--_Immanuel Kant_

[Illustration: IMMANUEL KANT]

We find that most men fit easily into types. You describe to me one
Durham cow and you picture all Durham cows. So it is with men: they
belong to breeds, which we politely call denominations, sects or
parties. Tell me the man's sect, and I know his dress, his habit of
life, his thought. His dress is the uniform of his party, and his
thought is that which is ordered and prescribed. Dull indeed is the
intellect which can not correctly prophesy the opinions to which this
man will arrive on any subject.

Durham cows are not exactly alike, I well know, but a trifle more length
of leg, a variation in color, or an off-angle of the horn, and that cow
is forever barred from exhibition as a Durham. She is fit only for beef,
and the first butcher that makes a bid takes her, hide and horns.

Members of sects do not think exactly alike, but there are well-defined
limits of thought and action, beyond which they dare not stray lest the
butcher bag them. In joining a sect they have given bonds to uniformity,
and have signed their willingness to think and act like all other
members of the sect.

Herbert Spencer deals with this "jiner" propensity in man, and describes
it as a manifestation of the herding instinct in animals. It is a
combination for mutual protection--a social contract, each one waiving a
part of his personality in order to secure a supposed benefit. A herd of
cattle can stand against a pack of wolves, but a cow alone is doomed.

Few men indeed can stand against the pack. Wise are the many who seek
safety in numbers! Think of those who have stood out alone and expressed
their individuality, and you count on your fingers God's patriots dead
and turned to dust.

The paradox of things is shown in that the entrenched many, having found
safety in aggregation, pay their debt of homage to the bold few who
lived their lives and paid the penalty by death.

Across the disk of existence, each decade, there glide five hundred
million souls, and disappear forever in the dim and dusk of the eternity
that lies behind. Out of the bare handful that are remembered, we
cherish only the memories of those who stood alone and expressed their
honest, inmost thought. And this thought is, always and forever, the
thought of liberty. Exile, ostracism, death, have been their fate, and
on the smoke of martyr-fires their souls mounted to immortality.

Future generation