“We need–each and all–to be needed,
To feel we have something to give
Towards soothing the moan of earth’s hunger;
And we know that then only we live
When we feed one another, as we have been fed
From the hand that gives body and spirit their bread.”
There are other people. We are not the only ones. Some of the others live close to us and some farther away. We stand in certain relations to these other people. They have claims upon us. We owe them duties, services, love. We cannot cut ourselves off from them, from any of them, saying that they are nothing to us. We cannot rid ourselves of obligations to them and say we owe them nothing. So inexorable is this relation to others that in all the broad earth there is not an individual who has no right to come to us with his needs, claiming at our hand the ministry of love. The other people are our brothers, and there is not one of them that we have a right to despise, or neglect, or hurt, or thrust away from our door.
We ought to train ourselves to think of the other people. We may not leave them out of any of the plans that we make. We must think of their interests and good when we are thinking of our own. They have rights as well as ourselves, and we must think of these when asserting our own. No man may set his fence a hair’s breadth over the line on his neighbour’s ground. No man may gather even a head of his neighbour’s wheat or a cluster of grapes from his neighbour’s vine. No man may enter his neighbour’s door unbidden. No man may do anything that will harm his neighbour. Other people have inalienable rights which we may not invade.
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