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Title: Love, Life & Work
Being a Book of Opinions Reasonably Good-Natured Concerning
How to Attain the Highest Happiness for One's Self with the
Least Possible Harm to Others
Author: Elbert Hubbard
Release Date: December 8, 2003 [EBook #10417]
Language: English
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LOVE LIFE & WORK
BEING A BOOK OF OPINIONS REASONABLY GOOD-NATURED CONCERNING HOW TO
ATTAIN THE HIGHEST HAPPINESS FOR ONE'S SELF WITH THE LEAST POSSIBLE
HARM TO OTHERS
1906
By ELBERT HUBBARD
CONTENTS
CHAPTERS
1. A Prayer
2. Life and Expression
3. Time and Chance
4. Psychology of a Religious Revival
5. One-Man Power
6. Mental Attitude
7. The Outsider
8. Get Out or Get in Line
9. The Week-Day, Keep it Holy
10. Exclusive Friendships
11. The Folly of Living in the Future
12. The Spirit of Man
13. Art and Religion
14. Initiative
15. The Disagreeable Girl
16. The Neutral
17. Reflections on Progress
18. Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise
19. Love and Faith
20. Giving Something for Nothing
21. Work and Waste
22. The Law of Obedience
23. Society's Saviors
24. Preparing for Old Age
25. An Alliance With Nature
26. The Ex. Question
27. The Sergeant
28. The Spirit of the Age
29. The Grammarian
30. The Best Religion
A Prayer
The supreme prayer of my heart is not to be learned, rich, famous,
powerful, or "good," but simply to be radiant. I desire to radiate
health, cheerfulness, calm courage and good will. I wish to live without
hate, whim, jealousy, envy, fear. I wish to be simple, honest, frank,
natural, clean in mind and clean in body, unaffected--ready to say "I do
not know," if it be so, and to meet all men on an absolute equality--to
face any obstacle and meet every difficulty unabashed and unafraid.
I wish others to live their lives, too--up to their highest, fullest and
best. To that end I pray that I may never meddle, interfere, dictate,
give advice that is not wanted, or assist when my services are not
needed. If I can help people, I'll do it by giving them a chance to help
themselves; and if I can uplift or inspire, let it be by example,
inference, and suggestion, rather than by injunction and dictation. That
is to say, I desire to be radiant--to radiate life.
Life and Expression
By exercise of its faculties the spirit grows, just as a muscle grows
strong thru continued use. Expression is necessary. Life is expression,
and repression is stagnation--death.
Yet, there can be right and wrong expression. If a man permits his life
to run riot and only the animal side of his nature is allowed to express
itself, he is repressing his highest and best, and the qualities not
used atrophy and die.
Men are punished by their sins, not for them. Sensuality, gluttony, and
the life of license repress the life of the spirit, and the soul never
blossoms; and this is what it is to lose one's soul. All adown the
centuries thinking men have noted these truths, and again and again we
find individuals forsaking in horror the life of the senses and devoting
themselves to the life of the spirit. This question of expression
through the spirit, or through the senses--through soul or body--has
been the pivotal point of all philosophy and the inspiration of
all religion.
Every religion is made up of two elements that never mix any more than
oil and water mix. A religion is a mechanical mixture, not a chemical
combination, of morality and dogma. Dogma is the science of the unseen:
the doctrine of the unknown and unknowable. And in order to give this
science plausibility, its promulgators have always fastened upon it
morality. Morality can and does exist entirely separate and apart from
dogma, but dogma is ever a parasite on morality, and the business of the
priest is to confuse the two.
But morality and religion never saponify. Morality is simply the
question of expressing your life forces--how to use them? You have so
much energy; and what will you do with it? And from out the multitude
there have always been men to step forward and give you advice for a
consideration. Without their supposed influence with the unseen we might
not accept their interpretation of what is right and wrong. But with the
assurance that their advice is backed up by Deity, followed with an
offer of reward if we believe it, and a threat of dire punishment if we
do not, the Self-appointed Superior Class has driven men wheresoever it
willed. The evolution of formal religions is not a complex process, and
the fact that they embody these two unmixable things, dogma and
morality, is a very plain and simple truth, easily seen, undisputed by
all reasonable men. And be it said that the morality of most religions
is good. Love, truth, charity, justice and gentleness are taught in them
all. But, like a rule in Greek grammar, there are many exceptions. And
so in the morality of religions there are exceptional instances that
constantly arise where love, truth, charity, gentleness and justice are
waived on suggestion of the Superior Class, that good may follow. Were
it not for these exceptions there would be no wars between
Christian nations.
The question of how to express your life will probably never down, for
the reason that men vary in temperament and inclination. Some men have
no capacity for certain sins of the flesh; others there be, who, having
lost their inclination for sensuality through too much indulgence, turn
ascetics. Yet all sermons have but one theme: how shall life be
expressed? Between asceticism and indulgence men and races swing.
Asceticism in our day finds an interesting manifestation in the
Trappists, who live on a mountain top, nearly inaccessible, and deprive
themselves of almost every vestige of bodily comfort, going without food
for days, wearing uncomfortable garments, suffering severe cold; and
should one of this community look upon the face of a woman he would
think he was in instant danger of damnation. So here we find the extreme
instance of men repressing the faculties of the body in order that the
spirit may find ample time and opportunity for exercise.
Somewhere between this extreme repression of the monk and the license of
the sensualist lies the truth. But just where is the great question; and
the desire of one person, who thinks he has discovered the norm, to
compel all other men to stop there, has led to war and strife untold.
All law centers around this point--what shall men be allowed to do? And
so we find statutes to punish "strolling play actors," "players on
fiddles," "disturbers of the public conscience," "persons who dance
wantonly," "blasphemers," and in England there were, in the year 1800,
thirty-seven offenses that were legally punishable by death. What
expression is right and what is not, is simply a matter of opinion. One
religious denomination that now exists does not allow singing;
instrumental music has been to some a rock of offense, exciting the
spirit through the sense of hearing, to improper thoughts--"through the
lascivious pleasing of the lute"; others think dancing wicked, while a
few allow pipe-organ music, but draw the line at the violin; while still
others use a whole orchestra in their religious service. Some there be
who regard pictures as implements of idolatry; while the Hook-and-Eye
Baptists look upon buttons as immoral.
Strange evolutions are often witnessed within the life of one
individual. For instance, Leo Tolstoy, a great and good man, at one time
a sensualist, has now turned ascetic; a common evolution in the lives of
the saints. But excellent as this man is, there is yet a grave
imperfection in his cosmos which to a degree vitiates the truth he
desires to teach: he leaves the element of beauty out of his formula.
Not caring for harmony as set forth in color, form and sweet sounds, he
is quite willing to deny all others these things which minister to
their well-being. There is in most souls a hunger for beauty, just as
there is physical hunger. Beauty speaks to their spirits through the
senses; but Tolstoy would have your house barren to the verge of
hardship. My veneration for Count Tolstoy is profound, yet I mention him
here to show the grave danger that lies in allowing any man, even one of
the wisest of men, to dictate to us what is best. We ourselves are the
better judges. Most of the frightful cruelties inflicted on men during
the past have arisen simply out of a difference of opinion that arose
through a difference in temperament. The question is as alive to-day as
it was two thousand years ago--what expression is best? That is, what
shall we do to be saved? And concrete absurdity consists in saying that
we must all do the same thing. Whether the race will ever grow to a
point where men will be willing to leave the matter of life-expression
to the individual is a question; but the millennium will never arrive
until men cease trying to compel all other men to live after
one pattern.
Most people are anxious to do what is best for themselves and least
harmful for others. The average man now has intelligence enough: Utopia
is not far off, if the self-appointed folk who rule us, and teach us for
a consideration, would only be willing to do unto others as they would
be done by, that is to say, mind their own business and cease coveting
things that belong to other people. War among nations and strife among
individuals is a result of the covetous spirit to possess.
A little more patience, a little more charity for all, a little more
love; with less bowing down to the past, and the silent ignoring of
pretended authority; a brave looking forward to the future, with more
self-confidence and more faith in our fellow men, and the race will be
ripe for a great burst of life and light.
[Illustration]
Time and Chance
As the subject is somewhat complex, I will have to explain it to you.
The first point is that there is not so very much difference in the
intelligence of people after all. The great man is not so great as folks
think, and the dull man is not quite so stupid as he seems. The
difference in our estimates of men lies in the fact that one individual
is able to get his goods into the show-window, and the other is not
aware that he has any show-window or any goods.
"The soul knows all things, and knowledge is only a remembering," says
Emerson.
This seems a very broad statement; and yet the fact remains that the
vast majority of men know a thousand times as much as they are aware of.
Far down in the silent depths of subconsciousness lie myriads of truths,
each awaiting a time when its owner shall call it forth. To utilize
these stored-up thoughts, you must express them to others; and to be
able to express them well your soul has to soar into this subconscious
realm where you have cached these net results of experience. In other
words, you must "come out"--get out of self--away from
self-consciousness, into the region of partial oblivion--away from the
boundaries of time and the limitations of space. The great painter
forgets all in the presence of his canvas; the writer is oblivious to
his surroundings; the singer floats away on the wings of melody (and
carries the audience with her); the orator pours out his soul for an
hour, and it seems to him as if barely five minutes had passed, so rapt
is he in his exalted theme. When you reach the heights of sublimity and
are expressing your highest and best, you are in a partial trance
condition. And all men who enter this condition surprise themselves by
the quantity of knowledge and the extent of insight they possess. And
some going a little deeper than others into this trance condition, and
having no knowledge of the miraculous storing up of truth in the
subconscious cells, jump to the conclusion that their intelligence is
guided by a spirit not theirs. When one reaches this conclusion he
begins to wither at the top, for he relies on the dead, and ceases to
feed the well-springs of his subconscious self.
The mind is a dual affair--objective and subjective. The objective mind
sees all, hears all, reasons things out. The subjective mind stores up
and only gives out when the objective mind sleeps. And as few men ever
cultivate the absorbed, reflective or semi-trance state, where the
objective mind rests, they never really call on their subconscious
treasury for its stores. They are always self-conscious.
A man in commerce, where men prey on their kind, must be alive and alert
to what is going on, or while he dreams, his competitor will seize upon
his birthright. And so you see why poets are poor and artists often beg.
And the summing up of this sermonette is that all men are equally rich,
only some thru fate are able to muster their mental legions on the
plains of their being and count them, while others are never able to
do so.
But what think you is necessary before a person can come into full
possession of his subconscious treasures? Well, I'll tell you: It is not
ease, nor prosperity, nor requited love, nor worldly security--not
these.
"You sing well," said the master, impatiently, to his best pupil, "but
you will never sing divinely until you have given your all for love,
and then been neglected and rejected, and scorned and beaten, and left
for dead. Then, if you do not exactly die, you will come back, and when
the world hears your voice it will mistake you for an angel and fall at
your feet."
And the moral is, that as long as you are satisfied and comfortable, you
use only the objective mind and live in the world of sense. But let love
be torn from your grasp and flee as a shadow--living only as a memory in
a haunting sense of loss; let death come and the sky shut down over less
worth in the world; or stupid misunderstanding and crushing defeat grind
you into the dust, then you may arise, forgetting time and space and
self, and take refuge in mansions not made with hands; and find a
certain sad, sweet satisfaction in the contemplation of treasures stored
up where moth and rust do not corrupt, and where thieves do not break
through and steal.
And thus looking out into the Eternal, you entirely forget the present
and go forth into the Land of Subconsciousness--the Land of Spirit,
where yet dwell the gods of ancient and innocent days? Is it worth
the cost?
Psychology of a Religious Revival
Traveling to and fro over the land and up and down in it are men who
manage street-fairs.
Let it be known that a street-fair or Mardi Gras is never a spontaneous
expression of the carnival spirit on the part of the townspeople. These
festivals are a business--carefully planned, well advertised and carried
out with much astuteness.
The men who manage street-fairs send advance agents, to make
arrangements with the local merchants of the place--these secure the
legal permits that are necessary.
A week is set apart for the carnival, much advertising is done, the
newspapers, reflecting the will of the many, devote pages to the
wonderful things that will happen. The shows arrive--the touters, the
spielers, the clowns, the tumblers, the girls in tights, the singers!
The bands play--the carnival is on! The object of the fair is to boom
the business of the town. The object of the professional managers of the
fair is to make money for themselves, and this they do thru the
guaranty of the merchants, or a percentage on concessions, or both.
I am told that no town whose business is on an absolutely safe and
secure footing ever resorts to a street-fair. The street-fair comes in
when a rival town seems to be getting more than its share of the trade.
When the business of Skaneateles is drifting to Waterloo, then
Skaneateles succumbs to a street-fair.
Sanitation, sewerage, good water supply, and schoolhouses and paved
streets are not the result of throwing confetti, tooting tin horns and
waiving the curfew law.
Whether commerce is effectually helped by the street-fair, or a town
assisted to get on a firm financial basis through the ministry of the
tom-tom, is a problem. I leave the question with students of political
economy and pass on to a local condition which is not a theory. The
religious revivals that have recently been conducted in various parts of
the country were most carefully planned business schemes. One F. Wilbur
Chapman and his corps of well-trained associates may be taken as a type
of the individuals who work up local religious excitement for a
consideration.
Religious revivals are managed very much as are street-fairs. If
religion is getting at a low ebb in your town, you can hire Chapman, the
revivalist, just as you can secure the services of Farley, the
strike-breaker. Chapman and his helpers go from town to town and from
city to city and work up this excitation as a business. They are paid
for their services a thousand dollars a week, or down to what they can
get from collections. Sometimes they work on a guaranty, and at other
times on a percentage or contingent fee, or both.
Towns especially in need of Mr. Chapman's assistance will please send
for circulars, terms and testimonials. No souls saved--no pay.
The basic element of the revival is hypnotism. The scheme of bringing
about the hypnosis, or the obfuscation of the intellect, has taken
generations to carefully perfect. The plan is first to depress the
spirit to a point where the subject is incapable of independent thought.
Mournful music, a monotonous voice of woe, tearful appeals to God,
dreary groans, the whole mingled with pious ejaculations, all tend to
produce a terrifying effect upon the auditor. The thought of God's
displeasure is constantly dwelt upon--the idea of guilt, death and
eternal torment. If the victims can be made to indulge in hysterical
laughter occasionally, the control is better brought about. No chance is
allowed for repose, poise or sane consideration. When the time seems
ripe a general promise of joy is made and the music takes an adagio
turn. The speaker's voice now tells of triumph--offers of forgiveness
are tendered, and then the promise of eternal life.
The final intent is to get the victim on his feet and make him come
forward and acknowledge the fetich. This once done the convert finds
himself among pleasant companions. His social station is
improved--people shake hands with him and solicitously ask after his
welfare. His approbativeness is appealed to--his position is now one of
importance. And moreover, he is given to understand in many subtile ways
that as he will be damned in another world if he does not acquiesce in
the fetich, so also will he be damned financially and socially here if
he does not join the church. The intent in every Christian community is
to boycott and make a social outcast of the independent thinker. The
fetich furnishes excuse for the hypnotic processes. Without assuming a
personal God who can be appeased, eternal damnation and the proposition
that you can win eternal life by believing a myth, there is no sane
reason for the absurd hypnotic formulas.
We are heirs to the past, its good and ill, and we all have a touch of
superstition, like a syphilitic taint. To eradicate this tyranny of fear
and get the cringe and crawl out of our natures, seems the one desirable
thing to lofty minds. But the revivalist, knowing human nature, as all
confidence men do, banks on our superstitious fears and makes his appeal
to our acquisitiveness, offering us absolution and life eternal for a
consideration--to cover expenses. As long as men are paid honors and
money, can wear good clothes, and be immune from work for preaching
superstition, they will preach it. The hope of the world lies in
withholding supplies from the pious mendicants who seek to hold our
minds in thrall.
