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 CCE-RIGliT DEPOSIT. 
 
THE 
 
 USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 AND 
 OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 CHARLES W. COLLINS 
 
 BOSTON 
 
 THE PILOT PUBLISHING COMPANY 
 
 1916 
 
*& 
 
 
 Nihil Obstat 
 PATRICK J. WATERS, Ph. D. 
 
 Imprimatur 
 * WILLIAM CARDINAL O'CONNELL 
 
 Archbishop of Boston 
 
 NOV -6/91S 
 
 Copyright 1916 by Charles W. Collins 
 ©CIA446523 
 
V 
 
 U* 
 
 To the 
 
 Pilot Publishing Company and its officers 
 
 By whom these little papers were 
 
 First given a welcome in the columns of 
 
 The Pilot 
 
 Gratitude and thanks 
 
 For past encouragement and for their present 
 
 Permanent form 
 
 Are hereby acknowledged 
 
 By the Author. 
 
CONTENTS. 
 
 Page 
 
 FOREWORD 6 
 
 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 8 
 
 THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY 14 
 
 THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS 20 
 
 GREAT AND LITTLE MEN 26 
 
 THE MIRAGE 32 
 
 SARCASM 38 
 
 THE OPEN MIND 44 
 
 COMPROMISE 49 
 
 RELIABLE MEN 54 
 
 THE CALL OF THE SEA 59 
 
 UNCONSCIOUS POETS 65 
 
 HEROES AND VALETS 71 
 
 SELF EXPRESSION 76 
 
 MECHANICAL MILLENIUM 83 
 
 MURDER AND MONEY 89 
 
 THE MODERN CITY 94 
 
 IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION 100 
 
 ACROBATS '. 105 
 
 OBLIGATIONS Ill 
 
 THE BETTERERS 116 
 
 TAKING PAINS 121 
 
 UNWORKED MINES 127 
 
 ATROCIOUS ENGLISH 132 
 
 BLATHER 138 
 
 APPEARANCES 143 
 
 THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE 149 
 
CONTENTS— Continued. 
 
 Page 
 
 THE SEEKERS 155 
 
 POPULAR TASTE 160 
 
 DEMAGOGUES 165 
 
 THE GLAD HAND 170 
 
 CHILDHOOD 176 
 
 THE BECKONING WEST 182 
 
 THE MORNING INTERVAL 187 
 
 ACCOMPLISHMENT 192 
 
 TODAY 198 
 
 THE BLACK M'AN 204 
 
 FRIENDSHIP 210 
 
 ENCOURAGEMENT 216 
 
 THE LAND OF JOY 222 
 
 THE AGELESS HEART 227 
 
 IN MEMORIAM 233 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 G"lHESTERTON, writing of the "Toy 
 Theatre" remarks that "the most inter- 
 esting thing about the theatrical art is 
 that the spectator sees the whole thing 
 through a window." 
 
 The most interesting thing about life is 
 that the spectator sees it through two small win- 
 dows which, though limiting his range, provide 
 in turn a wealth of detail and a vista of bound- 
 less variety and charm. The moving procession, 
 the still background have, of course, an objective 
 reality; but each individual brings to the survey 
 a store of memories and a mental viewpoint all 
 his own. 
 
 This mental refraction and coloring of per- 
 sonality have two important consequences for 
 human knowledge and literature: they thwart 
 the formation of a complete and accurate mass 
 of data on such topics as science and history, 
 but, on the other hand, they endow mankind with 
 the inexhaustible riches of imagination and in- 
 dependent thought. Science is as unreliable as 
 the sea. History, even when treating of con- 
 temporaneous events, is one-sided and fragmen- 
 tary and becomes the more vague and misleading 
 
FOREWORD. 
 
 according to the remoteness of the period 
 studied. 
 
 Contrast with this the imagery and music of 
 the poet, the multitude of characters springing 
 from the brain of the novelist, the flashing 
 power and far horizon of the philosopher; all 
 because each, whatever his gifts or bent, looks 
 out upon the world and humanity through two 
 small windows and beholds what is given no 
 other in the whole universe to see just as he 
 sees it. 
 
 The reminiscences of the policeman, the ideas 
 of the car-conductor, the philosophy of "the man 
 on the street" have a real value as well as those 
 of the men and women to whom the world listens 
 with bated breath for each has a story to tell 
 that is unique. The pity is, that while the vision 
 and the thought are universal, the faculty of 
 adequate and sincere expression is given to few. 
 
 The above then is the Apologia for this book 
 or, if you will, this series of glimpses at life. 
 It brings no new message. It preaches no gos- 
 pel. It solves no problems. But it has this 
 title to existence, a title like the "key of the 
 fields" for those who seek it. It is a human 
 document, things seen by the Looker-On 
 through his two small windows. 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 a-IDVERSITY is like the Angel with 
 whom Jacob wrestled. It blesses 
 those who strive against it. Men 
 ever sigh for wealth and ease, twin 
 foes of individuals and States. No one 
 yearns for adversity though its stroke 
 is beneficent. Few strong, true men are 
 overborne by trials ; they rise above them 
 purified and strengthened, but myriads of 
 giant souls have succumbed to the Circean 
 spell of prosperity and under it have for- 
 gotten manhood and honor. Men like 
 moths love to hover around the flame that 
 will wither them. 
 
 The great empires, the mighty nations 
 that endured long and won great glory, 
 were nurtured in the hard cradle of self- 
 denial, extended their confines by disci- 
 pline and economy and went to ruin 
 through excessive wealth and the enerva- 
 tion that follows in its train. Had the Na- 
 poleon of Waterloo been the Napoleon of 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 Marengo and Lodi the history of Europe 
 would be different today. 
 
 No soft-handed people unaccustomed to 
 braving the elements and the savage could 
 have torn America from England's grasp 
 and built up this Republic. The colonist in 
 the Western wilderness prepared himself 
 in adversity for the conflict that brought 
 this nation into being. Nor could England 
 herself have come to her present position 
 or retained the colonies that are now hers 
 had not her sons preserved a good modi- 
 cum of that discipline and fortitude in 
 hardship, by which her empire has been 
 built up and maintained. 
 
 Persecuted peoples are the hardiest. 
 They may lose their national identity but 
 they will win in every clime. The Jews 
 have ceaselessly borne for thousands of 
 years every variety of misfortune, the 
 Land of Promise has passed from them, 
 they are exiles ; yet in every civilized land 
 they constitute a minority strong out of 
 all proportion with their numbers. 
 
 The Irish people ground for centuries 
 under the heel of an atrocious tyranny 
 have not been annihilated by it but 
 
THB USES OP ADVHRSTFT 
 
 strengthened. They have made their mark 
 in every nation under the sun. They are 
 in the van of progress throughout the 
 world. Wherever you find a man of might 
 and kindness, a man of eloquence and prac- 
 ticalness, a man who will ride into the jaws 
 of death unterrified or sway thousands 
 with the magic of his voice, you may be 
 sure that he is at least in part an Irish- 
 man. 
 
 England persecuted Ireland, yet in that 
 persecution she has been the means of 
 breeding a type of man which the world 
 had never known before. 
 
 The men whose names are writ large 
 across the pages of the Nineteenth Cen- 
 tury and those who stand today the ac- 
 credited leaders in every sphere of activity 
 were not cradled in the lap of luxury, but 
 imbibed the energy that made them what 
 they are, from the hard breast of that se- 
 vere nurse, Adversity. 
 
 Read their biographies and you will find 
 that they were brought up in small houses, 
 with scanty food, that they wrested edu- 
 cation from life, that they fought every 
 step of their way up the heights ; and if 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 11 
 
 their faces are a bit grim and their hearts 
 somewhat seared, we should not wonder, 
 for these scarred warriors have come 
 through a hundred battles. 
 
 Watch workmen flinging coal or rock 
 against a screen. The larger lumps re- 
 sist the impact and remain outside, the 
 smaller ones pass through the coarse wires, 
 next against a screen of closer meshes and 
 so on until the different sizes are distrib- 
 uted. So are men flung against the screen 
 of life. Those of strong character and 
 intelligence resist the impact and take the 
 first places. Lesser men are sifted through 
 the graduated series of meshes of the life- 
 screen until they reach their allotted place 
 and field of usefulness or uselessness. It 
 is the shock, the impact, that proves their 
 quality. 
 
 Perfection comes through pain or some- 
 thing analogous to pain. Marble is hewn 
 into the statue by the blows of the chisel 
 and the mallet, the diamond is cut and 
 polished into glittering facets by keen in- 
 struments and the remorseless wheel, the 
 dream of the architect comes into being 
 only when stones torn from the hillside 
 
12 THE USES OF ADVBRSITT. 
 
 are cut into symmetry by ceaseless blows, 
 when trees shorn of their dignity and fo- 
 liage are sawed and planed into proper di- 
 mensions. 
 
 The laughing child, the smooth-browed 
 youth and maiden, have that beauty of 
 Nature about them that we see in the 
 blooming meadow and the quiet forest ; but 
 it is only when time, experience and adver- 
 sity have written their record on the brow 
 and the brain behind it that men and 
 women reach their true maturity of char- 
 acter. 
 
 Uniformly through created things from 
 the lowest to the highest works the inex- 
 orable law that the worth of man as the 
 worth of things must be shown forth 
 through bitterness and pain. Life does to 
 the soul of man what civilization and its 
 works do to inanimate Nature — tears, 
 cuts and smooths it to beauty and useful- 
 ness by hard blows. 
 
 Adversity alone strengthens. The an- 
 cient pagan saw that life was hard, steeled 
 his soul and worked on. The modern 
 pagan does the same. But man is more 
 
THE USES OP ADVERSITT. 13 
 
 than a beast and there is not equity in 
 this view of life. 
 
 Christ has blessed adversity ; glorified it 
 with a halo that is His own. He first went 
 up that awful road that leads to the Cross 
 and proved to men that the path of adver- 
 sity is the way to Heaven ; that it is only 
 through pain, sorrow and death that we 
 come to the only victory and only peace 
 that are worth striving for by the sons of 
 men. 
 
THE BLESSING OF 
 NECESSITY. 
 
 ffi 
 
 OST of the best work that men have 
 done in this world was done be- 
 cause they had to do it. It matters 
 little whether the necessity was 
 material or psychological; whether it was 
 that they must succeed or starve, or were 
 impelled to action by a mysterious law of 
 their souls. However we reason it out, 
 for them there w r as no middle course, no 
 alternative ; they were compelled to labor, 
 ponder, improve until their work was com- 
 plete and flawless. 
 
 Of course, there is this great difference 
 between the work that is done by men to 
 gain bread or pay a debt, and tha.t which 
 is the result of an inward conviction that 
 they are the bearers of a message which 
 they must deliver in the most perfect and 
 enduring form; one is accidental, the 
 other a part of the man. But the result 
 in each case is the same. Necessity is the 
 motive power. 
 
THE BLESSING OP NECESSITY. 15 
 
 How often we see men with every gift 
 except energy ! All their ability is palsied 
 by incorrigible indolence. They put off 
 the time of exertion from day to day and 
 daily the potentiality evaporates. Finally, 
 there comes the time when their eyes are 
 opened, but their hands are powerless, and 
 then comes bitter pessimism. 
 
 What a curse is laziness! It robs the 
 most gifted man of the power of produc- 
 tion. It makes of him who might have 
 been an ornament of his age, a benefactor 
 of his kind, an honor to his family, nothing 
 but a useless hulk. Fortunate is the man 
 congenitally lazy whom hard necessity or 
 the irresistable impulse from within, 
 pushes on to accomplishment. Necessity 
 has redeemed him. 
 
 Look at the crowds content to gain a 
 livelihood, earn enough for food, buy pleas- 
 ure and nothing more. Look at the hosts 
 of men with intelligence and education who 
 accomplish nothing and sink to the level 
 of the illiterate toiler. There can be no 
 question that in the multitude is extra- 
 ordinary ability, which under happier con- 
 ditions with more inward force, might 
 
U THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 have won all the rewards that life holds 
 out to him who strives. 
 
 Consider the inventions that have revo- 
 lutionized life in modern times. Not one 
 of these marvellous machines has been 
 evolved except at the expense of sleepless 
 nights, laborious days, monastic self-de- 
 nial and a perseverance all but incredible. 
 These inventors were possessed by their 
 message. They could not but keep on until 
 it had been delivered to mankind in the 
 best form they could give to it. Necessity 
 compelled them. 
 
 Consider the architects of the modern 
 fabulous fortunes. Prescinding from the 
 morality of their methods, the amount of 
 work the producers of these fortunes have 
 performed staggers belief. As an example 
 of what human ability and iron will can do, 
 it stands apart in the annals of mankind. 
 Almost every one of these men started at 
 the bottom and forced his way into power 
 by herculean struggles. What power urged 
 them on? 
 
 The men who have done great things in 
 our land in statesmanship, in the profes- 
 sions, who stand today the leaders of the 
 
THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY. 37 
 
 nation, have worked harder and more con- 
 stantly than the laborer in the trench. 
 Progress in these lines is never easy. There 
 is but one way to the top, that of hard, 
 gruelling work. Would these men have 
 condemned themselves to careers of cease- 
 less toil, not only to gain a place, but hav- 
 ing gained, to hold it, unless they felt they 
 had to? I trow not. 
 
 Go over the long list of scientists who 
 have wrung from Nature her deeply hidden 
 secrets, who have found out the enemies 
 of the human system in the blood and tis- 
 sues, who have lengthened the span of life 
 for millions and given to humanity a 
 working and winning force that otherwise 
 would have been a dream. They have done 
 all these things on the spur of necessity. 
 Whether they worked for mankind, for 
 fame, or for wealth, need not concern us : 
 they have proved themselves overpower- 
 ing benefactors to men. These blessings 
 we would not have, had not necessity com- 
 pelled the discoverers to go on until the 
 result was achieved. 
 
 Consider the great books that men have 
 written for the instruction and enjoyment 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 of their contemporaries and posterity. 
 Hardly one of these but was rewritten 
 scores of times, pondered and polished un- 
 til they were masterpieces. It is an in- 
 tolerable labor, yet scholars and artists 
 will do it until the end of the world, be- 
 cause they must do it. 
 
 Finally, the highest and most important 
 work that men have before them in life is 
 the salvation of their souls. If they 
 "scorn delights and live laborious days/' 
 fast, pray, scourge their bodies by morti- 
 fication, tell themselves that life is short 
 and eternity long, that pleasure deludes 
 and the world is a snare, and use up the 
 power of their souls that they may de- 
 velop in those souls spirituality, that 
 cleanness of heart v/ithout which we can- 
 not see God, we can be sure they suffer and 
 do all these things, because they are con- 
 vinced to the innermost fibre Of their be- 
 ings, that they must do so or die the 
 eternal death. 
 
 Yes, necessity is indeed a blessing to 
 mankind. Let those, therefore, whose 
 lives are hard and duties endless and re- 
 sponsibilities without number, cease repin- 
 
THE BLESSING OF NECESSITY. i9 
 
 ing and be thankful that such is their lot, 
 for they are the most fortunate of man- 
 kind. Without work there is nothing, and 
 there is no lasting work, no enduring ac- 
 complishment that is not born of that 
 hard-featured, yet kind-hearted and wise 
 mother, Necessity. 
 
THE FUTILITY OF 
 BITTERNESS. 
 
 9 
 
 N AUTHOR, whose books have de- 
 lighted thousands, met with a 
 great sorrow, one sufficient to shad- 
 ow forever the life of an ordinary 
 man. I often wondered how it would affect 
 his work. Some weeks ago a short story 
 from his pen was published, a little tale 
 so sprightly, so deftly told and shot 
 through with sunshine, that I marvelled 
 he could produce it even under the happi- 
 est circumstances. 
 
 I sent my congratulations, adding that 
 I was glad to see that trouble had not em- 
 bittered him. At the end of his character* 
 istic letter, he set down these words: 
 "I do not understand embitterment as the 
 result of anything." That phrase has 
 given me food for thought ever since. 
 
 How pitifully often do we see men and 
 women of more than average ability, 
 people who are valuable to the community, 
 giving away beneath a stroke of misfor- 
 tune and allowing it to render them cyni- 
 
THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 21 
 
 cal and discouraged. Metaphorically they 
 throw up their hands as if fate had ruined 
 their lives and relieved them from fur- 
 ther effort. What a detestable obsession ; 
 what moral cowardice! The children of 
 men have been suffering these blows since 
 the expulsion from Eden. Most of what 
 we enjoy in the intellectual sphere as well 
 as in material comfort, we owe to the 
 period after the calamity in each life, the 
 fruits of dauntless struggle, the victory 
 gained amid the throes of mental or physi- 
 cal pain. 
 
 Milton wrote his great poem after he 
 was stricken with blindness. Carlyle 
 forged his massive productions in the 
 agony of dyspepsia. Stevenson labored 
 over those classics he has given us, with 
 the grisly specter of consumption ever be- 
 fore him. It is not necessary to accumu- 
 late instances — each reader can easily 
 compile his own list. But the lesson in 
 all such cases is the same. The test was 
 there, coming in one form or another, and 
 they worthily passed it and went on to do 
 their appointed work with the best energy 
 that was in them. 
 
22 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 During long railroad journeys I have 
 often noticed the barren marshes near 
 the sea. Years do not change them. There 
 they are with their useless crop of swamp 
 grass, a misery even to the eye of the 
 traveler. There are dispositions like those 
 salt marshes. The individuals have in 
 many cases had hard lots, much labor, fre- 
 quent disappointments — and these have 
 soured them. They view each acquain- 
 tance acridly, they have nothing good to 
 say of anyone, they seem to take a fear- 
 ful joy in the misfortunes of others, as if 
 in some diabolical fashion these fed the 
 fires of resentment. 
 
 You meet such a person; his cynicism 
 makes its impression; you go your way. 
 You return after five or ten years. Every 
 day in those years has been marked in 
 your memory by death, bereavement, 
 financial trouble, pitiful cases of disease, 
 and you feel a great compassion for the 
 suffering, and admiration for courage 
 under dire distress. Those years 
 likewise have been marked by countless 
 triumphs in the spiritual, intellectual and 
 material world. Men have accomplished 
 
THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 23 
 
 much for the glory and improvement of 
 mankind. Heroism has shone forth, great 
 works of the mind produced, wonderful 
 structures raised, chasms spanned, science 
 has gone forward with mighty strides. 
 With these thoughts in your mind, you 
 encounter the old acquaintance. Not a 
 change ! The same sour grimace, the same 
 mordant comment, the same unholy glee 
 that another soul is suffering. Human 
 salt marsh! 
 
 You are on a journey and the train nears 
 a point that has always been distasteful 
 to you. It was sterile, neglected, offensive 
 to sight and smell. You stare in amaze- 
 ment. Has Aladdin's genie been at work? 
 Instead of noisesome pools, rubbish-strewn 
 land and snarling profanity, there are trim 
 lawns and flowers, well-kept houses and 
 children laughing and desporting on the 
 grass. It took hard work to effect 
 that transformation, but how beautifully 
 worth while it was. Thus too, grace and 
 courage transform unpleasant dispositions, 
 when their possessors eschew selfishness 
 and make up their minds to be of use to 
 their neighbors. 
 
24 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 The fact is, embitterment is synony- 
 mous with selfishness; concentrated, un- 
 reasonable selfishness. It is individual 
 nihilism. They who give it domain over 
 them in effect say: "if I cannot have 
 health, ease of mind and the good things 
 of life, I shall do my best to keep them 
 from others and when I cannot do that, I 
 shall exert myself to spoil their enjoy- 
 ment." Of course, this is not all conscious. 
 Much of it is entirely unconscious. It can 
 co-exist with a measure of exterior devo- 
 tion. The victims are let alone as a rule. 
 People recognize that such cases are gen- 
 erally incurable and do not risk their peace 
 of mind and perhaps reputations by ex- 
 postulations. It takes a stout heart to 
 reclaim a salt marsh. 
 
 But what a living encouragement, what 
 a trumpet note of power is sent forth by 
 those who cause men to rub their eyes 
 and lift their heads and take heart again 
 at indomitable cheerfulness and spirits on- 
 ly ennobled by pain and sorrow ! Such rare 
 souls do not realize the good they do, but 
 they will one day when good deeds are 
 counted. Meanwhile as a bit of sane phil- 
 
THE FUTILITY OF BITTERNESS. 25 
 
 osophy, think over my friend's remark: 
 "I do not understand embitterment as the 
 result of anything." 
 
GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 
 
 OME men are moulded intellectually 
 on large lines and for good or ill 
 are destined to play a controlling 
 part in the affairs of the world. 
 They are few, and it is better so, for other- 
 wise the earth would be a battle-ground 
 of Titans. 
 
 Other men — and they are the great 
 majority — are cast in a small mould and 
 are unable to do much good or harm. This, 
 too, is providential, for the labor of the 
 world must be performed by a multitude 
 of small men, each working in his own 
 place and doing his part. 
 
 It has always been so from the begin- 
 ning of history and under all kinds of 
 government. It is a fixed and immutable 
 law that a few, stronger, wiser and more 
 energetic than their neighbors, shall 
 dominate, while the rest shall be domi- 
 nated. It is the hierarchy of ability which 
 no man can disestablish. 
 
GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 27 
 
 Men of extraordinary power and energy 
 are urged on by the force of genius. Theirs 
 is the unerring insight, the breadth of out- 
 look, the capacity for doing things by 
 wholesale and commanding the situation 
 at a glance. 
 
 They cannot be men of details, for details 
 eat time, yet they must possess the gift of 
 comprehending details in the flash of an 
 eye. The commander of an army or the 
 head of a giant corporation cannot burden 
 his memory or waste his days with the 
 thousand small things which, for all their 
 smallness, must be well and faithfully 
 done. He selects others to look after such 
 things, and on the accuracy of this selec- 
 tion depends the success of the leader. 
 Moreover he must imbue with his own 
 spirit those who work for him that he may 
 see with a hundred eyes and act with a 
 hundred hands, for there is much to do 
 and the time is short. 
 
 It matters little in what century or in 
 what circumstances a great man is born. 
 He grasps events and sways them. He 
 comes to his own by inalienable right. No 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 one may lift the sword Excalibur except 
 Arthur. But he pays a high price for this. 
 He knows little peace. It is his lot to be 
 criticized unsparingly, for he cannot be 
 overlooked. Like St. Peter's or the Colos- 
 seum, great men fill the eye of the be- 
 holder ; their lightest word is remembered, 
 their smallest act recorded, their slightest 
 failing the theme of endless comment. 
 Thus it is that every man of power goes 
 into history maligned and vilified, for he 
 becomes a shibboleth and stirs the passions 
 of his time. 
 
 Small men are blessed in their limita- 
 tions. They are content in a narrow field, 
 happy in simple duties and pleasures. 
 They are spared the call of action, the 
 spur of ambition and the tongue of 
 calumny. It is their good fortune to be 
 fashioned for the quality of the work they 
 do and the places they must fill, and, if 
 we look at life from the standpoint of con- 
 tentment, they are doubtless the happiest 
 people in the world. Were they to be 
 raised to high places they would die of 
 misery, for, though they would not lack 
 
GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. V;9 
 
 abuse from others, their most merciless 
 critics would be themselves. So they 
 gravitate into their allotted places and 
 fulfil the law of their being. 
 
 Sometimes, however, small men fancy 
 they possess eminent ability and grasp 
 and, like the luckless frog who would vie 
 with the elephant, burst themselves with 
 striving. Once in a while some man of 
 meager mental equipment w T hose sole large 
 quality is self-conceit is lifted by chance 
 or unwise friends into high position, and 
 his frantic attempts to meet its require- 
 ments are painfully grotesque. The pub- 
 lic laughs and winks, but he notices 
 nothing. Like the demented individual 
 who imagines himself an emperor, the 
 conceited small man in great place is happy 
 in his delusion, a self-admirer with few 
 rivals, a petty paranoiac. But all this is 
 exceedingly unfortunate for others. They 
 pay the full vicarious penalty for his mis- 
 takes, his posing, his unfitness. The very 
 incongruity of the situation is painful. 
 
 Most communities are afflicted with 
 small men in important offices. This is 
 
30 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 one of the main reasons why villainy 
 thrives, needed work remains undone, and 
 time and money are wasted. Happily, un- 
 der democratic government there is a 
 chance of getting rid of the incubus. Some- 
 times, however, he is a life-incumbent and 
 then it is that the wide range of his de- 
 ficiencies is disclosed and the full measure 
 of his costliness realized. 
 
 The greatest men cannot do all things 
 well. No one can satisfy the whole public. 
 Life at best is a series of experiments and 
 compromises and even the wisest and most 
 far-sighted make their mistakes. But 
 these mistakes are valuable and the public 
 reaps the benefit. Such drawbacks are 
 to be expected in human nature and throw 
 into higher relief what is well accom- 
 plished. 
 
 When great positions are greatly filled, 
 the affairs of the community are properly 
 and intelligently administered, needed re- 
 forms instituted and public confidence 
 maintained. The very fallibility and 
 natural human weaknesses of the gifted 
 administrator and tribune of the people 
 
GREAT AND LITTLE MEN. 81 
 
 draw men to him by the cords of Adam. 
 Through the ruck and seeming confusion 
 of action the purpose of the great leader 
 is gradually revealed until finally men 
 rub their eyes and realize that the 
 right hand is at the helm — though some- 
 times this recognition does not come until 
 the helmsman is cold in death. But it 
 must come in time, for truth is mighty and 
 shall prevail and the common judgment 
 of men is finally right. 
 
 "The evil that men do lives after them ; 
 the good is oft interred with their bones/' 
 said the poet. But in the case of really 
 great men the reverse is true ; their frail- 
 ties are laid away in the coffin, but what 
 they have won for their brethren lives on 
 and works beneficence. The new provinces 
 annexed, the discoveries perfected, the 
 wise government established, the bound- 
 less legacies of genius, are the property of 
 mankind. The great man dies when his 
 time comes, but humanity thrives and 
 wins. 
 
THE MIRAGE. 
 
 XWANT to get out," said the star- 
 ling. This is not a world of con- 
 tented people. Nearly every one 
 finds his lot in life unsatisfactory 
 and wastes time in vain regrets. He mag- 
 nifies his own troubles and minimizes those 
 of his neighbors. If you could look into 
 the hearts of those about you, it would be 
 found that almost all are in the same con- 
 dition as yourself, beating their soul wings 
 against the bars of circumstance, like the 
 starling. Each human being is in his own 
 cage and the world is a huge cage around 
 them all. Analyze the situation. 
 
 Take the monarch. He is the prize pris- 
 soner. Birth, etiquette, precedent, for- 
 eign relations are the bars of his' cage. Of 
 course he wants to get out. Those who 
 have tried it by abdication have found 
 themselves living in an environment for 
 which they were not fitted. He is born 
 in captivity and freedom is not for him. 
 Take the millionaire, the rich business 
 
THE MIRAGE. 33 
 
 man. Responsibilities, plans, the plots of 
 rivals, the fluctuations of the market are 
 the bars of his cage. He may long for the 
 old home where his boyhood was spent and 
 desire to confront the world care free. Im- 
 possible. The myriad threads of affairs 
 hold him down as the Lilliputians held Gul- 
 liver. He cannot get away. Take the aver- 
 age man. He is snugly ensconced in his 
 own particular cage. Bread and butter, 
 the welfare of his family are contingent 
 on his close application to the work before 
 him. Of course he would like to go forth 
 to strange lands, have plenty of money 
 and no anxieties. He may as well dream 
 of owning empires. He is caged. 
 
