Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
by Arthur Brisbane · English · Gutenberg #742 · 457,178 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
Author: Arthur Brisbane
Release date: December 1, 1996 [eBook #742]
Most recently updated: April 1, 2015
Language: English
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/742
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK EDITORIALS FROM THE HEARST NEWSPAPERS ***
Ver.04.29.93*END*
EDITORIALS from the HEARST NEWSPAPERS {Arthur Brisbane}
CONTENTS
Why Are All Men Gamblers?
No Man Understands Iron
We Long for Immortal Imperfection--We Can't Have It.
Three Water-Drops Converse
Did We Once Live on the Moon?
William Henry Channing's Symphony
The Existence of God--Parable of the Blind Kittens
Have the Animals Souls?
Jesus' Attitude Toward Children
Study of the Character of God
The Fascinating Problem of Immortality
Discontent the Motive Power of Progress
The Automobile Will Make Us More Human
Let Us Be Thankful
The Harm That Is Done by Our Friends
Shall We Tame and Chain the Invisible Microbe As We Now Chain
Niagara?
The Elephant That Will Not Move Has Better Excuses Than We Have
for Folly Displayed
Let Us Be Thankful
What Will 999 Years Mean to the Human Race?
The Azores--A Small Lost World in a Universe of Water
No Napoleonic Chess Player on an Air Cushion
A Girl's Face in the Gaslight
The "Criminal" Class
The Wonderful Magnet
Who Is Independent? Nobody
When We Begin Using Land Under the Oceans
Where Your Body Came From
How Marriage Began
Man's Willingness to Work
The Human Brain Beats the Coal Mines
How the Other Planets Will Talk to Us
Shall We Do Without Sleep Some Day?
The Three Best Things in the World
The Value of Solitude
There Should Be a Monument to Time
A Mother's Work and Her Hopes
Your Work Is Your Brain's Gymnasium
The Steeple, Moving Like the Hand of a Clock
Cultivate Thought-Teach Your Brain to Work Early
The Wind Does Not Rule Your Destiny
One of the Many Corpses in the Johnstown Mine
"Limiting the Amount of a Day's Work"
Catching a Red-Hot Bolt
The Trusts and the Union--How Do They Differ?
France Has Learned Her Lesson
Union Men as Slave Owners
Again the Limited Day's Work
To the Merchants
What About the Chinese, Kind Sir?
150 against 150,000--We Favor the 150,000
To-day's World-Struggle
White-Rabbit Millionaires and Other Things
No Happiness Save in Mental and Physical Activity
The Owner of a Golden Mountain
The Human Weeds in Prison
Crime Is Dying Out
The Value of Poverty to the World
600 Teachers Now, 600,000 Good Americans in the Future
Education--The First Duty of Government
Poverty Is the Father of Vice, Crime and Failure
The Importance of Education Proved in Lincoln's Case
Knowledge Is Growth
A Whiskey Bottle
Those Who Laugh at a Drunken Man
Law Cannot Stop Drunkenness--Education Can
The Drunkard's Side of It
Drink a Slow Poison
To Those Who Drink Hard--You Have Slipped the Belt
Try Whiskey on Your Friend's Eyeball
What Are the Ten Best Books?
The Marvelous Balance of the Universe--A Lesson in the Texas Flood
The Earth Is Only a Front Yard
Last Week's Baby Will Surely Talk Some Day
The Good That Is Done by the Trusts
Trusts and the Senate
The Promising Toad's Head
Trusts Will Drive Labor Unions Into Politics
The Trusts Are National School Teachers
A Woman to Be Pitied
When Will Woman's Mental Life Begin?
The Cow That Kicks Her Weaned Calf Is All Heart
Respectable Women Who Listen to "Faust"
Why Women Should Vote
Astronomy- Woman's Future Work
Woman's Vanity Is Useful
To Editorial Writers--Adopt Ruskin's Main Idea
Imagination Without Dreaming the Secret of Material Success
The One Who Needs No Statue
The Vast Importance of Sleep
Woman Sustains, Guides and Controls the World
The Story of the Complaining Diamond
Don't Be in a Hurry, Young Gentlemen
hen the Baby Changed Into a Fourteen-year-old
The Eye That Weighs a Ton
What Animal Controls Your Spirit?
From Mammoths to Mosquitoes--From Murder to Hypocrisy
The Monkey and the Snake Fight
Too Little and Too Much
Do You Feel Discouraged?
Two Kinds of Discontent
What the Bartender Sees
What Should Be a Man's Object in Life?
Cruel Frightening of Children
It Is Natural for Children to Be Cruel
Two Thin Little Babies Are Left
A Baby Can Educate a Man
The articles in this book were published originally in the
editorial columns of the various Hearst newspapers throughout the
country.
These articles may have some interest for the student of modern
happenings, because of the fact that the newspapers publishing
them have an aggregate daily circulation of two millions of
copies, and are read each day by no fewer than five millions of
men and women. Such wide circulation of identical opinions on
current events, in different parts of the country, is a new
feature of our national life. The character of such writings, and
their probable influence upon the public mind, whatever their
lack of intrinsic merit, may be of sufficient importance to
justify the publication of this collection of ephemeral writings.
WHY ARE ALL MEN GAMBLERS?
The annual report of the gambling house at Monte Carlo shows a
profit of about $5,000,000.
A large collection of human beings travel from all parts of the
world to Monte Carlo for the sake of giving $5,000,000 to the
gambling concern there.
Wherever you look on earth to-day or in the past you find human
beings gambling, and you will find the gambling instinct stronger
than any other--stronger than the love of drink, infinitely
stronger than the love of normal, honest gain.
* * *
Christopher Columbus's sailors gambled on the way over, and the
Indians on this side were gambling while waiting to be
discovered.
In an office overlooking Trinity graveyard, in New York City, an
old man, past eighty, with a fortune of at least $50,000,000,
gambles every day with all the excitement of youth. The
fluctuations in his game bring to his sallow cheeks the color
that no other human emotion could bring there.
On his way home this old man passes crowds of children in the
streets and looks down, concerned and sorrowful, to find that
they, too, are gambling.
They are matching pennies or shaking dice.
* * *
Clergymen are startled and amazed to find that women are gambling
heavily.
They have gambled heavily ever since civilization has progressed
far enough to give them large sums to gamble with.
Marie Antoinette staked thousands of louis at a time at
Versailles.
She was so wrapped up in gambling she could not see that her neck
was in danger.
When the lava came down from Vesuvius it buried Pompeiians who
were gambling.
The men who dig up the old monuments in Africa find gambling
instruments crumbling away side by side with appliances for
taking human life.
* * *
Nowhere in the lower forms of animal life, so far as we know, is
there the slightest indication of the gambling instinct.
The monkey, the elephant, love whiskey, and easily become
drunkards.
The passion for alcohol seems innate in animal life; even the
wise ant can be readily induced to disgrace himself if alcohol is
put near him.
For all the human weaknesses and mainsprings--ambition,
affection, vanity, drunkenness, ferocity, greediness, cunning--we
can find beginnings among the lower animals.
But man appears to have evolved from within himself the gambling
instinct for his own especial damnation.
Where did the instinct come from? Why was it planted in us?
Like every other instinct with which intelligent nature endows
us, it must have its good purpose, and it must not be judged
merely in the corrupted form in which we study it at Monte Carlo
or in Wall Street.
Perhaps the spirit of gambling is really only an atrophied,
perverted form of the spirit of adventure.
Columbus staked his life and gambled, when he started across the
water.
The leaders of the American Revolution expressly staked their
lives, their fortunes and their "sacred honor" in signing the
Declaration of Independence. They were noble gamblers, working
for the welfare of their fellows.
Perhaps gambling is only a perverted form of intelligent
ambition--we are all natural gamblers because we have within us
the quality which makes us willing to risk our own comfort,
security and present happiness for a result that seems better
worth while.
The universality of the gambling instinct in human beings is
certainly worthy of our study.
NO MAN UNDERSTANDS IRON
HOW CAN WE HOPE TO UNDERSTAND GOD?
Is there laughter in heaven--or can nothing move the eternal
heavenly calm?
If mirth exists among the perpetually blissful, how must the
angels laugh when in idle moments they listen to our speculations
concerning the Divinity? They peer down at us as we look at ants
dragging home a fragment of dead caterpillar. They hear us say
things like this:
If God exists, why does He not reveal himself to ME?
How could God exist before He created the world? Force cannot
exist or demonstrate its existence without matter. How could a
creator exist except with creation around him?
Where did He live before He made heaven?
If He is all-powerful, could He in five seconds make a six
months' old calf? If He made it in five seconds it would not be
six months old.
Nonsense more subtle comes from the educated, from those who know
enough to be preposterous in a pretentious way.
Hear the wise man:
God does not exist, because I cannot prove His existence: I can
prove everything else. With my law of gravitation I point to a
speck in space and say: "You'll find a new planet there," and
you find it. If a God existed could I not also point to Him? If
I can trace a comet in its flight, could I not trace the comet's
maker?
Huxley says: "The cosmic process has no sort of relation to
moral ends." That's a philosopher's way of saying something
foolish. Lalande, the astronomer, remarked that he had swept the
entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. That's
funnier than any ant who should say: "I've searched this whole
dead caterpillar and found no God, so THERE IS NO GOD." The
corner of space which our telescopes can "sweep" is smaller,
compared to the universe, than a dead caterpillar compared with
this earth.
Moleschott, an able physiologist, believed that phosphorus was
essential to mental activity. Perhaps he did prove that. But he
said: "No thought without phosphorus," and thought he had wiped
the human soul out of existence. Philosophers do not laugh at
Moleschott. But they would laugh at a savage who would say:
"I have discovered that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle
without catgut--no music without cats. Don't talk to me about
soul or musical genius--it's all catgut."
We peek out at this universe from our half-developed corner of
it. We see faintly the millions of huge suns circling with their
planet families billions of miles away. We see our own little
sun rise and set; we ask ourselves a thousand foolish questions
of cause and Ruler--and because we cannot answer, we decry faith.
Wise doubter, look at a small piece of iron. It looks solid.
You suppose that its various parts touch. But submit it to cold.
You make it smaller. Then the particles did not touch. Do they
touch now? No; relatively they are farther apart than this
planet from its nearest neighbor.
That piece of iron, apparently solid, consists of clusters of
atoms wonderfully grouped, each cluster called a molecule. The
molecular cluster is invisible, millions of clusters in the
smallest visible fragment. The atom is accepted by science as
the final particle of matter. Its name indicates that it is
supposed to be indivisible. When science gets to the atom it
calmly gives up and says: "That is so small that it can no
longer be divided." A reasonable enough conclusion on the
surface, considering that you might have millions of atoms of
iron in one corner of your eye and not know it.
But why should the atom be incapable of further division? If it
is any size at all it can be thought of as split.
Where does the divisibility of matter end, if anywhere? What is
there SOLID about iron? Nothing in reality, except that it seems
to us solid. Already, with the X-ray, we can look through it.
Forces such as heat and electricity pass through it more readily
than through free air.
Science, which gradually finds things out, denying as it goes
along everything one step beyond, tells you truly that the
clusters of atoms in iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our
planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What
happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and
the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this
ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity
inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful
than that of coiled steel. ----
So much for one small piece of iron, such as you would kick to
one side in a junk heap. If it interests you, read pages 159 to
162 of John Fiske's admirable little book, "Through Nature to
God." You will finish the book the day you get it.
If you are surprised to learn how much you did not know about
iron--after living near bits of iron all your life--is it not
just possible that your mind may be too feeble to conceive of
God?
For the fly buzzing about the edge of Niagara Falls, the falls do
not exist. The fly's brain cannot grasp their grandeur. It can
understand only the speck of spray that falls on its wing.
You live with God around you, hopelessly incapable of perceiving
His existence save through that faint spark of unconscious faith
that was mercifully planted in you. Snuff that out with dull
efforts at reason, and you have nothing.
WE LONG FOR IMMORTAL IMPERFECTION-- WE CAN'T HAVE IT.
All our longings for immortality, all our plans for immortal life
are based on the hope that Divine Providence will condescend to
let us live in another world as we live here.
Each of us wants to be himself in the future life, and to see his
friends as he knew them.
We want to preserve individuality forever and ever, when the
stars shall have faded away and the days of matter ended.
But what is individuality except imperfection? You are different
from Smith, Smith is different from Jones. But it is simply a
difference of imperfect construction. One is more foolish than
another, one is more irresponsibly moved to laughter or
anger--that constitutes his personality.
Remove our imperfections and we should all be alike--smooth off
all agglomerations of matter on all sides and everything would be
spherical.
What would be the use of keeping so many of us if we were all
perfect, and therefore all alike? One talks through his nose,
one has a deep voice. But shall kind Providence provide two sets
of wings for nose talkers and chest talkers? Why not make the
two into one good talker and save one pair of wings?
Why not, in fact, keep just one perfect sample, and let all the
rest placidly drift back to nothingness? Or, better, why not
take all the goodness that there is in all the men and women that
ever were and melt it all down into one cosmic human being? ----
The rain drops, the mist and the sprays of Niagara all go back to
the ocean in time. Possibly we all go back at the end to the sea
of divine wisdom, whence we were sent forth to do, well or badly,
our little work down here:
Future punishment? We think not.
One drop of water revives the wounded hero--another helps to give
wet feet and consumption to a little child. It all depends on
circumstances.
Both drops go back to the ocean. There is no rule that sends the
good drop to heaven and the other to boil forever and ever in a
sulphur pit. ----
Troubles beset us when we think of a future state and our reason
quarrels always with our longings. We all want--in heaven--to
meet Voltaire with his very thin legs. But we cannot believe
that those skinny shanks are to be immortal. We shall miss the
snuff and the grease on Sam Johnson's collar. If an angel comes
up neat and smiling and says "Permit me to introduce myself --I
am the great lexicographer," we shall say "Tell that to some
other angel. The great Samuel was dirty and wheezy, and I liked
him that way."
And children. The idea of children in heaven flying about with
their little fluffy wings is fascinating. But would eternal
childhood be fair to them? If a babe dies while teething, shall
it remain forever toothless? How shall its mother know it if it
is allowed to grow up?
Listen to Heine--that marvellous genius of the Jewish race:
"Yes, yes! You talk of reunion in a transfigured shape. What
would that be to me? I knew him in his old brown surtout, and so
I would see him again. Thus he sat at table, the salt cellar and
pepper caster on either hand. And if the pepper was on the right
and the salt on the left hand he shifted them over. I knew him
in a brown surtout, and so I would see him again."
Thus he spoke of his dead father. Thus many of us think and
speak of those that are gone. How foolish to hope for the
preservation of what is imperfect!
How important to have FAITH, and to feel that reality will
surpass anticipation, and that whatever IS will be the best thing
for us and satisfy us utterly.
THREE WATER DROPS CONVERSE
Three drops of water, stranded in a crevice on the side of an
inland mountain, talked in this way:
First Drop--"They say there is an ocean whence we came and to
which we shall return."
Second Drop--"They say we three drops are made in the image of
that ocean; that as far as we go, which is not far, we are
miniature oceans."
Third Drop--"Bosh and nonsense. There is no ocean. It is all
superstition. Before we were born here, from the mist, what were
we? When we evaporate in a few minutes what becomes of us? You
two drops make me feel sorry for you. I know that when I cease
reflecting that white cloud up there, that ends ME. I have no
delusions about oceans or going back to anything." ----
You know what happened. The cloud formed into rain and our three
drops were washed into a tiny trickling stream. The thin stream
of rain ran into a brook, the brook into a river. Soon the three
drops were back in the ocean--possibly without knowing it.
Shall we some day go rolling back to the ocean of cosmic wisdom
whence we came?
Is it possible that man is indeed made in the image of God, as
drops are made in the ocean's image--the individual men, like the
individual drops, being sent forth to do necessary cosmic work
through the universe, going back to the ocean after each errand
is done, and so going back and forth, forever and ever?
That would not be such a mean destiny, we should say. It would
certainly be a very democratic form of cosmic government. ----
Inferior men, inferior women, unworthy of comparison with
perfect, cosmic wisdom?
Not at all. Not inferior men and women, but inferior mediums,
inferior brains, bodies and planets through which to work.
Is one drop of water inferior to another? Is any inferior to the
purest drop in the ocean?
No. But one drop runs through the gutter of a stable, another
rolls from a mountain spring, a third carries in solution the
germ of typhus. But all three came pure from the ocean and all
will go back to the ocean pure.
DID WE ONCE LIVE ON THE MOON?
AND SHALL WE MOVE ON TO THE SUN SOME FINE DAY?
The most interesting questions are such as these:
Whence did we come?
Whither are we going?
And, by the way, what are we? Are we of any true importance?
Are we a permanent part of the universal scheme, privileged to
move along through the ages and see the end as we have seen the
beginning? Or are we, as advanced science says, merely like the
weevil in the biscuit--no part of the Baker's plan?
Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up
and animating one material body after another--never
destroyed--or do we play on this earth the passing part of the
microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives that cheese its flavor?
----
A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes
essential to the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any
possibility of immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he
magnifies nature's mysteries; he sums up the investigations of
the Hertwig brothers; he discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of
the Cytula--or progeny cell. He declares that science is able to
watch the creation of a human being, as it watches the progress
of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new creature is
merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of the
mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a
final end. Man--a mixture of two sets of qualities--has no more
chance of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt
and hops.
Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited
destiny as science farthest advanced now sees it:
"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality
of the human person, when we know how this person, with all its
individual qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this
person possess an eternal life without end? The human person,
like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING
PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its
vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began."
That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has
sung "I want to be an angel."
Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of
immortality. But the other side of the grave has the LAST say,
and we think it will discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake
to do that now and here in two columns of a yellow journal. But
we are DETERMINED before the column ends to ask you what you
think of our moon-earth-sun transmigration notion.
The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably
fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of
miles into space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as
a snow-flake falling upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not
readily look upon the sun as our future home, if we accept its
present condition as permanent.
But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this
earth used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun
now looks to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior
human beings, in a low state of cosmic evolution, they
undoubtedly had to thank the earth for their life, as we thank
the sun. To them the earth, then incandescent, blazing with the
heat that now reveals itself through volcanoes, was simply a
whirling ball of fire, put in its place to warm them.
They could no more think that men would ever come to live here
than we can now think of moving on to the sun. ----
In course of time this earth cooled off. It cooled so thoroughly
that the moon died of cold. Life could no longer continue there.
The dead satellite's destiny thenceforward was to show gratitude
for past heat by moving our tides and cheering our poets. As
life died out on the cold moon which had given us temporary
hospitality, life sprang into being on this planet, now fitted to
support it.
Here, on a larger sphere, with greater opportunities, mankind is
growing, and will far outstrip all that it could have done on the
poor little moon.
Meanwhile, as we struggle on, improving slowly, the sun, as
science proves, is cooling off in its turn. The flames become
less fierce as the thousands of centuries roll by. When we shall
have developed as much as possible on this limited planet, our
home will be cooled and ready on the sun, centre of our life in
this corner of space.
We shall move up a step--as boys do in the public schools. We
shall have been moon men, earth men, and shall graduate into sun
men. Think of a home so vast! On that grand star we shall lead
lives worth while, and justify Huxley's belief that men exist
somewhere compared to whom we should "be as black beetles
compared to us."
The excitement of meeting our brothers from other planets as they
move up to the sun in batchcs will be great.
WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING'S SYMPHONY
THE THOUGHT--
To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than
luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy,
not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and
birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to
think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry
never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common--this is my symphony.
WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING.
TO LIVE CONTENT WITH SMALL MEANS.
This means to realize to the full the possibilities of life.
Contentment means ABSENCE OF WORRY. It is only when free from
worry that the brain can act normally, up to its highest
standard. The man content with small means does his best work,
devotes his energies to that which is worth while, and not to
acquiring that which has no value.
TO SEEK ELEGANCE RATHER THAN LUXURY.
