Brother, sister, how are you singing? Are your songs worthy to be heard with those of the noble great? Though not so well known, not so easily heard above the throng, your song is just as important as any other. God needs your song, the world needs it, your family needs it, your friends need it, you need it, for no man is truly happy until he has learned how to go Singing through Life with God.

CHAPTER XXXV

THE SONGS OF THE BLESSED VISIONARIES

ARE you content with Life as it is? Even though

your own lot is cast in pleasant places are you satisfied to have so many of your fellows diseased, poverty-stricken, insane, sinful, criminal, locked up in prisons and penitentiaries, incurable, incompetent, failures, tied down by drug habits, sensualists, gluttons, thieves, burglars, and the like? Has not the Great War revealed to us how disastrous to mankind selfishness and cruelty, urged on by desire for the possessions of others, can become? Think of the miseries caused by the hatreds, jealousies, malices, slanders, gossipings, and contemptible envies of mankind? Are you content that these should exist in the hearts of others-much less in your own?

There are those who are not content. While they really believe that "God's in His heaven"-and that all space in all the Universe is His heaven, and that "all's right with the world," they see and feel that all is not right with mankind. And they wonder why? Then they begin to ask: Are there no remedies for these evils? And Faith, Hope and Love spring up within their hearts and give them many and diverse

answers. Urged by a passion of love for humanity, they seek to make these answers known, to visualize them for others to see and seek to realize. These are the visionaries of the world, and most of them become, in the very nature of things, the so-called reformers.

I am not a socialist, nor am I at all satisfied that if the socialists had their way the world would be any better than it is today. Selfishness is just as rife in the hearts of one class of men as another, and until we are able to look at Life from a larger viewpoint than that of our own selfish interest there will be but little real improvement in the condition of mankind.

Yet I am not so blind that I cannot see the unselfishness, the Divine urge, in the passion for humanity manifested in the work of many socialists. Though I do not see eye to eye with them, I can understand their vision, the aim of their endeavor, and it is a noble and beautiful one.

Karl Marx, William Carpenter, Lloyd Demorest, Kropotkin, Wilshire, Sinclair, Jack London, saw in socialism of some form or other, the nationalization of capital and all machinery, and of all public utilities, the panacea for most of mankind's ill, and they worked, and are working, with their successors and compeers, to that end. Their vision is of legal and social equality-which certainly does not exist now-and their song has a large note in it of un

selfish helpfulness. This, I am assured, is heard in the Universal Symphony of God. Hence I see the true-hearted, devoted, socialist visionaries, "Singing through Life with God," and if their followers were as unselfish, as sincere, as their leaders, there is little doubt but that others would look upon their endeavors with more favor.

There are other visionaries-and I confess I am one of them-who resent the exploitation of the child in mill, factory, mine or field. They declare it a crime against humanity that boys and girls should be compelled, by the stern necessity of existence, to labor eight, ten, twelve hours a day, in the darkness of mine, heat of glass-factory, wearing grind and enervating atmosphere of cotton mill, and exhausting labor of the farm.

I should hate, you would hate, to have my, your, children thus compelled to labor. Should we not also hate that other parents' children are under these cruel compulsions and do all we can to render them impossible? Yet, by many, this desire for justice and freedom for the child laborer is called visionary and impossible. Nevertheless, decent men and women will continue to see the vision and work earnestly for its attainment.

Several years ago the late Elbert Hubbard wrote a passionate plea for the release of these wronged children from the body-destroying and mind-deadening labor of the Southern cotton-mills. He added to

his plea a fierce denunciation of the owners of the mills for permitting this great wrong to continue. Soon thereafter I was invited to a beautiful New England home to a special dinner, where there were a number of guests, among whom I chanced to be selected for special honor. During the meal various subjects were discussed, until, finally, the host himself introduced Elbert Hubbard's article and began to comment upon its untruthfulness, injustice and wrongful censure of the mill-owners. It happened that but a few weeks before I had been on a lecture trip South, had visited the very mills referred to by Hubbard, had seen boys and girls, under twelve, under ten years of age, trudging back and forth, hour after hour, in a heavy, warm and oil-odor saturated atmosphere, watching the spindles for the breaking of threads, stopping the "spinning-jenny" at each break, tying the threads and starting the jenny up again. Monotonous, wearisome, eye-straining to a degree, I was not at all surprised-though I was horrified— when noon-time came, to find that more than half of these youthful toilers were too tired to eat the scanty and unappetizing meals their older or younger brothers and sisters brought them, but threw themselves down on the ground to get the sleep and rest outraged Nature demanded they should have. These things I had seen with my own eyes, hence, common honor and simple truth demanded that, when my host denied their existence, I defend the statements of