JOSEPHINE, THE SONGSTRESS
221
reasons we must live dispersed are too great, our foes are too
many, the dangers prepared for us everywhere too incalculable–
we cannot remove children from the struggle for existence; if we
did it would only mean their untimely ends. But to these sad rea–
sons there should be added a more encouraging one, the fertility
of our race. One generation-and each is numerous-presses
close upon the others, children do not have time enough to be chil–
dren.
If
other nations bring up their children carefully, if they
establish schools for their little ones, if their children, these
nations' future, stream out of their schools daily, for some time at
least it is the same children that appear there day in and day out.
We have no schools, and at the very shortest intervals of time there
pour forth from our people immense swarms of children, merrily
spluttering and chirping until they can squeak, rolling or tumbled
along by the pressure of the others until they can run, clumsily
carrying everthing along by their mass until they can see: our
children! And not the way it is in the schools of those others, not
the same children, not at all, but always and ever again new ones,
without end or interruption; hardly does a child come forth but it
is no longer a child, and new child faces, indistinguishable in their
numbers and hurry, rosy with their joy, are already pressing
behind it. As pretty as all this may be and as much as others may
justly envy us for it, it must be admitted that we cannot exactly
give our children a real childhood. And this has its consequences.
A
certain undying, ineradicable childishness pervades our people;
in
direct contradiction to the best in us, our unerring sense of the
practical, we will often act like complete fools, and just the way
ehildren act foolishly: senselessly, extravagantly, on a big scale,
rivolously, and all this often for the sake only of a little fun. And
though, as is only natural, the joy we get out of it can no longer
ve the full force of the joy of children, at least some part of that
certainly present. And Josephine has profited at all times by
is childish streak in our people.
But our people are not only childish, they are also to some
ent prematurely old; childhood and old age are different with
than with others. We have no youth, we become adult imme–
"ately, and then we stay adult too long; a certain weariness and
opelessness leave a broad imprint upon the generally sturdy and
ptimistic character of our people. It is likely that our lack of
