Some in the cars play cards as they travel homeward. Others talk
gossip, and tens of thousands waste too much time on this and
other newspapers.

Try this experiment: Make up your mind to devote your hours of
travel to thinking. The brain, like the muscles, needs definite
and well-planned exercise. It must be methodical and regular.
There is no limit to its possible results. You would be glad to
spend your two travelling hours in a gymnasium on wheels. Make
of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning,
take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end--or as
far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to
reflect. Don't look at your fellow passengers as calves look at
each other on the way to the slaughter house.

Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or
stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain,
brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us
here.

They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time
in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts
passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought
to stir you. ----

The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to
them--blessed youth!--should interest you deeply. And the negro,
too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's
slavery--slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same.