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In the mean time nothing could be further from the thoughts of Euthymia than the prospect of an ambitious worldly alliance. The ideals of young women cost them many and great disappointments, but they save them very often from those lifelong companionships which accident is constantly trying to force upon them, in spite of their obvious unfitness.
The ideals and aspirations of preceding centuries had no meaning for what Addison called an "understanding age," and the standard of order, refinement and taste of the present had yet to come. The low state of society was realized and revolted against by the best minds of the time.
But this, though it has everything to do with my plea for a domestic dignity, has nothing to do with this passing summary of the situation of Socialism. I only remark in passing that it is vain for the more vulgar sort of Capitalist, sneering at ideals, to say to me that in order to have Socialism "You must alter human nature." I answer "Yes. You must alter it for the worse."
We men are compelled to wander, often to wander far, from the ideal. Unless our women remain aloof from action, how are the ideals to be preserved? Man for action; woman to purify man, when he returns stained with the blood and sin of battle. But with the birth of the first child I began to appreciate how profoundly right my mother had been about marriage and its source of happiness.
We surrender ourselves to a kind of miscellaneous appreciation, without standard or goal; and calling every vexatious apparition by the name of beauty, we become incapable of discriminating its excellence or feeling its value. We need to clarify our ideals, and enliven our vision of perfection.
That the fine things of life art, music and literature had thriven upon such enervating ideals he strenuously denied, insisting, rather, that they had endured in spite of civilization. "Show me the fat, opulent coward," he was wont to say, "who ever originated a beautiful ideal.
And among unstable and relative ideals none is more relative and unstable than that which transports all value to a universal law, itself indifferent to good and evil, and worships it as a deity. Such an idolatry would indeed be impossible if it were not partial and veiled, arrived at in following out some human interest and clung to by force of moral inertia and the ambiguity of words.
It is something larger and more transforming that is wanted. We need to make the school take a greater place in the life of the child; it must reach a deeper level of human nature, in which the motives of play and art lie, and there must be a broader exposure of all young life to those influences of the social life everywhere which contain our highest social ideals.
To-day society struggles for economic equality, not for an absolute material equality, but for that more practical, truer equality of which I have already spoken. And all the evidence enables us to foresee with mathematical certainty that this victory will be won to give place to new struggles and to new ideals among our descendants.
They come into the offices where we work as stenographers and insult us. It is that taint of mixed blood. We have the longings and the ideals of the best blood that is in our veins; but the skin and the color and the passions of the worst. We try to be good; some of us; but everything is against us.
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