Project Gutenberg's The University of Hard Knocks, by Ralph Parlette
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Title: The University of Hard Knocks
Author: Ralph Parlette
Posting Date: September 13, 2008 [EBook #455]
Release Date: March, 1996
Language: English
*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS ***
The University of Hard Knocks
by
Ralph Parlette
The School That Completes Our Education
"He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God,
and he shall be my son"--Revelation 21:7.
"Sweet are the uses of adversity;
Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And thus our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks
Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
Shakespeare
Why It Is Printed
MORE than a million people have sat in audiences in all parts of the
United States and have listened to "The University of Hard Knocks." It
has been delivered to date more than twenty-five hundred times upon
lyceum courses, at chautauquas, teachers' institutes, club gatherings,
conventions and before various other kinds of audiences. Ralph Parlette
is kept busy year after year lecturing, because his lectures deal with
universal human experience.
"Can I get the lecture in book form?" That continuous question from
audiences brought out this book in response. Here is the overflow of
many deliveries.
"What is written here is not the way I would write it, were I writing a
book," says Ralph Parlette. "It is the way I say it. The lecture took
this unconscious colloquial form before audiences. An audience makes a
lecture, if the lecture survives. I wish I could shake the hand of
every person who has sat in my audiences. And I wish I could tell the
lecture committees of America how I appreciate the vast amount of
altruistic work they have done in bringing the audiences of America
together. For lecture audiences are not drawn together, they are pushed
together."
The warm reception given "The University of Hard Knocks" by the public,
has encouraged the publishers to put more of Mr. Parlette's lectures
into book form, "Big Business" and "Pockets and Paradises" are now in
preparation as this, the third edition of "The University of Hard
Knocks" comes from the press.
Contents
SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS--The lecturer the delivery wagon--The sorghum
barrel--Audience must have place to put lecture--Why so many words
The University of Hard Knocks
I. THE BOOKS ARE BUMPS--Every bump a lesson--Why the two kinds of
bumps--Description of University--"Sweet are the uses of
Adversity"--Why children are not interested
II. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDLESS KNOCKS, the bumps that we bump
into--Getting the coffee-pot--Teaching a wilful child--Bumps make us
"stop, look, listen"--Blind man learns with one bump--Going up requires
effort--Prodigals must be bumped--The fly and the sticky
fly-paper--"Removed" and "knocked out"
III. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDFUL KNOCKS, the bumps that bump into us--Our
sorrows and disappointments--How the piano was made--How the "red mud"
becomes razor-blades--The world our mirror--The cripple taught by the
bumps--Every bump brings a blessing--You are never down and out
IV. "SHAKE THE BARREL"--How we decide our destinies--Why the big ones
shake up and the little ones shake down--The barrel of life sorting
people--How we hold our places, go down, go up--Good luck and bad
luck--The girl who went up--The man who went down--The fatal rattle--We
must get ready to get--Testimonials and press notices--You cannot
uplift people with derrick--No laws can equalize--Help people to help
themselves--We cannot get things till we get ready for them
V. GOING UP--How we become great--We must get inside greatness--There
is no top--We make ourselves great by service--the first step at
hand--All can be greatest--Where to find great people--A glimpse of
Gunsaulus
VI. THE PROBLEM OF "PREPAREDNESS"--Preparing children for life--Most
"advantages" are disadvantages--Buying education for children--The
story of "Gussie" and "Bill Whackem"--Schools and books only give
better tools for service--"Hard knocks" graduates--Menace of America
not swollen fortunes but shrunken souls--Children must have struggle to
get strength--Not packhorse work--Helping the turkeys killed them--the
happiness of work we love--Amusement drunkards--Lure of the
city--Strong men from the country--Must save the home towns--A school
of struggle--New School experiment
VII. THE SALVATION OF A "SUCKER"--You can't get something for
nothing--The fiddle and the tuning--How we know things--Trimmed at the
shell game--My "fool drawer"--Getting "selected to receive 1,000 per
cent"--You must earn what you own--Commencement orations--My maiden
sermon--The books that live have been lived--Singer must live
songs--Successful songs written from experience--Theory and
practice--Tuning the strings of life
VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My first school
teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll of my
schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben Hur won the
chariot race--Pulling on the oar
IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi keeps
on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but
stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best day,
tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just
beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too busy
to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not
best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming
obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not praise--Doing
duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of Waters"--Go on south
forever!
X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--Climbing
Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--Each day we
rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into the eternal
day--Going south is going upward
Some Preliminary Remarks
LADIES and Gentlemen:
I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want to be heard. I am only
the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon comes to your house, you
are not much interested in how it looks; you are interested in the
goods it brings you. You know some very good goods are sometimes
delivered to you in some very poor delivery wagons.
So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do not
pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to the
goods.
Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to you
some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours alone,
but everybody's.
Can Only Pull the Plug!
Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a lecture go
differently before every audience. The kind of an audience is just as
important as the kind of a lecture. A cold audience will make a good
lecture poor, while a warm audience will make a poor lecture good.
Let me illustrate:
When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to the
woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.
Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and the
sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall when it
was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not squirt. It
would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would have to wait a
long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real cold winter day I
would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not run at all. It would
just look out at me.
I discovered it was the temperature.
I have brought a barrel of sorghum to this audience. The name of the
sorghum is "The University of Hard Knocks." I can only pull the plug. I
cannot make it run. That will depend upon the temperature of this
audience. You can have all you want of it, but to get it to running
freely, you will have to warm up.
Did You Bring a Bucket?
No matter how the sorghum runs, you have to have a bucket to get it.
How much any one gets out of a lecture depends also upon the size of
the bucket he brings to get it in. A big bucket can get filled at a
very small stream. A little bucket gets little at the greatest stream.
With no bucket you can get nothing at Niagara.
That often explains why one person says a lecture is great, while the
next person says he got nothing out of it.
What It's All About
Here is a great mass of words and sentences and pictures to express two
or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing
up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own
personal overcoming, and that we never finish it.
Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound
life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No
statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can
alone solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a
higher vision.
We are told that the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would
not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So
abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental
digestion like more bulk in the way of pictures and discussions of
these truths. Here is bulk as well as nutriment.
If you get the feeling that the first personal pronoun is being
overworked, I remind you that this is more a confession than a lecture.
You cannot confess without referring to the confesser.
To Everybody in My Audience
I like you because I am like you.
I believe in you because I believe in myself. We are all one family. I
believe in your Inside, not in your Outside, whoever you are, whatever
you are, wherever you are.
I believe in the Angel of Good inside every block of human marble. I
believe it must be carved out in The University of Hard Knocks.
I believe all this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness,
hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside that must be chipped away.
I believe the Hard Knocks cannot injure the Angel, but can only reveal
it.
I hope you are getting your Hard Knocks.
I care little about your glorious or inglorious past. I care little
about your present. I care much about your future for that is to see
more of the Angel in you.
The University of Hard Knocks
Chapter I
The Books Are Bumps
THE greatest school is the University of Hard Knocks. Its books are
bumps.
Every bump is a lesson. If we learn the lesson with one bump, we do not
get that bump again. We do not need it. We have traveled past it. They
do not waste the bumps. We get promoted to the next bump.
But if we are "naturally bright," or there is something else the matter
with us, so that we do not learn the lesson of the bump we have just
gotten, then that bump must come back and bump us again.
Some of us learn to go forward with a few bumps, but most of us are
"naturally bright" and have to be pulverized.
The tuition in the University of Hard Knocks is not free. Experience is
the dearest teacher in the world. Most of us spend our lives in the
A-B-C's of getting started.
We matriculate in the cradle.
We never graduate. When we stop learning we are due for another bump.
There are two kinds of people--wise people and fools. The fools are the
people who think they have graduated.
The playground is all of God's universe.
The university colors are black and blue.
The yell is "ouch" repeated ad lib.
The Need of the Bumps
When I was thirteen I knew a great deal more than I do now. There was a
sentence in my grammar that disgusted me. It was by some foreigner I
had never met. His name was Shakespeare. It was this:
"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and
venomous, Wears yet a priceless jewel in its head; And thus our life,
exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running
brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
"Tongues in trees," I thought. "Trees can't talk! That man is crazy.
Books in running brooks! Why nobody never puts no books in no running
brooks. They'd get wet. And that sermons in stones! They get preachers
to preach sermons, and they build houses out of stones."
I was sorry for Shakespeare--when I was thirteen.
But I am happy today that I have traveled a little farther. I am happy
that I have begun to learn the lessons from the bumps. I am happy that
I am learning the sweet tho painful lessons of the University of
Adversity. I am happy that I am beginning to listen. For as I learn to
listen, I hear every tree speaking, every stone preaching and every
running brook the unfolding of a book.
Children, I fear you will not be greatly interested in what is to
follow. Perhaps you are "naturally bright" and feel sorry for
Shakespeare.
I was not interested when father and mother told me these things. I
knew they meant all right, but the world had moved since they were
young, and now two and two made seven, because we lived so much faster.
It is so hard to tell young people anything. They know better. So they
have to get bumped just where we got bumped, to learn that two and two
always makes four, and "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
reap."
But if you will remember some of these things, they will feel like
poultices by and by when the bumps come.
The Two Colleges
As we get bumped and battered on life's pathway, we discover we get two
kinds of bumps--bumps that we need and bumps that we do not need.
Bumps that we bump into and bumps that bump into us.
We discover, in other words, that The University of Hard Knocks has two
colleges--The College of Needless Knocks and The College of Needful
Knocks.
We attend both colleges.
Chapter II
The College of Needless Knocks
The Bumps That We Bump Into
NEARLY all the bumps we get are Needless Knocks.
There comes a vivid memory of one of my early Needless Knocks as I say
that. It was back at the time when I was trying to run our home to suit
myself. I sat in the highest chair in the family circle. I was three
years old and ready to graduate.
That day they had the little joy and sunshine of the family in his
high-chair throne right up beside the dinner table. The coffee-pot was
within grabbing distance.
I became enamored with that coffee-pot. I decided I needed that
coffee-pot in my business. I reached over to get the coffee-pot. Then I
discovered a woman beside me, my mother. She was the most meddlesome
woman I had ever known. I had not tried to do one thing in three years
that that woman had not meddled into.
And that day when I wanted the coffee-pot--I did want it. Nobody knows
how I desired that coffee-pot. "One thing thou lackest," a
coffee-pot--I was reaching over to get it, that woman said, "Don't
touch that!"
The longer I thought about it the more angry I became. What right has
that woman to meddle into my affairs all the time? I have stood this
petticoat tyranny three years, and it is time to stop it!
I stopped it. I got the coffee-pot. I know I got the coffee-pot. I got
it unanimously. I know when I got it and I also know where I got it. I
got about a gallon of the reddest, hottest coffee a bad boy ever
spilled over himself.
O-o-o-o-o-o! I can feel it yet!
There were weeks after that when I was upholstered. They put
applebutter on me--and coal oil and white-of-an-egg and starch and
anything else the neighbors could think of. They would bring it over
and rub it on the little joy and sunshine of the family, who had gotten
temporarily eclipsed.
Teaching a Wilful Child
You see, my mother's way was to tell me and then let me do as I
pleased. She told me not to get the coffee-pot and then let me get it,
knowing that it would burn me. She would say, "Don't." Then she would
go on with her knitting and let me do as I pleased.
Why don't mothers knit today?
Mother would say, "Don't fall in the well." I could go and jump in the
well after that and she would not look at me. I do not argue that this
is the way to raise children, but I insist that this was the most kind
and effective way to rear one stubborn boy I know of. The neighbors and
the ladies' aid society often said my mother was cruel with that angel
child. But the neighbors did not know what kind of an insect mother was
trying to raise. Mother did know. She knew how stubborn and self-willed
I was. It came from father's "side of the house."
Mother knew that to argue with me was to flatter me. Tell me, serve
notice upon me, and then let me go ahead and get my coffee-pot. That
was the quickest and kindest way to teach me.
I learned very quickly that if I did not hear mother, and heed, a
coffee-pot would spill upon me. I cannot remember when I disobeyed my
mother that a coffee-pot of some kind did not spill upon me, and I got
my blisters. Mother did not inflict them. Mother was not much of an
inflicter. Father attended to that in the laboratory behind the
parsonage.
"Stop, Look, Listen"
And thru the bumps we learn that The College of Needless Knocks runs on
the same plan. The Voice of Wisdom says to each of us, "Child of
humanity, do right, walk in the right path. You will be wiser and
happier." The tongues in the trees, the books in the running brooks and
the sermons in the stones all repeat it.
But we are not compelled to walk in the right path. We are free
im-moral agents.
We get off the right path. We go down forbidden paths. They seem easier
and more attractive. It is so easy to go downward. We slide downward,
but we have to make effort to go upward.
Anything that goes downward will run itself. Anything that goes upward
has to be pushed.
And going down the wrong path, we get bumped harder and harder until we
listen.
We are lucky if we learn the lesson with one bump. We are unlucky when
we get bumped twice in the same place, for it means we are making no
progress.
When we are bumped, we should "stop, look, listen." "Safety first!"
One time I paid a seeress two dollars to look into my honest palm. She
said, "It hain't your fault. You wasn't born right. You was born under
an unlucky star." You don't know how that comforted me. It wasn't my
fault--all my bumps and coffee-pots! I was just unlucky and it had to
be.
How I had to be bumped to learn better! Now when I get bumped I try to
learn the lesson of the bump and find the right path, so that when I
see that bump coming again I can say, "Excuse me; it hath a familiar
look," and dodge it.
The seeress is the soothing syrup for mental infants.
Blind Man's Fine Sight
The other day I watched a blind man go down the aisle of the car to get
off the train. Did you ever study the walk of a blind man? He
"pussyfooted" it along so carefully. He bumped his hand against a seat.
Then he did what every blind man does, he lifted his hand higher and
didn't bump any more seats.
I looked down my nose. "Ralph Parlette," I said to myself, "when are
you going to learn to see as well as that blind man? He learns his
lesson with one bump, and you have to go bumping into the same things
day after day and wonder why you have so much 'bad luck'!"
Are You Going Up or Down?
Let me repeat, things that go downward will run themselves. Things that
go upward have to be pushed. Going upward is overcoming. Notice that
churches, schools, lyceums, chautauquas, reform movements--things that
go upward--never run themselves. They must be pushed all the time.
And so with our own lives. Real living is conscious effort to go upward
to larger life.
If you are making no effort in your life, if you are moving in the line
of least resistance, depend upon it you are going downward. Look out
for the bumps!
Look over your community. Note the handful of brave, faithful,
unselfish souls who are carrying the community burdens and pushing
upward. Note the multitude making little or no effort, and even getting
in the way of the pushers.
Majorities do not rule. Majorities never have ruled. It is the brave
minority of thinking, self-sacrificing people that decides the tomorrow
of communities that go upward. Majorities are not willing to make the
effort to rule themselves. They are content to drift and be amused and
follow false gods that promise something for nothing. They must be
led--sometimes driven--by minorities.
People are like sheep. The shepherd can lead them to heaven--or to hell.
Bumping the Prodigals
Human life is the story of the Prodigal Son. We look over the fence of
goodness into the mystery of the great unknown world beyond and in that
unknown realm we fondly imagine is happiness.
Down the great white way of the world go the million prodigals, seeking
happiness where nobody ever found happiness. Their days fill up with
disappointment, their vision becomes dulled. They become anaemic
feeding upon the husks.
They just must get their coffee-pot!
How they must be bumped to think upon their ways. Every time we do
wrong we get a Needless Knock. Every time! We may not always get bumped
on the outside, but we always get bumped on the inside. A bump on the
conscience is worse than a bump on the "noodle."
"I can do wrong and not get bumped. I have no feelings upon the
subject," somebody says, You can? You poor old sinner, you have bumped
your conscience numb. That is why you have no feelings on the subject.
You have pounded your soul into a jelly. You don't know how badly you
are hurt.
How the old devil works day and night to keep people amused and doped
so that they will not think upon their ways! How he keeps the music and
the dazzle going so they will not see they are bumping themselves!
Consider the Sticky Flypaper
Did you ever watch a fly get his Needless Knocks on the sticky flypaper?
The last thing Mamma Fly said as Johnny went off to the city was,
"Remember, son, to stay away from the sticky flypaper. That is where
your poor dear father was lost." And Johnny Fly remembers for several
minutes. But when he sees all the smart young flies of his set go over
to the flypaper, he goes over, too. He gazes down at his face in the
stickiness. "Ah! how pretty I am! This sticky flypaper shows me up
better than anything at home. What a fine place to skate. Just see how
close I can fly over it and not get stuck a bit. Mother is such a silly
old worryer. She means all right, of course, but she isn't up-to-date.
We young set of modern flies are naturally bright and have so many more
advantages. You can't catch us. They were too strict with me back home."
You see Johnny fly back and forth and have the time of his naturally
bright young life. Afterwhile, tho, he stubs his toe and lands in the
stickiness. "Well, well, how nice this is on the feet, so soft and
soothing!"
First he puts one foot down and pulls it out. That is a lot of fun. It
shows he is not a prisoner. He is a strong-minded fly. He can quit it
or play in it, just as he pleases. After while he puts two feet down in
the stickiness. It is harder to pull them out. Then he puts three down
and puts down a few more trying to pull them out.
"Really," says Johnny Fly bowing to his comrades also stuck around him,
"really, boys, you'll have to excuse me now. Good-bye!" But he doesn't
pull loose. He feels tired and he sits down in the sticky flypaper. It
is a fine place to stick around. All his young set of flies are around
him. He does like the company. They all feel the same way--they can
play in the sticky flypaper or let it alone, just as they please, for
they are strong-minded flies. They have another drink and sing, "We
won't go home till morning."
Johnny may get home, but he will leave a wing or a leg. Most of them
stay. They just settle down into the stickiness with sleeping sickness.
The tuition in The College of Needless Knocks is very high indeed!
"Removed" or "Knocked Out"?
The man who goes to jail ought to congratulate himself if he is guilty.
It is the man who does not get discovered who is to be pitied, for he
must get some more knocks.
The world loves to write resolutions of respect. How often we write,
"Whereas, it has pleased an all-wise Providence to remove," when we
might reasonably ask whether the victim was "removed" or merely
"knocked out."
There is a good deal of suicide charged up to Providence.
Chapter III
The College of Needful Knocks
The Bumps That Bump Into Us
BUT occasionally all of us get bumps that we do not bump into. They
bump into us. They are the guideboard knocks that point us to the
higher pathway.
You were bumped yesterday or years ago. Maybe the wound has not yet
healed. Maybe you think it never will heal. You wondered why you were
bumped. Some of you in this audience are just now wondering why.
You were doing right--doing just the best you knew how--and yet some
blow came crushing upon you and gave you cruel pain.
It broke your heart. You have had your heart broken. I have had my
heart broken more times than I care to talk about now. Your home was
darkened, your plans were wrecked, you thought you had nothing more to
live for.
I am like you. I have had more trouble than anybody else. I have never
known anyone who had not had more trouble than anyone else.
But I am discovering that life only gets good after we have been killed
a few times. Each death is a larger birth.
We all must learn, if we have not already learned, that these blows are
lessons in The College of Needful Knocks. They point upward to a higher
path than we have been traveling.
In other words, we are raw material. You know what raw material
is--material that needs more Needful Knocks to make it more useful and
valuable.
The clothing we wear, the food we eat, the house we live in, all have
to have the Needful Knocks to become useful. And so does humanity need
the same preparation for greater usefulness.
I should like to know every person in this audience. But the ones I
should most appreciate knowing are the ones who have known the most of
these knocks--who have faced the great crises of life and have been
tried in the crucibles of affliction. For I am learning that these
lives are the gold tried in the fire.
The Sorrows of the Piano
See the piano on this stage? Good evening, Mr. Piano. I am glad to see
you. You are so shiny, beautiful, valuable and full of music, if
properly treated.
