Hillsboro People | Page 3

a crust may look in at a banqueting hall, but the people they
are forced to live with are exactly like themselves; and that way lies not
only monomania but an ennui that makes the blessing of life savorless.
If this does not seem the plainest possible statement of fact take a
concrete instance. Can a banker in the city by any possibility come to
know what kind of an individual is the remote impersonal creature who
waits on him in a department store? Most bankers recognize with a
misguided joy this natural wall between themselves and people who are
not bankers, and add to it as many stones of their own quarrying as
possible; but they are not shut off from all the quickening diversity of
life any more effectually than the college-settlement, boys'
Sunday-school, brand of banker. The latter may try as hard as he
pleases, he simply cannot achieve real acquaintanceship with a
"storekeeper," as we call them, any more than the clerk can achieve real
acquaintanceship with him.

Lack of any elements of common life form as impassable a barrier as
lack of a common language, whereas with us in Hillsboro all the life we
have is common. Everyone is needed to live it.
There can be no city dweller of experience who does not know the
result of this herding together of the same kind of people, this
intellectual and moral inbreeding. To the accountant who knows only
accounts, the world comes to seem like one great ledger, and
account-keeping the only vital pursuit in life. To the banker who knows
only bankers, the world seems one great bank filled with money,
accompanied by people. The prison doors of uniformity are closed
inexorably upon them.
And then what happens? Why, when anything goes wrong with their
trumpery account books, or their trashy money, these poor folk are like
blind men who have lost their staves. With all the world before them
they dare not continue to go forward. We in Hillsboro are sorry for the
account-keepers who disappear forever, fleeing from all who know
them because their accounts have come out crooked, we pity the banker
who blows out his brains when something has upset his bank; but we
can't help feeling with this compassion an admixture of the exasperated
impatience we have for those Prussian school boys who jump out of
third-story windows because they did not reach a certain grade in their
Latin examinations. Life is not accounts, or banks, or even Latin
examinations, and it is a sign of inexperience to think it so. The trouble
with the despairing banker is that he has never had a chance to become
aware of the comforting vastness of the force which animates him in
common with all the rest of humanity, to which force a bank failure is
no apocalyptic end of Creation, but a mere incident or trial of strength
like a fall in a slippery road. Absorbed in his solitary progress, the
banker has forgotten that his business in life is not so much to keep
from falling as to get up again and go forward.
If the man to whom the world was a bank had not been so inexorably
shut away from the bracing, tonic shock of knowing men utterly
diverse, to whom the world was just as certainly only a grocery store,
or a cobbler's bench, he might have come to believe in a world that is

none of these things and is big enough to take them all in; and he might
have been alive this minute, a credit to himself, useful to the world, and
doubtless very much more agreeable to his family than in the days of
his blind arrogance.
The pathetic feature of this universal inexperience among city dwellers
of real life and real people is that it is really entirely enforced and
involuntary. At heart they crave knowledge of real life and sympathy
with their fellow-men as starving men do food. In Hillsboro we explain
to ourselves the enormous amount of novel-reading and play-going in
the great cities as due to a perverted form of this natural hunger for
human life. If people are so situated they can't get it fresh, they will
take it canned, which is undoubtedly good for those in the canning
business; but we feel that we who have better food ought not to be
expected to treat their boughten canned goods very seriously. We can't
help smiling at the life-and-death discussions of literary people about
their preferences in style and plot and treatment ... their favorite brand
on the can, so to speak.
To tell the truth, all novels seem to us badly written, they are so faint
and faded in comparison to the brilliant colors of the life which
palpitates