The difference between elegance and luxury is the difference
between the thin, graceful deer, browsing on the scanty but
sufficient forest pasture, and the fat swine revelling in
plentiful garbage.
REFINEMENT RATHER THAN FASHION.
The difference between refinement and fashion is the difference
between brains and clothing, the difference between an Emerson or
a Huxley and a Beau Brummel or other worthless but elaborately
decked carcass.
TO BE WORTHY, NOT RESPECTABLE.
In other words, to be like Henry George, and not like the owner
of a trust.
WEALTHY, NOT RICH.
The man who has a good wife and good children, enough to take
care of them, but not enough to spoil them, is WEALTHY. He is
happier than the man who is RICH enough to be worried, rich
enough to make it certain that his children will be ruined by
extravagance, and perhaps live to be ashamed of him.
TO LISTEN TO STARS AND BIRDS, BABES AND SAGES, WITH OPEN HEART.
This means to enjoy the noblest gifts that God has given to man.
He is happy who takes more pleasure in a beautiful sunset than in
the sight of a flunky with powdered hair, artificial calves and
lofty manners, handing him something indigestible on a plate of
gold.
TO STUDY HARD; TO THINK QUIETLY, ACT FRANKLY, TALK GENTLY.
To exercise in this way the brain that is given to us is to lead
the life of a MAN, a life of self-control, a life that is worth
while, that leads to something and helps forward the improvement
of the race.
In the words which we have quoted at the top of this column
William Henry Channing has given a recipe for wise living. ----
WHO WAS CHANNING?
He was a good man, and a wise man. He was one of the most
eloquent clergymen ever born in this country, and as sincere a
friend of individual man and of the race in general as ever
lived.
He was an enthusiast and an optimist--admirable combination.
He was born in 1810, and died in 1884. His biography has been
written by Octavius B. Frothingham.
Channing saw the world through generous, charitable eyes.
He was an ardent admirer of Charles Fourier, and appreciated the
philosophy and social law-giving of that gigantic intellect.
The quotation we print above is an index to his whole character,
just as one flower tells the story of the beautiful garden in
which it grew.
Channing, unlike many sayers of fine things, was personally as
fine as the things he said. He was worthy even of his own best
thoughts, and that can be said for few fine thinkers.
Admire him. Read some of his sermons and other writings if you
have the chance.
THE EXISTENCE OF GOD--PARABLE OF THE BLIND KITTENS
The notion that small things, the petty details of life, such as
money getting, marriage questions, etc., are uppermost in the
modern human brain is entirely false.
If an editor asks: "Is marriage a failure?" he receives just so
many answers, and then the interest dies out.
If he asks: "Should a wife have pin money?" or "What is the
easiest way for a woman to earn a living?" he ceases to receive
answers after a short time.
But to questions concerning the immortality of the soul, the
existence of God, and man's destiny here and hereafter, the
answers are endless. Letters on such matters have been received
here by thousands. Every day the mail brings new and intelligent
contributions to the questions that have kept men praying,
thinking, fighting and hoping through the centuries:
"IS THERE A GOD, AND WILL MY SOUL LIVE FOREVER?" ----
Very interesting are the expressions of faith which fill a
majority of the letters. Interesting also are the letters of
doubters atheists, agnostics and the many intoxicated with a very
little knowledge, who have decided to substitute their own wisdom
and doubt for the belief of the ages--the belief in God and in
personal immortality.
Many think science has discovered that we could get on very well
without a God. But science has done just the contrary. And
here, if you please, we shall build up a sort of parable: ----
A Man had a box full of motherless blind kittens. He was very
kind to them. He put their box on wheels and moved it about to
keep it in the sun. He gave them milk at regular intervals.
With loving kindness he drove away the dog which growled and
scared the little kittens into spitting and back raising.
The kittens trusted the Man, loved him and felt that they needed
him. That was the age of faith.
One day a dog got a kitten and tore it to pieces.
The kitten had disobeyed orders and laws. It had crawled away
from the box.
Another kitten, with one eye now partly open, got thoughtful and
said: "There is no such thing as Man. Or, if there is such a
thing, he is a monster to let little Willie get torn up. Don't
talk to me about Kitten Wiliie being a sufferer through his own
fault. I say there is no such thing as a Man. We kittens are
bosses of the universe and must do our own fighting."
That speaker was the Ingersoll kitten.
A kitten of higher mental class opened both eyes just a little
and actually made observations.
Said he: "I am a scientist. I discover that we owe nothing to
Man's kindness. We are governed by laws. This box is on wheels.
It rolls around in the sunlight of its own volition. True, I do
not know who shoves it, but no Man could do it. Further, I
discover that there is such a thing as the law of 'milk-passing.'
Milk comes this way just so often. Its coming is nature's law.
It has always come. It always will come. Good-night, I am going
to sleep. But don't talk to me any more about a kind Man. It's
all law, and I am certainly great, for I saw the laws first."
That was the Newton kitten, but he lacked the Newton faith.
We have no time to tell what the Darwin kitten said. He was very
long-winded.
But this happened. The kittens grew up--such as did not perish
through their own fault. They got their eyes fully opened. They
saw the Man, recognized him and asked only to be allowed to stay
in his house. "Excuse us," they said, "for being such foolish
kittens. But you know our eyes were not quite open."
"Don't mention it," said the kind Man. "Go down cellar and help
yourselves to mice."
That's the end of the parable. We are all blind kittens, and our
few attempts at explaining nature's wonders and kindness only get
us into deeper and deeper mysteries.
We discover that the earth goes round the sun. But the greatest
scientist must admit his inability to tell or guess why it goes.
"Give me the initial impulse," he says, "and all the rest is
easy."
The blind kittens in their wagon say: "Give our wagon just one
shove and we'll explain the rest."
The kitten gets hold of a law of "milk-passing" and substitutes
that for man's individual kindness.
The feeble-minded agnostic seizes the law of gravitation and
thinks he can discard God with gravity's help.
But the great mind that defined gravity's law was a religious
mind--too profound to see anything final in its own feeble power.
Newton was no atheist. None better than he knew the mysterious
character of his law. That it has worked from all eternity
"directly as the mass and inversely as the square of the
distance" he knew and told his fellow-creatures. That is all he
knew and all that any man knows about it.
To-day Lord Kelvin, a worthy follower in Newton's steps, is asked
to explain WHY gravity acts. He can only say:
"I accept no theory of gravitation. Present science has no
right to attempt to explain gravitation. We know nothing about
it. We simply know NOTHING about it."
Darwin asks, without answering his question:
"Who can explain what is the essence of the attraction of
gravitation?" ----
To our doubting friends we say: Doubt if you must. But doubt
intelligently and doubt first of all your own blind kitten
wisdom. Remember that you at least know absolutely nothing.
Study and think. Read. But don't let the half-developed wisdom
of others choke up your brain and leave you a mere clogged-up
doubting machine.
Whatever you do, never interfere with the faith of others.
Spread KNOWLEDGE, spread FACTS. Keep to yourself the doubts that
would disturb others' happiness and do them no good. Tell what
you KNOW. Keep quiet about what you GUESS.
HAVE THE ANIMALS SOULS?
"For that which befalleth the sons of men, befalleth beasts;
even one thing befalleth them; as the one dieth, so dieth the
other; YEA, THEY HAVE ALL ONE BREATH; SO THAT A MAN HATH NO
PRE-EMINENCE ABOVE A BEAST: for all is vanity.
"Who knoweth the spirit of man that goeth upward, and the
SPIRIT of the beast that goeth downward to the earth."
--Ecclesiastes iii., 19-21.
The surface of the earth, the air as high as we can study it, the
depths of the sea, swarm with animal life.
The earth rolls around the sun bathed in its warm light.
Millions of creatures die with every revolution of the little
planet which is their home. And man "going to and fro in the
earth, and walking up and down in it" rules the little animals
and the big ones and calls himself sole heir of immortality. He
says: "For ME this earth was made and balanced in its wonderful
journey; for ME alone the marvels of future life are reserved."
He digs up the strange creatures from the slimy depths of the
ocean, studies and labels them.
He dissects one animal to study his own diseases. He skins
another to cover his feet with leather. He eats one ox and
hitches its brother to the plough. He uses nature's explosive
forces to bring down the bird on the wing. He sweeps the rivers
with his nets.
The stomach of the well-fed man is the graveyard of the animal
kingdom.
When his dinner is finished, the man well fed strokes his stomach
contentedly and says to himself:
All is well. For I have a soul and THEY have none. They
have died to feed me. I am happy and they should be satisfied.
----
What is the nature of the spirit that directs our humble animal
brothers and sisters? They cover the earth as long as we let
them, give place to us as the human race increases, and, without
any thought of organized resistance, die that we may live.
HAVE THESE ANIMALS SOULS?
You have seen the bird grieving over the destruction of its nest.
You have studied the pathetic eyes of the lost dog, and the sad
submission of the tired, beaten horse.
Is there not soul in those stricken creatures, and spiritual
feeling deeper than that displayed by many men?
First came all ANIMAL life, as we know it, and then came MAN.
Science and religion agree on this point, at least.
All owe their being to the same eternal FORCE. On this point
again religion and science agree.
Is the life in animals merely a passing dream, or does it express
in its humble way the promise of life eternal?
In Italy a scientific villain experimented on a dog to ascertain
the power of maternal affection.
The dog was most cruelly tortured. Its newborn puppy was beside
it. Its nerves were racked, its spine injured, BUT WHENEVER
PERMITTED TO DO SO, THE POOR TORTURED, ANIMAL MOTHER TURNED ITS
HEAD TOWARD ITS WHINING CHILD AND LICKED IT AFFECTIONATELY.
Until it died there was nothing that could overcome maternal love
in the heart of that poor dumb mother.
Is there not soul in such love as that?
JESUS' ATTITUDE TOWARD CHILDREN
A SUNDAY SERMON
"Suffer the little children to come unto me; and forbid them not;
for of such is the Kingdom of God."--Mark X., 14.
Jesus gave to the child its place in the world's society.
With all the power of divine authority He built around the
feeblest among us a wall that has protected them through the
ages.
Before His day the child existed only by sufferance. It had no
rights.
It was but a counter, an infinitesimal atom. It was considered
simply the property of the parent. Its father had power of life
and death over it. The homeless dog that roams the streets
to-day is more effectively shielded from cruelty than was the
friendless child before Jesus came to live and to die for the
weak and poor.
The law had said:
"The parent is ruler of the child, and may dispose of it as he
sees fit."
But Jesus said--and these are the most beautiful and affecting
words in all the moral law of the world:
"Take heed that ye despise not one of these little ones; for I
say unto you, that in heaven their angels do always behold the
face of my Father which is in heaven."--Matthew xviii., 10.
No threats so terrifying as those aimed at men who should harm
little children:
"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about
his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the
sea."--Matthew xviii., 6.
It is impossible now to conceive the horrid indifference to
childhood's rights which preceded the birth of Christianity.
Infanticide was not the exception, but a settled custom. So much
so, that in Rome the "exposure" of children in desert places was
almost a virtue, since it gave the child some slight chance of
surviving.
Not a few, but thousands and tens of thousands of children were
thus "exposed." They fell a prey to wild beasts, or to the human
beasts, still more ferocious, who took the children to make
slaves or criminals of them.
Jesus came, and a miracle was worked--a miracle that no man will
deny.
This was the miracle:
Jesus said:
"For I say unto you, their angels behold the face of my Father
which is in heaven."
Jesus spoke, and thousands of millions of men, through nineteen
centuries, have believed, and obeyed the command.
Every man was warned that the child dying goes straightway into
the presence of God, and there, looking upon His face, bears
witness to the treatment meted out to him here.
Well might it be said of the man who mistreated such a child:
"It were better for him that a millstone were hanged about
his neck, and that he were drowned in the depth of the sea."
Every man should study with awe and reverence the sad, lonely
misunderstood life of Jesus, the friend of children. He had no
home, and for companions only a few humble fishermen, to whom He
spoke in simple parables, as to children.
"The foxes have holes and the birds of the air have nests
but the Son of Man hath not where to lay his head."--Matthew
viii., 20.
It was this childless, homeless Man that ever used His marvellous
power to protect children.
It was He who gave to children their definite share in the
kingdom of God.
Before His coming the wisdom of the world was devoted to telling
the child ITS duty.
But Jesus explained to grown men THEIR duty toward children.
The family life was His ideal.
All men were His brothers, and, with Him, sons of God.
The loving kindness shown by God toward helpless men and women
THEY should show to helpless children.
Neither the rights nor the WISDOM of children must be despised:
"I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou
hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast
revealed them unto babes; even so, Father; for so it seemed
good in thy sight."--Luke x., 21.
Wherever Jesus went, children followed Him, and the tiniest
little soul, in its mother's arms or tottering along in wide-eyed
curiosity, could arrest His loving attention.
How beautiful is the picture that the Bible story presents to the
mind!
Jesus is at Capernaum, on the sunny shore of the Sea of Galilee.
The Disciples--simple, honest men, often excited as to precedence
and filled with deep longing to stand first in the Master's
esteem--ask Him:
"Who is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven?"--Matthew
xviii., 1.
Around them is gathered the typical Oriental group, and many
olive-skinned women, with their children:
"And Jesus called a little child unto Him, and set him in the
midst of them and said: 'Verily I say unto you, except ye be
converted, and become as little children, ye shall not enter into
the kingdom of heaven.
"'Whosoever, therefore, shall humble himself as this little
child, the same is greatest in the kingdom of heaven.
"'And whoso shall receive one such little child in my name
receiveth me.'"
Teach your children to think of and to love the divine Soul that
pleaded their cause. Teach them that in all the words He uttered
there can be found only love for them. No threats, no warnings--
only love.
STUDY OF THE CHARACTER OF GOD
"Then the Lord answered Job out of the whirlwind and said . . . .
Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?
Declare, if thou hast understanding."--Job xxxviii. 1, 4.
Since men have lived on earth their feeble intellects have
struggled to realize the majesty of God.
Succeeding nations and civilizations have expressed through laws
or religions their puny conceptions of the power that controls
the universe.
As mental and moral standards have improved, there has been
constant improvement in the conception of God.
The Greeks and Romans imagined a variety of gods, and attributed
to these the vices and weaknesses of men.
The Fijians worshipped a god who devoured the souls of the dead,
inflicting torture in the eating, but mercifully releasing souls
from pain when the meal was ended.
The ancient Mexicans went to war "because their gods demanded
something to eat." Their armies fought "only endeavoring to take
prisoners, that they might have men to feed those gods." ----
Even with the birth of the one great idea--THE UNITY OF GOD--the
personality of the universal Creator was but a reflection of His
worshippers.
He was a "jealous" God, a "man of war." "God Himself is with us
for our captain."-- Chron. xiii., 12.
God dwelt in a city made of nothing cheaper than gold and
precious stones. For His own glory, He maintained a court
Oriental in form, with strange beasts to sing His praises, and He
tortured forever and ever creatures that He had made.
The present conception of an omnipotent God has changed greatly
since the old days, when cruelty was the rule and was admired.
There is to-day insistence on God's LOVE, on His JUSTICE, on His
MERCY that "endureth forever"--there is practically no teaching
of the old belief that a creature, born of circumstances, and
good or bad as circumstances may determine, is to suffer endless
torment under never-changing conditions of horror. ----
The writing of this editorial is based upon frequent reading of
the book of Job. In that ancient and wonderful book, as in no
other writing, the Jewish forces of poetry and of prophecy are
exhausted in the effort to portray God's majesty.
All of the old prophet's knowledge of the world, all of his
mystic notions of sidereal government, are used in the effort to
glorify his Creator.
"Hast thou commanded the morning since thy days?
"Canst thou send lightnings, that they may go and say unto
thee, Here we are?
"Canst thou bind the unicorn with his band in the furrow?
"Gavest thou the goodly wings unto the peacocks?
"Canst thou draw out leviathan with an hook?
"Will he make many supplications unto thee? Will he speak
soft words unto thee?
"Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast
thou seen the treasures of the hail?"
Thus through chapters of greatest beauty the primitive mind seeks
to portray for the benefit of other primitive minds the
omnipotence of the world's Ruler. ----
What hope has man of conceiving, even approximately, the great
law-giving Force that rules the universe? Shall we ever do more
than attribute to Him those qualities which our own pygmy minds
admire? Shall we forever conceive Him as a glorified
"individual"?
We believe that in the Book of Job there is suggested the method
of studying God that alone can aid us to a better, higher
conception.
The study of God must be prosecuted through the study of
astronomy, and this the old prophet foreshadows clearly:
"Canst thou bind the sweet influences of Pleiades, or loose
the bands of Orion?
"Canst thou bring forth Mazzaroth in his season? or canst
thou guide Arcturus with his sons?"
Long years ago children were taught to admire a god who created a
leviathan, a unicorn, and "Behemoth."
Children of the future will be told:
You live on a globe twenty-five thousand miles round. It travels
ceaselessly through space at a speed of eighteen miles a second.
Compared to the huge sun that lights and gives us life, our earth
is but a pinhead, and the sun itself is but one tiny dot in the
ocean of space. Through that space the sun rushes on an errand
unknown, carrying us with it.
Everything moves, revolves, rushes ceaselessly, yet a balance
registering the one-thousandth part of a grain is not adjusted as
nicely as these huge behemoths of limitless space. Laplace shows
positive proof that the earth, travelling eighteen miles per
second, has not changed the period of its rotation by the
hundredth part of a second in two thousand years.
The mind of the future, imbued with respect for the Force that
controls, conducts and makes the laws for the universe, will
attain more nearly to a conception of God. But a study of God
will remain man's chief and constant effort while he lives here.
That study is never-ending.
THE FASCINATING PROBLEM OF IMMORTALITY
(If you read this you will probably feel that you have wasted
time.)
If you travel back far enough you can see in your mind's eye a
primitive man with long, red hair, shivering in some icy pool.
He has taken refuge there from a pursuing bear or other foe. He
sees that he must die of cold or of the bear's teeth. His dark
mind--product of a brain primitive and poor in
convolutions--contemplates vaguely the prospect ahead of him. He
hopes that after death he may through some mysterious kindness be
permitted to meet again the red-haired women and the wolfish cave
children left behind.
There, in the cave man's mind, is the first craving for
immortality. Born in that poor brain long centuries ago, it has
steadily grown stronger with man's mental development. ----
No man looks at death without looking beyond it. None but has a
craving for a future life, with consciousness of his personality
AND WITH RECOLLECTION OF FRIENDS, FACES AND DEEDS HERE.
Say to a man, "You shall be immortal, but you shall not know that
you are you." He will not give you thanks for such immortality.
So strong is man's craving for personal, individual immortality
that hell with its fires would be preferred by many to
annihilation. The strongest argument against immortality--weak
and ignorant at best--is but a frantic attempt of the mind to
prove negatively the existence of what it covets.
Fortunately for human happiness in general, FAITH, covers the
requirements of millions. They live and die contented, the
instinct within them fortified by the teachings of a faith not to
be questioned. ----
But what of the men and women who ask for evidence, or at least
for plausible argument, proving the reasonableness of
immortality? What can be said to please them?
Not much, alas! Probably because we are still so undeveloped
that it would be, for many reasons, unsafe to let us know how
great a future is before us. Strongest in hope is the
argument of Charles Fourier, based on what he declared to be
a natural law.
"Attractions are proportionate to destinies."
By this Fourier meant that a universal longing among human
beings was certain proof that their ultimate destiny involved
the fulfilment of the longing. The little girl fondling a doll
foretells maternity. The hectoring boy foretells the soldier's
career. No universal attraction, save with a destiny
proportionate. ----
The human race since it began to think and believe has thought of
and believed in immortality. The half wise declare that belief
in immortality and a spirit world came to savage peoples through
dreams, that it has been kept alive through superstition and the
power of religion. Trivial, certainly, is such an explanation of
a phenomenon as wide as mankind's existence. ----
A very consoling fact for the doubter is this. The strongest
minds born on the earth have almost invariably, at some stage
of development, rejected belief in immortality--only to return
to the belief, or at least to the HOPE, with fuller age and riper
wisdom. That no great mind has seen any positive argument
against the hope of immortality is certainly comforting to all
of us. Intelligence can always refute improbability and
falsehood.
