. 
 
 
 UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY 
 
 HIMIIIII 
 
 aC<ooo oinco t-^<d < 


 
 The 
 
 University 
 
 of Hard Knocks 
 
 The School Thai Completes 
 Our Education 
 
 "He that overcometh shall inherit all 
 things; and I will be his God, and he shall 
 be my son." 
 
 Revelation 21:7 
 
 "Sweet are the uses of adversity; 
 
 Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous. 
 
 Wears yet a precious jewel in his head; 
 
 And thus our life, exempt from public 
 haunt, 
 
 Mnds tongues in trees, books in running 
 brooks, 
 
 Sermons in stones, and good in every- 
 thing." 
 
 Shakespeare 
 
 A Lyceum and Chautauqua Lecture deliv- 
 ered since 1904 by Ralph Parlette, Editor 
 of The Lyceum Magazine, Chicago
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1914, 1915 
 
 By The Parlette-Padget Company 
 
 Publishers 
 
 Peoples Gas Building 
 
 Chicago 
 
 First Edition, September, 1914 
 Second Edition, January, 1916
 
 Perhaps a Million People 
 
 HAVE PAID their money up to date to 
 hear "The University of Hard Knocks" 
 in Lyceum Courses, Chautauquas, 
 Teachers' Institutes, Club Gatherings and 
 other assemblages. Perhaps a thousand peo- 
 ple have asked if the lecture could be got- 
 ten In book form. Perhaps a thousand more 
 have written about it. 
 
 That is why it is here in book form. This 
 is what they heard or a part of it, for I 
 have gathered up the overflow of many even- 
 ings and printed it. What is written here 
 isn't the way I would write it; it is the way 
 I said it. The lecture took this unconscious 
 colloquial form before audiences. An audi- 
 ence makes a lecture, if the lecture survives. 
 The first personal pronoun may seem to be 
 overworked, because this is more a confes- 
 sion than a lecture, and you can't confess 
 without saying "I." 
 
 I am just beginning to learn things. Ev- 
 ery day I seem to learn better, and see bet- 
 ter about something. I ought to wait till to- 
 morrow to print this lecture, for tomorrow 
 I shall know more and see how poor this 
 lecture is. 
 
 But it is the best and sincerest I can do 
 today. And you folks asked for it today. 
 I wish I could shake the hand of every one 
 of you and personally thank you. 
 
 Ralph Parlette. 
 
 The Lyceum Magazine, 
 
 Chicago, 
 
 Sept. 1, 1914.
 
 What It's All About 
 
 NOBODY CAN CnVE US OR BUY US AN 
 EDUCATION. We earn it in The Uni- 
 versity of Hard Knocks the School of 
 Service. Books and Colleges only give us 
 Bome tools some of the best tools in the 
 world. 
 
 We must use the tools in the School of 
 Service. It is the Service, the Struggle, the 
 Sacrifice, the Overcoming, the Achievement, 
 that brings the Knowing, the Understanding, 
 the Success, the Happiness, the Strength, the 
 Greatness, the Life. 
 
 "He who would be greatest among you, let 
 him become the Greatest Servant." For 
 Greatness is merely ability to carry great 
 loads, to serve greatly. 
 
 You cannot buy a great arm; you earn it in 
 physical service. 
 
 You cannot buy a great mind; you earn it 
 in mental service. 
 
 You cannot buy a great character; you 
 earn it in moral service. 
 
 The University of Hard Knocks is divided 
 Into two great colleges The College of Need- 
 less Knocks (where we get our "bad luck") 
 and the College of Needful Knocks (where we 
 get our "good luck"). Every bump is a les-
 
 son. We learn so slowly (it takes most of 
 our lives to learn a few little lessons) be- 
 cause most of us are "naturally bright." 
 
 We don't know what we have memorized; 
 we only know what we have vitalized. We 
 only know what we have lived. We only 
 know what the courts will take as evidence 
 when they swear us in as witnesses. 
 
 How long will America be strong and go 
 forward? It will depend upon how many 
 "Gussle" children we raise. 
 
 We are not growing old; we are growing 
 eternally young. All our life up to today has 
 been merely preparation for today. This is 
 the greatest, wisest, happiest day in all our 
 lives. 
 
 We have finished our education when all 
 the strife, discord, evil, have been pounded 
 out of our lives, and when Peace, Harmony, 
 Love, Wisdom and Understanding fill them. 
 Eternity alone can finish our Education. 
 
 As we overcome, we ascend the Mountain 
 of Life. We rise above the legacy of our 
 limitations. We rise above troubles and 
 storms into the sunshine. We rise to life's 
 mountain summit and see the night below us. 
 We have reached the new eternal day on the 
 summit God's Commencement Day!
 
 (Bob Melp iri0 
 
 To Know We are Little Children, Always 
 Growing UP, but Never Finishing 
 
 * * 
 
 (Bob Help 1Il0 
 
 To Keep On "Going South" 
 
 To Keep On Serving 
 
 To Keep On Overcoming 
 That 
 Our Days may be Longer, Stronger, Happier 
 
 That 
 We may have All The Good Things of Life 
 
 That 
 We may not "Rattle" 
 
 * * * 
 
 6ob Melp '^B 
 
 To Know That 
 
 YESTERDAY is Dead 
 
 TODAY is the Best Day of Our Life 
 
 TOMORROW is Going to be Better
 
 The University of Hard 
 Knocks 
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 ALL OVER this land are fathers and 
 mothers saying, "We haven't had 
 much chance in our lives, but we are 
 going to give our children every chance. We 
 are going to give our children the best edu- 
 cation OUR money can buy. 
 
 They think they can buy an education and 
 give it to their children C.O.D.! 
 
 But they cannot do it. They can only 
 open the gate and say, "Sic 'em, Tige!" 
 
 They can put money in their children's 
 pockets, ideas in their heads and food in their 
 stomachs. But the children do not yet own 
 it they must digest it. 
 
 We only own what we earn. We only 
 know what we have lived. We only imder- 
 
 7
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 stand what we have proven in the labora- 
 tories of our experience. 
 We can't get something for nothing. 
 
 We do not learn from books, we learn 
 from bumps. 
 
 We learn in the one great school The 
 University of Hard Knocks. Its playground 
 is the universe ; its president is the Almighty. 
 
 Here we learn all we ever know, and 
 write it in the only book we ever own The 
 Book of Our Experience. 
 
 Every bump we get is a lesson. If we 
 learn the lesson with one bump, we don't 
 get that bump any more; we get promoted 
 to the next bump. But if we are "naturally 
 bright" or there is something else the matter 
 with us (and really about the worst thing 
 that can be the matter with us is to be "nat- 
 urally bright" and know it!), so that we 
 don't learn that lesson with one bump, then 
 that same bump has to come back and bump 
 us again, and again, and again, until we do 
 learn it. Afterwhile we realize in the Ian-
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 guage of Shakespeare or somebody, "Every 
 little bumplet has a meaning all its own." 
 
 As we get wiser and sort out our bumps, 
 we discover we have had two kinds of bumps 
 bumps that we needed, and bumps that 
 we did not need. Bumps that we bumped 
 into and bumps that bumped into us. 
 
 That is, we discover that The University 
 of Hard Knocks has two colleges The Col- 
 lege of Needless Knocks and The College 
 of Needful Knocks. 
 
 Children, I am afraid you won't believe 
 what I am going to say. You can't tell 
 young people anything. They are "natur- 
 ally bright" and know better. So you'll just 
 have to bump your heads where we older 
 ones have bumped our heads! But if you'll 
 remember what I am going to say, it will 
 feel like a poultice after while. 
 * * * 
 
 The Needless Knocks 
 
 AH! How I remember one early Need- 
 less Knock! It was back at the time 
 when I was trying to run our home 
 to suit myself. I sat in the highest chair in 
 
 9
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 the family circle! I was four years old and 
 ready to graduate. That day they had me 
 in my little high-chair throne right up be- 
 side the dinner-table. The coffee-pot was 
 within grabbing distance. 
 
 I became enamored with that coffee-pot. 
 I decided I needed it in my business. I 
 reached over there to get the coffee-pot. 
 Just then I discovered a woman beside me. 
 She was the most meddlesome woman I had 
 ever known. I hadn't tried to do a thing in 
 four years that woman hadn't tried to "butt 
 in on" and stop. 
 
 I did want that coffee-pot. Nobody knows 
 how I wanted that coffee-pot! One thing 
 thou lackest a coffee-pot! Just as I was 
 going to get it, that woman said, "Don't 
 touch that!" 
 
 The longer I thought about it the mad- 
 der I became. What right has this female 
 to interfere with every plan I make? Now 
 I've stood this petticoat tyranny four years, 
 and it's time to stop it. (I thought this, I 
 did not say it. There is a fine point. ) Then 
 I stopped it. I got the coffee-pot. I know 
 I got the coffee-pot. I got it unanimously ! 
 
 10
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 I know when I got it, and I know where I 
 got it! I spilled about a gallon of that 
 redhot juice all over me. I can feel it yet! 
 
 There were weeks after that when I was 
 upholstered. They put applebutter on me, 
 and kerosene, and starch, and white-of-an- 
 egg and rags, and anything the neighbors 
 could think of, they brought over and 
 rubbed on little Ralphie. Because I had 
 gotten the coffee-pot. Because I had had 
 my own little foolish way. 
 
 My mother had a queer way of only tell- 
 ing me once. She wouldn't repeat or argue 
 it. She'd say, "Don't!" and then she'd go 
 on with her knitting. Why don't mothers 
 knit any more? 
 
 I could go ahead and do it after that. She 
 wouldn't even look at me. The neighbors 
 used to say my mother was cruel with that 
 "angel child." But the neighbors never knew 
 what kind of an insect she was trying to 
 raise. That was the quickest, kindest and 
 best way to teach a little stubborn, self-willed 
 boy like myself that if he didn't hear her that 
 oi-ice and heed, then go on, Ralphie, your 
 coffee-pot is ready. 
 
 11
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 It was always ready. I never disobeyed 
 my mother in my life that a coffee-pot didn't 
 spill on me and I got my blisters. She didn't 
 injflict them. She wasn't much of an inflicter. 
 Father attended to that in the laboratory 
 back of the parsonage ! 
 
 Yes, you're right. I'm one of them I 
 * * * 
 
 The years that since have passed have 
 taught me that the College of Needless 
 Knocks is run on the same plan. The Voice 
 of Wisdom says to each of us, "Child of hu- 
 manity, walk in the right path; you'll be 
 wiser and happier." Then we are not 
 stopped. We are told to do right, but we are 
 not compelled to do right. 
 
 We are free im-moral agents! 
 
 We get off the right path, get on a wrong 
 path, and it seems fine. It leads downward, 
 and therefore is so easy to walk in, for we 
 just slide downward. Paths that lead up- 
 ward are harder to walk in, for they require 
 climbing. Sooner or later the coffee-pot 
 spills; we get our blisters and Needless 
 Knocks. If you haven't gotten them, you 
 have them coming. 
 
 12
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 I used to call them my "bad luck." I 
 know better now; they are the punishment 
 for our sins. And lucky are we if we learn 
 the lesson with one bump. One time at a fair 
 I paid a seeress two dollars to look into my 
 honest palm. Then she said: "It hain't your 
 fault you wasn't born right, you was born 
 under an unlucky star!" You don't know 
 how good that made me feel! It wasn't my 
 fault, I was just unlucky and it had to be. 
 But now I know better. I know we all get 
 bumped and the lucky one is the one who 
 learns the lesson with one bump and doesn't 
 get bumped twice in the same place. Next 
 time he sees that bump coming he says, "Ex- 
 cuse me, it hath a familiar look," and he 
 dodges it. 
 
 If you are just drifting in your life, de- 
 pend upon it, you are going downward. You 
 cannot go upward without overcoming. Also 
 notice that anything that runs itself, runs 
 downward. Churches, schools, lyceum 
 courses, chautauquas, reform movements 
 everything that leads upward never run 
 themselves ; they must be pushed every min- 
 ^ite. ^ ^ ^ 
 
 13
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Human life is the Parable of the Prodigal 
 Son. We leave the Father's House of Wis- 
 dom to see the world. Down the Great 
 White Way of Artificial Life go the million 
 prodigals, all seeking happiness. Their days 
 fill up with emptiness and disappointment, 
 their lives fill up with husks. Then as they 
 are bumped they think upon their ways. 
 Whenever anybody can be induced to think 
 upon his ways he will see the emptiness of 
 any life that is not growing in Wisdom and 
 Strength, and arise and go back to his Fath- 
 er's House. 
 
 The devil is so busy with rattleboxes and 
 razzledazzle, to keep people doped so that 
 they will not think upon their ways. If you 
 can't get a person to thinking, you can't help 
 him. And it's mighty hard to get a young 
 person to think. They know better. They 
 are "naturally bright" and they can avoid the 
 pitfalls and bumps that have wrecked the mil- 
 lions. They just have to get their coffee- 
 pots. They just have to slide along amused 
 and doped every minute. 
 
 So the Needless Knocks must come, and 
 either knock them back to the right or knock 
 
 14
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 them out of existence. How often we write 
 into resolutions of respect, "Whereas, it has 
 pleased an Allwise Providence to remove," 
 when Providence didn't have anything at 
 all to do with it. He was just knocked out. 
 There's so much suicide charged up to 
 Providence I 
 
 The Needful Knocks 
 
 BUT all of us have had bumps that we 
 didn't bump into. They came bump- 
 ing into us. Some of them almost 
 crushed us. They gave us cruel pain, and 
 perhaps we haven't gotten over them yet. 
 Some day we shall see, if we haven't already 
 seen, that they were Needful Knocks. We 
 needed them, because everything has to be 
 pounded before it fits, and you and I are be- 
 ing fitted with these Needful Knocks. 
 
 One day I was up the Missabe road about 
 a hundred miles north of Duluth, Minnesota, 
 and came to a hole in the ground. It was a 
 big hole about half-a-mile of hole. There 
 were steam-shovels at work throwing out of 
 the hole what I thought was red mud. I 
 
 15
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 asked the man on the bank, "Kind sir, what 
 is this red mud?" 
 
 The man on the bank was a native and 
 properly insulted. "That hain't red mud; 
 that's iron ore, an' it's the best iron ore in 
 the world." 
 
 "What is that iron ore worth?" 
 
 "It hain't worth nothin' here. That's the 
 reason we're movin' it." 
 
 Wasn't that good? There's red mud 
 around every community that "hain't worth 
 nothin'," and you'd do it a favor to move it. 
 Send it to college, for instance! 
 
 Not very long after this, near Pittsburgh, 
 Pennsylvania, I saw this same red mud. It 
 had been moved over the Great Lakes and 
 over the rails to what they call a blast fur- 
 nace, but the technological name is The Col- 
 lege of Needful Knocks for Red Mud. 
 
 I saw the red mud matriculate saw it 
 matriculate down into a big hopper with 
 limestone and charcoal and other textbooks. 
 Then they corked it up and school began. 
 They roasted it. It's a great thing to be 
 roasted. When it was done roasting they 
 stopped. 
 
 16
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 They always stop roasting when we're 
 done. If we are yet getting roasted, the 
 probabilities are we are not yet done. 
 
 Then they pulled the plug out of the bot- 
 tom of the college and had promotion exer- 
 cises. The red mud squirted out into the 
 sand. It wasn't red mud now, because it had 
 been roasted. It was a freshman, pig iron, 
 worth more money than red mud, because it 
 had been roasted. 
 
 The pig iron that held out faithful went 
 up into another department, a big teakettle 
 thing, where it was roasted again, and now 
 it came out a sophomore, steel, worth more 
 money than pig iron. 
 
 The sophomore steel that held out faithful 
 went into another department where, after 
 they roasted it, they rolled it out thin into a 
 junior. 
 
 Some of it went on farther and had so much 
 more trouble and affliction. The red mud 
 didn't ask to be taken out of the hole in the 
 ground. They just came and took it. They 
 went on day after day bumping it and roast- 
 ing it. They slapped it, they stamped upon 
 
 17
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 it, they twisted it, fashioned it, formed it. 
 They hurt its feehngs. They insulted itl 
 
 I hear that red mud crying out, "O, help I 
 help I They're killing me ! I can't stand this 
 trouble I Why did they take me from my 
 happy hole-in-the-ground? I have been 
 good and honest, and yet they pound me and 
 afflict me and break my heart. O, I'll never 
 get over this. They'll never know me back 
 in the hole in the ground." 
 
 But after that they gave it a diploma a 
 price-mark telling how much it had been 
 bumped. Nobody wanted the red mud as 
 long as it lay there in the hole-in-the-ground. 
 
