighted at being told just what to do.  It would relieve him from all care, all responsibility; the necessity for thought, planning, and individual judgment would be wholly removed.

The musical student would not have to select his own instrument, his own teacher, nor even his own practice time.  Every author would know just how and when to write, and in order to become famous, he need only act upon the suggestions for stories and improvement of style which are gratuitously given him from day to day, by people who cannot write a clear and correct sentence.  This thing actually happened; consequently it is just the theme for fiction.  This plot, suitably developed, would make the nations sit up, and send the race by hundred thousands to the corner bookstore.

The cares incident to selecting a wardrobe would be wholly removed.  Every woman knows how every other should dress.  Her sure taste selects at a glance the thing which will best become the other, and over which the Unenlightened may ponder for hours.

[Sidenote:  A Common Vanity]

There is no more common vanity than claiming to “know” some particular person.  We are “all things to all men.”  The two who love each other better than all the world beside, have much knowledge, but it is not by any means complete.  “Souls reach out to each other across the impassable gulfs of individual being.”  And yet, daily, people who have no sympathy with us, and scarcely a common interest, will assume to “know” us, when we do not fully know ourselves, and when we earnestly hide our real selves from all save the single soul we love.

To assume intimate knowledge of the hundred considerations which make up a single situation, the various complexities of temperament and disposition which the personal equation continually produces in human affairs, of the imperceptible fibres of the web which lies between two souls, preventing always the fullest understanding, unless Love, the magician, gives new sight—­amounts to the proclamation of practical Omnipotence.

[Sidenote:  “I Told You So”]

There is no position in life which is secure.  No complication ever comes to our friends, which our advice, acted upon, would not immediately solve.  If our most minute directions are not thankfully received and put into effect, there is always the comforting indication of superiority—­“I told you so.”