Making the Most of Life Author:William Cunningham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: We do not all feel the difficulty which arises from the conflict between personal aims and the claims of the community equally strongly for we are not all inclin... more »ed to admit the claims of the community upon us at all. But they are likely to come home to those who enter into the married state, and have children for whose welfare they desire to provide and whom they desire to train for their part in the battle of life. They may expect to be roused out of the immediate range of personal interests and ambitions to a sense of responsibility and a share in the life of the community. This habit of thought takes them at once away from concentration on the present, since they must consider a future where their personal lives will be done with and completed, and there is need to take account of the double duty of finding a place in the world for the children and of fitting them for that place. There is a very wide range of matters that have to be considered, and that lie outside personal interests. When the sense of conflict is once roused, there seems to be little hope of allaying it except by a change in our ordinary and natural habits of thought. There must be a change in consciousness, either in thinking differently about society, or in feeling differently about ourselves. The consciousness of membership of a community came home to the landowner of two centuries ago in a somewhat different form. He was conscious that he had responsibilities and dignity that many of his fellow-citizens did not share, because he had a stake in the country. The estates of the landed gentry were parts of the land of the country, and the prosperity of those estates had a close and direct relation to the prosperity of the country as a whole. The land tax laid upon the landed gentry the chief responsibility ...« less