 Nobody wants a loafer! 
 
 But everybody wanted it after it had been 
 bumped and roasted. They paid the most 
 money for what had been bumped and 
 roasted the most. Now they sent it all over 
 the world. They hung it in glass cases, and 
 the people said, "Isn't that fine. We must 
 have some of that." If a ton of that red mud 
 had become watch-springs or razor-blades, 
 the price had gone up into hundreds of 
 thousands of dollars. 
 
 Fellow sufferers, all of us have to be 
 
 18
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 bumped and roasted before we get into a 
 glass case. The difference between the 
 chunk of coal and the diamond is the Need- 
 ful Knocks. There is no human diamond 
 that has not been crystallized in the crucible 
 of affliction. There is no great life that has 
 not known the great crises of life. 
 
 Cheer up when the Needful Knocks come. 
 Every bump is raising our price! 
 
 How THE Mississippi Becomes the Father 
 OF Waters 
 
 GO BACK to Minnesota. There is a 
 little silvery sheet of water they call 
 Lake Itasca. There is a place where 
 a little stream leaps out of the lake. "AVhat 
 is this little creek?" you ask Jim, who rows 
 the boat. 
 
 "Creek!" snorts Jim. "That hain't no 
 creek! That's the Mississippi River!" 
 
 The Mississippi River the Father of Wa- 
 ters that consumptive little streamlet! 
 Better take it in at night; somebody'll steal 
 it. So even the Father of Waters has to 
 
 19
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 start as a baby! Here we are where that 
 little Mississippi goes wabbling out from his 
 cradle as unsteady as a calf on his new legs. 
 He doesn't know where he is going, but he is 
 "on the way." 
 
 He wabbles around over counties until he 
 comes to the place where you and I come 
 sooner or later. It is the place where Saul 
 came on the road to Damascus. It is the 
 place of the Heavenly Vision, or the Grand 
 Bump. The place where we know which 
 way we are to go. If you haven't heard the 
 call, keep your ear to the receiver and you 
 will hear it. Here gravity calls to the Mis- 
 sippi, "O, little stream wandering thru Min- 
 nesota, do you want to grow? Then you'll 
 have to come south. Do you want to become 
 the Father of Waters? Then you'll have to 
 come south." 
 
 The little stream listens, then starts south. 
 You never meet him after that but what he 
 is going south. You never meet him but 
 what he says, "Excuse me, but I cannot stop 
 I must keep on going south." 
 
 He doesn't branch out. 
 
 20
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 He specializes on going south. He has 
 just one business in life, Going South. 
 
 He starts out in North Minnesota just like 
 a boy or girl who gets the vision and call to 
 do something. "Good bye, folks, I'm going 
 south." And you can almost hear the wise 
 men on the store-boxes saying, "Why, Mis- 
 sissippi, you hain't got water enough to get 
 out of the county. You stay where you are. 
 We know your folks." "Is not this the car- 
 penter's son?" 
 
 But the Mississippi doesn't try to get out 
 of the county; he just tries to get south. 
 He hasn't much water, but he doesn't wait 
 for a relative to die and leave him some 
 water. He starts with what water he has. 
 He doesn't know it is fifteen hundred miles 
 to the gulf. You and I don't know how far 
 it is to our goal. I'm so glad of that so 
 glad we don't know the struggles and the 
 bumps coming. But there is just one thing 
 we can know the direction. 
 
 And we all have enough water to start! 
 
 The Mississippi meets a stream the very 
 first day. He picks up the stream and has 
 some more water. He's a little bigger now 
 
 21
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 and farther south. Next day he picks up 
 another stream and makes it Mississippi. So 
 he goes on south picking up brooklets, 
 streamlets and rivulets. Business is picking 
 up! 
 
 Every day he grows as he goes south. 
 Presently you can hear the same wise men 
 back on the store-boxes saying, "I always 
 told you that Mississippi would get there!" 
 
 You always hear that after you begin to 
 succeed. You always hear them saying you 
 were somehow born lucky. The home town 
 is the slowest to credit you with success, but 
 after the outside world has labeled you a 
 success, the home town overcredits you. 
 
 Generally you are dead about a hundred 
 years before the home town band plays for 
 you. 
 
 Aren't you glad the Mississippi went 
 south? Had he gone any other direction he 
 would have been lost in the woods. 
 * * * 
 
 The Mississippi gets to Minneapolis and 
 St. Paul. Here are the Twin Cities that 
 ought to meet the Mississippi with a brass 
 band, because the river has made them about 
 
 22
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 all the prosperity they have has furnished 
 the power for the greatest flour mills in the 
 world. But the Twin Cities do to the Mis- 
 sissippi just what human beings do to you 
 and to me. 
 
 Have you noticed it? The folks we help 
 the most are generally the least grateful in 
 return. 
 
 Don't wait to be thanked. Hurry on to 
 avoid the kick! 
 
 Do good to others because it makes you 
 happy. But don't wait for a receipt. You'll 
 need a poultice every time you wait. I know, 
 for I've waited. 
 
 Do good from principle. Don't expect to 
 be thanked any more than the sun expects to 
 be thanked for shining. 
 
 How easy to say, but O, how hard to do ! 
 
 Minneapolis and St. Paul meet their ben- 
 efactor with bricks. They hit him with to- 
 mato cans. They throw all their junk, their 
 rag-tag and bob-tail every old thing they 
 don't want, down on the Mississippi. 
 
 The Mississippi doesn't resign! 
 
 The Mississippi doesn't tell a tale of woe. 
 He doesn't say, "I'm not appreciated. My 
 
 23
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 genius isn't understood. I'm not going to 
 play. I'm not going a step farther. I'm 
 going right back to Lake Itasca." 
 
 No he doesn't even go to live with his 
 father-in-law! 
 
 He says, "Thank you, Twin Cities, send 
 it all along; every little helps." If you go 
 a few miles below Minneapolis and St. Paul, 
 you'll see a miracle. You'll see how the Mis- 
 sissippi takes over all this discouragement, 
 defilement and poison. He purifies it, he 
 clarifies it, thru some mysterious alchemy of 
 nature. He makes it a part of himself 
 and he is Greater and Farther South! 
 
 It's by Going South and Overcoming 
 
 Ah, stream from Itasca, I discover your 
 secret of success. I discover how you be- 
 come the Father of Waters. You keep on 
 going south. Civilization conspires to defeat 
 you. Chicago's drainage canal pollutes you. 
 The flat, lazy Platte, three miles wide and 
 three inches deep; the peevish, bridge-hun- 
 gry Kaw, and all the other queer streams 
 that unite to form that treacherous, irrespon- 
 
 24
 
 The Two Colleges 
 
 sible lower Missouri all these pour over 
 you. The big muddy Ohio besmirches you. 
 The red floods, the blue floods, the brown 
 floods, the black floods all try to defile you. 
 But you take them over day by day, you 
 purify them, you make them a part of you, 
 and every night you are Greater and Far- 
 ther South! 
 
 Nothing can discourage you, defile you, 
 nor divert you. They build a great dam at 
 Keokuk. But you only rise the higher and 
 sweep over it, and that very struggle of 
 overcoming sends the electric thrill of power 
 and light all up and down the valley. 
 
 Power comes from overcoming resistance. 
 
 One day the train stopped in Louisiana. 
 We had come to a river so great science 
 hasn't been able to put a bridge across. We 
 had to stack up our train on a ferry-boat to 
 cross the Mississippi River. 
 
 Looking down into that lordly stream, 
 now a good mile wide, hurrying to his long 
 home in the gulf near at hand, there came a 
 great thrill. I could shut my eyes and see 
 the little stream in Minnesota struggling 
 southward. 
 
 25
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 O, Father of Waters, you have fought a 
 good fight ! You have conquered gloriously ! 
 You bear on your bosom the commerce of 
 many nations. I know why. Far back in 
 Minnesota you got in the right channel, you 
 learned the lessons of the knocks, and you 
 never stopped Going South. 
 
 And I see how our lives may become great 
 and successful. We must get the vision of 
 direction, we must press southward day by 
 day. And the countless streams of influence 
 that pour over us, the good and the bad, need 
 not defile, divert nor discourage. We must 
 overcome them, take them over, make them 
 a part of ourselves, and thus grow stronger ! 
 
 * * * 
 
 All the promises of God are "To him that 
 overcometh." All the kingdoms of earth 
 and heaven and the fullness thereof are to 
 the overcomer! 
 
 There's not a crumb promised to the 
 loafer, the shirker or the coward. 
 
 Go on South! Everyone of us is planned 
 to be a Mississippi. But most of us stop in 
 the Minnesota woods, or in the Twin Cities, 
 or at Keokuk. 
 
 26
 
 II 
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 ONE DAY the train stopped at a sta- 
 tion to take water. Beside the track 
 was a grocery store with a row of bar- 
 rels of apples in front. There was one barrel 
 full of big, red, fat apples. I rushed over 
 and got a sack of the big, red, fat apples. 
 Later on as the train was under way I looked 
 in the sack and there wasn't a big, red, fat 
 apple in the sack. All I could figure out was 
 there was only one layer of the big, red, fat 
 apples on the top of the barrel, and the gro- 
 ceryman, not desiring to spoil his sign, had 
 reached down under the top layer. 
 
 Anyhow, he gave me the worst mess of 
 runts and windfalls I ever saw in one sack. 
 The things I said about the grocery business 
 must have kept the recording angel busy ! 
 
 Then I calmed down. Did the groceryman 
 do that on purpose? Does the groceryman 
 ever put the big apples on top and the little 
 ones down underneath? Do you? Is there 
 a groceryman in this audience? 
 
 27
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 O, man of sorrows ! How you have been 
 slandered ! It never occurred to me until that 
 moment, the groceryman doesn't put the big 
 ones on top and the little ones underneath, 
 because he doesn't have to. It does itself. 
 It is the Shaking of the Barrel. 
 
 I remembered when I used to have big 
 marbles and little marbles in my box. The 
 big ones always shook to the top and the lit- 
 tle ones shook to the bottom. I always no- 
 ticed when big and little objects shook to- 
 gether, there was no mistake the big shook 
 up and the little shook down. Once a pike 
 contractor in our home county forgot this. 
 His contract called for the road to be made 
 of small stones, but he got in a hurry and 
 put big stones in the bottom of the road, and 
 covered them over with little ones on the top. 
 Before he could collect his money, the big 
 stones were sticking their noses right up thru 
 the top. And he didn't collect at all. 
 
 You little folks try that tomorrow. You 
 put big marbles and little marbles together 
 and shake them and see the big go up and the 
 little go down. 
 
 * * * 
 
 28
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 I remembered when I used to haul apples 
 to the cider-mill in the old dump-bed wagon. 
 I didn't sort out the apples; I just threw 
 them in any old way, and then drove four 
 miles and a half over corduroy roads. 
 
 Do you remember about corduroy roads? 
 O, poetry of motion I The wagon only "hit 
 the high spots" as it bumped from log to log, 
 and the apples were in the air most of the 
 time. 
 
 And when 1 got to the cider-mill, it seemed 
 as tho the big, fat apples were trying to get 
 to the top and the runts were trying to hold 
 a mass meeting in the bottom of the wagon- 
 bed. 
 
 The big ones had the good luck and the 
 runts had the bad luck. The same bump 
 was both good luck and bad luck it de- 
 pended upon the size of the apple. The same 
 bump that sent the little one down, sent the 
 big one up. It didn't depend upon the size 
 of the bump, but upon the size of the 
 bump-ee ! 
 
 Here were two apples right side by side 
 maybe brothers, a big brother and a little 
 runt brother. They got the same bump. 
 
 29
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Little brother had bad luck and shook down, 
 while big brother had good luck and shook 
 up. 
 
 O, little apple, I'm sorry for you. But 
 it's your own fault. Why don't you grow 
 bigger ? You little runt, growling about you 
 "never had no chance" and "folks never used 
 me right," you grow bigger. Get the lid 
 off and begin to get more capable. And 
 pretty soon the very bumps that used to be 
 bad luck and push you down, will become 
 good luck and push you up. 
 
 * * * 
 We Make Our Own Places 
 
 O FELLOW APPLES! We are all 
 apples in this great barrel of life, 
 on the way to the market-place of 
 the future. It's a corduroy road. Every day 
 we shake about and get bumped. All life is 
 a struggle to stay a survival of the fittest. 
 Every place is shaking the postoffice, the 
 pulpits, the schoolrooms, the stores, the 
 shops, the offices. Anyone holding a place 
 must fill it or he cannot stay there. If he 
 does not fill it, he will rattle. 
 
 30
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 Nobody can stay where he rattles. He 
 will shake down to a smaller place. 
 
 If he grows greater than the place, he will 
 shake up to a greater place, or push out 
 greater the place he is in, which is the same 
 thing. 
 
 Here is all humanity in the barrel big 
 apples, little apples, freckled apples, speck- 
 led apples, green apples and dried apples ! 
 
 We are not the victims of a blind fate, nor 
 creatures of chance. We have in our own 
 hands the power to decide our destiny, as 
 we grow or refuse to grow. 
 
 Some of us begin life on the top branches, 
 right in the sunshine of popular favor, and 
 get our names in the blue book at the start. 
 Some of us begin down in the shade on the 
 bottom branches, and we don't even "get in- 
 vited." We often get discouraged as we look 
 up to the top branches, and we say, *'0, if I 
 only had his chance! If I were only up 
 there, I might amount to something. I'm too 
 low down." 
 
 But we can grow ! 
 
 After while we are all in the same barrel, 
 shaken up and bumped about. There the 
 
 31
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 people do not ask us, "On what branch of 
 that tree did you grow?" so much as they 
 inquire, "How big are you?" 
 * * * 
 
 The One Who Shakes Up 
 
 Everywhere you look, in every community, 
 in every business, you see the barrel sorting 
 people according to size. 
 
 There is a city concern where a number of 
 young ladies worked. Some of them had 
 been there two years. There came a raw, 
 green Dutch girl from the country. It was 
 her first city office experience, and of course 
 she got the bottom job. The other girls 
 sneered at her. "Isn't she the limit?" they 
 would say. They were right. She made so 
 many blunders. But she didn't make the 
 same blunder twice. Every time she was 
 bumped she learned the lesson. 
 
 And she never "got done." When she had 
 finished the work she had been put at, she 
 could always see some other work that 
 needed to be done, and she would go ahead 
 and do it without being told. She had that 
 rare faculty the world is bidding for initia- 
 
 32
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 tive. The other girls "got done." That is, 
 when they had finished the work they had 
 been put at, they would wait O, so patiently 
 they would wait to be told what to do next. 
 
 Their heads were "fat." Sometimes I 
 think a "fathead" is really worse than a 
 "bonehead." Pardon this expression from 
 the diamond. 
 
 In three months time every other girl in 
 that office was asking questions of the little 
 Dutch girl. She had learned more about the 
 business in three months than the others had 
 learned in two years. That is, she had 
 grown greater than the others. The barrel 
 did the rest. She shook above them. Today 
 the little Dutch girl is giving orders to all 
 the rest, for she is the superintendent of that 
 office. 
 
 The other girls feel hurt about it. They 
 will tell you, "There was nothing fair about 
 that nothing fair. Jennie ought to have 
 had that job. Jennie had been here two 
 years I" 
 
 But Jennie hadn't grown as great as 
 
 "Dutchie"! 
 
 * * * 
 
 33
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 The One Who Shakes Down 
 
 I stood in a paper-mill the other day, be- 
 side a long machine making shiny supercal- 
 endered paper. I asked the man working 
 there some questions about the machine, 
 which he answered fairly well. Then I asked 
 him about a machine in the next room. He 
 said, "I don't know anything about it, boss, 
 I don't work there." 
 
 I asked him about another machine, and 
 he rephed, "I don't know anything about it, 
 boss, I don't work there." When I asked 
 him about the pulp mill in another building, 
 he replied, "I don't know anything about it, 
 boss, I don't work there." 
 
 "How long have you worked here?" 
 
 "About twelve years." 
 
 Going out of the building, I asked the 
 foreman, "Brother, do you see that man over 
 there at the supercalendered machine? Is 
 he a human being? What's the matter with 
 him?" 
 
 The foreman's face clouded. "I hate to 
 talk to you about that man. He is one of 
 the kindest-hearted men we ever had in this 
 plant, and I just hate to tell him the thing 
 
 34
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 I've got to tell him. You see he doesn't learn 
 anything doesn't try to learn, doesn't seem 
 to care whether he learns or not, and we're 
 afraid he'll break the machine he works at. 
 We must let him go." 
 
