always--and, if it be really
physical, then that surely is the answer to the weariness which always
comes with repetition of even the greatest blessings of life in both
people as well as things. If only we understood the psychology of
boredom we might attain the eternal delight of never being bored, and
what we loved once we should always love, until the end of our life's
short chapter. And that would simplify problems exceedingly, wouldn't it?

The "Glorious Dead"

For a long time past people have been--and, I suppose, for a long time
hence people will be--dusting their imaginations in order to discover the
most fitting tribute their and other people's money can erect to the
memory of the sailors and soldiers who died so that they and their
children might live. And yet it seems to me that in most of these
tributes the wishes of the "Glorious Dead," or what might easily be
regarded as their wishes, have rarely been consulted. The wishes of the
living have prevailed almost every time. Thus the "Glorious Dead" have,
as it were, paid off church debts, erected stained-glass windows in
places of worship which are beautified considerably thereby, paid for
statues of fallen warriors which have been placed in the middle of open
market-places to attract the passing attention of pedestrians and the
very active attention of small birds. A thousand awkward debts have been
wiped out by the money collected for the memory of deeds which for ever
will be glorious, and yet, it seems to me, in most of the cases the
wishes of the wealthy living--and of a very narrow circle of the
living--were at all times the primary, albeit the unconscious, object
which lay behind the tribute. And the worst of it is that so many of
these memorials to "Our Glorious Dead" are as "dead" as the heroes whom
they wish to commemorate. In ten years' time they will, for all
practical purposes be ignored. Maybe some little corner of the world is
more lovely for their being, but the world, the new and better world, for
which the "Glorious Dead" died, is just as barren as ever it was.
Rarely, only rarely, have these memorials been at all worthy of the
memory which they desire to keep alive. And these rare instances have
not been popular among the wealthy and the Churchmen, whose one cry was
that "something must be done"--something beautiful, but useless, for
preference. Mostly, they constitute some wing added to a hospital;
hostels for disabled so