How to be happy though human / by W. Béran Wolfe.
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archaeologists, classicists, and organizers. Their psycho¬ logical trends make them the best exponents of the “ old order ”. Religion appeals to their sense of authority. To be sure, when the oldest child has not emancipated himself from the feeling of being discriminated against, he is likely to become a bitter rebel, passionately striving for a position of renewed power. This is the reason why so many revolutionaries, so many dictators (Robespierre, Mussolini), and so many paranoiacs, have been eldest children. The rebellion of the second child is of a different calibre. He is an iconoclast for the pure joy of breaking up the shrines of the established conservatives. The history of the Russian revolution is an interesting example of the activity of some of these chronic rebels. Men who had put their entire lives into the fight against czarism became bitter enemies of the Bolsheviks as soon as these were in power. The French poet, Arthur Rimbaud, is the apostle of all embattled second sons. But the second child has a great future in the world of business and technique. In his desire to catch up with the older child he develops ways and means of establishing short cuts—and not infrequently the world has become the debtor of such a second-born child who developed some new and better way of living, because he refused to play second fiddle in early childhood. The way of social, business, or pro¬ fessional reform is perhaps the best pattern for second- born children whose family situation dominates the picture of their personality. The hated child, the poor child, the child of the minority group who has suffered his sense of inferiority chiefly because of these factors, will often find happiness in devotion to the task of social service, whether in medicine, in law, in politics, in actual social service, or in the broad field of education. Usually some aspect of their unhappy childhood is distinguished by its especial clarity, and this critical experience usually colours the child’s compensatory trends when he becomes an adult. There are, to be sure, manv individuals who have been 7 ' *