 For he had begun to rattle. Nobody can 
 stay where he rattles. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Now life is mainly routine. You and I 
 and everybody must go on doing pretty much 
 the same things over and over and over. 
 Every day we have about the same round 
 of duties. But if we go on doing just the 
 same things in the same way over and over 
 just turning round and round in our places 
 and not growing any, pretty soon we'll 
 shrivel some and rattle. 
 
 We must be learning and growing to hold 
 our place. The farmer must be getting a 
 new vision of farming year by year, or he 
 can't hold his place as a farmer. The mer- 
 chant must be learning something new about 
 merchandising. The mother must be getting 
 a wider vision of homemaking. The preacher 
 must be getting new visions or he cannot 
 stand in his pulpit. 
 
 35
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 So we must keep on growing to stay the 
 same size! Evaporation is going on all the 
 time. 
 
 When anybody stays in the same place 
 year after year, he doesn't rattle. 
 
 We never get done going south. Children, 
 when you go off to college, don't get the idea 
 you are going to a "finishing school," or 
 you'll be finished. 
 
 When I hear anybody say, "You can't tell 
 me anything about it; I know all there is to 
 know about it," I know he rattles. When I 
 hear anybody say, "I own the job; they just 
 can't get along without me," poor fellow! 
 I know he is rattling and going to shake 
 down. 
 
 We must grow or go ! 
 * * * 
 
 You Must First Grow Great 
 
 We young people come up into life and 
 want great places. I wouldn't give much 
 for a young person who doesn't want a great 
 place. I wouldn't give much for a young 
 person who isn't full of ambition and hustle. 
 
 We think the way to get a great place is 
 
 36
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 just to get it. Go after it and get it ! If we 
 don't have pull enough, get some more testi- 
 monials. We think if we could only get into 
 a great place, we'd be great. But we 
 wouldn't; we'd be a great joke! For we'd 
 rattle. 
 
 We don't become great by getting into a 
 great place any more than a boy becomes a 
 man by putting on his father's boots. He 
 rattles in the boots. He must grow greater 
 feet before he gets greater boots. But he 
 must get the feet before the boots! 
 
 No we become great before we get the 
 great place. As we become great, the barrel 
 shakes us up to the place we fit. The place 
 is only the label indicating our size. 
 
 Beware of testimonials! The man who 
 has the most testimonials generally needs 
 them the most. A testimonial is a crutch. 
 
 The little man tries to get the great place 
 by getting testimonials. Many a man writes 
 a testimonial to get rid of somebody. As he 
 goes away with it, the writer says, "Well, I 
 hope it will do him some good." It is dan- 
 gerous, for the higher you boost a little man, 
 the farther he is going to fall. It may break 
 
 37
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 his neck, and writing that testimonial would 
 be murder. 
 
 No, children, as you come up into life, 
 don't worry so much about places. Try to 
 get ready for places. They'll come to you 
 just as fast as you are ready for them. You 
 get the vision of what you are to do. You 
 keep working and listening for the call, 
 "Come south!" Then you go south! Get 
 into the first place that opens on the way 
 south, no matter if it is a knothole. Get into 
 the knothole. Then get too great for the 
 knothole. That doesn't mean get too big- 
 feeling, but it means doing more than you 
 are paid to do, knowing more than you are 
 paid to know in a knothole, and you simply 
 cannot stay in the knothole. The barrel will 
 shake you up into a bigger knothole. And 
 on up just as fast as you grow great. 
 
 Don't worry about salary. Salary will 
 take care of itself. Nobody can be long 
 overpaid, nor long underpaid. 
 
 Our real pay is gotten out of our work, 
 not out of our envelope. 
 
 How successful we are always means how 
 happy we are. ^ ^i^ ^ 
 
 38
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 You Get It When You Get Ready 
 
 O, why didn't they make me see that back 
 in the days when "Nobody used me right! 
 Nobody'd give me a chance"? 
 
 I used to carry a dinner-pail past Bill Bar- 
 low's bank. I was working on the "section" 
 for a dollar fifteen a day, and I rattled there. 
 I didn't earn my wages. I watched the clock 
 and left my pick up in the air when the 
 whistle blew. I would look up into the big 
 bank and see the mahogany furniture, and 
 growl, "I ought to have that bank. I'm nat- 
 urally bright. Everybody's trpng to keep 
 a brilliant young man down! If the rich 
 wasn't getting richer and the poor poorer, 
 I'd be running that bank." 
 
 Did you ever hear that line of conversa- 
 tion? It generally comes from somebody 
 who rattles where he is. 
 
 I do not mean that the bank job was any 
 greater than the handcar job. But when I 
 was not faithful over a few things I would 
 have rattled over many. 
 
 I look back now in gratitude to realize I 
 didn*t get the bank. Suppose I'd had my 
 foolish wish, as the fairy books love to tell 
 
 39
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 about love to tell about a clodhopper who is 
 suddenly enchanted up into a king or some- 
 thing. Suppose they had put me up into 
 the president's chair of that bank into a 
 great place that was shaking all the time, 
 where I would have rattled. I wouldn't have 
 lasted fifteen minutes. I was a peanut and 
 I would have rattled right down to the pea- 
 nut row. 
 
 I look back over my life and I want to hold 
 Thanksgiving services when I see that I 
 didn't get the things I wanted at the time I 
 wanted them. They would have been coffee- 
 pots! Thank the Lord! we don't get a cof- 
 fee-pot until we are ready to handle it. 
 
 Those dear folks who love to talk about 
 leveling things and turning the barrel upside 
 down, so as to give the little man a chance, 
 should sit down and have a quiet think about 
 this. The little man has the chance just as 
 fast as he grows greater. To turn the barrel 
 upside down would put the little ones all on 
 top and the big ones down in the bottom. But 
 it wouldn't stop the barrel from shaking! 
 
 And there would be a great social earth- 
 
 40
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 quake that would send those little ones down 
 and shake the big ones up, just as before. 
 
 You can't make apples of one size by act 
 of Congress. 
 
 Quit trying to fix the barrel. Fix the peo- 
 ple inside the barrel. Show them how to 
 grow greater. 
 
 Today you and I have things we couldn't 
 have yesterday. We just wanted them yes- 
 terday O, how we wanted them! But a 
 cruel fate wouldn't let us have them. Today 
 we have them they come to us just as nat- 
 urally, and we see it is because we have got- 
 ten ready for them, and the barrel has car- 
 ried us up to them. 
 
 Today you and I want things beyond our 
 reach. We j ust want them O, how we want 
 them! But a cruel fate won't let us have 
 them. 
 
 That cruel fate is our own smallness. We 
 are not big enough. Grow greater and we 
 get them. We have today all we can stand 
 today. More would wreck us. 
 
 "No good thing will He withhold from 
 
 41
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 them" that grow great enough. (Revised 
 version!) 
 
 * * * 
 
 Moses vtas Eighty Years Prepaeing 
 
 LIFE IS Preparation, not Pursuit. 
 You see the man pursuing hardest? 
 By and by he will wail, "They beat 
 me to it!" We don't have to pursue. We 
 just have to prepare for things, and as fast 
 as we prepare for things, the things come to 
 us and say, "Here we are; please have us." 
 
 No great thing was ever done, save by 
 great preparation. 
 
 Moses was eighty years old before he be- 
 gan his real job. Moses was eighty years 
 getting ready to do that last forty years 
 work. Eighty years getting ready to be 
 Moses. 
 
 Jesus was thirty years getting ready to 
 do three years work. Thirty years getting 
 ready to be Jesus. 
 
 Most of us today expect to get ready in 
 about four easy lessons by mail ! 
 
 We can be a pumpkin in one summer 
 with the accent on the punk! 
 
 42
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 If we can't wait that long, cheer up, we 
 can be a mushroom in a day. R-r-r-r-tl 
 We're a mushroom with the accent on the 
 mush I 
 
 We can't be an oak that way. When we 
 stop growing we stop living. 
 
 That story of Moses thrills me. I see 
 Moses the little Hebrew babe in the bul- 
 rushes. I see Pharaoh's daughter come down 
 to these same bulrushes. "O-o-o-oo-oo!" 
 says Miss Phyllis Pharaoh, "here is Moses! 
 Well, little tootsie wootsie, get into my 
 limousine !" 
 
 I see them take little Moses out of the 
 bulrushes into luxiu-y. They give him a 
 "bawth," they pour perfumery over him, 
 they feed him Mellin's Food, they dress him 
 in a cute little Lord Fauntleroy rig. Well, 
 well, Moses, you look just too cunning for 
 anything! You are fixed for life. Nothing 
 to do now but to loaf around palaces, look at 
 the album, smoke cigarets with your initials 
 on them and wear a wrist watch! 
 
 If Moses had stayed around the palaces, 
 
 43
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 he would have made a fine, fat mummy. All 
 the rest of the palace people went to mum- 
 mies. And Moses would have been the 
 seventeenth mummy on the thirty-ninth 
 shelf to the right, section Q! 
 
 Moses took off his tuxedo in time. He 
 kept on going south. He left the riot and 
 the debauchery of the palace. He went out 
 into the desert to the University of Hard 
 Knocks. It took eighty years to get the 
 meanness and selfishness and murder 
 pounded out of him so that he could lead the 
 Children of Israel thru the Wilderness. He 
 had to cross the Red Sea and go up Sinai, 
 and fight his way year by year before he 
 stood upon Nebo, the great lawgiver we 
 revere. * * * 
 
 We are Just Beginning! 
 
 Most of us die in the Wilderness tickled 
 to death with our press notices! 
 
 We make a little first reader success 
 some little knee-pants achievement and our 
 friends crowd around to congratulate us. 
 They tell us we have arrived. We believe 
 them! 
 
 44
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 We think we have arrived at the Gulf of 
 Mexico, when we haven't gotten out of the 
 woods of Minnesota. We stop going south 
 and get embalmed. The world is just lit- 
 tered up with mummies who strut and 
 squeak, "I'm a success. Do you not see I am 
 a success? Why don't you shout for me? 
 Here are my press notices." 
 
 Success is so hard to endure. We can 
 endure ten defeats better than one victory. 
 
 And we can protect ourselves fairly well 
 from our enemies, but heaven deliver us 
 from our fool friends ! 
 
 Generally speaking, the man who con- 
 fesses that he is a success, isn't a success. 
 
 The man who is a success will tell you of 
 the success he hopes for tomorrow. 
 
 Contentment with present achievement is 
 sleeping sickness. There are two kinds of 
 people in the world Educated People and 
 Fools. The Fools are the folks who have 
 graduated. And quit! 
 
 The other day I saw in a music store the 
 new Edison phonograph. I remembered 
 when a boy back in the seventies I had seen 
 
 45
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 the first phonograph that tinfoil cylinder 
 that screeched, scratched and stuttered. You 
 wouldn't have it in your barn today to play 
 to your "Ford". But the world said, "Won- 
 derful! Wonderful! Mr. Edison has suc- 
 ceeded!" Everybody believed Mr. Edison 
 had succeeded, save one man. 
 
 His name was Thomas A. Edison. He 
 hadn't gotten to St. Paul in his going south. 
 He went on succeeding. He went on work- 
 ing day and night. He went on making 
 thousands of experiments. Today when he 
 has become one of the world's greatest in- 
 ventors, if we could bring him to this plat- 
 form and ask him, "Wizard of Menlo Park, 
 have you succeeded?" I am sure he would 
 say, "My friends, I am only just beginning 
 to do the things I hope yet to do. Every- 
 thing I do today only lifts me higher to see 
 how much more there is to be done to- 
 morrow." 
 
 The oldest person in every audience (if 
 he be living and not vegetating) is readiest 
 to admit, "I am just beginning to learn." 
 
 The farther you travel thru life, the more 
 
 46
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 you want to say with Newton after he hi '. 
 written the world a new science, "I seem to 
 have been only like a boy playing on the sea- 
 shore * * * whilst the great ocean of 
 truth lay all undiscovered before me I" 
 
 Nothing is ever perfected; it is just evolv- 
 ing. 
 
 The only successful man is the one who 
 never gets done succeeding. 
 
 * * * 
 
 We Bury Ourselves 
 
 Observe that Moses was eighty years get- 
 ting ready for his job. His job was ready 
 and waiting for him all these eighty years. 
 All these eighty years the Children of Israel 
 were groaning for a Moses. But Moses 
 wasn't great enough. 
 
 You and I don't have to hunt for our job. 
 It is ready for us, waiting for us, waiting 
 for us to get great enough to do it. Every- 
 body has a great job waiting, but so few of 
 us keep on going south till we reach it. 
 
 If Moses had "retired" at seventy-nine, 
 we would never have heard about him. 
 
 I wish I could impress upon you that all 
 
 47
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 we have done up to today is just prepara- 
 tion for today. You and I are only children 
 in God's great kindergarten, just learning 
 our letters of life. It isn't hard to make these 
 boys and girls believe that they are just be- 
 ginning. But it is so hard to make us older 
 boys and girls believe this. Our hair begins 
 to get frosty or begins to wear off in spots, 
 and we begin to say, "I am getting old." 
 
 And then we do get old. We age rapidly 
 after that. Advertising gets results. We 
 are exactly as old as we think. Age isn't 
 birthdays; it is grunts. 
 
 We quit work and fold our hands. We 
 say, "I've seen my best days." And we push 
 forward the date of our funeral. 
 
 Every time we say, "My work is done," 
 the undertaker greases his wagon. 
 
 Imagine Moses living today amidst the 
 din of the high school orations on "The Age 
 of the Young Man" and the Ostler idea that 
 you are going downhill at fifty. Moses is 
 eighty years old when he first gets into the 
 newspapers. He is "living on borrowed 
 
 48
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 time" when he puts himself at the head of the 
 host of Israel. 
 
 I see his scandalized friends gather around 
 him. "Moses! Moses! what is this we hear? 
 You going to lead the Israelites to the Prom- 
 ised Land? Why, Moses, you are an old 
 man. Why don't you act like an old man? 
 You are liable to drop off any minute ! Here 
 is a pair of slippers. And keep out of the 
 night air. It's so hard on old folks." 
 
 I hear Moses say, "No! No! I am just 
 beginning. Watch things happen from now 
 on. My chance has just come. Children 
 of Israel, forward, march!" 
 
 I see Moses at eighty starting for the 
 Wilderness so fast Aaron can hardly keep 
 up. 
 
 Moses is eighty-five, and busier and more 
 enthusiastic than ever. The people say, 
 "Isn't Moses dead?" They reply, "No/' 
 "Well, why isn't he dead? He ought to be 
 dead this minute." 
 
 They appoint a committee to bury Moses. 
 You can't do anj^'thing in America without a 
 committee. The committee gets out the invi- 
 
 49
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 tations and makes all the arrangements for a 
 gorgeous funeral next Thursday. They get 
 the resolutions of respect "Whereas 
 Whereas Resolved Resolved." 
 
 Then the committee waits on Moses. 
 That's the job of every committee to 
 "wait" on something or other. 
 
 The committee goes up to General Moses' 
 private office. It is his busy day. They have 
 to stand in line and wait their turn. When 
 they get up to Moses' desk, Moses says, 
 "Boys, what is it, but cut it short, I'm very 
 busy." 
 
 The committee commences to weep. 
 "Why, General Moses, you don't under- 
 stand. You are eighty-five years old and 
 ought to be buried. We are the committee 
 duly authorized to give you gorgeous burial. 
 The funeral is to be next Thursday. Kindly 
 die!" 
 
 I see Moses look over his appointments. 
 "Next Thursday? Why, boys, every hour is 
 taken next Thursday. I simply can't at- 
 tend!" 
 
 And they couldn't bury Moses. He 
 
 50
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 wouldn't attend. You can't bury anybody 
 who is too busy to attend his own funeral. 
 You can't bury anybody until he consents. 
 It is bad manners! 
 
 The committee is so mortified. It had 
 gotten all the invitations out for Moses' 
 funeral and Moses wouldn't attend! Did 
 you ever see the perversity and lack of ap- 
 preciation of a man like Moses? 
 
 The committee waited. That's the job of 
 a committee to wait! 
 
 Moses is eighty-six and busier than ever. 
 The committee says, "Moses, can you attend 
 next Thursday?" And Moses says, "No, 
 boys, I'm so busy I haven't time even to 
 think about getting sick. You'll have to 
 wait." 
 
 The committee waits. Moses is ninety, 
 and rushed harder than ever. He is doing 
 ten men's work and his friends all say he is 
 killing himself. But he makes the committee 
 wait. 
 
 Moses is ninety-five. Moses is a hundred. 
 And the committee dies! 
 
 Moses goes right on shouting, "Onward!" 
 
