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Show V Man's Mind Is Sometimes Wont to Show Him More Than Seven Watchmen By RUDYARD KIPLING, In New York World. BUT one thing that stands outside eiaggeration or belittlement, through all changes in shapes of things, and the sounds of words, is the bidding, the guidance that drives a man to own himself and upholds him through his itepB on that road. The bidding comes, direct as a beam of light, from that past when man had grown into his present shape, which past, could we question it, would probably refer us to a past immeasurably remoter still, whose creature, not yet man, felt within him that it was not well for him to jackal round another brute's till, even if he went hungry for a while. It is not such a far cry from that creature howling over his empty stomach in the dark to the heir of all the ages counting over his coppers in front of a cookshop to see if they will run to a full meal as Borne few here have had to do, and the principle is the same : "At any price that I can pay, let me own myself." And the price is worth paying if you keep what you have bought. For the eternal question still is whether the profit of any concession that a man makes to his tribe, against the light that is in him, outweighs or justifies jus-tifies his disregard of that light. A man may apply his independence to what is called worldly advantage and discover too late that he laboriously has made himself dependent on a mass of external conditions for the main- tenance of which he sacrificed himself. So he may be festooned with the whole haberdashery of success and go to his grave a castaway. Some men hold that the risk is worth taking. Others do not. It is to these that I have spoken. "Let the council of thy own heart stand, for there is no man more faithful unto thee than it. For a man's mind is sometimes wont to show him more than seven watchmen who sit above in a high tower. |