d moved it
behoved them to move; that each man is made with the possibility of
every attitude and achievement as seeds within him; that circumstances
alone had caused him to live on some of these and not on others; that
intolerance was therefore a crime of the most unpardonable character;
that it was wrong and unprofitable to let one's self be borne along on
the surface of the world's tide--and that it was every man's duty to
use the world as he finds it for the development and fulfilment of all
that is best within him, and not to depend upon one thing and reject
another, favour one opinion, and oppose or even disregard another. And
those in the school who first realised this, determined not to submit
to the guiding and moulding of this mechanical institution, but to look
at the world around and outside them--its beauty, its methods, its
effects, its possibility, its wonder and its joy, and to develop for
themselves, under the guidance and suggestion of those whom they
trusted, their own powers, with their own principles to guide them and
their own aims to reach.

And in the carrying out of this plan and in the suggesting of it to
others and in witnessing the results in others and in the institution
to which they belonged, they, and later I and all those who followed
them, found great happiness--a happiness which I felt could come from
nowhere else, and certainly a happiness such as I had never before
experienced. A greater facility in all intellectual activity, and in
avoiding and fighting everything which one felt to be wrong, a greater
confidence, and determination through self-dependence in all things,
are some of the natural immediate fruits of a self-conceived basis of
thought and action which refused to accept blindly everything that was
handed down or dealt out.

The permanent results in the shape of statistics and concrete evidence
are proof and witness to the rightness of the undertaking. But now it
is all of the past--the reasons are irrelevant; suffice it that they
are iniquitous, and more than iniquitous, since they have murdered what
is right.

And now we had come, after passing through a great field of green corn
rustling in the light wind, to a fence, on which we sat. My
retrospective thoughts had now caught up to the present--but I was
still dreaming. All that I thought was unconscious, out of my control
and wonderful. Our attempt had been very beautiful, had been a work of
art, and in many wa