 51
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 "Speak to the children of Israel that they go 
 forward." He is a hundred and ten. He is 
 a hundred and twenty. Even then I read 
 that "His eye was not dim, nor his natural 
 force abated." He hadn't time to stop and 
 abate them. 
 
 And God had to bury him. The commit- 
 tee was dead ! 
 
 O, friends, this isn't irreverence. It is joy- 
 ful reverence. It is the message to you and 
 me: Get so busy and enthused in our work, 
 see the greater things yet to be done, and 
 we'll fool the "committee", and God will have 
 to bury us, too. Then the resolutions of 
 respect will come true "Whereas, it has 
 pleased an Allwise Providence to remove 
 us," and we'll quit committing suicide and 
 charging it up to Providence. 
 * * * 
 The Secret of Greatness 
 
 DON'T MAKE the world's mistake of 
 thinking that the top of the barrel 
 always means getting to the top in 
 worldly honors. Don't think becoming 
 greatest means getting the greatest pile of 
 
 52
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 material things. Don't think only a few can 
 become greatest. It is everybody's privi- 
 lege no, everybody's duty to become 
 greatest. 
 
 I turn back to the book I used to sneer at 
 the book that the worldly-wise builders 
 have always rejected, but it must become the 
 head-stone of the corner in every abiding 
 structure. Here I find the answer to every 
 question. 
 
 Jesus had a couple of disciples those 
 Zebedee boys. They wanted to be great. 
 James wanted to be secretary of state, and 
 John wanted to be postmaster general, or 
 something like that. They got very busy 
 pursuing greatness, but they did not prepare 
 for greatness. They got their mother out 
 electioneering for them. 
 
 They came to the Master. "O, Master, 
 we want the great jobs in your coming king- 
 dom. We want to sit on either side of you 
 on your throne. See! we have the home 
 endorsement!" 
 
 Then the Master said, "O, boys, you rat- 
 tle!" That is the Revised Version. Accord- 
 ing to King James he said, "Can you drink 
 
 53
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 of the cup that I drink of? and be baptized 
 with the baptism that I am baptized with?" 
 That is saying the same thing. They hadn't 
 gotten ready for such greatness. 
 
 And then he said a wonderful thing: 
 "Whosoever will be great among you, shall 
 be your minister: and whosoever of you will 
 be the chiefest, shall be servant of all.'* 
 
 Do you believe that? 
 
 Whether you are really living and happy 
 and successful, and strong and great and 
 educated, depends upon whether you accept 
 or reject that statement of the Wisest Man. 
 
 These two thousand years the world has 
 mainly rejected it. The world goes franti- 
 cally on trying to be great by being greatly 
 served. The world tries to get a great sal- 
 ary, and get great power and a retinue of 
 servants. Then after the world gets it all, 
 it cries out in bitter disappointment, "All is 
 vanity!" 
 
 Greatness is not in Getting, but in Giving. 
 
 Greatness merely means the ability to 
 carry great loads and to bear great burdens. 
 Greatness means giving great service. 
 * * * 
 
 54
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 How Aix Become Greatest 
 
 When the widow came casting her two 
 mites into the treasury, the Master said as 
 he pointed to the rich men who had cast gifts 
 into the same treasury, "This poor widow 
 hath cast in more than they all. For all these 
 have of their abundance cast in unto the 
 offerings of God : but she of her penury hath 
 cast in all the living that she had." 
 
 Here is the statement that when we have 
 given all we have, nobody can give more. 
 
 Every one of us has a coin of talent 
 rich gifts, perhaps, but at least some little 
 mite of a talent. Maj^'be just a talent for 
 peeling potatoes, or driving nails, or ruling 
 a nation. It matters not what our job, just 
 so it be our work the thing we can do. 
 
 When we have developed our talent to 
 the highest possible efficiency when we do 
 with all our might what our hands find to 
 do when we are giving the greatest possible 
 service out of our lives. We have become 
 Greatest, by the divine definition. 
 
 There is no greater success, nor greater 
 happiness, nor greater eminence, than just 
 to be permitted (not compelled) to serve at 
 
 55
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 the work we are best fitted to do. 
 
 That is the top of the barrel ! 
 
 Quit fretting and worrying about the 
 things you cannot get to do. Do the things 
 with your might that you can get to do. Rul- 
 ing or serving, it is all one. 
 
 I am learning to take off my hat to any- 
 body who can do anything greatly. I don't 
 know who fitted the boards in this floor, nor 
 do I know all the great people who may come 
 and stand upon this floor. But I do know 
 that the one who made the floor is just as 
 great as anybody in the world who can come 
 and stand upon it if Each be doing his 
 work with the same Zeal and Faithfulness 
 and Capability. 
 
 You thought when I was talking about the 
 barrel shaking and the big ones going to the 
 top, that I was sneering at the little man! 
 Don't you see the only little man in the 
 world is the man who won't serve? 
 
 Don't you see that all the promises in 
 God's Word are for "him who overcometh?" 
 Not one crumb for the loafer, the shirker, 
 the selfish one. 
 
 The world says some of us have golden 
 
 56
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 gifts, some silver gifts, but most of us have 
 copper gifts. Yet when we have given all 
 we have, there is a divine alchemy that trans- 
 mutes every gift into gold. Everything be- 
 comes gold when given in a golden manner. 
 Every work is drudgery when done selfishly. 
 Every work becomes great and glorious 
 when we put into it a great and glorious life. 
 
 Happiness the Pay for Service 
 
 Have you ever been unhappy ? I have. I 
 have been so unhappy I wanted to die. I 
 have been so unhappy I wanted to kill my- 
 self. I think I would have killed myself a 
 great many times, but I was too big a cow- 
 ard! My life was such a failure. Nobody 
 wanted me. The world seemed to want 
 everybody else, but the world wouldn't have 
 me. 
 
 Now I walk thru the same streets singing 
 where once I went swearing. I marvel today 
 how well the world uses me. 
 
 I had to get many, many bumps before I 
 could see that I was trying to become great 
 
 57
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 backwards. I was trying to get things self- 
 ishly and beat everybody to them. All I got 
 was bumps and coffee-pots. I never knew 
 one moment of real happiness until I turned 
 around and tried to give some service out of 
 my life. 
 
 Grow greater and your troubles grow 
 smaller! 
 
 Are you unhappy in your work? Then 
 you are working selfishly. And you'll have 
 to get your bumps and coffee-pots to teach 
 you you are going backwards. 
 
 You'll have to learn that greatness is not 
 Getting but Giving. 
 
 You'll have to learn that the Service of 
 God is the Service of Man. 
 * * * 
 
 Only One Business 
 
 Then hear the conclusion of the whole mat- 
 ter : There is only one business in the world 
 "My Father's Business," as the child Jesus 
 said in the temple. That is the Business of 
 Being Happy. The business of making the 
 kingdom of heaven appear on earth. The 
 business of answering our daily prayer, 
 
 58
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 "Thy kingdom come on earth as it is in 
 heaven." 
 
 The pay for this business is not money 
 but Happiness. We get it as we make oth- 
 ers happy by lovingly serving them. 
 
 Keeping a grocery, teaching school, run- 
 ning a home, a bank, a farm or a factory 
 it's all one business of Service, and we are 
 doing the part our talents determine. 
 
 He that saveth his life shall lose it. But 
 he that loseth his life in service shall find it 
 grown great and glorious and happy. 
 
 If you want to be great, don't go to Chi- 
 cago or New York or chasing around the 
 world to find it. Go back to your home 
 right back into your kitchen, or into your 
 shop or your ofiSce and simply lose yourself 
 in the service of others. Make your old 
 work luminous with a new devotion. Pres- 
 ently you will find yourself upon a new 
 throne of power; you will find the people 
 rising up to call you blessed, and you will 
 find that peace that passeth understanding. 
 
 * * * 
 We get all the Good things of Life in the 
 
 59
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 School of Service. Here we get Wisdom, 
 Understanding, Happiness, Manhood, 
 Womanhood, Greatness. 
 
 Getting these is getting an Education. 
 All the rest is scaffolding. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Finding the Great People 
 
 If I were making a roster of the great 
 people in this community, I would not go 
 first to the show places nor to the blue book. 
 I would go to the firing-line, and where the 
 burdens are heaviest. 
 
 I had to go to the shaft of a coal-mine in 
 a little Illinois town the other day. The 
 bureau had sent me there to lecture. I won- 
 dered what the grimy-faced man who came 
 from the shaft wearing a miner's lamp in his 
 cap, could possibly have to do with the lyceum 
 course. But I learned he had sold all the 
 tickets. That man is the superintendent of 
 the one Sunday school in the town. That 
 man is the storm-center of every altruistic 
 effort in the town the greatest man there, 
 because the most serviceable, tho he works 
 every day full time with his pick. 
 
 * * * 
 
 60
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 Chicago has a great man who preaches 
 on Sundays to thousands. He writes books 
 and runs a college. He is at the head of so 
 many uplift movements that his name gets 
 into the papers about every day, and you 
 read it in almost every committee doing good 
 things in Chicago. 
 
 He broke away from Chicago last summer 
 to have a vacation at the chautauquas. Many 
 people think that a vacation means going off 
 somewhere and stretching under a tree or 
 jumping into some sort of oblivion. But this 
 Chicago great man went from one chautau- 
 qua town to another, and took his vacation 
 going up and down the streets. He dug into 
 the local history of each place, and before 
 dinner knew more about the place than most 
 of the natives. "There's a sermon for me," 
 he would exclaim every half-hour. He went 
 to see people who were doing things. In 
 every town he would discover somebody of 
 unusual attainment, and he would visit him. 
 He made every town an unusual town. He 
 turned the humdrum travel map into a won- 
 derland. He scolded lazy towns and praised 
 enterprising towns. He stopped young fel- 
 
 61
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 lows on the street. "What are you going to 
 do in Hfe?" Perhaps the young man would 
 say he had no chance. "You come to Chi- 
 cago, and I'll give you a chance." 
 
 So this Chicago man was busy every day, 
 working overtime on his vacation. He was 
 busy about other people's business. He did 
 not once ask the price of land, or where 
 there was a good investment for himself, but 
 every day he was trying to make an invest- 
 ment in somebody else. 
 
 Ever so many of his friends worried about 
 him. They would say, "Why doesn't he take 
 care of himself? He just wears himself out 
 for other people until he hasn't strength 
 enough left to lecture and do his own work." 
 Sometimes they were right. 
 
 But he that saveth his life shall lose it, and 
 he that loseth his life in service finds it re- 
 turning to him great and glorious. This 
 man's preaching did not make him great. 
 His college did not make him great. His 
 books did not make him great. His life of 
 
 62
 
 How to Become Great 
 
 service makes him great makes his preach- 
 ing, his college, his books great. 
 
 This Chicago man gives his whole energy 
 into service, and it becomes the fuel that 
 makes the steam to accomphsh all the won- 
 derful things he does. Let him stop and 
 "take care of himself," and his career would 
 stop. If he had begun hfe by "taking care 
 of himself," and "looking out for number 
 one," and stipulating every cent he was to 
 get, and writing it all down in advance in the 
 contract, most likely Dr. Frank W. Gun- 
 saulus would have remained a struggling, 
 discouraged preacher in the backwoods of 
 Morrow county, Ohio. 
 
 Gunsaulus often says : "You are planning 
 and saving and telling yourself that after- 
 while you can give and do great things. You 
 are wrong. Give it now. Give your dollar 
 now rather than your thousands afterwhile. 
 You need to give it now, and the world needs 
 to get it now." 
 
 63
 
 Ill 
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 THERE IS a factory town in the East. 
 Not a pretty town, but just a great, 
 dirty mill and a lot of little dirty 
 houses around the mill. The hands lived in 
 the little dirty houses and worked six days 
 of the week in the big, dirty mill. On Sun- 
 day they didn't work, because this mill didn't 
 run on Sunday. They went to the factory 
 church. After preaching there would be 
 "class-meeting," and about halfway thru the 
 preacher would say, "We'll now change the 
 order of the services." That meant get up 
 and speak, if you had "religion." Always 
 there was a little old, dried-up man on the 
 front seat who would get up first. 
 
 Perhaps you would have laughed if you 
 had never seen him before. He was dried-up 
 and shriveled; one shoulder higher than the 
 other and his head upside down the smooth 
 end of his head was on top. 
 
 This little old man would pop up first and 
 say, "Brethern and sistern, I hain't got no 
 
 C4
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 book rarnin' like the rest of you." He al- 
 ways said that. Every Sunday he would 
 break the news to the congregation that he 
 had no "book I'arnin' like the rest of you." 
 Then he would tell them things, wonderful 
 things. 
 
 He was the man who owned the mill. He 
 had made it with his own hands out of noth- 
 ing. The "brethern and sistern" all worked 
 for him six days a week. He had never had 
 school advantages and he had an idolatry for 
 a book. 
 
 * * * 
 
 GussiE AND Bill Whackem 
 
 He had a little pink son, whose name was 
 "F. Gustavus Adolphus." He often said, 
 "I'm going to give that boy all the educa- 
 tion my money can buy." 
 
 Thought he could buy an education a 
 thing you earn in service! The old man 
 thought he could buy an education and give 
 it to Gussie C. O. D. 
 
 The old man began to polish and sand- 
 paper Gussie from the moment he could sit 
 up in the cradle and notice things. He sent 
 
 65
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 him to the astrologer, the phrenologer and all 
 the other "ologers" they had around there, 
 and got him "ologized." When Gussie was 
 old enough to export, he sent him to one of 
 the greatest universities in America. The 
 fault wasn't with the university, nor with 
 Gussie, who was bright and lovable. The 
 fault was with the old father. In the blind- 
 ness of his love he robbed his boy of his birth- 
 right. 
 
 What is every child's birthright? 
 
 The opportunity of becoming great. 
 
 How do we become great? 
 
 The Master told how by Service. 
 
 Gussie had no chance to serve. Every- 
 thing was bought and handed to him on a 
 silver platter. Gussie went thru that great 
 university just as a steer from the plains of 
 Texas goes thru Mr. Armour's Institute of 
 Pack-nology in Chicago. You remember that 
 in Packingtown, when the steer matricu- 
 lates when he gets the grand bump, said 
 steer doesn't have to do another thing after 
 that. His education is all arranged for in 
 advance and he merely rides thru and re- 
 ceives it. There is a row of professors with 
 
 66
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 their sleeves rolled up who give him the de- 
 grees. 
 
 So as Mr. T. Steer of Panhandle goes rid- 
 ing thru on that trolley from the A-B-C of 
 Packingtown to his eternal cold storage, each 
 professor hits him a dab. He rides along 
 from department to department until finally 
 he is canned. 
 
 They canned Gussie. 
 
 Gussie had a man hired to study for him. 
 He rode from department to department. 
 They did their level best from the outside 
 upholstered him, enameled him, manicured 
 him, sugar-cured him, embalmed him. Gus- 
 sie was done and the paint dry. 
 
 He was a thing of beauty! 
 
 Mill Closes Down Three Times 
 
 Gussie came back home with his education 
 in the baggage-car. The mill shut down on 
 a week day, the first time in its history. The 
 hands all marched down to the train, and 
 when the yoimg lord alighted, the factory 
 band played, "See! the Conquering Hero 
 Comes!" 
 
 67
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 A few years later the mill again shut do^vn 
 on a week day. They had crape on the office 
 door. Men and women stood on the streets 
 weeping. The little old father to the com- 
 munity had been translated. When they 
 opened the mill after that, F. Gustavus 
 Adolphus, who had inherited the plant, sat 
 in the office where the old man had sat so 
 long. 
 
 He sat in a great place, made by a great 
 life of service. It was shaking and Gussie 
 rattled, for he was not great. 
 
 You can't stay where you rattle not even 
 if you own the place. In two years and seven 
 months the mill was a wreck, under the boy 
 with all the advantages the old man hadn't 
 had. 
 
 The mill was shut down the third time on 
 a week day. It looked like it wouldn't open 
 again, for there wasn't much left to open. 
 But it did open, and with a new kind of a 
 boss. 
 
 If I were to give that new boss a descrip- 
 tive name, I certainly would call him Bill 
 Whackem. He was an orphan. He hadn't 
 any chance. He had a new black eye almost 
 
 68
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 every day. But he just seemed to fatten on 
 bumps. Every time Bill got a bump he 
 would swell up. Anybody who swells up 
 in efficiency, goes up. The barrel shakes him 
 up. 
 
 Bill Whackem became the most useful and 
 serviceable man in the community. People 
 forgot all about Bill's lowly origin. They got 
 to looking to Bill to start and run things. 
 By the divine definition, Bill went to the 
 top. So when the courts were looking for 
 somebody to handle the wreck of the mill, 
 it wasn't any accident that led them to ap- 
 point Hon. William Whackem receiver 
 for it. 
 
