This is what we were all doing, lumbering our minds with
literature that only served to cloud the really vital situation
spread before our eyes. It seemed to me too preposterous that in
my first view of the horror of East London I should have recalled
De Quincey's literary description of the literary suggestion
which had once paralyzed him. In my disgust it all appeared a
hateful, vicious circle which even the apostles of culture
themselves admitted, for had not one of the greatest among the
moderns plainly said that "conduct, and not culture is three
fourths of human life."
For two years in the midst of my distress over the poverty which,
thus suddenly driven into my consciousness, had become to me the
"Weltschmerz," there was mingled a sense of futility, of
misdirected energy, the belief that the pursuit of cultivation
would not in the end bring either solace or relief. I gradually
reached a conviction that the first generation of college women
had taken their learning too quickly, had departed too suddenly
from the active, emotional life led by their grandmothers and
great-grandmothers; that the contemporary education of young
women had developed too exclusively the power of acquiring
knowledge and of merely receiving impressions; that somewhere in
the process of 'being educated' they had lost that simple and
almost automatic response to the human appeal, that old healthful
reaction resulting in activity from the mere presence of
suffering or of helplessness; that they are so sheltered and
pampered they have no chance even to make "the great refusal.
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