This idea of a divine bankrupt court where you can get forgiveness by
paying ten cents on the dollar, with the guaranty of becoming a winged
pauper of the skies, is not alluring excepting to a man who has been
well scared. Advance agents pave the way for revivalists by arranging
details with the local orthodox clergy. Universalists, Unitarians,
Christian Scientists and Befaymillites are all studiously avoided. The
object is to fill depleted pews of orthodox Protestant churches--these
pay the freight, and to the victor belong the spoils. The plot and plan
is to stampede into the pen of orthodoxy the intellectual
unwary--children and neurotic grown-ups. The cap-and-bells element is
largely represented in Chapman's select company of German-American
talent: the confetti of foolishness is thrown at us--we dodge, laugh,
listen and no one has time to think, weigh, sift or analyze. There are
the boom of rhetoric, the crack of confession, the interspersed
rebel-yell of triumph, the groans of despair, the cries of victory. Then
come songs by paid singers, the pealing of the organ--rise and sing,
kneel and pray, entreaty, condemnation, misery, tears, threats, promise,
joy, happiness, heaven, eternal bliss, decide now--not a moment is to be
lost, whoop-la you'll be a long time in hell!
All this whirl is a carefully prepared plan, worked out by expert
flim-flammers to addle the reason, scramble intellect and make of men
drooling derelicts.
What for?
I'll tell you--that Doctor Chapman and his professional rooters may roll
in cheap honors, be immune from all useful labor and wax fat on the pay
of those who work. Second, that the orthodox churches may not advance
into workshops and schoolhouses, but may remain forever the home of a
superstition. One would think that the promise of making a person exempt
from the results of his own misdeeds, would turn the man of brains from
these religious shell-men in disgust. But under their hypnotic spell,
the minds of many seem to suffer an obsession, and they are caught in
the swirl of foolish feeling, like a grocer's clerk in the hands of a
mesmerist.
At Northfield, Massachusetts, is a college at which men are taught and
trained, just as men are drilled at a Tonsorial College, in every phase
of this pleasing episcopopography.
There is a good fellow by the suggestive name of Sunday who works the
religious graft. Sunday is the whirling dervish up to date. He and
Chapman and their cappers purposely avoid any trace of the ecclesiastic
in their attire. They dress like drummers--trousers carefully creased,
two watch-chains and a warm vest. Their manner is free and easy, their
attitude familiar. The way they address the Almighty reveals that their
reverence for Him springs out of the supposition that He is very much
like themselves.
The indelicacy of the revivalists who recently called meetings to pray
for Fay Mills, was shown in their ardent supplications to God that He
should make Mills to be like them. Fay Mills tells of the best way to
use this life here and now. He does not prophesy what will become of you
if you do not accept his belief, neither does he promise everlasting
life as a reward for thinking as he does. He realizes that he has not
the agency of everlasting life. Fay Mills is more interested in having a
soul that is worth saving than in saving a soul that isn't. Chapman
talks about lost souls as he might about collar buttons lost under a
bureau, just as if God ever misplaced anything, or that all souls were
not God's souls, and therefore forever in His keeping.
Doctor Chapman wants all men to act alike and believe alike, not
realizing that progress is the result of individuality, and so long as a
man thinks, whether he is right or wrong, he is making head. Neither
does he realize that wrong thinking is better than no thinking at all,
and that the only damnation consists in ceasing to think, and accepting
the conclusions of another. Final truths and final conclusions are
wholly unthinkable to sensible people in their sane moments, but these
revivalists wish to sum up truth for all time and put their leaden
seal upon it.
In Los Angeles is a preacher by the name of McIntyre, a type of the
blatant Bellarmine who exiled Galileo--a man who never doubts his own
infallibility, who talks like an oracle and continually tells of
perdition for all who disagree with him.
Needless to say that McIntyre lacks humor. Personally, I prefer the
McGregors, but in Los Angeles the McIntyres are popular. It was McIntyre
who called a meeting to pray for Fay Mills, and in proposing the meeting
McIntyre made the unblushing announcement that he had never met Mills
nor heard him speak, nor had he read one of his books.
Chapman and McIntyre represent the modern types of
Phariseeism--spielers and spouters for churchianity, and such are the
men who make superstition of so long life. Superstition is the one
Infamy--Voltaire was right. To pretend to believe a thing at which your
reason revolts--to stultify your intellect--this, if it exists at all,
is the unpardonable sin. These muftis preach "the blood of Jesus," the
dogma that man without a belief in miracles is eternally lost, that
everlasting life depends upon acknowledging this, that or the other.
Self-reliance, self-control and self-respect are the three things that
make a man a man.
But man has so recently taken on this ability to think, that he has not
yet gotten used to handling it. The tool is cumbrous in his hands. He is
afraid of it--this one characteristic that differentiates him from the
lower animals--so he abdicates and turns his divine birthright over to a
syndicate. This combination called a church agrees to take care of his
doubts and fears and do his thinking for him, and to help matters along
he is assured that he is not fit to think for himself, and to do so
would be a sin. Man, in his present crude state, holds somewhat the
same attitude toward reason that an Apache Indian holds toward a
camera--the Indian thinks that to have his picture taken means that he
will shrivel up and blow away in a month. And Stanley relates that a
watch with its constant ticking sent the bravest of Congo chiefs into a
cold sweat of agonizing fear; on discovering which, the explorer had but
to draw his Waterbury and threaten to turn the whole bunch into
crocodiles, and at once they got busy and did his bidding. Stanley
exhibited the true Northfield-revival quality in banking on the
superstition of his wavering and frightened followers.
The revival meetin' is an orgie of the soul, a spiritual debauch--a
dropping from sane and sensible control into eroticism. No person of
normal intelligence can afford to throw the reins of reason on the neck
of emotion and ride a Tam O'Shanter race to Bedlam. This hysteria of the
uncurbed feelings is the only blasphemy, and if there were a personal
God, He surely would be grieved to see that we have so absurd an idea of
Him, as to imagine He would be pleased with our deporting the divine
gift of reason into the hell-box.
Revivalism works up the voltage, then makes no use of the current--the
wire is grounded. Let any one of these revivalists write out his sermons
and print them in a book, and no sane man could read them without danger
of paresis. The book would lack synthesis, defy analysis, puzzle the
brain and paralyze the will. There would not be enough attic salt in it
to save it. It would be the supernaculum of the commonplace, and prove
the author to be the lobscouse of literature, the loblolly of letters.
The churches want to enroll members, and so desperate is the situation
that they are willing to get them at the price of self-respect. Hence
come Sunday, Monday, Tuesday and Chapman, and play Svengali to our
Trilby. These gentlemen use the methods and the tricks of the
auctioneer--the blandishments of the bookmaker--the sleek, smooth ways
of the professional spieler.
With this troupe of Christian clowns is one Chaeffer, who is a
specialist with children. He has meetings for boys and girls only, where
he plays tricks, grimaces, tells stories and gets his little hearers
laughing, and thus having found an entrance into their hearts, he
suddenly reverses the lever, and has them crying. He talks to these
little innocents about sin, the wrath of God, the death of Christ, and
offers them a choice between everlasting life and eternal death. To the
person who knows and loves children--who has studied the gentle ways of
Froebel--this excitement is vicious, concrete cruelty. Weakened vitality
follows close upon overwrought nerves, and every excess has its
penalty--the pendulum swings as far this way as it does that.
These reverend gentlemen bray it into the ears of innocent little
children that they were born in iniquity, and in sin did their mothers
conceive them; that the souls of all children over nine years (why
nine?) are lost, and the only way they can hope for heaven is through a
belief in a barbaric blood bamboozle, that men of intelligence have long
since discarded. And all this in the name of the gentle Christ, who took
little children in his arms and said, "Of such is the Kingdom
of Heaven."
This pagan proposition of being born in sin is pollution to the mind of
a child, and causes misery, unrest and heartache incomputable. A few
years ago we were congratulating ourselves that the devil at last was
dead, and that the tears of pity had put out the fires of hell, but the
serpent of superstition was only slightly scotched, not killed.
The intent of the religious revival is dual: first, the claim is that
conversion makes men lead better lives; second, it saves their souls
from endless death or everlasting hell.
To make men lead beautiful lives is excellent, but the Reverend Doctor
Chapman, nor any of his colleagues, nor the denominations that they
represent, will for an instant admit that the fact of a man living a
beautiful life will save his soul alive In fact, Doctor Chapman, Doctor
Torrey and Doctor Sunday, backed by the Reverend Doctor McIntyre,
repeatedly warn their hearers of the danger of a morality that is not
accompanied by a belief in the "blood of Jesus."
So the beautiful life they talk of is the bait that covers the hook for
gudgeons. You have to accept the superstition, or your beautiful life to
them is a byword and a hissing.
Hence, to them, superstition, and not conduct, is the vital thing.
If such a belief is not fanaticism then have I read Webster's
Unabridged Dictionary in vain. Belief in superstition makes no man
kinder, gentler, more useful to himself or society. He can have all the
virtues without the fetich, and he may have the fetich and all the vices
beside. Morality is really not controlled at all by religion--if
statistics of reform schools and prisons are to be believed.
Fay Mills, according to Reverend Doctor McIntyre has all the virtues--he
is forgiving, kind, gentle, modest, helpful. But Fay has abandoned the
fetich--hence McIntyre and Chapman call upon the public to pray for Fay
Mills. Mills had the virtues when he believed in the fetich--and now
that he has disavowed the fetich, he still has the virtues, and in a
degree he never before had. Even those who oppose him admit this, but
still they declare that he is forever "lost."
Reverend Doctor Chaeffer says there are two kinds of habits--good and
bad.
There are also two kinds of religion, good and bad. The religion of
kindness, good cheer, helpfulness and useful effort is good. And on this
point there is no dispute--it is admitted everywhere by every grade of
intellect. But any form of religion that incorporates a belief in
miracles and other barbaric superstitions, as a necessity to salvation,
is not only bad, but very bad. And all men, if left alone long enough to
think, know that salvation depends upon redemption from a belief in
miracles. But the intent of Doctor Chapman and his theological rough
riders is to stampede the herd and set it a milling. To rope the
mavericks and place upon them the McIntyre brand is then quite easy.
As for the reaction and the cleaning up after the carnival, our
revivalists are not concerned. The confetti, collapsed balloons and
peanut shucks are the net assets of the revival--and these are left for
the local managers.
Revivals are for the revivalists, and some fine morning these revival
towns will arise, rub their sleepy eyes, and Chapman will be but a bad
taste in the mouth, and Sunday, Chaeffer, Torrey, Biederwolf and
Company, a troubled dream. To preach hagiology to civilized people is a
lapse that Nemesis will not overlook. America stands for the Twentieth
Century, and if in a moment of weakness she slips back to the exuberant
folly of the frenzied piety of the Sixteenth, she must pay the penalty.
Two things man will have to do--get free from the bondage of other men;
and second, liberate himself from the phantoms of his own mind. On
neither of these points does the revivalist help or aid in any way.
Effervescence is not character and every debauch must be paid for in
vitality and self-respect.
All formal organized religions through which the promoters and managers
thrive are bad, but some are worse than others. The more superstition a
religion has, the worse it is. Usually religions are made up of morality
and superstition. Pure superstition alone would be revolting--in our day
it would attract nobody--so the idea is introduced that morality and
religion are inseparable. I am against the men who pretend to believe
that ethics without a fetich is vain and useless.
The preachers who preach the beauty of truth, honesty and a useful,
helpful life, I am with, head, heart and hand.
The preachers who declare that there can be no such thing as a beautiful
life unless it will accept superstition, I am against, tooth, claw,
club, tongue and pen. Down with the Infamy! I prophesy a day when
business and education will be synonymous--when commerce and college
will join hands--when the preparation for life will be to go to work.
As long as trade was trickery, business barter, commerce finesse,
government exploitation, slaughter honorable, and murder a fine art;
when religion was ignorant superstition, piety the worship of a fetich
and education a clutch for honors, there was small hope for the race.
Under these conditions everything tended towards division, dissipation,
disintegration, separation--darkness, death.
But with the supremacy gained by science, the introduction of the
one-price system in business, and the gradually growing conviction that
honesty is man's most valuable asset, we behold light at the end of
the tunnel.
It only remains now for the laity to drive conviction home upon the
clergy, and prove to them that pretence has its penalty, and to bring to
the mourners' bench that trinity of offenders, somewhat ironically
designated as the Three Learned Professions, and mankind will be well
out upon the broad highway, the towering domes of the Ideal City
in sight.
One-Man Power
Every successful concern is the result of a One-Man Power. Coöperation,
technically, is an iridescent dream--things coöperate because the man
makes them. He cements them by his will.
But find this Man, and get his confidence, and his weary eyes will look
into yours and the cry of his heart shall echo in your ears. "O, for
some one to help me bear this burden!"
Then he will tell you of his endless search for Ability, and of his
continual disappointments and thwartings in trying to get some one to
help himself by helping him.
Ability is the one crying need of the hour. The banks are bulging with
money, and everywhere are men looking for work. The harvest is ripe. But
the Ability to captain the unemployed and utilize the capital, is
lacking--sadly lacking. In every city there are many five- and
ten-thousand-dollar-a-year positions to be filled, but the only
applicants are men who want jobs at fifteen dollars a week. Your man of
Ability has a place already. Yes, Ability is a rare article.
But there is something that is much scarcer, something finer far,
something rarer than this quality of Ability.
It is the ability to recognize Ability.
The sternest comment that ever can be made against employers as a class,
lies in the fact that men of Ability usually succeed in showing their
worth in spite of their employer, and not with his assistance and
encouragement.
If you know the lives of men of Ability, you know that they discovered
their power, almost without exception, thru chance or accident. Had the
accident not occurred that made the opportunity, the man would have
remained unknown and practically lost to the world. The experience of
Tom Potter, telegraph operator at an obscure little way station, is
truth painted large. That fearful night, when most of the wires were
down and a passenger train went through the bridge, gave Tom Potter the
opportunity of discovering himself. He took charge of the dead, cared
for the wounded, settled fifty claims--drawing drafts on the
company--burned the last vestige of the wreck, sunk the waste iron in
the river and repaired the bridge before the arrival of the
Superintendent on the spot.
"Who gave you the authority to do all this?" demanded the
Superintendent.
"Nobody," replied Tom, "I assumed the authority."
The next month Tom Potter's salary was five thousand dollars a year, and
in three years he was making ten times this, simply because he could get
other men to do things.
Why wait for an accident to discover Tom Potter? Let us set traps for
Tom Potter, and lie in wait for him. Perhaps Tom Potter is just around
the corner, across the street, in the next room, or at our elbow.
Myriads of embryonic Tom Potters await discovery and development if we
but look for them.
I know a man who roamed the woods and fields for thirty years and never
found an Indian arrow. One day he began to think "arrow," and stepping
out of his doorway he picked one up. Since then he has collected a
bushel of them.
Suppose we cease wailing about incompetence, sleepy indifference and
slipshod "help" that watches the clock. These things exist--let us
dispose of the subject by admitting it, and then emphasize the fact that
freckled farmer boys come out of the West and East and often go to the
front and do things in a masterly way. There is one name that stands out
in history like a beacon light after all these twenty-five hundred years
have passed, just because the man had the sublime genius of discovering
Ability. That man is Pericles. Pericles made Athens.
And to-day the very dust of the streets of Athens is being sifted and
searched for relics and remnants of the things made by people who were
captained by men of Ability who were discovered by Pericles.
