In the background of the group are generally a few silent members of sensitive temperament and deeper intuition, who see with marvellous quickness, but see too much to be happy and content, almost too much to be true.

They incline towards another extreme, an ideal so high-pitched as to become unreal, and it meets with the penalty of unreality in over-balancing itself.

Children nearly always pull to one side or the other; it is a work of long patience even to make them accept that there should be a golden mean.

Did they ever need it so much as they do now?
Probably each generation in turn, from Solomon's time onward, has asked the same question.

But in the modern world there can hardly have been a time in which the principle of moderation needed to be more sustained, for there has never been a time when circumstances made man more daring in face of the forces of nature, and this same daring in other directions, less beautiful, is apt to become defiant and unashamed of excess.