----
What about the nature of immortality? The Indian hopes for dogs
and hunting, the Turk for a life of which the least said the
better. The Christian, borrowing his ideas from the writings of
the old Hebrews, looks forward to what may be called a solid gold
existence--everything made of gold or of something more
expensive.
We do not think that religious docility demands implicit belief
in any of the published details of our future existence. Gold is
not comfortable; jasper would not well replace the green turf.
Is it not more reasonable to assume, since immortality is to be
ours, that it is ours now and always has been? We cannot imagine
creation of the indestructible. Is it not sensible to take
literally that most beautiful invocation: "Thy kingdom come ON
EARTH as it is in heaven"?
We know that heaven cannot be above us or hell below; because as
we whirl round in each twenty-four hour period those abodes would
have to whirl also--quite unreasonable. ----
This earth would make a very good heaven--properly improved and
managed. Wipe out human selfishness, and the Sahara and other
deserts. Establish universal philanthropy, regulate the climate,
confine human manual labor to the pushing of an electric
button--all quite possible--and you have the sort of heaven that
man would select if left to choose.
Why should we not come back here again and again, taking varying
human forms, doing our duty well or badly each time
according to our start in life, and finally enjoying perfect
terrestrial happiness here as a finished race of immortal
beings--immortal in the sense of being indestructible and of
possessing the gift of perpetual reincarnation? ----
Now, this earthly reincarnation idea is what we have been driving
at since the beginning of this particular article. What is the
argument against prior and subsequent existence here? It is
this:
"If I am to live here again, I must have lived here before. If I
have lived here before I do not know it, and I do not look
forward with pleasure to future existence here in which I shall
not know myself."
This is a reasonable objection, certainly. Reincarnation without
consciousness of former existences would miss half the fun. ----
But it is possible to be in too much of a hurry. Let us suppose
that as yet we are not sufficiently developed to carry from
one existence to another the memory of former existence. Suppose
the time is to come when we shall suddenly advance as far beyond
this intellectual stage as this stage of intellect is beyond that
of the Bushman. Is it not conceivable that we may suddenly be
enabled to recall all former existences and to remember all the
various happenings of our former lives? May we not say, "There
is Mrs. Jones. I was married to her six million years ago, and
we quarrelled"? It seems quite hopeable.
You cannot deny that it is possible. For instance: You now
lead a continuous existence. You know that you were alive three
days ago and you remember what you did then. But a baby four
weeks old does NOT know that he was alive three days ago and he
does not know what he did then. He has not reached a stage where
his mind can grasp even the fact of continuous existence. We may
not have reached a stage enabling us to grasp continuous
reincarnation.
Think of this, and see if you cannot get some comfort, or at
least some amusing speculation out of it. ----
Science admits and thinks it proves that the inorganic atom of
matter is indestructible--that it persists forever. Why should
we not admit--and ultimately prove--that the atom of organic
force called a soul is indestructible and exists forever?
Every atom of matter, every particle of force, existing in the
visible universe will continue to exist billions of centuries
after the universe shall have melted and lost its present shape.
The nail on your finger will exist as separate atoms when the
Milky Way shall have faded from the heavens. How does that
strike you for immortality?
We predict that the mysterious force-atom called your soul will
exist AND KNOW ITSELF AND ITS FRIENDS ten thousand billions of
centuries from now and be as young as ever.
DISCONTENT THE MOTIVE POWER OF PROGRESS
At first the baby lies fiat on his back, eyes staring up at the
ceiling.
By and by he gets tired of lying on his back. DISCONTENT with
his condition makes him wriggle and wriggle. At last he succeeds
in turning over.
If he were contented then, there would be no men on earth--only
huge babies. But DISCONTENT again seizes him, and through
discontent he learns to crawl.
Crawling--travelling on hands and knees--satisfied lower forms of
animal life. It used to satisfy us, in the old days of early
evolutionary stages.
But the human infant--thanks to inborn cravings--is DISCONTENTED
with crawling. With much trouble and risk and many feeble
totterings, he learns to walk erect. He gets up into a position
that takes his eyes off the ground. He is able to look at the
sun and stars and takes the position of a man. DISCONTENT is his
mainspring at every stage. ----
What discontent does in the limited life of a child, it does on a
much larger scale in the life of a man--and on a scale still
larger in the life of a race.
You can always tell when a man has reached the limit of his
possible development. He ceases to be discontented--or at least
to show discontent actively.
Contentment, apathy, are signs of decadence and of a career ended
in either a man or a nation.
If a baby lies still, no longer wiggling or trying to swallow his
toe, you may be sure that he is seriously ill. The nation that
no longer wiggles is in a condition as serious as that of the
motionless infant. ----
The man or newspaper which imparts dissatisfaction--wise
discontent to a nation or to individuals, gives them the motive
power that brings improvement.
Ruskin as a young man declared that his one hope in life was to
arouse "some dissatisfaction."
The constant aim of men in talking to each other, in writing for
newspapers, even in writing novels, should be to arouse
discontent.
In this column, as our readers will have noticed, the constant
aim is to make the great crowd dissatisfied.
Only through discontent can changes come and are there not causes
enough for discontent and need enough for changes?
A majority of the people half educated, and tens of thousands
half fed.
Children run over daily because they have no playground but the
gutter.
Men of noble aspirations kept down by hard work and poverty.
Children left locked up alone all day while their mothers work
for a pittance.
Men, uncertain of their future and of their children's future,
engage in a constant struggle for wealth that is not needed--a
struggle that develops in the end a passion as useless as it is
degrading.
Unless you believe that the world is perfect because YOU happen
to have enough to eat and to wear, you should be discontented.
You should remember that the world's achievements and great
changes have all come from discontent, and you should be, in as
many ways as possible, a breeder of discontent among the human
beings around you.
THE AUTOMOBILE WILL MAKE US MORE HUMAN
One of the commonest and most disagreeable sights in a big city
is that of a strong, brutal human being beating a weak and
overworked horse because it refuses to do what it cannot do.
Brutality inflicted upon horses is atrocious. But the bad effect
of such unkind treatment of animals on HUMAN CHARACTER is far
more serious than the actual physical suffering inflicted. ----
The perfection of the automobile will do much to improve human
beings by taking away from their control and from brutal coercion
submissive animals.
Everybody knows that the moral standard is raised immediately in
a country when slavery is abolished.
In America we have abolished the slavery of human beings, but we
still adhere to horse slavery, accompanied by all the worst forms
of the old negro slavery. The faithful slave may be beaten and
driven to death. The driver MUST BE BRUTALIZED.
Every day, on every street, you may see stupid, muscular boys and
men jerking with all their might on the tender mouths of poor
horses, only too willing to do their best.
This brutal indifference to the sufferings of animals makes us
brutal and indifferent in other directions.
With the advent of the automobile and the disappearance of horses
from our cities, horse slavery will be abolished and men,
compelled to use their brains in dealing with machinery, will
soon become more nearly human than they are at present. The
practical abolition of the street-car horse is one great step in
advance.
The abolition of the truck horse, carriage horse, cab horse, soon
to come, will complete the dream of those modern and highly
deserving abolitionists, the automobile inventors and
manufacturers.
LET US BE THANKFUL
Thanksgiving Day, November 27, 1902.
Let us be thankful first of all for one great right:
The right, when dissatisfied, to SAY that we are dissatisfied,
and to try to make things better.
Let us be thankful that every man--with few exceptions--has a
holiday to-day.
However bad our national affairs may seem, let us be thankful
they are no worse. And above all let us be thankful that we have
the power and the constitutional right to change things, just as
soon as we become wise enough to use our ballots. ----
Let us be devoutly thankful for the PUBLIC SCHOOLS, for the fact
that every child is taught to read and encouraged to think. The
nation now declares that a child has a right to food for the
mind, as long as the child behaves properly. We are not so far
from the day when human decency will declare that every child and
every human being has a right to food for the BODY also, as long
as they behave, and are ready for honest work. Let us be
thankful for the constantly growing recognition of human rights.
The workingmen of America are better paid than they have ever
been before. More of them than ever are at work, and the unions
which protect them are more powerful than ever--let us be
thankful for these facts. The whole nation prospers when the
workers of the nation are busy and well paid.
Science has been, and is, making wonderful progress, explaining
for us daily the problems of the universe. Every man must be
thankful that highly specialized brains are constantly at work
piling up knowledge for him.
As a nation we are too big to fear successful attack, and we are,
it is to be hoped, too sensible to seek trouble with others. Let
us be thankful that all things point to continued national,
mental development on peaceful lines, free from the horrible
wholesale murders, called war, that have bled and weakened all
people through the ages. ----
Each of us individually has reason for thankfulness.
If you can feel that you are honestly trying to do your duty,
that is much to be thankful for.
If you are dissatisfied with yourself, you should be thankful for
the power of self-condemnation-- and thankful especially that you
have long and blessed TIME ahead of you to make up for your
mistakes and improve your record.
We live in a wonderful age--wonderful in the fact that life and
liberty are fairly secure; wonderful in freedom of conscience.
You can believe in Heaven, Hades, Christian Science, or in
nothing at all--and as long as you do not interfere with others,
no one can imprison you, or question, or burn you at the stake.
----
We should all be especially thankful for the steady awakening of
the national mind. We all pursue wealth--and doubtless
circumstances compel us to pay too much attention to that line of
effort. But we are all THINKING also. There are a thousand
times more thinking, reading men and women to-day in America
alone than lived on earth half a century ago. Love of knowledge
is spreading, and with love of knowledge, love of justice and a
sense of fairness will always be found.
Our material prosperity is great. But it is out- balanced by our
mental prosperity. We are becoming a nation of THINKING men and
women, and since that means real development, we have all reason
to be thankful.
THE HARM THAT IS DONE BY OUR FRIENDS
Thought lives through the ages, flies about over the earth, and
goes on visiting fresh minds, after the mind that gave it birth
has gone back to dust and nothingness.
An Italian wrote words to this effect:
"Man is commanded to forgive his enemies. Nowhere is imposed on
him the far more difficult task of forgiving his friends."
Francis Bacon, the philosopher, read in England the words of the
Italian and quoted them.
Vincent W. Byars, a very able thinking man of St. Louis, read
Bacon's quotation out there, and now, coming to New York, he says
to this writer:
"Why don't you make an editorial on that old Italian saying
quoted by Bacon?"
Italy--England--St. Louis--New York--thus the idea has hopped
about, until to-day you get it in this column. A million of you
read it, or at least glance at it; and so, if the idea has any
value, it will go hopping on all over the earth's surface long
after the steel press that prints this paper shall have crumbled
away. ----
How little your ENEMIES can hurt you! How little harm they do,
even when they try! You are warned against them and on your
guard. The world knows they are your enemies, and discredits
what they say.
It is quite easy to forgive our enemies, for they do us
comparatively little harm.
But to forgive our friends would be hard indeed if we could
realize how much harm they do us. ----
THE DRUNKARD'S FRIENDS
Who makes the drunkard? His enemies? No. The drunkard is made
by his friends.
When it is known that he is inclined to drink no enemy is so
vicious as to lead him on. No enemy slaps him on the back and
begs him to take "just another drink." No enemy laughs down his
poor, feeble attempts at reform. No enemy tells him that it will
not hurt him "just this time," and that he really must not refuse
to be a good fellow "just for once."
The drunkard is MADE a drunkard, is pushed into the last depths
of drunkenness, by his friends.
And it is his friends who kick him and leave him and despise him
when he has sunk into the mire.
Did ever the drunkard's enemy hurt him as much as the friend has
hurt him? ----
AMBITION KILLED BY FRIENDS
A young man starts out to succeed in life. His enemy may lie
about him, may call him worthless. He may think he is hurting
him. If there is anything in the young man, the enemy's lies and
discouraging words only spur him on to greater effort. They do
him good.
It is the friend that ruins the young man by false, injudicious,
unearned praise.
As artist, poet, writer, clerk, or in any other effort, the young
man begins his work.
It is his friends who tell him that he is a splendid success,
when he needs to be told that, at best, he has some slight chance
of success, and that everything depends on desperate effort.
Look at the young, conceited fool who, instead of struggling on,
rails at the world, feels that he is not appreciated. He is a
failure--a sad, foolish failure. He has been made a failure, not
by the attacks of his enemies, but by the more dangerous praise
of his friends. ----
The lonely and friendless often succeed amazingly. "Multum
incola fuit anima mea" ("My spirit hath been much alone") said
the great Bacon. His mind fed on loneliness, on failure, and
even on disgrace.
How much success is due to freedom from that harm which
friendship does?
The reader can finish this editorial for himself with hundreds of
other arguments. This is enough for a sample.
SHALL WE TAME AND CHAIN THE INVISIBLE MICROBE AS WE NOW CHAIN
NIAGARA?
When Solomon was gathering his materials to build the Temple,
his, large cedar trunks from Lebanon and his costly materials
from everywhere, he used oxen, mules, camels.
With all his wisdom, he little dreamed that the day would come
when his descendants, instead of using mules and huge beasts of
burden, would heat water and with steam develop a force
sufficient to tear his Temple from its foundation.
Still less did he dream that steam would eventually be
superseded, as clumsy and primitive, by the invisible force of
electricity.
When the thunder roared, the lightning flashed and his conscience
troubled him, Solomon, turning away from his thousand wives and
his numerous other doubtful associates, put his head under the
richly embroidered pillow, worked, perhaps, by Sheba's own fair
hands--it did not enter his mind that that lightning could be
tamed and put to work.
Man has been gradually controlling and employing the various
animals on the earth's surface. He taught the elephant to haul
wood and water and to fight his battles. He trained the horse,
the dog. He even taught falcons to bring him back birds from
beyond the clouds, and otters to catch fish in the bottom of
lakes and rivers.
Gradually he has made himself independent of his animal partners.
The rifle made the falcon useless; steam destroyed the importance
of the horse and the ox.
But apparently we have only begun using animal life. We must run
the whole gamut of the marvels of creation before conquering
conditions on this earth. ----
We used to train the biggest dogs to kill wolves. The Government
of the United States is now breeding darning-needles to kill
mosquitoes.
A certain kind of wasp, with a black and white striped body,
spends his time killing house-flies, and this creature could be
bred and used to destroy the disease-spreading pests.
Even the invisible insect life can be made most useful to man and
to his health.
The latest plan for disposing of city sewage involves the
cultivation of microbes, to be employed as disinfectors.
Several towns in Illinois and in Wisconsin have established
plants for the purification of sewage by means of microbe life.
The collections of organisms invisible to the naked eye are to be
kept in great antiseptic tanks, and employed in the purification
of the city 's refuse.
Mosquitoes will ultimately be destroyed, undoubtedly, by breeding
among them smaller creatures fatal to their existence.
Man, in his conquest and use of animal life, will run the gamut,
from the biggest elephant, employed as a public executioner in
India, to the invisible microbe, doing a work ten thousand times
more important all over the globe.
These infinitesimal microbes, bred and controlled by science,
will do regularly and methodically the work which buzzards and
vultures have done on land, which sharks and dogfish have done at
sea, throughout endless centuries.
To the marvellous workings of nature we cannot possibly give too
much thought or too great admiration. Gardens are filled with
beautiful flowers, and fields are fertile to-day because hundreds
of years ago sea birds were devouring the carcasses of dead fish,
acting as nature's scavengers, and building up the great guano
fields of South America.
There is a Peruvian millionaire in his big yacht, and there is a
rose in full bloom--the millionaire's money, the beauty of the
rose, come from those birds that picked up the dead fish five
hundred years ago.
It's an interesting world.
THE ELEPHANT THAT WILL NOT MOVE HAS BETTER EXCUSES THAN WE HAVE
FOR FOLLY DISPLAYED
This is an editorial which we shall merely suggest, and which
each reader will write out for himself.
In the Zoological Garden of New York a poor elephant has stood in
chains for years. The animal was thought to be vicious, and was
kept fastened tightly to one spot, that it might have no leeway
to do damage.
A short time ago its keeper became convinced that the elephant
would do no harm and might safely be unchained. The chains were
taken off, and the keeper thought with satisfaction that the poor
beast would now enjoy freedom and be made happy by the
possibility of moving freely about its large inclosure.
The elephant did not move. The chains were gone, it was no
longer tied, but it stood, and it still stands, in just the same
spot.
The habit of slavery, of monotony, had become too strong. The
elephant, though free, stands still, sadly swaying its heavy
head, ignorant of the freedom that has come to it.
Men and women and children who see the elephant, and other men
who write paragraphs for the newspapers, dilate on the poor
animal's "stupidity."
"The elephant has been called the most intelligent of animals,"
says one writer, "but this elephant, that doesn't know when the
chains are off, seems to prove that the elephant can be a good
deal of a fool."
How easy it is for us human beings to see the faults in others,
our fellows, and the animals below us.
But which one of us can truly say that he is not in exactly the
same position as that poor elephant, fixed to one spot by the
chains of long ago?
Are we not still standing as a race just as we stood years and
centuries ago, ignorant of the freedom that has come to us?
Thousands of splendid men have worked, lived and died to free us
from superstition, from credulity, from ignorance, yet still we
stand in the same place, and fail to appreciate the freedom that
is ours. ----
Millions of us, tied down by foolish superstition, are like that
elephant--the chains are off, but we stand still.
The road to peace, happiness and universal progress has been
shown us in the teachings of great leaders, but we still stand in
the same old place, fighting, hating, cheating, suspecting,
harming one another.
Here and there there is a little progress; gradually we begin to
appreciate and enjoy the freedom that has been given to us with
the striking away of old mental chains. The process is slow.
Look into your own mind. Do you take advantage of all the
possibilities that are before you? Do you use your brain to
control your existence, acts and habits for your own benefit and
the benefit of others?
If not, you ought to sympathize with this poor elephant, and
realize that as your brain exceeds his in bulk proportionately,
so do you exceed him in the folly that misses opportunity.
LET US BE THANKFUL
You get tired of reading editorials in which one man, spouting
from his editorial pulpit, lays down the law for you--without
giving you a chance to reply or contradict.
So let us write this editorial together.
There you sit--the reader--in your street car, or perhaps
clinging to a strap, and here we sit, impersonal editorial
creature, thinking over thankfulness,
Thanksgiving Day, and what reasons we have for feeling thankful.
Let us talk as few platitudes as possible, and try to get at a
few of the inside workings of human life. ----
You look across the car and hate the fat man who lounges and
spreads his feet around so boorishly.
LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE SO READILY PERCEIVE THE SHORTCOMINGS
OF OTHERS.
Much comfort is derived from others' failings. In the quiet
evenings we talk of our neighbors' weaknesses and we enjoy them.
By contrast we admire ourselves.
LET US BE THANKFUL THAT WE NEVER APPRECIATE OUR OWN LIMITATIONS.
Each man's children are beautiful and promising in his view.
He cannot see the hopeless construction of their foreheads, nor
can he read in their eyes the sad absence of "speculation."
Let us be thankful for that. The future depends on the good care
awarded to almost worthless specimens now. ----
FOR THE UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF THANKFULNESS, LET BE DEEPLY
THANKFUL.
The thick-lipped negro on the Congo finds a dead hippopotamus,
half eaten by wild beasts, and in his woolly brain a dim, misty
feeling of THANKFULNESS is born.
The Tartar bandit surprises mild Chinese conducting a tea caravan
across the stony desert. He murders the mild Celestials and
feels THANKFUL as he contemplates the booty.
A great Trust manager finds ways to add some millions to those
which he already has and does not need. In THANKFUL mood he
gives two millions or three to education.
As inborn, as instinctive as the beating of the heart in the
human being is THANKFULNESS.
Thankfulness is the unconscious acknowledgment of a Higher Power.
It is the indestructible evidence of man's permanent belief in
just government of the universe.
It is the most hopeful, the most promising feature of man's
character.
For THANKFULNESS itself we should be thankful. ----
If you want to succeed, cultivate a feeling of hopeful
thankfulness.