There is very little competition in this line of discovering Ability. We
sit down and wail because Ability does not come our way. Let us think
"Ability," and possibly we can jostle Pericles there on his pedestal,
where he has stood for over a score of centuries--the man with a supreme
genius for recognizing Ability. Hail to thee, Pericles, and hail to
thee, Great Unknown, who shall be the first to successfully imitate this
captain of men.
Mental Attitude
Success is in the blood. There are men whom fate can never keep
down--they march forward in a jaunty manner, and take by divine right
the best of everything that the earth affords. But their success is not
attained by means of the Samuel Smiles-Connecticut policy. They do not
lie in wait, nor scheme, nor fawn, nor seek to adapt their sails to
catch the breeze of popular favor. Still, they are ever alert and alive
to any good that may come their way, and when it comes they simply
appropriate it, and tarrying not, move steadily on.
Good health! Whenever you go out of doors, draw the chin in, carry the
crown of the head high, and fill the lungs to the utmost; drink in the
sunshine; greet your friends with a smile, and put soul into every
hand-clasp.
Do not fear being misunderstood; and never waste a moment thinking about
your enemies. Try to fix firmly in your own mind what you would like to
do, and then without violence of direction you will move straight to
the goal.
Fear is the rock on which we split, and hate the shoal on which many a
barque is stranded. When we become fearful, the judgment is as
unreliable as the compass of a ship whose hold is full of iron ore; when
we hate, we have unshipped the rudder; and if ever we stop to meditate
on what the gossips say, we have allowed a hawser to foul the screw.
Keep your mind on the great and splendid thing you would like to do; and
then, as the days go gliding by, you will find yourself unconsciously
seizing the opportunities that are required for the fulfillment of your
desire, just as the coral insect takes from the running tide the
elements that it needs. Picture in your mind the able, earnest, useful
person you desire to be, and the thought that you hold is hourly
transforming you into that particular individual you so admire.
Thought is supreme, and to think is often better than to do.
Preserve a right mental attitude--the attitude of courage, frankness and
good cheer.
Darwin and Spencer have told us that this is the method of Creation.
Each animal has evolved the parts it needed and desired. The horse is
fleet because he wishes to be; the bird flies because it desires to; the
duck has a web foot because it wants to swim. All things come through
desire and every sincere prayer is answered. We become like that on
which our hearts are fixed.
Many people know this, but they do not know it thoroughly enough so that
it shapes their lives. We want friends, so we scheme and chase 'cross
lots after strong people, and lie in wait for good folks--or alleged
good folks--hoping to be able to attach ourselves to them. The only way
to secure friends is to be one. And before you are fit for friendship
you must be able to do without it. That is to say, you must have
sufficient self-reliance to take care of yourself, and then out of the
surplus of your energy you can do for others.
The individual who craves friendship, and yet desires a self-centered
spirit more, will never lack for friends.
If you would have friends, cultivate solitude instead of society. Drink
in the ozone; bathe in the sunshine; and out in the silent night, under
the stars, say to yourself again and yet again, "I am a part of all my
eyes behold!" And the feeling then will come to you that you are no
mere interloper between earth and heaven; but you are a necessary part
of the whole. No harm can come to you that does not come to all, and if
you shall go down it can only be amid a wreck of worlds.
Like old Job, that which we fear will surely come upon us. By a wrong
mental attitude we have set in motion a train of events that ends in
disaster. People who die in middle life from disease, almost without
exception, are those who have been preparing for death. The acute tragic
condition is simply the result of a chronic state of mind--a culmination
of a series of events.
Character is the result of two things, mental attitude, and the way we
spend our time. It is what we think and what we do that make us what
we are.
By laying hold on the forces of the universe, you are strong with them.
And when you realize this, all else is easy, for in your arteries will
course red corpuscles, and in your heart the determined resolution is
born to do and to be. Carry your chin in and the crown of your head
high. We are gods in the chrysalis.
The Outsider
When I was a farmer lad I noticed that whenever we bought a new cow, and
turned her into the pasture with the herd, there was a general
inclination on the part of the rest to make the new cow think she had
landed in the orthodox perdition. They would hook her away from the
salt, chase her from the water, and the long-horned ones, for several
weeks, would lose no opportunity to give her vigorous digs, pokes
and prods.
With horses it was the same. And I remember one particular little black
mare that we boys used to transfer from one pasture to another, just to
see her back into a herd of horses and hear her hoofs play a resounding
solo on their ribs as they gathered round to do her mischief.
Men are animals just as much as are cows, horses and pigs; and they
manifest similar proclivities. The introduction of a new man into an
institution always causes a small panic of resentment, especially if he
be a person of some power. Even in schools and colleges the new teacher
has to fight his way to overcome the opposition he is certain to meet.
In a lumber camp, the newcomer would do well to take the initiative,
like that little black mare, and meet the first black look with a
short-arm jab.
But in a bank, department store or railroad office this cannot be. So
the next best thing is to endure, and win out by an attention to
business to which the place is unaccustomed. In any event, the bigger
the man, unless he has the absolute power to overawe everything, the
more uncomfortable will be his position until gradually time smooths the
way and new issues come up for criticism, opposition and resentment, and
he is forgotten.
The idea of Civil Service Reform--promotion for the good men in your
employ rather than hiring new ones for the big places--is a rule which
looks well on paper but is a fatal policy if carried out to the letter.
The business that is not progressive is sowing the seeds of its own
dissolution. Life is a movement forward, and all things in nature that
are not evolving into something better are preparing to return into
their constituent elements. One general rule for progress in big
business concerns is the introduction of new blood. You must keep step
with the business world. If you lag behind, the outlaws that hang on the
flanks of commerce will cut you out and take you captive, just as the
wolves lie in wait for the sick cow of the plains.
To keep your columns marching you must introduce new methods, new
inspiration and seize upon the best that others have invented or
discovered.
The great railroads of America have evolved together. No one of them has
an appliance or a method that is much beyond the rest. If it were not
for this interchange of men and ideas some railroads would still be
using the link and pin, and snake-heads would be as common as in the
year 1869.
The railroad manager who knows his business is ever on the lookout for
excellence among his men, and he promotes those who give an undivided
service. But besides this he hires a strong man occasionally from the
outside and promotes him over everybody. Then out come the hammers!
But this makes but little difference to your competent manager--if a
place is to be filled and he has no one on his payroll big enough to
fill it, he hires an outsider.
That is right and well for every one concerned. The new life of many a
firm dates from the day they hired a new man.
Communities that intermarry raise a fine crop of scrubs, and the result
is the same in business ventures. Two of America's largest publishing
houses failed for a tidy sum of five millions or so each, a few years
ago, just thru a dogged policy, that extended over a period of fifty
years, of promoting cousins, uncles and aunts whose only claim of
efficiency was that they had been on the pension roll for a long time.
This way lies dry-rot.
If you are a business man, and have a position of responsibility to be
filled, look carefully among your old helpers for a man to promote. But
if you haven't a man big enough to fill the place, do not put in a
little one for the sake of peace. Go outside and find a man and hire
him--never mind the salary if he can man the position--wages are always
relative to earning power. This will be the only way you can really man
your ship.
As for Civil Service Rules--rules are made to be broken. And as for the
long-horned ones who will attempt to make life miserable for your new
employe, be patient with them. It is the privilege of everybody to do a
reasonable amount of kicking, especially if the person has been a long
time with one concern and has received many benefits.
But if at the last, worst comes to worst, do not forget that you
yourself are at the head of the concern. If it fails you get the blame.
And should the anvil chorus become so persistent that there is danger of
discord taking the place of harmony, stand by your new man, even tho it
is necessary to give the blue envelope to every antediluvian. Precedence
in business is a matter of power, and years in one position may mean
that the man has been there so long that he needs a change. Let the
zephyrs of natural law play freely thru your whiskers.
So here is the argument: promote your deserving men, but do not be
afraid to hire a keen outsider; he helps everybody, even the kickers,
for if you disintegrate and go down in defeat, the kickers will have to
skirmish around for new jobs anyway. Isn't that so?
Get Out or Get in Line
Abraham Lincoln's letter to Hooker! If all the letters, messages and
speeches of Lincoln were destroyed, except that one letter to Hooker, we
still would have an excellent index to the heart of the Rail-Splitter.
In this letter we see that Lincoln ruled his own spirit; and we also
behold the fact that he could rule others. The letter shows wise
diplomacy, frankness, kindliness, wit, tact and infinite patience.
Hooker had harshly and unjustly criticised Lincoln, his commander in
chief. But Lincoln waives all this in deference to the virtues he
believes Hooker possesses, and promotes him to succeed Burnside. In
other words, the man who had been wronged promotes the man who had
wronged him, over the head of a man whom the promotee had wronged and
for whom the promoter had a warm personal friendship.
But all personal considerations were sunk in view of the end desired.
Yet it was necessary that the man promoted should know the truth, and
Lincoln told it to him in a way that did not humiliate nor fire to
foolish anger; but which surely prevented the attack of cerebral
elephantiasis to which Hooker was liable.
Perhaps we had better give the letter entire, and so here it is:
Executive Mansion,
Washington, January 26, 1863.
Major-General Hooker:
General:--I have placed you at the head of the Army of the Potomac. Of
course, I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient
reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some
things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you.
I believe you to be a brave and skilful soldier, which, of course, I
like. I also believe you do not mix politics with your position, in
which you are right.
You have confidence in yourself, which is a valuable if not an
indispensable quality.
You are ambitious, which, within reasonable bounds, does good rather
than harm; but I think that during General Burnside's command of the
army you have taken counsel of your ambition and thwarted him as much as
you could, in which you did a great wrong to the country, and to a most
meritorious and honorable brother officer.
I have heard, in such a way as to believe it, of your recently saying
that both the army and the government needed a dictator. Of course, it
was not for this, but in spite of it, that I have given you the command.
Only those generals who gain successes can set up dictators. What I now
ask of you is military success, and I will risk the dictatorship. The
government will support you to the utmost of its ability, which is
neither more nor less than it has done and will do for all commanders. I
much fear that the spirit you have aided to infuse into the army, of
criticising their commander and withholding confidence from him, will
now turn upon you. I shall assist you as far as I can to put it down.
Neither you nor Napoleon, if he were alive again, could get any good out
of an army while such a spirit prevails in it. And now beware of
rashness, but with sleepless vigilance go forward and give us victories.
Yours very truly, A. LINCOLN.
One point in this letter is especially worth our consideration, for it
suggests a condition that springs up like deadly nightshade from a
poisonous soil. I refer to the habit of carping, sneering, grumbling and
criticising those who are above us. The man who is anybody and who does
anything is certainly going to be criticised, vilified and
misunderstood. This is a part of the penalty for greatness, and every
great man understands it; and understands, too, that it is no proof of
greatness. The final proof of greatness lies in being able to endure
contumely without resentment. Lincoln did not resent criticism; he knew
that every life was its own excuse for being, but look how he calls
Hooker's attention to the fact that the dissension Hooker has sown is
going to return and plague him! "Neither you, nor Napoleon, if he were
alive, could get any good out of an army while such a spirit prevails in
it." Hooker's fault falls on Hooker--others suffer, but Hooker suffers
most of all.
Not long ago I met a Yale student home on a vacation. I am sure he did
not represent the true Yale spirit, for he was full of criticism and
bitterness toward the institution. President Hadley came in for his
share, and I was given items, facts, data, with times and places, for a
"peach of a roast."
Very soon I saw the trouble was not with Yale, the trouble was with the
young man. He had mentally dwelt on some trivial slights until he had
gotten so out of harmony with the place that he had lost the power to
derive any benefit from it. Yale college is not a perfect institution--a
fact, I suppose, that President Hadley and most Yale men are quite
willing to admit; but Yale does supply young men certain advantages, and
it depends upon the students whether they will avail themselves of
these advantages or not. If you are a student in college, seize upon
the good that is there. You receive good by giving it. You gain by
giving--so give sympathy and cheerful loyalty to the institution. Be
proud of it. Stand by your teachers--they are doing the best they can.
If the place is faulty, make it a better place by an example of
cheerfully doing your work every day the best you can. Mind your
own business.
If the concern where you are employed is all wrong, and the Old Man is a
curmudgeon, it may be well for you to go to the Old Man and
confidentially, quietly and kindly tell him that his policy is absurd
and preposterous. Then show him how to reform his ways, and you might
offer to take charge of the concern and cleanse it of its secret faults.
Do this, or if for any reason you should prefer not, then take your
choice of these: Get Out, or Get in Line. You have got to do one or the
other--now make your choice. If you work for a man, in heaven's name
work for him.
If he pays you wages that supply you your bread and butter, work for
him--speak well of him, think well of him, stand by him and stand by
the institution that he represents.
I think if I worked for a man, I would work for him. I would not work
for him a part of the time, and the rest of the time work against him. I
would give an undivided service or none. If put to the pinch, an ounce
of loyalty is worth a pound of cleverness.
If you must vilify, condemn and eternally disparage, why, resign your
position, and then when you are outside, damn to your heart's content.
But I pray you, as long as you are a part of an institution, do not
condemn it. Not that you will injure the institution--not that--but when
you disparage a concern of which you are a part, you disparage yourself.
More than that, you are loosening the tendrils that hold you to the
institution, and the first high wind that happens along, you will be
uprooted and blown away in the blizzard's track--and probably you will
never know why. The letter only says, "Times are dull and we regret
there is not enough work," et cetera.
Everywhere you will find these out-of-a-job fellows. Talk with them and
you will find that they are full of railing, bitterness, scorn and
condemnation. That was the trouble--thru a spirit of fault-finding they
got themselves swung around so they blocked the channel, and had to be
dynamited. They were out of harmony with the place, and no longer being
a help they had to be removed. Every employer is constantly looking for
people who can help him; naturally he is on the lookout among his
employees for those who do not help, and everything and everybody that
is a hindrance has to go. This is the law of trade--do not find fault
with it; it is founded on nature. The reward is only for the man who
helps, and in order to help you must have sympathy.
You cannot help the Old Man so long as you are explaining in an
undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental
attitude that he is a curmudgeon and that his system is dead wrong. You
are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up this cauldron of
discontent and warming envy into strife, but you are doing this: you are
getting yourself on a well-greased chute that will give you a quick ride
down and out. When you say to other employees that the Old Man is a
curmudgeon, you reveal the fact that you are one; and when you tell them
that the policy of the institution is "rotten," you certainly show
that yours is.
This bad habit of fault-finding, criticising and complaining is a tool
that grows keener by constant use, and there is grave danger that he who
at first is only a moderate kicker may develop into a chronic knocker,
and the knife he has sharpened will sever his head.
Hooker got his promotion even in spite of his many failings; but the
chances are that your employer does not have the love that Lincoln
had--the love that suffereth long and is kind. But even Lincoln could
not protect Hooker forever. Hooker failed to do the work, and Lincoln
had to try some one else. So there came a time when Hooker was
superseded by a Silent Man, who criticised no one, railed at nobody--not
even the enemy.
And this Silent Man, who could rule his own spirit, took the cities. He
minded his own business, and did the work that no man can ever do unless
he constantly gives absolute loyalty, perfect confidence, unswerving
fidelity and untiring devotion. Let us mind our own business, and allow
others to mind theirs, thus working for self by working for the good
of all.
The Week-Day, Keep it Holy
Did it ever strike you that it is a most absurd and semi-barbaric thing
to set one day apart as "holy?"
If you are a writer and a beautiful thought comes to you, you never
hesitate because it is Sunday, but you write it down.
If you are a painter, and the picture appears before you, vivid and
clear, you make haste to materialize it ere the vision fades.
If you are a musician, you sing a song, or play it on the piano, that it
may be etched upon your memory--and for the joy of it.
