the rights of others.  All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard.  But there was almost no teaching of the need for collective action, and of the fact that in addition to, not as a substitute for, individual responsibility, there is a collective responsibility.  Books such as Herbert Croly’s “Promise of American Life” and Walter E. Weyl’s “New Democracy” would generally at that time have been treated either as unintelligible or else as pure heresy.

The teaching which I received was genuinely democratic in one way.  It was not so democratic in another.  I grew into manhood thoroughly imbued with the feeling that a man must be respected for what he made of himself.  But I had also, consciously or unconsciously, been taught that socially and industrially pretty much the whole duty of the man lay in thus making the best of himself; that he should be honest in his dealings with others and charitable in the old-fashioned way to the unfortunate; but that it was no part of his business to join with others in trying to make things better for the many by curbing the abnormal and excessive development of individualism in a few.  Now I do not mean that this training was by any means all bad.  On the contrary, the insistence upon individual responsibility was, and is, and always will be, a prime necessity.  Teaching of the kind I absorbed from both my text-books and my surroundings is a healthy anti-scorbutic to the sentimentality which by complacently excusing the individual for all his shortcomings would finally hopelessly weaken the spring of moral purpose.  It also keeps alive that virile vigor for the lack of which in the average individual no possible perfection of law or of community action can ever atone.  But such teaching, if not corrected by other teaching, means acquiescence in a riot of lawless business individualism which would be quite as destructive to real civilization as the lawless military individualism of the Dark Ages.  I left college and entered the big world owing more than I can express to the training I had received, especially in my own home; but with much else also to learn if I were to become really fitted to do my part in the work that lay ahead for the generation of Americans to which I belonged.

CHAPTER II

THE VIGOR OF LIFE

Looking back, a man really has a more objective feeling about himself as a child than he has about his father or mother.  He feels as if that child were not the present he, individually, but an ancestor; just as much an ancestor as either of his parents.  The saying that the child is the father to the man may be taken in a sense almost the reverse of that usually given to it.  The child is father to the man in the sense that his individuality is separate from the individuality of the grown-up into which he turns.  This is perhaps one reason why a man can speak of his childhood and early youth with a sense of detachment.