 It was Bill who put the wreckage together, 
 made the wheels go round and put that hun- 
 gry town back to work. 
 
 * * * 
 Hakd Kxocks Graduates 
 
 This does not argue against the book or 
 the college. I have not come to attack books 
 and colleges, but to defend them. Books and 
 colleges suffer at the hands of their friends. 
 They say to the book and college, "Give us 
 
 69
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 an education." They are just as thoughtless 
 as the unthinking ones who say, "The college 
 made a fool out of Gussie." 
 
 You can't get an education from a book 
 or a college. You can only get the tools, 
 perhaps the best tools in the world. After 
 you get them you must go out into the School 
 of Service and achieve your education. 
 
 In every community there are Hard 
 Knocks graduates people who have made 
 a success of life without books. They 
 achieved it with some poor, homemade tools. 
 Every time they try to hit the big lick they 
 feel the lack of the early training and the 
 more efficient equipment. That is why they 
 say to young people, "All my life I have 
 been handicapped from lack of proper prep- 
 aration. Don't make my mistake go to 
 school." 
 
 They are like the man here and there who 
 is an electrical genius and you see him with 
 crude apparatus doing really remarkable 
 things. But how much more that same 
 genius would accomplish with a full West- 
 inghouse equipment. 
 
 70
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 The Tragedy of America 
 
 THE STORY of Gussie and BiU 
 Whackem is being written in every 
 community in tears, failure and heart- 
 ache. It is the Tragedy of American Civili- 
 zation. In every community there are fath- 
 ers and mothers saying, "We haven't had 
 much chance in our lives. But please God, 
 our children are going to have every chance 
 we can give them." 
 
 So they toil and save; they get great 
 farms, fine homes, big bank accounts. Not 
 for themselves, but for their children. Thisr 
 is right. Give the children all you can, if 
 you want to do it. Make them the greatest 
 place you possibly can make. 
 
 But remember the barrel shakes. 
 
 Remember every place is shaking. 
 
 If you make a great place for your child, 
 you must see to it that the child becomes 
 just as great as the place. 
 
 Else the child will rattle, will get its 
 bumps, will possibly make wreck of it all. 
 
 Then remember, the child will get the 
 blame for making the wreck, when the child 
 
 71
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 is the helpless victim.. Gussie was blamed for 
 wrecking his father's mill. 
 
 If you make a great place for your child 
 and do not see to it that the child becomes as 
 great as the place it is to occupy, you have 
 cruelly robbed your child of its birthright. 
 
 And seven out of ten parents all over this 
 land are doing it! 
 
 A man heard me telling the story of Gus- 
 sie and Bill Whackem and he went out of 
 my audience very indignant. He said he 
 was very glad his boy wasn't there to hear 
 it. He wouldn't for the world have his boy 
 hear such stuff. But that good, deluded 
 father now has his head bowed in shame over 
 the career of his spoiled son. 
 
 Poor Harry Thaw! Front-paged in the 
 newspapers, gibbeted in the pulpits these 
 years as the shocking example of youthful 
 depravity. He never had a fighting-chance 
 to become a man. Perhaps there never was 
 a child more cruelly and deliberately robbed 
 of his birthright than this same denatured 
 Harry Thaw. Yet in the annals of the Key- 
 stone State there are few such great business 
 generals as the father of Harry Thaw. He 
 
 72
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 could build a great coal-empire and command 
 a great army of men, but was strangely blind 
 to the fact that the barrel shakes. 
 
 It isn't the ignorant who make this mis- 
 take half so much as the educated, the rich 
 and the worldly wise. 
 
 The Menace of America lies not in the 
 Swollen Fortunes, but in the Shrunken 
 Souls who inherit them. 
 
 How long this nation will endure will de- 
 pend upon how many Gussie boys this nation 
 produces. Do you notice how few of our 
 great men get their start with steam heat? 
 
 Children, Leabn This Eably 
 
 You boys and girls, God bless you! You 
 have fine homes. Papa and mama love you 
 and give you everything you need. I won- 
 der if you get to thinking, "I don't have to 
 turn my hand over. Papa and mama will 
 take care of me, and when they are gone I'll 
 inherit everything they have, so I am fixed 
 for hfe." 
 
 I'm sorry for you if you think that. You 
 are a candidate for trouble. You are going 
 to rattle and get your bumps. 
 
 73
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Learn it now, children: You cannot get 
 something for nothing! Nobody can give 
 you anything. They can "wish" it upon 
 5^ou. Father and mother can put money in 
 your pocket, but j^ou do not own it until you 
 have earned it. They can put ideas in your 
 mind, but you do not own them until you 
 have proven them. They can put food in 
 your stomach, but j^ou do not own it imtil 
 you have digested it. 
 
 You only know what you have written in 
 the Book of Your Experience what the 
 courts will take as evidence when they have 
 sworn you in as witness. 
 
 You must work, you must struggle, you 
 must serve, you must overcome. Not to get 
 food. You can sit around and they'll take 
 you to the poorhouse and make you eat! 
 But to get Wisdom, Understanding, Happi- 
 ness, Manhood, Womanhood. 
 
 You get Strength from Struggle. 
 
 You get Life from Overcoming. 
 
 You get Happiness from Service. 
 
 You cannot buy a Great Arm. You earn 
 it in Physical Service. 
 
 74
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 You cannot buy a Great Mind. You earn 
 it in INIental Service. 
 
 You cannot buy a Great Character. You 
 earn it in Moral Service. You overcome evil 
 in your life. Each battle you win the angels 
 come to minister to you. Each victory gives 
 you more surely the scepter of power won 
 only by the real kings and queens of earth 
 those who demonstrate that "He who ruleth 
 his own spirit is greater than he who taketh 
 the city." 
 
 For if you cannot rule your own spirit, 
 you cannot hold the city after you have 
 taken it. 
 
 Happiness is in Your Work 
 
 I have often thought that the three great- 
 est diseases in America today (191o) are 
 Vacations, Coca Cola and The Saturday 
 Evening Post. 
 
 I don't want to attack these famous insti- 
 tutions "per se." They are merely symp- 
 toms. "If business interferes with pleasure, 
 cut out the business." We simply must be 
 
 75
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 amused. Where the crowd is greatest that 
 artificial, feverish note is loudest. 
 
 We read ourselves drunk just as surely as 
 we drink ourselves drunk. There are ten 
 literary drunkards, twenty amusement 
 drunkards and fifty vacation drunkards to 
 one alcoholic drunkard. The best-selling 
 news-stand dope is turning America into a 
 mental frog-pond and an intellectual slum. 
 We are in the business of vacating ourselves 
 into a vacancy. 
 
 Loving friends used to warn me against 
 "breaking down." They scared me into 
 "taking care" of myself. And I used to 
 rest and take such good care of myself I 
 became a physical wreck. 
 
 I saved myself by getting busier. I 
 plunged into work I love. I found my joy 
 in my work, not away from it. Now I do 
 two or three men's work, and have grown 
 from a skinny, fretful, nervous wreck into a 
 hearty, happy man. This has been a great 
 surprise to the world and a great disappoint- 
 ment to the undertaker. I am an editor in the 
 daytime and a lecturer at night. 
 
 76
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 I edit all day and then take a vacation 
 lecturing at night. I lecture every day 
 maybe two or three times and then take a 
 vacation at the edit job. Every day is just 
 jam full of play and vacation. The year is 
 one round of joy, and I ought to pay people 
 for the privilege of speaking and writing to 
 them instead of them paying me! 
 
 You see, I haven't any time nowadays to 
 break down. I haven't any time to think 
 and grunt and worry about my body. And 
 like Paul I am happy to be "absent from the 
 body and present with the Lord," and this 
 old body behaves just beautifully and wags 
 along like the tail follows the dog when I 
 forget all about it. The grunter lets the tail 
 wag the dog! 
 
 * * * 
 
 I have never known a case of "overwork". 
 I have never known of anybody killing him- 
 self by working. But I have known of 
 multitudes killing themselves by taking va- 
 cations. 
 
 The people who think they are overwork- 
 
 77
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 ing are merely overworrying. This is one 
 species of selfishnesss. 
 
 To worry is to doubt God. 
 
 To work at the things you love, or for the 
 ones you love, is to turn work into play and 
 duty into privilege. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Don't you get lonely in a city? There's so 
 few men and women there. There's a jam of 
 people, most of them imitations most of 
 them trying to look like they get more sal- 
 ary. I get lonely among the butterflies of 
 the brightlights. They are chasing amuse- 
 ment down the great white way. They must 
 be amused every moment or they'll have to 
 be alone with their empty lives. Rattle- 
 boxes and sugartits! The Prodigal Son 
 came to himself at last and thought upon his 
 ways. Then he arose and went to his fath- 
 er's house. Whenever anybody will stop 
 chasing amusements long enough to think 
 upon his ways, he will arise and go to his 
 Father's House of Wisdom. There's no 
 hope for anybody who will not stop chasing 
 amusement long enough to think. And the 
 
 78
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 devil works day and night shifts keeping the 
 crowd from stopping to think. 
 
 That's why the crowd isn't furnishing the 
 strong men and women. 
 
 We must have amusement and relaxation. 
 Study your muscles. First they contract, 
 and then they relax. But the muscle that 
 goes on continually relaxing is degenerating. 
 And the individual, the community, the 
 nation that goes on relaxing, without con- 
 tracting, serving, overcoming, struggling, is 
 degenerating. 
 
 And the more you study your muscles, the 
 more you learn that when one muscle is re- 
 laxing, another is contracting. So you must 
 learn that your real vacation, amusement, 
 relaxation, is merely changing over to work- 
 ing another set of muscles. 
 
 Go to the bank president's office; go to 
 the railroad magnate's office; go to the great 
 pulpit, to the college chair go to any place 
 of great responsibility in a city and ask the 
 one who fills that place, "Were you born in 
 this city?" 
 
 79
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 The reply is almost a monotony: "I born 
 in this city? No I was born in Posey ville, 
 Indiana, and I came to this city forty years 
 ago and went to work at the bottom." He 
 glows as he tells you of some log-cabin home, 
 hillside or farmside where he struggled as a 
 boy. Personally, I think this log-cabin busi- 
 ness has been overworked for campaign pur- 
 poses. Give me steam heat every time and 
 push-buttons. There's no virtue in a log- 
 cabin, save that there the necessity for the 
 struggle that brings the strength is most in 
 evidence. There the young person gets the 
 struggle and service that make for strength 
 and greatness. And as that young person 
 comes to the city and shakes in the barrel 
 among the weaklings of the amusement- 
 doped, clock-watching crowd, he rises above 
 them like an eagle rises above a lot of chat- 
 tering sparrows. 
 
 Tlie cities do not make their own steam. 
 The little minority from the farms and the 
 hillsides controls the majority. The red 
 blood of redemption from the countr}^ flows 
 year by year into the national arteries, else 
 the cities would weaken and drop off the 
 
 80
 
 Service Completes Our Education 
 
 map. If it weren't for Poseyville, Indiana, 
 Chicago would slide into the lake. If it were 
 not for Poseyville, New York would lose 
 her leadership. 
 
 I believe the most useful schools in Amer- 
 ica are the ones offering the most facilities to 
 young people to work their way thru. Dr. 
 H. S. Lehr used to say with pride, "Our 
 students come to school; they are not sent." 
 Most of those students were working their 
 way thru. And I do not believe there is a 
 school in America that can show an alumni 
 roster of men and women of uniformly 
 greater achievement. 
 
 This is uniting the School of Books with 
 the School of Service that completes our edu- 
 cation. 
 
 The Home Towns of America are sick. 
 Some of them are dying, some are dead. 
 
 The Lure of the City is doing it. 
 
 It must be fought with tlie Lure of the 
 Country. We must make the Home Town 
 the brightest, most attractive, most promis- 
 
 81
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 ing place for every young person. The town 
 that the young people leave is the town that 
 the young people ought to leave. 
 
 America is to be great not in the greatness 
 of a few cities, but in the greatness of in- 
 numerable Home Towns. 
 
 The slogan of the next great American 
 Crusade must be, "For God and Home and 
 the Home Town." 
 
 82
 
 IV 
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 ONE DAY a great manufacturer took 
 me thru his factory where he makes 
 fiddles. He doesn't make violins; he 
 makes fiddles. 
 
 A violin is only a fiddle with a college edu- 
 cation. 
 
 I have had the feeling ever since that you 
 and I come into this world like the fiddle 
 comes from the factory. We have a body 
 and a neck. That's about all there is, either 
 to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We 
 haven't any strings. We haven't any bow 
 or any beau yet I 
 
 When the human fiddles are about six 
 years old they go into the primary schools 
 and up thru the grammar grades, and get 
 the first string that little skinny E string. 
 The trouble is, so many of them think they 
 are an orchestra right away. They want to 
 quit school and go fiddling thru life on one 
 string ! 
 
 We must show these little fiddles they 
 
 83
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 must get back into school and go up thru all 
 the departments and institutions necessary 
 to get the full complement of strings for their 
 life symphonies. 
 
 After all this there comes the commence- 
 ment, and the violin comes forth with the 
 E, A, D and G strings all in place. Is it 
 educated? Why is a violin? To wear 
 strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot 
 of discord. The violin is to give music. 
 
 So there is much yet to do after getting the 
 strings. All the book and the college can do 
 is to give the strings the tools, as we saw 
 in the last chapter. After that the violin 
 must go out into God's great Tuning School, 
 the School of Service, and have the pegs 
 
 turned. 
 
 * * * 
 
 All you ever know is what you learn in the 
 School of Service. All you ever know is 
 what you have lived what you have trans- 
 lated from the Book of Theory into the Book 
 of Experience. What you have put in tune. 
 Not what you have memorized, but what you 
 have vitalized. 
 
 In its last analysis, all you really know is 
 
 84
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 what the courts will take as evidence when 
 you are sworn in as witness. Gussie says, 
 "I have read in a book." Bill Whackem 
 says, "I know I" 
 
 All of us are Christopher Columbuses, 
 discovering the same new-old continents of 
 Truth. We have read about them in a hazy 
 way. We do not know them until suddenly 
 we come upon them in our lives, and then the 
 oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a 
 flashing jewel of truth in our consciousness. 
 
 O, there's such a difference between read- 
 ing a thing and knowing a thing. I used to 
 stand in the row of blessed little rascals in 
 the old "deestrick school" and read out of 
 McGuffey's celebrated literature, "If I 
 p-p-play with the fi-fi i-i-i-r-r-r-e I 
 will g-e-e-e-t m-y-y-y f-f-f-f-ing-er-r- 
 r-rs bur-r-r-r-ned period !" 
 
 I didn't learn that. I wish I had learned 
 by reading in that reader that if I play with 
 the fire I will get my fingers burned. I had 
 to slap my hands on hot stoves and coffee- 
 pots, and get all kinds of blisters, to learn it. 
 
 85
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Then I had to go around showing the bhs- 
 ters, boring my friends and taking up a col- 
 lection of sympathy "Look at my bad 
 luck!" Fool! 
 
 This isn't a lecture this is a confession! 
 
 * * * 
 
 Learning About Something for 
 Nothing 
 
 1WAS thirty- four years learning one sen- 
 tence You can't get something for 
 nothing! It took me so long because I 
 was naturally bright. It takes that kind 
 longer than a human being. They are so 
 smart you can't teach them with a few 
 bumps you have to pulverize them. 
 
 That sentence takes me back to the days 
 when I was a "hired man" on the farm. 
 You'd hardly believe it that I used to be a 
 "hired man" on the farm at ten dollars a 
 month, and "washed, mended and found." 
 You see me standing on this platform in my 
 graceful and cultured manner, and you 
 wouldn't believe that I had ever trained an 
 orphan calf to drink out of a copper kettle, 
 or that I had ever driven a yoke of oxen and 
 said the words I thought had to go with that 
 
 86
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 job. May the Lord forgive me^ but I have! 
 
 I went to my first county fair. Fellow 
 sufferers, you remember that at a county fair 
 all the folks sort out into their own depart- 
 ments. Some people go to the fancy-work 
 department, some go to the canned fruit de- 
 partment, some go to the swine department 
 everybody goes to his own department. 
 And the suckers! They go to their depart- 
 ment. That is the "trimming department." 
 
 I was in the "trimming department" in 
 five minutes. Nobody told me where it was. 
 I didn't need to be told. All the suckers on 
 the grounds were there. That is because the 
 barrel always shakes all of one size to one 
 place. 
 