But if you are a cabinet-maker, you may make a design, but you will have
to halt before you make the table, if the day happens to be the "Lord's
Day"; and if you are a blacksmith, you will not dare to lift a hammer,
for fear of conscience or the police. All of which is an admission that
we regard manual labor as a sort of necessary evil, and must be done
only at certain times and places.
The orthodox reason for abstinence from all manual labor on Sunday is
that "God made the heavens and the earth in six days and on the seventh
He rested," therefore, man, created in the image of his Maker, should
hold this day sacred. How it can be possible for a supreme, omnipotent
and all-powerful being without "body, parts or passions" to become
wearied thru physical exertion is a question that is as yet unanswered.
The idea of serving God on Sunday and then forgetting Him all the week
is a fallacy that is fostered by the Reverend Doctor Sayles and his
coadjutor, Deacon Buffum, who passes the Panama for the benefit of those
who would buy absolution. Or, if you prefer, salvation being free, what
we place in the Panama is an honorarium for Deity or his agent, just as
our noted authors never speak at banquets for pay, but accept the
honorarium that in some occult and mysterious manner is left on the
mantel. Sunday, with its immunity from work, was devised for slaves who
got out of all the work they could during the week.
Then, to tickle the approbativeness of the slave, it was declared a
virtue not to work on Sunday, a most pleasing bit of Tom Sawyer
diplomacy. By following his inclinations and doing nothing, a
mysterious, skyey benefit accrues, which the lazy man hopes to have and
to hold for eternity.
Then the slaves who do no work on Sunday, point out those who do as
beneath them in virtue, and deserving of contempt. Upon this theory all
laws which punish the person who works or plays on Sunday have been
passed. Does God cease work one day in seven, or is the work that He
does on Sunday especially different from that which He performs on
Tuesday? The Saturday half-holiday is not "sacred"--the Sunday holiday
is, and we have laws to punish those who "violate" it. No man can
violate the Sabbath; he can, however, violate his own nature, and this
he is more apt to do through enforced idleness than either work or play.
Only running water is pure, and stagnant nature of any sort is
dangerous--a breeding-place for disease.
Change of occupation is necessary to mental and physical health. As it
is, most people get too much of one kind of work. All the week they are
chained to a task, a repugnant task because the dose is too big. They
have to do this particular job or starve. This is slavery, quite as
much as when man was bought and sold as a chattel.
Will there not come a time when all men and women will work because it
is a blessed gift--a privilege? Then, if all worked, wasteful consuming
as a business would cease. As it is, there are many people who do not
work at all, and these pride themselves upon it and uphold the Sunday
laws. If the idlers would work, nobody would be overworked. If this time
ever comes shall we not cease to regard it as "wicked" to work at
certain times, just as much as we would count it absurd to pass a law
making it illegal for us to be happy on Wednesday? Isn't good work an
effort to produce a useful, necessary or beautiful thing? If so, good
work is a prayer, prompted by a loving heart--a prayer to benefit and
bless. If prayer is not a desire, backed up by a right human effort to
bring about its efficacy, then what is it?
Work is a service performed for ourselves and others. If I love you I
will surely work for you--in this way I reveal my love. And to manifest
my love in this manner is a joy and gratification to me. Thus work is
for the worker alone and labor is its own reward. These things being
true, if it is wrong to work on Sunday, it is wrong to love on Sunday;
every smile is a sin, every caress a curse, and all tenderness a crime.
Must there not come a time, if we grow in mentality and spirit, when we
shall cease to differentiate and quit calling some work secular and some
sacred? Isn't it as necessary for me to hoe corn and feed my loved ones
(and also the priest) as for the priest to preach and pray? Would any
priest ever preach and pray if somebody didn't hoe? If life is from God,
then all useful effort is divine; and to work is the highest form of
religion. If God made us, surely He is pleased to see that His work is a
success. If we are miserable, willing to liberate life with a bare
bodkin, we certainly do not compliment our Maker in thus proclaiming His
work a failure. But if our lives are full of gladness and we are
grateful for the feeling that we are one with Deity--helping God to do
His work, then, and only then do we truly serve Him.
Isn't it strange that men should have made laws declaring that it is
wicked for us to work?
Exclusive Friendships
An excellent and gentle man of my acquaintance has said, "When fifty-one
per cent of the voters believe in coöperation as opposed to competition,
the Ideal Commonwealth will cease to be a theory and become a fact."
That men should work together for the good of all is very beautiful, and
I believe the day will come when these things will be, but the simple
process of fifty-one per cent of the voters casting ballots for
socialism will not bring it about.
The matter of voting is simply the expression of a sentiment, and after
the ballots have been counted there still remains the work to be done. A
man might vote right and act like a fool the rest of the year.
The socialist who is full of bitterness, fight, faction and jealousy is
creating an opposition that will hold him and all others like him in
check. And this opposition is well, for even a very imperfect society is
forced to protect itself against dissolution and a condition which is
worse. To take over the monopolies and operate them for the good of
society is not enough, and not desirable either, so long as the idea of
rivalry is rife.
As long as self is uppermost in the minds of men, they will fear and
hate other men, and under socialism there would be precisely the same
scramble for place and power that we see in politics now.
Society can never be reconstructed until its individual members are
reconstructed. Man must be born again. When fifty-one per cent of the
voters rule their own spirit and have put fifty-one per cent of their
present envy, jealousy, bitterness, hate, fear and foolish pride out of
their hearts, then Christian socialism will be at hand, and not
until then.
The subject is entirely too big to dispose of in a paragraph, so I am
just going to content myself here with the mention of one thing, that so
far as I know has never been mentioned in print--the danger to society
of exclusive friendships between man and man, and woman and woman. No
two persons of the same sex can complement each other, neither can they
long uplift or benefit each other. Usually they deform the mental and
spiritual estate. We should have many acquaintances or none. When two
men begin to "tell each other everything," they are hiking for senility.
There must be a bit of well-defined reserve. We are told that in
matter--solid steel for instance--the molecules never touch. They never
surrender their individuality. We are all molecules of Divinity, and our
personality should not be abandoned. Be yourself, let no man be
necessary to you--your friend will think more of you if you keep him at
a little distance. Friendship, like credit, is highest where it is
not used.
I can understand how a strong man can have a great and abiding affection
for a thousand other men, and call them all by name, but how he can
regard any one of these men much higher than another and preserve his
mental balance, I do not know.
Let a man come close enough and he'll clutch you like a drowning person,
and down you both go. In a close and exclusive friendship men partake of
others' weaknesses.
In shops and factories it happens constantly that men will have their
chums. These men relate to each other their troubles--they keep nothing
back--they sympathize with each other, they mutually condole.
They combine and stand by each other. Their friendship is exclusive and
others see that it is. Jealousy creeps in, suspicion awakens, hate
crouches around the corner, and these men combine in mutual dislike for
certain things and persons. They foment each other, and their sympathy
dilutes sanity--by recognizing their troubles men make them real. Things
get out of focus, and the sense of values is lost. By thinking some one
is an enemy you evolve him into one.
Soon others are involved and we have a clique. A clique is a friendship
gone to seed.
A clique develops into a faction, and a faction into a feud, and soon we
have a mob, which is a blind, stupid, insane, crazy, ramping and roaring
mass that has lost the rudder. In a mob there are no individuals--all
are of one mind, and independent thought is gone.
A feud is founded on nothing--it is a mistake--a fool idea fanned into
flame by a fool friend! And it may become a mob.
Every man who has had anything to do with communal life has noticed
that the clique is the disintegrating bacillus--and the clique has its
rise always in the exclusive friendship of two persons of the same sex,
who tell each other all unkind things that are said of each other--"so
be on your guard." Beware of the exclusive friendship! Respect all men
and try to find the good in all. To associate only with the sociable,
the witty, the wise, the brilliant, is a blunder--go among the plain,
the stupid, the uneducated, and exercise your own wit and wisdom. You
grow by giving--have no favorites--you hold your friend as much by
keeping away from him as you do by following after him.
Revere him--yes, but be natural and let space intervene. Be a Divine
molecule.
Be yourself and give your friend a chance to be himself. Thus do you
benefit him, and in benefiting him you benefit yourself.
The finest friendships are between those who can do without each other.
Of course there have been cases of exclusive friendship that are pointed
out to us as grand examples of affection, but they are so rare and
exceptional that they serve to emphasize the fact that it is
exceedingly unwise for men of ordinary power and intellect to exclude
their fellow men. A few men, perhaps, who are big enough to have a place
in history, could play the part of David to another's Jonathan and yet
retain the good will of all, but the most of us would engender
bitterness and strife.
And this beautiful dream of socialism, where each shall work for the
good of all, will never come about until fifty-one per cent of the
adults shall abandon all exclusive friendships. Until that day arrives
you will have cliques, denominations--which are cliques grown
big--factions, feuds and occasional mobs.
Do not lean on any one, and let no one lean on you. The ideal society
will be made up of ideal individuals. Be a man and be a friend to
everybody.
When the Master admonished his disciples to love their enemies, he had
in mind the truth that an exclusive love is a mistake--love dies when it
is monopolized--it grows by giving. Love, lim., is an error. Your enemy
is one who misunderstands you--why should you not rise above the fog and
see his error and respect him for the good qualities you find in him?
The Folly of Living in the Future
The question is often asked, "What becomes of all the Valedictorians and
all the Class-Day Poets?"
I can give information as to two parties for whom this inquiry is
made--the Valedictorian of my class is now a most industrious and worthy
floor-walker in Siegel, Cooper & Company's store, and I was the
Class-Day Poet. Both of us had our eyes fixed on the Goal. We stood on
the Threshold and looked out upon the World preparatory to going forth,
seizing it by the tail and snapping its head off for our own
delectation.
We had our eyes fixed on the Goal--it might better have been the gaol.
It was a very absurd thing for us to fix our eyes on the Goal. It
strained our vision and took our attention from our work. We lost our
grip on the present.
To think of the Goal is to travel the distance over and over in your
mind and dwell on how awfully far off it is. We have so little
mind--doing business on such a limited capital of intellect--that to
wear it threadbare looking for a far-off thing is to get hopelessly
stranded in Siegel, Cooper & Company.
Of course, Siegel, Cooper & Company is all right, too, but the point is
this--it wasn't the Goal!
A goodly dash of indifference is a requisite in the formula for doing a
great work.
No one knows what the Goal is--we are all sailing under sealed orders.
Do your work to-day, doing it the best you can, and live one day at a
time. The man that does this is conserving his God-given energy, and not
spinning it out into tenuous spider threads so fragile and filmy that
unkind Fate will probably brush it away.
To do your work well to-day, is the certain preparation for something
better to-morrow. The past has gone from us forever; the future we
cannot reach; the present alone is ours. Each day's work is a
preparation for the next day's duties.
Live in the present--the Day is here, the time is Now.
There is only one thing that is worth praying for--that we may be in the
line of Evolution.
The Spirit of Man
Maybe I am all wrong about it, yet I cannot help believing that the
spirit of man will live again in a better world than ours. Fenelon says:
"Justice demands another life to make good the inequalities of this."
Astronomers prophesy the existence of stars long before they can see
them. They know where they ought to be, and training their telescopes in
that direction they wait, knowing they shall find them.
Materially, no one can imagine anything more beautiful than this earth,
for the simple reason that we cannot imagine anything we have not seen;
we may make new combinations, but the whole is made up of parts of
things with which we are familiar. This great green earth out of which
we have sprung, of which we are a part, that supports our bodies which
must return to it to repay the loan, is very, very beautiful.
But the spirit of man is not fully at home here; as we grow in soul and
intellect, we hear, and hear again, a voice which says: "Arise and get
thee hence, for this is not thy rest." And the greater and nobler and
more sublime the spirit, the more constant is the discontent. Discontent
may come from various causes, so it will not do to assume that the
discontented ones are always the pure in heart, but it is a fact that
the wise and excellent have all known the meaning of world-weariness.
The more you study and appreciate this life, the more sure you are that
this is not all. You pillow your head upon Mother Earth, listen to her
heart-throb, and even as your spirit is filled with the love of her,
your gladness is half pain and there comes to you a joy that hurts. To
look upon the most exalted forms of beauty, such as sunset at sea, the
coming of a storm on the prairie, or the sublime majesty of the
mountains, begets a sense of sadness, an increasing loneliness. It is
not enough to say that man encroaches on man so that we are really
deprived of our freedom, that civilization is caused by a bacillus, and
that from a natural condition we have gotten into a hurly-burly where
rivalry is rife--all this may be true, but beyond and outside of all
this there is no physical environment in way of plenty which earth can
supply, that will give the tired soul peace. They are the happiest who
have the least; and the fable of the stricken king and the shirtless
beggar contains the germ of truth. The wise hold all earthly ties very
lightly--they are stripping for eternity.
World-weariness is only a desire for a better spiritual condition. There
is more to be written on this subject of world-pain--to exhaust the
theme would require a book. And certain it is that I have no wish to say
the final word on any topic. The gentle reader has certain rights, and
among these is the privilege of summing up the case.
But the fact holds that world-pain is a form of desire. All desires are
just, proper and right; and their gratification is the means by which
nature supplies us that which we need.
Desire not only causes us to seek that which we need, but is a form of
attraction by which the good is brought to us, just as the amoebae
create a swirl in the waters that brings their food within reach.
Every desire in nature has a fixed and definite purpose in the Divine
Economy, and every desire has its proper gratification. If we desire the
close friendship of a certain person, it is because that person has
certain soul-qualities that we do not possess, and which complement
our own.
Through desire do we come into possession of our own; by submitting to
its beckonings we add cubits to our stature; and we also give out to
others our own attributes, without becoming poorer, for soul is not
limited. All nature is a symbol of spirit, and so I am forced to believe
that somewhere there must be a proper gratification for this mysterious
nostalgia of the soul.
The Valhalla of the Norseman, the Nirvana of the Hindu, the Heaven of
the Christian are natural hopes of beings whose cares and
disappointments here are softened by belief that somewhere, Thor, Brahma
or God gives compensation.
The Eternal Unities require a condition where men and women shall be
permitted to love and not to sorrow; where the tyranny of things hated
shall not prevail, nor that for which the heart yearns turn to ashes at
our touch.
Art and Religion
While this seems true in the main, I am not sure it will hold in every
case. Please think it out for yourself, and if I happen to be wrong,
why, put me straight.
The proposition is this: the artist needs no religion beyond his work.
That is to say, art is religion to the man who thinks beautiful thoughts
and expresses them for others the best he can. Religion is an emotional
excitement whereby the devotee rises into a state of spiritual
sublimity, and for the moment is bathed in an atmosphere of rest, and
peace, and love. All normal men and women crave such periods; and
Bernard Shaw says that we reach them through strong tea, tobacco,
whiskey, opium, love, art or religion.
I think Bernard Shaw a cynic, but there is a glimmer of truth in his
idea that makes it worth repeating. But beyond the natural religion,
which is a passion for oneness with the Whole, all formalized religions
engraft the element of fear, and teach the necessity of placating a
Supreme Being. Our idea of a Supreme Being is suggested to us by the
political government under which we live. The situation was summed up by
Carlyle, when he said that Deity to the average British mind was simply
an infinite George IV. The thought of God as a terrible Supreme Tyrant
first found form in an unlimited monarchy; but as governments have
become more lenient so have the gods, until you get them down (or up) to
a republic, where God is only a president, and we all approach Him in
familiar prayer, on an absolute equality.
