es. I never knew why Green's history thrilled me
with the vigor of romance until I read his biography. Then I learned
how his quick imagination transfigured the hard, bare facts of life
into new and living dreams. When he and his wife were too poor to have
a fire, he would sit before the unlit hearth and pretend that it was
ablaze. "Drill your thoughts," he said; "shut out the gloomy and call
in the bright. There is more wisdom in shutting one's eyes than your
copybook philosophers will allow."

Every optimist moves along with progress and hastens it, while every
pessimist would keep the world at a standstill. The consequence of
pessimism in the life of a nation is the same as in the life of the
individual. Pessimism kills the instinct that urges men to struggle
against poverty, ignorance and crime, and dries up all the fountains
of joy in the world. In imagination I leave the country which lifts up
the manhood of the poor and I visit India, the underworld of
fatalism--where three hundred million human beings, scarcely men,
submerged in ignorance and misery, precipitate themselves still deeper
into the pit. Why are they thus? Because they have for thousands of
years been the victims of their philosophy, which teaches them that
men are as grass, and the grass fadeth, and there is no more greenness
upon the earth. They sit in the shadow and let the circumstances they
should master grip them, until they cease to be Men, and are made to
dance and salaam like puppets in a play. After a little hour death
comes and hurries them off to the grave, and other puppets with other
"pasteboard passions and desires" take their place, and the show goes
on for centuries.

Go to India and see what sort of civilization is developed when a
nation lacks faith in progress and bows to the gods of darkness. Under
the influence of Brahminism genius and ambition have been suppressed.
There is no one to befriend the poor or to protect the fatherless and
the widow. The sick lie untended. The blind know not how to see, nor
the deaf to hear, and they are left by the roadside to die. In India
it is a sin to teach the blind and the deaf because their affliction
is regarded as a punishment for offences in a previous state of
existence. If I had been born in the midst of these fatalistic
doctrines, I should still be in darkness, my life a desert-land where
no caravan of thought might pass between my spirit and the world
beyond.

The Hindoos believe i