Hopefulness, thankfulness and success are as near akin as light,
heat and motion--the same force underlies, makes up the first
trio, as it does the second.
If you find it hard to be thankful, read a little of history, and
thankfulness will come. Thousands of millions of men have lived
and suffered to make your existence here at least bearable. You
may not be satisfied, but you have comforts that were not dreamed
of by the luckiest a few centuries back. You think the
prosperous have too many privileges.
Perhaps they have. But when your great-grandfather was a young
man a nobleman could order his lackeys to seize Voltaire the
greatest mind in Europe--and beat him almost to death. Voltaire
was locked up in the Bastile for complaining.
Thanks to the eternal row that Voltaire kicked up, you can never
be treated as he was. So be thankful to Voltaire.
Be thankful to the long line of plucky men and fighters--not
forgetting Christopher Columbus--who have gone before you.
Be thankful that you are alive in an interesting age with
interesting events happening.
Be thankful also that with thankfulness you combine the feeling
of dissatisfaction, of unrest that will push you ahead and give
you cause for fresh thankfulness next year. ----
We are thankful to have you for a reader.
We are thankful for the criticisms and friendly comments that you
occasionally send.
We hope that you will enjoy your dinner to-day and not regret it
to-morrow.
WHAT WILL 999 YEARS MEAN TO THE HUMAN RACE
The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just
executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property
have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a
lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as
would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was
finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the
Egyptian Government.
These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring
vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and
splendid changes in human affairs.
The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the
imaginative mind.
They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably
primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.
These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling
slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid,
overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied,
ill-housed human beings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will
not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be
struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.
But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life
that marks the execution of these long leases.
Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other
cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.
Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the
air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far
from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.
It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable
tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly
will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the
centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of
modern city life.
Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and
Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have
grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty
million or more human beings.
Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.
But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have
died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died
in their turn.
The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens,
and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once
lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together
in horrible municipal ant-hills in the East, called cities,
before they learned how to live comfortably. ----
Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary
mania for money will have run its course.
Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves
must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse
was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned
alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the
great man who dies must leave behind him an accumulation of
millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give
him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired
that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.
It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have
seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in
our day, and which will run its course as did the military
feudalism of the Middle Ages.
What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand
years from now!
The earth will be adequately populated.
Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman
will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or
six into the world in order that two or three may live.
Competition will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent
servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically
for his government and for the people as the boy at college now
works for his college football team.
The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search
for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear
conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from
the superstition necessary to the moral control of a brutal
semi-civilization.
Human beings will have learned that the noblest thing one man can
do is to work for others.
Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the
welfare of all.
All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special
ability of the individual.
There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a
comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the
average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths
of the human race have been able to read only within the past few
years. What will a thousand years of universal education do?
----
The end of the leases of the Brooklyn Rapid Transit Company will
find many of our problems solved.
It will find, however, the real work of man just beginning. The
abstract work of the intellect, the proper organization of
society as expressed in human passions, the study of the
wonderful and beautiful universe outside of our own little
planet, will then begin with the conquest of our material
conditions.
THE AZORES--A SMALL LOST WORLD IN A UNIVERSE OF WATER
As you cross the Atlantic by the Southern route the "sighting of
the Azores" is one incident of your voyage. Just before daybreak
the ship is shaking and the passengers roused by the deep tones
of the big steam whistle.
One by one shivering forms straggle up from below, like reluctant
spirits answering a premature last call. Bare feet in slippers,
and shivering forms with overcoats over nightgowns, gradually
line the rails.
On the left there appears, apparently, a heavy, dark bank of
clouds:
"The Azores!" shouts down from the bridge your yellow-whiskered
captain, looking as cheerful and warm as though it were noon.
You watch, shiver and blink as the light grows stronger behind
the pinkish clouds in the east. The dark cloud settles into
solid land. You see it clearly. Sharply outlined against the
sky stands, forty miles long, a mammoth saw with huge teeth,
irregular, sharp. The power of old-time volcanoes made all of
that land, and those sharp saw-teeth, pointing toward the sky,
are the destroyers of long ago, cold and dead now, but telling
ominously of the power that lies hidden below.
Between you and the brightening sunrise, suspended in the "crow's
nest," half way up the mast, stands the sailor who watches the
sea for you through the night. He calls out, and ahead to the
left you see a small boat filled with human beings that seem
scarcely as big as your finger. Your ship could plough through
miles of such small boats-- but out there in the ocean, just as
well as inside the biggest court-house, LAW rules, and the big
ship must turn out for the small fishing boat.
You realize the power and beauty of law, as our governor and
sustainer. You see that laws of little men reach out two
thousand miles into the sea. You think of the laws of the
universe that stretch across the immeasurable distances of time
and space, protecting ALL, and insuring ultimate fulfilment
of the destinies of all the worlds.
As those fishermen of the Azores work safely, under full
protection, in their little lost corner of the great ocean, so
we, in our little world, our little insignificant corner of
space, work out our tiny problems safely under the splendid
protection of Divine Law and wisdom sent to us from some far- off
point of which we know nothing.
The light of the rising sun brings out from shore many other
small boats, each with its load of men who wave their arms to the
steamship and cheer against the sound of the waves and wind. To
them that ship is like the fast express that passes the country
railroad station, or the comet that whirls round our sun and off
again.
Those fishermen feel that THEY are the REAL world; the steamship
and outside creation are only half imagined, interesting
phenomena. You look down from the deck and the fishermen seem
unreal little ornaments of your European excursion. And so the
two sets of human beings go their ways--to each nothing is
important, save that which each is doing.
There are great planets and suns that roll past us across this
cosmic ocean of ether. Our pathetic little round earth looks to
them as that fishing-boat of the Azores looks to you. And WE
think of those great interstellar travellers as the fisherman in
his little boat thinks of the ocean liner--the great star to us
is merely an interesting feature of OUR sky. And we actually
wonder whether there is any thought on that big, distant sun; any
intelligence on the vast ship that ploughs the ocean of limitless
space. ----
The high ridge of volcanic peaks and the others near it are made
fertile and green by soil gradually developed through the
centuries by seeds brought across the ocean by winds and birds.
The tops of the mountains are black lava. Lakes of black water
fill some of the quiet craters. Only, here and there, the rising
sulphur smoke from rocky fissures tells of heat and power
smouldering.
The last great eruption of the volcanoes occurred a little more
than two hundred years ago--so the inhabitants laugh if you speak
of danger. They forget that two hundred years in the earth's
life is as two minutes in the life of a man--and that what a man
did two minutes since he may do again.
Fences are built across the fields of thin soil that cover the
lava. Each inch of that land thrown up by fire "belongs" to some
man. White houses stand at the edges of deep lava canyons
running from the mountain tops to the sea's edge canyons made by
pouring lava or by the splitting of the mountains under fearful
pressure.
Children play about the blocks of lava--and all their lives, no
matter where they may go, those children will think of that
far-off island as the only real home, and of black lava blocks as
the only REAL kind of stone.
From your passing boat you cannot see these children. Their
little lives, lost in the far-off sea, seem as unimportant as the
lives of the fish that swim below you.
But some child playing there to-day may be like that other island
child, Napoleon, and live to make the rest of the world talk
about the island that bred him. Or, better still, some one of
those children, with a brain made powerful by solitude and noble
thought, may have the idea that shall help us all, teach us more
and more to think kindly of each other and help each other,
instead of passing each other coldly and indifferently as the big
ship passes the little, far-off island.
NO NAPOLEONIC CHESS PLAYER ON AN AIR CUSHION
ZANGWILL'S IDEA IS FALSE--WHY CHESS PLAYING STUNTS GENIUS
Mr. Zangwill's keen intellect, straining hard for striking
pictures and word effects, sees falsely the great general of the
future. He says:
"The Napoleon of the future will be an epileptic chess player,
carried about the field of battle on an air cushion."
In this condensed, picturesque fashion Mr. Zangwill expresses
sententiously a number of mistaken ideas. He thinks that the
game of war is like the game of chess, and that the future world
conqueror will be a great chess player, using men as pawns and
the world as his chess-board.
He observes the curious and interesting historical fact that of
the world's great conquerors many, including the two greatest,
Napoleon and Alexander, were afflicted with that mysterious
disease, epilepsy. He concludes that the great general of the
future will probably be a confirmed epileptic.
The ability of a fighting man to-day resides largely, of course,
in the brain. The general's MUSCLES no longer count as a
fighting factor. His battles are won or lost inside of his
SKULL. Mr. Zangwill concludes that the future great general will
have a mind developed to an abnormal extent at the expense of the
body--he sees in the future world conqueror an abnormal creature,
a giant brain perched on a miserable, wasted body, so feeble and
delicate that it must be carried about the field of battle on an
air cushion to prevent shocks. ----
The quotation from Zangwill which we print above contains only
twenty-one words. Rarely have so many errors, so many
fundamental yet plausible errors, been crowded into so little
space.
The Napoleon of the future, the great conqueror, will NOT be a
chess player. The real Napoleon whom we know had no love for
chess or any other waste of time, or any other form of self-
indulgence.
Chess is no game for a Napoleon, or for any other man who wants
to embody real accomplishment in the story of his life.
CHESS IS A WEAK GAME, FOR IT ADMITS ALL KINDS OF RULES AND ALL
KINDS OF FOREORDAINED IMPOSSIBILITIES.
The man who makes the world's great success will not be bound by
rules. The great men of the world are great because they refuse
to ADMIT impossibilities.
The man who plays chess has two knights, and these knights he can
only send two squares in one direction and one square in another,
or one square in one direction and two squares in the other. His
two bishops can only move diagonally across the board, one on the
white and one on the black. His castles lumber along on straight
lines. His king cannot be touched or taken, and the game ends
when the king is in fatal danger. The queen, in the dull game we
call chess, can do almost anything.
But Napoleon was really a great man, and the game of life that he
played was very different from the chess game.
When the king was in hopeless danger, Napoleon's game had just
begun. Others before him had looked upon kings on the board of
life as the chess player looks upon the wooden or ivory king
before him.
But to Napoleon kings were pawns, to be moved around and made
ridiculous. When he felt like it, he made pawns into kings--the
descendant of one of his pawn-kings reigns to-day in Sweden.
Napoleon's game deprived the queen of all power--she was less
than a pawn. HIS game sent the bishops hopping back and forth,
diagonally or at right angles, as he saw fit. He created knights
to his heart's content, and he taught them to move as he wanted.
Napoleon was great because there was nothing of the chess player
about him. He did not admit of regular, foreordained moves on
the chess-board or on the board of life. HE REFUSED TO CONSIDER
ANYTHING IMPOSSIBLE UNTIL HE HAD TRIED IT. He tells us himself
that he deserved credit for crossing the Alps, not that he
accomplished a difficult feat, but because he refused to believe
those who declared the feat impossible.
If anybody said "Check" to Napoleon, he kicked over the
chess-board and began a new game of his own--that was what
surprised the poor, dull old Austrian generals in Italy.
No; the real great man is no chess player, he has no chess
player's mind. And do you, Mr. Reader, waste no time at chess,
if you have any idea of being WORTH WHILE in a big or a little
way. ----
The Napoleon of the future will be no epileptic. That terrible
disease has afflicted many of the noblest intellects, and it is
undoubtedly a disease brought on, or at least intensified, by
great intellectual activity and a lack of co-ordination between
the mental and physical operations of the body. But some great
men have been great, not because of that terrible disease, but in
spite of it. Science will conquer that trouble, as it has
conquered others, and the scientist to do this work will be,
himself, one of the world's great men. ----
The Napoleon of the future will be no huge-brained dwarf, with
feeble body, carried on an air cushion.
It is true that many great men of to-day are relatively small in
body. The gigantic muscle, thick legs, broad shoulders and hairy
chests of the successful Viking have nothing to do with modern
achievement.
But it is also true that to-day, as always, the healthy mind
lives in a healthy body, and lives ON a healthy body.
As well expect to find the most perfect fruit on a withered,
half-dead tree, as to find the most able brain in a withered,
half-dead body. The blood is the life of the brain, and unless a
HEALTHY body supplies HEALTHY blood the brain's chance is small.
Napoleon, it's true, was at one time a physical wreck--BUT DON'T
FORGET THAT HIS GREATNESS WAS ALSO A WRECK AT THAT TIME.
The GREAT Napoleon operated in a body tireless and powerful
enough to remain thirty consecutive hours on horseback. It was a
body so powerful that criminal neglect and stupid ignorance of
the laws of health were powerless against it for many years.
The Napoleon that went to St. Helena dwelt in a worn-out body, a
fat, degenerate perversion of the Napoleon that conquered the
world.
The great conqueror of the future, ladies and gentlemen, will be
a splendidly original brain, working through a perfectly
developed body, AND WORKING FOR THE MASS OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THEIR
FARE, NOT FOR THEIR CONQUEST AND OPPRESSION.
All of which is respectfully submitted to our readers for
discussion and criticism.
A GIRL'S FACE IN THE GASLIGHT AND AN IMPORTANT PART OF THE
WORLD'S WORK
On a corner of Rector street, down near the river, a loud drum
was beating. A guitar and a tambourine competed shrilly with the
drum's dull booming. Slowly a careless crowd gathered round the
Salvation Army workers.
There were bare-headed women, little girls holding little babies
in their arms, sailors drunk, and one or two sober, 'longshoremen
pleased with the sound of the drum, and a few of the thin, hungry
faces that disturb our well-fed happiness.
The man beat his drum, standing erect and proud in his army
uniform.
The two thin, nervous young women played on guitar and tambourine
with all their force, striving to gather the crowd whom they
hoped to make better men and women.
Thirty or forty people gathered--glad to accept any noise and
excitement in their dull lives.
The music stopped, and a young girl stepped to the centre of the
circle.
She was frightened. Her voice was weak at first. Gradually her
thin, pale face grew animated.
Her blue eyes dilated. In dull, routine way, doing her best,
earning respectful silence from the night crowd, she told her
story:
"I was bad. I tried to be good. But I couldn't do it with my
own strength. I asked God to save me. He did save me. He will
save you, if you will ask Him."
She spoke with a strong German accent. With all her deep,
earnest soul, with all her poor, limited mental force, she longed
to help the men and women around. As she spoke she bent her head
farther and farther back, until her eyes looked up to the sky.
There, with perfect faith, she saw the God whose work she was
humbly doing in the muddy streets and flickering gaslight of the
riverside.
While she could control her voice and her deep emotion she talked
on her one theme--the power of God to help the helpless. But she
BELIEVED, and she FELT what she said. Soon the tears ran over
from her upturned eyes, and she could speak no more.
Then a man began--thickset, earnest, with a strong Scotch accent.
He talked to the men about him in a rough way that appealed to
them. ----
As the crowd stood listening many passed. A few were
contemptuous; the majority were indifferent.
If you see these workers you ask perhaps:
"What good do they do?"
That is the question that may be asked of every man that ever
lived, and only One can answer it.
The thin, white-faced girl, playing, singing and PREACHING in the
dirty street, does this:
She touches the heart of a half-drunken man. Turning from the
saloon door he goes home, and takes to his wife and children as
much of his wages as is left, a feeling of repentance, good
resolutions.
Her tears are answered by the tears of miserable girls and women
who sink back into the shadow as they watch her pure face.
Through them she helps to undo the horrible, soul-destroying work
of brutal civilization. ----
Mysteriously, diversely, the work of the world is done.
The storm, endless in its power, washes down the mountain-tops to
fertilize the valley.
The tiny earthworm works in darkness, crumbling up its little
patch of earth to make it fit food for plants.
Each does its work.
The mighty intellect with cyclonic force gives to mankind grand,
general views of cosmic grandeur, and introduces to minds
prepared the "eternal silences," and the vast serene fields of
divine law.
THE "CRIMINAL" CLASS
DID THIS VIEW OF IT EVER OCCUR TO YOU?
Much interest just now in CRIMINALS.
Much horror aroused by depravity.
Many plans more or less appropriate for making the air pure.
Many good men, politicians, women and bishops, who spent the
Summer at the seaside willing now to spend a few days wiping
"CRIME" off the earth. ----
What is CRIME? Who are the criminals? Who makes the criminals?
Do criminals viciously and voluntarily arise among us, eager to
lead hunted lives, eager to be jailed at intervals, eager to
crawl in the dark, dodge policemen, work in stripes and die in
shame? Hardly.
Will you kindly and patiently follow the lives, quickly sketched,
of a boy and a girl?
THE GIRL
Born poor, born in hard luck, her father, or mother, or both,
victims of long hours, poor fare, bad air and little leisure.
As a baby she struggles against fate and manages to live while
three or four little brothers and sisters die and go back to kind
earth.
She crawls around the halls of a tenement, a good deal in the
way. She is hunted here and chased there.
She is cold in Winter, ill-fed in Summer, never well cared for.
She gets a little so-called education. Ill-dressed and ashamed
beside the other children, she is glad to escape the education.
No one at home can help her on. No one away from home cares
about her.
She grows up white, sickly, like a potato sprouting in a cellar.
At the corner of a fine street she sees the carriages passing
with other girls in warm furs, or in fine, cool Summer dresses.
With a poor shawl around her and with heels run down she peers in
at the restaurant window, to see other women leading lives very
different from hers.
Steadily she has impressed upon her the fact, absolutely
undeniable, that as the world is organized there is no especial
place for her--certainly no comfort for her.
She finds work, perhaps. Hours as long as the daylight.
Ten minutes late--half a day's fine.
At the end of the day aching feet, aching back, system ill-fed,
not enough earned to live upon honestly--and that prospect
stretches ahead farther than her poor eyes can see.
"What's the charge, officer?"
"Disorderly conduct, Your Honor."
There's the criminal, good men, politicians, women and bishops,
that you are hunting so ardently.
THE BOY
Same story, practically.
He plays on the tenement staircase--cuffed off the staircase.
He plays ball in the street--cuffed, if caught by the policeman.
He swings on the area railing, trying to exercise his stunted
muscles--cuffed again.
In burning July, with shirt and trousers on, he goes swimming in
the park fountain--caught and cuffed and handed over to "the
society."
A few months in a sort of semi-decent imprisonment, treated in a
fashion about equivalent to that endured by the sea turtle turned
over on its back in the market.
He escapes to begin the same life once more.
He tries for work.
"What do you know?"
"I don't know anything; nobody ever taught me."
He cannot even endure the discipline of ten hours' daily
shovelling--it takes education to instil discipline, if only the
education of the early pick and shovel.
He has not been taught anything. He has been turned loose in a
city full of temptation. He had no real start to begin with, and
no effort was ever made to repair his evil beginning. ----
"What's the charge, officer?"
"Attempted burglary; pleads guilty."
"Three years in prison, since it is his first offence."
In prison he gets an education. They teach him how to be a good
burglar and not get caught. Patiently the State boards him, and
educates him to be a first-rate criminal.
There's your first-rate criminal, Messrs. Bishops, good men,
politicians and benevolent women. ----
Dear bishops, noble women, good men and scheming politicians,
listen to this story:
In the South Sea Islands they have for contagious diseases a
horror as great as your horror of crime.
A man or woman stricken with a loathsome disease, such as
smallpox, is seized, isolated, and the individual sores of the
smallpox patient are earnestly scraped with sea shells--until the
patient dies. It hurts the patient a good deal--without ever
curing, of course--but it relieves the feelings of the outraged
good ones who wield the sea shells.
You kind-hearted creatures, hunting "crime" in great cities, are
like the South Sea Islanders in their treatment of smallpox.
You ardently wield your reforming sea shells and you scrape very
earnestly at the sores so well developed. ----
No desire here to decry your earnest efforts.
But if you ever get tired of scraping with sea shells, try
vaccination, or, better still, try to take such care of youth, to
give such chances and education to the young, as will save them
from the least profitable of all careers--CRIME. ----
Rich good men, nice bishops, comfortable, benevolent
ladies--every man and woman on Blackwell's Island, every wretched
creature living near a "red light," would gladly change places
with any of you.
