Page:The Art of Helping People Out of Trouble (1924).pdf/40

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does it spare or respect. It compels the attention and the energy of all mankind.

It is the most exacting of the arts, but it is not beyond mastery. Men have achieved it, are achieving it constantly. Rare is he who has not a fundamental capacity to adjust himself to life. When a man fails where his neighbors succeed, when under substantially the same economic and physical conditions and in the same crisis he falls into trouble which they avoid, it is not necessarily because he lacks the ability to achieve. It may be because he is prevented from using the powers with which he has been endowed. He is blocked; he is handicapped; he is not free. He is bound by habits, emotions, fears, prejudices, superstitions. He is thwarted by those with whom he is intimately associated in work or in pleasure, even by his friends, by the members of his family. He is thrust into trouble as was the little girl whose teacher said of her:

"If Martha is learning anything I don't know it. She never answers any questions. She never has anything to say in class. She just sits and looks."

So stupid did Martha appear to be that until an examination at a psychological clinic showed that