I have eaten up all the grounds of my tea, said, many years since, in my hearing, in modest yet triumphant tones, a little girl of seven years old.  I have but to close my eyes, and I see all that scene again, almost as plainly as ever.  Six or seven children (I am one of them) are sitting round a tea-table; their father and mother are there too; and an old gentleman, who is (in his own judgment) one of the wisest of men.  I see the dining-room, large and low-ceilinged; the cheerful glow of the autumnal fire; the little faces in the soft candle-light, for glaring gas was there unknown.  There had been much talk about the sinfulness of waste—­of the waste of even very little things.  The old gentleman, so wise (in his own judgment, and indeed in my judgment at that period), was instilling into the children’s minds some of those lessons which are often impressed upon children by people (I am now aware) of no great wisdom or cleverness.  He had dwelt at considerable length upon the sinfulness of wasting anything; likewise on the sinfulness of children being saucy or particular as to what they should eat.  He enforced, with no small solemnity, the duty of children’s eating what was set before them without minding whether it was good or not, or at least without minding whether they liked it or not.  The poor little girl listened to all that was said, and of course received it all as indubitably true.  Waste and sauciness, she saw, were wrong, so she judged that the very opposite of waste and sauciness must be right.  Accordingly, she thought she would turn to use something that was very small, but still something that ought not to be wasted.  Accordingly, she thought she would show the docility of her taste by eating up something that was very disagreeable.  Here was an opportunity at once of acting out the great principles to which she had been listening.  And while a boy, evidently destined to be a metaphysician, and evidently possessed of the spirit of resistance to constituted authority whether in government or doctrine, boldly argued that it could not be wicked in him to hate onions, because God had made him so that he did hate onions, and (going still deeper into things) insisted that to eat a thing when you did not want it was wasting it much more truly than it would be wasting it to leave it; the little girl ate up all the grounds left in her teacup, and then announced the fact with considerable complacency.

Very, very natural.  The little girl’s act was a slight straw showing how a great current sets.  It was a fair exemplification of a tendency which is woven into the make of our being.  Tell the average mortal that it is wrong to walk on the left side of the road, and in nine cases out of ten he will conclude that the proper thing must be to walk on the right side of the road; whereas in actual life, and in almost all opinions, moral, political, and religious, the proper thing is to walk neither on the left nor the right side, but somewhere about the middle.