Scrape away with your sea shells, but try also to give a few more
and a few better chances in youth to those whom you now hunt as
criminals in their mature years.
God creates boys and girls, anxious to live decently.
YOUR SOCIAL SYSTEM makes criminals and fills jails.
THE WONDERFUL MAGNET
HOW WILD SUPERSTITION SETTLES DOWN INTO SCIENTIFIC REALITY
Everybody knows something of the peculiarities of the magnet. As
a boy you led tiny painted ducks around the water basin, holding
a magnet in your hand, or you owned a horseshoe magnet that would
pick up nails and needles.
You know now in a general kind of way that the magnet is a very
useful as well as a somewhat mysterious thing.
The old Greeks and Romans simply knew that some remarkable iron
ore found in Lydia, near the town of Magnesia, and hence called
magnet, was capable of drawing and holding pieces of metal.
The ancients had the wildest theories concerning the magnet, just
as we have wild theories about things that are new and strange to
us to-day.
They thought that the magnet could be used in cases of sickness,
that it could attract wood and flesh, that it influenced the
human brain, causing melancholy. They believed that the power of
a magnet could be destroyed by rubbing garlic on it, and that
power brought back again by dipping the magnet in goat's blood.
They believed that a magnet could be used to detect bad conduct
in a woman; they believed that it would not attract iron in the
presence of a diamond. They believed much other nonsense quite
as ridiculous as the nonsense that we believe to-day. ----
It must have seemed a great waste of time in wise men in the old
days to discuss the magnet or think about it at all. Please
observe how the apparent nonsense of early speculation finally
ripens into actual utility, and learn to respect those who deal
as best they can with questions that seem beyond our
comprehension.
First the magnet was made actually and wonderfully useful in the
compass. Who discovered the compass nobody knows. It was
probably invented by the Chinese and brought to Europe through
the Arabs. Anyhow, some genius found out that a small needle
brought in contact with the so-called lodestone, or magnetic ore,
absorbs the qualities of the lodestone, and when placed on a
pivot will always point to the north.
In the magnet there were and there still are many mysteries. A
form of perpetual motion seems to be embodied in the principle of
magnetism. One strange fact is this, that the weight of the
metal is exactly the same before it is magnetized and after it is
magnetized.
Early students thought that the magnet pointed toward some
particular spot in the sky, perhaps some magnetic star. One
genius felt sure that there must be huge mountains of lodestone
near the North Pole. This suggestion was followed by ingenious
yarns to the effect that in the extreme North ships had to be
built with wooden nails, instead of iron nails, as the magnetic
mountains would draw the iron nails out of the ship.
After this came the more rational conception that our own earth
is a great magnet, and that the little magnet in the compass
simply obeys in pointing, the greater force of the earth magnet.
----
This editorial generalizing on the magnet is brought about by an
incident telegraphed from Vallejo, California. John Gettegg,
apprentice in the Navy Yard, had imbedded in his cheek a flying
piece of steel. To get it out would apparently have demanded a
painful and difficult surgical operation, as the piece of steel
had entered the bone. But the head electrician, Petrio, simply
placed near the wounded boy's face an electro-magnet capable of
lifting five hundred pounds, and the sharp piece of steel
instantly flew out of the cheek and attached itself to the
magnet.
So much for one proof of the value of developing what may seem at
first to be a foolish set of experiments.
In thousands of ways to-day this magnetic power is utilized.
You can buy strawberries in baskets very cheap, partly because
the baskets cost very little for labor. The man who tacks them
together uses a magnetized tack hammer. This magnetic tack
hammer picks up the tacks of its own accord, and the man drives
them in the basket as fast as he can touch the magnet to the
heads of the tacks and strike the basket.
In the great steel works where armor plate is made powerful
magnets are used to carry the hot plates from one place to
another. The magnet lifts up the hot, soft metal without denting
it or damaging it and drops it down where it is wanted. The
power which moves trolley cars through the streets is nothing in
reality but an application of the force of the magnetic
principle. ----
That the earth itself is a great magnet cannot be questioned.
And there is no doubt that each of us human beings is a compound
magnet on his own account, depending for his welfare on magnetic
force.
The millions of red corpuscles in the blood, each with its
infinitesimal particles of iron, absorb in the lungs and
distribute throughout the body the electric forces on which we
depend, and with which we do our work.
When you read of men and women dealing in a blundering kind of a
way with abstract, abstruse speculations and problems, do not
laugh at them too heartily. They are no more ridiculous than the
old Greeks who thought that a magnet could be regulated by garlic
or goat's blood. And their wild theories of to-day may settle
down into great utility centuries from now. This applies to
Christian Science, faith cures, telepathy, and the many other
speculations of the present day. There is unquestionably much
future fruit and value in many or all of them.
WHO IS INDEPENDENT? NOBODY
We all have our moments of imagining ourselves INDEPENDENT
characters. We take pride in our independence and are never as
foolish as when trying to prove how independent we are.
Every man, to begin with, is born absolutely at the mercy of his
ancestry. You have not a thing in you, and you never will have a
thing in you, that you did not inherit from some one of the
thousands and thousands of ancestors, all of whom are dimly
stored away in your complex make-up.
You may develop marvellously the faculties which they gave you.
But you ARE DEPENDENT on those who brought you into the world,
and upon those back of them.
The Kaffir, sober, industrious, honest, with all the virtues
rolled up within him, has not a fragment of one chance in ten
thousand billions of equalling the achievements of a tenth-rate
white man whose ancestral start was better. ----
After birth you start with dependence on your ancestors, and
after youth you are dependent on your education.
Facts are your tools, and you can't work without them.
If your mind has the right formation, if your brain is provided
with the deep convolutions, and good luck has supplied you with a
good education in youth, the whole thing is dependent on your
health--on your liver, your stomach, or some other part of your
internal machinery.
Very often your success is dependent on your temper and tact.
These depend on your digestion. Digestion, of course, depends on
your cook, and the cook's attention to business may depend on the
politeness of the policeman in front of the house.
You may FEEL absolutely independent and THINK you are
independent, when as a matter of fact you are miserably dependent
on the mood of the policeman who has snubbed the lady who cooks
your food.
WHEN WE BEGIN USING LAND UNDER THE OCEANS
BIG WORK AHEAD FOR MAN, KIND FRIENDS
There is a great deal of water on this earth of ours and a great
deal of land underneath it.
All the treasures of these hidden plains are simply put away for
our future use by bountiful nature, as prudent parents put money
in the savings bank for their young ones. ----
Already in Chili they are mining coal under the bed of the
Pacific Ocean, and the traveler may ride on electric cars through
solid tunnels of coal beneath the waters of the greatest ocean.
The tin mines in Wales extend far out beneath the sea.
Workers in the Calumet and Hecla mines work beneath the waters of
Lake Superior.
Oil wells are worked out beyond the edge of the Pacific Ocean.
You may see the oil derricks just off Santa Barbara's surf.
In the bay of San Francisco artesian wells, going through the
preliminary depths of salt water, bring the water of fresh
submarine springs to the surface.
But these little enterprises are but faint beginnings of the
great work that man has to do in exploiting the wealth beneath
the waters covering two-thirds of the earth's surface.
This earth will be quite a romantic abode when sub-oceanic
exploitation reaches full development, when the great gold mines
beneath the waters are indicated simply by latitude and
longitude.
Mars, with his huge canals distributing a planet's waters
scientifically, will be matched perhaps by our network of tunnels
under the water from here to Asia, and by our boring, with the
aid of cooling mediums, toward the earth's centre and bringing up
metals in a molten state.
Before he finishes with her, man will make old earth know that he
is at work "in her midst." He will make the harnessing of a tiny
Niagara or the boring of a poor little isthmus seem feeble
efforts.
WHERE YOUR BODY CAME FROM
LET IT BE SCATTERED AS IT WAS GATHERED
Did you ever think about the construction of the body which you
inhabit? Did it ever occur to you that your shoulders and hands
and chest and legs and lungs are made of contributions from
widely different parts of the earth?
Your brain, a wonderfully complex machine, the seat of thought
and of the will, is packed away in darkness in the bony skull.
The heart, working ceaselessly, pumps the blood that feeds the
brain and makes possible its work.
The eyes, with the aid of the nerves that perceive light, guide
you. The ears, with the nerves that interpret sound waves, tell
their story.
Like a central operator with a million wires leading to him, your
INDIVIDUALITY, a wonderful mystery without form, matter or name,
sits in your brain guiding the body. ----
Where did the body come from?
Part of it came from potatoes grown on Long Island, and part of
it from spices grown in Ceylon.
In your nerves there is the extract of tea leaves gathered by a
Chinese girl on the other side of the world. Your blood is
purified and made red by the wind that blew across the Rocky
Mountains only a few hours ago. That current of oxygen has
helped build up your strength.
A month ago an ox was eating grass in Texas.
Many millions of years ago the pollen of huge fern trees was
falling to the earth in the carboniferous era and making coal.
To-day, part of the backbone of the ox from Texas with the meat
attached is laid on the fire of coal made by those fern trees,
and the Texas ox and the fern pollen combined help to build up
your body.
That same body is three-quarters water, and of that water part
was once the Pacific Ocean; part, perhaps, was drunk up by a
whale before it reached you; and part floated in clouds over the
Southern Sea. ----
Your imagination can carry the picture as far as it will--to the
fisherman catching your sardines in the North, and the dark man
gathering your oranges in the South or your dates in some oasis.
We want to suggest this idea to you.
Since the body is gathered from all parts of the world, from all
corners of our little speck of the material universe, should it
not be scattered, at death, as it was gathered during life?
Is not the destruction of the body by fire far better than
hideous burial in the earth?
The body that fire destroys goes back to nature, instantly
reduced to its original elements. Is not such disposition of the
body more in accord with nature's laws and with respect for the
dead than our present custom?
Would it not be pleasanter to think that one we cared for had
gone back to the air, with only a handful of ashes remaining,
than to think of the dark, close, lonesome grave far below the
sunlight, clogging and uselessly occupying part of the earth,
which should be devoted to growth and cheerfulness?
HOW MARRIAGE BEGAN
HAPHAZARD REFLECTIONS ON GRAVE TOPICS.
At stated times we mortals have stated visitations.
One day it is the grippe, next day the financial problem.
Just now it is the marriage and divorce question, with much
learned expounding by the good and the pure, such as bishops and
members of Sorosis. ----
What is marriage? How did it begin? Whence does it come?
Why is it a feature of human life wherever that life is found.
You must begin with such questions. Always study beginnings.
Nothing can be learned by taking hold of a thing in the middle
and examining its imperfections.
The first priest to join man and woman together was no benign
being with lawn sleeves and soul-stirring words.
Marriage was brought about on this earth by the will and wisdom
of God Almighty working through primitive babyhood.
In the old days, when the world was cruder, men and women ran
wild through forests and swamps. They fought nature, fought each
other, as savage as other beasts around them. There was no love;
there was no marriage. The instincts of self-preservation and
of reproduction worked alone to keep the race here through its
hard childhood. ----
But in cold stone caves or in rough nests under fallen tree
trunks savage children were born and nursed by their savage
mothers with savage affection.
Through those infants of the stone age, or of ages much earlier,
marriage and pure affection came into the world.
It is not hard to reproduce in our minds the picture of the first
marriage.
A savage woman, half human, half ape, with rough, matted locks
hanging round her face, sits holding her new-born baby,
protecting it from wind and cold.
It is a queer baby, covered perhaps with reddish hair, its brow
no higher than a rat's. Its jaw protrudes; its tiny, grimy hands
clutch with monkey power all things within reach.
Along comes the father, full of plans to kill a mammoth or a cave
bear; interested in his stone-tipped club, but caring nothing for
the mother, who has been for some time only a whining nuisance.
He stops for a second to look at the small creature which he has
added to earth's animal life.
Its misshapen skull, ferret eyes, miniature shoulders--something
about it reminds him of his royal self, as studied in the pool.
He stoops to look closer. His bristly hairs are grabbed, and a
weird, insane, toothless grin lights up the little monkey face.
Then the savage takes a new view of life; there the marriage
institution and the marriage problem are born simultaneously.
Says the mammoth hunter, with whistling words and hoarse throat
sounds half articulated:
"I like this baby. He's like me. Let me hold him. Don't you go
out with him looking for food, and don't leave him alone while
I'm gone. I've got a bear located. No one can beat me killing
bears. I'll bring the bear's heart to you this evening. You can
give this baby some of the blood. It will do him good. Don't
have anything to say to that mammoth hunter in the next swamp. I
want you to stick to me. I'll look after you. I have taken a
fancy to that baby. He looks very much like me."
Off goes the father, and that savage mother, in a primitive way,
is a wife. Hereafter she is to be cared for. Bears will be
killed for her, even while she has children to keep her busy and
unattractive. Society takes a new turn and the red-haired baby
has done it.
To childhood, helpless and beautiful, we owe marriage and all
that growth of morality which is gradually making us really
civilized.
The basis of all real growth is altruism; and altruism, the
inclination to think more of others than of yourself, came into
the world through the cradle.
We owe such civilization as we have acquired to children.
"A softened pressure of an uncouth hand, a human gleam in an
almost animal eye, an endearment in an inarticulate voice--feeble
things enough. Yet in these faint awakenings lay the hope of the
human race." ----
The influence of childhood has transformed mere animal attraction
into unselfish affection. It has substituted family life for
savage life. The interests of childhood demand that marriage and
its responsibilities be held sacred.
Duty to future generations demands that divorce be made difficult
and considered a misfortune.
Marriage, brought into the world through the influence of
children, should be dissolved only with due regard for the
interests of children. ----
An unhappy marriage is earth's worst affliction. Quite true.
But it is not affliction wasted.
Examples are needed to warn the young against the matrimonial
recklessness which underlies most unhappy marriages.
Unhappy wives and husbands are human light-houses--lonely, but
useful.
If a gentle little Alderney calf should marry a sleek young zebra
and afterward get kicked to death for her pains, we should all
sympathize with her. But we should expect other mild-eyed
Alderneys after that to beware of zebras.
As a matter of fact, this present divorce talk, which sets the
good to fluttering, really interests a very unimportant class.
The man who spends his life spending what he didn't earn, feeding
his physical senses, who goes from rum to the races, from the
races to the opera, and from the opera to roulette, wears out his
nervous sensations.
He then thinks that he is unhappily married. He has possibly
driven his wife to being seven kinds of a fool.
But that is not her fault.
A man who marries a woman undertakes to make her happy and keep
her busy. If he keeps his contract, she will keep hers.
If he fails, he has no right to experiment on another
unfortunate. The divorce class is a self-indulgent, malformed
class, not worth notice. ----
Professor Cope, an earnest man and serious thinker, believed that
marriages should be contracted on probation--say for five years,
with the right on both sides to refuse a renewal.
Theoretically, this would be beautiful. It would make courtship
permanent, abolish curl-papered wives in the morning, and tipsy,
bragging husbands at night.
But it wouldn't work. It would be all right for women. They are
only too willing to be faithful and permanent.
But men cannot be trusted. The animal in them, so essential long
ago, when the race was struggling for a foothold, has not been
obliterated. They have got to be MADE responsible and HELD
responsible. ----
As a matter of fact, there really is no marriage or divorce
problem which sensible beings need consider.
At present men are not good enough to be trusted with liberal
marriage or divorce laws. When they are good enough the laws
will not be wanted. For the man fully developed and fully moral
will know what he is doing when he goes into a marriage contract.
His stability of character will insure permanency. There will be
no need of laws.
At one time the English laws regulated the conditions under which
a man might beat his wife. "The stick," said the law, "must not
be thicker than the husband's thumb."
Some Englishmen have very thick thumbs, and the law was doubtless
hard on some thin, worn-out women.
But that law is no longer needed.
Men have outgrown the need of regulations in wife-beating. In
time they will outgrow the need of laws regarding infidelity and
lack of self-respect.
MAN'S WILLINGNESS TO WORK
What a fortunate thing it is that men want to work and like to
live! Suppose for a moment that the out-of-work, hungry, unlucky
creatures, numbering one hundred thousand in New York City,
should suddenly change their character.
It is a harmless supposition, as it implies that a great body of
good, though unlucky, men should be suddenly metamorphosed. But
suppose, for instance, that one hundred thousand men should have
a meeting and say:
"The State provides food, lodging and good care for every thief.
It does not provide anything for us. Let us therefore accept the
situation like philosophers and become thieves."
Suppose the hundred thousand men thereupon, very quietly, without
any show of violence, should each proceed to steal something and
then announce the intention to accept the consequence by pleading
guilty. It would embarrass the State and the reigning powers,
would it not?
What could society do with a hundred thousand self-confessed
thieves to take care of? It could not lock them up. It could
not let them go. It could not nominally sentence them and have
the Governor pardon them, because the hundred thousand would then
proceed to steal something else.
What could be done? Nothing. There is no punishment save
imprisonment for theft, and the wholesale thieves would ask for
and demand imprisonment with the usual rations.
We think society is well balanced and that everything is
ingeniously provided for.
So it is; but everything hinges on the extraordinary fact that
the hungry, thin, common, shiftless, luckless man at the very
bottom is still a MAN. He will not be a thief, and he will die
of hunger and cold, as poor fellows do almost every winter day,
rather than take the food that society guarantees to the thief.
We attribute much to our own wisdom and the wisdom of our laws.
But we owe almost everything to the instinct of self-preservation
and to that second, very peculiar, instinct called pride.
THE HUMAN BRAIN BEATS THE COAL MINES
For six million years, during the carboniferous period, the tree
ferns dropped their pollen dust to the earth forming coal beds
which now cook our dinners and incidentally make J. Pierpont
Morgan so prosperous.
A good deal of useless anxiety has been devoted to the questions:
What will the human race do when the coal gives out? Shall we
freeze, or begin planting huge forests of wood, or what?
In the first place, coal will not give out for a long, long time.
In the second place, its disappearance will not make the
slightest difference, for in the few cubic inches of the human
brain nature has stored up treasures greater than all those
hidden in the depths of the earth. The creation of the human
brain took more years than the creation of the coal fields, but
the brain's resources are inexhaustible.
A German workman now comes along who has discovered a chemical
substitute for coal, better than coal in many ways, and before
this German shall have been dead many years some other will find
a further substitute far better and cheaper than his.
There is endless heat power in the action of the tides, in the
rush of Niagara, in the winds, and in endless chemical
combinations. Heat is motion, and the Universe is motion. Men
will soon cease lighting tiny bonfires to obtain crude heat in a
crude way. Electricity or the sun's own rays, concentrated for
heating purposes, will do the work without any digging in mines
by men, or delving in ashes and clinkers by women.
The story of antiquity, more or less fictitious, of the burning
of a fleet with the aid of a glass and the sunbeams, will be
matter-of-fact reality long before the coal shall have been
exhausted.
HOW THE OTHER PLANETS WILL TALK TO US
We talk of civilization as though it necessarily implied
improvement.
Civilization means the school and the library, but it also means
the prison and the poorhouse.
Two short stories illustrate different views of what we call
civilization:
Aristippus was a young Greek gentleman of large means, genuine
intellectual power, a sense of humor and a reputation as a
philosopher.
He was on his way to Corinth with a young lady named Lais, or
possibly he was coming from Corinth with her. Anyhow, he was
wrecked on the voyage. If you know anything about the reputation
of Lais, you know that the philosopher was badly employed, and
that the Greek gods doubtless wrecked his vessel to impress upon
his mind the importance of morality.
Thrown ashore on a barren stretch of sand, the philosopher was
very sad at first. He observed on the sand the remains of
certain geometrical drawings, and instantly exclaimed: "There is
help near. Here I see signs of thinking men, of civilization."
----
Voltaire tells of wrecked individuals thrown on a lonely coast,
and also much distressed and frightened.
They saw no geometrical tracings in the sand. But on a bleak
moor in the twilight they saw the black beams of a gibbet, and
below the cross-piece, swinging in the wind, they saw a human
skeleton with bony wrists and ankles chained together.