Do you know how you got upon this stage, Mr. Piano? You were bumped
here. This is no reflection upon the janitor. You became a piano by the
Needful Knocks.
I can see you back in your callow beginnings, when you were just a
tree--a tall, green tree. You were green! Only green things grow. Did
you get the meaning of that, children? I hope you are green.
There you stood in the forest, a perfectly good, green young tree. You
got your lessons, combed your hair, went to Sunday school and were the
best young tree you could be.
That is why you were bumped--because you were good! There came a man
into the woods with an ax, and he looked for the best trees there to
bump. He bumped you--hit you with the ax! How it hurt you! And how
unjust it was! He kept on hitting you. "The operation was just
terrible." Finally you fell, crushed, broken, bleeding.
It is a very sad story. They took you all bumped and bleeding to the
sawmill and they bumped and ripped you more. They cut you in pieces and
hammered you day by day.
They did not bump the little, crooked, dissipated, cigaret-stunted
trees. They were not worth bumping.
But shake, Mr. Piano. That is why you are on this stage. You were
bumped here. All the beauty, harmony and value were bumped into you.
The Sufferings of the Red Mud
One day I was up the Missabe road about a hundred miles north of
Duluth, Minnesota, and came to a hole in the ground. It was a big
hole--about a half-mile of hole. There were steam-shovels at work
throwing out of that hole what I thought was red mud.
"Kind sir, why are they throwing that red mud out of that hole?" I
asked a native.
"That hain't red mud. That's iron ore, an' it's the best iron ore in
the world."
"What is it worth?"
"It hain't worth nothin' here; that's why they're movin' it away."
There's red mud around every community that "hain't worth nothin'"
until you move it--send it to college or somewhere.
Not very long after this, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw some of
this same red mud. It had been moved over the Great Lakes and the rails
to what they call a blast furnace, the technological name of which
being The College of Needful Knocks for Red Mud.
I watched this red mud matriculate into a great hopper with limestone,
charcoal and other textbooks. Then they corked it up and school began.
They roasted it. It is a great thing to be roasted.
When it was done roasting they stopped. Have you noticed that they
always stop when anything is done roasting? If we are yet getting
roasted, perhaps we are not done!
Then they pulled the plug out of the bottom of the college and held
promotion exercises. The red mud squirted out into the sand. It was not
red mud now, because it had been roasted. It was a freshman--pig iron,
worth more than red mud, because it had been roasted.
Some of the pig iron went into another department, a big teakettle,
where it was again roasted, and now it came out a sophomore--steel,
worth more than pig iron.
Some of the sophomore steel went up into another grade where it was
roasted yet again and rolled thin into a junior. Some of that went on
up and up, at every step getting more pounding and roasting and
affliction.
It seemed as tho I could hear the suffering red mud crying out, "O, why
did they take me away from my happy hole-in-the-ground? Why do they
pound me and break my heart? I have been good and faithful. O, why do
they roast me? O, I'll never get over this!"
But after they had given it a diploma--a pricemark telling how much it
had been roasted--they took it proudly all over the world, labeled
"Made in America." They hung it in show windows, they put it in glass
cases. Many people admired it and said, "Isn't that fine work!" They
paid much money for it now. They paid the most money for what had been
roasted the most.
If a ton of that red mud had become watch-springs or razor-blades, the
price had gone up into thousands of dollars.
My friends, you and I are the raw material, the green trees, the red
mud. The Needful Knocks are necessary to make us serviceable.
Every bump is raising our price. Every bump is disclosing a path to a
larger life. The diamond and the chunk of soft coal are exactly the
same material, say the chemists. But the diamond has gone to The
College of Needful Knocks more than has her crude sister of the
coal-scuttle.
There is no human diamond that has not been crystallized in the
crucibles of affliction. There is no gold that has not been refined in
the fire.
Cripple Taught by Bumps
One evening when I was trying to lecture in a chautauqua tent in
Illinois, a crippled woman was wheeled into the tent and brought right
down to the foot of the platform. The subject was The University of
Hard Knocks. Presently the cripple's face was shining brighter than the
footlights.
She knew about the knocks!
Afterwards I went to her. "Little lady, I want to thank you for coming
here. I have the feeling that I spoke the words, but you are the
lecture itself."
What a smile she gave me! "Yes, I know about the hard knocks," she
said. "I have been in pain most of my life. But I have learned all that
I know sitting in this chair. I have learned to be patient and kind and
loving and brave."
They told me this crippled woman was the sweetest-spirited, best-loved
person in the town.
But her mother petulantly interrupted me. She had wheeled the cripple
into the tent. She was tall and stately. She was well-gowned. She lived
in one of the finest homes in the city. She had everything that money
could buy. But her money seemed unable to buy the frown from her face.
"Mr. Lecture Man," she said, "why is everybody interested in my
daughter and nobody interested in me? Why is my daughter happy and why
am I not happy? My daughter is always happy and she hasn't a single
thing to make her happy. I am not happy. I have not been happy for
years. Why am I not happy?"
What would you have said? Just on the spur of the moment--I said,
"Madam, I don't want to be unkind, but I really think the reason you
are not happy is that you haven't been bumped enough."
I discover when I am unhappy and selfish and people don't use me right,
I need another bump.
The cripple girl had traveled ahead of her jealous mother. For
selfishness cripples us more than paralysis.
Schools of Sympathy
When I see a long row of cots in a hospital or sanitarium, I want to
congratulate the patients lying there. They are learning the precious
lessons of patience, sympathy, love, faith and courage. They are
getting the education in the humanities the world needs more than
tables of logarithms. Only those who have suffered can sympathize. They
are to become a precious part of our population. The world needs them
more than libraries and foundations.
The Silver Lining
There is no backward step in life. Whatever experiences come to us are
truly new chapters of our education if we are willing to learn them.
We think this is true of the good things that come to us, but we do not
want to think so of the bad things. Yet we grow more in lean years than
in fat years. In fat years we put it in our pockets. In lean years we
put it in our hearts. Material and spiritual prosperity do not often
travel hand-in-hand. When we become materially very prosperous, so many
of us begin to say, "Is not this Babylon that I have builded?" And
about that time there comes some handwriting on the wall and a bump to
save us.
Think of what might happen to you today. Your home might burn. We don't
want your home to burn, but somebody's home is burning just now. A
conflagration might sweep your town from the map. Your business might
wreck. Your fortune might be swept away. Your good name might be
tarnished. Bereavement might take from you the one you love most.
You would never know how many real friends you have until then. But
look out! Some of your friends would say, "I am so sorry for you. You
are down and out." Do not believe that you are down and out, for it is
not true. The old enemy of humanity wants you to believe you are down
and out. He wants you to sympathize with yourself. You are never down
and out!
The truth is, another chapter of your real education has been opened.
Will you read the lesson of the Needful Knocks?
A great conflagration, a cyclone, a railroad wreck, an epidemic or
other public disaster brings sympathy, bravery, brotherhood and love in
its wake.
There is a silver lining to every hard knocks cloud.
Out of the trenches of the Great War come nations chastened by
sacrifice and purged of their dross.
Chapter IV
"Shake The Barrel"
How We Decide Our Destinies
NOW as we learn the lessons of the Needless and the Needful Knocks, we
get wisdom, understanding, happiness, strength, success and greatness.
We go up in life. We become educated. Let me bring you a picture of it.
One day the train stopped at a station to take water. Beside the track
was a grocery with a row of barrels of apples in front. There was one
barrel full of big, red, fat apples. I rushed over and got a sack of
the big, red, fat apples. Later as the train was under way, I looked in
the sack and discovered there was not a big, red, fat apple there.
All I could figure out was that there was only one layer of the big,
red, fat apples on the top, and the groceryman, not desiring to spoil
his sign, had reached down under the top layer. He must have reached to
the bottom, for he gave me the worst mess of runts and windfalls I ever
saw in one sack. The things I said about the grocery business must have
kept the recording angel busy.
Then I calmed down. Did the groceryman do that on purpose? Does the
groceryman ever put the big apples on top and the little ones down
underneath?
Do you? Is there a groceryman in the audience?
Man of sorrows, you have been slandered. It never occurred to me until
that day on the train that the groceryman does not put the big ones on
top and the little ones down underneath. He does not need to do it. It
does itself. It is the shaking of the barrel that pushes the big ones
up and the little ones down.
Shake to Their Places
You laugh? You don't believe that? Maybe your roads are so good and
smooth that things do not shake on the road to town. But back in the
Black Swamp of Ohio we had corduroy roads. Did you ever see a corduroy
road? It was a layer of logs in the mud. Riding over it was the poetry
of motion! The wagon "hit the high spots." And as I hauled a wagon-bed
full of apples to the cider-mill over a corduroy road, the apples
sorted out by the jolting. The big apples would try to get to the top.
The little, runty apples would try to hold a mass meeting at the bottom.
I saw that for thirty years before I saw it. Did you ever notice how
long you have to see most things before you see them? I saw that when I
played marbles. The big marbles would shake to the top of my pocket and
the little ones would rattle down to the bottom.
You children try that tomorrow. Do not wait thirty years to learn that
the big ones shake up and the little ones shake down. Put some big ones
and some little things of about the same density in a box or other
container and shake them. You will see the larger things shake upward
and the smaller shake downward. You will see every thing shake to the
place its size determines. A little larger one shakes a little higher,
and a little smaller one a little lower.
When things find their place, you can shake on till doomsday, but you
cannot change the place of one of the objects.
Mix them up again and shake. Watch them all shake back as they were
before, the largest on top and the smallest at the bottom.
Lectures in Cans
At this place the lecturer exhibits a glass jar more than half-filled
with small white beans and a few walnuts.
Let us try that right on the platform. Here is a glass jar and inside
of it you see two sizes of objects--a lot of little white beans and
some walnuts. You will pardon me for bringing such a simple and crude
apparatus before you in a lecture, but I ask your forbearance. I am
discovering that we can hear faster thru the eye than thru the ear. I
want to make this so vivid that you will never forget it, and I do not
want these young people to live thirty years before they see it.
If there are sermons in stones, there must be lectures in cans. This is
a canned lecture. Let the can talk to you awhile.
You note as I shake the jar the little beans quickly settle down and
the big walnuts shake up. Not one bean asks, "Which way do I go?" Not
one walnut asks, "Which way do I go?" Each one automatically goes the
right way. The little ones go down and the big ones go up.
Note that I mix them all up and then shake. Note that they arrange
themselves just as they were before.
Suppose those objects could talk. I think I hear that littlest bean
down in the bottom saying, "Help me! Help me! I am so unfortunate and
low down. I never had no chance like them big ones up there. Help me
up."
I say, "Yes, you little bean, I'll help you." So I lift him up to the
top. See! I have boosted him. I have uplifted him.
See, the can shakes. Back to the bottom shakes the little bean. And I
hear him say, "King's ex! I slipped. Try that again and I'll stay on
top." So I put him back again on top.
The can shakes. The little bean again shakes back to the bottom. He is
too small to stay up. He cannot stand prosperity.
Then I hear Little Bean say, "Well, if I cannot get to the top, you
make them big ones come down. Give every one an equal chance."
So I say, "Yes, sir, Little Bean. Here, you big ones on top, get down.
You Big Nuts get right down there on a level with Little Bean!" And you
see I put them down.
But I shake the can, and the big ones go right back to the top with the
same shakes that send the little ones back to the bottom.
There is only one way for those objects to change their place in the
can. Lifting them up or putting them down will not do it. But change
their size!
Equality of position demands quality of size. Let the little one grow
bigger and he will shake up. Let the big one grow smaller and he will
shake down.
The Shaking Barrel of Life
O, fellow apples! We are all apples in the barrel of life on the way to
the market place of the future. It is a corduroy road and the barrel
shakes all the time.
In the barrel are big apples, little apples, freckled apples, speckled
apples, green apples, and dried apples. A bad boy on the front row
shouted the other night, "And rotten apples!"
In other words, all the people of the world are in the great barrel of
life. That barrel is shaking all the time. Every community is shaking,
every place is shaking. The offices, the shops, the stores, the
schools, the pulpits, the homes--every place where we live or work is
shaking. Life is a constant survival of the fittest.
The same law that shakes the little ones down and the big ones up in
that can is shaking every person to the place he fits in the barrel of
life. It is sending small people down and great people up.
And do you not see that we are very foolish when we want to be lifted
up to some big place, or when we want some big person to be put down to
some little place? We are foolishly trying to overturn the eternal law
of life.
We shake right back to the places our size determines. We must get
ready for places before we can get them and keep them.
The very worst thing that can happen to anybody is to be artificially
boosted up into some place where he rattles.
I hear a good deal about destiny. Some people seem to think destiny is
something like a train and if we do not get to the depot in time our
train of destiny will run off and leave us, and we will have no
destiny. There is destiny--that jar.
If we are small we shall have a small destiny. If we are great we shall
have a great destiny. We cannot dodge our destiny.
Kings and Queens of Destiny
The objects in that jar cannot change their size. But thank God, you
and I are not helpless victims of blind fate. We are not creatures of
chance. We have it in our hands to decide our destiny as we grow or
refuse to grow.
We shake down if we become small; we shake up if we become great. And
when we have reached the place our size determines, we stay there so
long as we stay that size.
If we wish to change our place, we must first change our size. If we
wish to go down, we must grow smaller and we shall shake down. If we
wish to go up, we must grow greater, and we shall shake up.
Each person is doing one of three things consciously or unconsciously.
1. He is holding his place.
2. He is going down.
3. He is going up.
In order to hold his place he must hold his size. He must fill the
place. If he shrinks up he will rattle. Nobody can stay long where he
rattles. Nature abhors a rattler. He shakes down to a smaller place.
In order to stay the same size he must grow enough each day to supply
the loss by evaporation. Evaporation is going steadily on in lives as
well as in liquids. If we are not growing any, we are rattling.
We Compel Promotion
So you young people should keep in mind that you will shake into the
places you fit. And when you are in your places--in stores, shops,
offices or elsewhere, if you want to hold your place you must keep
growing enough to keep it tightly filled.
If you want a greater place, you simply grow greater and they cannot
keep you down. You do not ask for promotion, you compel promotion. You
grow greater, enlarge your dimensions, develop new capabilities, do
more than you are paid to do--overfill your place, and you shake up to
a greater place.
I believe if I were so fortunate or unfortunate as to have a number of
people working for me, I would have a jar in my office filled with
various sizes of objects. When an employee would come into the office
and say, "Isn't it about time I was getting a raise?" I would say, "Go
shake the jar, Charlie. That is the way you get raised. As you grow
greater you won't need to ask to be promoted. You will promote
yourself."
"Good Luck" and "Bad Luck"
This jar tells me so much about luck. I have noted that the lucky
people shake up and the unlucky people shake down. That is, the lucky
people grow great and the unlucky people shrivel and rattle.
Notice as I bump this jar. Two things happened. The little ones shook
down and the big ones shook up. The bump that was bad luck to the
little ones was good luck to the big ones. The same bump was both good
luck and bad luck.
Luck does not depend upon the direction of the bump, but upon the size
of the bump-ee!
The "Lucky" One
So everywhere you look you see the barrel sorting people according to
size. Every business concern can tell you stories like that of the
Chicago house where a number of young ladies worked. Some of them had
been there for a long time. There came a raw, green Dutch girl from the
country. It was her first office experience, and she got the bottom job.
The other girls poked fun at her and played jokes upon her because she
was so green.
Do you remember that green things grow?
"Is not she the limit?" they oft spake one to another. She was. She
made many blunders. But it is now recalled that she never made the same
blunder twice. She learned the lesson with one helping to the bumps.
And she never "got done." When she had finished her work, the work she
had been put at, she would discover something else that ought to be
done, and she would go right on working, contrary to the rules of the
union! Without being told, mind you. She had that rare faculty the
world is bidding for--initiative.
The other girls "got done." When they had finished the work they had
been put at, they would wait--O, so patiently they would wait--to be
told what to do next.
Within three months every other girl in that office was asking
questions of the little Dutch girl. She had learned more about business
in three months than the others had learned in all the time they had
been there. Nothing ever escaped her. She had become the most capable
girl in the office.
The barrel did the rest. Today she is giving orders to all of them, for
she is the office superintendent.
The other girls feel hurt about it. They will tell you in confidence
that it was the rankest favoritism ever known. "There was nothing fair
about it. Jennie ought to have been made superintendent. Jennie had
been here four years."
The "Unlucky" One
The other day in a paper-mill I was standing beside a long machine
making shiny super-calendered paper. I asked the man working there some
questions about the machine, which he answered fairly well. Then I
asked him about a machine in the next room. He said, "I don't know
nothing about it, boss, I don't work in there."
I asked him about another process, and he replied, "I don't know
nothing about it, I never worked in there." I asked him about the
pulpmill. He replied, "No, I don't know nothing about that, neither. I
don't work in there." And he did not betray the least desire to know
anything about anything.
"How long have you worked here?"
"About twelve years."
Going out of the building, I asked the foreman, "Do you see that man
over there at the supercalendered machine?" pointing to the man who
didn't know. "Is he a human being?"
The foreman's face clouded. "I hate to talk to you about that man. He
is one of the kindest-hearted men we ever had in the works, but we've
got to let him go. We're afraid he'll break the machine. He isn't
interested, does not learn, doesn't try to learn."
So he had begun to rattle. Nobody can stay where he rattles. It is grow
or go.
Life's Barrel the Leveler
So books could be filled with just such stories of how people have gone
up and down. You may have noticed two brothers start with the same
chance, and presently notice that one is going up and the other is
going down.
Some of us begin life on the top branches, right in the sunshine of
popular favor, and get our names in the blue-book at the start. Some of
us begin down in the shade on the bottom branches, and we do not even
get invited. We often become discouraged as we look at the
top-branchers, and we say, "O, if I only had his chance! If I were only
up there I might amount to something. But I am too low down."
We can grow. Everybody can grow.
And afterwhile we are all in the barrel of life, shaken and bumped
about. There the real people do not often ask us, "On what branch of
that tree did you grow?" But they often inquire, "Are you big enough to
fill this place?"
The Fatal Rattle!
Now life is mainly routine. You and I and everybody must go on doing
pretty much the same things over and over. Every day we appear to have
about the same round of duties.
But if we let life become routine, we are shaking down. The very
routine of life must every day flash a new attractiveness. We must be
learning new things and discovering new joys in our daily routine or we
become unhappy. If we go on doing just the same things in the same way
day after day, thinking the same thoughts, our eyes glued to
precedents--just turning round and round in our places and not growing
any, pretty soon we become mere machines. We wear smaller. The joy and
juice go out of our lives. We shrivel and rattle.
The success, joy and glory of life are in learning, growing, going
forward and upward. That is the only way to hold our place.
The farmer must be learning new things about farming to hold his place
this progressive age as a farmer. The merchant must be growing into a
greater, wiser merchant to hold his place among his competitors. The
minister must be getting larger visions of the ministry as he goes back
into the same old pulpit to keep on filling it. The teacher must be
seeing new possibilities in the same old schoolroom. The mother must be
getting a larger horizon in her homemaking.
We only live as we grow and learn. When anybody stays in the same place
year after year and fills it, he does not rattle.
Unless the place is a grave!
I shiver as I see the pages of school advertisements in the journals
labeled "Finishing Schools," and "A Place to Finish Your Child." I know
the schools generally mean all right, but I fear the students will get
the idea they are being finished, which finishes them. We never finish
while we live. A school finishing is a commencement, not an end-ment.
I am sorry for the one who says, "I know all there is to know about
that. You can't tell me anything about that." He is generally rattling.
The greater and wiser the man, the more anxious he is to be told.
I am sorry for the one who struts around saying, "I own the job. They
can't get along without me." For I feel that they are getting ready to
get along without him. That noise you hear is the death-rattle in his
throat.
Big business men keep their ears open for rattles in their machinery.
I am sorry for the man, community or institution that spends much time
pointing backward with pride and talking about "in my day!" For it is
mostly rattle. The live one's "my day" is today and tomorrow. The dead
one's is yesterday.