 But perhaps the tramp and the gipsy 
 are free. They go where they like, with- 
 out worries or family ties. Yes, and they 
 frequently go to the prosaic and very prac- 
 tical lock-up. They carry their cages. They 
 are ambulatory prisoners. Then again 
 they are pariahs. Every man's hand is 
 against them. Jack London's stories will 
 not tempt many boys to take up tramping 
 as a quest for happiness. Still, we cannot 
 deny it; the longing is there in high and 
 
34 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 low. Humanity re-echoes the cry of the 
 starling : "I want to get out." 
 
 Let us study this longing. The ana- 
 tomists find in the human body certain or- 
 gans whose usefulness is obscure, like the 
 appendix, which seems to menace its host 
 with death. They call these rudimentary 
 organs. They say that these once had a 
 function, but changed conditions have eli- 
 minated that function. It may be, I speak 
 in all humility, that this universal longing 
 is a rudimentary soul function which had 
 its exercise before Adam fell. Though hu- 
 man nature is weakened and debased, per- 
 haps it still conserves that faculty for en- 
 joyment granted to our First Parents 
 when the Lord placed them in Paradise, 
 and this terrible longing is only part of 
 our punishment. However, here we are, 
 each in his cage. What are we going to 
 do about it? 
 
 It is a consolation to know that the cage 
 is the common lot of all. Much of our 
 trouble comes from the error that we alone 
 are confined and others are free. No one 
 is free. It is merely a matter of cages. 
 Secondly, let us distrust the imagination. 
 
THE MIRAGE. 35 
 
 Like fire it is a good servant but a bad 
 master. The dream city is very fair, with 
 its glistening towers and fairy palaces ris- 
 ing on the far horizon, but no one can live 
 in it. It is a tantalizing allurement. The 
 poets and romancers have a heavy account 
 to render for unfitting mankind for the 
 world in which life must be lived. There 
 is no Arcadia except in poesy. "Shepherds 
 all and maidens fair" is very pretty and 
 very impractical. They are dream shep- 
 herds and dream maidens. The mind must 
 come back after the dream, tenfold sad- 
 dened for the fugitive peep into a fairy- 
 land which cannot be ours. 
 
 We make fun of Betty, the cook, as she 
 pores over stories of handsome heroes and 
 grand ladies sauntering and love-making 
 in great houses. We laugh as we see her 
 enrapt and fancying herself one of that 
 charmed circle. Betty ought to be doing 
 her washing or cleaning her dishes instead 
 of mingling in fancy with that gay throng. 
 Doubtless. But are not we as ludicrous, 
 closing our eyes to our blessings and con- 
 solations, and wishing ourselves in other 
 people's shoes? 
 
36 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 Betty may be silly, but not one whit 
 more than we. The only difference is that 
 her surroundings make the picture more 
 grotesque. Contentment lies along the 
 path of duty. We cannot attain it by by- 
 paths. The digression procures for us 
 only scratches and contusions. Keep to 
 the road. 
 
 What is the use of denying facts and 
 shutting our eyes like children, of running 
 after every will-o'-the-wisp that may lead 
 us only to sorrow and disillusion ! 
 
 God has placed us in a world just fair 
 enough to be unsatisfactory, to make us 
 long for a fairer world. He so intended it. 
 The longing that besets us, whether we 
 acknowledge it or not, is a longing for 
 Heaven. God alone can satisfy the heart 
 of man. Let us therefore wait for Him, 
 taking life cheerfully and bravely. When 
 the longing to be free comes, let us think 
 of that heavenly country where the soul 
 will enjoy its fullest exercise. When the 
 dream city shines before our eyes on the 
 far horizon, let us take it as an omen and 
 a forecast of that Celestial City prepared 
 for our eternal dwelling. We shall all get 
 
THE MIRAGE. 37 
 
 out one day, but our ultimate freedom de- 
 pends on facing life nobly in the cage. 
 
SARCASM. 
 
 05 
 
 HAT spiteful sprite visits the cradles 
 of many gifted men and adds to 
 the talents with which kindly 
 nature endows them, the one fatal 
 gift too many, sarcastic wit! It has 
 wrecked the careers and embittered the 
 days of hundreds who might have done 
 much with their lives. They seemed to 
 have every quality of leadership except 
 one. Their bitter tongues alienated those 
 who might have been their devoted liege- 
 men, stung sensitive acquaintances to life- 
 long enmity and bred distrust and dislike 
 in the public generally. There is no need 
 to call the roll of the brilliant spirits who 
 threw away the hopes of a life-time and 
 the certainty of long and fruitful service 
 for the sake of sharp epigrams. They 
 were the victims of their own vanity. 
 
 People enjoy a stinging retort, a bitter 
 jest, when they are not the target. A 
 faculty for sarcastic abuse is an asset to a 
 
SARCASM. 39 
 
 political party, but the party members do 
 not like the man of jibes a whit the better 
 for using him, and bring their confidence 
 and respect to the slow, kindly neighbor 
 who speaks plain words. They do not de- 
 mand that their leaders be "fellows of in- 
 finite jest/' and are satisfied with earnest- 
 ness and seriousness. The solemn, states- 
 manlike pose is often overdone, but the 
 popularity of the counterfeit only proves 
 the value of the reality. 
 
 Wise leaders of men are as careful about 
 the use of wit and sarcasm as the reliable 
 contractor is of high-power explosives. 
 There are times when these must be em- 
 ployed as there are times when dynamite 
 must be used to save a burning city, but 
 these occasions are rare. Men will bear 
 with violence and temper and even a de- 
 gree of bullying, for masterful men have 
 had the trick of imperiousness since the 
 world began. The soreness caused by hard 
 words soon wears away, but sarcasm car- 
 ries a poison that festers in the memory 
 for years. 
 
 One fact which renders the use of sar- 
 
46 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 castic wit such an unf orgiveable offence is 
 that the majority are powerless before it; 
 they cannot answer, but they can and 
 do resent it, feeling its unfairness 
 The man of bitter tongue who employs it 
 wantonly and frequently against his 
 neighbors is as cruel and contemptible as 
 the brute who strikes a woman or the des- 
 perado who shoots an unarmed man. He 
 is a social menace who will receive no 
 mercy. 
 
 Fortunately, sarcastic genius is rare. 
 Some, like Whistler, cultivate it and re- 
 joice in making enemies, but almost in- 
 variably it is a curse to its possessors. 
 They have their reward, it is true. Their 
 phrases are handed down for generations 
 as classics of epigram and achieve for 
 their authors an acrid immortality, but 
 this is a poor sort of success. ' 
 
 There is a class of men who wish to be 
 sarcastic, but lack the faculty that wings 
 the barbed word like an arrow. They are 
 merely spiteful. They have the nasty dis- 
 position and poison sac of the rattlesnake, 
 but are fangless. The sarcastic genius in- 
 
SARCASM. 41 
 
 vents something, his wit though stinging 
 has a malign power, but the spiteful man 
 contributes to the sum of human activities 
 nothing better than a smirk, a depreciat- 
 ing titter, a petty sneer. He does not 
 create ; he hisses. There is something mag- 
 nificent about a mind that coins the phrase 
 which will live as long as the language in 
 which it is uttered ; but the mean disposi- 
 tion that creates nothing, accomplishes 
 nothing, praises nothing, and is content 
 with impotent scoffing at the efforts and 
 success of other men, works its own con- 
 dign punishment. Some people of this 
 type have good qualities and think they 
 are of value to the world. It is a disposi- 
 tion of Providence that they fail to see 
 themselves as others see them, the pitiful 
 embodiment of a snarling sneer. 
 
 Once or twice in a century a man is born 
 with the wondrous faculty of mirroring 
 forth the words and doings of mankind in 
 mirthful guise, of touching with the fairy 
 wand of wit our vanities and shortcom- 
 ings, of giving us sound philosophy and 
 life-lore in lines of magic laughter, who 
 
42 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 
 
 contrive to be sarcastic yet never unkind. 
 Such men are benefactors of the race ; Josh 
 Billings, Artemas Ward, Eugene Field, 
 who are gone, and the genial Mr. Doo- 
 ley who is still with us. Long after they 
 are dust men and women will be glad- 
 dened by their merry thoughts, sad hearts 
 will be lightened and weary brains fresh- 
 ened by the works of these golden-hearted 
 humorists. There is no poison on their 
 shafts, no bitterness in their epigrams. 
 They have made life brighter for us all. 
 May their tribe increase, the sod rest 
 lightly upon their heads in death and may 
 the Lord be kind to them as they were 
 kind to their fellowmen! 
 
 But woe betide the public man who sets 
 up for a wit. Once he has donned the 
 livery of Harlequin, he can never take it 
 off. It is a shirt of Nessus. Men will 
 applaud his witticisms and repeat his epi- 
 grams and accord him all they give the 
 gifted clown, but their respect he can 
 never gain, no matter what his merits. 
 The public mind has an abiding distrust 
 of the joker. 
 
SARCASM. 43 
 
 Such brilliancy never made a friend, but 
 countless enemies. It blesses neither him 
 who gives nor him who receives. It is more 
 dreaded than poison and more hated than 
 sin. The counsel I would give a brother 
 who feels within him this evil genius for 
 making others squirm and rousing the 
 laugh of jeering applause is: throttle it as 
 it were a cobra, for otherwise you will live 
 to see the death of your last hope and the 
 back of your last friend and when you are 
 gone, men will say: "Thank God, there is 
 one bitter tongue the less in this world." 
 
THE OPEN MIND. 
 
 H~]GE and life are very relative terms. 
 Many men are old at thirty and 
 youth smiles from the eyes of oth- 
 ers who have passed the seventieth 
 milestone. The real distinction is between 
 the open and the closed mind. The aver- 
 age man early becomes indifferent and 
 case-hardened. He falls into ruts and 
 does not take the trouble to get out of 
 them. He takes the attitude that it is 
 foolish to spend time on anything that is 
 not of immediate use and has not to do 
 with the personal money problem. He 
 reverts to type. 
 
 Comparatively few men who succeed in 
 a marked degree or who exhibit high qual- 
 ities of resource in a crisis are groove 
 men. Of course, success is not' to be tak- 
 en as a synonym of money-making, which 
 after all is a very crude affair. Nor is 
 resource to be interpreted as the faculty 
 of doing an ordinary act at a critical time. 
 Success and resource come from the open 
 mind. 
 
THE OPEN MIND. 45 
 
 The great benefactors of mankind were 
 enabled to accomplish much by close 
 observation of men and things and 
 an intelligence that accepted each new 
 phenomenon as having a bearing on their 
 work. Creative ability in literature comes 
 to its own and delights readers because 
 they who have it and utilize it let nothing 
 escape them in the world in which they 
 live. The smallest traits of individuals, 
 the tricks of physiognomy, the moving ef- 
 fects of passion and conscience, are all 
 filed away almost unconsciously, and ev- 
 ery day adds to the collection and corrects 
 it. Great writers of fiction are of necessity 
 men whose minds are as sensitive as 
 photographic plates. 
 
 The great inventors have all their lives 
 been wide-awake to every small happen- 
 ing in inanimate nature. Those who gave 
 us the steam-engine and the electric dyna- 
 mo, communication by wire and wireless 
 and all that long list of appliances that 
 are today household words, solved their 
 delicate problems and perfected their ma- 
 chines because they were ever alert for 
 anything new in their chosen fields. The 
 
46 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 journeyman toils mechanically in his 
 place; the inventor is ceaselessly ex- 
 pectant. He may have done a bit of 
 work a thousand times, yet he is on the 
 watch for the next time when a slight 
 deviation may unfold to him a secret. 
 
 The masters of souls, the men by whose 
 instrumentality miracles of grace have 
 been wrought were men to whom each one 
 who sought them was as a book newly 
 opened. Average spiritual advisers divide 
 people into groups as one sorts vegetables, 
 but the sages of the spiritual life know that 
 each soul is a distinct entity and demands 
 a minute inspection. 
 
 The attitude is the same, one of vigilant 
 expectancy. The conclusion of yesterday 
 may at any moment be modified by the 
 developments of today. One has said that 
 genius consists in seeing what others are 
 looking at. Any other position is indi- 
 cative of mental laziness, and means the 
 loss of valuable material and knowledge. 
 With certain exceptions, each character of 
 fiction, each important discovery of 
 mechanics and science, each great truth of 
 the higher life, were passed unheeded by 
 
THE OPEN MIND. 47 
 
 myriads until the right men came and 
 made them their own. 
 
 We are often bored by the insatiable 
 curiosity of children. In a measure, it is 
 a faculty we all had once, but killed by 
 neglect. We go through life incessantly 
 grouping experiences. The alert mind does 
 indeed group them also, but always with 
 an eye for something which cannot rightly 
 be filed in the allotted places prepared. 
 A certain Oriental, who sojourned long 
 among us, was famed for his cease- 
 less questions. Reporters went to inter- 
 view him and instead were subjected to 
 analytic probing. Personages called to see 
 him and met the same fate. That man 
 has been able to do wonders for his own 
 country by reason of the searching ex- 
 amination he gave to every denizen of the 
 Western hemisphere who ever met him. 
 He was the personification of the open 
 mind. 
 
 A singular acquaintance, who recently 
 called upon me, stated that the great mys- 
 tery is "that which is called life/' It was 
 his opinion that three books were worth 
 study: — White's "Selborne," Thoreau's 
 
48 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 "Walden Pond" and Walton's "Angler." 
 He said that these three men had given 
 life real study. He also remarked that 
 nothing in the world was devoid of interest 
 and that a really wise man could write 
 volumes on the turning of a worm. Fabre 
 immortalized himself by studying insects. 
 But the boon of an open mind to the 
 ordinary man is its bounty to himself. 
 It exorcises melancholy, enlivens monot- 
 ony and makes each new day a progress 
 through some room of a wonderful mu- 
 seum. Humanity, in the mass, is a sleep- 
 ing world. The wondrous pageant sweeps 
 by unseen. But here and there are a few 
 — too few — who remain awake, and in the 
 intervals of our slumber they tell us what 
 we have missed. They are the men of the 
 open mind. 
 
COMPROMISE. 
 
 0"|NE of David Graham Phillips* short 
 stories is called "The Compro- 
 Y /[$M mise." It dealt with two strong and 
 clear-eyed people, a man and a 
 woman who, after marriage started to 
 conserve their ideals and succeed. These 
 ideals involved principle. Both found out 
 that adherence to the ideals would cost 
 success and both compromised. 
 
 The world progresses by a compromise 
 of non-essentials, but each compromise in 
 real essentials retards that progress. In 
 the latter case the individual for personal 
 success enacts, to some degree, the traitor 
 to the cause all are bound to uphold. 
 Though the individuals may not appreci- 
 ate it, each act of such a nature weakens 
 the moral fibre of the race, just as each 
 divorce strikes at marriage and each poli- 
 tical deal makes honest government more 
 difficult. 
 
 One of the basic truths the modern 
 world is fatally learning to forget it that 
 
50 THE USES OP ADVERSIT1. 
 
 rejection of compromise in essentials must 
 continue in individuals if society is to en- 
 dure. The price has nothing to do with 
 the question. From the beginning of the 
 world the best men and women have paid 
 the price unflinchingly and that is one 
 reason why the world is as good as it is 
 today, in spite of myriad evil agencies. It 
 is the individual citizen who saves the 
 State by being faithful in his own place, 
 great or small. It is the individual soldier 
 who saves the army by doing his whole 
 duty of whatever sort. If people could 
 understand that each such crisis in their 
 own lives is not merely a personal matter, 
 but a cosmic matter, they would think 
 long before deadening conscience with 
 shifts and sophistries. 
 
 In the long run, moreover, the compro- 
 miser who stoops to win, loses. There can 
 be no winning that involves loss of self-re- 
 spect. The Christian who fails at the 
 test knows himself to be unworthy of the 
 Church. The statesman who truckles to 
 retain office knows himself meaner than 
 the purchased voter. The merchant who 
 cheats because others do, knows himself 
 
COMPROMISE. 51 
 
 for a thief. There can be no winning for 
 men who resort to such practices. 
 
 The man who stands to his guns where 
 principle is involved will not go empty- 
 handed when he is called to God. He has 
 done what in him lay, to promote the com- 
 ing of God's Kingdom, the great cause of 
 all the centuries. On a lower plane, he 
 lives on, as long as there is a man on 
 earth who recognizes that stand and is 
 heartened by it. As the consequences 
 of one evil deed are endless, so are those 
 of a good deed. Did Mr. Reed fail when 
 he refused to purchase the Presidency at 
 the price of his principles ? Not at all. He 
 will be honored in history when many 
 Presidents are forgotten. Did Mr. Cleve- 
 land fail when he fought against all odds 
 for good government, was called a traitor 
 to his party and left for the nonce aban- 
 doned by all except a few? Not a bit of 
 it. The day is coming when Cleveland will 
 stand in history beside other great Amer- 
 icans, because he would not compromise 
 essentials. 
 
 The outlook for Christianity in the Wes- 
 tern world is not inspiring. What, hu- 
 
52 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 manly speaking, has been the great sol- 
 vent, the main agency of decay ? Compro- 
 mise. You can discern its destructive ef- 
 fects in every religious organization out- 
 side the Catholic Church. What has been 
 the hidden power behind that Church, that 
 has kept her steadfast to the right at all 
 costs ? The Holy Spirit, who strengthened 
 her representatives against compromise 
 in the essentials of faith and morals. 
 
 If there is any one lesson that the mod- 
 ern temporazing generation needs to learn 
 more than another, it is this same truth: 
 that compromise in essentials is ruinous 
 for the individual and the organization 
 and that the contributory agents of the 
 ruin are individuals. 
 
 Temptation normally presents the thin 
 end of the wedge to the tempted. He is 
 told that it is a small matter, that he 
 must look out for himself, that good men 
 have yielded before. 
 
 Despite all the cries of wild-eyed re- 
 formers, who yell that every city is cor- 
 rupt to the core, it is not so much the open 
 vice, the shameless deals made almost pub- 
 licly, the looting of a community by dis- 
 
COMPROMISE. 63 
 
 honest politicians. It is rather, as Phil- 
 lips states, the hold of the machine, some 
 sort of a hold, on men of principle and high 
 character, seemingly absolutely indepen- 
 dent and actually almost so. The hold 
 exists because the men of principle, to 
 gain something they wanted, have more 
 or less compromised that principle, and too 
 late find out that the thread has become a 
 cable. The quarry of the bad politician 
 is not bad men — he can get them cheap — 
 but honest men, and knowing that he can- 
 not bring them to open dishonesty, he in- 
 duces them to compromise some principle 
 for honor, trade or advantage. It is the 
 cunning network of such strings that holds 
 down the Gulliver of civic honesty. Again 
 the indictment is against the individual. 
 Life is a system of compromises — in 
 non-essentials ; but the life of compromise 
 in essentials is the vitality of putrefaction. 
 
RELIABLE MEN. 
 
 HERE are too many people in this 
 country who think that trickiness 
 and sharp dealing are the touch- 
 stones of success. Altogether too 
 much stress was laid some years ago on 
 the financial feats of men whom an 
 undeviating justice would have placed 
 in jail, but at that time they seemed very 
 clever and were pointed out to the youth 
 of the land as exemplars. One would hard- 
 ly think that such models were needed in 
 a country where adulteration, substitution 
 and jobbery had become fine arts, but as 
 a matter of fact, tricksters were for a 
 while, our symbols of success. 
 
 Certain events that have transpired have 
 somewhat sobered the public on this head. 
 The public pocket nerve suffered several 
 sharp twinges that wonderfully stimulated 
 the conscience, and it is now quite gen- 
 erally recognized that stealing directly or 
 indirectly is an indelicate way of amassing 
 a fortune. 
 
RELIABLE MEN. 65 
 
 This gospel of dishonesty was worse 
 than useless even for its own sordid ends, 
 because nine-tenths of those who heard it 
 were unable to imitate the bad examples 
 successfully. The sporadic cases of men 
 who had risen to prominence by shady 
 methods were typical of unusual ability 
 misused. It would have required genius 
 to duplicate their performances. They who 
 looked on and imitated absorbed nothing 
 except the cult of dishonesty. 
 
 It placed the idea in many slow brains 
 that no one but the fool earned money; 
 that sharp men arranged a shell game 
 and acquired it easily. The entire ethical 
 question of right and wrong was ignored 
 as if it were an exploded theory. The 
 logical consequences of cutting away from 
 the moorings of business honesty were 
 inevitable. We have all helped to pay for 
 this pernicious preaching. 
 
 It would be a "consummation devoutly 
 to be wished" if men, and especially young 
 men, were to realize that, apart from any 
 higher considerations, honesty is the best 
 policy and that it is the reliable man who 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 succeeds in the long run, not the rogue. 
 
 The very men who were responsible for 
 the debauchery of business methods illus- 
 trated the truth of the adage, for they 
 gathered about them faithful and reliable 
 employees, "falsely true." If this is the 
 rule with financial buccaneers, it is ten fold 
 true of reputable business men. 
 
 Every organization must have reliable 
 men. They are the stone, steel and con- 
 crete of the business edifice. Many other 
 qualities are desirable for the up-building, 
 promotion and growth of a great enter- 
 prise; initiative, alertness, system and so 
 on, but reliability is essential. 
 
 The great rewards of life come to those 
 who unite in their personalities large men- 
 tal grasp, ceaseless activity and dominat- 
 ing character, but such men are few. Those 
 of lesser gifts must be content with lesser 
 rewards. The one path of success to the 
 average man is along the lines of faithful 
 service. 
 
 Napoleon revolutionized warfare, but he 
 had behind him soldiers who idolized their 
 leader. He supplied the genius, his men 
 
RELIABLE MEN. 57 
 
 the faithfulness and courage. The trend 
 of modern methods is toward consolida- 
 tion. In every department of life large 
 organizations, well-planned and superbly- 
 officered, are the order of the day. In 
 them a man is assessed at his true valua- 
 tion as a worker. If he has unusual abil- 
 ity, some special gift that makes him valu- 
 able to the men at the helm, he is sure of 
 advancement — but he must be reliable. 
 
 Brilliant dilletanti we may have from 
 time to time, whimsical geniuses who de- 
 light us in hours of ease, but we will have 
 nothing of them in the strenuous work of 
 life. Modern life for men of responsibility 
 is an affair of strain. They supply the 
 initiative, the push, the plans. What they 
 need and must have is a supply of men 
 upon whom they can depend ; who will not 
 steal or be faithless or careless, but attend 
 faithfully to their several departments. 
 
 These adventurers who win every thing 
 by an amazing coup, who outwit the old 
 campaigners, almost invariably lose every- 
 thing by an equally amazing coup. One 
 might as well take a tight-wire artist as 
 
58 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 a model. The work and business of the land 
 is compacted of individuals who, utilizing 
 in full measure the abilities with which 
 they are endowed, do their best quietly 
 and steadily. There is no place for ad- 
 venturers, or tricksters on the firing line of 
 modern business. Some do appear, but 
 gravitate by elimination to the peniten- 
 tiary and the madhouse. 
 
 A human organization built up for a 
 definite purpose in trade or manufactures 
 tends to approach the machine. The effi- 
 ciency of a machine depends on the quality 
 of the parts and their efficiency. Men hate 
 to be called cogs in a human machine, yet 
 after all, the organization is democratic in 
 this, that all concerned have their part in 
 its fitness and effectiveness. It all comes to 
 this, little as we may like it; we are cogs 
 in the machinery of life, or else we are 
 on the scrap-heap. Our practical duty is 
 to be good cogs. 
 
THE CALL OF THE SEA. 
 
 9^]HE warm Spring winds and the stir- 
 \*s ring of Nature after the winter's 
 sleep awaken in the hearts of 
 thousands of inland dwellers a 
 longing for the sea. Though the spell that 
 the ocean casts over mankind is as ancient 
 as the tides, it is today as potent as when 
 the returning Greeks from Persia raised 
 the joyful shout, "The sea! The sea," or 
 Balboa "silent on a peak in Darien" first 
 surveyed the Pacific. 
 
 Had not the testimony of ages proved 
 that the ocean exerts a magic influence on 
 men, we might surmise that national rest- 
 lessness or a search for health was the 
 reason for the annual hegira of Americans 
 to the coast. Both have much to do with 
 the migration, but deeper and more far- 
 reaching than either is an impulse as sub- 
 tle, yet powerful as love or music, an inde- 
 finable, inward summons — the call of the 
 sea. 
 
 To those who dwell along the shore, who 
 
60 THE USES OF ADVERSIT5T. 
 
 are familiar with every mood of that 
 changeful element, life holds an ever-pres- 
 ent phase of the unexpected and a novelty 
 that rarely palls. They live on the border 
 line of the mysterious and unfathomable, 
 but in truth it is only they who, loving the 
 sea, must pass their days far away from 
 it, or they who were cradled among moun- 
 tains or on prairies, enjoy to the full 
 capacity of their being the enchanting 
 mystery of the deep. 
 
 What swimmer can ever be content in 
 land-locked lake or tepid river, who has 
 breasted the Atlantic, plunged through its 
 giant rollers and been swept in on the crest 
 of its foam-flecked breakers ? The river is 
 dead, the lake a listless medium, but the 
 sea is joyously, aggressively alive. A man 
 may love the city's roar, he may expe- 
 rience the deep peace of the mountains, but 
 the ocean's thunder soothes and its rock- 
 born spray is as strong wine to the hearts 
 of men. 
 
 Even for those whom sickness or weari- 
 ness condemns to inactivity, who can only 
 feast their eyes on the changing pageant 
 of the waters, watch the golden moon-path 
 
THE CALL OF THE SEA. 61 
 
 across the undulating surface or the toss- 
 ing waves of the sea-horses in storm, 
 there is nepenthe in the sea. 
 
 One recalls Mr. Blaine's eloquent and 
 pathetic funeral oration over President 
 Garfield, when he speaks of the dying 
 man's longing for the sea, his hope that 
 health would return to him near the ocean 
 where he would be lulled to sleep by the 
 sound of its myriad voices. It expresses 
 so well the yearning of sick soul or stricken 
 body for that mighty, distant music — the 
 call of the sea. 
 
 Who can sing a new song of the ocean ! 
 The sweetest singers, the most gorgeous 
 painters of word-pictures have done their 
 best, and the world knows it by heart. But 
 the influence that inspired them all is en- 
 dowed with immortal youth ; it sweeps the 
 heart-strings of prosaic beings, making 
 soundless music, thrilling mankind from 
 age to age. Doubtless the jaded occu- 
 pant of the Twentieth Century is filled 
 with the same delightful awe as he gazes 
 over the wide blue waters, as that which 
 stirred the first man who stood on the 
 
62 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 verge of a continent, rapt in that moving 
 mystery, the sea. 
 