Then soon, for the first time, we find man saying, "I am God, and you
are God, and we are all simply particles of Him," and this is where the
president is done away with, and the referendum comes in. But the
absence of a supreme governing head implies simplicity, honesty,
justice, and sincerity. Wherever plottings, schemings and doubtful
methods of life are employed, a ruler is necessary; and there, too,
religion, with its idea of placating God has a firm hold. Men whose
lives are doubtful feel the need of a strong government and a hot
religion. Formal religion and sin go hand in hand. Formal religion and
slavery go hand in hand. Formal religion and tyranny go hand in hand.
Formal religion and ignorance go hand in hand.
And sin, slavery, tyranny and ignorance are one--they are never
separated.
Formal religion is a scheme whereby man hopes to make peace with his
Maker; and a formal religion also tends to satisfy the sense of
sublimity where the man has failed to find satisfaction in his work.
Voltaire says, "When woman no longer finds herself acceptable to man,
she turns to God," When man is no longer acceptable to himself he goes
to church. In order to keep this article from extending itself into a
tome, I purposely omitted saying a single thing about the Protestant
Church as a useful Social Club and have just assumed for argument's sake
that the church is really a religious institution.
A formal religion is only a cut 'cross lots--an attempt to bring about
the emotions and the sensations that come to a man by the practice of
love, virtue, excellence and truth. When you do a splendid piece of work
and express your best, there comes to you, as reward, an exaltation of
soul, a sublimity of feeling that puts you for the time being in touch
with the Infinite. A formal religion brings this feeling without your
doing anything useful, therefore it is unnatural.
Formalized religion is the strongest where sin, slavery, tyranny and
ignorance abound. Where men are free, enlightened and at work, they find
all the gratification in their work that their souls demand--they cease
to hunt outside themselves for something to give them rest. They are at
peace with themselves, at peace with man and with God.
But any man chained to a hopeless task, whose daily work does not
express himself, who is dogged by a boss, whenever he gets a moment of
respite turns to drink or religion.
Men with an eye on Saturday night, who plot to supplant some one else,
who can locate an employer any hour of the day, who use their wit to
evade labor, who think only of their summer vacation when they will no
longer be compelled to work, are apt to be sticklers for Sabbath-keeping
and church-going.
Gentlemen in business who give eleven for a dozen, and count thirty-four
inches a yard, who are quick to foreclose a mortgage, and who say
"business is business," generally are vestrymen, deacons and church
trustees. Look about you! Predaceous real estate dealers who set nets
for all the unwary, lawyers who lie in wait for their prey, merchant
princes who grind their clerks under the wheel, and oil magnates whose
history was never written, nor could be written, often make peace with
God, and find a gratification for their sense of sublimity by building
churches, founding colleges, giving libraries, and holding firmly to a
formalized religion. Look about you!
To recapitulate: if your life-work is doubtful, questionable or
distasteful, you will hold the balance true by going outside your
vocation for the gratification that is your due, but which your daily
work denies, and you find it in religion, I do not say this is always
so, but it is very often. Great sinners are apt to be very religious;
and conversely, the best men who have ever lived have been at war with
established religions. And further, the best men are never found
in churches.
Men deeply immersed in their work, whose lives are consecrated to doing
things, who are simple, honest and sincere, desire no formal religion,
need no priest nor pastor, and seek no gratification outside their daily
lives. All they ask is to be let alone--they wish only the privilege
to work.
When Samuel Johnson, on his death bed, made Joshua Reynolds promise he
would do no more work on Sunday, he of course had no conception of the
truth that Reynolds reached through work the same condition of mind that
he, Johnson, had reached by going to church. Johnson despised work and
Reynolds loved it; Johnson considered one day in the week holy; to
Reynolds all days were sacred--sacred to work; that is, to the
expression of his best. Why should you cease to express your holiest and
highest on Sunday? Ah, I know why you don't work on Sunday! It is
because you think that work is degrading, and because your sale and
barter is founded on fraud, and your goods are shoddy. Your week-day
dealings lie like a pall upon your conscience, and you need a day in
which to throw off the weariness of that slavery under which you live.
You are not free yourself, and you insist that others shall not be free.
You have ceased to make work gladsome, and you toil and make others
toil with you, and you all well nigh faint from weariness and disgust.
You are slave and slave-owner, for to own slaves is to be one.
But the artist is free and he works in joy, and to him all things are
good and all days are holy. The great inventors, thinkers, poets,
musicians and artists have all been men of deep religious natures; but
their religion has never been a formalized, restricted, ossified
religion. They did not worship at set times and places. Their religion
has been a natural and spontaneous blossoming of the intellect and
emotions--they have worked in love, not only one day in the week, but
all days, and to them the groves have always and ever been God's
first temples.
Let us work to make men free! Am I bad because I want to give you
freedom, and have you work in gladness instead of fear?
Do not hesitate to work on Sunday, just as you would think good thoughts
if the spirit prompts you. For work is, at the last, only the expression
of your thought, and there can be no better religion than good work.
Initiative
The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one
thing. And that is Initiative. What is Initiative? I'll tell you: It is
doing the right thing without being told. But next to doing the right
thing without being told is to do it when you are told once. That is to
say, carry the Message to Garcia! There are those who never do a thing
until they are told twice: such get no honors and small pay. Next, there
are those who do the right thing only when necessity kicks them from
behind, and these get indifference instead of honors, and a pittance for
pay. This kind spends most of its time polishing a bench with a
hard-luck story. Then, still lower down in the scale than this, we find
the fellow who will not do the right thing even when some one goes along
to show him how, and stays to see that he does it; he is always out of a
job, and receives the contempt he deserves, unless he has a rich Pa, in
which case Destiny awaits near by with a stuffed club. To which class do
you belong?
The Disagreeable Girl
England's most famous dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, has placed in the
pillory of letters what he is pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."
And he has done it by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a manner
that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in the assize of
high society.
I say society's assize advisedly, because it is only in society that the
Disagreeable Girl can play a prominent part, assuming the center of the
stage. Society, in the society sense, is built upon vacuity; its favors
being for those who reveal a fine capacity to waste and consume. Those
who would write their names high on society's honor roll, need not be
either useful or intelligent--they need only seem.
And this gives to the Disagreeable Girl her opportunity. In the paper
box factory she would have to make good; Cluett, Coon & Co. ask for
results; the stage demands at least a modicum of intellect, in addition
to shape, but society asks for nothing but pretense, and the palm is
awarded to palaver. But do not, if you please, imagine that the
Disagreeable Girl does not wield an influence. That is the very
point--her influence is so far-reaching in its effect that George
Bernard Shaw, giving cross-sections of life in the form of dramas,
cannot write a play and leave her out.
She is always with us, ubiquitous, omniscient and omnipresent--is the
Disagreeable Girl. She is a disappointment to her father, a source of
humiliation to her mother, a pest to her brothers and sisters, and when
she finally marries, she slowly saps the inspiration of her husband and
very often converts a proud and ambitious man into a weak and
cowardly cur.
Only in society does the Disagreeable Girl shine--everywhere else she is
an abject failure. The much-vaunted Gibson Girl is a kind of de luxe
edition of Shaw's Disagreeable Girl. The Gibson Girl lolls, loafs,
pouts, weeps, talks back, lies in wait, dreams, eats, drinks, sleeps and
yawns. She rides in a coach in a red jacket, plays golf in a secondary
sexual sweater, dawdles on a hotel veranda, and can tum-tum on a piano,
but you never hear of her doing a useful thing or saying a wise one.
She plays bridge whist, for "keeps" when she wins, and "owes" when she
loses, and her picture in flattering half-tone often adorns a page of
the Sunday Yellow.
She reveals a beautiful capacity for avoiding all useful effort.
Gibson gilds the Disagreeable Girl.
Shaw paints her as she is.
In the _Doll's House_ Henrik Ibsen has given us _Nora Hebler_, a
Disagreeable Girl of mature age, who, beyond a doubt, first set George
Bernard Shaw a-thinking. Then looking about, Shaw saw her at every turn
in every stage of her moth-and-butterfly existence.
And the Disagreeable Girl being everywhere, Shaw, dealer in human
character, cannot write a play and leave her out, any more than the
artist Turner could paint a picture and leave man out, or Paul Veronese
produce a canvas and omit the dog.
The Disagreeable Girl is a female of the genus homo persuasion, built
around a digestive apparatus that possesses marked marshmallow
proclivities. She is pretty, pug-nosed, pink, pert and poetical; and at
first glance, to the unwary, she shows signs of gentleness and
intelligence. Her age is anywhere from eighteen to twenty-eight. At
twenty-eight she begins to evolve into something else, and her capacity
for harm is largely curtailed, because by this time spirit has written
itself in her form and features, and the grossness and animality which
before were veiled are becoming apparent.
Habit writes itself on the face, and body is an automatic recording
machine.
To have a beautiful old age, you must live a beautiful youth, for we
ourselves are posterity, and every man is his own ancestor. I am to-day
what I am because I was yesterday what I was. The Disagreeable Girl is
always pretty, at least we have been told she is pretty, and she fully
accepts the dictum.
She has also been told she is clever, and she thinks she is.
The actual fact is she is only "sassy."
The fine flaring up of youth has tended to set sex rampant, but she is
not "immoral" save in her mind.
She has caution to the verge of cowardice, and so she is sans reproche.
In public she pretends to be dainty; but alone, or with those for whose
good opinion she does not care, she is gross, coarse and sensual in
every feature of her life. She eats too much, does not exercise enough
and considers it amusing to let other people wait on her and do for her
the things she should do for herself. Her room is a jumble of disorder.
The one gleam of hope for her lies in the fact that out of shame, she
allows no visitor to enter her apartments if she can help it. Concrete
selfishness is her chief mark. She will avoid responsibility, side-step
every duty that calls for honest effort; is untruthful, secretive,
indolent and dishonest.
"What are you eating?" asks Nora Hebler's husband as she enters the
room, not expecting to see him.
"Nothing," is the answer, and she hides the box of bonbons behind her,
and soon backs out of the room.
I think Mr. Hebler had no business to ask her what she was eating--no
man should ask any woman such a question, and really it was no
difference anyway. But Nora is always on the defensive and fabricates
when it is necessary, and when it isn't, just through habit. She will
hide a letter written by her grandmother as quickly and deftly as if it
were a missive from a guilty lover. The habit of her life is one of
suspicion, for being inwardly guilty herself, she suspects everybody
although it is quite likely that crime with her has never broken through
thought into deed. Nora will rifle her husband's pockets, read his
note-book, examine his letters, and when he goes on a trip she spends
the day checking up his desk, for her soul delights in duplicate keys.
At times she lets drop hints of knowledge concerning little nothings
that are none of hers, just to mystify folks.
She does strange, annoying things simply to see what others will do.
In degree, Nora's husband fixed the vice of finesse in her nature, for
when even a "good" woman is accused she parries by the use of trickery
and wins her point by the artistry of the bagnio. Women and men are
never really far apart anyway, and women are largely what men have
made them.
We are all just getting rid of our shackles; listen closely, anywhere,
even among honest and intellectual people, if such there be, and you can
detect the rattle of chains.
The Disagreeable Girl's mind and soul have not kept pace with her body.
Yesterday she was a slave, sold in a Circassian mart, and freedom to her
is so new and strange that she is unfamiliar with her environment, and
she does not know what to do with it.
The tragedy she works, according to George Bernard Shaw, is through the
fact that very often good men, blinded by the glamour of sex, imagine
they love the Disagreeable Girl, when what they love is their own
ideal--an image born in their own minds.
Nature is both a trickster and a humorist, and ever sets the will of the
species beyond the discernment of the individual. The picador has to
blindfold his horse in order to get him into the bull-ring, and
likewise, Dan Cupid does the myopic to a purpose.
For aught we know, the lovely Beatrice of Dante was only a Disagreeable
Girl, clothed in a poet's fancy, and idealized by a dreamer. Fortunate
was Dante that he worshipped her afar, that he never knew her well
enough to be undeceived, and so walked through life in love with love,
sensitive, saintly, sweetly sad and most divinely happy in his
melancholy.
The Neutral
There is known to me a prominent business house that by the very force
of its directness and worth has incurred the enmity of many rivals. In
fact, there is a very general conspiracy on hand to put the institution
down and out. In talking with a young man employed by this house, he
yawned and said, "Oh, in this quarrel I am neutral."
"But you get your bread and butter from this firm, and in a matter where
the very life of the institution is concerned, I do not see how you can
be a neutral."
And he changed the subject.
I think that if I enlisted in the Japanese army I would not be a
neutral.
Business is a fight--a continual struggle--just as life is. Man has
reached his present degree of development through struggle. Struggle
there must be and always will be. The struggle began as purely physical;
as man evolved it shifted ground to the mental, psychic, and the
spiritual, with a few dashes of cave-man proclivities still left. But
depend upon it, the struggle will always be--life is activity. And when
it gets to be a struggle in well-doing, it will still be a struggle.
When inertia gets the better of you it is time to telephone to the
undertaker.
The only real neutral in this game of life is a dead one.
Eternal vigilance is not only the price of liberty, but of every other
good thing.
A business that is not safeguarded on every side by active, alert,
attentive, vigilant men is gone. As oxygen is the disintegrating
principle of life, working night and day to dissolve, separate, pull
apart and dissipate, so there is something in business that continually
tends to scatter, destroy and shift possession from this man to that. A
million mice nibble eternally at every business venture.
The mice are not neutrals, and if enough employes in a business house
are neutrals, the whole concern will eventually come tumbling about
their ears.
I like that order of Field-Marshal Oyama: "Give every honorable neutral
that you find in our lines the honorable jiu-jitsu hikerino."
Reflections on Progress
Renan has said that truth is always rejected when it comes to a man for
the first time, its evolution being as follows:
First, we say the thing is rank heresy, and contrary to the Bible.
Second, we say the matter really amounts to nothing, anyway.
Third, we declare that we always believed it.
Two hundred years ago partnerships in business were very rare. A man in
business simply made things and sold them--and all the manufacturing was
done by himself and his immediate family. Soon we find instances of
brothers continuing the work the father had begun, as in the case of the
Elzevirs and the Plantins, the great bookmakers of Holland. To meet this
competition, four printers, in 1640, formed a partnership and pooled
their efforts. A local writer by the name of Van Krugen denounced these
four men, and made savage attacks on partnerships in general as wicked
and illegal, and opposed to the best interests of the people. This view
seems to have been quite general, for there was a law in Amsterdam
forbidding all partnerships in business that were not licensed by the
state. The legislature of the State of Missouri has recently made war on
the department store in the same way, using the ancient Van Krugen
argument as a reason, for there is no copyright on stupidity.
In London in the seventeenth century men who were found guilty of
pooling their efforts and dividing profits, were convicted by law and
punished for "contumacy, contravention and connivance," and were given a
taste of the stocks in the public square.
When corporations were formed for the first time, only a few years ago,
there was a fine burst of disapproval. The corporation was declared a
scheme of oppression, a hungry octopus, a grinder of the individual. And
to prove the case various instances of hardship were cited; and no doubt
there was much suffering, for many people are never able to adjust
themselves to new conditions without experiencing pain and regret.
But we now believe that corporations came because they were required.
Certain things the times demanded, and no one man, or two or three men
could perform these tasks alone--hence the corporation. The rise of
England as a manufacturing nation began with the plan of the
stock company.
The aggregation known as the joint-stock company, everybody is willing
now to admit, was absolutely necessary in order to secure the machinery,
that is to say, the tools, the raw stock, the buildings, and to provide
for the permanence of the venture.
The railroad system of America has built up this country--on this thing
of joint-stock companies and transportation, our prosperity has hinged.
"Commerce, consists in carrying things from where they are plentiful to
where they are needed," says Emerson.
