Conclusion

WHILE we think of eating as largely a pleasure, we know it is also the means of keeping us alive. Similarly we think of conversation as a satisfaction and amusement, yet do not quite so well realize that it is also the sustenance of our mental life. It is an ocean that never dries up, but which, when it stagnates causes a shriveling up of everything else, and which, when it ebbs and flows and pushes in all the streams and inlets, gives a livelier pulse to life everywhere.

The conversation of the people — of the whole people, high brow and low brow — is the pulse of the level of culture and enterprise of a sect or of a nation. Conversation is the blossom of man's thoughts and ideas as they are about to go into action. What the scholar discovers in his library and the scientist in his laboratory only goes into general beneficial effect after all the people talk about it. The more Christian the world we live in is, and the more democratic, the more this is true.