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Show Loneliness of the City. Ther. are perhaps a hundred people ' in our apartment-house, a thousand, or It may be two or three thousand In our block They live In small, umforla-bly umforla-bly furnished and very convenient apart- 1 mcnts. but they live alone N oi.- ever Bees un exchange of courtesies between thern. They nr.' opart from the people about them. Vou might live there a year or ten years, and l doubt if our next-door neighbor would even mo much as know of your existence. He Is too busy Your laelne'S miht tail, .air children perish. You might Buffer everj calamity from heart-ache to literal physical physi-cal destruction und I dooi.t whether he would even h.-ur of it. Marriage, birth, death, any and all of the other happen- ! IngS of life are all trivial Under the Ul w dispensation. Neither you nor your wife nor children nor your children's children have any Interest In Him It Is all as If JTOU rcuily did not exist. The pathos Of all this Ik that these people never quit.- realize, until some r iin- ie.ii calamities of 1 1 r- overtake them, What they have been ignoring and casting cast-ing aside Until they sre old, until they I are stricken with illness, until they are i bereft of fortune, or until they are vis- ! Ited ly death then, and onl) then, do they become aware of the Importance of the Individual relationship, it mait.-is not in su. h an hour what the prime tin- I porlance of the world may be. It will not avail tli.in to know that the world still goes on und that the principal thor- j oughfures of the great cities are ullve with a spectacle forever u.k and I forever new. Life In tho abstract can I not aid the mother They arc alone, left longing foi a personal relationship with an aching and. too often, u hi caking heart Friendship, affection, tenderni as how they loom large In the hour of de-apalrl de-apalrl Theodore Dreiser in Watsona I Magazine. |