rich are bred into artificial deadening of their powers. Therefore in my school, much to the disgust of the people of expensive habits, I had to provide for this great teacher,—this bareness of furniture and materials,—not because it is poverty, but because it leads to personal experience of the world.
What I propose is that men should have some limited period of their life specially reserved for the life of the primitive man. Civilized busybodies have not been allowed to tamper with the unborn child. In the mother's womb it has leisure to finish its first stage of the vegetative life. But directly it is born, with all its instincts ready for the next stage, which is the natural life, it is at once pounced upon by the society of cultivated habits, to be snatched away from the open arms of earth, water and sky, from the sunlight and air. At first it struggles and bitterly cries, and then it gradually forgets that it had for its inheritance God's creation; then it shuts its windows, pulls down its curtains, loses itself among meaningless miscellanies and feels proud of its accumulations at the cost of its world and possibly of its soul.
The civilized world of conventions and things comes in the middle career of man's progress.