 It may be the same the world over, this 
 summer exodus to the coast, but there 
 must be a difference in the older coun- 
 tries, where the people are rooted in 
 their own ground and attached to the home 
 roof -tree. In some way they have lived 
 longer than we and lost that curious hope- 
 fulness which is such a marked character- 
 istic of our people. The American is no- 
 madic; his household gods are set up on 
 wheels. His environment incites him to 
 change. As Spring approaches the jour- 
 nals and magazines put forth their leaves 
 of alluring advertisements, and every bill- 
 board blooms into pictures of seashore de- 
 lights. Nature, trade and his own rebelli- 
 ous heart conspire to transport him sea- 
 ward, and he needs must go. 
 
 Even under modern conditions the 
 breaking up of a household and its tempo- 
 rary establishment elsewhere are expen- 
 sive and troublesome. Grown-up people 
 feel this keenly. It dulls the pleasure of a 
 summer vacation, for domestic and finan- 
 cial anxieties flourish under any sky. 
 
THE CALL OF THE SEA. 63 
 
 Not so with the child. To him the pack- 
 ing of trunks is a joyful portent. To him 
 expressmen are invested with mystic dig- 
 nity. The rush of the train and the chang- 
 ing scene are a continuous entertainment. 
 When finally the journey ends, and the 
 ocean is spread out for his benefit, his joy 
 is unalloyed. Never was there such a sea 
 before, such fields of sand, such rocks and 
 grass. His are the wide acreage of blue 
 sky, the boundless expanse of waves. The 
 wind is his, too. All this heritage of Na- 
 ture belongs to the little boy until that sad 
 day, when he passes out through the por- 
 tals of childhood. The elders have their 
 games and schemes in the social field, the 
 artificial things .that enliven tired people at 
 a summer resort, but the child dwells in a 
 delightful country of his own. 
 
 All hearts respond to the ocean's sum- 
 mons, but not always in equal measure. 
 Only in those early golden days do we ever 
 understand the secret of the sea, by simply 
 feeling it. None but childish eyes 
 see the strange and elusive beings who 
 people the deep. We have seen them long 
 ago. We have heard them, when we were 
 
64 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 small and innocent, above the booming 
 surges, the noisy pebbles and the wind. 
 Loud and clear they came to our childish 
 ears, the ring of elfin laughter and the 
 peal of fairy trumpets — the call of the sea. 
 
UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 
 
 DOUBTLESS the best poetry is never 
 written. Man has a boundless ca- 
 WJM pacity for feeling* and only a li- 
 mited faculty of expression. Poe- 
 try is not professional verse-making. Verse 
 is the vehicle, not the motive power. The 
 poet is one who sees a vision and strives 
 to reproduce it in words, as the painter 
 tries to reproduce his on canvas or the 
 sculptor in marble. The basic thing is 
 the vision. 
 
 The mechanical process is the great dif- 
 ficulty of those to whom the Muse com- 
 mandingly whispers: "Sing." It is the 
 same task that confronts the painter or 
 sculptor who is bidden to re-create with 
 brush or chisel the immortal children who 
 dance adown the vales of fancy. It is men- 
 tal parturition and means agony of soul. 
 This is the chief reason why the number 
 of accredited poets is so small. 
 
 He who would express beautiful 
 thoughts may scorn rhyme as Whitman 
 did or he may take the easy way of blank 
 
66 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 verse, but he must prove his case and 
 show his message if men are to listen, for 
 poetry to most men means rhyme. "Vers- 
 libre," must produce its evidence. On the 
 other side is the danger of taking tinkling 
 verses for poetry without regard to the 
 thought conveyed. This is responsible for 
 endless reams of doggerel. 
 
 It is often said now that poetry is out 
 of fashion. Poetry is never out of fashion, 
 for in truth every man is more or less, in 
 his own way, a poet. Poetry is as much 
 a part of life as air and sunshine, but the 
 consecrated form of expression has been 
 crowded out by other things. Men prefer 
 to read ideas printed so as to fill columns 
 rather than those with white spaces on 
 both sides. Men have heard so many 
 rhymes in popular songs, so much tuneful 
 nonsense, that they tire of rhymes telling 
 of the empyrean. 
 
 Gray immortalized the "mute, inglori- 
 ous Milton." The poets I have in mind 
 may be inglorious but they are by no 
 means mute. In former times the bard 
 stood in the market-place. You may find 
 him there today. The only difference is 
 
UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 67 
 
 that the whole country has become one 
 vast market-place and the bards are every- 
 where. 
 
 Every man is a poet when he mounts 
 his hobby. The cobbler has his Pegasus. 
 He may not stop to arrange his song in 
 lines of accepted form, but when he speaks 
 of the things nearest his heart he waxes 
 poetical. The bridge-builder, the engineer 
 and the commercial traveller all give rein 
 to fancy when they touch the main work 
 of their lives. 
 
 It was a trait of the old bards to be 
 borne away on the wings of imagination, 
 to leave the world of the senses for that 
 strange and wondrous country whose mem- 
 ories linger in the recesses of the brain. 
 They sang of hard battles, the stroke of 
 spear on shield, the dust and gore of war, 
 and anon would paint word-pictures of 
 youths and maidens dancing in the twi- 
 light on the rich meadow, as did Homer in 
 his description of the shield of Achilles. 
 The bard burst forth into song because 
 he loved these things. 
 
 You may find the bard anywhere; in 
 sober office or swiftly moving train. He 
 
68 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 may wear a frock coat or a week's growth 
 of beard, but you can always be sure of 
 one thing; if you touch the right note, 
 that thing of life in which he is most inter- 
 ested, he will sing. You must reach his 
 sub-conscious mind, let him forget himself 
 and be wafted into the realm where his 
 fancy dwells. Then he will tell you of bat- 
 tles, dreams and ambitions, the thoughts 
 that lie in the deep places of his soul. It 
 may be something that the world accepts 
 as a grand and inspiring theme ; it may be 
 some common w r onder like the making of 
 things out of steel or making steel do 
 things with the aid of steam and the light- 
 ning, but at all events he will talk poetry, 
 he will light up his narrative with the 
 flame of imagination, he will invoke the 
 Muse to tell his story better. He is an 
 unconscious poet. 
 
 Mayhap the poems we admire most are 
 stolen property. The man of verses sat 
 by the man of visions and listening to the 
 words poured forth in rich disorder, gath- 
 ered them up and gave them to the world 
 as his own. Our great books are filled with 
 folks who were kidnapped. The story 
 
UNCONSCIOUS POETS. 69 
 
 writer appropriated their personalities and 
 mental processes and compelled them to 
 slave forever in his books. I fear too that 
 the poets will have a heavy account to ren- 
 der for the poems they have stolen from 
 the farmer, the soldier and the sailor, the 
 visions of other men incorporated into 
 their smooth and silvery verses. 
 
 The professional poet does not own the 
 universe. The glories of sun and sky and 
 tempest, the beating of stormy seas, the 
 laughing meadow and still, smiling forest 
 belong to all who have the eyes to see their 
 beauty. It is in the artistic expression 
 that the monopoly consists. I have heard 
 noble poems from the lips of men who 
 never wrote a verse, men who had wrestled 
 all their lives with elemental things. Yet 
 they had the poet's vision, they could tell 
 in winged words of the things they had 
 seen. Often they have made me think of 
 old Homer, these gnarled and wrinkled 
 journeymen of labor. 
 
 Poetry will never die while men live ; for 
 the world of men is filled with it. The 
 verse-maker may scoff and call it fustian, 
 but the poet like the poor man, is always 
 
70 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 
 
 with us. He may swing the hammer or hold 
 the reins, he may watch the loom or the 
 market, but if he has the proper encour- 
 agement and a sympathetic listener, if the 
 thing dearest to his heart is mentioned, he 
 will, like the old, blind bard, lift up his 
 voice and sing of the things he loves. 
 
HEROES AND VALETS. 
 
 QO man is a hero to his valet." He 
 who coined that phrase had no love 
 for valets. Doubtless many people 
 knowing themselves to be very un- 
 heroic, take a fearful joy in repeating the 
 words, but it is with the melancholy satis- 
 faction of the discomfited spell-binder who 
 would pelt the statue of Webster with 
 aged eggs. In truth, the sting of the 
 sarcasm, like that of the bee, is in its tail. 
 Tiie phrase-maker conned the list of all 
 who would be associated with a hero in 
 one capacity or another and would appre- 
 ciate him, and at the end of the list he 
 came on the valet, as the one being most 
 likely to vilify a great man. It is a sort of 
 a survival of the unfittest. 
 
 The phrase-maker knew human nature 
 too well to say that no man is a hero to 
 his wife or mother, for these skilful arti- 
 ficers can manufacture heroes out of the 
 most unpromising material. He did not 
 insinuate that a man's chums smile know- 
 
72 THE USES OF ADVTDRSITT. 
 
 ingly when he is called a hero, for a man's 
 chums are his best allies under all circum- 
 stances. Nor did he hint that a great 
 commander is no hero to his men, for these 
 would wade through blood to lay the laurel 
 on his brow. No. He pointed out the one 
 individual petty enough to belittle a great 
 man. 
 
 It is a curious fact that sincere admira- 
 tion means kinship of soul with the one 
 admired. A man's wife or mother would 
 gladly give her life for him. His friends 
 would beggar themselves in his service. 
 His men would march to the cannon's 
 mouth to recover his body. All this goes 
 to show that in order to appreciate a hero 
 you must be a bit of one yourself. 
 
 Now look on the other side. What man- 
 ner of human is the average valet? He is 
 the sort who smokes his master's cigars 
 and drinks his wine, talks him over among 
 other valets, and who would shiver if you 
 pointed a tooth-brush at him. By the very 
 nature of his trade he is a colorless per- 
 sonality whose days are spent in caring 
 for the clothes, boots and furnishings of 
 another. The ordinary man would prefer 
 
HEROES AND YALETS. Tl 
 
 digging ditches to such work, but valeting 
 has an attraction for a certain type: that 
 hates hard work, that loves to strut be- 
 fore housemaids, the sort of creature that 
 whispers behind his hand to one of his own 
 ilk that his master snores like a pig and 
 makes noises with his soup when he 
 eats alone. If you have need of a sneak, 
 search for a man who maligns his em- 
 ployer. 
 
 I have no quarrel with valets as a class. 
 Doubtless there have been and are mag- 
 nanimous persons among them. But I 
 have in mind the valet who thinks the 
 hero whose boots he blacks an over-rated 
 individual. The unthinking public has a 
 false idea about celebrated men. It would 
 have them always on parade. It would 
 shudder at the thought of a popular figure 
 in pajamas and night-cap. It would have 
 him seen through the glorified haze that 
 surrounds Ouida's guardsmen or Richard 
 Harding Davis' pattern-panted prigs. In 
 short the unthinking public's idea of a 
 notable is enbalmed in the masterpieces 
 of Laura Jean Libbey. Now the valet class 
 represents a section of the unthinking pub- 
 
74 THB USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 lie in close menial relations with a great 
 man. 
 
 Even the conscientious and devoted valet 
 has the limitations of his class. All men, 
 be they monarchs or ashmen, eat, wash 
 themselves and sleep in beds. What dif- 
 ferentiates a leader of men from the com- 
 mon ruck is power of intellect and char- 
 acter, not the cut of his clothes. A man 
 may be famous in both hemispheres for 
 his learning, his bravery or artistic skill, 
 but the menial who lays out his clothes 
 thinks of him merely as a master who 
 locks up his cigars or has a predilection 
 for shocking hats. The trouble with the 
 valet is that his view-point is wrong and 
 petty. 
 
 There is a variety of human that re- 
 volts from what is noble. Conscious of its 
 own meanness, its scurviness of soul, it 
 seeks to drag down all to its own level. 
 We have all longed to stop the vile 
 tongues that proclaim no man as honest 
 and no woman as pure. Unfortu- 
 nately, such people are too well 
 represented in the valet class. Then 
 there is the result of environment. 
 
HEROES AND VALETS. 7i 
 
 Put ten men adrift in a boat with- 
 out food and cannibalism is likely to re- 
 sult. Put ten men in a club, dependent 
 on each other in business, society and 
 politics, and they will be very careful of 
 what they say and do. The poor valet 
 has nothing to keep his principles and 
 conduct up to the norm. He lives in a 
 world of petty, soul-shrinking things. His 
 importance among his kind depends upon 
 the amount of gossip or scandal he can 
 bring to the common fund. 
 
 I have read many books about great 
 men, books that were compiled by writers 
 with the souls of valets. They relate every 
 small circumstance tending to show their 
 victims as base clay, every outburst of 
 temper, misunderstood remark, every 
 backstairs incident and scullery episode, 
 and they have caused me to honor and 
 pity the great men and women thus de- 
 famed by ink-harpies. A man be a hero 
 to his valet! The good Lord forbid it! 
 That would be the final argument to prove 
 the alleged hero was a sham. 
 
SELF EXPRESSION. 
 
 y**s HUMB prints may be collected by the 
 K.J million, yet among them all you will 
 find no "duplicates." When sup- 
 posed "doubles" are examined 
 closely, they will be found to differ in im- 
 portant details. The fact is; each indivi- 
 dual is unique; there is no other exactly 
 like him. This in the domain of the phy- 
 sical. In the larger and more complex 
 realm of the mental and moral these dif- 
 ferences are much intensified. 
 
 If people realized these facts early in 
 life and acted on them, the sum of human 
 accomplishment would be multiplied. But 
 powerful influences are at work to 
 convince individuals that they belong in 
 this or that class with many others. The 
 schools, the tendency of modern business, 
 the hard and fast rules and customs of 
 life; all tend to quench the fire of origin- 
 ality, the beginnings of self expression. 
 
 Another pernicious influence is constant 
 companionship. One who is seldom alone 
 
SELF EXPRESSION. 77 
 
 has his individuality insidiously sapped. 
 Thousands live without any conscious 
 ideas of their own. They are conveyed 
 through life on the thoughts and decisions 
 of others. For the proper development of 
 natural powers a certain amount of phy- 
 sical or at least mental seclusion is essen- 
 tial. 
 
 The obstacles to effective accomplish- 
 ment are of course innumerable, but the 
 main one is not laziness or dissipation or 
 lack of opportunity, but lack of confidence 
 and the consequent falling into the groove 
 habit. Many early in life are conscious of 
 a certain bent or talent, but after a half- 
 hearted attempt or two give up and drift 
 into some work to which accident or the 
 need of money diverts them. 
 
 The whole world is hostile to the indivi- 
 dual and determined to force him to con- 
 form to type. Only the strongest minds 
 and wills are able to resist this steady 
 pressure and forge ahead on their own 
 lines. 
 
 In saying this, there is no intent to advo- 
 cate odd or fantastic ways in the ordinary 
 affairs of life. Conformity to sensible 
 
7S THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 fashions, accepted norms of speech and 
 manner, is an economy for the individual, 
 and indeed aids him in bringing out the 
 best there is in him. The fact that certain 
 genuises have been so original that this 
 quality tempted them to extremes is not 
 to the point. 
 
 We are considering what is called the 
 average man or woman, and the argument 
 is that such people are capable of more 
 than they actually perform and the failure 
 to express themselves adequately as indivi- 
 duals is the result of the world influences 
 they encounter and their own lack of con- 
 fidence in themselves. 
 
 If you study closely the careers, not 
 merely of geniuses, but of ordinary people 
 who have accomplished much for them- 
 selves and mankind, it will be found that 
 they are remarkable for their devotion to 
 individuality. This has nothing to do with 
 vanity or selfishness and is merely the re- 
 cognition of a fact. They were all alike in 
 this, that they believed themselves to be 
 distinct entities capable of great things if 
 they were faithful to the capabilities with- 
 
SELF EXPRESSION. T9 
 
 in them, and in each instance the result 
 proves that they were right. 
 
 There is hardly an example of a man 
 or woman who has reached distinction 
 where at some period this conflict did not 
 rage with the triumph of originality as 
 the result. Thousands of parents use every 
 influence in their power to eradicate in 
 their children this faculty of individuality. 
 This parental stupidity and obstinacy are 
 most costly to mankind. It is a marked 
 trait of those who have an inborn gift of 
 some sort, to struggle on to utilize this 
 gift to the fullest degree, no matter what 
 the obstacles. Few artists or statesmen 
 but have had to work as hard to gain an 
 opportunity as to utilize that opportunity 
 when it had been won. 
 
 Few Americans who have attained emi- 
 nence had to struggle against such odds as 
 Abraham Lincoln. Authorities may not 
 agree that he was a genius, but he was in 
 many ways something nobler and more ad- 
 mirable, a man who was absolutely true to 
 himself and in every crisis of his life ex- 
 pressed his individuality on those around 
 him; first his community and later on, the 
 
50 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 nation. Webster, Clay and Calhoun have 
 left treasures of eloquence, but not one of 
 them or all of them, equals the Gettysburg 
 Address. It required more than genius to 
 write that; it required a man of excep- 
 tional moral fibre, of intense human sym- 
 pathy, who all his life lived up to the 
 maxim : Know thyself and be true to thy- 
 self. 
 
 There is in Lincoln's life and in those of 
 scores of great Americans a lesson for 
 every young man and woman in the land. 
 It is not a lesson of success as such or of 
 fame, but a lesson of self expression. 
 There is not the smallest doubt that 
 thousands who have lived and died in 
 obscurity since the formation of this re- 
 public have had in them the potentiality 
 to equal or surpass the careers of the most 
 venerated figures in public life. The "mute, 
 inglorious Miltons" were not always mute 
 and inglorious because it was their fate to 
 accomplish nothing, but because from lack 
 of confidence or the despair that comes of 
 thwarted effort, they settled back into the 
 life-groove of those about them. They may 
 have been good men and women, but they 
 
SELF EXPRESSION. SI 
 
 failed in their duty to themselves. They 
 kept their one talent in a napkin and buried 
 it in the earth. They failed to develop the 
 gift that was within them. Opportunity 
 knocked at their doors time and again and 
 they heeded it not. Analyzed carefully 
 their failure was not intellectual, but mo- 
 ral. They had their chances but they lacked 
 the courage and perseverance to accept and 
 justify them. 
 
 There are hundreds within our own cir- 
 cles of acquaintance who possess the capa- 
 city to outdo those who are rated as great 
 successes, famous people — but they lack 
 moral power. It is useless to do anything 
 for them; no one can do what should be 
 done except themselves. Robert Burns 
 might be in this class had not inborn song 
 saved him. 
 
 It is the high duty of every man and 
 woman to recognize that they are indivi- 
 duals with certain gifts w T hose rich and 
 fruitful development they owe to God and 
 mankind. They may prate of circum- 
 stances, the overmastering influences of 
 environment, the tyranny of daily work. 
 These are not the difficulties, the real trou- 
 
32 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 ble is with themselves and in themselves — 
 lack of courage for self-expression. As 
 Emerson somewhere remarks, no one 
 knows what he can do until he tries— and 
 I add — and keeps on trying until he has 
 done it. 
 
MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 
 
 yS?]HE wonderful progress of the world 
 K.S during the last half century in the 
 means of travel, communication and 
 manifold conveniences is undeni- 
 able. Doubtless the denizen of the early 
 Nineteenth Century transported to our 
 time and ordinary life would think he had 
 awakened to the domination of magic or 
 witchcraft. The inhabitants of the globe 
 are knit together by the cable and the 
 wireless; it is easy to hear the human 
 voice and hold a conversation when the 
 speakers are thousands of miles apart. It 
 is a commonplace to travel in a few hours 
 today a distance that years ago would 
 have consumed many days. The automo- 
 bile has revolutionized travel by turnpike, 
 and the housewife of the present day can 
 work culinary marvels by the aid of 
 electricity. 
 
 Americans are proud of their conquests 
 in the realm of mechanics. The man who 
 shows you his town or the friend who 
 
S4 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 takes you through his new house always 
 dilates on the "modern appliances" with 
 which both are provided. Large numbers 
 of our citizens are professionally, or 
 financially interested in the perfec- 
 tion of practical mechanics, and it is to 
 their credit that they are deeply interested 
 in them. The number of articles on such 
 topics published continuously in our popu- 
 lar weeklies and monthlies shows that this 
 interest is really a national affair. 
 
 It is not at all surprising, that a man 
 like Mr. Tuttle, who had for years been 
 the head of a great railroad system and 
 had watched the development of traveling 
 facilities for more than fifty years, should 
 speak with warmth and a certain under- 
 current of envy of those who are begin- 
 ning life with so many of the mechanical 
 helps denied a former generation. The 
 personal equation in such cases is simply 
 overpowering. 
 
 In times of stress and anxiety ; as when 
 friends are on the wide sea at the mercy 
 of storm and iceburg, or locked in inac- 
 cessible mountains, or isolated otherwise, 
 we thank the Lord for the wireless, the 
 
MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 86 
 
 telephone and the motor-car, and we do 
 well, for there is nothing more heart-rend- 
 ing than to be separated from family and 
 friends, unable to know whether they are 
 alive or dead, and a prey to inconsolable 
 anxiety. 
 
 These, however, are extreme instances. 
 If, however, we study the current of mod- 
 ern life and the humanity carried along 
 by it, it is easy to discern that we have 
 paid something for the services of the 
 three genii: steam, steel and electricity. 
 We have become their dependents to such 
 a degree that we feel powerless without 
 them. 
 
 Few people in the total of our popula- 
 tion really understand mechanics ; they ac- 
 cept them without proof, as they do the 
 Munchausen stories about popularized 
 "science." Most of them declare that 
 science has eliminated religion. I speak 
 here of a class unfortunately large, that 
 has never given any real attention to reli- 
 gion and has derived whatever informa- 
 tion it has — whether true or false — from 
 the daily paper. Science, theoretical and 
 
36 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 applied, has done this part of the commu- 
 nity incalculable harm. 
 
 In other realms of modern life mechan- 
 ics has extracted its pound of flesh. In 
 what may be called the higher life of the 
 intellect, in the faculties for the percep- 
 tion of art in its varied forms, applied 
 science has dulled and killed these powers 
 of the mind. 
 
 The fallacy about mechanics is that 
 many fancy that physical comfort and 
 convenience are the apotheosis of civiliza- 
 tion. As in Mark Twain's story : "A Yan- 
 kee in King Arthur's Court," a New Eng- 
 lander of rather a vulgar sort triumphs 
 over the leaders of that far-off age by 
 means of his gun and a slight knowledge 
 of mechanics. A popular writer of the day 
 has made the same mistake in the story 
 called : "The Jingo/' in which an American 
 of the period turns an isolated mediaeval 
 kingdom topsy-turvy by means of the 
 commonplaces of present-day American 
 life. The wide popularity of tales of this 
 type and the artless air of superiority af- 
 fected by people who are not producers but 
 beneficiaries of mechanics show that a new 
 
MECHANICAL MILLENIUM. 87 
 
 idolatry has taken possession of the popu- 
 lace — or at least a section of it — the idol- 
 atry of machinery. 
 
 This, however, is the case generally with 
 people who are not familiar with science, 
 rightly so-called, either in theory or prac- 
 tice, and who have been misled by specious 
 articles and books written for the undis- 
 cerning. As in every other relation of life, 
 surfeit produces a re-action. The modern 
 family of wealth, while it is to an extent 
 dependent on mechanical conveniences, 
 seeks to flee them and emancipate itself 
 Every summer the quiet places in the 
 mountains and near the sea are occupied 
 by an increasing number of those who are 
 sick of cities, who wish to be spared the 
 ring of the telephone bell, the clang of the 
 trolley car, and even that boast of our 
 day — electric light. This is a healthy sign. 
 
 It should be remembered that the mas- 
 terpieces of human genius were produced 
 in an age and by men and women who 
 knew nothing about modern mechanical 
 conveniences. The greatest works of art in 
 sculpture, painting and poetry owe little or 
 nothing to this genie: "science", and we 
 
18 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 are all the poorer when we forget this. 
 Mechanical conveniences are all right in 
 their place, but that place is a subordinate 
 one. The trouble with many of our fellow 
 citizens is that they reverse the roles of 
 Aladdin and the Genie : they are the slaves 
 of the lamp. 
 
 When one hears the silly vaporings 
 about "modern science," the "passing of 
 Christianity" as a life force, the "ignor- 
 ance" of the people of past centuries; 
 when we see people accepting with flat- 
 tered complacency, their kinship with the 
 ape, as told them by some pseudo-scientist, 
 and then look back at what humanity has 
 done, in days innocent of steam, steel and 
 electricity, for the salvation of souls and 
 the highest interests of human life, we 
 instinctively ask the question: "these thy 
 gods, Oh Israel?" 
 
MURDER AND MONEY. 
 
 Q' ONE who reads a daily paper can 
 help remarking the frequency of 
 murder in this country — wholesale 
 and retail murder. Hundreds of 
 lives are snuffed out in a mine, not by 
 reason of an unforseen accident, but 
 through neglect to take precautions as 
 well known in mining circles as the safety 
 lamp. Scores are killed or injured in a 
 railroad accident because overworked dis- 
 patchers make mistakes or risky engin- 
 eers take chances in switching on to the 
 main line within a minute or two of the 
 the coming of an express, or in any of 
 the multitudinous ways in which pas- 
 sengers arrive in eternity instead of their 
 expected destination. Then there are holo- 
 causts that are the outcome of fire laws 
 neglected or evaded, and the destruction 
 of life wrought by those miscreants who 
 use dynamite as their agent of death. The 
 list is agonizingly long. It seems to be all 
 but impossible to place the responsibility 
 
90 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 of these deaths where it belongs, but in 
 one way or another, the reason why the 
 criminals are not punished is money. 
 
 More than one hundred men died in a 
 mine not long ago because it had not been 
 properly sprinkled. Some one ordered the 
 cessation of that work, some one who 
 knew what would happen sooner or later 
 in that mine. And the end of that killing 
 is not yet, for many of the widows and 
 children of the dead miners will die as a 
 consequence of that wilful neglect. 
 
 If the authorities of a railroad deliber- 
 ately overwork dispatchers or trainmen 
 there can be but one inevitable result, 
 and they know it. If the average traveler 
 knew to what an extent his life depended 
 on a tired youth at a telegraph key he 
 would think long before boarding a train. 
 If he knew the engineer on whose 
 keenness and decision depended the 
 lives of those in the coaches, he would 
 make inquiry how long it had been since 
 the engineer had a night's sleep. 
 
 The railroad officials know these things 
 accurately and keep up the practice. Why ? 
 Because those officials also know it is al- 
 
MURDER AND MONET. 91 
 
 most impossible to convict them of the 
 consequences of their orders, but the ulti- 
 mate reason for their action is money in 
 the shape of economy or dividends. 
 
 Over a hundred girls were burned to 
 death in a clothing factory a few years 
 ago. The camera men spared us none of 
 the horrors, and what they failed to do 
 the headlines finished. The fire escapes 
 of that building could not be reached. Evi- 
 dence was printed to the effect that the 
 doors leading to them were locked. Yet, 
 after weeks of law proceedings, the conclu- 
 sion was that no one was guilty. There 
 are laws covering the inspection of fire es- 
 capes. If these were not inspected, some 
 one was paid to overlook it. One would 
 like to know exactly what fees the attor- 
 neys in that case received after the verdict 
 was rendered, just how much, in terms of 
 dollars, the whole thing saved the proprie- 
 tors of the establishment. 
 