We Must Get Ready to Get
We young people come up into life wanting great places. I would not
give much for a young person (or any other person) who does not want a
great place. I would not give much for anybody who does not look
forward to greater and better things tomorrow.
We often think the way to get a great place is just to go after it and
get it. If we do not have pull enough, get some more pull. Get some
more testimonials.
We think if we could only get into a great place we would be great. But
unless we have grown as great as the place we would be a great joke,
for we would rattle. And when we have grown as great as the place, that
sized place will generally come seeking us.
We do not become great by getting into a great place, any more than a
boy becomes a man by getting into his father's boots. He is in great
boots, but he rattles. He must grow greater feet before he gets greater
boots. But he must get the feet before he gets the boots.
We must get ready for things before we get them.
All life is preparation for greater things.
Moses was eighty years getting ready to do forty years work. The Master
was thirty years getting ready to do three years work. So many of us
expect to get ready in "four easy lessons by mail."
We can be a pumpkin in one summer, with the accent on the "punk." We
can be a mushroom in a day, with the accent on the "mush." But we
cannot become an oak that way.
The world is not greatly impressed by testimonials. The man who has the
most testimonials generally needs them most to keep him from rattling.
A testimonial so often becomes a crutch.
Many a man writes a testimonial to get rid of somebody. "Well, I hope
it will do him some good. Anyhow, I have gotten him off my hands." I
heard a Chicago superintendent say to his foreman, "Give him a
testimonial and fire him!"
It is dangerous to overboost people, for the higher you boost them the
farther they will fall.
The Menace of the Press-Notice
Now testimonials and press-notices very often serve useful ends. In
lyceum work, in teaching, in very many lines, they are often useful to
introduce a stranger. A letter of introduction is useful. A diploma, a
degree, a certificate, a license, are but different kinds of
testimonials.
The danger is that the hero of them may get to leaning upon them. Then
they become a mirror for his vanity instead of a monitor for his
vitality.
Most testimonials and press-notices are frank flatteries. They magnify
the good points and say little as possible about the bad ones. I look
back over my lyceum life and see that I hindered my progress by reading
my press-notices instead of listening to the verdict of my audiences. I
avoided frank criticism. It would hurt me. Whenever I heard an adverse
criticism, I would go and read a few press-notices. "There, I am all
right, for this clipping says I am the greatest ever, and should he
return, no hall would be able to contain the crowd."
And my vanity bump would again rise.
Alas! How often I have learned that when I did return the hall that was
filled before was entirely too big for the audience! The editors of
America--God bless them! They are always trying to boost a home
enterprise--not for the sake of the imported attraction but for the
sake of the home folks who import it.
We must read people, not press-notices.
When you get to the place where you can stand aside and "see yourself
go by"--when you can keep still and see every fibre of you and your
work mercilessly dissected, shake hands with yourself and rejoice, for
the kingdom of success is yours.
The Artificial Uplift
There are so many loving, sincere, foolish, cruel uplift movements in
the land. They spring up, fail, wail, disappear, only to be succeeded
by twice as many more. They fail because instead of having the barrel
do the uplifting, they try to do it with a derrick.
The victims of the artificial uplift cannot stay uplifted. They rattle
back, and "the last estate of that man is worse than the first."
You cannot uplift a beggar by giving him alms. You are using the
derrick. We must feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but that is not
helping them, that is propping them. The beggar who asks you to help
him does not want to be helped. He wants to be propped. He wants you to
license him and professionalize him as a beggar.
You can only help a man to help himself. Help him to grow. You cannot
help many people, for there are not many people willing to be helped on
the inside. Not many willing to grow up.
When Peter and John went up to the temple they found the lame beggar
sitting at the gate Beautiful. Every day the beggar had been "helped."
Every day as they laid him at the gate people would pass thru the gate
and see him. He would say, "Help me!" "Poor man," they would reply,
"you are in a bad fix. Here is help," and they would throw him some
money.
And so every day that beggar got to be more of a beggar. The public
"helped" him to be poorer in spirit, more helpless and a more hopeless
cripple. No doubt he belonged after a few days of the "helping" to the
Jerusalem Beggars' Union and carried his card. Maybe he paid a
commission for such a choice beggars' beat.
But Peter really helped him. "Silver and gold have I none; but such as
I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and
walk."
Fix the People, Not the Barrel
I used to say, "Nobody uses me right. Nobody gives me a chance." But if
chances had been snakes, I would have been bitten a hundred times a
day. We need oculists, not opportunities.
I used to work on the "section" and get a dollar and fifteen cents a
day. I rattled there. I did not earn my dollar fifteen. I tried to see
how little I could do and look like I was working. I was the Artful
Dodger of Section Sixteen. When the whistle would blow--O, joyful
sound!--I would leave my pick hang right up in the air. I would not
bring it down again for a soulless corporation.
I used to wonder as I passed Bill Barlow's bank on the way down to the
section-house, why I was not president of that bank. I wondered why I
was not sitting upon one of those mahogany seats instead of pumping a
handcar. I was naturally bright. I used to say "If the rich wasn't
getting richer and the poor poorer, I'd be president of a bank."
Did you ever hear that line of conversation? It generally comes from
somebody who rattles where he is.
I am so glad now that I did not get to be president of the bank. They
are glad, too! I would have rattled down in about fifteen minutes, down
to the peanut row, for I was only a peanut. Remember, the hand-car job
is just as honorable as the bank job, but as I was not faithful over a
few things, I would have rattled over many things.
The fairy books love to tell about some clodhopper suddenly enchanted
up into a king. But life's good fairies see to it that the clodhopper
is enchanted into readiness for kingship before he lands upon the
throne.
The only way to rule others is to learn to rule ourself.
I used to say, "Just wait till I get to Congress." I think they are all
waiting! "I'll fix things. I'll pass laws requiring all apples to be
the same size. Yes, I'll pass laws to turn the barrel upside down, so
the little ones will be on the top and the big ones will be at the
bottom."
But I had not seen that it wouldn't matter which end was the top, the
big ones would shake right up to it and the little ones would shake
down to the bottom.
The little man has the chance now, just as fast as he grows. You cannot
fix the barrel. You can only fix the people inside the barrel.
Have you ever noticed that the man who is not willing to fix himself,
is the one who wants to get the most laws passed to fix other people?
He wants something for nothing.
That Cruel Fate
O, I am so glad I did not get the things I wanted at the time I wanted
them! They would have been coffee-pots. Thank goodness, we do not get
the coffee-pot until we are ready to handle it.
Today you and I have things we couldn't have yesterday. We just wanted
them yesterday. O, how we wanted them! But a cruel fate would not let
us have them. Today we have them. They come to us as naturally today,
and we see it is because we have grown ready for them, and the barrel
has shaken us up to them.
Today you and I want things beyond our reach. O, how we want them! But
a cruel fate will not let us have them.
Do you not see that "cruel fate" is our own smallness and unreadiness?
As we grow greater we have greater things. We have today all we can
stand today. More would wreck us. More would start us to rattling.
Getting up is growing up.
And this blessed old barrel of life is just waiting and anxious to
shake everybody up as fast as everybody grows.
Chapter V
Going Up
How We Become Great
WE go up as we grow great. That is, we go up as we grow up. But so many
are trying to grow great on the outside without growing great on the
inside. They rattle on the inside!
They fool themselves, but nobody else.
There is only one greatness--inside greatness. All outside greatness is
merely an incidental reflection of the inside.
Greatness is not measured in any material terms. It is not measured in
inches, dollars, acres, votes, hurrahs, or by any other of the world's
yardsticks or barometers.
Greatness is measured in spiritual terms. It is education. It is life
expansion.
We go up from selfishness to unselfishness.
We go up from impurity to purity.
We go up from unhappiness to happiness.
We go up from weakness to strength.
We go up from low ideals to high ideals.
We go up from little vision to greater vision.
We go up from foolishness to wisdom.
We go up from fear to faith.
We go up from ignorance to understanding.
We go up by our own personal efforts. We go up by our own service,
sacrifice, struggle and overcoming. We push out our own skyline. We
rise above our own obstacles. We learn to see, hear, hold and
understand.
We may become very great, very educated, rise very high, and yet not
leave our kitchen or blacksmith shop. We take the kitchen or blacksmith
shop right up with us! We make it a great kitchen or great blacksmith
shop. It becomes our throne-room!
Come, let us grow greater. There is a throne for each of us.
"Getting to the Top"
"Getting to the top" is the world's pet delusion. There is no top. No
matter how high we rise, we discover infinite distances above. The
higher we rise, the better we see that life on this planet is the going
up from the Finite to the Infinite.
The world says that to get greatness means to get great things. So the
world is in the business of getting--getting great fortunes, great
lands, great titles, great applause, great fame, and folderol.
Afterwhile the poor old world hears the empty rattle of the inside, and
wails, "All is vanity. I find no pleasure in them. Life is a failure."
All outside life is a failure. Real life is in being things on the
inside, not in getting things on the outside.
I weary of the world's pink-sheet extras about "Getting to the Top" and
"Forging to the Front." Too often they are the sordid story of a few
scrambling over the heads of the weaker ones. Sometimes they are the
story of one pig crowding the other pigs out of the trough and
cornering all the swill!
The Secret of Greatness
Christ Jesus was a great Teacher. His mission was to educate humanity.
There came to him those two disciples who wanted to "get to the top."
Those two sons of Zebedee wanted to have the greatest places in the new
kingdom they imagined he would establish on earth.
They got very busy pursuing greatness, but I do not read that they were
half so busy preparing for greatness. They even had their mother out
electioneering for them.
"O, Master," said the mother, "grant that these my two sons may sit,
the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom."
The Master looked with love and pity upon their unpreparedness. "Are ye
able to drink of the cup?" Then he gave the only definition of
greatness that can ever stand: "Whosoever will be great among you, let
him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be
your servant."
That is we cannot be "born great," nor "have greatness thrust upon" us.
We must "achieve greatness" by developing it on the inside--developing
ability to minister and to serve.
We cannot buy a great arm. Our arm must become a great servant, and
thus it becomes great.
We cannot buy a great mind. Our mind must become a great servant, and
thus it becomes great.
We cannot buy a great character. It is earned in great moral service.
The First Step at Hand
This is the Big Business of life--going up, getting educated, getting
greatness on the inside. Getting greatness on the outside is little
business. Much of it mighty little.
Everybody's privilege and duty is to become great. And the joy of it is
that the first step is always nearest at hand. We do not have to go off
to New York or Chicago or go chasing around the world to become great.
It is a great stairway that leads from where our feet are now upward
for an infinite number of steps.
We must take the first step now. Most of us want to take the hundredth
step or the thousandth step now. We want to make some spectacular
stride of a thousand steps at one leap. That is why we fall so hard
when we miss our step.
We must go right back to our old place--into our kitchen or our
workshop or our office and take the first step, solve the problem
nearest at hand. We must make our old work luminous with a new
devotion. We must battle up over every inch. And as fast as we solve
and dissolve the difficulties and turn our burdens into blessings, we
find love, the universal solvent, shining out of our lives. We find our
spiritual influences going upward. So the winds of earth are born; they
rush in from the cold lands to the warm upward currents. And so as our
problems disappear and our life currents set upward, the world is drawn
toward us with its problems. We find our kitchen or workshop or office
becoming a new throne of power. We find the world around us rising up
to call us blessed.
As we grow greater our troubles grow smaller, for we see them thru
greater eyes. We rise above them.
As we grow greater our opportunities grow greater. That is, we begin to
see them. They are around us all the time, but we must get greater eyes
to see them.
Generally speaking, the smaller our vision of our work, the more we
admire what we have accomplished and "point with pride." The greater
our vision, the more we see what is yet to be accomplished.
It was the sweet girl graduate who at commencement wondered how one
small head could contain it all. It was Newton after giving the world a
new science who looked back over it and said, "I seem to have been only
a boy playing on the seashore * * * while the great ocean of truth lay
all undiscovered before me." That great ocean is before us all.
The Widow's Mites
The great Teacher pointed to the widow who cast her two mites into the
treasury, and then to the rich men who had cast in much more. "This
poor widow hath cast in more than they all. For all these have of their
abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath
cast in all the living that she had."
Tho the rich men had cast in more, yet it was only a part of their
possessions. The widow cast in less, but it was all she had. The Master
cared little what the footings of the money were in the treasury. That
is not why we give. We give to become great. The widow had given
all--had completely overcome her selfishness and fear of want.
Becoming great is overcoming our selfishness and fear. He that saveth
his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for the advancement
of the kingdom of happiness on earth shall find it great and glorified.
Our greatness therefore does not depend upon how much we give or upon
what we do, whether peeling potatoes or ruling a nation, but upon the
percentage of our output to our resources. Upon doing with our might
what our hands find to do. Quit worrying about what you cannot get to
do. Rejoice in doing the things you can get to do. And as you are
faithful over a few things you go up to be ruler over many.
The world says some of us have golden gifts and some have copper gifts.
But when we cast them all into the treasury of right service, there is
an alchemy that transmutes every gift into gold. Every work is drudgery
when done selfishly. Every work becomes golden when done in a golden
manner.
Finding the Great People
I do not know who fitted the boards into the floor I stand upon. I do
not know all the great people who may come and stand upon this floor.
But I do know that the one who made the floor--and the one who sweeps
it--is just as great as anybody in the world who may come and stand
upon it, if each be doing his work with the same love, faithfulness and
capability.
We have to look farther than the "Who's Who" and Dun and Bradstreet to
make a roster of the great people of a community. You will find the
community heart in the precious handful who believe that the service of
God is the service of man.
The great people of the community serve and sacrifice for a better
tomorrow. They are the faithful few who get behind the churches, the
schools, the lyceum and chautauqua, and all the other movements that go
upward.
They are the ones who are "always trying to run things." They are the
happy ones, happy for the larger vision that comes as they go higher by
unselfish service. They are discovering that their sweetest pay comes
from doing many things they are not paid for. They rarely get thanked,
for the community does not often think of thanking them until it comes
time to draft the "resolutions of respect."
I had to go to the mouth of a coal-mine in a little Illinois town, to
find the man the bureau had given as lyceum committeeman there. I
wondered what the grimy-faced man from the shaft, wearing the miner's
lamp in his cap, could possibly have to do with the lyceum course. But
I learned that he had all to do with it. He had sold the tickets and
had done all the managing. He was superintendent of the Sunday school.
He was the storm-center of every altruistic effort in the town--the
greatest man there, because the most serviceable, tho he worked every
day full time with his pick at his bread-and-butter job.
The great people are so busy serving that they have little time to
strut and pose in the show places. Few of them are "prominent clubmen."
You rarely find their names in the society page. They rarely give
"brilliant social functions." Their idle families attend to such things.
A Glimpse of Gunsaulus
I found a great man lecturing at the chautauquas. He preaches in
Chicago on Sundays to thousands. He writes books and runs a college he
founded by his own preaching. He is the mainspring of so many uplift
movements that his name gets into the papers about every day, and you
read it in almost every committee doing good things in Chicago.
He had broken away from Chicago to have a vacation. Many people think
that a vacation means going off somewhere and stretching out under
trees or letting the mind become a blank. But this Chicago preacher
went from one chautauqua town to another, and took his vacation going
up and down the streets. He dug into the local history of each place,
and before dinner he knew more about the place than most of the natives.
"There is a sermon for me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went
to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were
doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual
attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum
travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised
enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets. "What are
you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no
chance." "You come to Chicago and I'll give you a chance," the man on
his vacation would reply.
So this Chicago preacher was busy every day, working overtime on his
vacation. He was busy about other people's business. He did not once
ask the price of land, nor where there was a good investment for
himself, but every day he was trying to make an investment in somebody
else.
His friends would sometimes worry about him. They would say, "Why
doesn't the doctor take care of himself, instead of taking care of
everybody else? He wears himself out for other people until he hasn't
strength enough left to lecture and do his own work."
Sometimes they were right about that.
But he that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life
in loving service finds it returning to him great and glorious. This
man's preaching did not make him great. His college did not make him
great. His books did not make him great. These are the by-products. His
life of service for others makes him great--makes his preaching, his
college and his books great.
This Chicago man gives his life into the service of humanity, and it
becomes the fuel to make the steam to accomplish the wonderful things
he does. Let him stop and "take care of himself," and his career would
stop.
If he had begun life by "taking care of himself" and "looking out for
number one," stipulating in advance every cent he was to get and
writing it all down in the contract, most likely Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus
would have remained a struggling, discouraged preacher in the backwoods
of Morrow county, Ohio.
Give It Now
Gunsaulus often says, "You are planning and saving and telling yourself
that afterwhile you are going to give great things and do great things.
Give it now! Give your dollar now, rather than your thousands
afterwhile. You need to give it now, and the world needs to get it now."
Chapter VI
The Problem of "Preparedness"
Preparing Children to Live
THE problem of "preparedness" is the problem of preparing children for
life. All other kinds of "preparedness" fade into insignificance before
this. The history of nations shows that their strength was not in the
size of their armies and in the vastness of their population and
wealth, but in the strength and ideals of the individual citizens.
As long as the nation was young and growing--as long as the people were
struggling and overcoming--that nation was strong. It was "prepared."
But when the struggle stopped, the strength waned, for the strength
came from the struggle. When the people became materially prosperous
and surrendered to ease and indulgence, they became fat, stall-fed
weaklings. Then they fell a prey to younger, hardier peoples.
Has the American nation reached that period?
Many homes and communities have reached it.
All over America are fathers and mothers who have struggled and have
become strong men and women thru their struggles, who are saying, "Our
children shall have better chances than we had. We are living for our
children. We are going to give them the best education our money can
buy."
Then, forgetful of how they became strong, they plan to take away from
their children their birthright--their opportunity to become strong and
"prepared"--thru struggle and service and overcoming.
Most "advantages" are disadvantages. Giving a child a chance generally
means getting out of his way. Many an orphan can be grateful that he
was jolted from his life-preserver and cruelly forced to sink or swim.
Thus he learned to swim.
"We are going to give our children the best education our money can
buy."
They think they can buy an education--buy wisdom, strength and
understanding, and give it to them C. O. D! They seem to think they
will buy any brand they see--buy the home brand of education, or else
send off to New York or Paris or to "Sears Roebuck," and get a
bucketful or a tankful of education. If they are rich enough, maybe
they will have a private pipeline of education laid to their home. They
are going to force this education into them regularly until they get
them full of education. They are going to get them fully inflated with
education!
Toll the bell! There's going to be a "blow out." Those inflated
children are going to have to run on "flat tires."
Father and mother cannot buy their children education. All they can do
is to buy them some tools, perhaps, and open the gate and say, "Sic
'em, Tige!" The children must get it themselves.
A father and mother might as well say, "We will buy our children the
strength we have earned in our arms and the wisdom we have acquired in
a life of struggle." As well expect the athlete to give them his
physical development he has earned in years of exercise. As well expect
the musician to give them the technic he has acquired in years of
practice. As well expect the scholar to give them the ability to think
he has developed in years of study. As well expect Moses to give them
his spiritual understanding acquired in a long life of prayer.
They can show the children the way, but each child must make the
journey.
Here is a typical case.
The Story of "Gussie"
There was a factory town back East. Not a pretty town, but just a
great, dirty mill and a lot of little dirty houses around the mill. The
hands lived in the little dirty houses and worked six days of the week
in the big mill.
There was a little, old man who went about that mill, often saying, "I
hain't got no book l'arnin' like the rest of you." He was the man who
owned the mill. He had made it with his own genius out of nothing. He
had become rich and honored. Every man in the mill loved him like a
father.
He had an idolatry for a book.
He also had a little pink son, whose name was F. Gustavus Adolphus. The
little old man often said, "I'm going to give that boy the best
education my money can buy."
He began to buy it. He began to polish and sandpaper Gussie from the
minute the child could sit up in the cradle and notice things. He sent
him to the astrologer, the phrenologer and all other "ologers" they had
around there. When Gussie was old enough to export, he sent the boy to
one of the greatest universities in the land. The fault was not with
the university, not with Gussie, who was bright and capable.
