Democratic Sentinel, Volume 9, Number 21, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 19 June 1885 — Average People. [ARTICLE]

Average People.

Average people are the ballast of the world. Notwithstanding their usefulness, how feAV people are willing to be ranked as average! How many secretly feel that they are beyond the limits of that epithet, and that their acquaintances are just below it! Those who think that they have escaped the boundary line and are.classed Avith the remarkable people indulge in a perpetual mirage of thought, which, to themselves, inverts their hulk of commonplaceness into mast-heads of prominence. We look at them through their self-imposed atmosphere and believe that they are above water-line; but the air changes, and the relative proportion of their attributes is plainly visible. Insignificance is never greater than when it thinks it is just above the average. Endeavoring to avoid its limitations it Avraps itself in the restlessness which it supposes is the necessary malady of growth. It hugs its imagined headaches and heartaches, and believes that it is perpetually suffering from an access of creative thought, of original deed, which, always coining, never appears. Some men and women are ever on an uneven race for wealth and ambition; they are discontented with the restrictions of home and humility; they speak with pathos of their unfulfilled aspirations, of their weary, large-eyed gaze at society, of the hollowness of life, of the solace of “interior vieAvs,” of the comfort in keeping thought diaries aud interchange of misty quotations with deep natures searching for truth. They try to do and to be more than their mental and physical limitations. The women want some loftier mission than housework; the men something more than clerkships. So many win the public school diplomas that" they are sure they can also succeed in the struggle for a profession, or for one of the higher avenues of employment. A failure is attributed to any other cause than to mistaken self-estimate. This desire for advancement, irrespective of personal qualifications, is the reason for the increasing influx of restlessness among so many persons. —Kate Gannett Wells.