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On the other hand there clings to literature, and particularly to poetry, which is the quintessence of literature, an air of pleasure-seeking, of holiday, of irresponsibility and detachment from the work-a-day world, which must captivate the student, or else the study itself will seem very poor fooling compared with football or hockey.

A house may be badly managed and ignorantly cared for, and people do not die of it, or become warped or crippled, but the soul of a child, to say nothing of the helpless little body, can be ruined utterly through the irresponsibility of the criminally ignorant people to whom the poor little thing is sent. Their ignorance is so dense and deep-searching that they never know that they are ignorant.

Doubtless it is a life of comfort, of peace, of irresponsibility they live there, but it lacks the grandeur which no sum of material prosperity can give; it is ignoble, like all voluntarily subordinate things. Somehow, one feels that it has no basis in the New World, and that till it is shaken loose from England it cannot have.

The totality of my mental impressions of what I heard from these two and other members of this incredible deputation of insurgent mutineers and of what I saw of the doings of the whole deputation, was vague and confused. From the confusion emerged a predominating sense of their many inconsistencies and of the haphazard irresponsibility and inconsequence of their states of mind and actions.

So far did the writer allow, not to his sword only, but also to his stilus, irresponsibility and exemption from all account.

It insists that a moral revival is needed for an intellectual renaissance. All students must be baptized with a passion for social service, before studies that enrich the mind and enlarge the character will be pursued with eager devotion. The blight of irresponsibility is almost universal upon the students in the higher educational institutions of our country.

Such is the nature of our constitution. But there is not on that account any analogy between the irresponsibility of the Queen and that of the President. The Queen can do no wrong; but therefore, in all matters of policy and governance, she must be ruled by advice.

I could ill afford to spare a twelfth to Bob Power. Yet I felt unreasonably pleased when he promised to dine with us. There is a certain flavour of the sea about Bob, a sense of boisterous good fellowship, a joyous irresponsibility, which would have been attractive to me at any time, and were singularly pleasant after my political experiences.

He was a little frightened, but more mortified and angry. That Billy should have allowed Miss Winthrop to call by appointment only to find no hostess, no message, no maid, even, to answer her ring it was inexcusable! Impulsiveness, unconventionality, and girlish irresponsibility were all very delightful, of course at times; but not now, certainly. Billy was not a girl any longer.

The proportion of ignorant to wilful irresponsibility can scarcely be estimated. But there is little choice between the two except on the score of the hopefulness of the latter.