' These
early marriages interfere with a young man's career."
This fragment of a real conversation, which is typical of numberless
others like it, reveals the false and shallow philosophy which, if it
becomes our code of national living, will make the lives of our young
people abnormal and our twentieth century civilization artificial and
neurotic. Even now too many people are thinking about a "career."
Mothers are talking about "careers" for their sons. Young men are
dreaming of their "careers."
It is assumed that a young man can "carve out his career" if his
attention is not distracted and his powers are not diminished by a
wife and children whom he must feed, clothe, and consider. The icy
selfishness of this hypothesis of life ought to be enough to reject it
without argument. Who is any man, that he should have a "career"? and
what does a "career" amount to, anyway? What is it for? Fame? Surely
not, because
"Imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
says Shakespeare. And Shakespeare ought to know; he is not quite three
centuries dead, and even now the world is sadly confused as to
whether he wrote Shakespeare.
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