The first aim for your time and your generation should be, to foster, each in yourselves, a simple and self-denying life—your ideal to be a true and useful one, must have these two characteristics before all others. Of course purity, courage, truthfulness are as absolutely necessary as ever, without them there can be no ideal at all. But as each age and each country has its own special needs and weaknesses, so the best mind of its youth should be bent on serving where the need is sorest, and bringing strength to the weak places. There will be always crowds ready to fall in with the dapper, pliant ways which lead most readily to success in every community. Society has been said to be “always and everywhere in conspiracy against the true manhood of every one of its members,” and the saying, though bitter, contains a sad truth. So the faithful idealist will have to learn, without arrogance and with perfect good[66] temper, to treat society as a child, and never to allow it to dictate. So treated, society will surely come round to those who have a high ideal before them, and therefore firm ground under their feet.
“Coy Hebe flies from those that woo
And shuns the hand would seize upon her;
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