Page:Revolution and Other Essays.djvu/74

 garnering from the great world ever since the day I when his eyes first focussed and he drew, startled, against the warm breast of his mother — the tyranny of these he cannot shake off. Servants of his will, they at the same time, master him. They may not coerce genius, but they dictate and sway every action of the clay-born. if he hesitate on the verge of a new departure, they whip him back into the well-greased groove; if he pause, bewildered, at sight of some unexplored domain, they rise like ubiquitous finger-posts and direct him by the village path to the communal meadow. And he permits these things, and continues to permit them, for he cannot help them, and he is a slave. Out of his ideas he may weave cunning theories, beautiful ideals; but he is working with ropes of sand. At the slightest stress, the last least bit of cohesion flits away, and each idea flies apart from its fellows, while all clamor that he do this thing, or think this thing, in the ancient and time-honored way. He is only a clay-born; so he bends his neck. He knows further that the clay-born are a pitiful, pitiless majority, and that he may do nothing which they do not do.