There are ten combinations of capital in this country that control over
six thousand miles of railroad each. These companies have taken in a
large number of small lines; and many connecting lines of tracks have
been built. Competition over vast sections of country has been
practically obliterated, and this has been done so quietly that few
people are aware of the change. Only one general result of this
consolidation of management has been felt, and that it is better
service at less expense. No captain of any great industrial enterprise
dares now to say, "The public be damned," even if he ever said it--which
I much doubt. The pathway to success lies in serving the public, not in
affronting it. In no other way is success possible, and this truth is so
plain and patent that even very simple folk are able to recognize it.
You can only help yourself by helping others.
Thirty years ago, when P. T. Barnum said, "The public delights in being
humbugged," he knew that it was not true, for he never attempted to put
the axiom in practice. He amused the public by telling it a lie, but P.
T. Barnum never tried anything so risky as deception. Even when he lied
we were not deceived; truth can be stated by indirection. "When my love
tells me she is made of truth, I do believe her, though I know she
lies." Barnum always gave more than he advertised; and going over and
over the same territory he continued to amuse and instruct the public
for nearly forty years.
This tendency to coöperate is seen in such splendid features as the
Saint Louis Union Station, for instance, where just twenty great
railroad companies lay aside envy, prejudice, rivalry and whim, and use
one terminal. If competition were really the life of trade, each
railroad that enters Saint Louis would have a station of its own, and
the public would be put to the worry, trouble, expense and endless delay
of finding where it wanted to go and how to get there. As it is now, the
entire aim and end of the scheme is to reduce friction, worry and
expense, and give the public the greatest accommodation--the best
possible service--to make travel easy and life secure. Servants in
uniform meet you as you alight, and answer your every question--speeding
you courteously and kindly on your way. There are women to take care of
women, and nurses to take care of children, and wheel chairs for such as
may be infirm or lame. The intent is to serve--not to pull you this way
and that, and sell you a ticket over a certain road. You are free to
choose your route and you are free to utilize as your own this great
institution that cost a million dollars, and that requires the presence
of two hundred people to maintain. All is for you. It is for the public
and was only made possible by a oneness of aim and desire--that is to
say coöperation. Before coöperation comes in any line, there is always
competition pushed to a point that threatens destruction and promises
chaos; then to divert ruin, men devise a better way, a plan that
conserves and economizes, and behold, it is found in coöperation.
Civilization is an evolution.
Civilization is not a thing separate and apart, any more than art is.
Art is the beautiful way of doing things. Civilization is the
expeditious way of doing things. And as haste is often waste--the more
hurry the less speed--civilization is the best way of doing things.
As mankind multiplies in number, the problem of supplying people what
they need is the important question of Earth. And mankind has ever held
out offers of reward in fame and money--both being forms of power--to
those who would supply it better things.
Teachers are those who educate the people to appreciate the things they
need.
The man who studies mankind, and finds out what men really want, and
then supplies them this, whether it be an Idea or a Thing, is the man
who is crowned with the laurel wreath of honor and clothed with riches.
What people need and what they want may be very different.
To undertake to supply people a thing you think they need but which they
do not want, is to have your head elevated on a pike, and your bones
buried in Potter's Field.
But wait, and the world will yet want the thing that it needs, and your
bones will then become sacred relics.
This change in desire on the part of mankind is the result of the growth
of intellect.
It is Progress, and Progress is Evolution, and Evolution is Progress.
There are men who are continually trying to push Progress along: we call
these individuals "Reformers."
Then there are others who always oppose the Reformer--the mildest name
we have for them is "Conservative."
The Reformer is either a Savior or a Rebel, all depending on whether he
succeeds or fails, and your point of view. He is what he is, regardless
of what other men think of him. The man who is indicted and executed as
a rebel, often afterward has the word "Savior" carved on his tomb; and
sometimes men who are hailed as saviors in their day are afterward found
to be sham saviors--to wit, charlatans. Conservation is a plan of
Nature. To keep the good is to conserve. A Conservative is a man who
puts on the brakes when he thinks Progress is going to land Civilization
in the ditch and wreck the whole concern.
Brakemen are necessary, but in the language of Koheleth, there is a time
to apply the brake and there is a time to abstain from applying the
brake. To clog the wheels continually is to stand still, and to stand
still is to retreat. Progress has need of the brakeman, but the brakeman
should not occupy all of his time putting on the brakes.
The Conservative is just as necessary as the Radical. The Conservative
keeps the Reformer from going too fast, and plucking the fruit before it
is ripe. Governments are only good where there is strong Opposition,
just as the planets are held in place by the opposition of forces. And
so civilization goes forward by stops and starts--pushed by the
Reformers and held back by the Conservatives. One is necessary to the
other, and they often shift places. But forward and forward Civilization
forever goes--ascertaining the best way of doing things.
In commerce we have had the Individual Worker, the Partnership, the
Corporation, and now we have the Trust.
The Trust is simply Corporations forming a partnership. The thing is all
an Evolution--a moving forward. It is all for man and it is all done by
man. It is all done with the consent, aye, and approval of man.
The Trusts were made by the People, and the People can and will unmake
them, should they ever prove an engine of oppression. They exist only
during good behavior, and like men, they are living under a sentence of
death, with an indefinite reprieve.
The Trusts are good things because they are economizers of energy. They
cut off waste, increase the production, and make a panic practically
impossible.
The Trusts are here in spite of the men who think they originated them,
and in spite of the Reformers who turned Conservatives and
opposed them.
The next move of Evolution will be the age of Socialism. Socialism means
the operation of all industries by the people, and for the people.
Socialism is coöperation instead of competition. Competition has been so
general that economists mistook it for a law of nature, when it was only
an incident.
Competition is no more a law of nature than is hate. Hate was once so
thoroughly believed in that we gave it personality and called it
the Devil.
We have banished the Devil by educating people to know that he who works
has no time to hate and no need to fear, and by this same means,
education, will the people be prepared for the age of Socialism.
The Trusts are now getting things ready for Socialism.
Socialism is a Trust of Trusts.
Humanity is growing in intellect, in patience, in kindness--in love. And
when the time is ripe, the people will step in and take peaceful
possession of their own, and the Coöperative Commonwealth will give to
each one his due.
Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise
Sympathy, Knowledge and Poise seem to be the three ingredients that are
most needed in forming the Gentle Man. I place these elements according
to their value. No man is great who does not have Sympathy plus, and the
greatness of men can be safely gauged by their sympathies. Sympathy and
imagination are twin sisters. Your heart must go out to all men, the
high, the low, the rich, the poor, the learned, the unlearned, the good,
the bad, the wise and the foolish--it is necessary to be one with them
all, else you can never comprehend them. Sympathy!--it is the touchstone
to every secret, the key to all knowledge, the open sesame of all
hearts. Put yourself in the other man's place and then you will know why
he thinks certain things and does certain deeds. Put yourself in his
place and your blame will dissolve itself into pity, and your tears will
wipe out the record of his misdeeds. The saviors of the world have
simply been men with wondrous sympathy.
But Knowledge must go with Sympathy, else the emotions will become
maudlin and pity may be wasted on a poodle instead of a child; on a
field-mouse instead of a human soul. Knowledge in use is wisdom, and
wisdom implies a sense of values--you know a big thing from a little
one, a valuable fact from a trivial one. Tragedy and comedy are simply
questions of value: a little misfit in life makes us laugh, a great one
is tragedy and cause for expression of grief.
Poise is the strength of body and strength of mind to control your
Sympathy and your Knowledge. Unless you control your emotions they run
over and you stand in the mire. Sympathy must not run riot, or it is
valueless and tokens weakness instead of strength. In every hospital for
nervous disorders are to be found many instances of this loss of
control. The individual has Sympathy but not Poise, and therefore his
life is worthless to himself and to the world.
He symbols inefficiency and not helpfulness. Poise reveals itself more
in voice than it does in words; more in thought than in action; more in
atmosphere than in conscious life. It is a spiritual quality, and is
felt more than it is seen. It is not a matter of bodily size, nor of
bodily attitude, nor attire, nor of personal comeliness: it is a state
of inward being, and of knowing your cause is just. And so you see it is
a great and profound subject after all, great in its ramifications,
limitless in extent, implying the entire science of right living. I once
met a man who was deformed in body and little more than a dwarf, but who
had such Spiritual Gravity--such Poise--that to enter a room where he
was, was to feel his presence and acknowledge his superiority. To allow
Sympathy to waste itself on unworthy objects is to deplete one's life
forces. To conserve is the part of wisdom, and reserve is a necessary
element in all good literature, as well as in everything else.
Poise being the control of our Sympathy and Knowledge, it implies a
possession of these attributes, for without having Sympathy and
Knowledge you have nothing to control but your physical body. To
practise Poise as a mere gymnastic exercise, or study in etiquette, is
to be self-conscious, stiff, preposterous and ridiculous. Those who cut
such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make angels weep, are men
void of Sympathy and Knowledge trying to cultivate Poise. Their science
is a mere matter of what to do with arms and legs. Poise is a question
of spirit controlling flesh, heart controlling attitude.
Get Knowledge by coming close to Nature. That man is the greatest who
best serves his kind. Sympathy and Knowledge are for use--you acquire
that you may give out; you accumulate that you may bestow. And as God
has given unto you the sublime blessings of Sympathy and Knowledge,
there will come to you the wish to reveal your gratitude by giving them
out again; for the wise man is aware that we retain spiritual qualities
only as we give them away. Let your light shine. To him that hath shall
be given. The exercise of wisdom brings wisdom; and at the last the
infinitesimal quantity of man's knowledge, compared with the Infinite,
and the smallness of man's Sympathy when compared with the source from
which ours is absorbed, will evolve an abnegation and a humility that
will lend a perfect Poise. The Gentleman is a man with perfect Sympathy,
Knowledge, and Poise.
Love and Faith
No woman is worthy to be a wife who on the day of her marriage is not
lost absolutely and entirely in an atmosphere of love and perfect trust;
the supreme sacredness of the relation is the only thing which, at the
time, should possess her soul. Is she a bawd that she should bargain?
Women should not "obey" men anymore than men should obey women. There
are six requisites in every happy marriage; the first is Faith, and the
remaining five are Confidence. Nothing so compliments a man as for a
woman to believe in him--nothing so pleases a woman as for a man to
place confidence in her.
Obey? God help me! Yes, if I loved a woman, my whole heart's desire
would be to obey her slightest wish. And how could I love her unless I
had perfect confidence that she would only aspire to what was beautiful,
true and right? And to enable her to realize this ideal, her wish would
be to me a sacred command; and her attitude of mind toward me I know
would be the same. And the only rivalry between us would be as to who
could love the most; and the desire to obey would be the one controlling
impulse of our lives.
We gain freedom by giving it, and he who bestows faith gets it back with
interest. To bargain and stipulate in love is to lose.
The woman who stops the marriage ceremony and requests the minister to
omit the word "obey," is sowing the first seed of doubt and distrust
that later may come to fruition in the divorce court.
The haggling and bickerings of settlements and dowries that usually
precede the marriage of "blood" and "dollars" are the unheeded warnings
that misery, heartache, suffering, and disgrace await the principals.
Perfect faith implies perfect love; and perfect love casteth out fear.
It is always the fear of imposition, and a lurking intent to rule, that
causes the woman to haggle over a word--it is absence of love, a
limitation, an incapacity. The price of a perfect love is an absolute
and complete surrender.
Keep back part of the price and yours will be the fate of Ananias and
Sapphira. Your doom is swift and sure. To win all we must give all.
Giving Something for Nothing
To give a man something for nothing tends to make the individual
dissatisfied with himself.
Your enemies are the ones you have helped.
And when an individual is dissatisfied with himself he is dissatisfied
with the whole world--and with you.
A man's quarrel with the world is only a quarrel with himself. But so
strong is this inclination to lay blame elsewhere and take credit to
ourselves, that when we are unhappy we say it is the fault of this woman
or that man. Especially do women attribute their misery to That Man.
And often the trouble is he has given her too much for nothing.
This truth is a reversible, back-action one, well lubricated by use,
working both ways--as the case may be.
Nobody but a beggar has really definite ideas concerning his rights.
People who give much--who love much--do not haggle.
That form of affection which drives sharp bargains and makes demands,
gets a check on the bank in which there is no balance.
There is nothing so costly as something you get for nothing.
My friend Tom Lowry, Magnate in Ordinary, of Minneapolis and the east
side of Wall Street, has recently had a little experience that proves
my point.
A sturdy beggar-man, a specimen of decayed gentility, once called on
Tammas with a hard-luck story and a Family Bible, and asked for a small
loan on the Good Book.
To be compelled to soak the Family Bible would surely melt the heart of
gneiss!
Tom was melted.
Tom made the loan but refused the collateral, stating he had no use for
it.
Which was God's truth for once.
In a few weeks the man came back, and tried to tell Tom his hard-luck
story concerning the Cold Ingratitude of a Cruel World.
Tom said, "Spare me the slow music and the recital--I have troubles of
my own. I need mirth and good cheer--take this dollar, and peace be
with you."
"Peace be multiplied unto thee," said the beggar, and departed. The
next month the man returned, and began to tell Tom a tale of Cruelty,
Injustice and Ingratitude.
Tom was riled--he had his magnate business to attend to, and he made a
remark in italics. The beggar said, "Mr. Lowry, if you had your business
a little better systematized, I would not have to trouble you
personally--why don't you just speak to your cashier?" And the great
man, who once took a party of friends out for a tally-ho ride, and
through mental habit collected five cents from each guest, was so
pleased at the thought of relief that he pressed the buzzer. The cashier
came, and Tom said, "Put this man Grabheimer on your pay-roll, give him
two dollars now and the same the first of every month."
Then turning to the beggar-man, Tom said, "Now get out of here--hurry,
vamose, hike--and be damned to you!"
"The same to you and many of them," said His Effluvia politely, and
withdrew.
All this happened two years ago. The beggar got his money regularly for
a year, and then in auditing accounts Tom found the name on the
pay-roll, and as Tom could not remember how the name got there, he at
first thought the pay-roll was being stuffed. Anyway he ordered the
beggar's name stricken off the roster, and the elevator man was
instructed to enforce the edict against beggars.
Not being allowed to see his man, the beggar wrote him
letters--denunciatory, scandalous, abusive, threatening. Finally the
beggar laid the matter before an obese limb o' the Law, Jaggers, of the
firm of Jaggers & Jaggers, who took the case on a contingent fee.
The case came to trial, and Jaggers proved his case se
offendendo--argal: it was shown by the defendant's books that His
Bacteria had been on the pay-roll and his name had been stricken off
without suggestion, request, cause, reason or fault of his own.
His Crabship proved the contract, and Tom got it in the mazzard.
Judgment for plaintiff, with costs. The beggar got the money and
Minneapolis Tom got the experience. Tom said the man would lose the
money, but he himself has gotten the part that will be his for
ninety-nine years. Surely the spirit of justice does not sleep and there
is a beneficent and wise Providence that watches over magnates.
Work and Waste
These truths I hold to be self-evident: That man was made to be happy;
that happiness is only attainable through useful effort; that the very
best way to help ourselves is to help others, and often the best way to
help others is to mind our own business; that useful effort means the
proper exercise of all our faculties; that we grow only through
exercise; that education should continue through life, and the joys of
mental endeavor should be, especially, the solace of the old; that where
men alternate work, play and study in right proportion, the organs of
the mind are the last to fail, and death for such has no terrors.
That the possession of wealth can never make a man exempt from useful
manual labor; that if all would work a little, no one would then be
overworked; that if no one wasted, all would have enough; that if none
were overfed, none would be underfed; that the rich and "educated" need
education quite as much as the poor and illiterate; that the presence of
a serving class is an indictment and a disgrace to our civilization;
that the disadvantage of having a serving class falls most upon those
who are served, and not upon those who serve--just as the real curse of
slavery fell upon the slave-owners.