The fault was with the little old man, who was so wise and great about
everything else, and so foolish about his own boy. In the blindness of
his love he robbed his boy of his birthright.
The birthright of every child is the opportunity of becoming great--of
going up--of getting educated.
Gussie had no chance to serve. Everything was handed to him on a silver
platter. Gussie went thru that university about like a steer from Texas
goes thru Mr. Armour's institute of packnology in Chicago. Did you ever
go over into Packingtown and see a steer receive his education?
You remember, then, that after he matriculates--after he gets the grand
bump, said steer does not have to do another thing. His education is
all arranged for in advance and he merely rides thru and receives it.
There is a row of professors with their sleeves rolled up who give him
the degrees. So as Mr. T. Steer of Panhandle goes riding thru on that
endless cable from his A-B-C's to his eternal cold storage, each
professor hits him a dab. He rides along from department to department
until he is canned.
They "canned" Gussie. He had a man hired to study for him. He rode from
department to department. They upholstered him, enameled him, manicured
him, sugar-cured him, embalmed him. Finally Gussie was done and the
paint was dry. He was a thing of beauty.
Gussie and Bill Whackem Gussie came back home with his education in the
baggage-car. It was checked. The mill shut down on a week day, the
first time in its history. The hands marched down to the depot, and
when the young lord alighted, the factory band played, "See, the
Conquering Hero Comes."
A few years later the mill shut down again on a week day. There was
crape hanging on the office door. Men and women stood weeping in the
streets. The little old man had been translated.
When they next opened up the mill, F. Gustavus Adolphus was at its
head. He had inherited the entire plant. "F. Gustavus Adolphus,
President."
Poor little peanut! He rattled. He had never grown great enough to fill
so great a place. In two years and seven months the mill was a wreck.
The monument of a father's lifetime was wrecked in two years and seven
months by the boy who had all the "advantages."
So the mill was shut down the third time on a week day. It looked as
tho it never could open. But it did open, and when it opened it had a
new kind of boss. If I were to give the new boss a descriptive name, I
would call him "Bill Whackem." He was an orphan. He had little chance.
He had a new black eye almost every day. But he seemed to fatten on
bumps. Every time he was bumped he would swell up. How fast he grew! He
became the most useful man in the community. People forgot all about
Bill's lowly origin. They got to looking up to him to start and run
things.
So when the courts were looking for somebody big enough to take charge
of the wrecked mill, they simply had to appoint Hon. William Whackem.
It was Hon. William Whackem who put the wreckage together and made the
wheels go round, and finally got the hungry town back to work.
Colleges Give Us Tools
After that a good many people said it was the college that made a fool
of Gussie. They said Bill succeeded so well because he never went to
one of "them highbrow schools." I am sorry to say I thought that way
for a good while.
But now I see that Bill went up in spite of his handicaps. If he had
had Gussie's fine equipment he might have accomplished vastly more.
The book and the college suffer at the hands of their friends. They say
to the book and the college, "Give us an education." They cannot do
that. You cannot get an education from the book and the college any
more than you can get to New York by reading a travelers' guide. You
cannot get physical education by reading a book on gymnastics.
The book and the college show you the way, give you instruction and
furnish you finer working tools. But the real education is the journey
you make, the strength you develop, the service you perform with these
instruments and tools.
Gussie was in the position of a man with a very fine equipment of tools
and no experience in using them. Bill was the man with the poor,
homemade, crude tools, but with the energy, vision and strength
developed by struggle.
The "Hard Knocks Graduates"
For education is getting wisdom, understanding, strength, greatness,
physically, mentally and morally. I believe I know some people
liberally educated who cannot write their own names. But they have
served and overcome and developed great lives with the poor, crude
tools at their command.
In almost every community are what we sometimes call "hard knocks
graduates"--people who have never been to college nor have studied many
or any books. Yet they are educated to the degree they have acquired
these elements of greatness in their lives.
They realized how they have been handicapped by their poor mental tools.
That is why they say, "All my life I have been handicapped by lack of
proper preparation. Don't make my mistake, children, go to school."
The young person with electrical genius will make an electrical machine
from a few bits of junk. But send him to Westinghouse and see how much
more he will achieve with the same genius and with finer equipment.
Get the best tools you can. But remember diplomas, degrees are not an
education, they are merely preparations. When you are thru with the
books, remember, you are having a commencement, not an end-ment. You
will discover with the passing years that life is just one series of
greater commencements.
Go out with your fine equipment from your commencements into the school
of service and write your education in the only book you ever can
know--the book of your experience.
That is what you know--what the courts will take as evidence when they
put you upon the witness stand.
The Tragedy of Unpreparedness
The story of Gussie and Bill Whackem is being written in every
community in tears, failure and heartache. It is peculiarly a tragedy
of our American civilization today.
These fathers and mothers who toil and save, who get great farms, fine
homes and large bank accounts, so often think they can give greatness
to their children--they can make great places for them in life and put
them into them.
They do all this and the children rattle. They have had no chance to
grow great enough for the places. The child gets the blame for making
the wreck, even as Gussie was blamed for wrecking his father's plant,
when the child is the victim.
A man heard me telling the story of Gussie and Bill Whackem, and he
went out of my audience very indignant. He said he was very glad his
boy was not there to hear it. But that good, deluded father now has his
head bowed in shame over the career of his spoiled son.
I rarely tell of it on a platform that at the close of the lecture
somebody does not take me aside and tell me a story just as sad from
that community.
For years poor Harry Thaw was front-paged on the newspapers and
gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity.
He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems
to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father
of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention
expenses was one of the greatest business generals of the Keystone
state. He could plat great coal empires and command armies of men, but
he seems to have been pitifully ignorant of the fact that the barrel
shakes.
It is the educated, the rich and the worldly wise who blunder most in
the training of their children. Poverty is a better trainer for the
rest.
The menace of America lies not in the swollen fortunes, but in the
shrunken souls who inherit them.
But Nature's eliminating process is kind to the race in the barrel
shaking down the rattlers. Somebody said it is only three generations
from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.
How long this nation will endure depends upon how many Gussie boys this
nation produces. Steam heat is a fine thing, but do you notice how few
of our strong men get their start with steam heat?
Children, Learn This Early
You boys and girls, God bless you! You live in good homes. Father and
mother love you and give you everything you need. You get to thinking,
"I won't have to turn my hand over. Papa and mamma will take care of
me, and when they are gone I'll inherit everything they have. I'm fixed
for life."
No, you are unfixed. You are a candidate for trouble. You are going to
rattle. Father and mother can be great and you can be a peanut.
You must solve your own problems and carry your own loads to have a
strong mind and back. Anybody who does for you regularly what you can
do for yourself--anybody who gives you regularly what you can earn for
yourself, is robbing you of your birthright.
Father and mother can put money in your pocket, ideas in your head and
food in your stomach, but you cannot own it save as you digest it--put
it into your life.
I have read somewhere about a man who found a cocoon and put it in his
house where he could watch it develop. One day he saw a little insect
struggling inside the cocoon. It was trying to get out of the envelope.
It seemed in trouble and needed help. He opened the envelope with a
knife and set the struggling insect free. But out came a monstrosity
that soon died. It had an over-developed body and under-developed
wings. He learned that helping the insect was killing it. He took away
from it the very thing it had to have--the struggle. For it was this
struggle of breaking its own way out of that envelope that was needed
to reduce its body and develop its wings.
Not Packhorse Work
But remember there is little virtue in work unless it is getting us
somewhere. Just work that gets us three meals a day and a place to lie
down to sleep, then another day of the same grind, then a year of it
and years following until our machine is worn out and on the junkpile,
means little. "One day nearer home" for such a worker means one day
nearer the scrapheap.
Such a worker is like the packhorse who goes forward to keep ahead of
the whip. Such a worker is the horse we used to have hitched to the
sorghum mill. Round and round that horse went, seeing nothing, hearing
nothing, his head down, without ambition enough to prick up his ears.
Such work deadens and stupefies. The masses work about that way. They
regard work as a necessary evil. They are right--such work is a
necessary evil, and they make it such. They follow their nose. "Dumb,
driven cattle."
But getting a vision of life, and working to grow upward to it, that is
the work that brings the joy and the greatness.
When we are growing and letting our faculties develop, we will love
even the packhorse job, because it is our "meal ticket" that enables us
to travel upward.
"Helping" the Turkeys
One time I put some turkey eggs under the mother hen and waited day by
day for them to hatch. And sure enough, one day the eggs began to crack
and the little turkeys began to stick their heads out of the shells.
Some of the little turkeys came out from the shells all right, but some
of them stuck in the shells.
"Shell out, little turkeys, shell out," I urged, "for Thanksgiving is
coming. Shell out!"
But they stuck to the shells.
"Little turkeys, I'll have to help you. I'll have to shell you by
hand." So I picked the shells off. "Little turkeys, you will never know
how fortunate you are. Ordinary turkeys do not have these advantages.
Ordinary turkeys do not get shelled by hand."
Did I help them? I killed them, or stunted them. Not one of the turkeys
was "right" that I helped. They were runts. One of them was a regular
Harry Thaw turkey. They had too many silk socks. Too many "advantages."
Children, you must crack your own shells. You must overcome your own
obstacles to develop your own powers.
A rich boy can succeed, but he has a poorer chance than a poor boy. The
cards are against him. He must succeed in spite of his "advantages."
I am pleading for you to get a great arm, a great mind, a great
character, for the joy of having a larger life. I am pleading with you
to know the joy of overcoming and having the angels come and minister
to you.
Happiness in Our Work
Children, I am pleading with you to find happiness. All the world is
seeking happiness, but so many are seeking it by rattling down instead
of by shaking up.
The happiness is in going up--in developing a greater arm, a greater
mind, a greater character.
Happiness is the joy of overcoming. It is the delight of an expanding
consciousness. It is the cry of the eagle mounting upward. It is the
proof that we are progressing.
We find happiness in our work, not outside of our work. If we cannot
find happiness in our work, we have the wrong job. Find the work that
fits your talents, and stop watching the clock and planning vacations.
Loving friends used to warn me against "breaking down." They scared me
into "taking care" of myself. And I got to taking such good care of
myself and watching for symptoms that I became a physical wreck.
I saved myself by getting busier. I plunged into work I love. I found
my job in my work, not away from it, and the work refreshed me and
rejuvenated me. Now I do two men's work, and have grown from a skinny,
fretful, nervous wreck into a hearty, happy man. This has been a great
surprise to my friends and a great disappointment to the undertaker. I
am an editor in the daytime and a lecturer at night.
I edit all day and take a vacation lecturing at night. I lecture almost
every day of the year--maybe two or three times some days--and then
take a vacation by editing and writing. Thus every day is jam full of
play and vacation and good times. The year is one round of joy, and I
ought to pay people for the privilege of speaking and writing to them
instead of them paying me!
If I did not like my work, of course, I would be carrying a terrible
burden and would speedily collapse.
You see, I have no time nowadays to break down. I have no time to think
and grunt and worry about my body. And like Paul I am happy to be
"absent from the body and present with the Lord." Thus this old body
behaves just beautifully and wags along like the tail follows the dog
when I forget all about it. The grunter lets the tail wag the dog.
I have never known a case of genuine "overwork." I have never known of
anyone killing himself by working. But I have known of multitudes
killing themselves by taking vacations.
The people who think they are overworking are merely overworrying. This
is one species of selfishness.
To worry is to doubt God.
To work at the things you love, or for those you love, is to turn work
into play and duty into privilege.
When we love our work, it is not work, it is life.
Many Kinds of Drunkards
The world is trying to find happiness in being amused. The world is
amusement-mad. Vacations, Coca Cola and moviemania!
What a sad, empty lot of rattlers! Look over the bills of the movies,
look over the newsstands and see a picture of the popular mind, for
these places keep just what the people want to buy. What a lot of
mental frog-pond and moral slum our boys and girls wade thru!
There are ten literary drunkards to one alcoholic drunkard. There are a
hundred amusement drunkards to one victim of strong drink. And all just
as hard to cure.
We have to have amusement, but if we fill our lives with nothing but
amusement, we never grow. We go thru our lives babies with new
rattleboxes and "sugar-tits."
Almost every day as I go along the street to some hall to lecture, I
hear somebody asking, "What are they going to have in the hall tonight?"
"Going to have a lecture."
"Lecture?" said with a shiver as tho it was "small pox." "I ain't
goin.' I don't like lectures."
The speaker is perfectly honest. He has no place to put a lecture. I am
not saying that he should attend my lecture, but I am grieving at what
underlies his remark. He does not want to think. He wants to follow his
nose around. Other people generally lead his nose. The man who will not
make the effort to think is the great menace to the nation. The crowd
that drifts and lives for amusement is the crowd that finds itself back
near the caboose, and as the train of progress leaves them, they wail,
they "never had no chanct." They want to start a new party to reform
the government.
The Lure of the City
Do you ever get lonely in a city? How few men and women there. A jam of
people, most of them imitations--most of them trying to look like they
get more salary. Poor, hungry, doped butterflies of the bright
lights,--hopers, suckers and straphangers! Down the great white way
they go chasing amusement to find happiness. They must be amused every
moment, even when they eat, or they will have to be alone with their
empty lives.
The Prodigal Son came to himself afterwhile and thought upon his ways.
Then he arose and went to his father's house. Whenever one will stop
chasing amusements long enough to think upon his ways, he will arise
and go to his father's house of wisdom. But there is no hope for the
person who will not stop and think. And the devil works day and night
shifts keeping the crowd moving on.
That is why the crowd is not furnishing the strong men and women.
We must have amusement and relaxation. Study your muscles. First they
contract, then they relax. But the muscle that goes on continually
relaxing is degenerating. And the individual, the community, the nation
that goes on relaxing without contracting--without struggling and
overcoming--is degenerating.
The more you study your muscles, the more you learn that while one
muscle is relaxing another is contracting. So you must learn that your
real relaxation, vacation and amusement, are merely changing over to
contracting another set of muscles.
Go to the bank president's office, go to the railroad magnate's office,
go to the great pulpit, to the college chair--go to any place of great
responsibility in a city and ask the one who fills the place, "Were you
born in this city?"
The reply is almost a monotony. "I born in this city? No, I was born in
Poseyville, Indiana, and I came to this city forty years ago and went
to work at the bottom."
He glows as he tells you of some log-cabin home, hillside or farmside
where he struggled as a boy. Personally, I think this log-cabin
ancestry has been over-confessed for campaign purposes. Give us steam
heat and push-buttons. There is no virtue in a log-cabin, save that
there the necessity for struggle that brings strength is most in
evidence. There the young person gets the struggle and service that
makes for strength and greatness. And as that young person comes to the
city and shakes in the barrel among the weaklings of the artificial
life, he rises above them like the eagle soars above a lot of
chattering sparrows.
The cities do not make their own steam. The little minority from the
farms controls the majority. The red blood of redemption flows from the
country year by year into the national arteries, else these cities
would drop off the map.
If it were not for Poseyville, Indiana, Chicago would disappear. If it
were not for Poseyville, New York would disintegrate for lack of
leaders.
"Hep" and "Pep" for the Home Town
But so many of the home towns of America are sick. Many are dying. Many
are dead.
It is the lure of the city--and the lure-lessness of the country. The
town the young people leave is the town the young people ought to
leave. Somebody says, "The reason so many young people go to hell is
because they have no other place to go."
What is the matter with the small town? Do not blame it all upon the
city mail order house. With rural delivery, daily papers, telephones,
centralized schools, automobiles and good roads, there are no more
delightful places in the world to live than in the country or in the
small town. They have the city advantages plus sunshine, air and
freedom that the crowded cities cannot have.
I asked the keeper who was showing me thru the insane asylum at Weston,
West Virginia, "You say you have nearly two thousand insane people in
this institution and only a score of guards to keep them in. Aren't you
in danger? What is to hinder these insane people from getting together,
organizing, overpowering the few guards and breaking out?"
The keeper was not in the least alarmed at the question. He smiled.
"Many people say that. But they don't understand. If these people could
get together they wouldn't be in this asylum. They are insane. No two
of them can agree upon how to get together and how to break out. So a
few of us can hold them."
It would be almost unkind to carry this further, but I have been
thinking ever since that about three-fourths of the small towns of
America have one thing in common with the asylum folks--they can't get
together. They cannot organize for the public good. They break up into
little antagonistic social, business and even religious factions and
neutralize each other's efforts.
A lot of struggling churches compete with each other instead of massing
for the common good. And when the churches fight, the devil stays
neutral and furnishes the munitions for both sides.
So the home towns stagnate and the young people with visions go away to
the cities where opportunity seems to beckon. Ninety-nine out of a
hundred of them will jostle with the straphangers all their lives, mere
wheels turning round in a huge machine. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of
them might have had a larger opportunity right back in the home town,
had the town been awake and united and inviting.
We must make the home town the brightest, most attractive, most
promising place for the young people. No home town can afford to spend
its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the
worst kind of soil impoverishment--all going out and nothing coming
back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all
the city mail order houses.
America is to be great, not in the greatness of a few crowded cities,
but in the greatness of innumerable home towns.
The slogan today should be, For God and Home and the Home Town!
A School of Struggle
Dr. Henry Solomon Lehr, founder of the Ohio Northern University at Ada,
Ohio, one of Ohio's greatest educators, used to say with pride, "Our
students come to school; they are not sent."
He encouraged his students to be self-supporting, and most of them were
working their way thru school. He made the school calendar and courses
elastic to accommodate them. He saw the need of combining the school of
books with the school of struggle. He organized his school into
competing groups, so that the student who had no struggle in his life
would at least have to struggle with the others during his schooling.
He pitted class against class. He organized great literary and debating
societies to compete with each other. He arranged contests for the
military department. His school was one surging mass of contestants.
Yet each student felt no compulsion. Rather he felt that he was
initiating an individual or class effort to win. The literary societies
vied with each other in their programs and in getting new members,
going every term to unbelievable efforts to win over the others. They
would go miles out on the trains to intercept new students, even to
their homes in other states. Each old student pledged new students in
his home country. The military companies turned the school into a
military camp for weeks each year, scarcely sleeping while drilling for
a contest flag.
Those students went out into the world trained to struggle. I do not
believe there is a school in America with a greater alumni roll of men
and women of uniformly greater achievement.
I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools
offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their
way thru and to act upon their own initiative.
Men Needed More Than Millions
We are trying a new educational experiment today.
The old "deestrick" school is passing, and with it the small academies
and colleges, each with its handful of students around a teacher, as in
the old days of the lyceum in Athens, when the pupils sat around the
philosopher in the groves.
From these schools came the makers and the preservers of the nation.
Today we are building wonderful public schools with equally wonderful
equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few
great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are
spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance.
Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak
the last word in every department of human research.
O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this
day! Many of them never saw a germ!
But each student has the same definite effort to make in assimilation
today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in
the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with
its splintered side up.
I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and
girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not
be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they
will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated
and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired,
not denatured but discovered.
All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be
men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern
equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that
each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life,
not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives
touch greater lives.
A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and
millions.
Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is
endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the
spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when
the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty
degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in
the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.
Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by
foundations? That is the question the age is asking.
You and I are very much interested in the answer.
Chapter VII
The Salvation of a "Sucker"
The Fiddle and the Tuning
HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years
learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have
not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.
For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies
every field of activity.
What is knowing?
One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles.
Not violins--fiddles.
A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.
I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world
like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That
is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We
have no strings. We have no bow--yet!
When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary
schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the
little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think
they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go
fiddling thru life on this one string!
We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go
up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the
full complement of strings for their life symphonies.
After all this there comes the commencement, and the violin comes forth
with the E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a
violin? To wear strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot of discord.
The violin is to give music.
