THE PHILOSOPHY OF THE DOUGHNUT

At the "college for hoboes" opened last fall by a Chicago woman one of the regular students announced that he was a "milleniumite", that his philosophy was the philosophy of the doughnut; "the bigger the doughnut, the bigger the hole." He entered vigorously into the activities of the college, helped equip a stage; and directed the production of the plays got up by the pupils until the pangs of hunger forced him to leave the institution and go to work.

A good many other "milleniumites" find themselves in the predicament of the hobo stage director brought up short by the uncompromising necessity of going to work. But first comes an interval when most men play with the idea of going somewhere and "getting away from it all". The much quoted "Go West, Young Man" legend has brought to the Pacific dozens of dreamers filled with ideas of immediate prosperity, but with no more definite notions of how to get it than Captain John Smith's followers had at Jamestown three hundred years before.

But whether Horace Greeley's West, Palm Beach as pictured in the rotogravure supplements, or a hill farm in Vermont; the somewhere is always somewhere else, a place to go to with no responsibilities and the opportunity to move whenever the prospect grows tiresome. This state of mind is often conveniently labelled "sophomoric", but it is too elastic to be classified under one head. It may stretch over a man's entire life or end with his senior year at high school. While it lasts the philosophy of the "milieniumite", the pleasant dream of a little "kingdom round the corner" holds complete sway.

The "wanderlust" gets into everyone's blood to a greater or lesser degree and no Maeterlinck Bluebird idea of happiness or Carlyle gospel of work are of much avail to keep it in check. Once a man gets the desire to tuck his "trouser-ends into his boots" and go off to the far corners of the earth, he will go and continue to go until he develops a definite purpose to hold him back.

Luckily or unluckily the average newly-hatched college graduate finds what serves for a purpose, temporarily at least, thrust at him on the same terms which faced the milleniumite stage director, the ultimatum of "work or starve". His first job and his hardest is the job of finding a job which he can develop and which will develop him. Until he succeeds, his purpose will be lost to sight, and the vision of a kingdom round the corner dance instead before his eyes.