Page:About people (IA aboutpeople00well).pdf/64

of words is not the material which moves the ages. Conscientiousness should guide its growth, self-sacrifice illumine its path, and love of beauty moderate its pace. Fanatics, reformers, constantly injure their work by insistence on the rights of their own sacred cause, without regard to the conventions and amenities of life. The reforms of a century hence will not be accomplished in the despotic manner in which many have been, and still are, carried on. The liberal leagues, the temperance cause, and many religious movements, are sullied by the intensity with which one would put his right into some one's else being. Many a society is started to carry out some special individuality, which by honest meditation and compromise could have been incorporated with some already existing institution, and thus have been saved the device of a new name and the expense of a new set of officers, etc. The organized individualism often succeeds, but oftener is short-lived.