this compassion an admixture of the exasperated impatience we have for
those Prussian school boys who jump out of third-story windows because
they did not reach a certain grade in their Latin examinations. Life is
not accounts, or banks, or even Latin examinations, and it is a sign of
inexperience to think it so. The trouble with the despairing banker is
that he has never had a chance to become aware of the comforting vastness
of the force which animates him in common with all the rest of humanity,
to which force a bank failure is no apocalyptic end of Creation, but a
mere incident or trial of strength like a fall in a slippery road.
Absorbed in his solitary progress, the banker has forgotten that his
business in life is not so much to keep from falling as to get up again
and go forward.

If the man to whom the world was a bank had not been so inexorably shut
away from the bracing, tonic shock of knowing men utterly diverse, to whom
the world was just as certainly only a grocery store, or a cobbler's bench,
he might have come to believe in a world that is none of these things and
is big enough to take them all in; and he might have been alive this
minute, a credit to himself, useful to the world, and doubtless very much
more agreeable to his family than in the days of his blind arrogance.

The pathetic feature of this universal inexperience among city dwellers of
real life and real people is that it is really entirely enforced and
involuntary. At heart they crave knowledge of real life and sympathy with
their fellow-men as starving men do food. In Hillsboro we explain to
ourselves the enormous amount of novel-reading and play-going in the great
cities as due to a perverted form of this natural hunger for human life.
If people are so situated they can't get it fresh, they will take it
canned, which is undoubtedly good for those in the canning business; but
we feel that we who have better food ought not to be expected to treat