So there is much yet to do after getting the strings. All the book and
college can do is to give the strings--the tools. After that the violin
must go into the great tuning school of life. Here the pegs are turned
and the strings are put in tune. The music is the knowing. Learning is
tuning.
You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have
vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience.
Gussie says, "I have read it in a book." Bill Whackem says, "I know!"
Reading and Knowing
All of us are Christopher Columbuses, discovering the same new-old
continents of Truth. That is the true happiness of life--discovering
Truth. We read things in a book and have a hazy idea of them. We hear
the preacher utter truths and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is
so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not
excited. Truth never excites--it is falsehood that excites--until we
discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there
is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the
oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight
and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the joy of
living.
There is such a difference between reading a thing and knowing a thing.
We could read a thousand descriptions of the sun and not know the sun
as in one glimpse of it with our own eyes.
I used to stand in the row of blessed little rascals in the "deestrick"
school and read from McGuffey's celebrated literature,
"If--I-p-p-play--with--the--f-f-f-i-i-i-i-r-r-e--I--will--g-e-e-et
--my-y-y-y-y--f-f-f-f--ingers--bur-r-r-rned--period!"
I did not learn it. I wish I had learned by reading it that if I play
with the fire I will get my fingers burned. I had to slap my hands upon
hot stoves and coffee-pots, and had to get many kinds of blisters in
order to learn it.
Then I had to go around showing the blisters, boring my friends and
taking up a collection of sympathy. "Look at my bad luck!" Fool!
This is not a lecture. It is a confession! It seems to me if you in the
audience knew how little I know, you wouldn't stay.
"You Can't Get Something for Nothing"
Yes, I was thirty-four years learning that one sentence. "You can't get
something for nothing." That is, getting it in partial tune. It took me
so long because I was naturally bright. It takes that kind longer than
a human being. They are so smart you cannot teach them with a few
bumps. They have to be pulverized.
That sentence takes me back to the days when I was a "hired man" on the
farm. You might not think I had ever been a "hired man" on the farm at
ten dollars a month and "washed, mended and found." You see me here on
this platform in my graceful and cultured manner, and you might not
believe that I had ever trained an orphan calf to drink from a copper
kettle. But I have fed him the fingers of this hand many a time. You
might not think that I had ever driven a yoke of oxen and had said the
words. But I have!
I remember the first county fair I ever attended. Fellow sufferers, you
may remember that at the county fair all the people sort out to their
own departments. Some people go to the canned fruit department. Some go
to the fancywork department. Some go to the swine department. Everybody
goes to his own department. Even the "suckers"! Did you ever notice
where they go? That is where I went--to the "trimming department."
I was in the "trimming department" in five minutes. Nobody told me
where it was. I didn't need to be told. I gravitated there. The barrel
always shakes all of one size to one place. You notice that--in a city
all of one size get together.
Right at the entrance to the "local Midway" I met a gentleman. I know
he was a gentleman because he said he was a gentleman. He had a little
light table he could move quickly. Whenever the climate became too
sultry he would move to greener pastures. On that table were three
little shells in a row, and there was a little pea under the middle
shell. I saw it there, being naturally bright. I was the only naturally
bright person around the table, hence the only one who knew under which
shell the little round pea was hidden.
Even the gentleman running the game was fooled. He thought it was under
the end shell and bet me money it was under the end shell. You see,
this was not gambling, this was a sure thing. (It was!) I had saved up
my money for weeks to attend the fair. I bet it all on that middle
shell. I felt bad. It seemed like robbing father. And he seemed like a
real nice old gentleman, and maybe he had a family to keep. But I would
teach him a lesson not to "monkey" with people like me, naturally
bright.
But I needn't have felt bad. I did not rob father. Father cleaned me
out of all I had in about five seconds.
I went over to the other side of the fairgrounds and sat down. That was
all I had to do now--just go, sit down. I couldn't see the mermaid now
or get into the grandstand.
Sadly I thought it all over, but I did not get the right answer. I said
the thing every fool does say when he gets bumped and fails to learn
the lesson from the bump. I said, "Next time I shall be more careful."
When anybody says that he is due for a return date.
I Bought the Soap
Learn? No! Within a month I was on the street a Saturday night when
another gentleman drove into town. He stopped on the public square and
stood up in his buggy. "Let the prominent citizens gather around me,
for I am going to give away dollars."
Immediately all the prominent "suckers" crowded around the buggy.
"Gentlemen, I am introducing this new medicinal soap that cures all
diseases humanity is heir to. Now just to introduce and advertise, I am
putting these cakes of Wonder Soap in my hat. You see I am wrapping a
ten-dollar bill around one cake and throwing it into the hat. Now who
will give me five dollars for the privilege of taking a cake of this
wonderful soap from my hat--any cake you want, gentlemen!"
And right on top of the pile was the cake with the ten wrapped around
it! I jumped over the rest to shove my five (two weeks' farm work) in
his hands and grab that bill cake. But the bill disappeared. I never
knew where it went. The man whipped up his horse and also disappeared.
I never knew where he went.
My "Fool Drawer"
I grew older and people began to notice that I was naturally bright and
therefore good picking. They began to let me in on the ground floor.
Did anybody ever let you in on the ground floor? I never could stick.
Whenever anybody let me in on the ground floor it seemed like I would
always slide on thru and land in the cellar.
I used to have a drawer in my desk I called my "fool drawer." I kept my
investments in it. I mean, the investments I did not have to lock up.
You get the pathos of that--the investments nobody wanted to steal. And
whenever I would get unduly inflated I would open that drawer and "view
the remains."
I had in that drawer the deed to my Oklahoma corner-lots. Those lots
were going to double next week. But they did not double I doubled. They
still exist on the blueprint and the Oklahoma metropolis on paper is
yet a wide place in the road.
I had in that drawer my deed to my rubber plantation. Did you ever hear
of a rubber plantation in Central America? That was mine. I had there
my oil propositions. What a difference, I have learned, between an oil
proposition and an oil well! The learning has been very expensive.
I used to wonder how I ever could spend my income. I do not wonder now.
I wonder how I will make it.
I had in that drawer my "Everglade" farm. Did you ever hear of the
"Everglades"? I have an alligator ranch there. It is below the
frost-line, also below the water-line. I will sell it by the gallon.
I had also a bale of mining stock. I had stock in gold mines and silver
mines. Nobody knows how much mining stock I have owned. Nobody could
know while I kept that drawer shut. As I looked over my gold and silver
mine stock, I often noticed that it was printed in green. I used to
wonder why they printed it in green--wonder if they wanted it to
harmonize with me! And I would realize I had so much to live for--the
dividends. I have been so near the dividends I could smell them. Only
one more assessment, then we will cut the melon! I have heard that all
my life and never got a piece of the rind.
Getting "Selected"
Why go farther? I am not half done confessing. Each bump only increased
my faith that the next ship would be mine. Good, honest, retired
ministers would come periodically and sell me stock in some new
enterprise that had millions in it--in its prospectus. I would buy
because I knew the minister was honest and believed in it. He was
selling it on his reputation. Favorite dodge of the promoter to get the
ministers to sell his shares.
I was also greatly interested in companies where I put in one dollar
and got back a dollar or two of bonds and a dollar or two of stock.
That was doubling and trebling my money over night. An old banker once
said to me, "Why don't you invest in something that will pay you five
or six per cent. and get it?"
I pitied his lack of vision. Bankers were such "tightwads." They had no
imagination! Nothing interested me that did not offer fifty or a
hundred per cent.--then. Give me the five per cent. now!
By the time I was thirty-four I was a rich man in worthless paper. It
would have been better for me if I had thrown about all my savings into
the bottom of the sea.
Then I got a confidential letter from a friend of our family I had
never met. His name was Thomas A. Cleage, and he was in the Rialto
Building, St. Louis, Missouri. He wrote me in extreme confidence, "You
have been selected."
Were you ever selected? If you were, then you know the thrill that rent
my manly bosom as I read that letter from this man who said he was a
friend of our family. "You have been selected because you are a
prominent citizen and have a large influence in your community. You are
a natural leader and everybody looks up to you."
He knew me! He was the only man who did know me. So I took the cork
clear under.
"Because of your tremendous influence you have been selected to go in
with us in the inner circle and get a thousand per cent. dividends."
Did you get that? I hope you did. I did not! But I took a night train
for St. Louis. I was afraid somebody might beat me there if I waited
till next day. I sat up all night in a day coach to save money for Tom,
the friend of our family. But I see now I need not have hurried so.
They would have waited a month with the sheep-shears ready. Lambie,
lambie, lambie, come to St. Louis!
I don't get any sympathy from this crowd. You laugh at me. You respect
not my feelings. I am not going to tell you a thing that happened in
St. Louis. It is none of your business!
O, I am so glad I went to St. Louis. Being naturally bright, I could
not learn it at home, back in Ohio. I had to go clear down to St. Louis
to Tom Cleage's bucket-shop and pay him eleven hundred dollars to
corner the wheat market of the world. That is all I paid him. I could
not borrow any more. I joined what he called a "pool." I think it must
have been a pool, for I know I fell in and got soaked!
That bump set me to thinking. My fever began to reduce. I got the
thirty-third degree in financial suckerdom for only eleven hundred
dollars.
I have always regarded Tom as one of my great school teachers. I have
always regarded the eleven hundred as the finest investment I had made
up to that time, for I got the most out of it. I do not feel hard
toward goldbrick men and "blue sky" venders. I sometimes feel that we
should endow them. How else can we save a sucker? You cannot tell him
anything, because he is naturally bright and knows better. You simply
have to trim him till he bleeds.
I Am Cured
It is worth eleven hundred dollars every day to know that one sentence,
You cannot get something for nothing. Life just begins to get juicy
when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad,
"Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I stop my subscription to that
paper. I simply will not take a paper with that ad in it, for I have
graduated from that class.
I will not grasp a fortune now. Try me, I dare you! Bring a fortune
right up on this platform and put it down there on the floor. I will
not grasp it. Come away, it is a coffee-pot!
Today when somebody offers me much more than the legal rate of interest
I know he is no friend of our family.
If he offers me a hundred per cent. I call for the police!
Today when I get a confidential letter that starts out, "You have been
selected--" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is
adjourned. I select the waste-basket. Here, get in there just as quick
as you can. I was selected!
O, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it early in life. The law of
compensation is never suspended. You only own what you earn. You can't
get something for nothing. If you do not learn it, you will have to be
"selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally
bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to receive a
thousand per cent. dividends," it means you have been selected to
receive this bunch of blisters because you look like the biggest sucker
on the local landscape.
The other night in a little town of perhaps a thousand, a banker took
me up into his office after the lecture in which I had related some of
the above experiences. "The audience laughed with you and thought it
very funny," said he. "I couldn't laugh. It was too pathetic. It was a
picture of what is going on in our own little community year after
year. I wish you could see what I have to see. I wish you could see the
thousands of hard-earned dollars that go out of our community every
year into just such wildcat enterprises as you described. The saddest
part of it is that the money nearly always goes out of the pockets of
the people who can least afford to lose it."
Absalom, wake up! This is bargain night for you. I paid eleven hundred
dollars to tell you this one thing, and you get it for a dollar or two.
This is no cheap lecture. It cost blood.
Learn that the gambler never owns his winnings. The man who accumulates
by sharp practices or by undue profits never owns it. Even the young
person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We only own
what we have rendered definite service to bound. The owning is in the
understanding of values.
This is true physically, mentally, morally. You only own what you have
earned and stored in your life, not merely in your pocket, stomach or
mind.
I often think if it takes me thirty-four years to begin to learn one
sentence, I see the need of an eternity.
To me that is one of the great arguments for eternal life--how slowly I
learn, and how much there is to learn. It will take an eternity!
Those Commencement Orations
The young person says, "By next June I shall have finished my
education." Bless them all! They will have put another string on their
fiddle.
After they "finish" they have a commencement, not an end-ment, as they
think. This is not to sneer, but to cheer. Isn't it glorious that life
is one infinite succession of commencements and promotions!
I love to attend commencements. The stage is so beautifully decorated
and the joy of youth is everywhere. There is a row of geraniums along
the front of the stage and a big oleander on the side. There is a
long-whiskered rug in the middle. The graduates sit in a semicircle
upon the stage in their new patent leather. I know how it hurts. It is
the first time they have worn it.
Then they make their orations. Every time I hear their orations I like
them better, because every year I am getting younger. Damsel Number One
comes forth and begins:
"Beyond the Alps (sweep arms forward to the left, left arm leading)
lieth Italy!" (Bring arms down, letting fingers follow the wrist. How
embarrassing at a commencement for the fingers not to follow the wrist!
It is always a shock to the audience when the wrist sweeps downward and
the fingers remain up in the air. So by all means, let the fingers
follow the wrist, just as the elocution teacher marked on page 69.)
Applause, especially from relatives.
Sweet Girl Graduate Number 2, generally comes second. S. G. G. No. 2
stands at the same leadpencil mark on the floor, resplendent in a filmy
creation caught with something or other.
"We (hands at half-mast and separating) are rowing (business of
propelling aerial boat with two fingers of each hand, head inclined).
We are not drifting (hands slide downward)."
Children, we are not laughing at you. We are laughing at ourselves. We
are laughing the happy laugh at how we have learned these great truths
that you have memorized, but not vitalized.
You get the most beautiful and sublime truths from Emerson's essays.
(How did they ever have commencements before Emerson?) But that is not
knowing them. You cannot know them until you have lived them. It is a
grand thing to say, "Beyond the Alps lieth Italy," but you can never
really say that until you know it by struggling up over Alps of
difficulty and seeing the Italy of promise and victory beyond. It is
fine to say, "We are rowing and not drifting," but you cannot really
say that until you have pulled on the oar.
O, Gussie, get an oar!
My Maiden Sermon
Did you ever hear a young preacher, just captured, just out of a
factory? Did you ever hear him preach his "maiden sermon"? I wish you
had heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought I had a call. I think
now I was "short-circuited." The "brethren" waited upon me and told me
I had been "selected": Maybe this was a local call, not long distance.
They gave me six weeks in which to load the gospel gun and get ready
for my try-out. I certainly loaded it to the muzzle.
But I made the mistake I am trying to warn you against. Instead of
going to the one book where I might have gotten a sermon--the book of
my experience, I went to the books in my father's library. "As the poet
Shakespeare has so beautifully said," and then I took a chunk of
Shakespeare and nailed it on page five of my sermon. "List to the poet
Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. So I soldered these fragments from
the books together with my own native genius. I worked that sermon up
into the most beautiful splurges and spasms. I bedecked it with
metaphors and semaphores. I filled it with climaxes, both wet and dry.
I had a fine wet climax on page fourteen, where I had made a little
mark in the margin which meant "cry here." This was the spilling-point
of the wet climax. I was to cry on the lefthand side of the page.
I committed it all to memory, and then went to a lady who taught
expression, to get it expressed. You have to get it expressed.
I got the most beautiful gestures nailed into almost every page. You
know about gestures--these things you make with your arms in the air as
you speak. You can notice it on me yet.
I am not sneering at expression. Expression is a noble art. All life is
expression. But you have to get something to express. Here I made my
mistake. I got a lot of fine gestures. I got an express-wagon and got
no load for it. So it rattled. I got a necktie, but failed to get any
man to hang it upon. I got up before a mirror for six weeks, day by
day, and said the sermon to the glass. It got so it would run itself. I
could have gone to sleep and that sermon would not have hesitated.
Then came the grand day. The boy wonder stood forth and before his
large and enthusiastic concourse delivered that maiden sermon more
grandly than ever to a mirror. Every gesture went off the bat according
to the blueprint. I cried on page fourteen! I never knew it was in me.
But I certainly got it all out that day!
Then I did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that
earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man
out of the church--and I hurried. But they beat me out--all nine of
them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the
key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse
than that. You're all right, bub, but you don't know nothin' yet."
I cried all the way to town. If he had plunged a dagger into me he
would not have hurt me so much. It has taken some years to learn that
the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No sermon
ever had greater truth, but I had not lived it. The old man meant I did
not know my own sermon.
So, children, when you prepare your commencement oration, write about
what you know best, what you have lived. If you know more about peeling
potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potatoes," and
you are most likely to hear the applause peal from that part of your
audience unrelated to you.
Out of every thousand books published, perhaps nine hundred of them do
not sell enough to pay the cost of printing them. As you study the
books that do live, you note that they are the books that have been
lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them
and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse.
They come out of the author's head. The books that live must come out
of his heart. They are his own life. They come surging and pulsating
from the book of his experience.
The best part of our schooling comes not from the books, but from the
men behind the books.
We study agriculture from books. That does not make us an
agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go out and agricult. That is the
knowing in the doing.
You Must Live Your Song
"There was never a picture painted,
There was never a poem sung,
But the soul of the artist fainted,
And the poet's heart was wrung."
So many young people think because they have a good voice and they have
cultivated it, they are singers. All this cultivation and irritation
and irrigation and gargling of the throat are merely symptoms of a
singer--merely neckties. Singers look better with neckties.
They think the song comes from the diaphragm. But it comes from the
heart, chaperoned by the diaphragm. You cannot sing a song you have not
lived.
Jessie was singing the other day at a chautauqua. She has a beautiful
voice, and she has been away to "Ber-leen" to have it attended to. She
sang that afternoon in the tent, "The Last Rose of Summer." She sang it
with every note so well placed, with the sweetest little trills and
tendrils, with the smile exactly like her teacher had taught her.
Jessie exhibited all the machinery and trimmings for the song, but she
had no steam, no song. She sang the notes. She might as well have sung,
"Pop, Goes the Weasel."
The audience politely endured Jessie. That night a woman sang in the
same tent "The Last Rose of Summer." She had never been to Berlin, but
she had lived that song. She didn't dress the notes half so beautifully
as Jessie did, but she sang it with the tremendous feeling it demands.
The audience went wild. It was a case of Gussie and Bill Whackem.
All this was gall and wormwood to Jessie. "Child," I said to her, "this
is the best singing lesson you have ever had. Your study is all right
and you have a better voice than that woman, but you cannot sing "The
Last Rose of Summer" yet, for you do not know very much about the first
rose of summer. And really, I hope you'll never know the ache and
disappointment you must know before you can sing that song, for it is
the sob of a broken-hearted woman. Learn to sing the songs you have
lived."
Why do singers try to execute songs beyond the horizon of their lives?
That is why they "execute" them.
The Success of a Song-Writer
The guest of honor at a dinner in a Chicago club was a woman who is one
of the widely known song-writers of this land. As I had the good
fortune to be sitting at table with her I wanted to ask her, "How did
you get your songs known? How did you know what kind of songs the
people want to sing?"
But in the hour she talked with her friends around the table I found
the answer to every question. "Isn't it good to be here? Isn't it great
to have friends and a fine home and money?" she said. "I have had such
a struggle in my life. I have lived on one meal a day and didn't know
where the next meal was coming from. I know what it is to be left alone
in the world upon my own resources. I have had years of struggle. I
have been sick and discouraged and down and out. It was in my little
back-room, the only home I had, that I began to write songs. I wrote
them for my own relief. I was writing my own life, just what was in my
own heart and what the struggles were teaching me. No one is more
surprised and grateful that the world seems to love my songs and asks
for more of them."
The woman was Carrie Jacobs-Bond, who wrote "The Perfect Day," "Just a
Wearyin' for You," "His Lullaby" and many more of those simple little
songs so full of the pathos and philosophy of life that they tug at
your heart and moisten your eyes.
Anybody could write those songs--just a few simple words and notes. No.
Books of theory and harmony and expression only teach us how to write
the words and where to place the notes. These are not the song, but
only the skeleton into which our own life must breathe the life of the
song.
The woman who sat there clad in black, with her sweet, expressive face
crowned with silvery hair, had learned to write her songs in the
University of Hard Knocks. She here became the song philosopher she is
today. Her defeats were her victories. If Carrie Jacobs-Bond had never
struggled with discouragement, sickness, poverty and loneliness, she
never would have been able to write the songs that appeal to the
multitudes who have the same battles.