 Retail murder fares nearly as well in 
 the courts. If there is enough money to 
 hire skilled attorneys, handwriting ex- 
 perts and alienists, the most brutal and 
 notorious murderer has a far better 
 
12 THE USES OP ADVERSITT. 
 
 chance of dying of old age than a decent 
 citizen. When the accused is poor and the 
 evidence sufficiently conclusive, criminal 
 procedure works with commendable dis- 
 patch, but when money takes its stand at 
 the rail with the attorneys for the defence, 
 the chances of conviction are slim. 
 
 There is another sinister fact about 
 this clogging the wheels of justice: we 
 all help pay for it. Every time a cele- 
 brated murder case drags its weary length 
 through months and even years, the 
 county in which the accused is tried pays 
 out thousands and sometimes hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars. The citizens of 
 that county and state pay those expenses. 
 So, not only is money used to defeat the 
 ends of justice through technicalities, eva- 
 sions and the tricks of experts, but the 
 taxpayer contributes a part of his income 
 to the same end. 
 
 The citizen pays enough to obtain ade- 
 quate justice in the community. One of 
 the magazine writers gives an exposi- 
 tion of the cost of judges. He states that 
 there are about three thousand judges in 
 this country receiving on an average some 
 
MURDER AND MONEY. 
 
 thousands of dollars a year each, and it is 
 his contention that many of them are paid 
 to retard, not facilitate justice. However 
 this is but a drop in the bucket. There 
 are the phalanx of criminal officers, costly 
 court houses, large legal expenses, and 
 for all these the citizen pays, with the re- 
 sult that corporations come forth scot- 
 free from the worst carnival of death and 
 the wealthy man escapes the consequences 
 of his acts. 
 
 The country is exercised just now over 
 the high cost of living, the tariff, unlawful 
 combinations in trade and dozens of these 
 bugbears of civilization (to call it by the 
 conventional name), but there is another 
 problem worthy of examination and solu- 
 tion, the high cost of injustice in capital 
 cases. They tell us that our law comes 
 from England. Evidently since importa- 
 tion it has been adulterated with money. 
 
THE MODERN CITY. 
 
 C"|HE average American is never satis- 
 fied with anything for long, and old 
 gggjjg things are his bugbear. The entire 
 stage-setting of modern life is con- 
 stantly being shifted in accordance with 
 the capricious taste for novelty. The man 
 who leaves his home city and lives for a 
 decade abroad will have need of a guide 
 on his return. Conspicuous landmarks are 
 gone, small houses with encompassing 
 lawns are replaced by ambitious blocks; 
 historic mansions obscured by a growth 
 of shoddy tenements, once familiar streets 
 glare at him with the studied aloofness of 
 the conscious parvenue. 
 
 In a subtle manner the buildings speak 
 of the changed conditions of the people. 
 In some metropolitan centers this phenom- 
 enon may be observed in its extremes. In 
 such cities one who is away from home a 
 month may come back to find his neigh- 
 borhood transformed ; it affects the whole 
 
THE MODERN CITY. 95 
 
 country and nearly every community is 
 bitten by it. 
 
 I have often passed a fine old house 
 that for a century and a quarter has stood 
 firmly on its granite foundations with the 
 dignity and independence of an aged citi- 
 zen honored by all. It was not a hand- 
 some edifice, but it had self-respect. I 
 notice that the owners have fallen victims 
 to the vice of modernity and are "restor- 
 ing" the centenarian out of all recognition. 
 The old timbers seem to cry out: "This is 
 a shame !" But the occupants wish to be 
 in fashion, and so my old friend is at the 
 mercy of the wood surgeons. 
 
 It grates somewhat, this craze for 
 renovation, upon one who is so sentimental 
 as to love old things for their own sake; 
 who takes pleasure in queer fan-lights over 
 front doors and chimneys of generous pro- 
 portions and window-panes pink wrought 
 in the alembic of sunshine. Not that these 
 tricks of architecture are much in them- 
 selves. It is rather that these substantial 
 dwellings are historical records in brick 
 and wood. They tell the story as plainly 
 fts the printed book. The people of earlier 
 
16 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 days were content with scant comfort 
 from our point of view, yet the annals of 
 those days seem to show that they gleaned 
 as much from life as we do. Had they felt 
 the need of more conveniences, doubtless a 
 way to them would have been found. The 
 houses show that the occupants found 
 them satisfactory. 
 
 In bustling cities these architectural 
 veterans have short shrift. They are 
 hacked to pieces with undemonstrative 
 rapidity, and monstrosities in steel and 
 stone desecrate their memory. In smaller 
 towns there is a difference. The general 
 characteristics of the house are retained, 
 but the modern owners imprint a new 
 character on the old structure after the 
 manner of the palimpsest. The family 
 nautilus, finding the shell too restricted, 
 makes additions to suit new conditions. 
 The same thing took place on a gigantic 
 scale in the building of the mediaeval 
 eathedrals and many of the more ancient 
 houses of England and the Continent. 
 Each century wrote itself down truly in 
 stone, defects and bad taste as well as 
 excellences. 
 
THE MODERN CITY. 97 
 
 Anyone surveying well the old-fashioned 
 homes of New England will arrive at an 
 accurate estimate of the people who built 
 them: sturdy narrowness, scorn of mere 
 comfort for its own sake, a certain inde- 
 finable dignity and scrupulous neatness. 
 How subtilly too the present generation 
 gives itself away! It keeps the good ex- 
 ternals of old time, but within luxury has 
 its way. The record is overwritten there 
 on the rigid asceticism of the past. The 
 house reveals the owner. 
 
 In another way, dwelling places tell the 
 story of the people. Gregariousness is a 
 dominant note in modern life. People 
 cannot entertain themselves ; they have no 
 interior strength, no reserves to support 
 them in solitude. The real estate tempter 
 comes to the suburban resident, points out 
 the impossibility of his old-fashioned 
 house, paints the delights of a flat ; steam 
 heat, electricity, etc. The theatres and 
 shops will be so much nearer; there is 
 always something going on. The subur- 
 banite yields. Forgotten are the charms 
 of independent life and a house of his own, 
 air, sunlight and green grass. He moves 
 
J8 THE USES OP ADVERSIT3T. 
 
 into the city to inhabit a caravansary, 
 sandwiched between layers of alien hu- 
 manity. The householder is no more; he 
 is a human document properly filed and in- 
 dexed. He is known by a number and 
 summoned by a push-button. The flat 
 tells his story too. 
 
 What a fearful jumble is the modern 
 city! Its sky line recalls a bad 
 dream. Every form of architectural ugli- 
 ness is there materialized. The buildings 
 along a street are like the recruits in an 
 awkward squad ; they toe the line and that 
 is all. No troup of revolutionaries, garbed 
 in odds and ends of military apparel is 
 more ludicrous to the discerning eye than 
 a typical street of an American city. In 
 high relief are revealed the ignorance, the 
 vagaries, the foolish ambition of archi- 
 tect, builder and proprietor. Greek art 
 portrayed the spirit of Greece. Roman 
 art, imitative yet independently adaptive, 
 mirrored the Roman character. In both 
 there was a faithfulness to the laws of 
 symmetry. But our modern cities are a 
 hideous hodge-podge, without law, design 
 
THE MODERN CITY. 99 
 
 or taste. Like Topsy, they have "jes' 
 growed." 
 
 It is a true portrait. It shows forth 
 our slip-shod educational methods, our be- 
 nighted contempt for the canons of the 
 past, our corroding materialism, our un- 
 accountable pride in costly ugliness. The 
 human nautilus has gone to great trouble 
 to make his shell an authentic record of 
 all his deficiencies. 
 
IGNORANCE AND 
 EDUCATION. 
 
 y**s HIS is an age of shams. We eat 
 V^ sham, food sold o us in ornamental 
 cartons. We wear sham clothes that 
 fall to pieces in a few months. The 
 sick load their systems with sham medi- 
 cines. We shout ourselves hoarse over 
 sham statesmen and go into raptures over 
 sham culture. Among many curious no- 
 tions prevalent at the present day is that 
 concerning the dividing line between ignor- 
 ance and education. Broadly speaking, the 
 criterion is the ability to read and write 
 the vernacular. If you can spell through 
 the newspapers and sign your name you 
 are educated ; if you cannot you are a clod. 
 I never pass our numerous and costly 
 schoolhouses without wondering whether 
 they are worth what they cost the com- 
 munity. Every one has heard of Lord 
 Macauley's prodigious schoolboy who was 
 credited by the essayist with an amount 
 of knowledge that would have been un- 
 
IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION. 101 
 
 usual in a university professor. Are not 
 these edifices erected with the vague ex- 
 pectation of producing prodigies? I can- 
 not rid myself of the dread that these 
 great schoolhouses are temples of idolatry 
 — the idolatry of false educational stan- 
 dards. The pagans built costly structures 
 in honor of gods who were mere personi- 
 fications of the elements or the passions. 
 The moderns build costly structures in 
 honor of a deity they call education. 
 
 Have you ever met a boy or girl in the 
 grammar grades who could read intelli- 
 gently or could write a fair letter ? I have 
 listened to many youngsters recite and 
 read ; they might as well have been mouth- 
 ing Choctaw. Lucid composition seems to 
 have become a Lost Art in the schools. Not 
 long ago I received a letter from a young 
 collegian. If all goes well, he will gradu- 
 ate next year with the degree: Bachelor 
 of Arts. His letter would be no credit to 
 a child of ten, educated at home by a care- 
 ful mother. 
 
 We have lost our bearings in this mat- 
 ter of education, mistaken the sham for 
 the reality. Some of the wisest men and 
 
Lt2 THE USE* OF ADVERSITT. 
 
 women I have ever known were unable to 
 read or write. I suppose school children 
 of the present day would look down on 
 them in pity. I recall meeting a hulking 
 boy of fourteen who was looking for a job. 
 He had spent two years at a grammar 
 school. Obesrving his broad shoulders, I 
 hinted that laborers were needed in vari- 
 ous places. "Awh," remarked he, "That's 
 all right for the old man ; he can't read. 
 I got an education." 
 
 We all have our narrow lines of learn- 
 ing, but outside of these we are ignorant. 
 Higher mathematics, mechanics, electrical 
 matters, medicine, the different depart- 
 ments of business are an unknown country 
 to all except those who have specialized 
 in them. How many master a foreign 
 language in school or college ? Yet porters 
 in European hotels and Oriental drago- 
 mans speak half a dozen languages with 
 fluency and surprising correctness. If you 
 wish to measure your own ignorance, talk 
 with a farmer, a telephone repairer, a mo- 
 torman, or the first man you encounter 
 who has a special trade. 
 
 In the generation that has passed were 
 
IGNORANCE AND EDUCATION. 101 
 
 hundreds of men who could neither read 
 nor write, yet carried on large enterprises 
 successfully and figured more closely than 
 the technical experts. They reached the 
 solution of problems by methods of their 
 own, but the solutions were correct. The 
 architects of great American fortunes 
 owed little to the schools. On the prin- 
 ciple that men admire what they lack, 
 many of these have given millions to the 
 schools, but as a matter of fact, they won 
 an education that no schools can give, and 
 in their chosen lines they were experts. 
 I have no intention of decrying edu- 
 cation, but at the same time, I do not like 
 to see schools erected into a fetish. This 
 seems to be the tendency. It is taken for 
 granted that if a boy or girl spends so 
 many years at school he or she comes 
 out educated. Yet if you happen to be 
 thrown in with these young people you 
 will be at a loss to find out what they 
 have learned. They have swallowed a few 
 facts, they have acquired a jargon, they 
 are entirely convinced that they are edu- 
 cated, but when they try to find situations 
 there seems to be something lacking. 
 
104 THE USES OF ADVERSITT. 
 
 What amazes me is the solid training, 
 the mass of accurate knowledge possessed 
 by men and women who are not regarded 
 as educated at all in the popular sense of 
 the word. Young people who have en- 
 joyed all the advantages the schools can 
 give are accorded a definite position or 
 class status, while those who have had to 
 fend for themselves, never dreaming 
 that they possess any educational stand- 
 ing, put them to shame when there is ques- 
 tion of accuracy and efficiency. 
 
 Do not make prigs of children by ex- 
 hibiting them and their supposed talents. 
 In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, a 
 phonograph will do better work and is more 
 enjoyable. Let them see and know people 
 who are not considered educated. Let 
 them find out how little mere book learning 
 is worth when placed side by side with 
 experience and close observation. The 
 more I see of workmen, of those who earn 
 money by producing real results, the more 
 I feel schools to be over-rated institutions 
 and myself an ignoramus. 
 
ACROBATS. 
 
 y**; HE daily press is fast becoming a 
 V-} series of chronicles devoted to the 
 performances of lightning-change 
 artists, to puffs of surprising intel- 
 lectual side-shows and the mental pirou- 
 ettes of smirking dancers. I feel that an 
 apology is due the hard-working members 
 of the theatrical profession for using this 
 figure of speech to describe the vocal and 
 printed antics of the so-called "leaders of 
 thought." The stars of the stage and saw- 
 dust ring labor strenuously and endanger 
 their lives for small salaries. The theatre 
 and circus demand the spangles, the rouge 
 and the set smile. They are a part of the 
 business. But for our sins and exactions 
 we are afflicted with hordes of publicity- 
 seekers who are ready to advocate, approve 
 or argue anything from kleptomania to 
 homicide for half a column of print. They 
 are literary mercenaries. 
 
 The Monday morning paper is of neces- 
 sity dull, but one wonders what dearth of 
 
ICfi THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 news impels editors to give space to the 
 pages of slush and blasphemy miscalled, 
 "sermons." The worst characteristic of 
 these diatribes is not their outrage against 
 religion and decency, though this is flag- 
 rant enough, but their self-evident insin- 
 cerity. Any craze or ism is snatched up 
 by these talkers with shark-like voracity. 
 Nothing is too base or revolting, provided 
 the speakers can catch the ears of the 
 groundlings. 
 
 The Eighteenth Century saw the rise of 
 a new species of scribe, whose pen was at 
 the service of anyone who would pay, and 
 who dealt out abuse without stint at the 
 will of his employers. But it must be said, 
 in explanation if not exculpation, that most 
 of these scurrilous writers wrote that they 
 might eat. Their modern representatives 
 have not even this small excuse; they 
 write merely to be talked about. 
 
 There is no crime so noisesome that 
 they disdain to touch it; no disaster on 
 which they refrain from hanging their 
 anathemas. A recent disgusting murder 
 trial furnished them with material for 
 months. They could not even let the dead 
 
ACROBATS. 1#7 
 
 of the "Titanic" rest under the waves of 
 the North Atlantic. That awful scene 
 which the moving-picture shows were for- 
 bidden to exploit was sketched with all 
 the horrors the pulpiteers could conjure 
 up, to denounce someone or other. All 
 for notoriety! 
 
 Time was when journals had convictions. 
 Advertising and money have eliminated 
 these. We smiled at Charles A. Dana 
 and his animosities. But they were honest 
 animosities. He wrote what he thought, 
 without fear or favor. But the modern 
 editorial is as much a matter of commerce 
 as a patent medicine advertisement. It is 
 a wonder newspaper offices dare to pre- 
 serve their files, so redolent are they of 
 rank inconsistency. But the proprietors 
 know their public. Yesterday and tomor- 
 row count for nothing. To tickle the pub- 
 lic palate for today is enough. 
 
 The most melancholy of all literature is 
 history — at least as it has been written in 
 English these three centuries past — for the 
 most popular histories reveal a degree of 
 moral turpitude almost incalculable in the 
 garbling of texts, the destruction of con- 
 
108 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 texts and twisting of plain statements. 
 The men who wrote Church history, did so 
 with their sources before them, and they 
 deliberately mutilated what they found 
 there to make out a case for prejudice. 
 
 No wonder a roar of rage swept across 
 England when Britons read what Lloyd 
 George said of the Anglican Establish- 
 ment. That rage was the natural explo- 
 sion of a nation that had been systematic- 
 ally lied to for three hundred years. 
 Lloyd George is probably the most bitterly 
 hated man in English public life by the 
 adherents of Anglicanism because he tore 
 off the plaster that covered a sore in 
 the body politic of Great Britain. 
 
 Does any honest man, irrespective of 
 creed, believe for a moment the lies that 
 are peddled by shameless sectaries about 
 the Catholic Church ? Not one. Do these 
 def amers themselves believe the filth they 
 are circulating ? Not for an instant. It is 
 merely their trade. There is a degenerate 
 section of readers that craves this pabu- 
 lum. It has had its prototypes in every 
 century. 
 
 When religious prejudice was a creed, 
 
ACROBATS. 109 
 
 when party spirit was hot, it was only nat- 
 ural that men were carried away by hate 
 and obstinate dislike, and believed any- 
 thing against an enemy. Today both are 
 anachronisms. Yet for a paltry wage cer- 
 tain writers pander to the appetites of 
 the ignorant and unthinking. 
 
 The posing and grimacing go on from 
 day to day. Men write magazine articles 
 and books for one side or the other, pre- 
 cisely as a contractor builds a house with- 
 out care about the use to which it will be 
 put when finished. When a new paymas- 
 ter appears they will write other articles 
 and books that flatly contradict what they 
 had written before. All this without re- 
 gard to the truth defamed, the characters 
 smirched or the evil done. 
 
 The only line to take concerning all this 
 trash is to pass it over in disgust. But 
 honest people everywhere ought to be on 
 their guard against hired and conscience- 
 less scribblers. No matter how many de- 
 grees they write after their names, or the 
 wide advertising a sensational press gives 
 them, or the blatant effrontery of their 
 very pose, they are mercenaries and their 
 
110 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 word is worth no more than the promises 
 printed on a cure-all, or the ante-election 
 charges of a demagogue. 
 
OBLIGATIONS. 
 
 © 
 
 ETWEEN the two words promise 
 and performance lies in great part 
 the field of human action. Whether 
 in an individual, corporate or na- 
 tional way, men work on the principle that 
 action is the fulfilment of a promise. 
 
 The simplest transaction of life between 
 man and man is an instance of this; the 
 ordering of groceries, the writing of a 
 check, the hiring of a house. There is a 
 mutual promise with expectation of mu- 
 tual performance. 
 
 All the great works of public utility and 
 corporation enterprise, the railroads, in- 
 dustrial plants and other achievements 
 performed by men banded together in a 
 business way illustrate in all the ramifica- 
 tions of their construction the working 
 out of the self -same basic idea. 
 
 Not only is there a contract in each case 
 between the leading parties, but on each 
 side there is a chain of contracts between 
 the leaders and those selected to perform 
 
112 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 allotted duties for the completion of the 
 work. One can scarcely realize at first the 
 bewildering series of agreements, written, 
 verbal or implied, which enables a company 
 to construct a railroad or a sky-scraper. 
 Once this work is done and the con- 
 struction enters upon the function for 
 which it was made, the working of the 
 same principle goes on. The most humble 
 individual who buys a railroad ticket en- 
 ters upon a contract with the company 
 and the ticket is his proof of it. In return 
 for so much money the company agrees to 
 transport him so many miles and guaran- 
 tees him a certain measure of safety dur- 
 ing the time of the journey. So the whole 
 industrial world; the trains rattling over 
 tracks, the looms whirring in the mills, the 
 multitutes of workers hurrying hither and 
 thither in the early morning with cease- 
 less clicking of heels, are all playing varia- 
 tions of the same theme ; promise and per- 
 formance. 
 
 Political affairs also conform to this 
 principle. The candidate for office, be it 
 great or small, first makes promises to his 
 party. Once selected he makes promise to 
 
OBLIGATIONS. 113 
 
 the electorate and in case he is chosen the 
 fulfilment of these and other implied 
 promises is before him. 
 
 The great difficulty about the keeping 
 of political promises, apart from the weak- 
 ness of human nature, lies in the fact that 
 one man makes promises to constituents 
 numbered by thousands, all more or less 
 differently minded and each with his own 
 axe to grind. But all the same there is a 
 line of consistency and performance which 
 the elected man is pledged to observe. He 
 may make enemies here and there, but 
 his general duty is plain. 
 
 The balance of power between magnates 
 of the world, the eternal shifting and 
 changing of political and trade relations, 
 the constant disputes in all sorts of mat- 
 ters are regulated by a series of promises 
 between the different countries and which 
 they are held to keep, or run the risk 
 of war, or reprisal. 
 
 Thus it is that the entire fabric of mod- 
 ern life is knit together by mutual con- 
 tracts, which however vague and indefin- 
 able, have their stern reality and consti- 
 tute real obligations. This stupendous 
 
114 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 mass of agreements is the result of na- 
 tional growth and modern progress in ma- 
 terial things. In primitive times trade was 
 barter. The man with more of one kind 
 of goods than he needed exchanged a part 
 of these for other goods of which he stood 
 in need. In the course of time money of 
 some kind came to represent value, but as 
 business increased and the transfer of pre- 
 cious metals was inconvenient and unsafe, 
 the practice came into vogue of employing 
 written or printed promises guaranteeing 
 the deposit of money with someone trusted 
 by both parties. But as affairs increased 
 and became more complex, it became neces- 
 sary to employ in the transaction of busi- 
 ness a great variety of signed and stamped 
 papers, which by common consent came to 
 stand for real values. Hence it is that 
 the most important and far-reaching mat- 
 ters of modern trade are facilitated with- 
 out the passing of money at all, but rather 
 by the execution of certain promises which 
 both parties by law and for their own in- 
 terests are obliged to fulfil. 
 
 In the broader and higher sense life it- 
 self is the performance of a promise. We 
 
OBLIGATIONS. Hi 
 
 are ushered into this world to fulfil cer- 
 tain duties which are clear and well de- 
 fined, and good life whether in low or high 
 station is simply the performance of these 
 duties. Some of these contracts are in- 
 herited and we grow gradually into the 
 realization of them and the necessity of 
 keeping them. No one can say, on coming 
 to a knowledge of what health is, that he 
 is not bound to preserve that health under 
 ordinary circumstances by certain action 
 and abstention. No one coming to a real- 
 ization of what his Faith is can escape the 
 logic by which certain duties follow from 
 the acceptance of that Faith. But the ex- 
 istence of these laws and duties, far from 
 discouraging and bewildering people 
 should rather strengthen them and ener- 
 gize duty and action, for these laws show 
 order, without which nothing can be done 
 well. Were we to be transported from this 
 world of law and order to some realm 
 where all things happened by chance and 
 everything was unreliable, we would soon 
 realize the value of the present system of 
 life, however imperfectly it may work out 
 in individual cases. 
 
THE BETTERERS. 
 
 ^^lHERE is a vast number of people at 
 U present busy in a frantic way try- 
 HH] ing to better human conditions. 
 They are divided into almost as 
 many sects as Protestants. The majority 
 of them are men and women who are well 
 off financially and with more time on their 
 hands than they know how to use. To 
 give them due credit, their intentions are 
 admirable, their activity incessant and 
 their energy boundless. The main trouble 
 with them is that their axioms are only 
 assumptions, but they hold to these with 
 all the fanatical zeal of a Mohammedan, 
 and on these assumptions they base their 
 work. 
 
 To take a classic instance ; the Prohibi- 
 tionists. Their basic doctrine is that al- 
 cohol taken internally is a poison and 
 therefore liquor drinking must cease. 
 It makes no difference to them that ex- 
 perts cannot agree upon the effect of al- 
 cohol on the human system. The Prohi- 
 
THE BETTERERS. 117 
 
 bitionists have made up their minds and 
 that settles the matter. 
 
 Then there are the Christian Scientists 
 who calmly aver that there is no such 
 thing as pain and will argue the matter out 
 with a man who is screaming with gout 
 
 Recently we have had a new accession to 
 the ranks, the Emmanuel movement, 
 whose reason for existence is that minis- 
 ters know more about disease and its 
 treatment than physicians. 
 
 Lastly, we have the horde of social ama- 
 teurs who discovered yesterday evils ex- 
 istent and well-known almost from the 
 foundation of the world and each one of 
 these enthusiasts is filling the air or the 
 magazines with brand new remedies for 
 all social ills. 
 
 There is one beautiful feature about 
 these betterers; their enthusiasm, their 
 unaffected and unbounded self-confidence. 
 It demands a very high order of self -hyp- 
 notism for one who knows nothing about 
 bridge-building to walk into the office of 
 an engineer and tell him that his plans are 
 all wrong. The explanation of this phe- 
 nomenon is that all this betterment craze 
 
11* TMB USES OF ADVERSITT. 
 
 is founded not on knowledge but on feel- 
 ing, and born of sympathy rather than 
 study and experience. 
 
 The Prohibitionist feels so intensely the 
 evil of drunkenness that he attempts the 
 impossible — to prevent all men from 
 drinking liquor. The Christian Scientist 
 pities suffering so much that he attempts 
 an absurdity — to prove to the sufferer that 
 there is no pain. The Emmanuel people 
 are so eager to assuage the woes of man- 
 kind that they start to treat them without 
 waiting to study medicine. As for the so- 
 cial enthusiasts, they know full well that 
 the millenium is inside their own skulls 
 and their only .dread is that death may 
 come before they can tell mankind all 
 about it. 
 
 All these people think they have short 
 cuts to the solution of world problems. 
 They have no patience whatever with the 
 knowledge and experience that men have 
 painfully gathered during some thousands 
 of years of living and dying. And most 
 of them, to tell the truth, take man to be 
 little more than an animal highly improved 
 by long physical evolution. Finding that 
 
THE BETTEREM. Ill 
 
 the question of the soul bothers them they 
 ignore or deny its existence. This, of 
 course, simplifies their work very much. 
 
 In their one-sidedness, their illogic 
 and pride these betterers are legitimate 
 children of the Protestant revolt. They 
 choose some form of misery, some unde- 
 niable ill and think its eradication means 
 everything, just as certain Protestants 
 specialized on predestination and others on 
 salvation through faith alone. They do 
 not realize that pathology, whether spirit- 
 ual, physical or moral, is a hard and in- 
 volved problem. They are firmly convinced 
 that if men could be brought to see things 
 their way the millenium would dawn. 
 
 They are also like Protestants in this, 
 that they think that all men who lived 
 before their time were either numbskulls 
 or rogues and that the only ones in past 
 centuries who are worth talking about are 
 those who quarrelled with constituted au- 
 thority. The teaching, the experience and 
 work of mankind before Luther rebelled 
 are simply worthless. In fact the main 
 claim to importance that past ages can 
 make is that the men and women of by- 
 
120 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 gone centuries by generation made it pos- 
 sible for the betterers to be bom. The 
 Christian virtue of Temperance is a foolish 
 delusion. The soothing power of the Sac- 
 raments is silly superstition. The benedic- 
 tion of a priest is quackery. The work of 
 Religious Orders among the poor was un- 
 scientific. Prohibition, Christian Science, 
 Emmanuel treatment and social dabbling 
 are the key to everything! 
 
