I have spent a good deal of my time patching up the children
who have been wounded by people who gave them fear. Fear
can be a terrible thing in a child's life. Fear must be entirely
eliminated--fear of adults, fear of punishment, fear of disap-
proval, fear of God. Only hate can flourish in an atmosphere of
fear.

We are afraid of so many things--afraid of poverty, afraid of
ridicule, afraid of ghosts, afraid of burglars, afraid of accidents,
afraid of public opinion, afraid of disease, afraid of death. A
man's life is the story of his fears. Millions of adults fear to
walk in the dark. Thousands have a vague feeling of uneasiness
when a policeman rings the doorbell. Most travelers have fan-
tasies of the ship's sinking or of the airplane's being wrecked.
Railway travelers seek the middle coaches of a train. "Safety
First" expresses man's leading concern.

There must have been a time in the history of man when
the fear of being killed made him flee and hide. Today, life
has become so safe that fear in the service of self-protection is
no longer necessary. And yet today, humanity probably ex-
periences more fear than did our Stone Age ancestors. Primitive
man had only the large-bodied monsters to fear, but we have
many monsters--trains, ships, airplanes, burglars, automobiles
and, most potent of all, the fear of being found out. Fear is still
necessary for us. Fear makes me cross the street carefully.

In nature, fear serves the purpose of race preservation. Rab-
bits and horses have survived because of the fear that forced
them to run from danger. Fear is an important factor in the
law of the wild.

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