How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.

unmoved by adversity in an obstinate belief in the validity of their own magical formulae. They make their experiences to suit their own magical beliefs. They distort reality to suit their own ends, and come out smiling, with their belief in their own magical fetish as vigorous as before. Their lives are devoted to the recapture of the lost happiness of a childhood paradise. Often these pampered boys and girls are “ good ” sons and daughters, good because they obey blindly, accept no responsibilities and remain close to their pampering parents. Their sphere of activity is constructed on a radius the length of which is determined by their maternal apron-strings. If they marry, and succeed, as is not infrequently the case, in getting a mate who will continue to pamper them in the fashion they would like to become accustomed to, they stifle their children with a cloying over-solicitude and thus spread the contagion of their neuroses into the next generation. There is no psychiatrist who has not at some time or other had one of these unfortunate children of romantic idealists in his care, who has not been stopped in his cure by the interference of parents whose vanity and egoism knew bounds neither of reason, time, nor of space. There is no business man who has not wanted to take some young man and give him a good spanking, no teacher who has not been impelled to bring the reality principle closer to some maliciously pampered little girl with the help ot a well-applied birch switch. And yet we must sympathize with these unfortunates, who are the unwitting victims of generations and genera¬ tions of false educational ideas. We must admit that they act rationally and justly according to the plan they have been led to expect the world is constructed on. We must not lose patience with them, but we cannot afford to be ensnared by their . charming personalities or their flattering helplessness. It is criminal not to awaken them from their romantic dreams in order to make useful human beings of them. The romantic idealists fall into several groups. There