 The average man as he gets older won- 
 ders more and more how humanity, handi- 
 capped as it has been, has accomplished so 
 much; he is scared by the immensity of 
 the universe and the sum of human en- 
 deavor. He is content to do what he is 
 told by the wisdom of ages and constituted 
 authority, but the betterer is bothered by 
 none of these thoughts. He knows that 
 the Creation was a badly done job, that 
 the only remarkable thing about mankind 
 is its remarkable stupidity, and even his 
 only fear has passed, for it was this ; what 
 would have become of the world if the bet- 
 terer had failed to be born to solve its 
 problems out of his own head and to teach 
 men how to live. 
 
TAKING PAINS. 
 
 1/^vlENIUS has been defined as "an infi- 
 nLA nite capacity for taking pains." 
 nUMI But painstaking" is not genius any 
 more than parturition is a child. 
 It is not genius but life that consists in 
 the infinite capacity for taking pains. 
 
 To endure pain is passive and not ne- 
 cessarily heroic, but to take pains is active 
 and oftentimes demands a courage and 
 persistence that amount to heroism. It 
 shows vividly the course of one who vol- 
 untarily undergoes discomfort and per- 
 haps anguish in order to effect some re- 
 sult which he considers worth the trouble. 
 All real effort entails pain. The line of care- 
 lessness, of least resistance generally ends 
 in pain, but the end is unsought and terri- 
 fying. He who takes pains, surveys the 
 problem, counts the cost and calmly goes 
 forward to the long and toilsome conflict, 
 believing that he does no more than his 
 duty. 
 
 It is hardly realized to what extent our 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 civilization depends upon this quality in 
 men who gain small honor and little pay. 
 If the workers ceased to take pains 
 we would all speedily be in a parlous state, 
 for it is just this extra effort, this painful 
 care, this ceaseless vigilance that keep the 
 wheels of the world revolving and spell 
 progress. 
 
 The magnate in his private car, the cap- 
 italist in his sumptuous skyscraper office 
 and the commutor who clings to a strap 
 while steam or electricity hurl him miles 
 across the country, all depend for life and 
 limb upon the painstaking of men they 
 have probably never seen and are not in- 
 terested in at all. 
 
 We are living an artificial life. The city 
 dweller inhabits a world not so much of 
 God as of man. He does his work not 
 standing on the solid earth, but perched 
 like a bird hundreds of feet in the air in 
 a steel and stone cage. He goes about, 
 not by means of the feet given to him by 
 the Creator but by means of remarkable 
 contrivances invented for the purpose of 
 transporting men and merchandise swift- 
 ly. He has gotten away from Nature and 
 
TAKING FAINS. lag 
 
 lives in an environment of man-made 
 things. Hence he must depend for his life 
 and safety, not as formerly upon his own 
 prudence and courage, but upon the care 
 and skill of other men, strangers working 
 for pay. If the average man sat down and 
 considered the degree in which his conti- 
 nued existence is dependent upon the 
 watchfulness of others not directly con- 
 cerned with him at all, he would expe- 
 rience a species of nightmare. 
 
 Life at best is an individual testing of a 
 theory of probabilities, but as most of us 
 live, it is the wildest kind of a wager. 
 Roughly it is regulated by a scale com- 
 puted like the average expectation of life 
 of the insurance companies, but the indi- 
 vidual is apt to forget how small he bulks 
 in such a scale. 
 
 There are frequent fires day and night 
 in cities, yet we work in ten-story offices 
 and sleep in fifteen-story hotels without a 
 qualm. Daily the journals chronicle disas- 
 ters on land and sea with deplorable loss 
 of life, yet we buy railroad and steamship 
 tickets and board electric cars with the un- 
 conscious aplomb of a man who is on his 
 
124 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 way to be hanged and thinks he is going 
 to supper. Every day we eat food of whose 
 production and preparation we know 
 hardly anything. It may be filled with 
 death-dealing substances, yet we permit 
 none of these considerations to interfere 
 with our digestion. 
 
 What, then, is the explanation of this 
 curious confidence, this continual taking of 
 risks of every kind without a thought of 
 the possible consequences? A belief that 
 other people are taking pains. We hold 
 without adequate proof that the manufac- 
 turer and the merchant saw to it that our 
 food is fit to eat. If they did not we 
 would be a poor insurance risk, for food 
 easily becomes poison if carelessly pre- 
 pared. 
 
 We board the car in the morning sure of 
 the motorman ; we take the elevator in se- 
 rene confidence that it is well built and 
 in good order and the operator reliable; 
 we labor secure in the belief that the 
 janitor in the basement sees to it that no 
 anarchist enters to blow the whole struc- 
 ture skyward. We visit a hotel in another 
 city and take a twelfth floor room, acting 
 
TAKING PAINS. 125 
 
 upon the assumption that others watch 
 while we sleep in our aerial berths, that 
 the firemen are waiting for the first alarm, 
 that fire-escapes are in good order and 
 that we may go to bed in peace. 
 
 When we board the train next morning 
 we do so on a wager with ourselves that 
 track-walkers have inspected every foot of 
 the miles of rail and every bridge, that 
 the car wheels are tested, the engineer 
 sober and in his right mind and the dis- 
 patchers sure to give proper directions. If 
 we did not firmly believe these things I do 
 not see how any sane man would dare to 
 board a train. 
 
 The city goes about its business and 
 pleasure, traffic whirls and beneath the 
 surface of things are thousands of keen- 
 eyed, steady-nerved men who see to it that 
 all is safe. These are the men on whom 
 the country depends for life, who are ex- 
 pected to take pains ceaselessly for a small 
 wage. I always feel like removing my hat 
 in presence of engineers, firemen, builders 
 and even elevator men, for who knows 
 when one of these will hold my life in the 
 hollow of his hand. It is well for us that 
 
12« THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 workingmen take pains. When, therefore, 
 they ask higher wages or shorter hours, 
 let us reflect that we are interested, for on 
 their courage and conscientious work de- 
 pend not merely the prosperity but the 
 safety of us all. 
 
UNWORKED MINES. 
 
 rpyl^OM time to time the world is 
 [J^l startled by the news that a rich 
 deposit of gold or silver has been 
 discovered. It may be in the Cali- 
 fornian hills, or on the Yukon beach, or in 
 some lonely mountain of Mexico. No mat- 
 ter how inaccessible and inhospitable the 
 country or dangerous the journey, thou- 
 sands are fired with the fever of the quest 
 and flock to the new mines. The gold has 
 reposed there for centuries. It was as 
 valuable five centuries ago as it is today, 
 but no man knew of its existence. 
 
 There have been millions of dollars of 
 value almost in plain sight of travellers 
 for unnumbered years. Fields that were 
 despised because they did not yield wheat 
 or vegetables to their incurious owners 
 have yielded fortunes to men of expe- 
 rience. The tendency of men is to go in a 
 rut, to esteem what others have approved. 
 Babies played jackstraw with stones worth 
 the ransom of an emperor. The value was 
 
128 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 there, but it was not perceived until the 
 fortunate comer investigated. 
 
 The richest mines have been discovered 
 by accident. It was not scientific search 
 or keen foresight that brought them to 
 light, but oftentimes a stumble. It is piti- 
 ful to think that thousands in sore 
 need, thousands whom a fraction of the 
 wealth beneath their feet would have made 
 prosperous for a lifetime, have gone 
 on unheeding over undiscovered mines; 
 to think of the melancholy fate of lone 
 prospectors and hardy pioneers who have 
 starved on the ground which held riches 
 that might have brought them plenty. 
 They worked and travelled and looked in 
 vain, while fortune laughed at them. 
 
 Daily men are coming to the front, ex- 
 hibiting qualities of leadership and skill 
 given to few. Every great war finds its 
 wonderful strategists who in peace would 
 have remained plain, unhonored citizens. 
 Every crisis brings out heroes who knew 
 not their own heroism. No one minded 
 these men until the chance occasion 
 showed them for what they were. 
 
 The Elegy in a Country Churchyard is 
 
UNWORKED MINES. 12$ 
 
 the saddest of poems for it sings of rare 
 abilities esteemed as nothing 1 , but every 
 country churchyard holds the same sad 
 story. There rest the bones of men and 
 women whose characters and minds would 
 have bequeathed rich legacies of thought 
 to mankind had fortune been kinder. They 
 lived and died unheeding and unheeded 
 ■precisely as the gold lurking in the moun- 
 tain crevices and the diamonds thrown in- 
 to the corner of a hut. 
 
 Men imitate one another. They troop 
 along a path like sheep. They will 
 make a Saul their leader because he is 
 taller than his brethren. David has ever 
 to prove his worth against Goliath. Many 
 a boy who in mature years has glorified 
 his age, fought hard to be a ploughboy 
 and strove against his destiny. The peo- 
 ple of remote villages from which geniuses 
 have come laughed at those geniuses for 
 decades and ranked them with the village 
 fool. It was the man who could do a good 
 day's work with the shovel who appealed 
 to them. Years pass, fame comes to the 
 village boy, thousands are enthralled by 
 his eloquence, by the witchery of his style, 
 
130 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 by his skill with brush or chisel, and after 
 his death someone erects a hideous monu- 
 ment to him in his native town. As well 
 might men have built monuments in the 
 Black Hills or erected cairns on the sands 
 of the Yukon. The talent was taken away 
 from the place where it was not esteemed 
 to bless humankind. 
 
 Nature does not tire. She has not shown 
 all her treasures. The mountains still teem 
 with gold, there are millions lying around 
 us to be discovered in the future by 
 sons of fortune. Talent is about us on 
 every side. Men whose names will be trum- 
 peted down the corridors of time pass us 
 every week. We know their names and 
 think we are perfectly familiar with them. 
 Time will give us the lie some day. 
 
 If then the earth is filled with unworked 
 mines ; if our neighbors have hidden pow- 
 ers that later on will win fame, why may 
 we not suspect ourselves? Are we not 
 strangers to our own gifts even as we are 
 to those of people around us ? Mayhap we 
 need to know ourselves, to see if we are 
 not wasting our time and neglecting capa- 
 bilities of moment. Time and again men 
 
UNWORKED MINES. 131 
 
 have gone on for years in some humdrum 
 occupation until chance revealed what 
 their life work was to be. Emerson, who 
 wrote much nonsense and some sentences 
 of rare beauty, said that no man knows 
 what he can do until he has tried. Few 
 fail to possess certain distinct gifts which 
 they value little and seldom use. It 
 would certainly be a grim joke for us if we 
 carried to the grave powers that can ac- 
 complish great things and wasted our time 
 in pottering over inanities. It would be 
 like the prospector who starves to death 
 on a ledge of solid gold. 
 
 The genius is an eccentricity; it is the 
 persistent dullard who wins. The mounte- 
 bank, the smooth talker, the seller of nos- 
 trums grow rich and famous, while merit 
 starves unnoticed. It would be bad enough 
 if it were conscious but neglected merit, 
 but it is worse, for it is unconscious. "What 
 fools we mortals be!" In your character, 
 in your crevice of the world, a neglected 
 mine may exist. Make a mental in- 
 ventory. You may have overlooked the 
 most valuable thing. 
 
ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. 
 
 X"]N THE small hamlets of the land, as 
 well as in the great cities, large 
 sums of money and an almost in- 
 credible amount of care and thought 
 are being devoted to the free education 
 of the young. Journey where you will, 
 academies and advanced schools meet the 
 eye. They are maintained through the 
 generosity of individuals and the large fees 
 paid by parents to give children a mental 
 training beyond the ordinary. Hundreds 
 of colleges and universities are extending 
 tfteir domains and manifesting all the 
 signs of an enlightened competition in edu- 
 cation. While I have no statistics to back 
 up my statement, I am entirely certain 
 that the cause of education costs the people 
 of this country, directly or indirectly, more 
 than the railroads or other great indus- 
 trial enterprises. At all events, the Amer- 
 ican people have invested vast sums of 
 money in the business of instructing and 
 educating youth. Can we honestly say 
 
ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. 133 
 
 that at the present time the investment is 
 a paying one? 
 
 I have read many violent arraignments 
 of the public school by its friends as well 
 as its enemies. Some of them have laid 
 stress on the inefficiency of the system in 
 preparing boys and girls for their work 
 in the world. Others have emphasized the 
 point that after a course of nine years 
 young people cannot read, write or cipher 
 satisfactorily for ordinary requirements. 
 With these matters at the moment I have 
 nothing to do. But there is one matter 
 which must be plain to reflecting men and 
 women, and this is, that our young people 
 speak their language atrociously. That 
 this, in many cases, is an affectation of 
 youth and not the result of ignorance is not 
 the point. I think the majority of observ- 
 ers will bear me out in saying that chil- 
 dren of school age, whether in lower grades 
 or in the colleges, use the worst variety 
 of English that can be sampled among 
 our population. If you doubt this, listen 
 tc a bevy of high school girls as long as 
 you can stand it, or a group of boys from 
 one of our noted institutions. You will 
 
134 THE USES OP ADVERSITF. 
 
 find that they use an unintelligible dialect. 
 In fact, correct English seems to be taboo. 
 
 This is not merely youthful extrava- 
 gance. Go among those who have enjoyed 
 all the advantages of modern school train- 
 ing and are occupying prominent places in 
 our social life. You will find that they 
 carry with them the dialect of school days 
 and employ it constantly. I am aware that 
 a certain extreme section of English so- 
 ciety has developed an appalling lingo of 
 baby-talk. The speech of our people 
 who are supposed to represent a high aver- 
 age of mind betrays a manner of speak- 
 ing that has no warrant in reason. 
 
 This habitual slovenliness in speaking 
 has become such a marked characteristic 
 in our life that one is almost shocked to 
 listen to a man or woman of the old school 
 who talks without slang, clipped syllables 
 or an affected drawl. I have paid some 
 attention to this matter, and strange to 
 say, I have heard the best and most cor- 
 rect English, not from those who call them- 
 selves educated, but from those who have 
 had only the narrowest sort of technical 
 training in schools. I find that the carpen- 
 
ATROCIOUS ENGLISH. Ill 
 
 ter, the plumber and the grocer give a bet- 
 ter example of the vernacular than the 
 college man or society woman. I have 
 noticed a cultivation of tone and language 
 among country people that can be matched 
 only by that of the people of Dublin. 
 
 In all this I am far from saying that 
 people cannot speak good English if they 
 50 desire. They do not so desire. This is 
 the failure of our school system. It does 
 not instil proper methods of speaking into 
 children. It does not inculcate that rever- 
 ence for our common tongue, that respect 
 for its integrity which certainly are among 
 the main objects of true education and in- 
 struction. It is not impressed upon the 
 boys and girls of our schools that careful 
 use of words and a pleasing intonation are 
 not merely for special occasions, but indis- 
 pensable for those who would claim the 
 title ; lady or gentleman. 
 
 Apart from some errors of pronunciation 
 and picturesque use of certain words, the 
 laboring man speaks better and purer Eng- 
 lish than the professional man. The 
 reason for this is that the first has not 
 been spoiled. The second has an idea that 
 
186 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 proper speaking is something to be avoided, 
 like priggishness. 
 
 To one who has seen men and cities, 
 the fact is painfully evident that the 
 American people lack a certain respect for 
 the language they speak. You will travel 
 far in the older lands before experiencing 
 a counterpart of this evil national habit. 
 The Oriental, no matter what his station, 
 is a model of correctness in speech. The 
 European, while less flowery, sets careful 
 limits to taking liberties with his language. 
 He sees no reason for degrading or distort- 
 ing it. It has been left for us to give a 
 horrible example in this regard. I hold 
 no brief just now for or against the public 
 school, but I do contend that the public 
 school fails to turn out scholars who speak 
 English even passably well. Much of this 
 is due, no doubt, to national flippancy and 
 a tendency to haste in expressing ideas, 
 as all else in our life. But it is surely 
 a strange pass that young people on 
 whose education so much money has been 
 spent, speak far less grammatically than 
 the men and women who have cost our 
 school system little if anything at all. If 
 
ATROCIOUS HlfQLIBH. 137 
 
 thirteen or fifteen years spent at books 
 will not suffice to turn out men and women 
 who have the taste and discrimination to 
 use the vernacular decently, is it not time 
 for a real investigation? 
 
BLATHER. 
 
 CALLEYRAND stated that language 
 was designed to conceal thought, 
 and one never realizes the pro- 
 found truth of this observation un- 
 til circumstances have chained him to a 
 pillar while chattering crowds sweep by, 
 or converted him into a human sandwich 
 in a packed trolley car with conversation 
 furnished free by passengers. 
 
 After the first violent nausea passes, the 
 impression that breaks on the lis- 
 tener is the enormous amount of perfectly 
 good talk that is wasted. Ordinarily, 
 when there is a group of two or three, es- 
 pecially of the devout sex, each remark is 
 delivered in triplicate. Next comes the 
 number of words that have no bearing 
 whatever on the topic in hand. 
 
 People who are afflicted with excess dig- 
 nity prefix a variety of semi-articulate 
 sounds to their sentences ; others are poor 
 starters and turn themselves back for a 
 second and sometimes third trial; others 
 
BLATHER. 11$ 
 
 still amble along somewhat after the fash- 
 ion of a distanced horse in a race, talking 
 diligently without anyone on earth being 
 concerned in the least as to the matter or 
 manner of the thought or words produced. 
 
 There is still another variety, happily 
 not common, the conversational tyrant 
 who brooks no rivals or interruptions, and 
 when he notices any party eager to enter 
 the lists, pulls some mental lever with a 
 conversational smashup as the result. 
 
 Most people have on occasion been told 
 that they talk too much. It is too bad 
 that this great truth is not impressed on 
 the public more often and emphatically, 
 and that there is no sanction attached to 
 it. Probably the only way to enforce any 
 such rule would be to charge so much a 
 word, as the telegraph companies do, or 
 better, like the telephone people, a fixed 
 tariff for the first three minutes, with an 
 increase per minute after that. It is the 
 only way to convince people of the amount 
 of talk they waste. 
 
 They who think clearly and speak lu- 
 cidly and briefly are so rare that some 
 decoration, like the Legion of Honor, 
 
140 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 should be conferred upon them, also a pen- 
 sion. The average man or woman who 
 goes to a store or office or bank to speak 
 on anything out of the routine generally 
 conceals thought most successfully — and 
 yet people wonder why clerks appear 
 weary of life. It is not of life but of talk, 
 undigested, amorphous thought, that is 
 poured out over them all day long and 
 every day in the week. 
 
 Some hold to Carlyle's extreme state- 
 ment and maintain that the people 
 are "mostly fools. " You will easily ascer- 
 tain that this is a fallacy by the simple 
 experiment of doing business with them. 
 The trouble is in the expression of thought. 
 
 Some people are so constituted that talk 
 comes forth from them, as it were, drop 
 by drop; others wish to heave a subject 
 and its trimmings into your ears, as a 
 drayman heaves a brimming basket, while 
 a third variety comport their conversa- 
 tion after the melancholy fashion familiar 
 to all who have tried to pour liquid from a 
 bottle after the cork has been driven 
 through into the bottle ; their conversation 
 is punctuated by gulps and gurgles. 
 
BLATHER. 141 
 
 The writer who said of an acquaintance 
 that his conversation was illumined by 
 brilliant flashes of silence uttered a com- 
 pliment. The impression to be gathered 
 in crowds is that a surprising number of 
 people have made a vow against silence — 
 and keep the vow. There is really no harm 
 in thinking about what you are to say 
 before you attempt to clothe thoughts in 
 words. 
 
 In the first place, there is something in- 
 delicate, indecorously "intime" in expos- 
 ing naked mental processes to the world. 
 It reminds one of that peculiar man, in the 
 front of the old almanacs, surrounded by 
 the signs of the zodiac. 
 
 Again, it is a charitable thing to allow 
 pauses for thought during conversation, 
 for it may be that others desire to say 
 something. 
 
 Certain statisticians tell us the number 
 of words in Shakespeare's vocabulary, and 
 I believe, it is estimated that the average 
 individual uses not more than three hun- 
 dred, but these emphatically are used. If 
 these three hundred words wore out like 
 children's shoes, half of them would be in 
 
142 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 the shop to be heeled and half -soled most 
 of the time, while the owners struggled 
 along on interjections. 
 
 There is something positively madden- 
 ing about the constant repetition of a cer- 
 tain word or expression. What countless 
 thousands of young women who are little 
 more than "sez I" and "sez he" factories, 
 have escaped violent ends simply because 
 murder, even among us, is occasionally 
 punished. Every suffering listener can 
 easily compile his little Purgatorial list. 
 
 But, after all the worst conversational 
 plagues are talkers who can enunciate 
 words for hours without a single thought 
 to be sifted from the turgid stream ; they 
 go on forever; they are conversational in- 
 ebriates who should be restrained by law 
 and the parties furnishing them with 
 topics should be prosecuted. Almost 
 everything is taught in the schools now. It 
 is a pity some expert does not open a 
 school to teach people how to keep still. 
 
APPEARANCES. 
 
 I CERTAIN society woman recently 
 argued in favor of "dignified gam- 
 ^Tj bling." It was her contention that 
 persons of wealth and social posi- 
 tion should have gaming rights denied to 
 ordinary folk. Her plea in effect was that 
 great wealth is above law. 
 
 There is no doubt that rich men and 
 women assume regal airs, counting regula- 
 tions as an impertinence. It is difficult to 
 find any justification except caprice for 
 such an attitude. An action is either right 
 or wrong and money cannot change the 
 ethics of the situation. But it always 
 makes the attempt. As "society" is 
 largely an effort to keep all except a fa- 
 vored few out of an exclusive circle, so 
 wealth essays to make law a rule only for 
 "common people/' 
 
 The feudal noble claimed the privilege 
 of breaking all laws, divine and human, on 
 the principle that God would think twice 
 before condemning a nobleman to eternal 
 
144 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 punishment. This is insanity, but it is an 
 enduring taint showing itself century after 
 century. It is seen to evince itself among 
 those whom overmuch money or power 
 has blinded to the existence of unchang- 
 ing standards of right and wrong. 
 
 In past ages this claim of aristocrats 
 that they were above the law obtained a 
 foothold from the fact that a powerful 
 nobleman could tyrannize ecclesiastical au- 
 thority and induct parasites into chaplain- 
 cies and even bishoprics. Lay investiture 
 was an enemy that long gave trouble to 
 the Church, and if the Church failed Cod 
 alone stood for the right. 
 
 In modern times the same claim suc- 
 ceeds even better, because the offenders 
 have divested themselves of belief in the 
 supernatural, conscientious standards and 
 respect for any higher law. 
 
 The Sacrament of Penance is a great so- 
 cial leveller. It hews to the line. The sin- 
 ner undergoes two examinations: first of 
 his own conscience and second by the con- 
 fessor. When there is no balancing of soul 
 accounts, the individual runs adrift and is 
 guided only by appetite and fear of pub- 
 
APPEARANCES. 145 
 
 lie shame. In process of time this ini- 
 quitous rule of conduct has been erected 
 into a sort of fetish. The one thing to 
 which wealthy outlaws cleave is respect- 
 ability. 
 
 Now this respectability is merely titu- 
 lar, a fiction of social law. It has nothing 
 to do with probity, but is an arbitrary 
 limit set to social actions. A man may 
 keep up two establishments, provided 
 there is no public outcry. He may be in- 
 toxicated nearly all the time if he does not 
 make a "scene." A "scene" is the unpar- 
 donable crime. 
 
 Thus it is that all solid standards are set 
 at naught and in their place is built a 
 flimsy stockade to hide unpleasant reali- 
 ties. People may become accustomed to 
 anything, no matter how absurd, and con- 
 vince themselves that it is a proper code of 
 conduct. This is evidently the case of the 
 woman who argues for "dignified gam- 
 bling." 
 
 The same thing is characteristic of many 
 so-called "reformers." It is not sin or evil 
 life that offends them and which thoy 
 
14C THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 strive to remove, but the vulgarity of sin 
 that is publicly offensive. 
 
 They do not rebuke drunkenness among 
 their social intimates or immorality among 
 their acquaintances, but drunkenness 
 that is a nuisance and immorality that 
 flaunts itself publicly. They are victims 
 of a mental twist that causes them to 
 mistake grossness as the determining fac- 
 tor in sin. 
 
 The Spartans used the drunken slave as 
 a horrid example to their children. The 
 modern "submerged tenth" cite the drunk- 
 enness and immorality of the rich as a jus- 
 tification for their own delinquencies. 
 
 It is no palliation of the deeds of a male- 
 factor, that he is rich or socially promi- 
 nent. It is an aggravation of his offense, 
 but in every community there prevails a 
 curious conspiracy against justice, and 
 the basis of this conspiracy is the assump- 
 tion that rich men can do no wrong. 
 
 The radical evil of modern life is iden- 
 tical with that which destroyed the em- 
 pire of the Caesars and the rule of the 
 French kings, namely, the substitution of 
 "appearances" for the rock-ribbed princi- 
 
APPEARANCES. 147 
 
 pies of right and duty. In the beginning 
 the evil was confined to the ruling class, 
 but it quickly ate its way like a cancer 
 down to the vitals of the government and 
 left the country an easy prey to attack or 
 revolution. 
 
 "The divinity that doth hedge a king" 
 is but a legend of the past and the self -con- 
 stituted aristocrat lives in a house of 
 cards. A breath of revolution will scatter 
 it and its occupants to the winds. The 
 "unchurched" masses are as godless as the 
 classes and give no hostage to appearances 
 or respectability. The millionaire of today 
 holds his wealth by an insecure tenure, for 
 socialism and anarchy are rampant. 
 
 It is therefore most injudicious on the 
 part of wealthy people to claim any ex- 
 emption from the laws established for the 
 well-being and order of the community, for 
 the wealthy idle on the slopes of a social 
 volcano. The feminine gambler ingenu- 
 ously voiced a sentiment unduly prevalent 
 among her class, but generally covert. 
 
 Any close student of modern times and 
 conditions must reach one of two conclu- 
 sions. Either the spreading irreligion 
 
148 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 must be checked by a return to conscien- 
 tious standards braced up by living faith 
 in God, or it will certainly end by destroy- 
 ing utterly the existing social fabric and 
 open the gates to an anarchy the conse- 
 quences of which no man can foresee. 
 
THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE. 
 
 n 
 
 E who is untouched by the melan- 
 choly of the Autumn winds is 
 either a pachyderm or an arrant 
 optimist. He must be either rooted 
 and grounded in gladness or be destitute of 
 feeling. No matter how merry the com- 
 pany or loud the gaiety, the lull comes 
 when the ear is assailed by the mournful 
 wail of the wind. Like the Greek chorus, 
 it breaks in on the drama, singing vaguely 
 of woe. 
 
 But it is when one is alone that the po- 
 tency of the wind-spirits becomes a force 
 almost personal. It is a ceaseless knock- 
 ing at the gates of attention, like the cry- 
 ing of a child in the night or the whining 
 of an injured animal at the door. It plays 
 upon the naked nerves. We suddenly real- 
 ize the meaning of the old pagan cry: 
 "Great Pan is dead." The glory of the 
 Summer is departed, the flowers are with- 
 ered, the grain is laid away. The skeleton 
 trees keep watch over the waste, and Na- 
 
1M TH1 USEI OF APTERglTr. 
 
 ture makes moan over the destruction of 
 all she watched and tended. The earth is 
 a vast necropolis, and the sky is oppressed 
 with gloom. 
 