That people who are waited on by a serving class cannot have a right
consideration for the rights of others, and they waste both time and
substance, both of which are lost forever, and can only seemingly be
made good by additional human effort.
That the person who lives on the labor of others, not giving himself in
return to the best of his ability, is really a consumer of human life
and therefore must be considered no better than a cannibal.
That each one living naturally will do the thing he can do best, but
that in useful service there is no high nor low.
That to set apart one day in seven as "holy" is really absurd and serves
only to loosen our grasp on the tangible present.
That all duties, offices and things which are useful and necessary to
humanity are sacred, and that nothing else is or can be sacred.
The Law of Obedience
The very first item in the creed of common sense is _Obedience_.
Perform your work with a whole heart.
Revolt may be sometimes necessary, but the man who tries to mix revolt
and obedience is doomed to disappoint himself and everybody with whom he
has dealings. To flavor work with protest is to fail absolutely.
When you revolt, why revolt--climb, hike, get out, defy--tell everybody
and everything to go to hades! That disposes of the case. You thus
separate yourself entirely from those you have served--no one
misunderstands you--you have declared yourself.
The man who quits in disgust when ordered to perform a task which he
considers menial or unjust may be a pretty good fellow, but in the wrong
environment, but the malcontent who takes your order with a smile and
then secretly disobeys, is a dangerous proposition. To pretend to obey,
and yet carry in your heart the spirit of revolt is to do half-hearted,
slipshod work. If revolt and obedience are equal in power, your engine
will then stop on the center and you benefit no one, not even yourself.
The spirit of obedience is the controlling impulse that dominates the
receptive mind and the hospitable heart. There are boats that mind the
helm and there are boats that do not. Those that do not, get holes
knocked in them sooner or later.
To keep off the rocks, obey the rudder.
Obedience is not to slavishly obey this man or that, but it is that
cheerful mental state which responds to the necessity of the case, and
does the thing without any back talk--unuttered or expressed.
Obedience to the institution--loyalty! The man who has not learned to
obey has trouble ahead of him every step of the way. The world has it in
for him continually, because he has it in for the world.
The man who does not know how to receive orders is not fit to issue them
to others. But the individual who knows how to execute the orders given
him is preparing the way to issue orders, and better still--to have
them obeyed.
Society's Saviors
All adown the ages society has made the mistake of nailing its Saviors
to the cross between thieves.
That is to say, society has recognized in the Savior a very dangerous
quality--something about him akin to a thief, and his career has been
suddenly cut short.
We have telephones and trolly cars, yet we have not traveled far into
the realm of spirit, and our X-ray has given us no insight into the
heart of things.
Society is so dull and dense, so lacking in spiritual vision, so dumb
and so beast-like that it does not know the difference between a thief
and the only Begotten Son. In a frantic effort to forget its hollowness
it takes to ping-pong, parchesi and progressive euchre, and seeks to
lose itself and find solace and consolation in tiddle-dy-winks.
We are told in glaring head-lines and accurate photographic
reproductions of a conference held by leaders in society to settle a
matter of grave import. Was it to build technical schools and provide a
means for practical and useful education? Was it a plan of building
modern tenement houses along scientific and sanitary lines? Was it
called to provide funds for scientific research of various kinds that
would add to human knowledge and prove a benefit to mankind? No, it was
none of these. This body met to determine whether the crook in a certain
bulldog's tail was natural or had been produced artificially.
Should the Savior come to-day and preach the same gospel that He taught
before, society would see that His experience was repeated. Now and then
it blinks stupidly and cries, "Away with Him!" or it stops its game long
enough to pass gall and vinegar on a spear to One it has thrust
beyond the pale.
For the woman who has loved much society has but one verdict: crucify
her! The best and the worst are hanged on one tree.
In the abandon of a great love there exists a godlike quality which
places a woman very close to the holy of holies, yet such a one, not
having complied with the edicts of society, is thrust unceremoniously
forth, and society, Pilate-like, washes its hands in innocency.
Preparing for Old Age
Socrates was once asked by a pupil, this question: "What kind of people
shall we be when we reach Elysium?"
And the answer was this: "We shall be the same kind of people that we
were here."
If there is a life after this, we are preparing for it now, just as I am
to-day preparing for my life to-morrow.
What kind of a man shall I be to-morrow? Oh, about the same kind of a
man that I am now. The kind of a man that I shall be next month depends
upon the kind of a man that I have been this month.
If I am miserable to-day, it is not within the round of probabilities
that I shall be supremely happy to-morrow. Heaven is a habit. And if we
are going to Heaven we would better be getting used to it.
Life is a preparation for the future; and the best preparation for the
future is to live as if there were none.
We are preparing all the time for old age. The two things that make old
age beautiful are resignation and a just consideration for the rights
of others.
In the play of _Ivan the Terrible_, the interest centers around one man,
the Czar Ivan. If anybody but Richard Mansfield played the part, there
would be nothing in it. We simply get a glimpse into the life of a
tyrant who has run the full gamut of goosedom, grumpiness, selfishness
and grouch. Incidentally this man had the power to put other men to
death, and this he does and has done as his whim and temper might
dictate. He has been vindictive, cruel, quarrelsome, tyrannical and
terrible. Now that he feels the approach of death, he would make his
peace with God. But he has delayed that matter too long. He didn't
realize in youth and middle life that he was then preparing for old age.
Man is the result of cause and effect, and the causes are to a degree in
our hands. Life is a fluid, and well has it been called the stream of
life--we are going, flowing somewhere. Strip _Ivan_ of his robes and
crown, and he might be an old farmer and live in Ebenezer. Every town
and village has its Ivan. To be an Ivan, just turn your temper loose
and practise cruelty on any person or thing within your reach, and the
result will be a sure preparation for a querulous, quarrelsome, pickety,
snipity, fussy and foolish old age, accented with many outbursts of
wrath that are terrible in their futility and ineffectiveness.
Babyhood has no monopoly on the tantrum. The characters of _King Lear_
and _Ivan the Terrible_ have much in common. One might almost believe
that the writer of _Ivan_ had felt the incompleteness of _Lear_, and had
seen the absurdity of making a melodramatic bid for sympathy in behalf
of this old man thrust out by his daughters.
Lear, the troublesome, Lear to whose limber tongue there was constantly
leaping words unprintable and names of tar, deserves no soft pity at our
hands. All his life he had been training his three daughters for exactly
the treatment he was to receive. All his life Lear had been lubricating
the chute that was to give him a quick ride out into that black
midnight storm.
"Oh, how sharper than a serpent's tooth it is to have a thankless
child," he cries.
There is something quite as bad as a thankless child, and that is a
thankless parent--an irate, irascible parent who possesses an
underground vocabulary and a disposition to use it.
The false note in _Lear_ lies in giving to him a daughter like
_Cordelia_. Tolstoy and Mansfield ring true, and _Ivan the Terrible_ is
what he is without apology, excuse or explanation. Take it or leave
it--if you do not like plays of this kind, go to see Vaudeville.
Mansfield's _Ivan_ is terrible. The Czar is not old in years--not over
seventy--but you can see that Death is sniffing close upon his track.
_Ivan_ has lost the power of repose. He cannot listen, weigh and
decide--he has no thought or consideration for any man or thing--this is
his habit of life. His bony hands are never still--the fingers open and
shut, and pick at things eternally. He fumbles the cross on his breast,
adjusts his jewels, scratches his cosmos, plays the devil's tattoo, gets
up nervously and looks behind the throne, holds his breath to listen.
When people address him, he damns them savagely if they kneel, and if
they stand upright he accuses them of lack of respect. He asks that he
be relieved from the cares of state, and then trembles for fear his
people will take him at his word. When asked to remain ruler of Russia
he proceeds to curse his councilors and accuses them of loading him with
burdens that they themselves would not endeavor to bear.
He is a victim of amor senilis, and right here if Mansfield took one
step more his realism would be appalling, but he stops in time and
suggests what he dares not express. This tottering, doddering,
slobbering, sniffling old man is in love--he is about to wed a young,
beautiful girl. He selects jewels for her--he makes remarks about what
would become her beauty, jeers and laughs in cracked falsetto. In the
animality of youth there is something pleasing--it is natural--but the
vices of an old man, when they have become only mental, are most
revolting.
The people about _Ivan_ are in mortal terror of him, for he is still the
absolute monarch--he has the power to promote or disgrace, to take their
lives or let them go free. They laugh when he laughs, cry when he does,
and watch his fleeting moods with thumping hearts.
He is intensely religious and affects the robe and cowl of a priest.
Around his neck hangs the crucifix. His fear is that he will die with no
opportunity of confession and absolution. He prays to High Heaven every
moment, kisses the cross, and his toothless old mouth interjects prayers
to God and curses on man in the same breath.
If any one is talking to him he looks the other way, slips down until
his shoulders occupy the throne, scratches his leg, and keeps up a
running comment of insult--"Aye," "Oh," "Of course," "Certainly," "Ugh,"
"Listen to him now!" There is a comedy side to all this which relieves
the tragedy and keeps the play from becoming disgusting.
Glimpses of _Ivan's_ past are given in his jerky confessions--he is the
most miserable and unhappy of men, and you behold that he is reaping as
he has sown.
All his life he has been preparing for this. Each day has been a
preparation for the next. _Ivan_ dies in a fit of wrath, hurling curses
on his family and court--dies in a fit of wrath into which he has been
purposely taunted by a man who knows that the outburst is certain to
kill the weakened monarch.
Where does _Ivan the Terrible_ go when Death closes his eyes?
I know not. But this I believe: No confessional can absolve him--no
priest benefit him--no God forgive him. He has damned himself, and he
began the work in youth. He was getting ready all his life for this old
age, and this old age was getting ready for the fifth act.
The playwright does not say so, Mansfield does not say so, but this is
the lesson: Hate is a poison--wrath is a toxin--sensuality leads to
death--clutching selfishness is a lighting of the fires of hell. It is
all a preparation--cause and effect.
If you are ever absolved, you must absolve yourself, for no one else
can. And the sooner you begin, the better.
We often hear of the beauties of old age, but the only old age that is
beautiful is the one the man has long been preparing for by living a
beautiful life. Every one of us are right now preparing for old age.
There may be a substitute somewhere in the world for Good Nature, but I
do not know where it can be found.
The secret of salvation is this: Keep Sweet.
An Alliance with Nature
My father is a doctor who has practised medicine for sixty-five years,
and is still practising.
I am a doctor myself.
I am fifty years old; my father is eighty-five. We live in the same
house, and daily we ride horseback together or tramp thru the fields and
woods. To-day we did our little jaunt of five miles and back
'cross country.
I have never been ill a day--never consulted a physician in a
professional way, and in fact, never missed a meal through inability to
eat. As for the author of the author of _A Message to Garcia_, he holds,
esoterically, to the idea that the hot pedaluvia and small doses of hop
tea will cure most ailments that are curable, and so far all of his own
ails have been curable--a point he can prove.
The value of the pedaluvia lies in the fact that it tends to equalize
circulation, not to mention the little matter of sanitation; and the
efficacy of the hops lies largely in the fact that they are bitter and
disagreeable to take.
Both of these prescriptions give the patient the soothing thought that
something is being done for him, and at the very worst can never do him
serious harm.
My father and I are not fully agreed on all of life's themes, so
existence for us never resolves itself into a dull, neutral gray. He is
a Baptist and I am a Vegetarian. Occasionally he refers to me as
"callow," and we have daily resorts to logic to prove prejudices, and
history is searched to bolster the preconceived, but on the following
important points we stand together, solid as one man:
First. Ninety-nine people out of a hundred who go to a physician have no
organic disease, but are merely suffering from some symptom of their own
indiscretion.
Second. Individuals who have diseases, nine times out of ten, are
suffering only from the accumulated evil effects of medication.
Third. Hence we get the proposition: Most diseases are the result of
medication which has been prescribed to relieve and take away a
beneficent and warning symptom on the part of wise Nature.
Most of the work of doctors in the past has been to prescribe for
symptoms; the difference between actual disease and a symptom being
something that the average man does not even yet know.
And the curious part is that on these points all physicians, among
themselves, are fully agreed. What I say here being merely truism,
triteness and commonplace.
Last week, in talking with an eminent surgeon in Buffalo, he said, "I
have performed over a thousand operations of laparotomy, and my records
show that in every instance, excepting in cases of accident, the
individual was given to what you call the 'Beecham Habit.'"
The people you see waiting in the lobbies of doctors' offices are, in a
vast majority of cases, suffering thru poisoning caused by an excess of
food. Coupled with this goes the bad results of imperfect breathing,
irregular sleep, lack of exercise, and improper use of stimulants, or
holding the thought of fear, jealousy and hate. All of these things, or
any one of them, will, in very many persons, cause fever, chills, cold
feet, congestion and faulty elimination.
To administer drugs to a man suffering from malnutrition caused by a
desire to "get even," and a lack of fresh air, is simply to compound
his troubles, shuffle his maladies, and get him ripe for the ether-cone
and scalpel.
Nature is forever trying to keep people well, and most so-called
"disease," which word means merely lack of ease, is self-limiting, and
tends to cure itself. If you have appetite, do not eat too much. If you
have no appetite, do not eat at all. Be moderate in the use of all
things, save fresh air and sunshine.
The one theme of _Ecclesiastes_ is moderation. Buddha wrote it down that
the greatest word in any language is Equanimity. William Morris said
that the finest blessing of life was systematic, useful work. Saint Paul
declared that the greatest thing in the world was love. Moderation,
Equanimity, Work and Love--you need no other physician.
In so stating I lay down a proposition agreed to by all physicians;
which was expressed by Hippocrates, the father of medicine, and then
repeated in better phrase by Epictetus, the slave, to his pupil, the
great Roman Emperor, Marcus Aurelius, and which has been known to every
thinking man and woman since: Moderation, Equanimity, Work and Love!
The Ex. Question
Words sometimes become tainted and fall into bad repute, and are
discarded. Until the day of Elizabeth Fry, on the official records in
England appeared the word "mad-house." Then it was wiped out and the
word "asylum" substituted. Within twenty years' time in several states
in America we have discarded the word "asylum" and have substituted the
word "hospital."
In Jeffersonville, Indiana, there is located a "Reformatory" which some
years ago was known as a penitentiary. The word "prison" had a
depressing effect, and "penitentiary" throws a theological shadow, and
so the words will have to go. As our ideas of the criminal change, we
change our vocabulary.
A few years ago we talked about asylums for the deaf and dumb--the word
"dumb" has now been stricken from every official document in every state
in the Union, because we have discovered, with the assistance of Gardner
G. Hubbard, that deaf people are not dumb, and not being defectives,
they certainly do not need an asylum. They need schools, however, and so
everywhere we have established schools for the deaf.
Deaf people are just as capable, are just as competent, just as well
able to earn an honest living as is the average man who can hear.
The "indeterminate sentence" is one of the wisest expedients ever
brought to bear in penology. And it is to this generation alone that the
honor of first using it must be given. The offender is sentenced for,
say from one to eight years. This means that if the prisoner behaves
himself, obeying the rules, showing a desire to be useful, he will be
paroled and given his freedom at the end of one year.
If he misbehaves and does not prove his fitness for freedom he will be
kept two or three years, and he may possibly have to serve the whole
eight years. "How long are you in for?" I asked a convict at
Jeffersonville, who was caring for the flowers in front of the walls.
"Me? Oh, I'm in for two years, with the privilege of fourteen," was the
man's answer, given with a grin.
The old plan of "short time," allowing two or three months off from
every year for good behavior was a move in the right direction, but the
indeterminate sentence will soon be the rule everywhere for first
offenders.
