defied the times? Who directed the multitudes? A few among men. Even in our republican system, who decides? Is it a matter of numbers, of hands forever raised — or is it a luminous few who cut the road, who propose, direct, and carry out?

It may seem to some of you that I am cheating the masses of their due, in an age that fights to give the masses their due; or that I despise the toiling, silent multitudes laboring unseen, in a period when these multitudes are fighting in defense of their right to life; or that I belong to the party that pleads for the aristocracy, its merit and its rights, because it patronized the arts, and its palaces were a refuge for thought and a haven for learning.

No. For all my acknowledgment of the historical fact, I am of these multitudes; I feel with their feelings and suffer with their sufferings. Nor am I one of the geniuses, that I should count myself among that creative few who rise above the shoulders of

men. I am rather one of the modest citizens who believe that every one of us can be numbered in the ranks of the good minority, and that it is not necessary for you or for me to be a poet or an artist or a philosopher or a scientist and inventor in order for you or me to be pressed into the company of the immortals.

I said at the beginning of my talk that we live in a period in which people have lost their faith in spiritual values. Do you believe in spiritual values? Then you are of the creative minority. For the civilization that loses its faith in spiritual values dies.

We live in a period marked by doubt — doubt in everything: in the worth of justice and goodness, in the worth of morals and religion, in the worth of the school and the laboratory, in the worth of life itself. Do you believe in the worth of justice and goodness? Do you believe in man? Do you believe that he is destined to reach the rank of the angels? Then you are of the creative minority.

We live in an atmosphere in which human conceptions have been turned upside down: virtue is scorned, tyranny is magnified, bodily force is sanctified, commer-cial monopoly is counted genius and opportunism intelligence; and nothing is easier for a man in such an atmosphere than to lose his faith and abandon his ideals. Do you keep your faith in virtue? Do you keep your ideals? Then you are of the creative minority. For every civilization that loses faith in spiritual values, in the human virtues, is a civilization walking toward extinction.

Among the secrets of genius is sacrifice; among its elements, pain; among its circumstances, privation. But among the secrets of genius is immortality; among its elements, victory over pain; among its circumstances, con-tentment. Let us, then, be of this minority which, though it sacrifice, though it suffer, though it be mocked, remains the minority that leads the caravan toward the light, the good, and the beautiful.