over their fences, climbs up their
mountains, and eats of their fruit, and dreams by their streams, or is
caught camping out in their woods, he is made an example of. He is
treated as a tramp and an idler, and if he cannot be held down with a
dictionary he is looked upon as not worth educating. If his parents
decide he shall be educated anyway, dead or alive, or in spite of his
being alive, the more he is educated the more he wonders why he was born
and the more his teachers from behind their dictionaries, and the other
boys from underneath their dictionaries, wonder why he was born. While
it may be a general principle that the longer a boy wonders why he was
born in conditions like these, and the longer his teachers and parents
wonder, the more there is of him, it may be observed that a general
principle is not of very much comfort to the boy while the process of
wondering is going on. There seems to be no escape from the process, and
if, while he is being educated, he is not allowed to use himself, he can
hardly be blamed for spending a good deal of his time in wondering why
he is not some one else. In a half-seeing, half-blinded fashion he
struggles on. If he is obstinate enough, he manages to struggle through
with his eyes shut. Sometimes he belongs to a higher kind, and opens his
eyes and struggles.

With the average boy the struggle with the School and the Church is less
vigorous than the struggle at home. It is more hopeless. A mother is a
comparatively simple affair. One can either manage a mother or be
managed. It is merely a matter of time. It is soon settled. There is
something there. She is not boundless, intangible. The School and the
Church are different. With the first fresh breaths of the world tingling
in him, the youth stands before them. They are entirely new to him. They
are huge, immeasurable, unaccountable. They loom over him--a part of the
structure of the universe itself. A mother can meet one in a door. The
problem is concentrated. The Church stretches beyond the sunrise. The
School is part of the horizon of the earth, and what after all is his
own life and who is he that he should take account of it? Out of
space--out of time--out of history they come to him--the Church and the
School. They are the assembling of all mankind around his soul. Each
with its Cone of Ether, its desire to control the breath of his life,
its determination to do his breathing for him, to push the Cone down
over him, l