The popular song is the song that best voices what is in the popular
heart. And while we have a continual inundation of popular songs that
are trashy and voice the tawdriest human impulses, yet it is a tribute
to the good elements in humanity that the wholesome, uplifting
sentiments in Carrie Jacobs-Bond's songs continue to hold their
popularity.
Theory and Practice
My friends, I am not arguing that you and I must drink the dregs of
defeat, or that our lives must fill up with poverty or sorrow, or
become wrecks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me
in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real
success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the
fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of
Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who
have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical
realities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking
upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or
trampling upon their fellow men they dream of helping. Their ideas must
be forged into usefulness available for this day upon the anvil of
experience.
Many of the most brilliant theorists have been the greatest failures in
practice.
There are a thousand who can tell you what is the matter with things to
one person who can give you a practical way to fix them.
I used to have respect amounting to reverence for great readers and
book men. I used to know a man who could tell in what book almost
anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was
a walking library index. I thought him a most wonderful man. Indeed, in
my childhood I thought he was the greatest man in the world.
He was a remarkable man--a great reader and with a memory that retained
it all. That man could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you
almost any date. He could finish almost any quotation. His conversation
was largely made up of classical quotations.
But he was one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical
life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could
quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one
sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was
liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He
seemed never to have digested any of the things in his memory. Since I
have grown up I always think of that man as an intellectual cold
storage plant.
The greatest book is the textbook of the University of Hard Knocks, the
Book of Human Experience the "sermons in stones" and the "books in
running brooks." Most fortunate is he who has learned to read
understandingly from it.
Note the sweeping, positive statements of the young person.
Note the cautious, specific statements of the person who has lived long
in this world.
Our education is our progress from the sweeping, positive, wholesale
statements we have not proved, to the cautious, specific statements we
have proved.
Tuning the Strings of Life
Many audiences are gathered into this one audience. Each person here is
a different audience, reading a different page in the Book of Human
Experience. Each has a different fight to make and a different burden
to carry. Each one of us has more trouble than anybody else!
I know there are chapters of heroism in the lives of you older ones.
You have cried yourselves to sleep, some of you, and walked the floor
when you could not sleep. You have learned that "beyond the Alps lieth
Italy."
A good many of you were bumped today or yesterday, or maybe years ago,
and the wound has not healed. You think it never will heal. You came
here thinking that perhaps you would forget your trouble for a little
while. I know there are people in this audience in pain.
Never do this many gather but what there are some with aching hearts.
And you young people here with lives like June mornings, are not much
interested in this lecture. You are polite and attentive because this
is a polite and attentive neighborhood. But down in your hearts you are
asking, "What is this all about? What is that man talking about? I
haven't had these things and I'm not going to have them, either!"
Maybe some of you are naturally bright!
You are going to be bumped. You are going to cry yourselves to sleep.
You are going to walk the floor when you cannot sleep. Some of you are
going to know the keen sorrow of having the one you trust most betray
you. Maybe, betray you with a kiss. You will go through your
Gethsemane. You will see your dearest plans wrecked. You will see all
that seems to make life livable lost out of your horizon. You will say,
"God, let me die. I have nothing more to live for."
For all lives have about the same elements. Your life is going to be
about like other lives.
And you are going to learn the wonderful lesson thru the years, the
bumps and the tears, that all these things somehow are necessary to
promote our education.
These bumps and hard knocks do not break the fiddle--they turn the pegs.
These bumps and tragedies and Waterloos draw the strings of the soul
tighter and tighter, nearer and nearer to God's great concert pitch,
where the discords fade from our lives and where the music divine and
harmonies celestial come from the same old strings that had been
sending forth the noise and discord.
Thus we know that our education is progressing, as the evil and
unworthy go out of our lives and as peace, harmony, happiness, love and
understanding come into our lives.
That is getting in tune.
That is growing up.
Chapter VIII
Looking Backward
Memories of the Price We Pay
WHAT a price we pay for what we know! I laugh as I look backward--and
weep and rejoice.
I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, altho it is quite
evident that I could have handled a pretty good-sized spoon. But father
being a country preacher, we had tin spoons. We never had to tie a red
string around our spoons when we loaned them for the ladies' aid
society oyster supper. We always got our spoons back. Nobody ever
traded with us by mistake.
Do you remember the first money you ever earned? I do. I walked several
miles into the country those old reaper days and gathered sheaves. That
night I was proud when that farmer patted me on the head and said, "You
are the best boy to work, I ever saw." Then the cheerful old miser put
a nickel in my blistered hand. That nickel looked bigger than any money
I have since handled.
That "Last Day of School"
Yet I was years learning it is much easier to make money than to handle
it, hence the tale that follows.
I was sixteen years old and a school teacher. Sweet sixteen--which
means green sixteen. But remember again, only green things grow. There
is hope for green things. I was so tall and awkward then--I haven't
changed much since. I kept still about my age. I was several dollars
the lowest bidder. They said out that way, "Anybody can teach kids."
That is why I was a teacher.
I had never studied pedagogy, but I had whittled out three rules that I
thought would make it go. My first rule was, Make 'em study. My second,
Make, em recite. That is, fill 'em up and then empty 'em.
My third and most important rule was, Get your money!
I walked thirteen miles a day, six and a half miles each way, most of
the time, to save money. I think I had all teaching methods in use.
With the small fry I used a small paddle to win their confidence and
arouse their enthusiasm for an education. With the pupils larger and
more muscular than their teacher I used love and moral suasion.
We ended the school with an "exhibition." Did you ever attend the old
back-country "last day of school exhibition"? The people that day came
from all over the township. They were so glad our school was closing
they all turned out to make it a success. They brought great baskets of
provender and we had a feast. We covered the school desks with boards,
and then covered the boards with piles of fried chicken, doughnuts and
forty kinds of pie.
Then we had a "doings." Everybody did a stunt. We executed a lot of
literature that day. Execute is the word that tells what happened to
literature in District No. 1, Jackson Township, that day. I can shut my
eyes and see it yet. I can see my pupils coming forward to speak their
"pieces." I hardly knew them and they hardly knew me, for we were
"dressed up." Many a head showed father had mowed it with the
sheepshears. Mother had been busy with the wash-rag--clear back of the
ears! And into them! So many of them wore collars that stuck out all
stiff like they had pushed their heads on thru their big straw hats.
I can see them speaking their "pieces." I can see "The Soldier of the
Legion lay dying in Algiers." We had him die again that day, and he had
a lingering end as we executed him. I can see "The boy stood on the
burning deck, whence all but he had fled." I can see "Mary's little
lamb" come slipping over the stage. I see the tow-headed patriot in
"Give me liberty or give me death." I feel now that if Patrick Henry
had been present, he would have said, "Give me death."
There came a breathless hush as "teacher" came forward as the last act
on the bill to say farewell. It was customary to cry. I wanted to yell.
Tomorrow I would get my money! I had a speech I had been saying over
and over until it would say itself. But somehow when I got up before
that "last day of school" audience and opened my mouth, it was a great
opening, but nothing came out. It came out of my eyes. Tears rolled
down my cheeks until I could hear them spatter on my six-dollar suit.
And my pupils wept as their dear teacher said farewell. Parents wept.
It was a teary time. I only said, "Weep not for me, dear friends. I am
going away, but I am coming back." I thought to cheer them up, but they
wept the more.
Next day I drew my money. I had it all in one joyous wad--$240. I was
going home with head high and aircastles even higher. But I never got
home with the money. Talk about the fool and his money and you get very
personal.
For on the way home I met Deacon K, and he borrowed it all. Deacon K
was "such a good man" and a "pillar of the church." I used to wonder,
tho, why he didn't take a pillow to church. I took his note for $240,
"due at corncutting," as we termed that annual fall-time paying up
season. I really thought a note was not necessary, such was my
confidence in the deacon.
For years I kept a faded, tear-spattered, yellow note for $240, "due at
corncutting," as a souvenir of my first schoolteaching. Deacon K has
gone from earth. He has gone to his eternal reward. I scarcely know
whether to look up or down as I say that. He never left any forwarding
address.
I was paid thousands in experience for that first schoolteaching, but I
paid all the money I got from it--two hundred and forty
thirteen-mile-a-day dollars to learn one thing I could not learn from
the books, that it takes less wisdom to make money, than it does to
intelligently handle it afterwards. Incidentally I learned it may be
safer to do business with a first-class sinner than with a second-class
saint.
Which is no slap at the church, but at its worst enemies, the foes of
its own household.
Calling the Class-Roll
A lyceum bureau once sent me back to my home town to lecture. I imagine
most lecturers have a hard time lecturing in the home town. Their
schoolmates and playmates are apt to be down there in the front rows
with their families, and maybe all the old scores have not yet been
settled. The boy he fought with may be down there. Perhaps the girl who
gave him the "mitten" is there.
And he has gotten his lecture out of that home town. The heroes and
villains live there within striking distance. Perhaps they have come to
hear him. "Is not this the carpenter's son?" Perhaps this is why some
lecturers and authors are not so popular in the home town until several
generations pass.
I went back to the same hall to speak, and stood upon the same platform
where twenty-one years before I had stood to deliver my graduating
oration, when in impassioned and well modulated tones I had exclaimed,
"Greece is gone and Rome is no more, but fe-e-e-e-ear not, for I will
sa-a-a-a-ave you!" or words to that effect.
Then I went back to the little hotel and sat up alone in my room half
the night living it over. Time was when I thought anybody who could
live in that hotel was a superior order of being. But the time had come
when I knew the person who could go on living in any hotel has a
superior order of vitality.
I held thanksgiving services that night. I could see better. I had a
picture of the school in that town that had been taken twenty-one years
before, just before commencement. I had not seen the picture these
twenty-one years, for I could not then afford to buy one. The price was
a quarter.
I got a truer perspective of life that night. Did you ever sit alone
with a picture of your classmates taken twenty-one years before? It is
a memorable experience.
A class of brilliant and gifted young people went out to take charge of
the world. They were so glad the world had waited so long on them. They
were so willing to take charge of the world. They were going to be
presidents and senators and authors and authoresses and scientists and
scientist-esses and geniuses and genius-esses and things like that.
There was one boy in the class who was not naturally bright. It was not
the one you may be thinking of! No, it was Jim Lambert. He had no
brilliant career in view. He was dull and seemed to lack intellect. He
was "conditioned" into the senior class. We all felt a little sorry for
Jim.
As commencement day approached, the committee of the class appointed
for that purpose took Jim back of the schoolhouse and broke the news to
him that they were going to let him graduate, but they were not going
to let him speak, because he couldn't make a speech that would do
credit to such a brilliant class. They hid Jim on the stage back of the
oleander commencement night.
Shake the barrel!
The girl who was to become the authoress became the helloess in the
home telephone exchange, and had become absolutely indispensable to the
community. The girl who was to become the poetess became the goddess at
the general delivery window and superintendent of the stamp-licking
department of the home postoffice. The boy who was going to Confess was
raising the best corn in the county, and his wife was speaker of the
house.
Most of them were doing very well even Jim Lambert. Jim had become the
head of one of the big manufacturing plants of the South, with a lot of
men working for him. The committee that took him out behind the
schoolhouse to inform him he could not speak at commencement, would now
have to wait in line before a frosted door marked, "Mr. Lambert,
Private." They would have to send up their cards, and the watchdog who
guards the door would tell them, "Cut it short, he's busy!" before they
could break any news to him today.
They hung a picture of Mr. Lambert in the high school at the last
alumni meeting. They hung it on the wall near where the oleander stood
that night.
Dull boy or girl--you with your eyes tear-dimmed sometimes because you
do not seem to learn like some in your classes can you not get a bit of
cheer from the story of Jim?
Hours pass, and still as I sat in that hotel room I was lost in that
school picture and the twenty-one years. There were fifty-four young
people in that picture. They had been shaken these years in the barrel,
and now as I called the roll on them, most of them that I expected to
go up had shaken down and some that I expected to stay down had shaken
up.
Out of that fifty-four, one had gone to a pulpit, one had gone to
Congress and one had gone to the penitentiary. Some had gone to
brilliant success and some had gone down to sad failure. Some had found
happiness and some had found unhappiness. It seemed as tho almost every
note on the keyboard of human possibility had been struck by the one
school of fifty-four.
When that picture was taken the oldest was not more than eighteen, yet
most of them seemed already to have decided their destinies. The
twenty-one years that followed had not changed their courses.
The only changes had come where God had come into a life to uplift it,
or where Mammon had entered to pull it down. And I saw better that the
foolish dreams of success faded before the natural unfolding of
talents, which is the real success. I saw better that "the boy is
father to the man."
The boy who skimmed over his work in school was skimming over his work
as a man. The boy who went to the bottom of things in school was going
to the bottom of things in manhood. Which had helped him to go to the
top of things!
Jim Lambert had merely followed the call of talents unseen in him
twenty-one years before.
The lazy boy became a "tired" man. The industrious boy became an
industrious man. The sporty boy became a sporty man. The domineering
egotist boy became the domineering egotist man.
The boy who traded knives with me and beat me--how I used to envy him!
Why was it he could always get the better of me? Well, he went on
trading knives and getting the better of people. Now, twenty-one years
afterwards, he was doing time in the state penitentiary for forgery. He
was now called a bad man, when twenty-one years ago when he did the
same things on a smaller scale they called him smart and bright.
The "perfectly lovely" boy who didn't mix with the other boys, who
didn't whisper, who never got into trouble, who always had his hair
combed, and said, "If you please," used to hurt me. He was the
teacher's model boy. All the mothers of the community used to say to
their own reprobate offspring, "Why can't you be like Harry? He'll be
President of the United States some day, and you'll be in jail." But
Model Harry sat around all his life being a model. I believe Mr.
Webster defines a model as a small imitation of the real thing. Harry
certainly was a successful model. He became a seedy, sleepy, helpless
relic at forty. He was "perfectly lovely" because he hadn't the energy
to be anything else. It was the boys who had the hustle and the energy,
who occasionally needed bumping--and who got it--who really grew.
I have said little about the girls of the school. Fact was, at that age
I didn't pay much attention to them. I regarded them as in the way. But
I naturally thought of Clarice, our social pet of the class--our real
pretty girl who won the vase in the home paper beauty contest. Clarice
went right on remaining in the social spotlight, primping and flirting.
She outshone all the rest. But it seemed like she was all out-shine and
no in-shine. She mistook popularity for success. The boys voted for
her, but did not marry her. Most of the girls who shone with less
social luster became the happy homemakers of the community.
But as I looked into the face of Jim Lambert in the picture, my heart
warmed at the sight of another great success--a sweet-faced irish lass
who became an "old maid." She had worked day by day all these years to
support a home and care for her family. She had kept her grace and
sweetness thru it all, and the influence of her white, loving life
radiated far.
The Boy I Had Envied
Frank was the boy I had envied. He had everything--a fine home, a
loving father, plenty of money, opportunity and a great career awaiting
him. And he was bright and lovable and talented. Everybody said Frank
would make his mark in the world and make the town proud of him.
I was the janitor of the schoolhouse. Some of my classmates will never
know how their thoughtless jeers and jokes wounded the sensitive,
shabby boy who swept the floors, built the fires and carried in the
coal. After commencement my career seemed to end and the careers of
Frank and the rest of them seemed to begin. They were going off to
college and going to do so many wonderful things.
But the week after commencement I had to go into a printing office,
roll up my sleeves and go to work in the "devil's corner" to earn my
daily bread. Seemed like it took so much bread!
Many a time as I plugged at the "case" I would think of Frank and
wonder why some people had all the good things and I had all the hard
things.
How easy it is to see as you look backward. But how hard it is to see
when you look forward.
Twenty-one years afterward as I got off the train in the home town, I
asked, "Where is he?" We went out to the cemetery, where I stood at a
grave and read on the headstone, "Frank."
I had the story of a tragedy--the tragedy of modern unpreparedness. It
was the story of the boy who had every opportunity, but who had all the
struggle taken out of his life. He never followed his career, never
developed any strength. He disappointed hopes, spent a fortune, broke
his father's heart, shocked the community, and finally ended his wasted
life with a bullet fired by his own hand.
Why Ben Hur Won
It revived the memory of the story of Ben Hur.
Do you remember it? The Jewish boy is torn from his home in disgrace.
He is haled into court and tried for a crime he never committed. Ben
Hur did not get a fair trial. Nobody can get a fair trial at the hands
of this world. That is why the great Judge has said, judge not, for you
have not the full evidence in the case. I alone have that.
Then they condemn him. They lead him away to the galleys. They chain
him to the bench and to the oar. There follow the days and long years
when he pulls on the oar under the lash. Day after day he pulls on the
oar. Day after day he writhes under the sting of the lash. Years of the
cruel injustice pass. Ben Hur is the helpless victim of a mocking fate.
That seems to be your life and my life. In the kitchen or the office,
or wherever we work we seem so often like slaves bound to the oar and
pulling under the sting of the lash of necessity. Life seems one
futureless round of drudgery. We wonder why. We often look across the
street and see somebody who lives a happier life. That one is chained
to no oar. See what a fine time they all have. Why must we pull on the
oar?
How blind we are! We can only see our own oar. We cannot see that they,
too, pull on the oar and feel the lash. Most likely they are looking
back at us and envying us. For while we envy others, others are envying
us.
But look at the chariot race in Antioch. See the thousands in the
circus. See Messala, the haughty Roman, and see! Ben Hur from the
galleys in the other chariot pitted against him. Down the course dash
these twin thunderbolts. The thousands hold their breath. "Who will
win?" "The man with the stronger forearms," they whisper.
There comes the crucial moment in the race. See the man with the
stronger forearms. They are bands of steel that swell in the forearms
of Ben Hur. They swing those flying Arabians into the inner ring. Ben
Hur wins the race! Where got the Jew those huge forearms? From the
galleys!
Had Ben Hur never pulled on the oar, he never could have won the
chariot race.
Sooner or later you and I are to learn that Providence makes no
mistakes in the bookkeeping. As we pull on the oar, so often lashed by
grim necessity, every honest effort is laid up at compound interest in
the bank account of strength. Sooner or later the time comes when we
need every ounce. Sooner or later our chariot race is on--when we win
the victory, strike the deciding blow, stand while those around us
fall--and it is won with the forearms earned in the galleys of life by
pulling on the oar.
That is why I thanked God as I stood at the grave of my classmate. I
thanked God for parents who believed in the gospel of struggle, and for
the circumstances that compelled it.
I am not an example of success.
But I am a very grateful pupil in the first reader class of The
University of Hard Knocks.
Chapter IX
Go On South!
The Book in the Running Brook
THERE is a little silvery sheet of water in Minnesota called Lake
Itasca. There is a place where a little stream leaps out from the lake.
"Ole!" you will exclaim, "the lake is leaking. What is the name of this
little creek?"
"Creek! It bane no creek. It bane Mississippi river."
So even the Father of Waters has to begin as a creek. We are at the
cradle where the baby river leaps forth. We all start about alike. It
wabbles around thru the woods of Minnesota. It doesn't know where it is
going, but it is "on the way."
It keeps wabbling around, never giving up and quitting, and it gets to
the place where all of us get sooner or later. The place where Paul
came on the road to Damascus. The place of the "heavenly vision."
It is the place where gravity says, "Little Mississippi, do you want to
grow? Then you will have to go south."
The little Mississippi starts south. He says to the people, "Goodbye,
folks, I am going south." The folks at Itascaville say, "Why,
Mississippi, you are foolish. You hain't got water enough to get out of
the county." That is a fact, but he is not trying to get out of the
county. The Mississippi is only trying to go south.
The Mississippi knows nothing about the Gulf of Mexico. He does not
know that he has to go hundreds of miles south. He is only trying to go
south. He has not much water, but he does not wait for a relative to
die and bequeath him some water. That is a beautiful thought! He has
water enough to start south, and he does that.
He goes a foot south, then another foot south. He goes a mile south. He
picks up a little stream and he has some more water. He goes on south.