Prayerfully the wanderers dropped on their knees and exclaimed
with upturned eyes:
"Thank God, we have got back to civilization." ----
Thus, you see, there are varying signs of civilization. There is
a great gulf between the signs perceived by Aristippus--signs of
the mental activity which engages in geometrical
demonstrations--and Voltaire's sign of civilization--the brutal
execution of a brutal criminal. ----
Those accustomed to waste time in speculations that cannot bring
a financial return may be interested in the following application
of the sign of civilization which Aristippus immediately
recognized back in the days of two thousand years ago.
We know that some day the inhabitants on Mars or some other
planet will want to talk to us. They have doubtless been
studying us and consider us still too barbarous and primitive to
be worth talking to.
But when we become semi-civilized, in the cosmic sense of the
word, the older and wiser planets will get ready to open
communication with us.
How will they go about it? They are perhaps absolutely different
from us, in shape, in manner of thought, in every conceivable
way, including language, customs, and so on.
BUT GEOMETRICAL, MATHEMATICAL FACTS ARE THE SAME THROUGHOUT THE
UNIVERSE.
Will not the wise Martian who wants to speak to us and decides to
flash some message down here on our clouds, or on the surface of
the water, utilize the universality of geometrical truths in
order to make us understand that thinking beings are trying to
talk to us?
The sum of the angles of any triangle is equal to two right
angles.
That is true of every triangle, no matter what its shape, no
matter whether it be drawn on this earth or on the most distant
sun.
Therefore, when the Martian gentleman gets ready to talk to us he
need only repeatedly place before us two right angles followed by
a triangle, or a triangle followed by two right angles.
Instantly, like Aristippus, we can say there is civilization in
Mars, or wherever that sign comes from, or at least there is
organized thought. The mind that is flashing that sign knows
something about geometry.
Of course, we should also recognize "signs of civilization" if
the Martians should project upon our atmosphere a skeleton
hanging in chains. But it is to be hoped that the Martians have
got beyond that particular evidence of civilization.
SHALL WE DO WITHOUT SLEEP SOME DAY?
A half-developed being like man, hanging midway between primitive
barbarism and ultimate perfection, should study the insect tribes
which appear to have realized the possibilities of development in
their line.
The study of the ant and the bee, the spider and the scorpion
should fill us with hope. We should say to ourselves:
"If these tiny fragments of life can develop so highly, what may
not WE hope for in the way of ultimate possibilities? Our
beginning is so much more full of promise than the beginnings of
our tiny insect brothers." ----
This writer, taking his own advice, which is most unusual, has
been trying to get acquainted with some insects in the hope of
cheering himself and getting new ideas.
From the female scorpion we acquire fresh veneration for the
possibilities of maternal devotion.
The mother of the Gracchi has been well advertised because she
preferred her sons to jewelry. The Russian mother who feeds
herself to the wolves, instead of throwing her boy over the back
of the sleigh in the usual way, is also highly praised. But
their devotion shrinks to nothing when compared with that of any
poor mother scorpion of Mexico's sandy tracts.
As soon as her young scorpions arrive, they climb to her back,
half a hundred of them or more. She moves about with them,
protecting them, avoiding danger, giving them the sunlight.
Meanwhile they are feeding on her body. Her movements get
gradually slower and slower; finally they cease. The young
scorpions depart leaving the mother scorpion simply an empty
shell. We should dislike to see any such exhibition of
tenderness among human beings, but we can't help admiring the
scorpion.
Mr. Scorpion, placed as was Captain Dreyfus, would sting himself
to death. They are a determined race. ----
Spiders who construct tiny balloons with little cars all complete
are wonderful creatures. They cross chasms in their balloons,
throwing out bits of trailing web which seem to act as rudders.
In their little way and in a perfectly adequate fashion they have
solved aerial navigation, which still puzzles us. We admire
spiders and kill only those with yellow stomachs, which are
"poison." ----
But up to the present we have found the ant the most
interestingly suggestive creature. He has developed and
understands stirpiculture--the improvement of the race by careful
breeding--which with us is as yet mere theory, and as we look
down at the ant, we look up to him because the strangely active
creature manages to do without sleep.
We human beings drowse through thirty years of our threescore and
ten, but the ant is awake and working all the time.
If the ant has managed to live without sleep, if he has acquired
the faculty of lifelong wakefulness, why should we not do as much
in time? We take it for granted that sleep is essential, as we
take everything else for granted. We used to take it for granted
that the earth was flat, but we have stopped that. Sleep was at
one time forced upon man and other animals.
The earth in its rollings turned away from the sun once in every
twenty-four hours. In the darkness of the beginning man said to
himself: "If I go walking around, I shall fall into a hole, so I
shall lie down and wait until the sun comes again."
He did as all the animals did before him for millions of years.
Since that time, man has conquered darkness. Why should he not
ultimately conquer sleep?
We know that thin men, nervous, highly organized, do with far
less sleep than others. We know that old age requires less sleep
than youth.
Can we not cultivate and develop the characteristics which make
sleep less necessary? Higher races of apes have abolished tails.
Can't we abolish sleep? ----
As old age needs less sleep than babyhood, so in our maturity as
a human race we shall probably demand less sleep than now in our
racial babyhood. Perhaps none at all will be needed.
If that happens our lives will be doubled in value, they will be
complete. The hours of sunlight will be devoted to examination
and admiration of nature's beauties on this earth.
The hours of darkness, given up to sleep no longer, will be
devoted to the study of space, to investigation among other
worlds.
That kind of life will be worth while. Bear in mind that we
shall only really begin to live on this earth when we shall have
settled all the little social and material questions here and
shall have begun in earnest the study of the universe in which we
are a speck.
The days of the future will be given up to artistic enjoyment of
the beautiful. The nights will be devoted to intellectual
development and research.
Man will LIVE.
THE THREE BEST THINGS IN THE WORLD
If you had choice of all qualities which man can possess, which
three would you declare most important?
This question is submitted as interesting every man. We give our
answer; if yours is different, send it here. ----
SELF-CONTROL.
JUSTICE.
IMAGINATION.
Those we think the most important elements in the human
character. A man fully and evenly equipped with all three would
be greater than any the world has known. ----
SELF-CONTROL you must start with.
It makes life worth while. It frees you from the danger of
remorse, the wasted time of self- reproach. It sees
opportunities as they come; saves you from damaging temptation.
It is as important to a brain as is physical equilibrium to a
work of masonry.
A man without self-control, a building out of plumb, cannot
endure.
JUSTICE.
It is the foundation of all reputation worth the having. It is
to man as necessary as the compass to a ship. It is the compass.
Justice will give reputation for greatness though you create
nothing great. It will win affectionate reverence in life and a
gratifying gravestone at life's end. ----
IMAGINATION.
Greatest gift to man. It finds him grovelling here a pithecoid
littleness.
The rough hair is gone from his body. His thumb has lost its
monkey smallness; he walks flat on his feet.
But beyond that he has naught else to thank material nature for.
All the rest comes to him from imagination. Marvellous work she
performs. She takes naked man with his low forehead, with his
gruntings and whistlings through his teeth, and makes of him what
man was meant to be.
Very slowly she works, but ceaselessly. Her task is not nearly
ended. At her first glimmerings man's real life begins. He
learns from her to add wood to a fire. No monkey ever did it.
That stamps him a man.
Soon, with her help, he leaves the earth and travels off ten
thousand million miles into space. He counts the suns in the
Milky Way; travels in the air, under the water; harnesses
lightning, controls nature. By IMAGINATION he is made
CAPTAIN of this earthen ship on which he travels through space.
IMAGINATION separates Archimedes, working at his problems in the
sunlight, from the vile soldier that slaughtered him.
Shakespeare rattling his ale pot and Johanna, the ape, shaking
her bars at the Zoo are alike, save for difference of
imagination.
SELF-CONTROL to balance you.
JUSTICE to guide you.
IMAGINATION to lend creative power.
"Equilibrium, Direction, Creation."
The TRINITY ardently to be desired. ----
Long ago Plato announced that apparent differences are deceptive;
that all things existing come from one casting--the mind of
God--which he names "idea."
Similarly to-day the solemn-thinking German tells you that matter
and force are identical, that the interchangeable character of
forces--heat light, magnetism, etc.--is part of the a, b, c of
proved phenomena.
Haeckel stops digging up old bones and classifying sea
microscopic organisms long enough to write "Monism," expressing
his belief that God is anything and everything from Orion to a
tumble- bug.
It is quite easy to show that the selected three--self-control,
justice and imagination--are in reality one. Each exists as part
of the others. Each is made up of the other two.
But this column is not devoted to any save simple things.
The question is this, once more:
What are man's three most useful qualities--which three would
you possess?
Do not call this question idle or believe that we cannot change
ourselves. We CAN.
Napoleon said: "Never believe that a man ever changed his
temperament."
But Napoleon often said what was foolish.
It ought to delight you to know that you can change yourself if
you want to, as you can change the arrangement of your back
parlor.
Try it. It is hard work, but good exercise.
THE VALUE OF SOLITUDE
We inflict a piece of advice upon our readers. It is intended
especially for the young, who have still to get their growth,
whose characters and possibilities are forming.
GET AWAY FROM THE CROWD WHEN YOU CAN. KEEP YOURSELF TO YOURSELF,
IF ONLY FOR A FEW HOURS DAILY. ----
Full individual growth, special development, rounded mental
operations--all these demand room, separation from others,
solitude, self-examination and the self-reliance which solitude
gives.
The finest tree stands off by itself in the open plain. Its
branches spread wide. It is a complete tree, better than the
cramped tree in the crowded forest.
The animal to be admired is not that which runs in herds, the
gentle browsing deer or foolish sheep thinking only as a fraction
of the flock, incapable of personal independent direction. It's
the lonely prowling lion or the big black leopard with the whole
world for his private field that is worth looking at.
The man who grows up in a herd, deer-like, thinking with the
herd, acting with the herd, rarely amounts to anything. ----
Do you want to succeed? Grow in solitude, work, develop in
solitude, with books and thoughts and nature for friends. Then,
if you want the crowd to see how fine you are, come back to it
and boss it if it will let you.
Constant craving for indiscriminate company is a sure sign of
mental weakness.
Schopenhauer--a sour genius, BUT a genius--speaks contemptuously
of the negroes herded in small rooms unable to get "enough of one
another's snub-nose company." ----
If you enter a village or small town and want to find the man or
youth of ability, do you look for him leaning over the village
pool table, sitting on the grocery store boxes, lounging in the
smelly tavern with other vacant minds?
Certainly not. You find him at work, and you find him by
himself.
Think how public institutions dwarf the brains and souls of
unhappy children condemned to live in them. No chance there for
individual, separate development. Millions of children have
grown up in such places millions of sad nonentities. ----
Here is what Goethe says:
"Es bildet ein Talent sich in der Stille, doch ein Charakter in
dem Strome der Welt." (Talent is developed in solitude, character
in the rush of the world.)
You wonder why so much ability comes from the country--why a
Lincoln comes from the backwoods while you, flourishing in a
great city, can barely keep your place as a typewriter.
The countryman has GOT to be by himself much of the time whether
he wishes to or not. If he has anything in him it comes out.
Astronomy, man's grandest study, grew up among the shepherds.
You of the cities never even see the stars, much less study them.
----
Don't be a sheep or a deer. Don't devote your hours to the
company and conversation of those who know as little as you do.
Don't think hard only when you are trying to remember a popular
song or to decide on the color of your Winter overcoat or
necktie.
Remember that you are an individual, not a grain of dust or a
blade of grass. Don't be a sheep; be a man. It has taken nature
a hundred million years to produce you. Don't make her sorry she
took the time.
Get out in the park and walk and think. Get up in your hall
bedroom, read, study, write what you think. Talk more to
yourself and less to others. Avoid magazines, avoid excessive
newspaper reading.
There is not a man of average ability but could make a striking
career if he could but WILL to do the best that is in him.
Proofs of growth due to solitude are endless. Milton's greatest
work was done when blindness, old age and the death of the
Puritan government forced him into completest seclusion.
Beethoven did his best work in the solitude of deafness.
Bacon would never have been the great leader of scientific
thought had not his trial and disgrace forced him from the
company of a grand retinue and stupid court to the solitude of
his own brain.
"Multum insola fuit anima mea." (My spirit hath been much alone.)
This he said often, and lucky it was for him. Loneliness of
spirit made him.
Get a little of it for yourself.
Drop your club, your street corner, your gossipy boarding-house
table. Drop your sheep life and try being a man.
It may improve you.
THERE SHOULD BE A MONUMENT TO TIME
Time has no real existence. Yet time is man's most precious
possession.
Time is defined as a "succession of events." What we call an
hour means certain movements in the machinery of a watch. What
we call a day means one revolution of the earth upon its axis,
the turning of its surface toward the light of the sun. Time is
the most mysterious factor in our lives and thoughts. It never
had a beginning, it cannot possibly have an end.
Time only exists for us in the actual moment in which we live.
Yet our thoughts are in the time of past and future, and hardly
ever on the actual reality of the moment.
With the ceasing of our own consciousness, time ceases, so far as
we are concerned. If you go to sleep and sleep soundly, you
cannot tell when you awake whether you have slept a minute or an
hour. Time stops when YOU cease to observe the succession of
events. In dying, we duplicate on a big and prolonged scale our
little daily sleeps in life.
If a man were told that after death his soul would not regain
consciousness for a thousand millions of years, he would worry,
and complain of the "long time." But it would make no difference
to him whether the time were a thousand millions of years or
forty seconds--time would not exist for him; he would not know
the difference.
There is little doubt that to the ephemeridae, creatures that
live but for a day, that day must seem as long as our century,
for in their life of incessant activity and agitation every
second is a long space. And there is no doubt that to the giant
turtles of the Galapagos Islands, heavy monsters that live ten
centuries or longer, a week is a fraction of time far less
important than an hour to us. ----
A mysterious thing is time and its divisions. Man manufactures a
watch capable of registering a fraction of a second. And in the
force called light we have a power that can go seven times around
the world in one second.
We estimate our time by years. It takes one year for our little
earth to spin round the sun. And during that year it turns three
hundred and sixty-five times on its own axis. While the entire
body of our earth flies through space, accompanying the sun on
its journey, the northern extremity of our planet has a separate
circular motion of its own. This circular motion takes
twenty-seven thousand years to complete one circle, and as it
moves in this inconceivably slow journey our pole selects for us
and points out the various suns which in turn we call the North
Star.
We have written thus much to fix the attention of readers on the
question of time. Now, how does it affect you? Time represents
your only chance, your only wealth, your only possibility for
achieving anything.
The man who lasts fifty years lives about four hundred and
thirty-eight thousand hours. Sleep takes at least one-third, or
one hundred and forty-six thousand hours. The processes of
eating, washing, dressing, getting up and going to bed take up at
least three hours per day, or fifty-four thousand seven hundred
and fifty hours.
In addition to all this TIME cut out of our lives there is the
time devoted to amusement, the time devoted to idle dreaming--and
yet millions of people are wondering how they can "PASS THE
TIME."
In every great city and in every small town there should be a
monument to time. Young children should be taken to see it,
clergymen should preach at the foot of it on the sacred
importance of the few hours of activity given to us here. As the
sand runs through an hour glass, so you run your short race on
this earth. That passing sand means the passing of your chances
for making your life worth while. Instead of thinking how you
WILL pass the time, cross-examine yourself and ask yourself how
you HAVE passed the time thus far.
What did you do last year--what use did you make of the time as
it went by? What did you do yesterday? What are you going to do
to-day? You possess a mind organized for practically unlimited
thinking and studying. How many of your hours do you live as a
thinking, studying man? How many do you live on a par with an ox
chewing his cud in the field?
The ox does not waste HIS time. It is his business to grow fat
and produce beef. He uses every hour. It is your business to
use your time in the development of your mind, in dealing with
the duties and problems that are put before you.
Every young man can make a success if he will really look upon
each hour as an OPPORTUNITY, and cease to look upon the hours as
useless things, to be thrown away.
One hour will give you a knowledge of some good book, or wisely
spent, with a purpose of improving your health, it will make your
brain more efficient and add to the value of all future hours.
If you have a horse, a bicycle, a gun, you feel that because you
HAVE it you ought to USE it.
How much more should you feel that you ought to use your TIME, in
using which you use your own brain! Surely, your brain is more
important and more worthy of conscientious use than a bicycle or
a gun.
Talk to children on this question of time. Teach them that
respect for time means respect for their own lives and success in
life.
A MOTHER'S WORK AND HER HOPES
This editorial is not written for women. It is written for MEN,
and for boys; for the millions who fail to appreciate the work
that mothers do, for the millions that ignore the self-sacrifice
and devotion upon which society is based.
On a hot night, in the dusty streets of a dirty city, you see
hundreds of women sitting in the doorways, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.
In lonesome farm houses, far out on monotonous plains, with the
late sun setting on a long day of hard work, you find women,
cheerful and persevering, TAKING CARE OF BABIES.
In the middle of the night, in earliest morning, when MEN sleep,
all over the world, in ice huts North, in southern tents, in big
houses and in dingy tenements, you find women awake, cheerfully
and gladly TAKING CARE OF BABIES. ----
We respect and praise the man selfishly working for himself.
If he builds up a great industry and a great personal fortune, we
praise him.
If he risks his life for personal glory and for praise, we praise
him.
If he shows courage even in saving his own carcass from
destruction, we praise him.
There was never a man whose courage, or devotion, could be
compared with that of a woman caring for her baby.
The mother's love is unselfish, and it has no limit this side of
the grave.
You will find ONE man in a thousand who will risk his life for a
cause.
You will find a THOUSAND women in a thousand who will risk their
lives for their babies.
Everything that a man has and is he owes to his mother. From her
he gets health, brain, encouragement, moral character, and ALL
his chances of success.
How poorly the mother's service is repaid by men individually,
and by society as a whole!
The individual man feels that he has done much if he gives
sufficient money and a LITTLE attention to her who brought him
from nothingness into life and sacrificed her sleep and youth and
strength for his sake.
Society, the aggregate of human beings, feels that its duty is
done when a few hospitals are opened for poor mothers, and a
little medicine doled out in cold-hearted fashion to the sick
child.
Fortunately, it may truly be said that the great man is almost
always appreciative of his greater mother.
Napoleon was cold, jealous of other men, monumentally egotistical
when comparing himself with other sons of women. But he
reverenced and appreciated the noble woman who bore him, lived
for him, and watched over him to the end. He said:
"It is to my mother, to her good principles, that I owe my
success and all I have that is worth while. I do not hesitate
to say that the future of the child depends on the mother."
----
The future of the individual child depends on the individual
mother, and the future of the race depends on the mothers of the
race.
Think what has been done for mankind by thousands of millions of
perfectly devoted mothers.
Every mother is entirely DEVOTED, entirely HOPEFUL, entirely
CONFIDENT that no future is too great for her baby's deserts.
The little head--often hopelessly ill-shaped--rolls about feebly
on the thin neck devoid of muscles. The toothless gums chew
whatever comes along. The wondering eyes look feebly, aimlessly
about, without focus or concentration. The future human being,
to the cold-blooded onlooker, is a useless little atom added to
the human sea of nonentity.
But to the mother that baby is the marvel of all time. There is
endless meaning in the first mumblings, endless soul in the
senile, baby smile, unlimited possibilities in the knobby
forehead and round, hairless head. She sees in the future of the
baby responsibilities of government, and feels that one so
perfectly lovely must eventually be acclaimed ruler by mankind.
As a result of perfect confidence in its future, the mother gives
to every baby perfect devotion, perfect and affectionate moral
education. Each child begins life inspired by the most beautiful
example of altruism and self-sacrifice.
Kindness has gradually taken the place of brutality among human
beings, because every baby at its birth has found itself
surrounded by absolute kindness.
The mother's kindness forms moral character.
The mother's confidence and encouragement stimulate ambition and
inspire courage.
The mother's patient watchfulness gives good health, and fights
disease when it comes.
The mother's wrathful protection shields the child from the stern
and dwarfing severity of fathers.