 Right at the entrance of the local Midway, 
 I met a gentleman. I know he was a gentle- 
 man because he said he was a gentleman. 
 He had a little light table that he could move 
 quickly. Whenever the climate became too 
 salubrious, he would move the table to pas- 
 tures greener. 
 
 On that table were three little shells in a 
 row. There was a little pea under the mid- 
 dle shell. I saw it there ! But the man was 
 
 87
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 fooled about it the gentleman running the 
 game. He thought it was under the end 
 shell, and he kept watching that end shell. I 
 knew better, for I was naturally bright. He 
 bet me it was under the end shell. Here was 
 a great chance to get something for nothing. 
 I bet all the money I had on that middle shell. 
 This wasn't gambling this was a sure thing. 
 (It was!) I hated to take the money. It 
 seemed like robbing father. The gentleman 
 had a family to keep and here I was robbing 
 him, because I was brighter than he. 
 
 But I did not rob father ! Father cleaned 
 me out of every cent I had in about four 
 seconds. I went over to the other side of the 
 grounds. That was all I could do now I 
 couldn't go in and see the mermaid. But I 
 didn't learn the lesson from the bump. I 
 said the thing every fool says when he gets 
 his bump and doesn't learn: "Next time I'll 
 be more careful." 
 
 When anybody says that, he's due for a 
 
 return date on the same bump! 
 
 * * * 
 
 Getting in on the Ground Floor 
 I grew older and people began to notice I
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 was naturally bright and therefore good 
 picking. They began to let me in on the 
 ground floor. Did anybody ever let you in 
 on the ground floor? I never could stick. 
 I always slid thru somehow and landed in 
 the cellar, every time anybody let me in on 
 the ground floor. 
 
 I began to invest in gold mines. And sil- 
 ver mines. Nobody knows nobody ever will 
 know, if I can help it, how many gold and 
 silver and precious metal mines I am in. I'm 
 in them yet. I can't get out. I have some- 
 thing to live for the dividends! I've been 
 so near to the dividends I could smell them! 
 Only one more assessment, and then we'll cut 
 the melon! I've heard that all my life and 
 have never yet gotten a piece of the rind ! 
 * * * 
 
 I got the gold cure without Dr. Keeley's 
 aid. Then I got interested in Florida, thru 
 some kind friends in Kansas City who desired 
 to make me rich in the Everglades. I have 
 an alligator ranch in Florida, below the frost 
 line. Alligators do better below the frost 
 line. I'll sell it by the gallon. 
 
 Which is not saying all Florida is bunk 
 
 89
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 no indeed, just the part the sHck promoter 
 sells you for a song, the part that is going to 
 double in value before the fifteenth of next 
 month. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Getting "Selected"' 
 
 I was thirty-four years old when the big 
 killing came. Fellow sufferers, if you have 
 tears to shed, get your shedder ready! 
 
 I got a confidential letter from a frien^i of 
 our family I had never met. His name was 
 Thomas A. Cleage, and he lived in the Rial to 
 Building, St. Louis, Missouri. He wrote me 
 this in extreme confidence: "You have been 
 selected." 
 
 Ah! were you ever selected? 
 
 Then you know the thrill of joy that rent 
 my manly bosom as I read this letter from 
 this friend of our family who wrote: "You 
 have been selected, because you are a promi- 
 nent citizen and have a large influence in 
 your community." 
 
 You see, he did know me! 
 
 "You are to receive a thousand percent 
 dividends." A thousand percent! Did you 
 get that? I hope you did. I didn't! 
 
 90
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 I took a night train to St. Louis. I was 
 so afraid somebody would beat me there. I 
 sat up all night in a day coach to save money 
 for Tom. But I needn't to have hurried so. 
 Tom would have waited a month on me 
 with the sheep-shears ready! "Lambie, 
 lambie, lambie ! Come to St. Louis !" 
 
 I don't get any sympathy from this crowd. 
 You jeer, you laugh, you respect not my 
 feelings. I'm not going to tell you a thing 
 that happened in St. Louis. It is none of 
 your business ! 
 
 But I'm so glad I went to St. Louis. I 
 was naturally bright. So bright I couldn't 
 learn back in the Ohio town, but had to go 
 clear to St. Louis, Missouri, to Thomas A. 
 Cleage's bucket-shop, and pay Tom eleven 
 hundred dollars. But I got the thirty-third 
 degree. I got the cure got the fever all out 
 of my blood. 
 
 It is worth eleven hundred dollars every 
 day to know that one sentence You can't 
 get something for nothing. Not merely to 
 know it, but to KNOW it. Life just begins 
 to get juicy when you KNOW it. Oh, the 
 joy of going thru life day b}^ day and not 
 
 91
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 getting fussed up over these chances to get 
 something for nothing. I wouldn't grasp a 
 fortune now wouldn't touch it if it were 
 right here on the platform. Come away, 
 Ralphie, it doesn't belong to you; somebody 
 lost it. It's a coffee-pot! 
 
 If anybody now offers me more than ten 
 to twenty percent dividends I know he is no 
 friend to our family. 
 
 If he offers me fifty percent, I shout for 
 the police. 
 
 I'm yet on the suckers' lists. Just the 
 other day I got another confidential letter. 
 It started out, "You have been se " Plunk! 
 It went into the waste-basket. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Oh, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it 
 early in life the law of compensation is 
 never suspended; you can't get something 
 for nothing. If you don't, then you'll be 
 selected to receive a thousand percent divi- 
 dends, too. But, Ab, it always means, you 
 have been selected to receive this bunch of 
 blisters because you look like the biggest 
 sucker on the local landscape ! 
 
 * * * 
 
 92
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 The other night in a little town of perhaps 
 a thousand, a banker took me up to his office 
 after the lecture, in which I had related the 
 above. "The audience laughed with you and 
 thought it very, very funny," said he. "I 
 wish you knew how tragically true is every 
 word of it. I wish you could see what I have 
 to see in this town. I wish you could know 
 of the thousands of dollars that go out of 
 this community every month into just such 
 fool enterprises as you confessed to. The 
 saddest part of it is that these thousands 
 come from the pockets of the people who 
 can least afford to lose." 
 
 So I have no apology to offer for taking 
 all this time to tell how I have learned one 
 sentence. If it took me thirty-four years to 
 learn one sentence, don't you see the need 
 of an eternity? To me that is the greatest 
 argument for eternal life how slowly I 
 learn. 
 
 93
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Those Commencement Orations 
 
 YET EVERY DAY some young per- 
 son says: "You see, by June I shall 
 have finished my education." 
 
 Bless them all! They will have merely 
 gotten another string on their fiddle. 
 
 After they "finish" they will have a Com- 
 mence-ment, not an End-ment, as they think. 
 Just the commencement of the next chapter 
 of their infinite education. Children, this is 
 not to sneer, but to cheer. Isn't it glorious 
 that life is one infinite succession of com- 
 mencements and promotions! 
 
 I love to attend high school commence- 
 ments. The stage is so beautifully deco- 
 rated. There is a row of geraniums in front, 
 there is a big oleander on the side, and a 
 long- whiskered rug in the middle, just as the 
 Ladies' Home Journal directs in the April 
 number. The graduates sit in a semicircle 
 on the stage in their new patent leather. I 
 know how it hurts. It is the first time they 
 have worn it. 
 
 Then they make their orations. Every 
 time I hear their orations I like them better, 
 because every year I am getting younger. 
 
 94
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 Damsel Number One comes forth and be- 
 gins: 
 
 "Beyond the Alps (sweep arms forward 
 to the left, left arm higher) lieth Italy! 
 (Bring arms down, let the fingers follow the 
 wrist. Wouldn't it be embarrassing at a 
 commencement, if the fingers wouldn't fol- 
 low the wrist ? Think of the shock to the au- 
 dience if the wrist should sweep downward 
 and the fingers should stay up in the air!) 
 
 Applause, especially from relatives. 
 
 Damsel Number Two, who generally 
 comes second, now stands forth at the same 
 lead-pencil mark on the floor, resplendent 
 in a pink creation caught up with something- 
 or-other : 
 
 "We (hands at half-mast and separating) 
 are rowing (business of propelling an aerial 
 boat with two fingers of each hand, head in- 
 clined). We are not drifting (hands slide 
 
 downward)." 
 
 * * * 
 
 Children, we are not laughing at you. We 
 are laughing at ourselves, and at how we 
 have learned these great truths that you 
 have memorized, but not vitalized. 
 
 95
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 You get the most beautiful truths from 
 Emerson's essays, but that is not knowing 
 them. You cannot know them until you have 
 lived them. It is a grand thing to say, "Be- 
 yond the Alps lieth Italy," but you can never 
 really say that until you have yourselves 
 struggled over Alps of difficulty and have 
 seen the Italy of victory beyond. It is fine 
 to say, "We are rowing and not drifting." 
 But you cannot say that in tune until you 
 have pulled on the oar. 
 
 O, Gussie, get an oar ! 
 
 * * * 
 
 My "Maiden Sermon" 
 
 DID YOU ever hear a young preacher, 
 just captured, just out of a "fac- 
 tory"? Did you ever hear him preach 
 his "maiden sermon"? I wish you had 
 heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought 
 I had a call. I might have been "short-cir- 
 cuited," but the "brethren" waited upon me, 
 and told me I had been "selected." Maybe 
 this was a local call and not long distance. 
 
 They gave me six weeks to load the gospel 
 gun and get ready for my "try-out." 
 
 96
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 I certainly loaded it to the muzzle. But I 
 made the mistake I am trying to warn you 
 against. Instead of going to the one book 
 where I could have gotten a sermon the 
 Book of My Experience, I went to the books 
 in my father's library. "As the poet Shake- 
 speare has so beautifully said," and then I 
 took a chunk from Shakespeare and nailed 
 it on page five of my sermon. "List to the 
 poet Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. 
 So I soldered these chunks from the books 
 together with my own native genius. I 
 worked that sermon up into the most beau- 
 tiful splurges and spasms. I bedecked it 
 with metaphors and semaphores. I filled it 
 with climaxes, both wet and dry. I had the 
 finest wet climax on page fourteen, where I 
 had made a little mark in the margin which 
 meant "cry here." This was the spilling- 
 point of the wet climax. I was to cry on the 
 left-hand side of the page. 
 
 Then I committed it all to memory, and 
 went to the lady who taught expression to 
 get it expressed. You must get it expressed ! 
 
 I got the most beautiful gestures nailed 
 into every page. You know about gestures 
 
 97
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 these things you make in the air with your 
 hands as you speak. You can notice it on me 
 yet! 
 
 I am not sneering at expression. Expres- 
 sion is a noble art. But you must get some- 
 thing to express! 
 
 Here I made my mistake. I got a lot of 
 gestures. I got an express-wagon, and didn't 
 get any load for it. So it rattled. I got a 
 necktie, but didn't get any man to hang it 
 on. I got up before a mirror for six weeks, 
 day by day, and said that sermon to the 
 looking-glass. It got so it would run itself. 
 I could have gone to sleep and that sermon 
 wouldn't have hesitated. 
 
 Then came the grand day. The boy won- 
 der stood forth before that large and admir- 
 ing throng. I delivered that sermon more 
 grandly than ever to a mirror. Every ges- 
 ture went off the bat just where planned. I 
 cried on page fourteen. I never knew it was 
 in me but I certainly got it all out that day. 
 
 Then I did another fine thing I sat down. 
 I wish I had done that earlier! I wish now 
 I had sat down before I got up. I was the 
 last man out of the church and I hurried! 
 
 98
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 But they beat me out all nine of them. 
 When I went out the door, the old sexton 
 said as he jiggled the key in the door to 
 hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd 
 worse than that. You're all right, bub, but 
 you don't know nothing yet." 
 
 I cried all the way to town. If he had 
 plunged a dagger into me he wouldn't have 
 hurt me so much. It has taken a good many 
 years to learn that the old man was right. I 
 had wonderful truth in that sermon. No ser- 
 mon ever had greater truth, but I hadn't 
 lived it. The old man meant that I didn't 
 know my own sermon. 
 
 * * * 
 
 So, children, when you prepare your com- 
 mencement oration, write about the thing 
 you know best. If you know more about 
 peeling potatoes than anything else, you 
 make your oration on "Peeling Potatoes," 
 and the applause will peal from every seat. 
 
 Out of every thousand books published, at 
 least nine hundred do not pay the cost of the 
 first edition. As you study the books that 
 do live, you note that they are the books that 
 have been lived. Perhaps the books that fail 
 
 99
 
 The University of Hard Knoclcs 
 
 have even more of truth in them and are 
 better written, yet they lack the vital im- 
 pulse. They come out of the author's head. 
 The books that live come out of the author's 
 heart and hfe. They are what he really 
 knows. They come surging and pulsating, 
 come from his own Book of Experience. 
 
 Life only comes from life, and we have 
 life more abundantly as our lives touch 
 greater lives. The best part of your school- 
 ing is not from touching books, but from 
 touching the lives of their teachers. 
 
 Here is the dividing line between success 
 and failure in education. The books and 
 schools do their part well in giving the tools 
 and the strings. But the failure comes if we 
 go no farther. 
 
 We study agriculture in books. But that 
 does not make us an agriculturist. We must 
 take a hoe and go out and agricult! 
 * * * 
 
 You Must Live Your Song 
 "There was never a picture painted, 
 There was never a poem sung, 
 But the soul of the artist fainted, 
 And the poet's heart was wrung." 
 
 100
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 So many young people think because they 
 have a good voice and they have cultivated 
 it, they are singers. All this cultivation and 
 irritation and irrigation and gargling of the 
 throat, are merely symptoms of a singer 
 merely neckties. Singers look better in neck- 
 ties. 
 
 They think the song comes from the dia- 
 phragm. But it doesn't; it comes from the 
 heart, chaperoned by the diaphragm. 
 
 You can never sing one song you haven't 
 lived. 
 
 I said that to Jessie the other day at the 
 chautauqua. She has a beautiful voice and 
 had been away to "Ber-leen" to study. She 
 sang that afternoon in the tent, "The Last 
 Rose of Summer." She sang it with every 
 note so well placed, with the sweetest little 
 trills and tendrils, with a smile just as her 
 teacher had taught her. Jessie exhibited all 
 the machinery to sing "The Last Rose of 
 Summer," but she had no steam. All she 
 sang was the notes. She might as well have 
 sung "Pop Goes the Weasel!" 
 
 When I got back to the hotel Jessie was 
 crying. "Why did I fail?" 
 
 101
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 "Why, Jessie, I think this is the best sing- 
 ing lesson you have ever had. You tried to 
 sing 'The Last Rose of Summer,' when you 
 don't know very much yet about the first 
 rose of summer. Child, I hope you'll never 
 know the ache and disappointment and de- 
 spair you'll have to know before you can 
 really sing 'The Last Rose of Summer,' for 
 that is the sob of a broken-hearted woman." 
 O, why do young girls always try to execute 
 that impossible song impossible to them? 
 And they always do "execute" it! 
 
 * * * 
 Why Carrie Jacobs-Bond Succeeded 
 
 The other night James G. MacDermid, 
 Sibyl Sammis and I sat at a table in the Cliff 
 Dwellers' Club in Chicago, listening to the 
 fourth member of the party a woman clad 
 in black, with a sweet, expressive face 
 crowned with silvery hair. She is a well- 
 known song writer, and her songs go out of 
 Chicago literally by the carload. 
 
 I wanted to ask her, "How did you suc- 
 ceed ? How did you know what kind of songs 
 the people wanted?" 
 
 102
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 "Isn't it good to be here? Isn't it great 
 to have friends? And a fine home and 
 money?" she said. "I have had such a strug- 
 gle in my hfe. I have lived on one meal a 
 day and didn't know where the next meal 
 was coming from. I had been left alone in 
 the world without resources. I had years of 
 struggle. Sick and down-and-out, I began 
 writing songs in my little back-room. I 
 wrote what was in my heart. I wrote of my 
 own life and struggles. My songs just came 
 pouring out of my life. I had to write them 
 for relief. And I am so happy that the world 
 loves my songs, and buys them and asks for 
 more of them." 
 
 That woman was Carrie Jacobs-Bond. 
 She wrote "The Perfect Day," "His Lul- 
 laby," "Just a Wearyin' for You," and so 
 many more of those little, simple songs that 
 tug at your heart and sometimes moisten 
 j'our eyes. I have looked at the songs. Why, 
 anybody could write such songs just a few 
 words and a few simple notes. 
 
 But I know better since that night in the 
 Cliff Dwellers' Club. Books of theory and 
 harmony only teach us to write the notes, 
 
 103
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 which are only the skeleton. The notes are 
 only the place to hang a song. The song 
 must come from the life. 
 