He picks up another stream and grows some more. Day by day he picks up
streamlets, brooklets, rivulets. Business is picking up! He grows as he
flows. Poetry!
My friends, here is one of the best pictures I can find in nature of
what it seems to me our lives should be. I hear a great many orations,
especially in high school commencements, entitled, "The Value of a Goal
in Life." But the direction is vastly more important than the goal.
Find the way your life should go, and then go and keep on going and
you'll reach a thousand goals.
We do not have to figure out how far we have to go, nor how many
supplies we will need along the way. All we have to do is to start and
we will find the resources all along the way. We will grow as we flow.
All of us can start! And then go on south!
Success is not tomorrow or next year. Success is now. Success is not at
the end of the journey, for there is no end. Success is every day in
flowing and growing. The Mississippi is a success in Minnesota as well
as on south.
You and I sooner or later hear the call, "Go on south." If we haven't
heard it, let us keep our ear to the receiver and live a more natural
life, so that we can hear the call. We are all called. It is a divine
call--the call of our unfolding talents to be used.
Remember, the Mississippi goes south. If he had gone any other
direction he would never have been heard of.
Three wonderful things develop as the Mississippi goes on south.
1. He keeps on going on south and growing greater.
2. He overcomes his obstacles and develops his power.
3. He blesses the valley, but the valley does not bless him.
Go On South and Grow Greater
You never meet the Mississippi after he starts south, but what he is
going on south and growing greater. You never meet him but what he
says, "Excuse me, but I must go on south."
The Mississippi gets to St. Paul and Minneapolis. He is a great river
now--the most successful river in the state. But he does not retire
upon his laurels. He goes on south and grows greater. He goes on south
to St. Louis. He is a wonderful river now. But he does not stop. He
goes on south and grows greater.
Everywhere you meet him he is going on south and growing greater.
Do you know why the Mississippi goes on south? To continue to be the
Mississippi. If he should stop and stagnate, he would not be the
Mississippi river, he would become a stagnant, poisonous pond.
As long as people keep on going south, they keep on living. When they
stop and stagnate, they die.
That is why I am making it the slogan of my life--GO ON SOUTH AND GROW
GREATER! I hope I can make you remember that and say it over each day.
I wish I could write it over the pulpits, over the schoolrooms, over
the business houses and homes--GO ON SOUTH AND GROW GREATER. For this
is life, and there is no other. This is education--and religion. And
the only business of life.
You and I start well. We go on south a little ways, and then we retire.
Even young people as they start south and make some little knee-pants
achievement, some kindergarten touchdown, succumb to their press
notices. Their friends crowd around them to congratulate them. "I must
congratulate you upon your success. You have arrived."
So many of those young goslings believe that. They quit and get canned.
They think they have gotten to the Gulf of Mexico when they have not
gotten out of the woods of Minnesota. Go on south!
We can protect ourselves fairly well from our enemies, but heaven
deliver us from our fool friends.
Success is so hard to endure. We can endure ten defeats better than one
victory. Success goes to the head and defeat goes to "de feet." It
makes them work harder.
The Plague of Incompetents
Civilization is mostly a conspiracy to keep us from going very far
south.
The one who keeps on going south defies custom and becomes unorthodox.
But contentment with present achievement is the damnation of the race.
The mass of the human family never go on south far enough to become
good servants, workmen or artists. The young people get a smattering
and squeeze into the bottom position and never go on south to
efficiency and promotion. They wonder why their genius is not
recognized. They do not make it visible.
Nine out of ten stenographers who apply for positions can write a few
shorthand characters and irritate a typewriter keyboard. They think
that is being a stenographer, when it is merely a symptom of a
stenographer. They mangle the language, grammar, spelling,
capitalization and punctuation. Their eyes are on the clock, their
minds on the movies.
Nine out of ten workmen cannot be trusted to do what they advertise to
do, because they have never gone south far enough to become efficient.
Many a professional man is in the same class.
Half of our life is spent in getting competents to repair the botchwork
of incompetents.
No matter how well equipped you are, you are never safe in your job if
you are contented to do today just what you did yesterday. Contented to
think today what you thought yesterday.
You must go on south to be safe.
I used to know a violinist who would say, "If I were not a genius, I
could not play so well with such little practice." The poor fellow did
not know how poor a fiddler he really was. Well did Strickland
Gillilan, America's great poet-humorist, say, "Egotism is the opiate
that Nature administers to deaden the pains of mediocrity."
This Is Our Best Day
Just because our hair gets frosty or begins to rub off in spots, we are
so prone to say, "I am aging rapidly." It pays to advertise. We always
get results. See the one shrivel who goes around front-paging his age.
Age is not years; age is grunts.
We say, "I've seen my best days." And the undertaker goes and greases
his buggy. He believes in "preparedness."
Go on south! We have not seen our best days. This is the best day so
far, and tomorrow is going to be better on south.
We are only children in God's great kindergarten, playing with our
A-B-C's. I do not utter that as a bit of sentiment, but as the great
fundamental of our life. I hope the oldest in years sees that best. I
hope he says, "I am just beginning. Just beginning to understand. Just
beginning to know about life."
We are not going on south to old age, we are going on south to eternal
youth. It is the one who stops who "ages rapidly." Each day brings us a
larger vision. Infinity, Eternity, Omnipotence, Omniscience are all on
south.
We have left nothing behind but the husks. I would not trade this
moment for all the years before it. I have their footings at compound
interest! They are dead. This is life.
Birthdays and Headmarks
Yesterday I had a birthday. I looked in the glass and communed with my
features. I saw some gray hairs coming. Hurrah!
You know what gray hairs are? Did you ever get a headmark in school?
Gray hairs are silver headmarks in our education as we go on south.
You children cheer up. Your black hair and auburn hair and the other
first reader hair will pass and you'll get promoted as you go on south.
Don't worry about gray hair or baldness. Only worry about the location
of your gray hair or baldness. If they get on the inside of the head,
worry. Do you know why corporations sometimes say they do not want to
employ gray-headed men? They have found that so many of them have quit
going on south and have gotten gray on the inside--or bald.
These same corporations send out Pinkertons and pay any price for
gray-headed men--gray on the outside and green on the inside. They are
the most valuable, for they have the vision and wisdom of many years
and the enthusiasm and "pep" and courage of youth.
The preacher, the teacher--everyone who gets put on the retired list,
retires himself. He quits going on south.
The most wonderful person in the world is the one who has lived years
and years on earth and has perhaps gotten gray on the outside, but has
kept young and fresh on the inside. Put that person in the pulpit, in
the schoolroom, in the office, behind the ticket-window or on the
bench--or under the hod--and you find the whole world going to that
person for direction, advice, vision, help, sympathy, love.
I am happy today as I look back over my life. I have been trying to
lecture a good while. I am almost ashamed to tell you how long, for I
ought to know more about it by this time. But when anybody says, "I
heard you lecture twenty years ago over at----" I stop him. "Please
don't throw it up to me now. I am just as ashamed of it as you are. I
am trying to do better now."
O, I want to forget all the past, save its lessons. I am just beginning
to live. If anybody wants to be my best friend, let him come to me and
tell me how to improve--what to do and what not to do. Tell me how to
give a better lecture.
Years ago a bureau representative who booked me told me my lectures
were good enough. I told him I wanted to get better lectures, for I was
so dissatisfied with what little I knew. He told me I could never get
any better. I had reached my limit. Those lectures were the "limit." I
shiver as I think what I was saying then. I want to go on south
shivering about yesterday. These years I have noticed the people on the
platform who were contented with their offerings, were not trying to
improve them, and were lost in admiration of what they were doing, did
not stay long on the platform. I have watched them come and go, come
and go. I have heard their fierce invectives against the bureaus and
ungrateful audiences that were "prejudiced" against them.
Birthdays are not annual affairs. Birthdays are the days when we have a
new birth. The days when we go on south to larger visions. I wish I
could have a birthday every minute!
Some people seem to string out to near a hundred years with mighty few
birthdays. Some people spin up to Methuselahs in a few years.
From what I can learn of Methuselah, he never grew past copper-toed
boots. He just hibernated and "chawed on."
The more birthdays we have, the nearer we approach eternal youth!
Bernhardt, Davis and Edison
The spectacle of Sarah Bernhardt, past seventy, thrilling and gripping
audiences with the fire and brilliancy of youth, is inspiring. No
obstacle can daunt her. Losing a leg does not end her acting, for she
remains the "Divine Sarah" with no crippling of her work. She looks
younger than many women of half her years. "The years are nothing to
me."
Senator Henry Gassaway Davis, West Virginia's Grand Old Man, at
ninety-two was working as hard and hopefully as any man of the
multitudes in his employ. He was an ardent Odd Fellow, and one day at
ninety-two--just a short time before his passing--he went out to the
Odd Fellows' Home near Elkins, where he lived. On the porch of the home
was a row of old men inmates. The senator shook hands with these men
and one by one they rose from the bench to return his hearty greetings.
The last man on the bench did not rise. He helplessly looked up at the
senator and said, "Senator, you'll have to excuse me from getting up.
I'm too old. When you get as old as I am, you'll not get up, either."
"That's all right. But, my man, how old are you?"
"Senator, I'm old in body and old in spirit. I'm past sixty."
"My boy," laughed Senator Davis, "I was an Odd Fellow before you were
born."
The senator at ninety-two was younger than the man "past sixty,"
because he was going on south.
When I was a little boy I saw them bring the first phonograph that Mr.
Edison invented into the meeting at Lakeside, Ohio. The people cheered
when they heard it talk.
You would laugh at it today. It had a tinfoil cylinder, it screeched
and stuttered. You would not have it in your barn today to play to your
ford!
But the people said, "Mr. Edison has succeeded." There was one man who
did not believe that Mr. Edison had succeeded. His name was Thomas Alva
Edison. He had gotten to St. Paul, and he went on south. A million
people would have stopped there and said, "I have arrived." They would
have put in their time litigating for their rights with other people
who would have gone on south with the phonograph idea.
Mr. Edison has said that his genius is mainly his ability to keep on
south. A young lady succeeded in getting into his laboratory the other
day, and she wrote me that the great inventor showed her one invention.
"I made over seven thousand experiments and failed before I hit upon
that."
"Why make so many experiments?"
"I know more than seven thousand ways now that won't work."
I doubt if there are ten men in America who could go on south in the
face of seven thousand failures. Today he brings forth a
diamond-pointed phonograph. I am sure if we could bring Mr. Edison to
this platform and ask him, "Have you succeeded?" he would say what he
has said to reporters and what he said to the young lady, "I have not
succeeded. I am succeeding. All I have done only shows me how much
there is yet to do."
That is success supreme. Not "succeeded" but "succeeding."
What a difference between "ed" and "ing"! The difference between death
and life. Are you "ed-ing" or "ing-ing"?
Moses Begins at Eighty
Moses, the great Hebrew law-giver, was eighty years old before he
started south. It took him eighty years to get ready. Moses did not
even get on the back page of the Egyptian newspapers till he was
eighty. He went on south into the extra editions after that!
If Moses had retired at seventy-nine, we'd never have heard of him. If
Moses had retired to a checkerboard in the grocery store or to pitching
horseshoes up the alley and talking about "ther winter of fifty-four,"
he would have become the seventeenth mummy on the thirty-ninth row in
the green pickle-jar!
Imagine Moses living today amidst the din of the high school orations
on "The Age of the Young Man" and the Ostler idea that you are going
down hill at fifty. Imagine Moses living on "borrowed time" when he
becomes the leader of the Israelite host.
I would see his scandalized friends gather around him. "Moses! Moses!
what is this we hear? You going to lead the Israelites to the Promised
Land? Why, Moses, you are an old man. Why don't you act like an old
man? You are liable to drop off any minute. Here is a pair of slippers.
And keep out of the night air. It is so hard on old folks."
I think I would hear Moses say, "No, no, I am just beginning to see
what to do. Watch things happen from now on. Children of Israel,
forward, march!"
I see Moses at eighty starting for the Wilderness so fast Aaron can
hardly keep up. Moses is eighty-five and busier and more enthusiastic
than ever. The people say, "Isn't Moses dead?" "No." "Well, he ought to
be dead, for he is old enough."
They appoint a committee to bury Moses. You cannot do anything in
America without a committee. The committee gets out the invitations and
makes all the arrangements for a gorgeous funeral next Thursday. They
get ready the resolutions of
respect--"Whereas,--Whereas,--Resolved,--Resolved."
Then I see the committee waiting on Moses. That is what a committee
does--it "waits" on something or other. And this committee goes up to
General Moses' private office. It is his busy day. They have to stand
in line and wait their turn. When they get up to Moses' desk, the great
prophet says, "Boys, what is it? Cut it short, I'm busy."
The committee begins to weep. "General Moses, you are a very old man.
You are eighty-five years old and full of honors. We are the committee
duly authorized to give you gorgeous burial. The funeral is to be next
Thursday. Kindly die."
I see Moses look over his appointments. "Next Thursday? Why, boys,
every hour is taken next Thursday. I simply cannot attend my funeral
next Thursday."
They cannot bury Moses. He cannot attend. You cannot bury anybody who
is too busy to attend his own funeral! You cannot bury anybody until he
consents. It is bad manners! The committee is so mortified, for all the
invitations are out. It waits.
Moses is eighty-six and the committee 'phones over, "Moses, can you
attend next Thursday?" And Moses says, "No, boys, you'll just have to
hold that funeral until I get this work pushed off so I can attend it.
I haven't even time to think about getting old."
The committee waits. Moses is ninety and rushed more than ever. He is
doing ten men's work and his friends all say he is killing himself. But
he makes the committee wait.
Moses is ninety-five and burning the candle at both ends. He is a
hundred. And the committee dies!
Moses goes right on shouting, "Onward!" He is a hundred and ten. He is
a hundred and twenty. Even then I read, "His eye was not dim, nor his
natural force abated." He had not time to stop and abate.
So God buried him. The committee was dead. O, friends, this is not
irreverence. It is joyful reverence. It is the message to all of us, Go
on south to the greater things, and get so enthused and absorbed in our
going that we'll fool the "committee."
All the multitudes of the Children of Israel died in the Wilderness.
They were afraid to go on south. Only two of them went on south--Joshua
and Caleb. They put the giants out of business.
The Indians once owned America. But they failed to go on south. So
another crop of Americans came into the limelight. If we modern
Americans do not go on south we will join the Indians, the auk and the
dodo.
The "Sob Squad"
I am so sorry for the folks who quit, retire, "get on the shelf" or
live on "borrowed time."
They generally join the "sob squad."
They generally discover the world is "going to the dogs." They cry on
my shoulder, no matter how good clothes I wear.
They tell me nobody uses them right. The person going on south has not
time to look back and see how anybody uses him.
They say nobody loves them. Which is often a fact. Nobody loves the
clock that runs down.
They say, "Only a few more days of trouble, only a few more
tribulations, and I'll be in that bright and happy land." What will
they do with them when they get them there? They would be dill pickles
in the heavenly preserve-jar.
They say, "I wish I were a child again. I was happy when I was a child
and I'm not happy now. Them was the best days of my life childhood's
palmy days."
Wake up! Your clock has run down. Anybody who wants to be a child again
is confessing he has lost his memory. Anybody who can remember the
horrors of childhood could not be hired to live it over again.
If there is anybody who does not have a good time, if there is anybody
who gets shortchanged regularly, it is a child. I am so sorry for a
child. Hurry up and go on south. It is better on south.
Waiting till the "Second Table"
I wish I could forget many of my childhood memories. I remember the
palmy days. And the palm!
I often wonder how I ever lived thru my childhood. I would not take my
chances living it thru again. I am not ungrateful to my parents. I had
advantages. I was born in a parsonage and was reared in the nurture and
admiration of the Lord. I am not just sure I quoted that correctly, but
I know I was reared in a parsonage. About all I inherited was a Godly
example and a large appetite. That was about all there was to inherit.
I cannot remember when I was not hungry. I used to go around feeling
like the Mammoth Cave, never thoroly explored.
I never sit down as "company" at a dinner and see some little children
going sadly into the next room to "wait till the second table" that my
heart does not go out to them. I remember when I did that.
I can only remember about four big meals in a year. That was "quart'ly
meeting day." We always had a big dinner on "quart'ly meeting day."
Elder Berry would stay for dinner. His name was Berry, but being
"presiding elder," we called him Elder Berry.
Elder Berry always stayed for dinner. He was one of the easiest men to
get to stay for dinner I ever saw.
Mother would stay home from "quart'ly meeting" to get the big dinner
ready. She would cook up about all the "brethren" brought in at the
last donation. We had one of those stretchable tables, and mother would
stretch it clear across the room and put on two table-cloths. She would
lap them over in the middle, where the hole was.
I would watch her get the big dinner ready. I would look over the long
table and view the "promised land." I would see her set on the jelly.
We had so much jelly--red jelly, and white jelly, and blue jelly. I
don't just remember if they had blue jelly, but if they had it we had
it on that table. All the jelly that ever "jelled" was represented. I
didn't know we had so much jelly till "quart'ly meeting" day. I would
watch the jelly tremble. Did you ever see jelly tremble? I used to
think it ought to tremble, for Elder Berry was coming for dinner.
I would see mother put on the tallest pile of mashed potatoes you ever
saw. She would make a hollow in the top and fill it with butter. I
would see the butter melt and run down the sides, and I would say,
"Hurry, mother, it is going to spill!" O, how I wanted to spill it! I
could hardly hold out faithful.
And then Elder Berry would sit down at the table, at the end nearest
the fried chicken. The "company" would sit down. I used to wonder why
we never could have a big dinner but what a lot of "company" had to
come and gobble it up. They would fill the table and father would sit
down in the last seat. There was no place for me to sit. Father would
say, "You go into the next room, my boy, and wait. There's no room for
you at the table."
The hungriest one of that assemblage would have to go in the next room
and hear the big dinner. Did you ever hear a big dinner when you felt
like the Mammoth Cave? I used to think as I would sit in the next room
that heaven would be a place where everybody would eat at the first
table.
I would watch them thru the key-hole. It was going so fast. There was
only one piece of chicken left. It was the neck. O, Lord, spare the
neck! And I would hear them say, "Elder Berry, may we help you to
another piece of the chicken?"
And Elder Berry would take the neck!
Many a time after that, Elder Berry would come into the room where I
was starving. He would say, "Brother Parlette, is this your boy?" He
would come over to the remains of Brother Parlette's boy. He would
often put his hand in benediction upon my head.
My head was not the place that needed the benediction.
He would say, "My boy, I want you to have a good time now." Now! When
all the chicken was gone and he had taken the neck! "My boy, you are
seeing the best days of your life right now as a child."
The dear old liar! I was seeing the worst days of my life. If there is
anybody shortchanged--if there is anybody who doesn't have a good time,
it's a child. Life has been getting better ever since, and today is the
best day of all. Go on south!
It's Better on South
Seeing your best days as a child? No! You are seeing your worst days.
Of course, you can be happy as a child. A boy can be happy with fuzz on
his upper lip, but he'll be happier when his lip feels more like mine
like a piece of sandpaper. There are chapters of happiness undreamed of
in his philosophy.
A child can be full of happiness and only hold a pint. But afterwhile
the same child will hold a quart.
I think I hold a gallon now. And I see people in the audience who must
hold a barrel! Go on south. Of course, I do not mean circumference. But
every year we go south increases our capacity for joy. Our life is one
continual unfolding as we go south. Afterwhile this old world gets too
small for us and we go on south into a larger one.
So we cannot grow old. Our life never stops. It goes on and on forever.
Anything that does not stop cannot grow old or have age. Material
things will grow old. This stage will grow old and stop. This hall will
grow old and stop. This house we live in will grow old and stop. This
flesh and blood house we live in will grow old and stop. This lecture
even will grow old--and stop! But you and I will never grow old, for
God cannot grow old. You and I will go on living as long as God lives.
