Page:Points of View (1924).pdf/35

 example, know well enough what is expected of them, and they know well enough what they themselves hope to be. They hope to be the flower of the younger generation, the human embodiment of the kalonkagathon, the good and the beautiful, in the society of their own times. And they have some notion of the necessity that is on them for being clean, healthy, intelligent, and able to stand inspection. Where they fall short, is in working out the necessary implications of their heart's desire. They are quite willing, they are eager, to be known as the flower of their generation, the finest young men and women of their time, improved successors in a modern democracy of the old-fashioned New England Puritan and the old-fashioned lady and gentleman of the Old South. But they haven't fully worked out the implication of this ambition. They haven't clearly recognized that the attainment of their ambition is incompatible, for example, with their soft and muddleheaded tolerance of loafing in their fraternities, cheating in their classrooms, and thieving in the gymnasiums and cloakrooms, passing bad checks at the banks, and sundry other practices by which they make no improvement upon the extinct types of the New England Puritan and the gentleman of the Old South. Their beliefs lie loosely around them, scattered and unvalued, like lumps of pig iron, which need to be gathered up, and melted, and forged and tempered and sharpened like a sword and girded to their sides, and used to cut their way out of the obscure jungle of their conflicting ideas.