 If Carrie Jacobs-Bond had never been 
 hungry, lonely, discouraged, struggling, she 
 never would have known how to write one 
 of the songs that have made her famous. 
 Her defeat was her victory. 
 
 So we don't have to know what the world 
 wants. We have merely to produce the per- 
 fect product of our own life, and the world 
 clamors for it. The greatest art is merely 
 the truest echo of our living. 
 * * * 
 
 This the Lesson of Your Bumps 
 
 MY FRIENDS, I do not argue that 
 you and I must drink the dregs of 
 defeat, or that our lives must fill 
 with sorrow or become wrecks. No but I 
 do insist that none of us will ever know real 
 success in any line of human endeavor, until 
 that success flows from the fullness of our 
 experience just as the songs came pouring 
 from the life of Carrie Jacobs-Bond. 
 
 Many audiences are gathered here. Each 
 
 104
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 person is a different audience. No two are 
 alike. Each has a different fight to make 
 and a different burden to carry. Each of us 
 has more trouble than anybody else. 
 
 You older ones, there are chapters of posi- 
 tive heroism in your lives. You know most 
 about The University of Hard Knocks. You 
 have walked the floor when you could not 
 sleep. You have cried yourselves to sleep. 
 You know best that "beyond the Alps lieth 
 Italy." 
 
 A good many of you here got bumped to- 
 day, or you expect to get bumped tomorrow. 
 Maybe you got bumped years ago and the 
 wound doesn't heal, and you think it never 
 will heal. You came here thinking that per- 
 haps if you came you would forget your 
 trouble a little while. I know there are peo- 
 ple in this audience in trouble and in pain. 
 Never do this many gather but what some 
 have aching hearts. 
 
 If I were to go on talking about it, pretty 
 soon I'd see your eyes glisten. And my eyes 
 would leak. For I am like you I have had 
 more trouble than anybody else. 
 
 Then you young folks ! You aren't much 
 
 105
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 interested in this lecture. You are polite to 
 me, because this is a polite neighborhood, 
 but you don't care much for this lecture. 
 You are saying, "What's this all about? 
 What's that man talking about? I haven't 
 had these things and I'm not going to have 
 them, either!" 
 
 And maybe some of you are naturally 
 bright ! 
 
 Children, you are not old enough to feel 
 the need of this kind of Castoria. 
 
 But you will know. You will need it. I 
 don't ask you to believe this only remember 
 it, so when you are bumped it will feel like a 
 poultice. Your life is going to be very much 
 like all other lives. All lives have about the 
 same elements. You are going to weep. 
 Some of you are going to cry yourselves to 
 sleep. Some of you are going to walk the 
 floor when you can't sleep. You are going 
 to get bumped just as hard as papa and 
 mama have been bumped. It's just going 
 to be terrible! 
 
 Some of you are going to know the keen- 
 est sorrow, when the ones or one you trusted 
 most, the ones closest to you, betray you. 
 
 106
 
 The Violin and the Tuning 
 
 Maybe, betray you with a kiss ! You will go 
 thru your Gethsemane, and you'll think 
 there isn't going to come any morning. You 
 will say, "God, let me die. I am so un- 
 happy. I have nothing more to live for." 
 
 But it is a long time after that until you 
 are dead. 
 
 You are yet to discover that the best part 
 of our lives comes after we have been killed 
 a few times ! 
 
 * * * 
 
 This the Path to Heaven 
 
 And you are going to learn thru the years 
 and the bumps and the tears, that all these 
 things somehow are necessary to complete 
 our education. 
 
 These bumps and hard knocks do not 
 break the fiddle they only turn the pegs! 
 
 Thru the years and the tears these bumps 
 and tragedies and Waterloos draw the 
 Strings of the Soul tighter and tighter, near- 
 er and nearer to God's Great Concert Pitch, 
 where the discords fade out of our lives, 
 where the music divine and the harmonies 
 celestial come from the same old strings that 
 
 107
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 had been sending forth all that noise and 
 discord ! 
 
 Thus we know our education is being fin- 
 ished when the evil and the wrong and the 
 discord go out of our lives, and when peace, 
 understanding, sympathy, love and harmony 
 fill them. 
 
 Then and not till then, is our Education 
 completed. 
 
 For Education is merely the path to com- 
 plete Happiness the pathway to Heaven! 
 
 108
 
 LooJxing Backward 
 
 WHAT MEMORIES revive in all of 
 us as I touch these old familiar 
 chords. In my earlier talks on "The 
 University of Hard Knocks" I used to dis- 
 cuss these matters at length. Perhaps it will 
 not be amiss to note a few of them here. 
 
 You gather from these remarks I was not 
 born with a silver spoon in my mouth, tho 
 it is evident I could have handled a pretty 
 good-sized spoon. My father was a Metho- 
 dist preacher, and we had tin spoons. We 
 never had to tie a red string around our 
 spoons when we loaned them for the ladies' 
 aid society oyster supper. We always got 
 our spoons back! 
 
 The first money I ever earned, I got by 
 walking several miles into the country and 
 gathering sheaves all day in the harvest field. 
 You remember those old reaper days. That 
 night I was so proud when that farmer pat- 
 ted me on the head and said: "You are the 
 best boy to work I ever saw." Then the 
 
 109
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 cheerful old miser put a nickel in my blis- 
 tered hand. That nickel looked bigger than 
 any money I have since handled. 
 
 The "Last Day of School" 
 
 Yet I was years learning it is much easier 
 to make money than to learn how to handle 
 it, hence the tale that follows. 
 
 I was sixteen years old and a school 
 teacher. Sweet sixteen I mean, green six- 
 teen. Cheer up, children, only green things 
 grow! I was so tall and awkward then I 
 have since changed so much ! I got the school 
 because I was several dollars the lowest bid- 
 der. They used to say anybody could teach 
 "kids." 
 
 I had never studied pedagogy, but I had 
 whittled out three rules of teaching that I 
 thought would make it go. My three rules 
 of teaching were 
 
 1, Make 'em study. 
 
 2, Make 'em recite. That is, fill 'em up 
 and then empty 'em! 
 
 3, Get your money. With the accent on 
 the third rule. 
 
 110
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 I walked the thirteen miles, six and a half 
 each way, most of the time, to save money. 
 I was not so narrow as to confine my teach- 
 ing to one method. I was broad enough to 
 use all methods the same day. With the 
 small fry in the front rows I used a small 
 paddle to win their confidence and to arouse 
 their enthusiasm for an education. But with 
 pupils larger and more muscular than the 
 teacher, I used love and moral suasion. 
 
 We ended the school with an "exhibition." 
 Did you ever attend the old back country 
 "ex-hi-bition" The people came that day 
 from all over the township. They were so 
 glad our school was closing they all turned 
 out to make it a success. They brought great 
 baskets of provender and we had a feast. We 
 covered the school desks with boards and 
 then stacked them high with fried chicken 
 and doughnuts and pie forty kinds of pie! 
 Applebutter pie with the cross-barred lid, 
 and dried-apple pie that was positively 
 "swell"! 
 
 Then we had a "doings." Everybody did 
 a stunt. We executed a lot of literature, 
 and "execute" is the word that tells what we 
 111
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 did to literature that day. I can shut my 
 eyes now and see that show. I can see my 
 pupils coming up one by one to speak their 
 piece. I hardly knew them, for they were 
 dressed up, and I had on a collar. Father 
 had cut their hair with the sheepshears. 
 Mother had washed them washed them 
 clear back of the ears and even into them, 
 twisting up the towel into a gimlet for that 
 purpose. They wore collars that stuck out 
 all around like they had pushed their heads 
 thru a wagon-wheel. 
 
 I can see them coming up one by one to 
 speak their piece. I can see "The Soldier of 
 the Legion Day Dying in Algiers." We 
 had him die again that day, and he died a 
 terrible death as we executed him. I can see 
 "The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck." I 
 can see Mary's little lamb come skipping 
 again over the stage. I can see the tow- 
 headed patriot again come forward to recite 
 Patrick Henry's "Give Me Liberty or Give 
 Me Death!" I have often thought that if 
 Patrick Henry had attended our "ex-hi- 
 bition," he would have said, "Give me death!" 
 
 Then came a breathless hush, as "teacher" 
 
 112
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 came forth to say farewell. It was custom- 
 ary to cry, but I thought I would yell. To- 
 morrow I would get my money. I had a 
 speech I had been saying over and over until 
 it would run itself. But somehow when I 
 got up before that last day of school audi- 
 ence, and opened my mouth, it was a great 
 opening, but it missed fire. There I stood 
 with my mouth open and nothing coming out. 
 It came out of my eyes. Tears rolled down 
 my cheeks until I could hear them spatter 
 on my six-dollar suit. 
 
 And my pupils wept as their dear teacher 
 said farewell! Parents wept. It was the 
 teariest time you ever saw. I managed to 
 say, "Weep not for me, dear friends, I am 
 going away from you but I shall return and 
 teach your school next year." 
 
 I think they cried harder after that ! 
 * * * 
 
 Due at "Corncutting" 
 
 Next day I drew my money. I had it all 
 in one joyous wad $240. I was going home 
 with head high and aircastles built even 
 higher. 
 
 113
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 But I never got home with the money. 
 Talk about the fool and his money, and you 
 get very personal. On the road home I met 
 Squire K, and he borrowed all the money of 
 me. I loaned it so freely to him and no ques- 
 tions asked, because Squire K was "such a 
 good man," and a pillar of the church. I 
 used to wonder why he didn't take a pillow 
 to church. 
 
 Squire K gave me a note for $240, due at 
 "corncutting," as we termed that annual fall- 
 time paying-up season. I have that note yet. 
 I have a faded, yellow, tear-spattered note 
 for two hundred and forty dollars due at 
 "corncutting," back in the eighties. 
 
 Squire K has gone from earth has gone 
 to his eternal reward. I scarcely know 
 whether to look up or down as I say that. 
 He never left any address that I could find. 
 
 Yet I gained. There is compensation and 
 hard knocks education in all these bumps. 
 The school teaching was worth thousands in 
 experience, but I paid two hundred and forty 
 thirteen-mile-a-day dollars to learn a little, 
 simple lesson I couldn't learn out of the 
 books that a fool can make money, but only 
 
 114
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 a wise man can spend it. And incidentally 
 I learned it may be safer to do business with 
 a first-class sinner than a second-class saint. 
 This isn't a slap at the church, but a slap 
 at the worst enemies of the church, the foes 
 of its own household. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Graduating from the High School 
 
 But let me add just one lesson the lesson 
 that every discontented, ungrateful soul 
 must learn. 
 
 We had a commencement in the home 
 town high school. A class of brilliant and 
 gifted young men and women went forth to 
 take charge of the world. We were so glad 
 the world had waited on us so long, and we 
 were so sure the world would be richly repaid 
 for waiting. 
 
 We were going to be presidents and sena- 
 tors, authors and authoresses, poets and poet- 
 esses, scientists and scientistesses, geniuses 
 and geniusesses, and things like that. There 
 was just one boy in the class who wasn't 
 bright. This Jim Lambert person didn't 
 have any brilliant career in view; he didn't 
 
 115
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 even want to be postmaster. He somehow 
 couldn't learn like the rest of us, for he lacked 
 the intellect. They "conditioned" him into 
 the senior class, and so we all looked down 
 on him. 
 
 As commencement day approached, the 
 committee of the class appointed for that 
 purpose took Jim around back of the school- 
 house and broke the news to him that they 
 were going to let him graduate with the class, 
 but they wouldn't let him speak, because he 
 couldn't make a speech. So they hid Jim 
 on the stage back of the oleander that com- 
 mencement night. 
 
 Shake the barrel ! 
 
 The girl who was to become the authoress 
 became the helloess in the home telephone 
 exchange, and has become absolutely indis- 
 pensable to the community. The girl who 
 was to become the poetess became the god- 
 dess at the general delivery window and su- 
 perintendent of the stamp-licking depart- 
 ment of the home postoffice. The boy who 
 was going to Congress is raising the best 
 
 116
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 corn in the county, and his wife is speaker 
 of the house. 
 
 Some of them are doing very well espe- 
 cially Jim Lambert. 
 
 Jim, who wasn't bright, is the head of one 
 of the big manufacturing plants of the South, 
 with a lot of men working for him. The 
 committee that took him behind the school- 
 house to inform him he couldn't speak at 
 commencement, would now have to wait in 
 line before a frosted door marked, "Mr. 
 Lambert, Private." They would have to 
 send up their cards, and have the watchdog 
 who guards the door tell them, "Cut it short, 
 he's busy!" before they could interview him 
 today. 
 
 They hung a picture of Mr. Lambert in 
 the high school back there at the last alumni 
 meeting. Hung it in the same room where 
 they hid Jim behind the oleander when he 
 graduated, because he wasn't bright. 
 
 Dull boy, you with your eyes tear-dimmed 
 sometimes because you can't learn like the 
 bright ones in your class doesn't the story 
 of the Lambert boy cheer you up a little? 
 * * * 
 
 117
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Twenty-One Years Afterwards! 
 
 I was janitor of the schoolhouse. Some 
 of my classmates will never know how their 
 thoughtless jeers womided the shabby boy 
 who swept the floors and carried in the coal. 
 After commencement my career seemed to 
 end, just where the careers of the rest of the 
 class seemed to begin. They were going off 
 to college and were going to do great things. 
 But I was too poor to go. The week after 
 commencement I went off to a printshop in 
 another town, rolled up my sleeves and went 
 to work in the "devil's corner" to earn my 
 daily bread. 
 
 It took such a lot of bread ! 
 
 I was discouraged and bitter at my fate. 
 I had no chance like the rest. 
 
 Twenty-one years afterwards, a lyceum 
 bureau sent me back to that home town 
 to give a lecture. Every lecturer has a 
 thrill and generally a frost when he goes 
 back to lecture in the home town. He be- 
 comes a boy again, not a lecturer, for there 
 are the boys he played with, and fought with 
 down there in the front rows, with their 
 wives and their children. And he has got- 
 
 118
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 ten his lectures out of this home town, and 
 his horrible examples, and if he gives his 
 lecture he will stir things up. His heroes 
 and villains are within striking distance. 
 * * * 
 
 I went back to the same old hall to lec- 
 ture, and stood upon the same old boards 
 where twenty-one years before I had stood 
 to orate, and had said in my impassioned elo- 
 quence, "Ladies and gentlemen: Greece is 
 go-o-one, and Rome is no mo-o-o-ore, but 
 fear not, for I will save you!" or words to 
 that effect. 
 
 Then I went back to the hotel with my eyes 
 swimming and my heart afire with gratitude. 
 I had a picture of the class the one that had 
 been taken twenty-one years before, just be- 
 fore we graduated. I hadn't seen the pic- 
 ture these twenty-one years, for I didn't have 
 the quarter. 
 
 Hours I sat with that picture that night, 
 living it over and getting a truer perspective 
 of life. If you want to read the greatest 
 chapter of life, you sit alone at night with a 
 picture of your playmates taken twenty-one 
 years before. 
 
 119
 
 The University of Hard Kriocks 
 
 In that picture were fifty-four young peo- 
 ple, all going to do wonderful things. But 
 the barrel had been shaking, and almost 
 every one that I expected would go up had 
 shaken down, while those I expected would 
 go down, had gone up. Out of that class, one 
 had gone to a pulpit, one had gone to Con- 
 gress and one had gone to the penitentiary. 
 There had been drunkards, gamblers, wrecks 
 and a suicide in that class. It seemed as tho 
 every note on the keyboard of human possi- 
 bility and failure had been struck in that 
 one class. 
 
 And when that picture was taken the old- 
 est was not more than eighteen, yet it seemed 
 as tho the destiny of every one was pretty 
 nearly decided. They were still going the 
 way their faces were turned in that picture. 
 
 The boy who skimmed over his work in 
 school was still skimming over the work of 
 life. 
 
 The boy who went to the bottom of things 
 in school was still going to the bottom of 
 tilings in life. Which had helped him to go 
 to the top of things. 
 
 Jim Lambert was still interested in ma- 
 
 120
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 chinery as he was when he was so dull in his 
 books. 
 
 The boy who traded knives with me and 
 skinned me. Why was it he could always 
 beat me in a trade? Well, he went on trad- 
 ing knives and skinning folks. Twenty-one 
 years afterwards he was doing time in the 
 state penitentiary as a forger. He was now 
 called a very bad man, when twenty-one 
 years ago as he did the same things on a 
 smaller scale they called him smart and 
 bright. 
 
 How easy it is to see as you look back- 
 ward. 
 
 How hard it is to see as you look for- 
 ward. 
 
