Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/19

 and power behind them; and they were hunting for adequate objects on which to expend them. They had not been very successful, nor much cheered by their contact with our fellow countrymen. They came back from their explorations of the democracy with such an account of the political and social and moral corruption and disintegration rampant in our great cities and in our small country towns, that I myself returned to the relative peace and order and sobriety of my own university community full of a kind of private and selfish thanksgiving that I lived there and not somewhere else. I came back full of a very genuine gratitude that my community consisted mainly of several thousand young men and women united in an inspiring enterprise, united in the quest of wisdom, and truth, and beauty. It seemed to me, for the moment, that, comparatively speaking, a university community had an interesting and adequate object for living.

"In the outside world," I said to myself, "there seem to be, if one may trust the reports, scattered individuals of energy and virtue and upward purpose; but the general force of society is against them; the general pull of society is down, not up. They can maintain their energy and virtue only by constantly resisting the social pressure towards slackness and vice and inefficiency. But here in the university community," I said, "the conditions are reversed. As individuals, many of us, perhaps most of us, have our weak moods and our slack and inefficient moods and our downward tendencies; but