no ironic contrast of needs with pretensions, no human comedy, nothing but a perpetual romance. To be sure, the other name of this idyllic paradise is hell. It is a universal melodrama, a home of delusion; and we humans, if we analyze our deep est preferences, will not wish to be translated pre maturely from this normal, incomplete, but de veloping life to one of universal melodrama and perpetual romance.
The normal life rather than abnormalities, pros perity rather than misery, health rather than dis ease, will furnish the framework of our discussion.
"The normal life of man" suggests a fairly defi nite picture, the same in its essentials however much it may vary as to details.
We think of a child born, without congenital defects, into a home where it has been lovingly expected and prepared for. We see it carefully, if not always scientifically, tended through its first delicate years, weathering various minor ailments and "children's diseases," though probably with one or more narrow escapes, learning its first lessons in self-control, getting its fundamental ideas of material things and of human relations—in short, entering into its "social heritage." Next comes a happy period made up of school and play and home life, some acquaintance with racial traditions of religion and morality, and more or less acquaintance, through travel and otherwise, with the outside world. We think of the family circle as including the child's father and mother, one or two or three brothers and sisters, a grandmother, at least, to represent the older generation, and some uncles and aunts and cousins to form an intermediate link between the home and the mysterious world.
Childhood past,—whether at fourteen or sixteen or twelve or ten,—there follows a period of prepara tion for the responsibilities of manhood and woman hood, and this is the point where there will probably be the greatest varieties among our mental pictures of a normal life. To some it means a broad general education, followed by professional training, with a year or two in Europe and long summers of recre ation, bringing the young woman to the age of twenty-three or four or five, and the young man to perhaps twenty-seven or eight. For others it represents a high school and normal course for the girl, and a high school course followed by induction into "business" or a skilled trade for the boy; for others still a brief and superficial commercial or industrial training at the end of grammar school.
Even among those whose children go to work, at any kind of job they can get, as soon as the law allows, few would be found to defend the practice. A high school education or its equivalent, with some sort of vocational training,—agricultural, industrial, commercial, or professional,—is fast coming to be part of the American standard of living.
Arrived at maturity, equipped to earn a living and to spend it, we picture the young man and woman marrying, surrounding their children with rather more comforts and advantages than they them selves had, giving them a longer period for educa tion. We think of them as living to see their chil dren established in homes of their own, and their grandchildren growing up; gradually relinquishing active duties to the younger generation, while keep ing lively interests and a place of usefulness; their support provided either by savings or by their children's care, and at the end leaving the world,— reluctantly, to be sure, for it has been an agree able place,—but with a sense of satisfaction, as at the close of a full day of work and wholesome pleas ure and friendly intercourse.
There is no place in the picture for blind babies, feeble-minded girls, syphilitic young men, neglected orphans, child workers, ignorant and inefficient men and women, repulsive and lonely old people; there is no place for dependence on charity, for long disabling illness or accident, for prostitution, drunkenness, vice, or habitual crime, for neglect of children or other disregard of natural obligations, for premature age or early death.
These things all exist,—we are not in heaven,— and we all know that they exist,—we are not in hell,—but they do not occur to us, even to those of us who are most familiar with them, when we are thinking of the normal course of an individual's life from the cradle to the grave. They are abnormali ties. They are things which interfere with the realization by every individual of a normal life. They are obstacles that we shall have to reckon with in considering by what means the normal life, at each stage of the individual's development, may be assured.