The indeterminate sentence throws upon the man himself the
responsibility for the length of his confinement and tends to relieve
prison life of its horror, by holding out hope. The man has the short
time constantly in mind, and usually is very careful not to do anything
to imperil it. Insurrection and an attempt to escape may mean that every
day of the whole long sentence will have to be served.
So even the dullest of minds and the most calloused realize that it pays
to do what is right--the lesson being pressed home upon them in a way it
has never been before.
The old-time prejudice of business men against the man who had "done
time" was chiefly on account of his incompetence, and not his record.
The prison methods that turned out a hateful, depressed and frightened
man who had been suppressed by the silent system and deformed by the
lock-step, calloused by brutal treatment and the constant thought held
over him that he was a criminal, was a bad thing for the prisoner, for
the keeper and for society. Even an upright man would be undone by such
treatment, and in a year be transformed into a sly, secretive and
morally sick man. The men just out of prison were unable to do
anything--they needed constant supervision and attention, and so of
course we did not care to hire them.
The Ex. now is a totally different man from the Ex. just out of his
striped suit in the seventies, thanks to that much defamed man,
Brockway, and a few others.
We may have to restrain men for the good of themselves and the good of
society, but we do not punish. The restraint is punishment enough; we
believe men are punished by their sins, not for them.
When men are sent to reform schools now, the endeavor and the hope is to
give back to society a better man than we took.
Judge Lindsey sends boys to the reform school without officer or guard.
The boys go of their own accord, carrying their own commitment papers.
They pound on the gate demanding admittance in the name of the law. The
boy believes that Judge Lindsey is his friend, and that the reason he
is sent to the reform school is that he may reap a betterment which his
full freedom cannot possibly offer. When he takes his commitment papers
he is no longer at war with society and the keepers of the law. He
believes that what is being done for him is done for the best, and so he
goes to prison, which is really not a prison at the last, for it is a
school where the lad is taught to economize both time and money and to
make himself useful.
Other people work for us, and we must work for them. This is the supreme
lesson that the boy learns. You can only help yourself by
helping others.
Now here is a proposition: If a boy or a man takes his commitment
papers, goes to prison alone and unattended, is it necessary that he
should be there locked up, enclosed in a corral and be looked after by
guards armed with death-dealing implements?
Superintendent Whittaker, of the institution at Jeffersonville, Indiana,
says, "No." He believes that within ten years' time we will do away with
the high wall, and will keep our loaded guns out of sight; to a great
degree also we will take the bars from the windows of the prisons, just
as we have taken them away from the windows of the hospitals for
the insane.
At the reform school it may be necessary to have a guard-house for some
years to come, but the high wall must go, just as we have sent the
lock-step and the silent system and the striped suit of disgrace into
the ragbag of time--lost in the memory of things that were.
Four men out of five in the reformatory at Jeffersonville need no
coercion, they would not run away if the walls were razed and the doors
left unlocked. One young man I saw there refused the offered parole--he
wanted to stay until he learned his trade. He was not the only one with
a like mental attitude.
The quality of men in the average prison is about the same as that of
the men who are in the United States Army. The man who enlists is a
prisoner; for him to run away is a very serious offense, and yet he is
not locked up at night, nor is he surrounded by a high wall.
The George Junior Republic is simply a farm, unfenced and unpatroled,
excepting by the boys who are in the Republic, and yet it is a penal
institution. The prison of the future will not be unlike a young ladies'
boarding school, where even yet the practice prevails of taking the
inmates out all together, with a guard, and allowing no one to leave
without a written permit.
As society changes, so changes the so-called criminal. In any event, I
know this--that Max Nordau did not make out his case.
There is no criminal class.
Or for that matter we are all criminals. "I have in me the capacity for
every crime," said Emerson.
The man or woman who goes wrong is a victim of unkind environment.
Booker Washington says that when the negro has something that we want,
or can perform a task that we want done, we waive the color line, and
the race problem then ceases to be a problem. So it is with the Ex.
Question. When the ex-convict is able to show that he is useful to the
world, the world will cease to shun him. When Superintendent Whittaker
graduates a man it is pretty good evidence that the man is able and
willing to render a service to society.
The only places where the ex-convicts get the icy mitt are pink teas
and prayer meetings. An ex-convict should work all day and then spend
his evenings at the library, feeding his mind--then he is safe.
If I were an ex-convict I would fight shy of all "Refuges," "Sheltering
Arms," "Saint Andrew's Societies" and the philanthropic "College
Settlements." I would never go to those good professional people, or
professional good people, who patronize the poor and spit upon the
alleged wrongdoer, and who draw sharp lines of demarcation in
distinguishing between the "good" and the "bad." If you can work and are
willing to work, business men will not draw the line on you. Get a job,
and then hold it down hard by making yourself necessary. Employers of
labor and the ex-convicts themselves are fast settling this Ex.
Question, with the help of the advanced type of the Reform School where
the inmates are being taught to be useful and are not punished nor
patronized, but are simply given a chance. My heart goes out in sympathy
to the man who gives a poor devil a chance. I myself am a poor devil!
The Sergeant
A colonel in the United States Army told me the other day something like
this: The most valuable officer, the one who has the greatest
responsibility, is the sergeant. The true sergeant is born, not made--he
is the priceless gift of the gods. He is so highly prized that when
found he is never promoted, nor is he allowed to resign. If he is
dissatisfied with his pay, Captain, Lieutenant and Colonel chip in--they
cannot afford to lose him. He is a rara avis--the apple of their eye.
His first requirement is that he must be able to lick any man in the
company. A drunken private may damn a captain upside down and wrong-side
out, and the captain is not allowed to reply. He can neither strike with
his fist, nor engage in a cussing match, but your able sergeant is an
adept in both of these polite accomplishments. Even if a private strike
an officer, the officer is not allowed to strike back. Perhaps the man
who abuses him could easily beat him in a rough-and-tumble fight, and
then it is quite a sufficient reason to keep one's clothes clean. We
say the revolver equalizes all men, but it doesn't. It is disagreeable
to shoot a man. It scatters brains and blood all over the sidewalk,
attracts a crowd, requires a deal of explanation afterward, and may cost
an officer his stripes. No good officer ever hears anything said about
him by a private.
The sergeant hears everything, and his reply to backslack is a
straight-arm jab in the jaw. The sergeant is responsible only to his
captain, and no good captain will ever know anything about what a
sergeant does, and he will not believe it when told. If a fight occurs
between two privates, the sergeant jumps in, bumps their heads together
and licks them both. If a man feigns sick, or is drunk, the sergeant
chucks him under the pump. The regulations do not call for any such
treatment, but the sergeant does not know anything about the
regulations--he gets the thing done. The sergeant may be twenty years
old or sixty--age does not count. The sergeant is a father to his
men--he regards them all as children--bad boys--and his business is to
make them brave, honorable and dutiful soldiers.
The sergeant is always the first man up in the morning, the last man to
go to bed at night. He knows where his men are every minute of the day
or night. If they are actually sick, he is both nurse and physician, and
dictates gently to the surgeon what should be done. He is also the
undertaker, and the digging of ditches and laying out of latrines all
fall to his lot. Unlike the higher officers, he does not have to dress
"smart," and he is very apt to discard his uniform and go clothed like a
civilian teamster, excepting on special occasions when necessity demands
braid and buttons.
He knows everything, and nothing. No wild escapade of a higher officer
passes by him, yet he never tells.
Now one might suppose that he is an absolute tyrant, but a good sergeant
is a beneficent tyrant at the right time. To break the spirit of his men
will not do--it would unfit them for service--so what he seeks to do is
merely to bend their minds so as to match his own. Gradually they grow
to both love and fear him. In time of actual fight he transforms cowards
into heroes. He holds his men up to the scratch. In battle there are
often certain officers marked for death--they are to be shot by their
own men. It is a time of getting even--and in the hurly-burly and
excitement there are no witnesses. The sergeant is ever on the lookout
for such mutinies, and his revolver often sends to the dust the head
revolutionary before the dastardly plot can be carried out. In war-time
all executions are not judicial.
In actual truth, the sergeant is the only real, sure-enough fighting man
in the army. He is as rare as birds' teeth, and every officer anxiously
scans his recruits in search of good sergeant timber.
In business life, the man with the sergeant instincts is even more
valuable than in the army. The business sergeant is the man not in
evidence--who asks for no compliments or bouquets--who knows where
things are--who has no outside ambitions, and no desire save to do his
work. If he is too smart he will lay plots and plans for his own
promotion, and thereby he is pretty sure to defeat himself.
As an individual the average soldier is a sneak, a shirk, a failure, a
coward. He is only valuable as he is licked into shape. It is pretty
much the same in business. It seems hard to say it, but the average
employe in factory, shop or store, puts the face of the clock to shame
looking at it; he is thinking of his pay envelope and his intent is to
keep the boss located and to do as little work as possible. In many
cases the tyranny of the employer is to blame for the condition, but
more often it is the native outcrop of suspicion that prompts the seller
to give no more than he can help.
And here the sergeant comes in, and with watchful eye and tireless
nerves, holds the recreants to their tasks. If he is too severe, he will
fix in the shirks more firmly the shirk microbe; but if he is of better
fibre, he may supply a little more will to those who lack it, and
gradually create an atmosphere of right intent, so that the only
disgrace will consist in their wearing the face off the regulator and
keeping one ear cocked to catch the coming footsteps of the boss.
There is not the slightest danger that there will ever be an overplus of
sergeants. Let the sergeant keep out of strikes, plots, feuds, hold his
temper and show what's what, and he can name his own salary and keep his
place for ninety-nine years without having a contract.
The Spirit of the Age
Four hundred and twenty-five years before the birth of the Nazarene,
Socrates said, "The gods are on high Olympus, but you and I are here."
And for this--and a few other similar observations--be was compelled to
drink a substitute for coffee--he was an infidel! Within the last thirty
years the churches of Christendom have, in the main, adopted the
Socratic proposition that you and I are here. That is, we have made
progress by getting away from narrow theology and recognizing humanity.
We do not know anything about either Olympus or Elysium, but we do know
something about Athens.
Athens is here.
Athens needs us--the Greeks are at the door. Let the gods run Elysium,
and we'll devote ourselves to Athens.
This is the prevailing spirit in the churches of America to-day. Our
religion is humanitarian, not theological.
A like evolution has come about in medicine. The materia medica of
twenty-five years ago is now obsolete. No good doctor now treats
symptoms--he neither gives you something to relieve your headache nor to
settle your stomach. These are but timely ting-a-lings--Nature's
warnings--look out! And the doctor tells you so, and charges you a fee
sufficient to impress you with the fact that he is no fool, but that
you are.
The lawyer who now gets the largest fees is never seen in a court-room.
Litigation is now largely given over to damage suits--carried on by
clients who want something for nothing, and little lawyers, shark-like
and hungry, who work on contingent fees. Three-fourths of the time of
all superior and supreme courts is taken up by His Effluvia, who brings
suit thru His Bacteria, with His Crabship as chief witness, for damages
not due, either in justice or fact.
How to get rid of this burden, brought upon us by men who have nothing
to lose, is a question too big for the average legislator. It can only
be solved by heroic measures, carried out by lawyers who are out of
politics and have a complete indifference for cheap popularity. Here is
opportunity for men of courage and ability. But the point is this, wise
business men keep out of court. They arbitrate their differences
--compromise--they cannot afford to quit their work for the
sake of getting even. As for making money, they know a better way.
In theology we are waiving distinctions and devoting ourselves to the
divine spirit only as it manifests itself in humanity--we are talking
less and less about another world and taking more notice of the one we
inhabit. Of course we occasionally have heresy trials, and pictures of
the offender and the Fat Bishop adorn the first page, but heresy trials
not accompanied by the scaffold or the faggots are innocuous and
exceedingly tame.
In medicine we have more faith in ourselves and less in prescriptions.
In pedagogy we are teaching more and more by the natural
method--learning by doing--and less and less by means of injunction
and precept.
In penology we seek to educate and reform, not to suppress, repress and
punish.
That is to say, the gods are on high Olympus--let them stay there.
Athens is here.
The Grammarian
The best way to learn to write is to write.
Herbert Spencer never studied grammar until he had learned to write. He
took his grammar at sixty, which is a good age for one to begin this
most interesting study, as by the time you have reached that age you
have largely lost your capacity to sin.
Men who can swim exceedingly well are not those who have taken courses
in the theory of swimming at natatoriums, from professors of the
amphibian art--they were just boys who jumped into the ol' swimmin'
hole, and came home with shirts on wrong-side out and a tell-tale
dampness in their hair.
Correspondence schools for the taming of bronchos are as naught; and
treatises on the gentle art of wooing are of no avail--follow
nature's lead.
Grammar is the appendenda vermiformis of the science of pedagogics: it
is as useless as the letter q in the alphabet, or the proverbial two
tails to a cat, which no cat ever had, and the finest cat in the world,
the Manx cat, has no tail at all.
"The literary style of most university men is commonplace, when not
positively bad," wrote Herbert Spencer in his old age.
"Educated Englishmen all write alike," said Taine. That is to say,
educated men who have been drilled to write by certain fixed and
unchangeable rules of rhetoric and grammar will produce similar
compositions. They have no literary style, for style is individuality
and character--the style is the man, and grammar tends to obliterate
individuality. No study is so irksome to everybody, except the sciolists
who teach it, as grammar. It remains forever a bad taste in the mouth of
the man of ideas, and has weaned bright minds innumerable from a desire
to express themselves through the written word.
Grammar is the etiquette of words, and the man who does not know how to
properly salute his grandmother on the street until he has consulted a
book, is always so troubled about the tenses that his fancies break thru
language and escape.
The grammarian is one whose whole thought is to string words according
to a set formula. The substance itself that he wishes to convey is of
secondary importance. Orators who keep their thoughts upon the proper
way to gesticulate in curves, impress nobody.
If it were a sin against decency, or an attempt to poison the minds of
the people, for a person to be ungrammatical, it might be wise enough
to hire men to protect the well of English from defilement. But a
stationary language is a dead one--moving water only is pure--and the
well that is not fed by springs is sure to be a breeding-place
for disease.
Let men express themselves in their own way, and if they express
themselves poorly, look you, their punishment will be that no one will
read their literary effusions. Oblivion with her smother-blanket lies in
wait for the writer who has nothing to say and says it faultlessly.
In the making of hare soup, I am informed by most excellent culinary
authority, the first requisite is to catch your hare. The literary
scullion who has anything to offer a hungry world, will doubtless find a
way to fricassee it.
The Best Religion
A religion of just being kind would be a pretty good religion, don't you
think so?
But a religion of kindness and useful effort is nearly a perfect
religion.
We used to think it was a man's belief concerning a dogma that would fix
his place in eternity. This was because we believed that God was a
grumpy, grouchy old gentleman, stupid, touchy and dictatorial. A really
good man would not damn you even if you didn't like him, but a bad
man would.
As our ideas of God changed, we ourselves changed for the better. Or, as
we thought better of ourselves we thought better of God. It will be
character that locates our place in another world, if there is one, just
as it is our character that fixes our place here.
We are weaving character every day, and the way to weave the best
character is to be kind and to be useful.
THINK RIGHT, ACT RIGHT; IT IS WHAT WE THINK AND DO THAT MAKE US WHAT WE
ARE.
So here ends LOVE, LIFE AND WORK, being
a book of Essays selected from the writings
of ELBERT HUBBARD, and done into print by
_The Roycrofters_ at their Shop at East Aurora,
which is in Erie County, New York, U.S.A.
Completed in the month of July, MCMVI
[Illustration: The Roycroft Shop]
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