The Bridgeport evening farmer., 1914-10-30
sontinued.l

8 more constructive imagination. There is natural order in these things, and art comes before science as the satds- faction of more elemental needs must come before art, and as play and pleas ure come in a human life before the development Of a settled purpose.
 For thousands of years this gather ing impulse to creative work must have struggled in man against the lim- itadons imposed upon him by his so- cial inepntude. It was a long smolder- ing fire that named out at last into all these things. The evidence of a pa thetic. perpetually thwarted urgency to make something is one of the most touching aspects Of the relics and rec crds of our immediate ancestors There exists stiu in the death area about the London bombs al region of deserted small homes that furnish the most H. luminatihg comment on the old state of affairs. These homes are entirely horrible, uniform, square, squat, hide ously proportioned, uncomfortable, din-- gy and in some respects quite filthy; only people In complete despair Of any thing better could have lived in them, but to each is attached a ridiculous Htr tie rectangle or land called stthe gar den," containing usually a prop for drying clothes and Ioathsome box of offaI the dustbin, full of eggsheIIa cin- ders and such like refuse. Now that one may go about this region in com paratdVe security for the London radi- ations have dW1ndled to tneonsiderabIe propOrttons-k is possible to trace in nearly every one of these gardens some effort to make. Here 1t is poor little plank summer house, here 1t is fountain Of bricks and oyster shells. here. 1srOckery.'' here workshop And in the houses everywhere there are pttiful little decorations, clumsy models, feeble drawings These efforts are almost incredibly inept, like the drawings of blindfoIded men. They are only one shade less harro wing te sympathetic observer than the scratch lngs one finds upon the walls of the old prisons. but there they are wit messing to the poor buried instincts that struggled up toward the light That god Of joyous expression our poor fathers ignorantly sought our freedom has declared to us.
 In the old days the common ambition of every simple soul was to possess a little property, a patch of land, . house uncontrolled by otHers, an '1R- dependence,' 7 as the English used to put it. And what made this desire for freedom and prosperity so strong was very evidently the dream of self expression. of doing something with It, of playing with 1t, of making a per sOnal eIightfu1ness, dtst1ncttveness. Property was never moro than means to an end. nor avarice more than a perv ersion. Men owned in order to do freely. Now that every one has his own apartments and his own privacy secure, this disposition to own has found it's release in a new direction. Men study and save and strive that they may leave behind them series of panels in some public arcade, a row of carven figures along terrace grove, a pavilion. Or they give them selves to the penetration of some still opaque riddle in phenomena as once men gave the1hseaves to the accumula- don of riches. The work that was once the whole substance of social ex tstencefor most men spent all their lives in earning hving-is now no more than was the burthen upon one of those old climbers who carried knap- sacks of provisions on their backs in order that they might ascend noun tains It matters little to the easy charities Of our enancipated time that most people who have made their la bor contribution produce neither new beauty nor new wisdom, but are simply busy about those pleasant activities and enjoyments that reassure them that they are alive. They help, 1t may be, by reception and reverberat1on, and they hinder nothing
 { Now all this phase.of gigantic change nsthe contours and appearances of hu- e.T1< Tzes a change as rapid and as wonderful as the swift ripening of adolescence to manhood after the barbaric boyish years, is correlated with moral and mental changes at least as unprece- dented Itis not as if old things were going out of life and new things com ing in. it is rather that the altered cir cumstances of men are making an ap-= peal to clements in his nature that have hitherto been suppressed, and checking tendencies that have hither- to been overstimulated and over developed. He has not so much grown and altered his essential being as turned new aspects to the light Such turnings round into a new atti- tude the world has seen on a less ex- tensive scale before. The Highlanders of the seventeenth century, for ex- ample, were cruel and blooethirsty robbers: in the nineteenth their de- scendants were conspicuously trusty and honorable men. There was not d people in western Europe in the early twentieth century that seemed capa- ble of hideous massacres and none that had not been guilty of them within the previous two centuries. The free, frank, kindly, gentle life of the pros porous classes in any European coun- try before the years of the last wars was in different world of thought and feeling from that of the dingy, suspi- cious, secretive and uncharita ble exist ence of the respectable poor, or the constant personal violence, the squalor and naive passions of the lowest stratum. Yet there were no real diff