I am not worried today over what I do not know. I used to be worried. I
used to say, "I have not time to answer you now!" But today it is such
a relief to look people in the face and say, "I do not know."
And I have to say that to many questions, "I do not know." I often
think if people in an audience only knew how little I know, they would
not stay to hear me.
But some day I shall know! I patiently wait for the answer. Every day
brings the answer to something I could not answer yesterday.
It will take an eternity to know an infinity!
What a wonderful happiness to go on south to it!
Overcoming Obstacles Develops Power
As the Mississippi River goes on south he finds obstacles along the
way. You and I find obstacles along our way south. What shall we do?
Go to Keokuk, Iowa, for your answer.
They have built a great concrete obstacle clear across the path of the
river. It is many feet high, and many, many feet long. The river cannot
go on south. Watch him. He rises higher than the obstacle and sweeps
over it on south.
Over the great power dam at Keokuk sweeps the Mississippi. And then you
see the struggle of overcoming the obstacle develops light and power to
vitalize the valley. A hundred towns and cities radiate the light and
power from the struggle. The great city of St. Louis, many miles away,
throbs with the victory.
So that is why they spent the millions to build the obstacle--to get
the light and the power. The light and the power were latent in the
river, but it took the obstacle and the overcoming to develop it and
make it useful.
That is exactly what happens when you and I overcome our obstacles. We
develop our light and power. We are rivers of light and power, but it
is all latent and does no good until we overcome obstacles as we go on
south.
Obstacles are the power stations on our way south!
And where the most obstacles are, there you find the most power to be
developed. So many of us do not understand that. We look southward and
we see the obstacles in the road. "I am so unfortunate. I could do
these great things, but alas! I have so many obstacles in the way."
Thank God! You are blessed of Providence. They do not waste the
obstacles. The presence of the obstacles means that there is a lot of
light and power in you to be developed. If you see no obstacles, you
are confessing to blindness.
I hear people saying, "I hope the time may speedily come when I shall
have no more obstacles to overcome!" When that time comes, ring up the
hearse, for you will be a "dead one."
Life is going on south, and overcoming the obstacles. Death is merely
quitting.
The fact that we are not buried is no proof that we are alive. Go along
the street in almost any town and see the dead ones. There they are
decorating the hitching-racks and festooning the storeboxes. There they
are blocking traffic at the postoffice and depot. There they are in the
hotel warming the chairs and making the guests stand up. There they
are--rows of retired farmers who have quit work and moved to town to
block improvements and die. But they will never need anything more than
burying.
For they are dead from the ears up. They have not thought a new thought
the past month. Sometimes they sit and think, but generally they just
sit. They have not gone south an inch the past year.
Usually the deadest loafer is married to the livest woman. Nature tries
to maintain an equilibrium.
They block the wheels of progress and get in the way of the people
trying to go on south. They say of the people trying to do things. "Aw,
he's always tryin' to run things."
They do not join in to promote the churches and schools and big brother
movements. They growl at the lyceum courses and chautauquas, because
they "take money outa town." They do not take any of their money "outa
town." Ringling and Barnum & Bailey get theirs.
I do not smile as I refer to the dead. I weep. I wish I could squirt
some "pep" into them and start them on south.
But all this lecture has been discussing this, so I hurry on to the
last glimpse of the book in the running brook.
Go on South From Principle
Here we come to the most wonderful and difficult thing in life. It is
the supreme test of character. That is, Why go on south? Not for
blessing nor cursing, not for popularity nor for selfish ends, not for
anything outside, but for the happiness that comes from within.
The Mississippi blesses the valley every day as he goes on south and
overcomes. But the valley does not bless the river in return. The
valley throws its junk back upon the river. The valley pours its foul,
muddy, poisonous streams back upon the Mississippi to defile him. The
Mississippi makes St. Paul and Minneapolis about all the prosperity
they have, gives them power to turn their mills. But the Twin Cities
merely throw their waste back upon their benefactor.
The Mississippi does not resign. He does not tell a tale of woe. He
does not say, "I am not appreciated. My genius is not understood. I am
not going a step farther south. I am going right back to Lake Itasca."
No, he does not even go to live with his father-in-law.
He says, "Thank you. Every little helps, send it all along." Go a few
miles below the Twin Cities and see how, by some mysterious alchemy of
Nature, the Mississippi has taken over all the poison and the
defilement, he has purified it and clarified it, and has made it a part
of himself. And he is greater and farther south!
He fattens upon bumps. Kick him, and you push him farther south. "Hand
him a lemon," and he makes lemonade.
Civilization conspires to defeat the Mississippi. Chicago's drainage
canal pollutes him. The flat, lazy Platte, three miles wide and three
inches deep; the peevish, destructive Kaw, and all those streams that
unite to form the treacherous, sinful, irresponsible lower Missouri;
the big, muddy Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red, the black and the blue
floods--all these pour into the Mississippi.
Day by day the Father of Waters goes on south, taking them over and
purifying them and making them a part of himself. Nothing can
discourage, divert nor defile him. No matter how poisonous he becomes,
he goes a few miles on south and he is all pure again.
Wonderful the book in the running brook! We let our life stream become
poisoned by bitter memories and bitter regrets. We carry along such a
heart full of the injuries that other people have done us, that
sometimes we are bank to bank full of poison and a menace to those
around us. We say, "I can forgive, but I cannot forget."
Oh, forget it! Drop it all. Purify your life and go on south all sweet
again. We forget what we ought to remember and remember what we ought
to forget. We need schools of memory, but we need schools of
forgettery, even more.
As you go on south and bless your valley, do you notice the valley does
not bless you very much? Have you sadly noted that the people you help
the most often are the least grateful in return?
Don't wait to be thanked. Hurry on to avoid the kick! Do good to others
because that is the way to be happy, but do not wait for a receipt for
your goodness; you will need a poultice every time you wait. I know,
for I have waited!
We get so discouraged. We say, "I have gone far enough south." There is
nobody who does not have that to meet. The preacher, the teacher, the
editor, the man in office, the business man, the father and
mother--every one who tries to carry on the work of the church, the
school, the lyceum and chautauqua, the work that makes for a better
community, gets discouraged at times.
We fail to see what we are doing or why we are doing it. Sometimes we
sit down completely discouraged and say, "I'm done. I'm going to quit.
I have done my share. Nobody appreciates what I do. Let somebody else
do it awhile."
Stop! You are not saying that. The evil one is whispering that into
your heart. His business is to stop you from going south. His most
successful tool is discouragement, which is a wedge, and if he can get
the sharp edge started into your thought, he is going to drive it
deeper.
You do not go south and overcome your obstacles and bless the valley
for praise or blame, for appreciation or lack of it. You do it to live.
You do it to remain a living river and not a stagnant, unhappy pond or
swamp.
YOU ARE SAVING YOURSELF BY SAVING OTHERS. GO ON SOUTH!
Almost everybody is deceived. We work from mixed motives. We fool
ourselves that we are working to do good, when as we do the good, if we
are not praised or thanked for it, if people do not present us a medal
or resolutions, we want to quit. That is why there are so many
disappointed and disgruntled people in the world. They worked for
outside thanks instead of inside thanks. They were trying to be
personal saviours. They say this is an ungrateful world.
O, how easy it is to say these things, and how hard it is to do them!
Reaching the Gulf
But because the Mississippi does these things, one day the train I was
riding stopped in Louisiana. We had come to a river so great science
has not yet been able to put a bridge across it.
I watched them pile the steel train upon a ferry-boat. I watched the
boat crossing a river more than a mile wide. Standing upon the
ferry-boat, I could look down into the lordly river and then far north
perhaps fifteen hundred miles to the little struggling streamlet
starting southward thru the forests of Minnesota, there writing the
first chapter of this wonderful book in the running brook.
I thank God that I had gone a little farther southward in my own life.
Father of Waters, you have fought a good fight. You are conquering
gloriously. You bear upon your bosom the commerce of many nations. I
know why. I saw you born, saw your struggles, saw you get in the right
channel, saw you learn the lessons of your knocks, and saw that you
never stopped going southward.
And may we read it into our own lives. May we get the vision of which
way to go, and then keep on going south--on and on, overcoming, getting
the lessons of the bumps, the strength from the struggle and thus
making it a part of ourselves, and thus growing greater.
Go on South Forever!
Where shall we stop going south? At the Gulf of Mexico?
The Mississippi knows nothing about the gulf. He goes on south until he
reaches the gulf. Then he pushes right on into the gulf as tho nothing
had happened. So he pushes his physical banks on south many miles right
out into the gulf.
And when he comes to the end of his physical banks, he pushes on south
into the gulf, and goes on south round and round the globe.
When you and I come to our Gulf of Mexico, we must push right on south.
So we push our physical banks years farther into the gulf. And when
physical banks fail, we go on south beyond this mere husk, into the
great Gulf of the Beyond, to go on south unfolding thru eternity.
WE NEVER STOP GOING SOUTH.
Chapter X
Going Up Life's Mountain
The Defeats that are Victories
HOW often we say, "I wish I had a million!" Perhaps it is a blessing
that we have not the million. Perhaps it would make us lazy, selfish
and unhappy. Perhaps we would go around giving it to other people to
make them lazy, selfish and unhappy.
O, the problem is not how to get money, but how to get rid of money
with the least injury to the race!
Perhaps getting the million would completely spoil us. Look at the wild
cat and then look at the tabby cat. The wild cat supports itself and
the tabby cat has its million. So the tabby cat has to be doctored by
specialists.
If the burden were lifted from most of us we would go to wreck.
Necessity is the ballast in our life voyage.
When you hear the orator speak and you note the ease and power of his
work, do you think of the years of struggle he spent in preparing? Do
you ever think of the times that orator tried to speak when he failed
and went back to his room in disgrace, mortified and broken-hearted?
Thru it all there came the discipline, experience and grim resolve that
made him succeed.
When you hear the musician and note the ease and grace of the
performance, do you think of the years of struggle and overcoming
necessary to produce that finish and grace? That is the story of the
actor, the author and every other one of attainment.
Do you note that the tropics, the countries with the balmiest climates,
produce the weakest peoples? Do you note that the conquering races are
those that struggle with both heat and cold? The tropics are the
geographical Gussielands.
Do you note that people grow more in lean years than in fat years? Crop
failures and business stringencies are not calamities, but blessings in
disguise. People go to the devil with full pockets; they turn to God
when hunger hits them. "Is not this Babylon that I have builded?" says
the Belshazzar of material prosperity as he drinks to his gods. Then
must come the Needful and Needless Knocks handwriting upon the wall to
save him.
You have to shoot many men's eyes out before they can see. You have to
crack their heads before they can think, knock them down before they
can stand, break their hearts before they can sing, and bankrupt them
before they can be rich.
Do you remember that they had to lock John Bunyan in Bedford jail
before he would write his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress"? It may be that
some of us will have to go to jail to do our best work.
Do you remember that one musician became deaf before he wrote music the
world will always hear? Do you remember that one author became blind
before writing "Paradise Lost" the world will always read?
Do you remember that Saul of Tarsus would have never been remembered
had he lived the life of luxury planned for him? He had to be blinded
before he could see the way to real success. He had to be scourged and
fettered to become the Apostle to the Gentiles. He, too, had to be sent
to prison to write his immortal messages to humanity. What throne-rooms
are some prisons! And what prisons are some throne-rooms!
Do you not see all around you that success is ever the phoenix rising
from the ashes of defeat?
Then, children, when you stand in the row of graduates on commencement
day with your diplomas in your hands, and when your relatives and
friends say, "Success to you!" I shall take your hand and say, "Defeat
to you! And struggles to you! And bumps to you!"
For that is the only way to say, "Success to you!"
Go Up the Mountain
O UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS, we learn to love you more with each
passing year. We learn that you are cruel only to be kind. We learn
that you are saving us from ourselves. But O, how most of us must be
bumped to see this!
I know no better way to close this lecture than to tell you of a great
bump that struck me one morning in Los Angeles. It seemed as tho twelve
years of my life had dropped out of it, and had been lost.
Were you ever bumped so hard you were numb? I was numb. I wondered why
I was living. I thought I had nothing more to live for. When a dog is
wounded he crawls away alone to lick his wounds. I felt like the
wounded dog. I wanted to crawl away to lick my wounds.
That is why I climbed Mount Lowe that day. I wanted to get alone.
It is a wonderful experience to climb Mount Lowe. The tourists go up
half a mile into Rubio Canyon, to the engineering miracle, the
triangular car that hoists them out of the hungry chasm thirty-five
hundred feet up the side of a granite cliff, to the top of Echo
Mountain.
Here they find that Echo Mountain is but a shelf on the side of Mount
Lowe. Here they take an electric car that winds five miles on towards
the sky. There is hardly a straight rail in the track. Every minute a
new thrill, and no two thrills alike. Five miles of winding and
squirming, twisting and ducking, dodging and summersaulting.
There are places where the tourist wants to grasp his seat and lift.
There is a wooden shelf nailed to the side of the perpendicular
rockwall where his life depends upon the honesty of the man who drove
the nails. He may wonder if the man was working by the day or by the
job! He looks over the edge of the shelf downward, and then turns to
the other side to look at the face of the cliff they are hugging, and
discovers there is no place to resign!
The car is five thousand feet high where it stops on that last shelf,
Alpine Tavern. One cannot ride farther upward. This is not the summit,
but just where science surrenders. There is a little trail that winds
upward from Alpine Tavern to the summit. It is three miles long and
rises eleven hundred feet.
To go up that last eleven hundred feet and stand upon the flat rock at
the summit of Mount Lowe is to get a picture so wonderful it cannot be
described with this poor human vocabulary. It must be lived. On a pure,
clear day one looks down this sixty-one hundred feet, more than a mile,
into the orange belt of Southern California. It spreads out below in
one great mosaic of turquoise and amber and emerald, where the miles
seem like inches, and where his field-glass sweeps one panoramic
picture of a hundred miles or more.
Just below is Pasadena and Los Angeles. To the westward perhaps forty
miles is the blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean, on westward the faint
outlines of Catalina Islands. The ocean seems so close one could throw
a pebble over into it. How a mountain does reduce distances. You throw
the pebble and it falls upon your toes!
And Mount Lowe is but a shelf on the side of the higher Sierras. The
granite mountains rise higher to the northward, and to the east rises
"Old Baldy," twelve thousand feet high and snow eternally on his head.
This is one of the workshops of the infinite!
All alone I scrambled up that three-mile trail to the summit. All alone
I stood upon the flat rock at the summit and looked down into the
swimming distances. I did not know why I had struggled up into that
mountain sanctuary, for I was not searching for sublimity. I was
searching for relief. I was heartsick.
I saw clouds down in the valley below me. I had never before looked
down upon clouds. I thought of the cloud that had covered me in the
valley below, and dully watched the clouds spread wider and blacker.
Afterwhile the valley was all hidden by the clouds. I knew rain must be
falling down there. The people must be saying, "The sun doesn't shine.
The sky is all gone." But I saw the truth--the sun was shining. The sky
was in place. A cloud had covered down over that first mile. The sun
was shining upon me, the sky was all blue over me, and there were
millions of miles of sunshine above me. I could see all this because I
had gone above the valley. I could see above the clouds.
A great light seemed to break over my stormswept soul. I am under the
clouds of trouble today, BUT THE SUN IS SHINING!
I must go on up the mountain to see it.
The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my
sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how
black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path,
I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and
God forever in His heavens.
Each day as I go up the mountain I get a larger vision. The miles that
seem so great down in the valley, seem so small as I look down upon
them from higher up. Each day as I look back I see more clearly the
plan of a human life. The rocks, the curves and the struggles fit into
a divine engineering plan to soften the steepness of the ascent. The
bumps are lifts. The things that seem so important down in the smudgy,
stormswept valley, seem so unimportant as we go higher up the mountain
to more important things.
Today I look back to the bump that sent me up Mount Lowe. I did not see
how I could live past that bump. The years have passed and I now know
it was one of the greatest blessings of my life. It closed one gate,
but it opened another gate to a better pathway up the mountain.
Late that day I was clambering down the side of Mount Lowe. Down in the
valley below me I saw shadows. Then I looked over into the southwest
and I could see the sun going down. I could see him sink lower and
lower until his red lips kissed the cheek of the Pacific. The glory of
the sunset filled sea and sky with flames of gold and fountains of
rainbows. Such a sunset from the mountain-side is a promise of heaven.
The shadows of sunset widened over the valley. Presently all the valley
was black with the shadow. It was night down there. The people were
saying, "The sun doesn't shine." But it was not night where I stood. I
was farther up the mountain. I turned and looked up to the summit. The
beams of the setting sun were yet gilding Mount Lowe's summit. It was
night down in the valley, but it was day on the mountain top!
Go on south!
That means, go on up!
Child of humanity, are you in the storm? Go on upward. Are you in the
night? Go on upward.
For the peace and the light are always above the storm and the night,
and always in our reach.
I am going on upward. Take my hand and let us go together. Mount Lowe
showed the way that dark day. There I heard the "sermons in stones."
Some day my night will come. It will spread over all this valley of
material things where the storms have raged.
But I shall be on the mountain top. I shall look down upon the night,
as I am learning to climb and look down upon the storms. I shall be in
the new day of the mountain-top, forever above the night.
I shall find this mountain-top just another shelf on the side of the
Mountain of Infinite Unfolding. I shall have risen perhaps only the
first mile. I shall have millions of miles yet to rise.
This will be another Commencement Day and Master's Degree. Infinite the
number on up. "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered
into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that
love Him."
We are not growing old. We are going up to Eternal Life.
Rejoice and Go Upward!
ANOTHER BEGINNING
The Big Business of Life Turning work Into Play
By Ralph Parlette
This book proves that the real big business is that of getting our
happiness now in our work, and not tomorrow for our work.
Judge Ben B. Lindsey, the kids' Judge, says: "It is a great big boost
for everybody who will read it. People ought to buy them by the gross
and send them to their friends."
Dr. J. G. Crabbe, President of the State Teachers College, Greeley,
Colo., says: "The Big Business of Life is a real joy to read. It is big
and ought to be read today and tomorrow and forevermore every where. It
is truly 'A Book of Rejoicing'."
The Augsberg Teacher, a Magazine for Teachers, says: "In The Big
Business of Life we have the practical philosophy that it is everyone's
business to abolish work and turn this world into a playground. Who
will not confess that many mortals take their work too seriously, and
that to them it is a joyless, cheerless thing? To be able to find
happiness, and to find it when we are bending to our duties is to
possess the secret of living to the full. And happiness is to be sought
within, and not among the things that lie at our feet. The book before
us is wholesome and vivacious. It provokes many a smile, and beneath
each one is a bit of wisdom it would do us a world of good to learn. It
recalls the saying of the wise man 'A merry heart doeth good like a
medicine'."
Many who have read The Big Business of Life write us that they think it
is even better than "The University of Hard Knocks," which, they add,
is mighty hard to beat.
It's Up To You!
Are You Shaking Up or Rattling Down?
Go On South!
The Best is Yet to Come
The Salvation of a Sucker
You Can't Get Something for Nothing
These booklets by Ralph Parlette are short stories adapted from
chapters in "The University of Hard Knocks."
John C. Carroll, President of the Hyde Park State Bank of Chicago,
bought 1000 copies of the booklet "It's Up to You!" and of it he says,
"Parlette's Beans and Nuts is just as good as the Message to Garcia and
will be handed around just us much. I have handed the book to business
men, to young fellows, bond salesmen and such, to our own vice
president, and they all want another copy to send to some friend. I
would rather be author of it than president of the bank."
Employers in every line of business are buying quantities of "It's Up
to You!" for their workers.
William Jennings Bryan says of the booklet "Go On South": "It is one of
the great stories of the day."
Charles Grilk of Davenport, says: "My two children and I read the
Mississippi River story together and we were thoroly delighted."
Instruct us to send one of these booklets to your friends. It will
delight them more than any small present you can make.
End of Project Gutenberg's The University of Hard Knocks, by Ralph Parlette
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