THE SOCIAL REFORMER 7 



individual having enough of medicine, or of any other 

 art, for many unskilled ones." But reverence and justice 

 must be given to all. ' ' I should like them all to have a 

 share," said Zeus ; "for cities cannot exist if a few only 

 share in the virtues, as in the arts." 1 'The growing 

 good of the world," says George Eliot, speaking in the 

 same spirit as Plato, ' ' is partly dependent on unhistoric 

 acts ; and that things are not so ill with you and me as 

 they might have been is half owing to the number who 

 lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.^' 

 It has taken us all to build the social edifice ; it will take 

 us all to comprehend it. 



It has ever been a mark of the successful worker in the 

 social field that he has a living sense of this truth. He 

 does not merely contemplate his fellows in the mass, nor 

 employ the " method of averages" when he seeks to help 

 or understand them. He knows that every individual of 

 them all has his own internal life, intensely real and 

 significant to him ; and society is not to him a general 

 term, but a system of personalities, every one of them 

 unique. And he has the gift of sympathetic imagination, 

 to construct their experience from within. The distinc- 

 tion between right and wrong is plain for him and firmly 

 drawn, and every other distinction is of comparatively 

 little account ; for it is to jnen of an ardent ethical spirit 

 tha^jhejprpblems_of sp^iaiJifejLppejil_mp^^^qngly. But 

 he is not intolerant ; he has no fixed prejudices or rigid 

 standards. He is sensitive to the worth of institutions, 

 of ways of life and of types of character different from 

 his own. He knows that the good takes many forms, and 

 that God fulfils Himself in many ways. He is like the 



1 Plato's Protagoras, 322. 



