Page:The Hope of the Great Community (1916).djvu/146

 was what I failed to understand when my mates taught me those instructive lessons in San Francisco, This was that which I tried to understand when I went to Germany. I have been unpractical, — always socially ineffective as regards genuine “team play,” ignorant of politics, an ineffective member of committees, and a poor helper of concrete social enterprises. Meanwhile I have always been, as in my childhood, a good deal of a nonconformist, and disposed to a certain rebellion. An English cousin of mine not long since told me that, according to a family tradition current in his community, a common ancestor of ours was one of the guards who stood about the scaffold of Charles the First. I can easily mention the Monarch in modern Europe, in the guard about whose scaffold I should most cheerfully stand, if he had any scaffold. So much of the spirit that opposes the community I have and have always had in me, simply, elementally, deeply. Over against this natural ineffectiveness in serving the community, and over against this