 But the dominant quality of this tragic 
 music is its insistence. You cannot escape 
 it. The air is stirred to voices and repeats 
 ceaselessly: "Alas! Alas." It is a plaint 
 like that of Rachel mourning over her 
 children and refusing to be comforted. The 
 sounds rise and fall, are now loud, now 
 soft, but the sad theme of the wind chorus 
 never changes. 
 
 Autumn is an eerie season. Winter 
 makes the land a desert and is satisfied. 
 The rapture of Spring brings no forebod- 
 ings. Summer sunk in repletion has no 
 space for introspection, but Autumn is 
 filled with mystery and presage of ill. Its 
 myriad voices sing in a minor key, bodying 
 forth the two last great conscious realities 
 of life, regret and dread. It is not merely 
 the dirge of the dead Summer the Autumn 
 winds sing. We know they rehearse our 
 own Requiem. 
 
 There is a terrifying multiple person- 
 ality about those winds. It is as if lost 
 
THE AUTUMNAL DIRGE. 151 
 
 souls wandering over the scenes of wasted 
 lives bemoaned neglected opportunities 
 and the contemned virtue that brings ulti- 
 mate joy. You cannot see them, or inter- 
 rogate them. You can only surmise their 
 grief. Around the windows they flit and 
 beat their hands and wail. The cadence 
 has not one note of gladness, but is filled 
 with death and lamentation. You can 
 translate it into words and ever they shape 
 themselves into the same strain: "Alas! 
 Alas! 
 
 Small wonder that the nations of North- 
 ern Europe, nurtured under the spell of 
 such winds as these evolved their weird 
 mythology. They listened all their lives to 
 that sad, spectral music. It was woven 
 into the fibre of their being, this instinc- 
 tive realization of mysterious voices, of 
 vague unutterable grief. They looked forth 
 at the visible world and Nature justified 
 their inward vision and lent a touch of 
 reality to a scheme of things wherein right 
 failed just as its triumph was due, joy was 
 struck down in the heyday of youth, and 
 the wind spirits chanted mournful music 
 over the graves of shattered hopes. 
 
152 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 Here, too, we see the origin of the 
 Banshee. Figure to yourself the lonely 
 cabin on the moor or the bleak mountain, 
 the mother with her children about her 
 knee, and beyond in the room the dead 
 father. The night wind sweeps by with 
 a shriek and she clasps the little ones 
 tightly, for it is the Banshee! A crowd 
 gathered about the fire in some great cas- 
 tle hears in the momentary silence the 
 shrill cry of the wind. Yes, there will be a 
 death soon, for the Banshee is abroad ! 
 
 It is the preparedness of the mind for 
 the mysterious, the expectancy of the un- 
 earthly, that give the Autumn wind its 
 melancholy power. The whole world seems 
 to be awaiting something in awe. An inde- 
 finable feeling grips the heart. The being 
 is swept by a nameless dread. A cold fear 
 lays its finger upon the soul. Then man 
 becomes Nature's Aeolian harp, and on his 
 heart strings she plays her minor sympho- 
 nies. Once the ear is attuned to that mys- 
 tic music anything may happen. The ac- 
 tual world recedes. The spirits take the 
 stage. Out of this mental condition come 
 the ghost stories, the marvelous folk-lore, 
 
THB AUTUMNAL, DIRGE. U3 
 
 the tales of unaccountable disappearances. 
 It is the very brooding ground of wraiths, 
 and the wind provides fit accompaniment 
 for the uncanny necromancy. 
 
 We live on the borderland of the myste- 
 rious. There is a faculty within us that 
 makes that mysterious more real than the 
 things which we touch and see, and never 
 more so than in the gloomy stage setting 
 of the November night, when the earth- 
 noises are stilled and the wind-spirits hold 
 court in the far reaches of the upper air. 
 Before the eyes of fancy, spectral shapes 
 swing and reel, multitudes of shades bow 
 their heads and moan. The legion of the 
 lost ones returns to earth to expiate in 
 sigh and lament the sins of wasted years. 
 The listener, held rigid by that compel- 
 ling choral undertone of the solemn wind, 
 galvanizes his past years. They troop by, 
 each with averted visage. It is the mas- 
 que of life endowed with vocal power. All 
 the sadness of life is compressed within 
 that span. Outside the wind keeps up its 
 interminable plaint, and within him the 
 quivering heart-strings repeat the mourn- 
 ful song: "Oh for the sweetness of the 
 
154 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 youth that is gone, the feeling of unwear- 
 ied strength, the uplifting of unscarred 
 hope, the vanished glory of life's Spring- 
 time." And the wind chorus repeats its 
 moan. Alas ! Alas ! 
 
THE SEEKERS. 
 
 H~"]E AVING aside the great body of men 
 and women who find the concrete 
 ^ggfej problem of earning a living quite 
 sufficient to engage their attention 
 and energies, and considering the minority 
 who, by position and advantages, are en- 
 abled to take an active interest in hu- 
 manity as a whole and to exert a predomi- 
 nant influence on the times in which 
 they live, we discern two camps set over 
 against one another. The watchword of 
 one is: look for the fine things in 
 life, that of the other is: look for what 
 is despicable. Both these camps are filled 
 with people of great earnestness and abil- 
 ity, but their energies in each case are 
 bent in opposite directions. 
 
 Life is so compacted of good and bad 
 hopelessly mingled, it is so vast in its reach 
 and even the keenest human mind is so 
 inadequate an instrument for a true sur- 
 vey, that the question resolves itself into 
 this: What are you seeking? 
 
 You will always find in mankind what 
 
156 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 you seek. If you are buoyed up by faith 
 and charity, life will show itself to 
 you in a benign aspect, every ill will have 
 its attendant compensation. If you have 
 no faith and think that humanity is ut- 
 terly depraved and selfish, you will come 
 on only too many evidences to support 
 your theory. 
 
 How few of all the publicists who put 
 forth their views in print are animated by 
 the spirit of fairness ! The great majority 
 start out with an inherited or pre-con- 
 ceived theory and hunt for facts to bear 
 it out. Whether it be a question of reli- 
 gion, sociology or politics, men tend to be 
 partisans rather than honest students. 
 
 For more than three hundred years his- 
 tory as written in the English language 
 has been a conspiracy against the truth. 
 The shibboleth was: No good can come 
 out of the Catholic Church. So they set 
 to work to travesty and vilify it. Any- 
 thing in its favor was tabooed, nothing 
 against it was too vile to magnify. They 
 sought, not truth, but the despicable 
 phases of history, and in the great muck- 
 heap thrown out by seventeen centuries 
 
THE SEEKERS. 157 
 
 they found plenty to bolster up their ma- 
 lign theory. 
 
 The main trend of modern humanita- 
 rianism is to consider man, not as a crea- 
 ture of soul and body, but as a higher 
 order of animal. It endeavors to improve 
 the baser part of man, the body. It 
 started out by eliminating the soul and 
 then attempted to formulate life standards 
 that would be workable. Man is an animal, 
 though this is but part of the story, but 
 if you take it as the axiom you can always 
 find instances to prove it. 
 
 The basic principle of very many who 
 are working for the purification of poli- 
 tics and for good government seems to be 
 that the people are unfit to govern them- 
 selves, that if left alone they will choose 
 unworthy representatives, and therefore 
 the only thing to do is so to restrict and 
 bend suffrage that power shall rest in the 
 hands of a few whose theories of govern- 
 ment must prevail. 
 
 Here again there is no honest study of 
 conditions on the basis of equal citizen- 
 ship, but an abiding distrust of democracy. 
 
 There is a consistent error in these 
 
158 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 three great departments of human acti- 
 vity, and though all ages have seen its 
 workings, the present age beholds its fine 
 flower and fruition. The error is that re- 
 spectability is a substitute for religion. 
 Working on that theory a powerful class 
 has attempted to control society. 
 
 What was the basic idea of that Puritan 
 religious system, which under one guise or 
 another, has been the opponent of the 
 Church for three centuries? External 
 dignity of a particularly repellant sort. 
 The church must give way to the bare 
 meeting house, the natural enthusiasm of 
 religion must be changed to a cold formal- 
 ism, the spontaneous gaiety of life must be 
 swathed in iron bands! 
 
 What is the main intent of professional 
 social workers ? To make the poor respect- 
 able. Teach them to care for their bodies, 
 for, forsooth! they have no souls to care 
 for. Put the young in schools where their 
 minds may be sharpened, for only thus can 
 they survive in the race of life. The self- 
 respect that comes of education is to shape 
 their moral conduct. These people usurp 
 the place of God in society. They attempt 
 
THE SEEKERS. 159 
 
 to exile Him, to make humanity over to 
 fit their gloomy theories of life. 
 
 What is the main aim of the political 
 reformer? To obtain a government of 
 "respectables." Hound the petty grafter, 
 exterminate the ward politician, not be- 
 cause they are criminal, but because they 
 are vulgar. Manage government by means 
 of a well-mannered oligarchy. Financiers 
 who steal millions respect the social amen- 
 ities and must be immune. The gigantic 
 violations of law that double the price of 
 the necessaries of life can await the puri- 
 fication of politics! 
 
 Such performances do not excite horror 
 because their authors are prominent in the 
 nation and of great wealth. But the basic 
 error is that immense peculations cannot 
 be bad because the authors are respect- 
 able. 
 
 Does this give pause to those whose in- 
 fluence is paramount in the land ? Not at 
 all. They have made up their minds, they 
 have formulated their theories and facts 
 must square with them. There are two 
 words that describe them and their proce- 
 dure perfectly : "Whited Sepulchres." 
 
POPULAR TASTE. 
 
 X-jT was said not long ago that the re- 
 marks of prize-fighters are more 
 read than the speeches of the 
 greatest statesmen. Why not? 
 The reading public has more in common 
 with the pugilist than with the statesman. 
 The man of high thought is always sure 
 of a small audience, but he must be content 
 that it is small. Few have the intelligence 
 and taste to enjoy the best speaking and 
 thinking, while millions are interested in 
 the words of a man who has fought his 
 way to eminence with no more protection 
 to his hands than two-ounce gloves. A 
 very few enjoy both and their exploits, 
 the catholics of the intellectual world. 
 
 Most people want their pabulum pre- 
 digested. As it is with breakfast foods 
 so with reading. They do not want to 
 take trouble. They want some one to do 
 the thinking and give them the results in 
 language easy to grasp. The public wants 
 
POPULAR TASTE. 161 
 
 its political news, that is, news about im- 
 portant state matters and without any sen. 
 sational qualities, in the smallest possible 
 compass and in the fewest possible words. 
 This is the secret of the "Yellow Press" 
 and the sensational editorial. They take 
 the responsibility of thinking from the 
 reader and interest without tiring him. 
 
 But to go back to the original conten- 
 tion; who will allege that the remarks of 
 any eminent senator can vie in interest 
 for the people with the remarks of an 
 eminent pugilist? The senator speaks to 
 a select and scholarly coterie of men who 
 wrestle with the intricate problems of 
 tariff, currency and military matters, all 
 about as attractive to an ordinary man as 
 a table of logarithms. But the pugilist 
 speaks to the whole country as the 
 crowned king of fisticuffs, a game which 
 every boy has played with varying skill 
 and success in earlier days. It is pretty 
 well admitted that no one thoroughly un- 
 derstands the currency question, but 
 everyone understands fighting, and more 
 enjoy it than are willing to confess it. 
 
 The land is covered with schools and 
 
162 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 people are very much in earnest about 
 education, but it seems to be a fact that 
 the great majority of men and women, 
 after having left school revert intellectu- 
 ally to a savage state, something after the 
 manner of the educated Indian returning 
 to the tepee. They reach their intellectual 
 level. The school often puts on the mind a 
 coating of culture that does not "strike in" 
 and which peels off in the shock and scram- 
 ble of life as weather removes poor paint 
 from a building. I believe that a much 
 larger number of people than is generally 
 supposed are impervious to education as 
 ordinarily understood, at least they throw 
 it aside on entering actual life as the col- 
 lege graduate puts off his cap and gown. 
 Here is a vast public, the sham-edu- 
 cated and the frankly and joyously igno- 
 rant to whom the easy writer appeals irre- 
 sistibly. If he is a newspaper man 
 he colors up the happenings of the day, 
 the comedies and tragedies of actual pres- 
 ent human life. If he is a novelist he in- 
 vents situations and weaves a plot to 
 hold the reader enthralled. Always the 
 method is the same. The reader is inter- 
 
POPULAR TASTE. 163 
 
 ested without having to think too hard. 
 
 There is another point. Those whose 
 lives are quiet and humdrum, who have no 
 adventures in life seek adventures in 
 books, and this on the whole is a very 
 prudent and safe way of having adven- 
 tures. Moreover, a man sees romance and 
 adventure in every line of life except his 
 own, which to him is sordid fact. Detec- 
 tive stories appeal to everybody except the 
 detective. Political stories bore the politi- 
 cian. It is only the working out of the 
 old fallacy. The other side of the road 
 always looks smoother to the traveler. As 
 the great majority of people lead narrow 
 and simple lives their ideals of happiness 
 and advenjture are correspondingly com- 
 monplace. 
 
 The literary taste of the average reader 
 is execrably bad. He all but creates badly 
 written books by the demand he voices 
 for such reading matter. He does 
 not appreciate and will not buy well 
 thought out and well written books. What 
 he wants is trash. And so the people who 
 are literary purveyors or panders, wheth- 
 er in the newspapers, the magazines, or 
 
164 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 publishing offices, furnish the reading 
 public with what it seeks — f or a consider- 
 ation — and everybody is satisfied. 
 
 There is much talk about the blessings 
 of modern education in comparison with 
 the widespread ignorance of times gone by, 
 yet the universal schooling which has been 
 spread out so thin over the land has re- 
 sulted in a debasement of literary taste 
 which would be incomprehensible to the 
 thinking man of a century ago. 
 
DEMAGOGUES. 
 
 p^jHERE is something pathetic about 
 ^J a political campaign. The excite- 
 ment, the gatherings of delegates, 
 the heated oratory, are merely 
 surface manifestations. It is all theatrical. 
 As at a play, one instinctively thinks, not 
 of the pageant and the lines spoken by the 
 actors, but of the real agents behind the 
 scenes, for whose benefit the public pays 
 and applauds. No man can be either so 
 good or so bad as a political candidate is 
 pictured by supporters or opponents. 
 
 The real hero of the convention and the 
 election is not the man whose name is on 
 every lip or the skilful manager who suc- 
 ceeds in placing his chief in the coveted 
 position, but that great moral person, the 
 people, in whose name all are acting, yet 
 who seems to gain little, whatever the 
 issue of the conflict. 
 
 Each time the chosen men of various 
 parties assemble in some city to settle 
 nominations, they gather to give that 
 
166 THE USES OF ADVERSITT. 
 
 blind and manacled Samson, the "plain 
 people," an opportunity to burst his 
 shackles and assume control. The pathos 
 lies in the fact that the shackles are not 
 burst. There is a terrific struggle. The 
 friends of Samson plead his cause and 
 cheer their cohorts, but when all is over, 
 Samson is still in his gyves. 
 
 A presidential year is a momentous 
 epoch for every workingman in the land. 
 If he could voice his woes in the conven- 
 tion, there would be a long step forward, 
 but the trouble is, the ordinary man fails 
 to understand the issues. There are so 
 many self-styled representatives clamor- 
 ing to be lifted to the place of leader, that 
 the plain citizen is bewildered. He suffers 
 from a plethora of champions, each claim- 
 ing to be the real one. 
 
 It is often stated that there is a lack 
 of issues; that there are now no great 
 questions, like slavery, to arouse the mass 
 of citizens. There is the usual patter about 
 the tariff, "interests" and the cost of liv- 
 ing. Men come forward with political 
 panaceas, such as the Initiative and Refer- 
 endum. We have seen how hollow is the 
 
DEMAGOGUES. 167 
 
 promise of the loudly trumpeted "pri- 
 mary," for only a small fraction of the 
 voters go to the polls at all. 
 
 Samson is blind and bound. He cannot 
 effectively voice the cruelty and injustice 
 which he suffers. What he needs is a man 
 who will do for him what Lincoln did for 
 the slave. Lincoln's name and fame are 
 much spoken of but one looks in vain 
 among popular leaders for a personality 
 that recalls the great Emancipator and 
 the mantle they try to drape about them- 
 selves is much too large. 
 
 It is said that the day of conventions 
 is passing, that they will be replaced by 
 some more effective manner of choosing 
 candidates. Yet there is much to be said 
 in favor of conventions. Convention day 
 is the one day in years when Samson can 
 make his pathetic appeal for justice. The 
 gathering of men from all parts of the 
 land does focus attention on wrongs and 
 grievances as hardly anything else can. 
 Doubtless there is much commercialism on 
 these occasions, yet the convention of to- 
 day is vastly different from the one of 
 twenty years ago. It is more turbulent 
 
168 THE USES OF ADVERSITY 
 
 because the people realize their disabilities 
 more keenly. There is less sentimental talk 
 and more plain speech about practical 
 issues. 
 
 Why should the ideal convention be as 
 calm as a pink tea? Such quiet would in- 
 deed be a sign of despotism. Men who 
 are really in earnest are careless of par- 
 liamentary law. Violence is sometimes 
 disgraceful, yet it must be admitted that 
 millions of our people labor under condi- 
 tions that are disgraceful. These are the 
 real issues of a campaign and they are 
 sedulously kept out of sight by party man- 
 agers and instead much eloquence is 
 wasted on abstractions. 
 
 We must have our demagogues. The 
 demagogue is an imposter. This is sig- 
 nificant. The multiplicity of pretenders is 
 evidence that there are in the land men 
 worthy of high office. We have had such 
 leaders in the past and we shall have them 
 again. It may not happen this time or 
 four years later, but the day is surely ap- 
 proaching when out of the ruck of a tur- 
 bulent convention will rise one who will 
 be without rhetoric or bombast a 
 
DEMAGOGUES. 169 
 
 Tribune of the "plain people." With this 
 conviction we can afford to bear a little 
 longer with the demagogue. He is the 
 impersonator of the leader who is to come. 
 
THE GLAD HAND. 
 
 y*»s HE cynic ever finds in mankind ma- 
 ^J terial for his ungracious trade. He 
 scoffs at politeness as hypocrisy 
 and kindliness as a counterfeit. He 
 will have it that all who are cheery are 
 actuated by selfish motives. To him all 
 fruit that is fair to the eye is bitter to the 
 taste. He is a mental dyspeptic and nat- 
 urally to his eyes mankind is a humbug 
 and life a sham. 
 
 Even men who think they eschew cyni- 
 cism insensibly take an attitude of disbe- 
 lief in pleasant manners. They expect too 
 much from their neighbors. No matter 
 how a man comports himself, he is wrong, 
 according to these theories. If he be re- 
 served, he acquires the reputation of 
 haughtiness. If he radiates good nature, 
 he is supposed to have an axe to 
 grind. When we are reserved we expect 
 others to recognize our position as proper ; 
 if we put ourselves out to be pleasant, we 
 are wroth to be told it is assumed. Why 
 
ON THE GLAD HAND. 171 
 
 not give the other man the benefit of the 
 same measure? 
 
 The misapprehension all comes from 
 keeping a strict code of responsibilities for 
 other people and an easy one for ourselves. 
 If we are looking out for our own interests, 
 is it wrong for others to do the same? 
 What does humanity owe us that it must 
 give us something for nothing ? 
 
 We hear of great bargains, bargains too 
 good to be true. We ought to know that 
 merchants seldom sell at a loss and that if 
 they are so compelled, it is mean to real- 
 ize on their hard necessity. But we do not 
 think of that. We are perfectly willing to 
 purchase goods at a price far below their 
 real value. We sally forth to get some- 
 thing cheap. We find that it is indeed 
 cheap, that we have about what we paid 
 for. Then we straightway berate the mer- 
 chant as a thief. 
 
 You are introduced to a man who seems 
 the incarnation of kindness and good-fel- 
 lowship. You find his society delightful 
 and insensibly you begin to count on this 
 as your right, and in the attempt to real- 
 ize on good nature, you find that there is 
 
172 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 steel beneath the velvet. Ten to one, you 
 denounce your quondam friend as insin- 
 cere. You were looking out for your own 
 interest all the time. You tried to play 
 the game unfairly and half your chagrin 
 comes from the realization that after all 
 he is the better man. 
 
 You meet a man of high position who is 
 more democratic and good natured than 
 most of his class, who puts himself out to 
 talk with you, takes an interest in your 
 prospects and your family. He owes you 
 nothing. His kindness is a free gift. You 
 begin to think you own this man. 
 On occasion you encounter him in the com- 
 pany of others of his set. To your suspi- 
 cious eye his greeting is cold. He does not 
 introduce his friends to you. You say to 
 yourself, "He is a snob. I am good enough 
 when he is alone, but not good enough 
 when he is with rich friends !" Why should 
 he introduce you to his friends? They 
 have not asked it, nor have you. Perhaps 
 they do not want to know you, and if he at- 
 tempted to play the good fellow, both you 
 and he might experience a rebuff. A man 
 can be answerable for himself, but not for 
 
ON THE GLAD HAND. 173 
 
 his friends or acquaintances. You were 
 the snob. You wanted to be able to say, 
 "I am well acquainted with such and such 
 a rich man." 
 
 Kindness is worth while for its own 
 sake. It is a good in itself. Even if its 
 expression were insincere beyond a doubt, 
 it would be still an agency for good. It 
 makes life easier. Civilization must be a bit 
 insincere. Solid gold must have some alloy 
 to make it practical for use. You, too, are 
 committed to a host of small insincerities. 
 You meet an undesirable acquaintance and 
 tell him you are glad to see him. Nothing 
 of the kind ! You write to Smith about a 
 disputed bill and begin the letter with 
 "Dear Smith." Now Smith is dear only in 
 a monetary way. You finish your letter 
 by "Yours sincerely." You visit a dying 
 friend and hypocritically tell him he will 
 soon be well again though death is written 
 on his face. You congratulate another on 
 his marriage though he really needs con- 
 dolences and you know it. 
 
 All dolls are stuffed with sawdust. All 
 toys are make believe. Why tear the doll 
 apart to view the melancholy contents or 
 
174 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 break the toy in sheer ill humor! They 
 gave real pleasure. You can pick life 
 apart, too, and find it nothing but sadness 
 and disappointment with death to crown 
 it all. The strongest and bravest whistle 
 to keep their spirits up. Nothing 
 lasts. Beauty fades, joy palls and life ever 
 promises what it cannot perform. 
 
 Shall we therefore join the cynics and 
 make life worse than needs be? We are 
 all aboard a sinking ship ; it is only a mat- 
 ter of time. What use to whimper, or 
 curse, or in other ways add to the sum of 
 misery of our fellows ? It is far better to 
 affect a bravery we do not feel, a cheer- 
 fulness in part assumed, that others may 
 not suffer unnecessary grief. 
 
 This is taking life on an all but pagan 
 basis. There is one thing that fails not, 
 faith. There is one promise that will be 
 redeemed in full, heaven, if we are fit for 
 it. There is one Friend who will never 
 fail us if we do our duty, Christ. The 
 kindest man is the truly religious man, for 
 his joy springs like the water that re- 
 sponded to the touch of Moses' wand, from 
 the rock. 
 
ON THE GLAD HAND. 175 
 
 Kindliness is indestructible. No part of 
 it is ever wasted and humanity bids us 
 give of it the best we can, for even the 
 counterfeit is better than surliness. 
 
CHILDHOOD. 
 
 6 
 
 DEN doubtless had long been a dim, 
 delightful memory to our first par- 
 ents before they died. After the 
 loss of their original innocence 
 they were changed and the world was 
 changed for them. Though the children 
 of Adam are born into a saddened world 
 there is a paradise which they enjoy dur- 
 ing the first few years of their lives, while 
 still they are innocent and untroubled, and 
 before they are thrust out into the wil- 
 derness of toil and worry. But once the 
 fairy portals have silently closed behind 
 them they are changed. Something has 
 been obliterated from their minds. 
 
 Once in a while a dim picture of that 
 far off time may come back to them, as 
 Eve may have recalled some scene of her 
 first home. Sometimes above the clang of 
 the world may drift in an elusive bit of 
 melody from a song that ceased years be- 
 fore, but the beauty and freshness of crea- 
 tion as it is mirrored in childish eyes re- 
 
CHILDHOOD. 177 
 
 turns not after they are seared by expe- 
 rience. The laughter that bubbles from 
 young lips is a lost art in maturity. No! 
 when we pass out of childhood, we are 
 shut out forever, exiles. 
 
 Children know instinctively that their 
 elders are alien beings, that they 
 themselves live in a world as differ- 
 ent from ours as if it were in another 
 planet. Children never reveal themselves 
 entirely. They cannot. They have secret 
 springs of joy that we never find, visions 
 that to them are realities. We knew these 
 things once, but that knowledge has 
 passed away. 
 
 Children are happier than grown-up 
 people, but that happiness is founded on 
 ignorance and illusion! Perhaps. All 
 worldly happiness is similarly based. Pro- 
 metheus toiled only to win agony. Worldly 
 knowledge is pain. Children are spared 
 it. Enter a city in the twilight. Dimness 
 enshrouds all unpleasant sights, smooths 
 down ugly angles, converts a scraggy 
 patch of trees into a little park. It is with 
 eyes reprieved from the tawdriness of 
 things that the child beholds the world. 
 
178 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 But in another way the child sees more 
 than we do. The grimy tramp slouching 
 along the road is for him a hero of ad- 
 venture, laborers going to work are bent 
 on secret and important missions, drivers 
 of wagons are voyagers who know what is 
 going on in the dim beyond. He is girt 
 about by delightful mysteries in the very 
 presence of common things. In a very true 
 sense the child is right too. The knights 
 of the road do have romantic adventures, 
 even as did their forerunners of the lance 
 and corselet, as Jack London has explained 
 to us. Laborers are bent on an important 
 mission — earning their living, and so se- 
 cret is it that thousands die because they 
 cannot discover it. Drivers have a wide 
 and valuable knowledge of the world. The 
 child's instinct is wiser than our expe- 
 rience. 
 
 The secret of this lies in the fact that 
 to a child no object is simply what older 
 folk know it to be. Everything is pro- 
 tean. He fights Indians all day in a small 
 yard and sticks are the Indians. He rides 
 leagues on a hobby horse without moving 
 ten feet. He circumnavigates the globe by 
 
CHILDHOOD. 179 
 
 means of a shingle boat in a puddle. These 
 are mighty privileges. 
 
 The supposed misery of poor children 
 is doubtless exaggerated. Given food and 
 air, they can be happier than their elders 
 with all that wealth can buy, for the poor- 
 est of them holds fairyland in fee simple 
 and sprites we never see do his bidding. 
 
