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394 not withered, and there is no turning them from the conviction of their brief experience that almost all that is, is inexorably so. Accomplished things obsess us more and more. What man or woman over thirty in Great Britain dares to hope for a republic before it is time to die? Yet the thing might be. Or for the reunion of the English-speaking peoples? Or for the deliverance of all of our blood and speech from those fouler things than chattel slavery, child and adolescent labour? Or for an infantile death-rate under ninety in the thousand, and all that would mean in the common life? These and a hundred such things are coming now, but only the young know how near they may be brought to us. As for us others, we plant a tree never believing we shall eat the fruit, we build a house never hoping to live therein. The desert, we believe in our hearts, is our home and our destined grave, and whatever we see of the Promised Land we must see through the eyes of the young.

With each year of their lives they come more distinctly into conscious participation with our efforts. Those soft little creatures that we have figured grotesquely as dropping from an inexorable spout into our world; those weak and wailing lumps of pink flesh, more helpless than any animal, for whom we have planned better care, a better chance of life, better conditions of all sorts; those larval souls, who are at first helpless clay in our hands,