otest against the habit of employees
at the State House of professing ignorance
of the location of the committee-room where
the hearings are to be held; also to protest against
the habit of postponing the hearings after one has
at great personal inconvenience come to the State
House in order to protest.
The duty of doing your Christmas shopping early
enough in July to allow the shop-girls to enjoy
their summer vacation.
The duty of knowing what you are talking about, and
of talking about all the things you ought to know
about.
The obligation of feeling that it is a joy and a privilege
to live in a country where eternal vigilance is
the price of liberty, and where even if you have
the price you don't get all the liberty you pay for."

I was a little troubled over this effusion, as it seemed to indicate
that Bagster had reached the limit of elasticity. A few days later I
received a letter asking me to call upon him. I found him in a state of
uncertainty over his own condition.

"I want you," he said, "to listen to the report my stenographer has
handed me, of an address which I gave day before yesterday. I have been
doing some of my most faithful work recently, going from one meeting to
another and helping in every good cause. But at this meeting I had a
rare sensation of freedom of utterance. I had the sense of liberation
from the trammels of time and space. It was a realization of moral
ubiquity. All the audiences I had been addressing seemed to flow
together into one audience, and all the good causes into one good cause.
Incidentally I seemed to have solved the Social Question. But now that I
have the stenographic report I am not so certain."

"Read it," I said.

He began to read, but the confidence of his pulpit tone, which was one
of the secrets of his power, would now and then desert him, and he would
look up to me as if waiting for an encouraging "Amen."

"Your secretary, when she called me up by telephone, explained to me the
object of your meeting. It is an object with which I deeply sympathize.
It is Rest. You stand for the idea of poise and tranquillity of spirit.
You would have a place for tranquil meditation. The thought I would
bring to you this afternoon is this: We are here not to be doing, but to
be.

"But of course the thought at once occurs to us, How can we _be_
considering the high cost of the necessaries of life? It will