 There is a freemasonry among all 
 children. They tolerate grown-up people 
 but never admit them to the secrets of the 
 craft. Watch a man or woman talking to 
 a group of children. It is like seeking in- 
 formation in the enemy's country. There 
 is a veiled hostility beneath their polite- 
 ness, and when the interview is over, they 
 run away intent on some mystic business 
 which it interrupted. If you are very wise 
 and patient with these small, secretive 
 creatures, you may get a peep into the 
 realities of their proceedings, but never a 
 satisfactory view. And justly so. You 
 have been expelled from that society and 
 have forgotten the grip and pass word. 
 Its doings are not for you to know. Chil- 
 dren understand this and treat you ac- 
 cordingly. 
 
180 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 Doubtless this is the explanation of 
 much of the difficulty in taking care of 
 children, a misunderstanding of the situa- 
 tion. Naturally the father thinks it 
 strange that his small daughter cries and 
 dances when compelled to pass a large tree 
 in the evening. He does not appreciate 
 that the tree is a very bad giant, and she 
 will never tell him. The mother who 
 stumbles over a pile of bricks in the area 
 way would not be so cross if she under- 
 stood that she had demolished Aladdin's 
 palace. It will never be told by her little 
 boy. We are well meaning but blundering 
 ogres of the childish fairyland. 
 
 Contrast the helplessness of mature peo- 
 ple, their inability to amuse themselves, 
 their running to theatres, getting up en- 
 tertainments to escape boredom, with the 
 resourcefulness of a child who finds every- 
 thing in the world so interesting that he is 
 always, as it were, at the circus. He makes 
 his enjoyment out of the most unpromis- 
 ing materials. He plans and stages His 
 dramas on boards that even Shakespeare 
 would call bare. He really enjoys life. We 
 are case-hardened. We have walked out 
 
CHILDHOOD. 181 
 
 of the fairy ring and forgotten the spell 
 to bring us back. The door is closed and 
 we cannot recall: "Open sesame." And 
 the little ragamuffin in the puddle knows 
 the charm and enters as he lists. 
 
THE BECKONING WEST. 
 
 XT is quite likely that Kipling's soldier 
 in the dull and dreary weather of 
 England heard "the East a-calling, ,, 
 for the dreamy and voluptuous life 
 of the Orient holds a strong appeal for 
 Tommy Atkins. But for most men these 
 many centuries gone, it is rather the West 
 that has beckoned and called to the men 
 of the East. From that cradle of the race 
 in far off Asia men have now for many 
 hundreds of years set their eyes and their 
 feet towards the setting sun. They went 
 across the wide steppes down into Europe. 
 Some settled, the others went on. 
 
 The progress continued until the pil- 
 grims had reached the sea, and there for a 
 time their journey was interrupted. They 
 settled all over Europe, crossed even to the 
 islands of the North, harrying and occupy- 
 ing until the lands were filled, and new and 
 old races intermingling began what we 
 now call modern Europe. 
 
 But there came a time when the beckon- 
 
THE BECKONING WEST. 183 
 
 ing finger could no longer be denied. Co- 
 lumbus and those who imitated him, set 
 out for the West across the vast deep in 
 the small ships of those days, and so at 
 last this Western World of ours was dis- 
 covered and occupied by those of the older 
 lands. 
 
 Here began anew the old story. At first 
 the settlements were along the sea coast, 
 a mere fringe on the moist hem of this 
 great continent. But something in the 
 blood of the men who came from over 
 seas throbbed in their children, who 
 pushed onward to the West. Every vari- 
 ety of danger and privation faced them, 
 but they would not be stayed. As we read 
 the story of the first overland pilgrims, it 
 is as if they were Crusaders on a new 
 quest or seekers after the Holy Grail. Dec- 
 ade by decade the wilderness took its 
 toll of life and blood, and steadily gave be- 
 fore the indomitable march of man, until 
 at last the invaders crossed the Rockies 
 and stood at the shores of the Pacific, 
 whose far off waters wash the East 
 where humanity was cradled. So there is 
 nothing more to do unless men are to con- 
 
184 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 tinue on to the Westward until they reach 
 the East again. 
 
 All along the world-path that marks the 
 successive progress of the migration of 
 the nations stand great cities and rich 
 fields occupied by men and women who are 
 perfectly sure that the place where they 
 live is the finest on the globe, and it is 
 well that this is so, for contentment is the 
 secret of life. But along with this satisfac- 
 tion goes a certain contempt for those who 
 live in newer lands, where life is raw and 
 crude, where people are not polished down 
 to a uniform smoothness and convention- 
 ality. 
 
 The average European today looks on us 
 with a self-complacent toleration. When 
 we go abroad to look at their treasures of 
 art and architecture, to visit the scenes of 
 the tales we have read in childhood, those 
 who live in those lands think we are paying 
 them a compliment, when as a matter of 
 fact it is merely a pilgrimage we are mak- 
 ing to the shrines of our ancestors. The 
 average Englishman to this day smiles 
 somewhat at the "Yankee." We make a 
 good deal of after dinner talk, which is 
 
THE BECKONING WEST. 1S5 
 
 accepted at its face value by the recipients ; 
 at least they enjoy all the aroma there is 
 in this post prandial incense. The Eng- 
 lishman never realizes that the average 
 American would go mad if he were con- 
 demned to live the life of England. 
 
 So, too, in our own land, the dwellers 
 along the Atlantic are apt to feel quite 
 complacent when they think of the West. 
 They say: Our sons have made it what it 
 is. That is true. But they forget that it 
 was the beckoning of the West to the best 
 and strongest and most adventurous 
 among those nurtured in New England and 
 on the Atlantic Coast that has drawn these 
 mighty men who have built out there on 
 the plains and across the Mississippi a 
 veritable Empire. They forget that New 
 England has been bled almost to the white 
 that the West might grow. They forget, 
 too, that these sons who have gone forth 
 from them are in spirit and sympathy all 
 but aliens, that they would feel as ill at 
 ease and cramped by the stiffness and 
 numberless conventionalities of ancestral 
 neighborhoods as some lusty youngster in 
 a stately parlor. 
 
186 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 The East woos the man who longs for 
 languor, the tropic sunlight, the dreamy 
 life, the aromatic winds of the lands of 
 "dolce far niente." But the West woos 
 men, strong, active men with red blood 
 bounding in their arteries. It is like the 
 rain that beats against the face of the 
 sailor as his boat goes onward to sea, the 
 snow blast that stings the cheek of the 
 traveller who pushes forward on some er- 
 rand of import. The very opposition is a 
 caress, like the wild gaiety and freshness 
 of a young girl. So will the West call men 
 always, not to ease and luxury, but to 
 work and effort. It is this attraction that 
 has made this nation what it is, mighty 
 and self-reliant. Many a man whom 
 life condemns to remain like a peg in a 
 hole, who is tied down by duty and unes- 
 capable obligations, feels within him that 
 tremendous rush, hears in the ears of 
 fancy that cry that echoes across the cen- 
 turies, the cry that men first heard in the 
 far East ages ago, and following, made 
 the world what it is. 
 
THE MORNING INTERVAL. 
 
 w E are born again each morning. The 
 vl/ night has swept away the anxieties 
 of the preceding day, and we open 
 our eyes to find all things new. 
 Sleep gives a sort of reprieve from the 
 effects of past trouble, and it is only when 
 we violate the tacit compact and rush back 
 into the turmoil of life, that the peace 
 vouchsafed by the healing hours of uncon- 
 sciousness leaves us and the excitement of 
 the world resumes its sway. 
 
 Of course there is work to be done. The 
 problems of livelihood must be faced. Out- 
 side our door is the burden of duties which 
 we must lift again to our shoulders. But 
 there is no need of hurry. It is a mis- 
 take to rise as if the house were afire, 
 dress in haste, snatch a morsel or two and 
 run to work. It is harmful for the body 
 and more so for the mind. The soul is 
 never so conscious of its individuality and 
 independence, so entirely master of itself 
 as in the interval between waking and 
 work. 
 
118 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 It is indeed one of the worst character- 
 istics of this age of unrest that it tends 
 to make people live mechanically. They 
 lose that invaluable power of surveying 
 themselves as distinct and accountable be- 
 ings and all others as outsiders. The morn- 
 ing interval is the best time of the entire 
 day. The body is refreshed by sleep, the 
 mind detached from the mesh of engage- 
 ments and anxieties that occupy and vex 
 the later waking hours. It is a time of 
 normality. Once we open the door all the 
 Cares troop in, even as they burst forth 
 from Pandora's box, and sometimes in- 
 deed Hope comes not in with them. It is 
 well to put off this inevitable moment until 
 we have readjusted ourselves and are able 
 to receive the intruders with dignity and 
 calm. 
 
 The man who goes forth in the morning 
 to his appointed duty is in a way dis- 
 guised ; first in the clothes he wears, a con- 
 cession to conventionality, and again in his 
 manner to those whom he meets, a conces- 
 sion to civility and good-fellowship. One 
 must adjust himself to each friend and 
 acquaintance. But the robe of sleep is the 
 
THE MORNING INTERVAL. 189 
 
 badge of freedom. We can afford the lux- 
 ury of being what we are, without allow- 
 ances or reservations. Conventionalities 
 must be. They are part of our gain from 
 barbarism. But like taxes for the common 
 good, they are irksome to the individual. 
 
 But we need never worry that the world 
 will not obtain its own. The Roman 
 citizen who vainly sought to escape Caesar 
 and the Eastern sage who tried to outrun 
 death were no more certain to be captured 
 than the man or woman who in our day 
 strives to bid defiance to the conventions 
 of modern life. 
 
 But there is no need to wear our chains 
 as ornaments. Some people appear to be 
 compact of conventionality, to possess no 
 "Ego," to be institutions like the news- 
 paper or railroad station, and not persons ; 
 doubtless for the reason that they do not 
 know what self communion means. But 
 the generality of folk, though close pressed 
 on all sides by the world, keep certain 
 chambers of the soul locked against all 
 comers, reserve certain tokens that mean 
 much to themselves and nothing to others. 
 Hence it is always a gruesome experience 
 
190 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 to go over the keepsakes of a dead friend. 
 We come upon many objects that spoke in 
 a secret language to the one who is gone. 
 We seem to be intruders in the lodgings 
 of a departed soul. 
 
 These considerations apply to normal 
 men and women whose sleep is natural and 
 sufficient, and who awaken to the con- 
 sciousness of health. Drug-bought sleep 
 presents its bill in the morning, the first 
 bill of the day and the hardest to pay, the 
 more so that its presentation breaks in on 
 a time that should be sacred, like a bailiff 
 entering a chamber with a writ. 
 
 So for those who lie down worn with 
 sickness and awaken to lift again to their 
 weary shoulders the cross of pain. The 
 sufferer sees himself in an unreal light, 
 his musings are apt to be abnormal. But 
 most pitiable of all is he to whom the 
 night brings no peace, whose forehead is 
 never touched by the light fingers of the 
 Angel of Sleep, who stares with open eyes 
 into the darkness and hears the sullen 
 hours grind on until the chill morning 
 breaks, welcome only because it is not 
 night. Insomnia, mother of maniacs! 
 
THE MORNING INTERVAL. 191 
 
 Such unfortunates feel in the early hours 
 not their own but an alien consciousness; 
 they are robbed of the blessed interval. 
 
 As in all things in life except sorrow 
 and death, the morning comes to no one in 
 such joyful guise, with such radiant, danc- 
 ing feet as to the child. He is Nature's 
 darling to whom she pours out all her 
 treasures with open hands. So the laugh- 
 ter of children in the early day is as nat- 
 ural as the sunrise song of the awakened 
 birds. Both salute the morn with a hymn, 
 untaught yet perfect. 
 
 We owe it to ourselves to devote some 
 time before the work of the day to self 
 communion, to becoming acquainted with 
 ourselves, for the day comes when we can 
 no more lean upon the world, and we need 
 the strength that comes of that silent soul 
 talk. The hardest battles of life are soli- 
 tary battles, and the last great fight, in 
 which we must die to win, will be fought 
 by you and by me alone. 
 
ACCOMPLISHMENT. 
 
 OIGNITY is the last shred of respect- 
 ability to which many who have lost 
 everything else still cling. Dignity 
 is a good cane, but a poor crutch. 
 Like an old family name or armorial bear- 
 ings, it is a fine adjunct, but a small asset. 
 Centuries ago civilization was crystal- 
 lized. The noble had his fixed and guar- 
 anteed place in society, the commoner was 
 content with a lower but still worthy con- 
 dition, and the serf toiled hopelessly in 
 the depths. Life and events in almost 
 every land have played havoc with these 
 time-honored institutions. Civilization to- 
 day is in a half -molten state; it hardens 
 and then liquifies. Nothing is, settled. 
 
 Practically the only institution of the 
 Western world that has preserved the re- 
 spect of men for its order and orders is 
 the Catholic Church, and for this reason; 
 the Catholic Church uses external dignity 
 merely as an adjunct. She is always ready 
 to yield "storied fanes" and rich vestments 
 
ACCOMPLISHMENT. 193 
 
 when principles are at stake, and go forth 
 with staff and scrip like the Apostles. De- 
 nuded of power, shorn of wealth, given 
 over to persecution, she promptly takes 
 root again and with divine vigor is soon 
 as strong as before. 
 
 Everything else has gone by the board. 
 Emperors and kings stand daily at the 
 bar of public opinion; they are ridiculed 
 as easily as beggars and all their royal 
 state goes for nothing. A sort of social 
 clairvoyance has set in that rates with 
 brutal frankness and a sort of rough jus- 
 tice gentle and simple alike. This may be 
 dangerous, a sign of decay, subversive of 
 order and hostile to the best interests of 
 mankind, but it is a fact. 
 
 Yet there was never a time when a cer- 
 tain segment of society, and in a way, an 
 important one, ran faster and harder af- 
 ter honors and titles. People are rarely 
 concerned with the shadow of greatness 
 until the substance has departed. Many 
 names meant much in Europe three cen- 
 turies ago. They mean nothing today ex- 
 cept in history. This is not necessarily 
 the fault of those who now bear the 
 
194 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 names. The conditions have changed. 
 The coin is accepted no more in the marts. 
 
 Yet American girls commit themselves 
 incontinent to marriage with needy titles, 
 crazed by the desire to be called by an 
 old name, anxious to gain a place whose 
 glory has passed these two or three hun- 
 dred years, and hard-headed fathers, who 
 by soul-destroying struggles have 
 amassed millions bestow them upon 
 strangers as if under the influence of some 
 magic spell. All sorts of charlatans affect 
 absurd and sounding appellations and suc- 
 ceed in getting themselves accepted at 
 their face value. 
 
 Still this phenomenon is more apparent 
 than real. It affects deeply an over-adver- 
 tised minority, who have used up life, ex- 
 hausted the gamut of the emotions and are 
 spoiled by success. The magnate of the 
 Cinquecento, having conquered his city or 
 province, turned to collecting antiques. The 
 magnate of the Twentieth Century, having 
 made himself master of a Trust, the sole 
 dispenser of some life-necessity, some 
 trade essential, turns to collecting an- 
 tiques, sons-in-law with ancient names. 
 
ACCOMPLISHMENT. 135 
 
 The sane and vigorous majority is con- 
 cerned with these things only as reading 
 matter. When one leaves the stifling at- 
 mosphere of wealth and imitation gran- 
 deur for the wide plains wherein men work 
 and struggle, he finds a very different code 
 and rating system. First of all, men ad- 
 mire effectiveness. "The man who does 
 things" is the man of the millions. Next, 
 effectiveness possessing also grace and 
 dignity is a combination to conjure with, 
 the modern "philosopher's stone/' that 
 transmutes all things to gold. 
 
 Active men resent dignity alone as a 
 variety of false pretence. Success alone, 
 while winning respect, still lacks the gra- 
 cious something, but the two combined 
 in one man take the highest place by 
 unanimous vote. This is nothing new. 
 The old play still keeps the boards, but 
 the stage carpenter, Circumstance, has de- 
 signed new scenery. Men have always 
 been guided by the self -same rule in elect- 
 ing their leaders and heroes. In bloodier 
 days, when landmarks were unsettled and 
 war the most prosperous business, amid 
 the clash of shields and on gory fields, they 
 
196 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 lifted the soldier to their shoulders and 
 shouted his name in glad acclaim. Today, 
 amid the clang of manufactures, on the 
 fierce battlefield of trade, they lift up the 
 captain of industry, the strategist of af- 
 fairs. It is always the same type of man 
 who wins the plaudits and wields the 
 power. Men made the kings, dukes and 
 earls of dead and gone centuries for the 
 same reason and by the same rule that 
 today they make the rulers who sway 
 commerce and politics. The type of man 
 that founded European dynasties and 
 made the names "that ring down the cor- 
 ridors of time," if translated to our day, 
 would command men just the same. Our 
 modern magnates thrust back a few cen- 
 turies would establish kingdoms by the 
 same inevitable law. 
 
 Why then should we bother about hon- 
 ors and name-handles ? The public has its 
 own code of nobility and enforces it with 
 an iron hand. It is not concerned with 
 virtue as such, or uprightness as such, 
 but with effectiveness. Every man has 
 his rating in that list, a rating irrespective 
 of genealogy, strictly according to the 
 
ACCOMPLISHMENT. 197 
 
 measure of his proven ability, but in the 
 highest place of that "fierce democracies 
 always sits the man of effectiveness and 
 dignity. 
 
TODAY. 
 
 XT IS quite the fashion to extol the 
 past and malign the present. There 
 
 is nothing new about this attitude. 
 
 A certain number of people are al- 
 ways out of joint with the age in which 
 they live. There are many factors in mod- 
 ern life that tend to accentuate and exag- 
 gerate this attitude, though this too may 
 be alleged in defence of any period. There 
 are many advocates abroad preaching the 
 gospel of discontent and emphasizing ev- 
 erything that can make people fancy them- 
 selves ill used. One of these factors is the 
 daily newspaper focusing the concentrated 
 woes and horrors of the world on the in- 
 dividual. Another is the scolding maga- 
 zine that exists only to find fault with the 
 universe as it is constituted. Now the 
 average reader is an idolater ; he worships 
 the daily printed word ; to him it is infalli- 
 ble. He may doubt many things : the exis- 
 tence of God, the inspiration of the Bible, 
 the immortality of the soul, but he never 
 
TODAY. 199 
 
 thinks of doubting what is served up to 
 him morning and evening on a wood-pulp 
 flimsy. 
 
 One point on which the evangelists of 
 trouble are insistent is that the world is 
 going to the dickens; that the poor were 
 never so ill treated, the rich so heartless 
 and the whole social economy so hopelessly 
 wrong. It is possible to illustrate this un- 
 healthy state of mind by the example of 
 a wife who has not enough to do. She 
 compares her lot with what she sees of 
 other women. She compares her husband 
 with what she hears and sees of other 
 men. She discounts every blessing that 
 is hers and magnifies every comfort that 
 surrounds others. There is only one seem- 
 ing hope on her horizon, divorce ! In a way, 
 it may be said of modern society that it 
 dreams of divorce from facts, from certain 
 evils that must be, from certain pains that 
 must be borne, and hugs the delusion that 
 another alliance will bring all it sighs for. 
 
 If one has a bit of the judicial tempera- 
 ment, he will grow weary of this constant 
 plaint of discontented folk who abuse the 
 age in which they live as if it were the 
 
200 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 abomination of desolation. The fact is, 
 this generation is spoiled. It has so many 
 things that it cries for the impossible like 
 an ill-tempered child. A little reading 
 of history would do much to change the 
 view of our chronic complainers. If they 
 were to go back in spirit a few years or 
 decades and sense what men and women 
 had to bear, it might open their eyes. 
 
 Without dwelling on the present state 
 of things across the Atlantic, it is many 
 a year since we felt the horror of war and 
 many more since our people saw an enemy 
 in their streets. Long ago the great pesti- 
 lences have been conquered by the sleep- 
 less brain of science. Long ago the in- 
 tolerable discomforts of travel and com- 
 munication have been eliminated by the 
 capitalists we are so fond of abusing. In 
 fact, the world has been made what it is 
 for our benefit. The very poor, the pa- 
 riahs, are the same in every century, but 
 the average man and woman of today 
 have such comforts as would amaze the 
 rich of fifty years ago. 
 
 Recently I visited several handsome 
 mansions of the ante-bellum type, ad- 
 
TODAY. 201 
 
 mired their graceful lines, stately furni- 
 ture and indescribable dignity. Then there 
 came to me the comparison. The people 
 who lived in these beautiful houses had 
 not a tithe of the conveniences that the 
 day laborer has at present. A bath room 
 was undreamed of, steam heat or hot 
 water systems unthought of, the telephone 
 would have started a witchcraft craze. A 
 train that would bear the traveler one hun- 
 dred miles comfortably in three hours 
 would have been laughed to scorn by the 
 stalwart folk who occupied these solid 
 dwellings. Then consider illumination, even 
 that provided through the medium of the 
 execrated Rockefeller, not to mention 
 acetylene and the radiance that Edison has 
 given us. Finally, think of the great mat- 
 ter of food. The Roman exquisite revelled 
 in his banquet of assembled foods from 
 distant parts of the empire. The modern 
 clerk or mechanic sits down to a meal that 
 assembles the products of a continent and 
 thinks himself badly served. 
 
 Some student would render a service to 
 us by investigating the meaning of the 
 word, "comfort/' in different epochs of his- 
 
202 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 tory. Not but what misery exists, and ex- 
 tortion and cruelty! Man never yet has 
 evolved a scheme of life that eliminated 
 these things. The fact is, the standard 
 of living has shifted. People demand as 
 necessities what the fortunate of earlier 
 days regarded as luxuries. How the work- 
 man of a century ago would have rejoiced 
 in the eight-hour working day, in the com- 
 forts that warm the modest home, in the 
 clothing that covers people of small in- 
 comes ! What amusement had the people 
 of New England seventy-five years ago? 
 None but what they devised themselves. 
 Now you can stand in a village street and 
 watch the wives and children of poor 
 families stream into the moving-picture 
 theatre. The dwellers in the small cities 
 can have the best that the drama affords 
 for a small sum. The laborer is conveyed 
 for miles to his work for a nickel. The 
 modern school is equipped as no king could 
 fit up quarters for his children two hun- 
 dred years ago. 
 
 The men and women of the present day 
 are spoiled. They have so much that they 
 cry for the moon. Because, for a cent they 
 
TODAY. 203 
 
 have the news of the world to read; be- 
 cause, for five cents they are whirled from 
 one town to another; because they are 
 warm and well-fed they grow peevish and 
 demand the unattainable. Yes, we have 
 sickness, poverty, discomfort, but not even 
 one per cent of what the children of men 
 bore in past centuries. Thank God you 
 are living today. 
 
THE BLACK MAN. 
 
 © 
 
 HE Governor of South Carolina has 
 been indulging in violent vaporings 
 on the race question and various 
 editors have criticized his utter- 
 ances in terms scarcely less vitriolic. It 
 is strange that these grizzled veterans of 
 the press, who have been dealing with 
 "roorbacks" and other political dodges 
 time out of mind, failed to discern the 
 Ethiopian in that particular wood-pile. Ap- 
 pealing to race prejudice for votes is sure- 
 ly nothing new in our "fierce democracie." 
 This brand of it, however, is dangerous; 
 it is liable to enlarge that foul blot on our 
 civilization — burning negroes alive. 
 
 The North was wrought up over slav- 
 ery as never before or since. No other 
 issue produced so much enthusiasm, elo- 
 quence and poetry — real and alleged. It 
 was the berseker madness of a self- 
 contained people, for what men and 
 women in their sober senses would take 
 "Uncle Tom's Cabin" for realism or that 
 
THE BLACK MAN. 205 
 
 masterpiece of fustian : "The Battle Hymn 
 of the Republic/' for poetry! Righteous 
 indignation was all the easier, because few 
 Northern communities knew anything 
 about the discomforts of a negro majority. 
 Beneath all the high sentiment of that 
 time one feels the presence of the smug 
 satisfaction: "Let the galled jade wince, 
 our withers are unwrung." It was worthy 
 of note then and is now, that those to 
 whom detestation of negro slavery was a 
 religion never blinked at white industrial 
 slavery. Dividends? Of course not! 
 
 The North was fired with the mighty 
 principle that no man should own another 
 man — if that other happened to be black — 
 but it seemed to forget that it was a con- 
 dition, not a theory, that confronted the 
 South ; it displayed a marked lack of under- 
 standing of, and sympathy with practical 
 Southern problems. The fact was that 
 slavery was a minor issue converted into 
 a shibboleth by animosity. Anyone who 
 reads American history from the Revolu- 
 tion to the Civil War can not fail to see 
 that Mason and Dixon's line separated two 
 hostile policies, that the differences be- 
 
206 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 tween the two were not debatable and were 
 bound to come at last to the arbitriment of 
 the sword. Once the fight was on, one 
 side wished to cripple the other and the 
 North made a sort of idol of the negro. As 
 a result of the war, the black man had a 
 vote for which he was not fitted and which 
 he knew not how to use. All the military 
 force of reconstruction and the "carpet- 
 bagger" was powerless to make this any- 
 thing but a dead-letter law. In many 
 States it is so today and will remain for 
 many a long year. 
 
 It was unfortunate that the negroes 
 were not distributed more evenly through 
 the country, for it was precisely because 
 of sectionalism that the North idealized 
 and spoiled the colored man, although in 
 practice and as a class the people of the 
 Northern States are not willing to admit 
 the negro to real equality and hurt his 
 feelings far more than the people of the 
 South. It may be that this problem is 
 incapable of solution, that it is the penalty 
 for a crime against the law of nations, for 
 the slave traffic that placed the black man 
 in an environment where he will always be 
 
THE BLACK MAN. 207 
 
 an inferior. The pity of it is that he, who 
 was the original victim, is the scapegoat 
 for most of the odium and pain. 
 
