FROM A BERKSHIRE CABIN 179 



workers who asked for enough of the profits of their 

 toil to buy meat once a week. 



I sit here on my cabin veranda, while the wind 

 whispers in the hemlocks, and try to think what is 

 the duality in my own nature, what paradoxes my 

 life offers between a love of beauty and the responsi- 

 bility for ugliness, between spiritual kindliness and 

 cruelty. To be sure, I have never had the oppor- 

 tunity to control the destinies of any of my fellow- 

 men, and it is doubtless impossible to say how I 

 should act in such a situation. But I can honestly 

 say that I have no desire to control them. Neither 

 have I any desire for wealth beyond a point that 

 insures comfort, a point that might be reached by 

 every family in America under a different economic 

 system. I certainly feel no divine right to rule 

 anybody, and just as certainly I feel that nobody 

 has any divine right to rule me. My happiness 

 consists in doing my own work as well as I can, in 

 the companionship of kindly people and beautiful 

 objects, and, I have always placidly supposed, in 

 the sense of social well-being around me. My 

 greatest unhappiness I thought to be caused by in- 

 justice, cruelty, and social ugliness. On the whole, 

 this summary would seem to show that I am a 

 pretty fine fellow — and yet something is wrong 

 with me. There's another fellow somewhere. I 

 had a peep at him only yesterday, when I read of 

 an Allied bombing raid over a German city. Of 

 course, I should have been horrified, or at the very- 

 least grieved that the Allies had to sink to the level 

 of German "atrocities." But I wasn't. Honesty 

 compels me to admit that I was delighted. I hoped 