Truly, a man may and should be judged by his feeling toward his
own mother, and toward the mothers of other men--of ALL men.
In the character of Christ, whose last earthly thought on
Golgotha was for His Mother, as in the character of the
hard-working, ignorant man whose earnings go to make his mother
comfortable, the most beautiful trait is devotion to the mother
who suffers and works for her children, from the hours that
precede their birth through all the years that they spend on
earth together.
Honor thy father and THY MOTHER.
And honor the mothers of other men. Make their task easier
through fair payment of the men who support the children, through
good public schools for their children, through respectful
treatment of ALL women.
The mother is happy. For she knows "the deep joy of loving some
one else more than herself."
You honor yourself, and prove yourself worthy of a good mother
and of final success, when you do something for the mothers of
the world.
YOUR WORK IS YOUR BRAIN'S GYMNASIUM
For "buyers" in big stores,
For clerks in little stores,
For office boys,
For typewriters, reporters, car conductors, household domestics,
for all who are hired to work for others, this article is
intended.
There is no greater mistake than skimping your work--BECAUSE YOU
ARE WORKING FOR ANOTHER, AND FEAR YOU MAY DO TOO MUCH.
For your own sake remember that whatever you do in the way of
honest concentrated work you do FIRST OF ALL FOR YOURSELF.
Only one thing in the world can improve you and better your
condition, and that thing is your own effort.
You begin life with certain mental faculties, and with certain
muscular faculties. Their development or decay depends entirely
on yourself.
No work that you do is worthless. It will NEVER pay you to
neglect or slur the task that you have undertaken.
You may be idle, in the thought that you are indulging yourself
at the expense of your employer. It is a dishonest thought, and
it is a stupid thought at the same time.
You may rob your employer of the time that he pays for, but when
you shirk your work you rob yourself first of all. ----
You may say that your employer pays you too little. Perhaps he
does. But that is no reason for hurting your moral character
through dishonesty. It is no excuse for failing to develop
yourself.
The store, or factory, or office in which you work is to your
mind what a gymnasium is to your muscles.
You enter a gymnasium AND PAY FOR THE PRIVILEGE OF WORKING
THERE.
You do not say to yourself: "This gymnasium belongs to another
man. The profits go to him, and so I'll not work hard."
On the contrary, you realize that the owner of the gymnasium
gives you the chance to develop your muscles, and you thank him,
although he makes you pay for the privilege. And you do your
very best, on the trapeze, rings, parallel bars, or in any other
direction.
Act in your work as you do in your gymnasium hours.
There is no kind of work that can fail to make you a better and
more successful man if you work at it honestly and loyally.
If you sweep an office, sweep it well. And begin punctually each
day, remembering that punctuality acquired in sweeping an
office may be used later in governing a city.
Train your mind through your work, whatever it is.
Study the lives of those who have succeeded. You will see that
they did whatever they did as well as they could.
Edison was an ordinary telegraph operator. But he was not
content with merely working as others worked. He worked very
hard, devised means to make more valuable the instruments of his
employers. Soon he was an employer himself, and what is far
better than being an employer, he was a creator of new ideas and
a benefactor of the world. ----
Intelligent readers will not misinterpret this advice to mean
that they should OVERWORK themselves, or work regardless of
their own physical welfare.
The right course is this:
Do as much as you can in the present, without drawing on your
future reserves.
Don't work all night and then go on the next day. Such effort
impairs permanently your store of vitality, and that vitality is
your capital.
But never form the habit of neglecting work, of shamming and
lying instead of achieving honestly.
You may deceive one employer, or ten. But 36> you can't deceive
nature, and you can't deceive yourself.
You can form good habits only through regular work. You can
develop your faculties only through exercising them honestly and
systematically. ----
MERELY WORKING "FAIRLY WELL" IS NOT ENOUGH.
If you want to run a mile fast, you do not merely jog. You try
every day to run the mile faster than you did the day before. If
you want to learn to jump high, you strain your muscles and try
over and over to do what you can't do. Ultimately you achieve
it.
Keep that in mind when you work. Remember that you must wind
yourself up. The most watchful employer may discharge you. But
he cannot wind you up.
Be a self-winding machine, and keep yourself wound up.
Your hardest effort may fail to achieve greatness. But honest
work will at least make it impossible for you to be a failure.
Train your brain, nerves and muscles to regular, steady,
conscientious effort. Make up your mind that FOR YOUR OWN
SAKE you will make every effort your best effort.
You will soon find yourself a more successful, more
self-respecting, abler man or woman.
And here is an argument that should be more powerful with you
than self-interest:
Remember that the world needs honest, conscientious men and
women, able to do good work themselves and to people the earth
with children born of honest parents.
Make up your mind to be one of the world's HONEST citizens.
To improve the world begin by improving yourself.
THE STEEPLE, MOVING LIKE THE HAND OF A CLOCK
If you live in the suburbs you devote perhaps two hours each day
to travel. Two hours per day means practically one-fifth of your
active life.
How many readers make any use of those two hours, and feel each
day that they have been well spent? ----
Instead of being wasted, those hours should be among your best.
Never mind if you are clinging to a strap because companies are
licensed to exploit you. Never mind if you are tired and weary
when the day is ended. The tired brain often thinks better than
the fresh one. And man, so recently descended from the monkey
who had to think while hanging head down, ought to have no
trouble thinking as he hangs from his strap--head up. ----
Some in the cars play cards as they travel homeward. Others talk
gossip, and tens of thousands waste too much time on this and
other newspapers.
Try this experiment: Make up your mind to devote your hours of
travel to thinking. The brain, like the muscles, needs definite
and well-planned exercise. It must be methodical and regular.
There is no limit to its possible results. You would be glad to
spend your two travelling hours in a gymnasium on wheels. Make
of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning,
take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end--or as
far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to
reflect. Don't look at your fellow passengers as calves look at
each other on the way to the slaughter house.
Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or
stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain,
brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us
here.
They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time
in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts
passing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought
to stir you. ----
The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to
them--blessed youth!--should interest you deeply. And the negro,
too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's
slavery--slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same.
Possibly you despise his thick lips. But those lips are carved
on every sphinx in Egypt's sand, and if you could go back far
enough you would find the ancestors of that negro, before the
days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and
locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were
gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh.
When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one
who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think
about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end--and your
own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and
go on chewing gum. ----
The pictures that flash by your car windows should help you to
think.
The train rumbles over the switches, and in the dusk a swinging
lantern tells you that a man is at work, guiding you safely when
your work is done. Can't you take an interest in that human
atom, representing the Power that swings our tiny sun in space,
lighting us on our journey toward the constellation Hercules?
----
A black steeple is outlined against the dark-blue sky of the
evening. That is a finger of stone, built by man to point
everlastingly toward Infinite Power. It now points "upward." In
twelve hours--as the earth slowly turns--it will be pointing
"downward." But there is no upward or downward in the carpentry
of the universe. In the twenty-four hours, as it turns round
with the earth, that steeple points toward all the corners of
space, and constantly it points toward Eternal Wisdom and Justice
in every corner. ----
This is tiresome? All right, then we'll stop. But whether we
tire or interest you, remember:
As a man thinks, so he grows. Think, study, use all the hours
that separate your croupy cradle from your gloomy grave. Those
hours are few.
CULTIVATE THOUGHT--TEACH YOUR BRAIN TO WORK EARLY
Two centuries back a young man of twenty-three sat in the quiet
of the evening--THINKING.
His body was quiet; his vitality, his life, all his powers, were
centred in his brain.
Above, the moon shone, and around him rustled the branches of the
trees in his father's orchard.
From one of the trees an apple fell.
No need to tell you that the young man was Newton; that the fall
of the apple started in his READY brain the thought that led
to his great discovery, giving him fame to last until this earth
shall crumble.
How splendid the achievement born that moment! How fortunate for
the world and for the youth Newton, that at twenty-three his
brain had cultivated the HABIT OF THOUGHT! ----
Our muscles we share with everything that lives--with the oyster
clinging to his rock, the whale ploughing through cold seas, and
our monkey kinsman swinging from his tropical branch.
These muscles, useful only to cart us around, help us to do
slave work or pound our fellows, we cultivate with care.
We run, fence, ride, walk hard, weary our poor lungs and gather
pains in our backs building the muscles that we do not need.
Alone among animals, we possess a potentiality of mind
development unlimited.
And for that, with few exceptions, we care nothing. ----
Most of us, sitting in Newton's place and seeing the apple fall,
would merely have debated the advisability of getting the apple
to eat it--just the process that any monkey mind would pass
through.
A Newton, a BRAIN TRAINED TO THINK, sees the apple drop, asks
himself why the moon does not drop also. And he discovers the
law of gravitation which governs the existence of every material
atom in the universe. ----
Young men who read this, start in NOW to use your brains.
Take nothing for granted, not even the fact that the moon stays
in her appointed place or that the poor starve and freeze amid
plenty.
Think of the things which are wrong and of the possibilities of
righting them. Study your own weaknesses and imperfections.
There is power in your brain to correct them, if you will
develop that power.
As surely as you can train your arm to hold fifty pounds out
straight, just so surely can you train your brain to deal with
problems that now would find you a gaping incompetent.
You may not be a Newton. But if you can condescend to aim at
being an inferior Sandow, can't you afford to try even harder to
be an inferior Newton?
Don't be a muscular monkey. Be a low-grade philosopher, if you
can't be high-grade, and find how much true pleasure there is
even in inferior brain gymnastics. ----
Take up some problem and study it:
There goes a woman, poor and old. She carries a heavy burden
because she is too sad and weak to fight against fate, too honest
to leave a world that treats her harshly.
There struts a youngster, rich and idle.
How many centuries of hell on earth will it take to put that
woman's load on that other broad, fat, idle back?
Answer that one question, better still, TRANSFER THE LOAD, and
your life will not have been wasted. ----
It is THOUGHT that moves the world. In Napoleon's BRAIN
are born the schemes that murder millions and yet push
civilization on. The mere soldier, with gold lace and sharp
sword, is nothing--a mere tool.
It is the concentrated thought of the English people under
Puritan influence that makes Great Britain a sham monarchy and a
real republic now.
It is the thought of the men of independent MIND in this country
that throws English tea and English rule overboard forever.
Don't wait until you are old. Don't wait until you are ONE DAY
older. Begin NOW.
Or, later, with a dull, fuzzy, useless mind, you will realize
that an unthinking man might as well have been a monkey, with fur
instead of trousers, and consequent freedom from mental
responsibility or self-respect.
THE WIND DOES NOT RULE YOUR DESTINY
"There be three things which are too wonderful for me; yea, four
which I know not.
"The way of an eagle in the air; the way of a serpent upon
a rock; THE WAY OF A SHIP IN THE MIDST OF THE SEA, and the way
of a man with a maid."
At sunset a long train of cars waited on a bridge as a sailing
ship passed through the draw.
The ship sailed up the river toward the cold Winter sun; another
ship sailed past it going in the OPPOSITE direction.
Only ONE wind was blowing. Yet, of those two ships blown by
the same wind, moved by the same power, one sailed EAST and
one WEST.
It may be of use to you in your career to think for a few minutes
about these two ships and the lesson which they teach--especially
to young men. ----
The man who has sailed, in his life's journey, toward failure and
disaster looks always with envy, sometimes with hatred, and very
often with an intense sensation of injustice, at the man who
passes him going in exactly the opposite direction.
Yet the FORCES that move men bound toward success are exactly
the same as those that move other men to failure, humiliation and
defeat.
It is all a question of the way in which you use the forces
within you--just as on shipboard it is all a question of the use
of the common wind which blows.
IT IS A QUESTION OF THE USE OF THE RUDDER.
Two ships pass, each with its sails filled out by the same wind.
The difference in direction is accounted for by the handling of
the rudder and the adjustment of the sails.
What the force of the wind is to the ship, our varying emotions,
passions, ambitions, appetites and aspirations are to us. All of
these constitute the power which may be called HUMAN FORCE.
This power differs in different individuals, as the wind differs
on different days. It may blow from the east or the west or the
north or the south. However it may blow, it can be forced, by
proper steering, to send the ship in any direction desired.
It is harder to beat against the wind, of course, and many men
have hard struggles to steer themselves to a good port in the
face of an adverse start, a hard beginning, or inclinations
difficult to overcome. ----
But in all of us the force exists which can be made to move us in
the right direction--the force within us can be MADE to obey
our will, if the will be strong and the hand on the rudder
steady. This can be proved--for instance:
There is a certain force in human beings called LOVE. This
force leads sometimes, and happily it leads usually, to
domesticity, morality, care of children and lifelong devotion.
Then the force is used properly.
The same human passion leads to murder, suicide, theft, to almost
all forms of crime.
There is another human passion called AMBITION.
This human force of ambition, with a Lincoln's conscience to
guide it, saves a republic.
The same force guided by Benedict Arnold seeks to betray the
nation. ----
Consider yourself a ship launched on the sea of life under
certain conditions--but with the essential condition in your own
control.
The wind may be feeble, you may drift for a while or move very
slowly--move at least in the right direction.
The wind may blow a gale, and you may feel, as so many do, that
you cannot control your emotions and your appetites. But if that
comes show at least as much interest in yourself as a sailor does
in his ship. Take in sail and fight the storm, instead of going
willingly to destruction. ----
Four things puzzled and impressed the wise man that wrote the
nineteenth verse of the thirtieth chapter of Proverbs.
Think to-day about the third of these things:
"The way of a ship in the midst of the sea"
The way of a human being in the midst of life is like that of a
ship on the ocean.
Make up your mind that your own way at least shall be controlled
by the rudder of conscience, and learn from the passing ships a
lesson of use in your own life.
ONE OF THE MANY CORPSES IN THE JOHNSTOWN MINE
The widow says to the mine owner: "Here he is, dead--killed
working for you. Where were you when he was killed? Driving in
your carriage, enjoying the difference between his EARNINGS
and his PAY. Was one dollar and thirty cents per day too much
to pay him for this risk? Was it too much to let him save
something for us--who now have nothing? Is there nothing to
arbitrate when the man who risks his life and gets nothing asks
arbitration of the man who risks nothing and gets all? ----
There are many men in America--honest and sincere--who believe
that strikers are nearly always right, that failure of a strike
is a calamity.
Other men, less numerous, but also honest and sincere, consider
strikes an evil. They believe that labor unionism threatens
"capital," threatens national energy, and our national industrial
supremacy. ----
Let us endeavor to take a clear view of the strike question, and
to discuss--as free from bias as may be possible--some of the
main viewpoints of those interested.
We may, at the start, accept two statements as sound:
First. The employer wants as much money as he can possibly get.
Second. The workman wants as much money as HE can possibly get.
It is impossible for both or for either to win absolutely. The
success of one must leave the other penniless.
Let us look at the matter of a coal strike only, for simplicity's
sake.
In a coal mine you have three factors:
First. The COAL given to men--presumably for the use of mankind
in general--by Divine Providence.
Second. The WORKMEN who dig the coal, haul it, screen it, etc.
Third. The OWNER, who through money, or intelligence, or both,
gets control of mines and works them for his profit.
The mine owner resents the suggestion that he and his men are
partners.
Ought he to resent that suggestion? We think not.
Miners without any capitalist could certainly get coal out of the
ground.
The capitalist without miners could not possibly get coal out of
the ground.
The labor is at least as important as the mine. ----
The capitalist who wishes to acquire a mine is willing to grant
certain rights and conditions to him who has the MINE for sale.
He treats with that person as with an equal.
WHY WILL HE NOT GRANT RIGHTS AND EQUALITY TO THOSE WHO HAVE THE
LABOR FOR SALE?
If a hundred men own the mine, and elect a certain agent to
represent them in the sale, the capitalist will willingly treat
with that agent EVEN THOUGH HE BE NOT ONE OF THE ACTUAL MINE
OWNERS. It becomes simply a question of the agent's AUTHORITY.
Why does the capitalist haughtily refuse to treat with the
accredited agent of the men who have the LABOR for sale,
Is it not because he resents the workman's attempt at
emancipation and equality? Is it not because the capitalist in
his heart demands SUBMISSION from the man who works for a
daily wage?
Is it not because the powerful among us fail to admit that
workers have passed from slavery to equality?
A man owns vast mining properties. He lives in New York and in
Newport. Comfortably, and at a distance, he runs and rules his
mines. He is good-natured enough, kind-hearted. He means well.
He does not see the corpses brought up from the fire-damp. He
does not notice the hollow chests of young children with the
pores of their skin and the pores of their lungs full of coal
dust.
This owner--who rules and draws his profits from Newport--has one
bitter complaint against his striking men. He cannot forgive
them BECAUSE THEY CALL IN A LABOR LEADER FROM CHICAGO TO SETTLE
A LABOR DISPUTE IN PENNSYLVANIA.
Imagining himself most condescending, he expresses willingness to
treat personally and individually with his men. But he will not
tolerate interference "with my business" on the part of the
workmen's agent, whom he calls "an agitator from Chicago."
WHY should he feel so badly about it?
If the Pennsylvania workman is willing to let a NEWPORT man
manage the capitalistic end, should not that Newport man allow a
CHICAGO labor leader to manage the labor end?
Is not one explanation the fact that the owner considers his
workmen, in every possible respect, financially, morally,
legally, ethically and eternally, his inferiors?
If one mine owner disagrees with another, each will treat with
the other's chosen agent, whether he be Tom Reed, corporation
lawyer from Maine; Joe Choate, corporation lawyer from New York,
or Levy, corporation lawyer from Chicago.
Why not accord to the workman the right to choose his accredited
representative?
So much for the much-talked-of "interference in MY business by
labor agitators."
What about the interests of the country? There are in
Pennsylvania, let us say, one hundred square miles of coal lands
OWNED BY ONE MAN, and WORKED BY TEN THOUSAND MEN.
The working of this mining region develops an annual net profit,
perhaps, of five million dollars, AFTER the workmen have been
paid as little as they will work for.
The owner lives in a house of a hundred rooms.
The miner's family lives in two rooms. The owner has a yacht, a
private car, a fast automobile, fine carriages, many servants.
The miner WALKS. He has a wife who cooks, sews, scrubs,
washes, mends while he and his boys work in the mines.
We wish to arouse no "maudlin sympathy" for the miner, no
"anarchist loathing" of the owner.
We ask an answer to this question:
Which would be better for America: to let one man have five
millions a year, and keep ten thousand men on the edge of want;
or to let the one (and, if you choose, SUPERIOR) man have one
million a year, and divide the four millions among ten thousand
families, adding four hundred dollars to the income of each
family? That is a plain, simple question.
Remember, we suggest and advocate no COMPULSION. We state a
situation. The STRIKER is trying to get a little more for
himself and family. The OWNER is trying to keep the vast sum
for himself and his family. Each is convinced of the
righteousness of his cause. The striker does not try to TAKE
AWAY money or property from the owner. He simply strikes,
saying:
"I will not work for less than such a sum, unless you starve
me into working."
He calls upon YOU, the public, to give him moral support. He
entreats other workmen not to take his place while he strikes.
It is for YOU, the public, and for YOU, the idle, hard-pressed
workmen, to answer conscientiously the question:
Is it better for one man to have four extra MILLIONS a year, or
for each of ten thousand families to have four extra HUNDREDS a
year, that they need sadly and sorely?
If this question were answered as Christ would answer it, there
would be no smug respectabilities scoffing at the striker. There
would be no heartless scabs taking the places of men struggling
to support wives and children.
Leave out sentimentality, if you will, and Christianity, and our
hollow pretence of following Him who called every poor man "my
brother."
What about the cold utility? Four millions more for an owner
mean what?
Some bogus antiquities, and perhaps a bogus title brought to
America.
Another palace, with a dissatisfied owner.
A dissipated son; money spent by this son to promote vice, and by
the father to corrupt legislation. Four hundred dollars more for
a workman's family mean wholesome food for children. And the
children go to school and have a chance.