 One thing is certain, and it should make 
 us less intolerant towards the people of 
 the South — though it can never palliate 
 the horrible barbarities committed against 
 the negro when the white man takes the 
 law into his own hands — if this race ques- 
 tion is ever solved, it will be by the South- 
 ern people. They know the negro at his 
 best and at his worst. Whoever reads 
 Grady's great speech on "The New South" 
 will be convinced of this, of the deep un- 
 derstanding, a real liking for the son of 
 Ham on the part of the white people of 
 the South. Perhaps the fairest estimate 
 of him recently from Northern lips came 
 from Hon. Morgan J. O'Brien in a speech 
 delivered in New York in 1899 and quoted 
 recently in the Boston Herald: 
 
 "No more striking proof is needed of 
 the truth that right principle, more than 
 racial blood, is necessary to the growth of 
 heroes, than we have had exhibited by a 
 race which, though separated from us, yet 
 stands side by side with us in forming our 
 
208 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 citizenship. A generation ago it was a race 
 of slaves. Today, it has its representa- 
 tives among our heroes. Not all the 
 waters of the ocean can make it white, 
 for it wears the burnished livery of the 
 sun. But it earned its place in history by 
 the side of the Irish at Fontenoy and the 
 Old Guard at Waterloo, when the colored 
 regular regiments went up to death on 
 San Juan hill, with their merry eyes 
 twinkling and their white teeth gleaming, 
 singing as they went, 'Climbing up de 
 Golden Stairs/ " 
 
 But wipe out the color line! As the 
 speaker says, not all the waters of the 
 ocean can do that. But what we can do is, 
 be honest with the black man, and not 
 take back from him with one hand what 
 we give with the other. To use one code 
 of action when wrought up in enthusiasm 
 or in theoretical discussion and another for 
 everyday life is fatal and unjust to him 
 and to ourselves. This has done more 
 harm than all the intemperate utterances 
 of Southern demagogues. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the black man in 
 the Northern States needs no bogus phil- 
 
THE BLACK MAN. 209 
 
 anthropy. We can well afford to let the 
 South settle the race problem in its own 
 way — providing it is a law-abiding way 
 and not the fashion of the savage. The 
 Governor of South Carolina does not rep- 
 resent Southern sentiment. It is time 
 that the racial hypocrisy of the Sixties 
 were relegated to "innocuous deseu- 
 tude" together with the waving of "the 
 bloody shirt." 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 fi 
 
 HILOSOPHERS have told us that he 
 who has one or two friends is a 
 fortunate man. They might have 
 said with equal truth that he who 
 possesses one or two perfect diamonds is 
 fortunate. It is indeed a part of the value 
 of all things precious that they are rare. 
 Again it may be seriously doubted 
 whether one can rightly fulfil the offices 
 of friendship for more than one or two. 
 They who are said to "have many friends" 
 often find in times of stress that they have 
 not even one. Life itself, even the ordinary 
 and uneventful life, is a severe test of the 
 quality of friendship. Think of the gaunt- 
 let that an old and tried friend must have 
 run : absence, grief, change of worldly po- 
 sition, misunderstanding, evil minded ac- 
 quaintances. It is a very labyrinth, a 
 slough of despond, and sometimes the 
 outer rim of an inferno that a man must 
 pass through before he can qualify as the 
 true friend of another. 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 211 
 
 It may seem strange to dignify ordinary 
 lives as if they were of the fabric of which 
 mankind's deathless stories have been 
 woven. They are. The most moving 
 tragedies, the grandest dramas were orig- 
 inally the simple yet pathetic happenings 
 in the lives of ordinary people, but the 
 world has placed a halo about these sto- 
 ries because they epitomized the human 
 heart and its workings in grief or joy. So 
 the tiny dramas played silently in the 
 hearts of simple folk contain all the ele- 
 ments of true power. They are miniature 
 masterpieces. Each one is a microcosm. 
 Love itself is only a dearer name for the 
 attar of roses of true friendship. It comes 
 to the peasant as it does to the king and it 
 comes not often. Many pretenders and 
 masqueraders may come to one or the 
 other, but when the jollity is over and the 
 rout ended, they all unmask and we know 
 them for what they are. 
 
 Some complain that they have no 
 friends. They do not need friends. They 
 really sigh for human props, trouble-car- 
 riers, skilled heart-nurses serving without 
 pay. When they speak of friends they 
 
THE USES OF ADVERSIT I 
 
 mean traffic-policemen, people who will 
 help them out in difficult situations. With 
 them friendship is a one-sided affair. 
 
 Instead of being despondent that we 
 have so few friends, it would be much more 
 pertinent, seeing what unsatisfactory crea- 
 tures we are, how compacted of selfishness, 
 weakness and meanness, if we were to ask 
 ourselves in all honesty, by what freak of 
 good fortune we ever happened to seem 
 worthy of having even one true friend. 
 
 Yet like the prospector in a new mining 
 country, we ought constantly to be on the 
 lookout for friends. No sage can lay down 
 rules for the finding of friends. You may 
 in your pilgrin\age through life encounter 
 in early years one who seems to have been 
 designed from the constitution of things 
 to be your friend. The experience has all 
 the charm of fairy-land, the unreality of a 
 dream, the suddenness of a lightning flash, 
 yet the passing years but witness to its 
 truth, that the electric spark flashing be- 
 tween kindred souls made no mistake. 
 
 It may be that chance throws you for a 
 time into the company of one of whom 
 you would never think in the guise of a 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 
 
 friend. In exterior he does not measure 
 up to the ideal standard you have set. Yet 
 the unfolding of circumstance, the stress 
 of life, crucial crises reveal to your as- 
 tonished eyes depths of generosity, riches 
 of unfailing trust of which no living man 
 can ever be really worthy. It was a wise 
 man who said : "Be careful how you treat 
 your enemy, for one day he may be your 
 friend." 
 
 Life can never be monotonous or weari- 
 some to the man who hopes to find in a 
 newcomer a friend who will be as true as 
 steel. It is perhaps one of the best of the 
 purely natural joys of living. Yet like the 
 pursuit of the Holy Grail, it must be car- 
 ried on with purity of intention. If we 
 look for those who will help us on in the 
 world, if we have ulterior motives, it is 
 certain we shall never discover true 
 friends, for our eyes are blinded by our 
 own unworthiness. 
 
 Friendship is not demonstrative. It 
 needs not to hang out bulletins that it is 
 unchanged. The world has no business in 
 such matters. These outward advertise- 
 ments serve very well as the stage settings 
 
214 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 of a fiction, like the "amity of nations" or 
 the carefully phrased notes that pass be- 
 tween the rulers of States. It is of the es- 
 sence of friendship that it should be a calm 
 reality, shunning show yet possessing "the 
 strength of the hills." The time when it 
 has the right to proclaim itself before the 
 world is the time of crisis when others fall 
 away. Then out of the ranks of the time- 
 servers and pretenders stands forth the 
 true friend and proves the quality of his 
 regard. A man is always ennobled by such 
 a proof. It helps him to recognize reali- 
 ties, to appreciate true loyalty. He sees 
 then that if he were to go into the market- 
 place with the wealth of the world at his 
 disposal, he might offer it all and be unable 
 to buy one friend. 
 
 Friendship is a grace, a free gift, of 
 which the recipient is never - worthy. 
 Therein consists its unique preciousness. 
 Blessed is that day in the life of a man 
 when he can lie down in the evening in 
 the untroubled certainty that he has found 
 a friend. He may well mark that day with 
 a white stone and celebrate its anniver- 
 saries. He may live to great age or come 
 
FRIENDSHIP. 215 
 
 to high position, but he will never receive 
 a higher compliment or a greater gift. God 
 bless our friends ! 
 
ENCOURAGEMENT. 
 
 H 
 
 A 
 
 UMAN nature wants so many things 
 that it is useless to make a 
 list of them all, but one thing it 
 needs badly and all the time — en- 
 couragement. Not many souls are self- 
 sufficient, do not have their hours of deep 
 depression, and these hours are often cru- 
 cial ones. Often the failure to make a 
 step forward is a step backward. 
 
 I am not speaking of weaklings, but of 
 men and women who know what life is — 
 know it too well. The mask of illusion has 
 been torn off as far as they are concerned 
 and they can see failure grinning before 
 them. They come to that stage where 
 facts defeat them. You can regard facts 
 as the dumb beasts of creation as some 
 writer has it, or you can look on them as 
 arch-charlatans. They are a little of both. 
 But in either case persistent purpose will 
 tame the beasts or expose the charlatans, 
 
 There were facts to spare in the house- 
 hold of the man who invented the 
 
ENCOURAGEMENT. 217 
 
 vulcanizing of rubber. One of the worst of 
 them was lack of food and money. But he 
 kept on doggedly and at last by accident 
 hit upon the secret he had striven for 
 years to discover. Harriman had his fight 
 with facts years ago and conquered them 
 by his power of imagination. He found 
 out that there are millions to be obtained 
 by the man who can borrow money and 
 make it work hard. Perhaps nothing has 
 been more ridiculed than the foolishness 
 of a man trying to fly. We all re- 
 member "Darius Green and His Fly- 
 ing Machine." Newspaper men had great 
 sport some time ago telling about the 
 Wright brothers out in Ohio hopping over 
 the hills on contrivances they called "glid- 
 ers." The facts were all against the 
 Wright brothers, yet not so long ago one 
 of the Wrights circled over New York and 
 around the Statue of Liberty. These are 
 merely a few instances of the idiocy of 
 being discouraged by facts. 
 
 To get back among the common people, 
 the men on your own street, those whom 
 you meet every day ; the tyranny of facts 
 is the great evil. Talk seriously to the 
 
218 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 first half dozen men you happen to know 
 and you will find they are more or less dis- 
 couraged. Facts are getting too strong 
 for them. Sickness, loss of work, family 
 troubles are getting on their nerves and 
 spoiling their waking hours. They are 
 really capable of getting the best of these 
 troubles with a little encouragement. 
 There ought to be shops where this admir- 
 able quality could be dispensed and ex- 
 perts be ready to give optimistic advice. 
 
 If a man once gains a reputation for 
 being able to cheer people up he will be 
 besieged morning, noon and night. People 
 resort to him from all sides. This is one 
 of the secrets of that latest phase of quack- 
 ery — "Christian Science" — it cheers peo- 
 ple up, convinces them that nothing mat- 
 ters and that everything is all right. It is 
 a great idea and capable of much good for 
 most of our troubles are imaginative. The 
 harm came of labelling the thing as a reli- 
 gion and financing it like a patent medi- 
 cine. 
 
 The doctor who cheers his patients 
 never lacks them and they generally re- 
 cover, for belief in recovery is a great fac- 
 
ENCOURAGEMENT. 219 
 
 tor in convalescence. The lawyer who con- 
 vinces his clients they will win succeeds if 
 he has ordinary ability because he con- 
 vinces the jury also. The merchant who 
 is an optimist builds up a large business 
 for he infuses his spirit into his assistants 
 and buyers flock to his shop. Now this 
 may all be called moonshine and nonsense, 
 but it is very true nevertheless that the 
 ability to convince people who see failure 
 looming before them that they will suc- 
 ceed does result in success in nine times 
 out of ten. 
 
 The capacity of doing things success- 
 fully in this world consists largely in beat- 
 ing down facts. Now a man may be born 
 with this capacity or it may be infused 
 into him. This country is an example of 
 the truth. It was not merely the oppor- 
 tunities that it opened to incomers, it was 
 a something they seemed to draw out of 
 American air, a sublime conviction that it 
 was going to be a great country and that 
 they themselves were to have a part in its 
 greatness. Take any one of the thousands 
 of men born to poverty and no pros- 
 pects who have achieved success in 
 
220 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 any line of endeavor. Experience would 
 have spoiled them, but they had no expe- 
 rience and so achieved the impossible. 
 Many of them could never have done this, 
 without encouragement at the right time. 
 The young man or woman who hopes to 
 win fame by writing is considered a joke. 
 If they listen to experience they will re- 
 main a joke. It is encouragement that en- 
 ables them to convert the dream into a 
 reality. Of course ability must be postu- 
 lated. The sad thing is that much ability 
 comes to naught because it lacks encour- 
 agement, Once let a man become pene- 
 trated with the idea that he cannot win 
 and he is sure to lose. Now we cannot all 
 be winners. Every battle means so many 
 corpses in the field when all is over. For 
 the majority mediocrity is the portion, but 
 there is no need of putting ourselves in 
 that class while there is an ounce of energy 
 left. Then there is always the chance of 
 helping others more gifted than we, hut 
 who are losing courage. If we cannot win 
 ourselves, let us do it by proxy, by en- 
 abling someone else to win. Great vic- 
 tories of war and peace, poems that are 
 
ENCOURAGEMENT. 221 
 
 immortal, careers that are an inspiration 
 to mankind have come about through 
 encouragement. What boots it that the 
 collaborators fail to get credit? They 
 have fulfilled their destiny in helping 
 some great work to be done. 
 
THE LAND OF JOY. 
 
 >^]OU will not find it on the map, nor 
 
 ^gr will any many-cylindered motor 
 
 H car or bi-plane be of any assistance 
 
 in the attempt to reach it. Yet the 
 
 denizens of that land are all around us. 
 
 They are a sort of secret society, the 
 
 great company whose pass-word is "joy," 
 
 but if you are not a member the pass-word 
 
 will do you no good. The society is so 
 
 secret that the members do not realize it 
 
 themselves. 
 
 The grimy urchin wandering happily 
 along the noisesome street singing at the 
 top of his voice belongs to the company; 
 you have only to look at him to see it. 
 He will not give the secret away because 
 he knows nothing about it ; he has merely 
 the use and enjoyment of it. The gang of 
 brawny laborers on their way to work, 
 chaffing each other and filling the air with 
 rough laughter, give the looker-on no hint 
 of their high standing in that exclusive 
 society. Next is a bevy of schoolgirls 
 
THE LAND OF JOY. 223 
 
 munching candy, giggling and clutching 
 one another after the manner of half- 
 grown women whose lives have not yet 
 been shadowed by sorrow. What dissim- 
 ilar types! Yet all three live, move and 
 have their being in the Land of Joy. 
 
 Some writer, rightly or wrongly, has 
 proposed the theory that the angels do not 
 necessarily live beyond the stars, that the 
 dwellers in the Celestial City may be near- 
 er us than we imagine. We never hear 
 their voices lifted in hymns to the Most 
 High, for our ears are dull. We never 
 catch the smallest glimpse of their flash- 
 ing beauty, for human eyes behold only 
 gross, material things. 
 
 It is not exactly so with the dwellers 
 in the Land of Joy. We can see the glee 
 dancing in the care-free eyes of the boy; 
 we can hear the jovial talk of workers 
 who are healthy and contented, we can 
 even detect happiness beneath the giggle 
 of the schoolgirl, but unless you belong 
 to the mystic company, that is as near as 
 you will get to the secret. 
 
 Except for these random occasions, it 
 is rare indeed that one has the chance to 
 
224 THE USES OF ADVERSIT \ 
 
 study this phenomenon. Hence, I esteem 
 myself most fortunate that I was privi- 
 leged to spend an evening with a group 
 made up of charter members. Had you 
 happened in, you might have gone away 
 without suspecting the truth. They were 
 gathered in a tiny restaurant high above 
 the crowded street, a crowd of men at sup- 
 per. I know little about them except that 
 they fairly radiated good cheer. Across 
 the board flashed an endless succession 
 of jests, interspersed with flurries of song, 
 and deep, honest laughter as some point 
 was well scored. They ate and drank and 
 talked like a crowd of boys out for a frolic. 
 Soon one took up a guitar and began to 
 sing folk-songs filled with blue skies and 
 sunshine. He was a rare comedian, that 
 fellow with the guitar. He could interpret 
 the tarantella with an art and finish that 
 would shame the sinuous ladies who dance 
 Spring songs. He could imitate the lover 
 carolling beneath the balcony of his 
 inamorata until you would think she lived 
 in one of the tall houses across the street. 
 i the others supported him well, all 
 could sing the songs of the South in that 
 
THE LAND OF JOY. 225 
 
 language whose spoken words are as mol- 
 ten music. 
 
 Here was the wonder of it. The en- 
 vironment was plain, the men, not of 
 wealth or special cultivation, yet gathered 
 about that table by some subtle gift they 
 radiated gladness. I thought what a price- 
 less boon to thousands in the great city 
 the knowledge of that secret would be, not 
 merely to the homeless wanderers or dis- 
 contented workmen, but even to the bored 
 audiences in the theatres, the listless din- 
 ers in exclusive hotels, the dissipated folk 
 who nightly run crazily after enjoyment 
 and paying high, never get it. Here it 
 was after all, in a small dining-room, hid- 
 den away on a side street, and these light- 
 hearted singers and jesters, for all their 
 disguise, were of rare fellowship. 
 
 Of course it is not a place ; it is a state 
 of mind. Some people there are who have 
 not the faculty of it, as certain folk cannot 
 understand or relish music, but there are 
 lands more favored than others in this 
 matter of joy. It is difficult for one to 
 live in Italy and not be influenced by the 
 good-nature and natural gaiety of all 
 
226 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 about him. And in Ireland, too, in spite 
 of all the trouble that has come to its 
 people, there is deep in their natures a 
 bubbling spring of joy that overcomes 
 hunger, sadness and an alien rule. 
 
 The inventors are racking their brains 
 contriving new mechanical marvels, the 
 financiers are shortening their lives plan- 
 ning new and larger companies, energy is 
 poured out like water that money may be 
 produced in larger quantities. I have 
 no sympathy with all this useless effort. 
 What humanity really needs is geniuses 
 who will devote their gifts to the produc- 
 tion and diffusion of joy. 
 
THE AGELESS HEART. 
 
 OMETIME ago I read a story about 
 an old woman who had just lost 
 her husband and whose children 
 were doing their best to comfort 
 her. They hid every reminder of the dead 
 man, never left her alone, tried to cheer 
 her up, hoping in this way to give her 
 consolation. 
 
 At last, the old lady, desperate at their 
 well-intended attempts at comforting, con- 
 trived a subterfuge to get them all out of 
 the house. When she was alone, her bit- 
 ter grief came forth in the cry: "Willy, 
 Willy !" He whom she had lost was not 
 the aged man the children had seen borne 
 to the grave, but the handsome, winning 
 young fellow of other years. She was not 
 the old woman they thought her, but the 
 little lass who had linked her life with his. 
 They were all mistaken. 
 
 How hard it was to part with him no 
 one but herself could know, and there was 
 but one way to meet her grief, alone. She 
 
228 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 ransacked every closet where they had 
 hidden the clothes and well-remembered 
 trinkets of her husband, brought them to 
 their accustomed places and indulged her- 
 self in a good cry. After that she felt 
 better. 
 
 What fools we are when dealinj with 
 old folks! We adopt a policy divided be- 
 tween the comforting of a child and the 
 soothing of a demented person. It is 
 futile, for we mistake the entire condition. 
 The whitening hair, the lagging step, the 
 wrinkled brow delude us and we conjure 
 up an unreal personality and do our best 
 to make that unreality happy. 
 
 Grandpa and Grandma sit by the fire 
 outwardly placid and unnoticing. He is 
 bent and feeble, his eye is dim, his speech 
 halting. She, too, is worn with years 
 and peers at us through her thick 
 spectacles. The dear old couple, what a 
 picture they make and how mcn.y senti- 
 mental remarks they occasion! We feel 
 moved to give them encouragement and 
 use that tenderly patronizing tone re- 
 served for the very young. We soften 
 things down for them, offer platitudes 
 
THE AGELESS HEART. 229 
 
 which we fondly think are appreciated and 
 then go back to our families with feelings 
 of conscious rectitude. 
 
 What a deplorable lack of insight ! Why 
 that old man sees what is utterly beyond 
 our ken. Before him is a wisp of a girl 
 with hair that will not be confined and eyes 
 that are dancing. She enacts every mood 
 of an April day, flouts and jeers him ten- 
 derly just for the fun of consoling him in 
 a way she alone knows. Her quiet words 
 that are so familiar to the younger mem- 
 bers of the family are transfigured for him. 
 The reason his eyes look dim is that he 
 is always looking backward. 
 
 Grandma knits quietly. You would nev- 
 er suspect her thoughts. Women are de- 
 ceivers ever and the best of them deceive 
 the most. They make us think they are 
 well when they are racked with pain, they 
 smile when their hearts are breaking, 
 they console when the whole world is a 
 wilderness of bitterness to them. So 
 Grandma fools us all. She understands 
 completely the wiles of the young people 
 and smiles internally. Teach Grandma! 
 
230 THE USES OP ADVERSITY 
 
 She will never give herself away, but in 
 her heart this is what she sees: 
 
 Across the chimney-corner is a well- 
 knit, ruddy boy, half -confident and half- 
 afraid. His eyes are bright and teeth 
 shining in a familiar smile. She keeps 
 him in a condition of delightful impatience. 
 A handsome youth, so kind, so weak, so 
 strong, so hot-tempered and yet humble! 
 How many tasks he has done, how many 
 presents he has given just to behold that 
 look in her eyes ! Yes, Grandma sees many 
 things that escape us, through those thick 
 spectacles. 
 
 The human heart never grows old ; it is 
 as tender and delicate at seventy as at sev- 
 enteen. The frame grows old, the senses 
 are dulled, a gentle patience diffuses itself 
 through the body, but the affections are 
 unchanged. You have often , heard old 
 people say that fifty years seemed but a 
 short time ; the reason is that in a certain 
 sense, they are still in the living present 
 of long ago. 
 
 Aged folk understand each other, for 
 they know they are really not old at all, 
 only seemingly so. But they are wary and 
 
THE AGELESS HEART. 231 
 
 keep this to themselves. This phenomenon 
 recalls many of the familiar tales of en- 
 chantment, of men and women changed 
 in outward form by the power of some 
 magic; but you will remark that in all 
 such stories, it is only the body that is 
 changed in some grotesque manner; the 
 mind, the soul remain the same. Time, 
 the magician touches the boys and girls of 
 yesterday with his wand and, as it seems, 
 all the outward characteristics of youth 
 disappear; the quick energy, the alert 
 senses, the attractiveness of feature and 
 form. But the spell of the magician stops 
 there. 
 
 The sons want Grandma to move out 
 of the little house in the country and take 
 an apartment where she will have comfort 
 and care. It will be so convenient for her, 
 so nice to have young people about. But 
 Grandma will have nothing to do with the 
 plan. Here is the home to which her hus- 
 band brought her years ago. Every board 
 in the floor is dear to her, every tree and 
 shrub have a message and delightful mem- 
 ory. Here she can sit and wait for him 
 to come home, though he comes no more. 
 
232 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 The familiar surroundings help her to keep 
 on living. Where on earth can she find the 
 comfort, the peace and joy that center in 
 this little house ? In the tales of enchant- 
 ment the spell is always lifted finally, 
 and the hero and heroine after their vicis- 
 situdes return to their original guise. The 
 aged wait for that return. 
 
 While we are young it is useless to try 
 and enter the world of the old. We shall 
 enter in time. But let us not make the 
 mistake of thinking the dim eyes and 
 wrinkled cheeks tell the whole story. They 
 are only folds of the veil that time has 
 gradually draped over the foreheads and 
 shoulders and down to the feet of those 
 who in reality are ever young. 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 
 
 X STOOD this week by the open grave 
 of one of the sweetest and bravest 
 Christian women I have ever 
 known. A few days ago she was 
 with us, full of life and anticipation, dif- 
 fusing the warmth of her lovable person- 
 ality, and now we were gathered in the 
 cemetery to pay her the last sorrowful 
 tribute. 
 
 As the earth sifted down upon the 
 coffin, I looked back through the mist of 
 unbidden tears on the radiant years of our 
 flawless friendship. The thronging memo- 
 ries flashed by, each touched anew with 
 sad beauty by the pathos of the scene and 
 the realization that the word, finis, had 
 been written in the record of a singularly 
 unselfish and noble life. 
 
 I saw her again as the care-free girl in 
 the garden spot by the sea she loved so 
 well, her eyes twinkling with merriment, 
 her laugh like the tinkle of tiny bells, her 
 mind busy on whatever would bring joy to 
 
234 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 those about her ; as the happy bride kneel- 
 ing before the good old Bishop beside the 
 man of her choice; as the young mother 
 glad in the baptism of her first born; as 
 the gracious hostess whose smile was a 
 sunbeam and whose welcome held an in- 
 communicable charm. 
 
 In the old streets of European cities 
 there are little shrines set up in the walls 
 of houses, recalling to the wayfarer the 
 Friends of God. So, in a city where one 
 has lived a long time certain houses are 
 shrines of friendship. Time may change 
 or destroy, Death may work his will, but 
 whenever one passes the familiar portals, 
 he beholds the vivid picture of hospitality 
 and goodly converse, of geniality and 
 heart-felt fellowship. When the heedless 
 car sweeps me past the house which was 
 so long to me the house of my friends, 
 friends among a thousand, I see her in 
 fancy standing at the door and feel that 
 hand-clasp whose reality I shall never 
 know again. The old house we laughingly 
 abused and wanted to turn around to face 
 the sunlight, means nothing to the hurry- 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 235 
 
 ing throngs or to those who live there 
 now, but to me it is a shrine. 
 
 As the earth sifted down upon the coffin 
 I thought of many in the graves near her's 
 who in life had loved her, warmed to the 
 touch of her hand, felt the consolation of 
 her voice, the inspiration of her generous 
 activity. As I looked about on the men 
 and women who sould not bear to leave her 
 until the inevitable moment, I saw on every 
 side those who were better that she had 
 lived, who had received of her kind offices 
 and smiling encouragement. As I looked 
 back at the city from which we had come, 
 I thought of the many households sad- 
 dened by her loss, of the poor who would 
 miss her. Then came the crashing vision 
 of the stricken home from which she had 
 been borne, the husband left to fight the 
 battle alone, the little ones who must grow 
 up without the kisses that only a mother 
 can give, the tender touches that to all 
 others are a Lost Art. There are many 
 sad sounds in this weary world and one 
 of the saddest of all is the fall of the clods 
 on the coffin of a beloved friend. 
 
 All her life pain had walked beside her, 
 
236 THE USES OP ADVERSITY. 
 
 but she always smiled. She could bear her 
 own troubles unfalteringly; it was only 
 the pain of others that saddened her. The 
 ideal happiness of her own life opened her 
 heart to those who were in misery. She 
 was never too tired to respond to the call 
 of duty or charity. The thought of little 
 children in winter without shoes oppressed 
 her, until the want was supplied. The poor 
 must have their Christmas dinner even if 
 she had to go without her own. Wherever 
 there was death or sorrow among her ac- 
 quaintances you would be sure to see her. 
 As a wife and mother she was a gift of 
 God to her husband. In truth it could be 
 carved on her tomb-stone that she lived 
 for others. 
 
 In every large duty large or small she 
 showed that fine conscientiousness that 
 does all things well. I shall always think 
 of her as bearing gifts, not merely the 
 material ones whose great value consists 
 in the good heart that prompts the giving, 
 but the better gifts of kindness, sympathy 
 and encouragement. She never failed to 
 find an excuse for those who offended, a 
 charitable explanation for the words that 
 
IN MEMORIAM. 237 
 
 hurt her. She would go all the way on the 
 road of forgiveness and was grieved only 
 when forgiveness failed. 
 
 In all the years I counted her my friend, 
 from the first day we met until she died, 
 there was never a time of joy or sorrow in 
 my life that she did not give unstintingly 
 of her congratulation, her consolation, and 
 all the time, in full measure and overflow- 
 ing, of her abiding friendship. She was to 
 all who knew her a constant inspiration to 
 long-suffering, self-sacrifice and charity. 
 God be blessed for such friends and vouch- 
 safe resignation when the parting comes! 
 
 They laid her out in the sunny south 
 parlor beneath the picture of the Lord 
 whose uplifted fingers seemed to bless her 
 in death. The flowers sent by her friends 
 carpeted the floor, but there was one rose 
 blossom on her quiet breast. They told me 
 it bloomed in her garden the day she died. 
 I would put nothing beside that rose, but 
 in remembrance of a thousand deeds of 
 kindness, in recognition of the best that 
 life can give and death take away, pure, 
 noble Catholic womanhood, I lay this sprig 
 of rosemary in snirit on her grave and 
 
238 
 
 THE USES OF ADVERSITY. 
 
 pray that God may grant unto her eternal 
 rest and that the light of His love may 
 shine upon her forever. 
 
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