This sum means a self-respecting life for a father, and for the
mother it means everything. She can hire some woman to help her
when her babies come. She can give her husband and her children
good food, rejoice in their comfort, add good, healthy citizens
to the nation. ----
The owner in his struggle makes various statements of which only
a few must be answered, and very briefly, for the sake of the
impatient reader.
"If capital goes on granting the demands of union labor there
will be no more capital, no more big manufactures, our prosperity
will die as England's prosperity is dying--killed by union
labor!"
Thus speaks the indignant, would-be patriotic and unselfish
capitalist. Let us see:
What becomes of the established FACT that a nation is
prosperous in proportion as the average individual citizen
(NOT its few millionaires) is prosperous? There are nowhere
on earth stronger labor unions than in the United States. There
are no such unions in Mexico, none such in South America, none
as powerful in Canada. Why are we not eclipsed industrially by
those countries?
You say that labor unions have killed English industry? No.
They have kept England alive in the face of fierce competition.
Millions upon millions of Englishmen live on a little foggy
northern island incapable of supporting them. By their courage,
their mental power, their genius, their UNION, they have kept
the nation great. It is as though in one corner of New York
State we had the greatest industrial power on earth. What the
Gulf Stream has been to England's agriculture, labor unionism has
been to England's industry.
It is not the English WORKINGMAN who has been beaten. The
English workmen did not sell the English mercantile navy to J.P.
Morgan. English capitalists did that.
Get this in your heads, you who talk against unions. Morgan and
his fellow American capitalists have formed themselves into
financial UNIONS, which we call trusts. And they have beaten
the English capitalist, who did not know enough to take lessons
from his workman and form unions of his own.
The American FINANCIAL union, not the English LABOR union, has
beaten England in the race for industrial supremacy.
Union is strength everywhere and forever. The remaining strength
of England is in her labor unions, which give men time to think,
food to grow on, and give real men to the nation. You say that
powerful unions kill nations.
Why is not China a great industrial power?
She has vast fortunes and no unions. Li Hung Chang was richer
than Morgan, and could cut off the head of any striker. His
coolies got five cents a day and worked fourteen hours--is THAT
your ideal system? ----
Last of all (and we apologize for this unforgivably long
editorial), let us discuss the question of foreign labor. The
capitalist complains that the Hungarian, "the brutal, ignorant
foreigner," makes much of the trouble, and "wants as much as an
American."
Loud is this cry against the foreign laborer. And the ignorant,
know-nothing American workman joins in the cry only too
willingly.
Who brings in those foreign laborers by the shipload, Mr.
Mineowner?
Who rounds up cargoes of Slavs on the other side and brings them
here to cut the wages and the living of the native-born?
Who shrieks dolefully, Mr. Miner, when the Slav shows that he is
a MAN brave and willing to prove worthy of freedom by joining
the army of union labor?
The Slav and the Hungarian ARE HERE, and their children will
be here when we are dead.
Which is better, to underpay them, treat them like cattle, fill
them with just hatred of unjust discrimination, or give them a
chance to be men?
Shall their children grow up ignorant mine slaves? Or shall they
go to that factory of honest citizenship--the public school--to
be improved as we have all been improved, whether we came
originally from Hungary, Ireland, England, France, Russia, or
elsewhere?
The struggle of the strikers, like all great struggles, is
sometimes unjust. It has not always the wisest or the most
unselfish leaders.
But it is an effort to improve the AVERAGE CONDITION OF
HUMANITY. Help that effort.
"LIMITING THE AMOUNT OF A DAY'S WORK"
THERE'S A GOOD DEAL OF NONSENSE TALKED ON THIS SUBJECT
An honest, well-meaning clergyman talked the other day on labor
unions, and wandered out of his depth. As a rule, clergymen,
having studied the teachings of Christ, are aware that they ought
to be on the side of the workingman. Hence the strongest
supporters of the union are found among the clergy.
The mistake of the clergyman whom we mention is discussed here,
because it is often made by well-meaning, but narrow-minded,
citizens.
He spoke of "the custom union labor has of limiting a day's work
AND OTHER DISHONEST PRACTICES."
By limiting a day's work, the reverend gentleman referred to the
rule existing in certain unions regulating the maximum day's
labor.
That rule does exist, and sometimes undoubtedly--labor union men
not being angels or cherubim--the rule may be pushed to extremes.
But on the whole the rule is necessary, and it works for good.
We shall tell this clergyman and other citizens one special
reason for limiting the day's work.
The contractors want to make all the money they can. When the
unions forced them into recognition of certain hours of labor as
constituting a day's work, THAT was looked upon as a dishonest
practice. It was felt in the old days that a workman should be
only too glad to get out of bed at daybreak and work until dark.
Now even the stupidest and most selfish have come to recognize
limited hours as a feature of American industry. And the
enlightened gladly admit that the well-paid, well-rested,
independent worker usually does more in his eight or nine hours
than he used to do in his twelve or fourteen.
After the inauguration of the limited-hour day the contractors
invented what is known as a "rusher."
The "rusher" is a young workman, in his prime, marvellously quick
in his work as compared with the ordinary, good, capable workman.
On a job of bricklaying, carpentering, or other work, it was
customary for the shrewd contractor to hire one or more
"rushers." Nominally the "rusher" was paid regular union wages.
But secretly the contractor paid him double wages, or more than
double wages. The "rusher" worked at high pressure hour after
hour, day after day. The others could not possibly have kept up
with him had he worked his fastest. But his instructions
were to keep just a little ahead, that the others might struggle
and do their best to keep even in their task, in order not to
lose their work for apparent idleness. Thus the "rusher," a man
of unusual skill, getting double wages, went along well within
his forces, while the others were working themselves to death in
order to keep up and not lose their jobs.
The limitation of the day's output is based originally on the
desire to squelch this "rusher" idea, or to put the quietus on
the very young and able workman anxious to curry favor with his
"boss" by making the pace too hot for the men working beside him.
----
Our friend, the clergyman, and many others say that it is
dishonest to limit the day's output. But is it dishonest? What
is the difference between limiting the DAY'S output and
limiting a YEAR'S output?
In the middle of the Summer the clergyman says, "I have worked
enough; I ought to go to Europe," and he goes.
The bricklayer does not criticise the clergyman for limiting his
YEAR'S output to forty sermons. He does not say to him, "You
are ABLE to preach fifty-two sermons a year. If you preach
only forty, you are dishonest and rob your parishioners."
What business is it of the clergyman's if the bricklayers, among
themselves, decide that it is better for them in the long run to
set only a given number of brick per day?
The trouble with some clergymen and many others is that they
forget one important thing--namely, THAT THE WORKINGMEN NOW
HAVE SOMETHING TO SAY.
When it comes to a question of laying brick, it is no longer the
squire or the local clergyman who decides what shall be done.
The BRICKLAYER DECIDES WHAT SHALL BE DONE.
And when it comes to carpenter work, the CARPENTER decides what
shall constitute a day's work.
In olden times the clergymen, the lawyers, the rich, the lucky
class in general, decided for THEMSELVES what THEY should do, and
then they decided for their so-called inferiors what those
INFERIORS should do.
Our prosperous class are having a very painful time indeed
getting into their minds the fact that such a thing as the right
of the majority REALLY EXISTS. And they find it very hard indeed
to believe that the doctrine of human equality is to be taken
seriously in matters of business.
Labor unions are performing an important educational function
when they drive into the heads of these would-be superiors the
fact that this nation is becoming actually a republic in which
the workingmen shall decide for themselves questions affecting
themselves, and in which they shall no longer be guided by the
whims or financial interests of would-be "superiors."
CATCHING A RED-HOT BOLT
Men were working on the roof of a Pennsylvania ferryhouse,
overhanging the North River on the Jersey side.
The passengers on one of the big ferryboats watched with
admiration the work of the fearless young mechanics.
The men stood on a board not more than a foot wide. They had
nothing to hold to. Sixty feet below them was a mass of rough
piles. A misstep would have meant death.
One of the men, standing perfectly at ease on his narrow ledge,
swung a heavy sledge-hammer, while the other held in place the
bolt to be driven home in the iron-work. ----
The work on that bolt was finished, and one of the young men, a
wiry giant over six feet tall, picked up in his arms a small
wooden keg which stood on the board beside him. It was a keg
such as nails are packed in. About forty feet away from the
bridge, up among the iron beams, a smith was at work heating the
bolts red-hot.
This smith saw the young man on the narrow board holding the
wooden keg in his arms. He knew that another bolt was needed.
The bolt, white-hot, was seized with a pair of tongs, thrown
violently through the air, sending off a shower of white sparks
as it went.
As the white bolt shot toward the metal worker, he held out the
wooden keg in a matter-of-fact way, caught the bolt, picked it
out of the keg with a pair of pincers, and soon the heavy sledge-
hammer was at work driving the metal, still white-hot, into the
hole. ----
Passengers who make their living in a less exciting way watched
with great excitement as one after another of these heavy red-hot
bolts came flying through the air, each in its turn caught by the
mechanic standing on the narrow board.
If the bolt had struck or burned him, he must almost inevitably
have fallen. He must have fallen had he made a misstep reaching
out the wooden keg to catch the flying iron.
Among those who watched him were very prosperous men come in from
the seaside on the flying express, bound for Wall Street. These
men were sorry when their boat pulled out, so deeply interested
were they in the skill and courage of the mechanics working so
high up on so narrow a footing.
If their opinion had been asked then and there they would have
said that no reasonable rate of pay would be too high for such
mechanics, and that eight hours of work catching red-hot bolts
and driving them home, on a narrow plank sixty feet in the air,
ought to be considered a fair day's work.
We trust that if these men read in the future that the structural
iron-workers or the house-smiths are striking for a little more
pay and for eight hours' work they will remember those men
working on the ferryhouse, and remember that all of these
iron-workers, like all miners, and many others, earn their bread
at the risk of their lives.
We hope that those who watched the red-hot bolts flying through
the air will remember their sensations when they hear of a strike
among those men, and not say, as they usually do:
"The impudence of union labor must be suppressed. The men are
lazy; that's what's the matter with them. It is all nonsense to
talk about working eight hours. Union labor, if it keeps on,
will ruin this country's commercial supremacy." ----
The trouble with human beings is that their lives are widely
separated and sympathy is killed by ignorance.
The banker does not see, therefore cannot appreciate, the courage
of the man working on an iron beam at the top of a steel frame
300 feet in the air.
The mechanic cannot understand, and therefore cannot appreciate,
the worry, the mental stress of the money man, who must make ends
meet, pay bills, arrange mortgages, find tenants and settle his
union troubles at the same time.
Better acquaintance with each other is what human beings need.
It would be well if more very rich men had seen that young
mechanic catching his red-hot bolts.
It would be well if more young mechanics who like their beefsteak
and onions could see John D. Rockefeller sipping his glass of
milk and seltzer (his whole dinner), or know what Rockefeller
feels when he lies awake half the night. He has found pretty
well-paid employment for a hundred thousand men who sleep soundly
while he tosses and turns and feels the weight of a ton on his
chest.
THE TRUSTS AND THE UNION-- HOW DO THEY DIFFER?
A letter signed "Several Democrats from St. Paul" reads, in
part, as follows:
"In order to convert several rank Republicans it is necessary
that we should be able to explain the difference between a trust
and a labor union. Will you kindly, through your columns, make a
clear explanation of this distinction? Our opponents holdthat
both trusts and unions are combinations, which appears to be
true, but there is apparently a weak point in our ability to
definitely show the difference, and we beg that you explain it."
----
Trusts and unions are both combinations, beyond question. But a
pronounced difference distinguishes them, and we shall endeavor
to make it clear.
You see a horse after a hard day's work grazing in a swampy
meadow. He has done his duty and is getting what he can in
return.
On the horse's flank you may see a leach sucking blood.
The LEACH is the trust.
The HORSE is the labor UNION.
Possibly you have read "Sindbad the Sailor," with its story of
the Old Alan of the Sea. The Old Man of the Sea rode round on
the sailor's back squeezing his neck with his tightly twisted
legs.
The OLD MAN is the TRUST.
The SAILOR is the labor UNION. ----
In Chicago two combinations are fighting. One is a combination
of citizens--the Citizens' Union. The other is a combination of
public robbers--the Gas Trust. Each combination is trying to get
what it wants. Surely you can see the difference between the two
combinations.
The citizens are striving in a purely legitimate way to obtain
their RIGHTS.
Similarly, Labor Unions, when soundly organized, are striving
properly and legitimately to obtain their RIGHTS.
Gas Trusts and other Trusts endeavor improperly and
illegitimately to obtain what does not belong to them. ----
In old times, on the high seas, there were two classes of
vessels. The great majority were honest vessels of commerce,
doing good to the world, while striving, of course, to benefit
their crews and owners.
Those honest SHIPS were the Labor UNIONS. On the same waters
there sailed other ships--fast, daring--manned by unscrupulous,
although able, men.
Those were the pirate ships.
The TRUSTS compared to Labor UNIONS are the pirate ships
compared to honest ships of commerce.
FRANCE HAS LEARNED HER LESSON
The employes on the Paris underground railroad had a strike and
have settled their strike.
The terms of the settlement amaze the outside world. The terms
are especially amazing to the American--and well they may be.
The employes of the underground railroad in Paris are GOVERNMENT
employes.
Their strike inconvenienced the public, and even the radical
French people were annoyed with the strikers.
In other European countries and in this country, as the news
reports very truly say, the strike of those Government employes
would have been dealt with very summarily. Three engines of
civilization would have been brought into play effectively.
"First the police, second the cavalry, third Gatling guns." ----
But the police, the cavalry and guns were tried on the French
people long ago, and that little matter was fought out and
settled. The men who govern France know that at a certain stage
in the proceedings a courageous people will not stand Gatling
guns, cavalry or police. They have found out in France that the
way to deal with striking workmen is just the way the Government
official would like to be dealt with himself if he were a
striking workman instead of a well-paid public officer.
The striking men complained that their day's work was too long
and their pay too small. The pay was increased and the day
shortened--which was perfectly right.
Each employe is now allowed one day off in seven, and ten days'
vacation every year with full pay--which is perfectly right.
The young men employed on the road are compelled to do twenty
days' work in the army each year. Their wages are paid while
they are doing this compulsory military work--which is perfectly
right.
If a man is ill through no fault or vice of his own he gets his
pay as long as he is ill up to three hundred and sixty-five days,
and the company in whose service he has become ill pays his
doctor's bill, his drug store bill and any extra expenses
involved--which is perfectly just and fair.
No striker is to be dismissed because of having taken part in the
strike. A benefit fund is provided for the employes of this
Government enterprise--and the company pays the membership
subscription to the benefit fund with NO DEDUCTION FROM THE
WORKMEN'S PAY.
The above seems a horrible narrative to the energetic American
exploiter of labor.
It would have seemed very stupid, in fact quite incomprehensible,
to the French Government at any time before the Revolution.
But the Revolution taught France and some other people that a
nation, like any other structure, is insecure when its foundation
is agitated. The foundation of a nation is the enormous mass of
working people, and that foundation the French have learned to
respect and treat well.
We shall learn as much here some day. Let us hope we shall learn
it more peaceably than the French did.
UNION MEN AS SLAVE OWNERS
WHAT PLANS HAS THE FIVE-DOLLAR-A-DAY MAN MADE TO HELP HIS POORER
FELLOW-CREATURES?
Every addition within reason to wages, every reasonable reduction
of working hours, must help the whole nation. Working human
beings have been looked upon through the ages as slaves, either
on an actual slave-owning basis or on an insufficient wage
basis--which is about the same thing. Each recognition of the
worker's rights moves us a little farther from slave days. Every
time a new class earns decent treatment by hard fighting we see
increased the number of those who may properly be called men.
The blind employer asks: "Shall men be allowed to fix their own
wages?"
OF COURSE they shall. And until they do fix their own wages they
are not men at all. The ox does not fix his hours of labor or
the quantity of his corn. But the man does. The man controlled
like an ox is nearer an ox than a man.
We delight in the efforts of unions. We are advocates of every
movement that tends to divide among a still larger class the good
things of the world.
But this newspaper is no mere labor union organ. We care more
for the welfare of the humblest, non-organized, underpaid,
underfed citizen than for the finest, most highly paid, most
intelligent mechanic.
The man who is least well off needs our help most. He needs,
above all men, some practical PROOF that he lives where men
are equal. He should be the object of earnest thought on the
part of the five-dollar-a-day man.
It is the five-dollar-a-day man, the able mechanic, whom we
address to-day: ----
Many of your thoughts and words, Mr. Five-Dollar Man, are
devoted to plutocrats. You are not free from envy. You
consider, and with perfect justice, that you do not--even with
your five dollars--get your share of the world's good things.
But, for a change to-day, will you look DOWN instead of UP?
You work hard at five dollars per day "to fatten in comfort the
happy millionaire employer." All right; admitted.
But did you ever think who works hard to fatten YOU?
Did it ever occur to you that you are a plutocrat, and a very
numerous and decided plutocrat? Do you ever wonder what you will
answer when the time comes for those whom you underpay to demand
eight hours and fair wages of YOU?
You keep a servant girl to help your wife. Does she work eight
hours a day? No; she works about fourteen, and hears a good deal
of grumbling because she does not do better. Does she get union
wages? No; she gets about thirty cents a day. Does she get
double pay on holidays? Can she put on any substitute if she
chooses to wander off for two or three days a week?
The woman who works to make your life comfortable works just as
many hours as you can make her work, and she gets just as little
pay as you can get her to take. Is that all right? ----
And the servant girl is not the only one. Some farmer's hand
works to raise the wheat, the potatoes that you eat. What is he
paid? What are his hours? Fifty cents a day, twelve or fourteen
hours of work. And your bootmaker in the factory, and the
sweat-shop slave who makes your coat, and the long list of other
poor devils who work for about one-tenth of your salary. Do you
know why you are comparatively well off? Simply because the man
for whom YOU work pays you ten times as much as you pay the
men and women who work for YOU.
You pay indirectly? True. But what difference does that make?
You are well-to-do because you purchase without question the
product of men who are really slaves. You have brains, and by
combination have FORCED your employer to treat you decently.
Yes, and you deserve credit. But you are not fundamentally
superior to the other men around you. What are you going to do
when they demand treatment as good as yours? What are you going
to reply when they class you with the other plutocrats?
You enjoy the work of only ten or twenty underpaid men--that is
so. But you are in the same class with the plutocrat who enjoys
the profit on the work of ten or twenty thousand men.
Utter disregard of others--where it does not affect your own
wages--is your rule, and you know it. What better joke is there
than the joke about the union label? How many hats on your rack
have union labels in them? How many of you can swear no
sweatshop ever saw your clothes? How many of you would apologize
for not offering your friend a "union-made" cigar?
It is the nature of man to think earnestly of only one thing at a
time. If one pursuit really engrosses his attention he has
little time to think of anything else. In the hard struggle for
a living the workingman has little time for any thought save for
his OWN wage, his OWN stomach, his OWN welfare.
As union men you will continue to struggle for your five dollars
a day--restricting apprentices, that others may be shut out from
your field; opposing changes threatening you, however beneficial
they may be generally.
But as individuals you must THINK. You study, and, being
free from the grind of real poverty, you should be less hardened
than the unfortunate, and inclined to feel for others.
You have made a good fight against the slavery that used to
oppress you. In England you destroyed mills, endured shooting
and hanging. All over the world, by hard fighting and wise
voting, you have established the fact that the top class of
mechanics must no longer be treated as cattle.
Now, what are you going to do for the others who are still
cattle? You have demanded in the name of holy justice that
others help you. In the same name, what do you propose to do for
those still oppressed? Will you use your big voting power for
the millions who are still at the bottom?
Will you combine for the benefit of the vast army as you have
combined for your OWN benefit?
Or will you wait--as did the employers--to be FORCED into
decency? Will you free your own collection of underpaid,
overworked slaves, or wait for them to organize and beat you into
decency, as your representatives did with your oppressors long
ago?
Take a look downward once in a while. Study those below you.
Glance over your own little collection of "wage slaves" in your
kitchen a
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