 The bookworm boy who didn't mix with 
 the other boys, who didn't whisper, who 
 didn't get into trouble, who always had his 
 hair combed and said, "If you please," used 
 to hurt me. All the mothers used to say as 
 they punished their own reprobate sons, 
 "Why can't you be like Harry? He'll be- 
 come president of the United States, and 
 you'll go to jail." That model Plarry never 
 had the gumption to do anything but sit 
 
 121
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 around and be a model. I believe it is Mr. 
 Webster who defines a model as a small imi- 
 tation of the real thing. Harry certainly 
 was a successful model. He became a seedy, 
 sleepy old relic at forty. It was the boys 
 who had the hustle and the life and energy, 
 who occasionally needed licking and who 
 got it good and plentifully who really 
 achieved things. 
 
 It might be added that Clarice, our society 
 girl our real pretty girl of the class, who 
 won the majolica vase in the home paper 
 beauty coupon contest, went right on thru 
 the years in the social spothght, primping 
 and flirting. At last she got on the rem- 
 nant counter with no bidders. The girls of 
 the class who shone in society mainly as 
 wall-flowers, were the ones who became the 
 mothers in the real homes of the community. 
 Somehow, the boys hurrahed for giddy Cla- 
 rice, but picked a wall-flower to preside over 
 
 their new home! 
 
 * * * 
 
 The Boy I Had Envied! 
 
 Frank was the boy I had envied most. He 
 had everything had a fine home, a loving 
 
 122
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 father, money, opportunity and a great ca- 
 reer awaiting him. Everybody said that 
 Frank was the most popular boy in the town, 
 and he was brilliant and lovable. People 
 always said he would make his mark in the 
 world and make the town proud of him. 
 
 Many a time as I plugged away at the 
 printer's case I longed for Frank's chance. 
 
 Twenty-one years afterwards when I got 
 off the train in the old town I asked, 
 "Where's Frank?" Presently we went out 
 on the edge of the town to the cemetery and 
 stood at a grave, where I read on the head- 
 stone, "Frank." 
 
 And I had the story of the kind of a trag- 
 edy too pitifully common these days. The 
 story of the boy who had every advantage 
 and opportunity, but had everything given 
 him had all of life made too easy for him. 
 Pie had no discipline in the School of Service, 
 and he never entered his career. He just 
 seemed to plunge headlong hellward. He 
 disappointed every proud hope, broke his 
 father's heart, spent his fortune, shocked a 
 community, and finally ended his wasted life 
 with a bullet fired by his own hand. 
 * * * 
 
 123
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 Pulling on the Oar 
 
 Did you get the great lesson from "Ben 
 Hur"? 
 
 The Jewish boy is torn from his home in 
 disgrace. Heartbroken he is haled into court 
 and tried for a crime he never committed. 
 Ben Hur didn't get a fair trial. Xobody 
 gets a fair trial at the hands of this world. 
 That is why the great Judge has said, "Judge 
 not, for you have not the full evidence in the 
 case." 
 
 Then they condemn him. They lead him 
 away to the galleys, they chain him to the 
 bench, chain him to the oar. There follow 
 the days and years when the lash falls on his 
 back as he pulls on the oar. Day by day his 
 back bleeds, his heart aches, his eyes fill with 
 tears. He is the victim of cruel, mocking 
 fate. He is getting nowhere; just pulling 
 on the oar. 
 
 Just as you and I cry out. In a kitchen 
 or an office or wherever we work we seem 
 so often like slaves just pulling on the oar. 
 Life seems just one futureless round of 
 drudgery. The lash of necessity falls on our 
 
 124
 
 Looking Backward 
 
 back, and our heart aches and our eyes fill 
 up with tears. O, God, how long! Each one 
 of us can look across the street and see some- 
 body who doesn't have to pull on the oar. 
 They have a better time than we have and 
 we envy them. 
 
 We cannot see that they, too, are pulling 
 on the oar. We can only see the oar we seem 
 chained to. We do not see that those we 
 envy are often envying us. 
 
 But look at the chariot race in Antioch. 
 See the thousands in the circus. See Mes- 
 sala, the haughty Roman, and see! Ben Hur 
 from the galleys in the other chariot driving 
 those Arabian steeds pitted against jNIessala. 
 Down the course hurl these twin thunder- 
 bolts. Who will win? "The man with the 
 stronger forearms," whisper the thousands. 
 
 There comes the crucial moment in the 
 race when Ben Hiu' with those mighty fore- 
 arms of steel that he had been getting in the 
 galleys pulling on the oar when those tre- 
 mendous arms are able to pull those flying 
 Arabians into the inner ring, and Ben Hur 
 wins tlie race, because he had been pulling 
 on the oar! Had Ben Hur never been ar- 
 
 125
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 rested, and condemned, he never could have 
 won the race. 
 
 Sooner or later you and I are to discover 
 as we pull on the oar, lashed so often by 
 grim necessity, that Providence doesn't make 
 any mistakes in its bookkeeping. Every hon- 
 est effort we make, tho blindly and despair- 
 ingly, is somehow laid up for us as a bank 
 account of strength, at compound interest. 
 And the time comes when we are in the 
 chariot race, when we win the victory when 
 we strike the blow, when we stand and do 
 not fall with the strength we got back there 
 in the clouds when we were pulling on the 
 
 oar. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Standing at Frank's grave I thanked God 
 for the oar. I am not an example of suc- 
 cess. But I am a very grateful pupil in the 
 first reader class of the University of Hard 
 Knocks. 
 
 126
 
 VI 
 
 Looking Forward 
 
 THIS IS the Best Day of My Life! 
 It is the Best Day of Your Life. It 
 is the Best Day of Everybody's Life. 
 
 All of us are wiser, stronger, greater to- 
 day than ever before. All of the past is ours 
 today at compound interest. All the past 
 has been spent to prepare for today. 
 
 I am so glad for today ! 
 
 I am so sorry for the one who doesn't be- 
 lieve it. I am sorry for the one who weeps 
 on my shoulder and says, "I wish I were a 
 child again. O, if I could only live my life 
 over. I was happy when I was a child, and 
 I'm not happy now. Those were the best 
 days of my life." 
 
 Wake up, my friend ! Your clock has run 
 down! You say the child is happy? The 
 babe doesn't know what happiness is, be- 
 cause the babe hasn't known anything else. 
 You've got to live long and get bumped and 
 disappointed and cry yourself to sleep before 
 you can know what happiness really is. 
 
 127
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 We don't know how to appreciate the day 
 until we've been in the night. 
 
 We don't know how to appreciate food 
 until we've been hungry ; nor rest until we've 
 been fatigued. 
 
 Do you know what heaven is? Just get 
 the toothache and then wait until it quits. 
 
 That is heaven. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Waiting to the "Second Table" 
 
 I'm sorry for a child. I don't want to be 
 a child again. I don't want to live it over. 
 I wouldn't take my chances going thru it all 
 again and getting here today. I deserved 
 killing a thousand times. I don't see how I 
 escaped. 
 
 My advice to children is, Don't be a child 
 any longer than you have to be, for it's bet- 
 ter farther on. 
 
 Life's great truth is. It's Better Farther 
 On. 
 
 I remember when a child, the elder used 
 to come to our house and stay for dinner. 
 He used to be the easiest man to get to stay 
 for dinner I ever saw. That was the big 
 dinner. Mother always outdid herself when 
 
 128
 
 Looking Forward 
 
 the elder stayed for dinner. She'd uncork 
 about eleven cans of fruit, and jelly and jam 
 and watermelon preserves. And there would 
 be a great big plate full of fried chicken, 
 and gravy and mashed potatoes I 
 
 I could hardly wait for dinner, I was so 
 hungry. Then the elder would sit down at 
 the head of the table, and father would say 
 to me, '*Boy, you run along into the other 
 room and wait I There isn't room for you." 
 
 I used to go into that other room while 
 they ate the big dinner, and nearly starve. 
 I was the hungriest one in the house, and 
 waiting because I was a child. I used to sit 
 there and yammer thru a crack in the door 
 at them eating the big dinner out in the other 
 room, and I used to think heaven must be a 
 place where everybody gets to eat at the first 
 table! 
 
 I would see the dinner going fast. There 
 was only one piece of chicken left on the 
 plate the neck. O, Lord, save the neck! 
 
 And the elder took that! 
 
 Then I have seen that good elder come into 
 the room where I was starving, he full of 
 that good dinner. He would come up to 
 
 129
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 that little hungry wretch waiting behind the 
 door. "Brother Parlette, is this your boy?" 
 He would put his hand in benediction on my 
 head my head wasn't the place that needed 
 the benediction! and say, "My boy, you 
 want to have a good time now." 
 
 Now! With all the chicken gone! 
 
 "You want to have a good time now, my 
 boy, because you are seeing the best days of 
 your life right now." 
 
 The dear old liar! I was seeing the worst 
 days of my life. If there is anybody short- 
 changed if there is anybody who doesn't 
 have a good time, it's a child. 
 
 Each Year Brings More 
 I don't say this to make a child unhappy. 
 A child is happy. A boy is happy with fuzz 
 on his upper lip. But he'll be happier when 
 his lip feels more like mine like a piece of 
 sandpaper. Why, there are chapters and 
 chapters of happiness undreamed of in his 
 philosophy. Perhaps there is a time coming 
 when all the milhons of girls in the world 
 will boil down into one girl "the only girl 
 
 130
 
 Looking Forward 
 
 in the world" for him. The time may come 
 when he'll find her, or she'll find him, accord- 
 ing to the suffragette indications. He'll take 
 her little, soft, white hand into his big, rough, 
 horny fist and say, "That little hand will 
 never be put into dishwater." 
 
 Classic fib ! 
 
 They'll think they can't possibly be hap- 
 pier than that, but those two precious chil- 
 dren are only beginning. Wait till you're 
 my age. I know that far, and I know it's 
 the best today. Anybody in this audience 
 older than I am, I envy you; you're nearer 
 heaven. Anybody in this audience younger 
 than I am, I pity you ; hurry up ! 
 
 A child can be full of joy. But when the 
 child is full of joy, it doesn't hold enough 
 joy. Not more than a pint; then it slops 
 over. 
 
 Afterwhile that same child will hold a 
 quart of joy, and not make half so much 
 fuss. 
 
 I hold a gallon! 
 
 Some of j'ou folks must hold a barrel! I 
 don't mean circumference. I mean every 
 vear increases our capacity for joy. Our life 
 
 131
 
 The Universiiy of Hard Knocks 
 
 begins small. But it grows and widens with 
 the years. Bigger and bigger it becomes 
 mitil this old world actually gets too small 
 for us and presently the fences go down and, 
 hooray! we're in heaven! 
 
 We Cannot Geow Old 
 
 So we cannot grow old. Our life never 
 stops. It goes on and on forever. 
 
 That is why we cannot grow old. Any- 
 thing that doesn't stop cannot have age. This 
 hall will grow old; it will stop. This stage 
 will grow old ; it will stop. Even my lecture 
 will grow old ; it will stop I 
 
 But you and I will never grow old, for 
 God cannot grow old; and you and I will 
 go on living as long as God lives. 
 
 I am not worried today over what I do 
 not know. I used to be worried. I used to 
 say, "I have not time to answer you now!" 
 But today it is such a relief to look people in 
 the face and say, "I don't know." Some 
 day I'll know. Every day the answer comes 
 to something. 
 
 132
 
 Looking Forward 
 
 It will take an eternity to know an in- 
 finity! 
 
 * * 
 
 I discover that the man who says the world 
 is degenerating, has been looking in the glass 
 too much. 
 
 I discover the world is all looking-glass. 
 We see around us just what we have in our 
 own heart. 
 
 I'm sorry for the man who says this is a 
 bad world, for he sees himself. 
 
 I'm sorry for the man who says, "Every- 
 body is trying to rob you." Instinctively, I 
 put my hand on my wallet. 
 
 If we call the world bad, it shouts back 
 like an echo, "Bad! bad! bad I" 
 
 If we sing to the world, it sings back to us. 
 
 If we love the world, it loves us. 
 
 Defeats That Become Victoeies 
 Children, when you hear an orator speak 
 and you note the ease and power of his work, 
 do you ever think of the years of struggle 
 he spent in preparing? Do you ever think 
 of the times that orator tried to speak and 
 
 133
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 failed, and went back to his room in disgrace, 
 mortified and broken-hearted? Thru it all 
 there came the discipline and experience and 
 grim resolve that resulted in the successful 
 orator you now hear. 
 
 When you hear the musician and see the 
 ease of that performance, do you think of 
 the years of struggle and overcoming neces- 
 sary to do it with that finish and grace ? That 
 is the story of the actor, the author and every 
 other one of attainment. 
 
 Do you note that the tropics, the countries 
 with the balmiest climate, produce the weak- 
 est peoples ? Do you note that the conquer- 
 ing races are those that struggle with both 
 heat and cold? Be glad you live in a land 
 where the mercury goes below zero even if 
 you are not in the coal business. The tropics 
 are the geographical Gussies. 
 
 Do you note that people grow more in lean 
 }^ears than in fat years ? Crop failures aren't 
 calamities, but blessings in disguise. People 
 go to the devil with full pockets; they turn 
 to God when hunger hits them. "Is not this 
 Babylon that I have builded?" Belshazzar 
 
 134
 
 Looking Forward 
 
 will tell you that the "hard times" are the 
 Needful Knocks. 
 
 Do you remember that they had io lock 
 John Bunyan in Bedford jail before he 
 would write that immortal "Pilgrims' Prog- 
 ress"? Perhaps some of us should go to jail 
 to do our best work! 
 
 Do you remember that one musician be- 
 came deaf before he wrote the music the 
 world will always hear? Do you remember 
 that one author became blind before he wrote 
 "Paradise Lost"? 
 
 Do you remember that Saul of Tarsus was 
 educated at the feet of Gamaliel, with wealth 
 and honor at his command? But he had to 
 be blinded and scourged and humiliated be- 
 fore he could become the great apostle to 
 the Gentiles. 
 
 Do you remember that the Bull Run bat- 
 tle must be fought before you come to Ap- 
 pomattox ? 
 
 Do you see all around you that Success is 
 ever the Phoenix rising from the ashes of 
 defeat ? 
 
 Then when you graduate and you stand 
 in a row with your diplomas in your hands 
 
 135
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 and the relatives and friends shake your hand 
 and say, "Success to you I" I shall take 
 your hand and say, "Defeat to you!" "And 
 a black eye to you !" "And plenty of bumps 
 to your 
 
 For I want you to become Great, and 
 Strong, and Successful, and Happy, and 
 Educated! 
 
 136
 
 VII 
 
 Getting to Life's Summit 
 
 ONE DAY in California I climbed 
 Mount Lowe. Some of you, no 
 doubt, have climbed that old brown 
 sentinel of the orange belt of Southern Cali- 
 fornia. That day I went from Los Angeles, 
 "city of the angels" and real estate agents, 
 to Pasadena, and then to Altadena, and those 
 other little "denas" and things every half- 
 mile till I got to Mount Lowe's feet, or foot- 
 hills. 
 
 We went up Rubio Canyon until we came 
 to the triangular thing the guide-book calls 
 an "engineering miracle." We got into this 
 and then were boosted no, yanked thirty- 
 five hundred feet upward. We quickly rose 
 out of that hungry looking chasm, up the 
 side of that granite cliff to the top of Echo 
 Mountain, with only two little rails and some 
 ropes between me and depending upon how 
 I had lived ! 
 
 Then on the top of Echo Mountain we got 
 out of that lifter thing, and discovered it 
 
 137
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 wasn't a mountain-top at all, but a shelf on 
 the side of the greater mountain. Here we 
 got into a trolley-car and went about five 
 miles farther up the side of Mount Lowe, 
 without a straight rail in the track. Every 
 minute a new thrill and no two thrills alike! 
 Five miles of winding and squirming, and 
 twisting and ducking, and dodging and sum- 
 mersaulting ! 
 
 We went over so many wooden bridges 
 that squeaked. Where I would grab the seat 
 and lift! 
 
 We came to the headliner thrill. Money 
 positively refunded at the gate if not as ad- 
 vertised ! I saw it coming ! Oo-oo-oo ! The 
 car ran out on a wooden shelf that man had 
 nailed to the perpendicular face of the rock 
 wall. Where my life hung on the honesty 
 of the man who drove the nails. 
 
 I wondered if he had been working by the 
 day or by the job when he drove those nails! 
 
 I would look over the edge of the car, down 
 down down ! 
 
 I would look on the other side of the car 
 at the face of the cliff we were hugging, up 
 up up! About a mile either way, straight 
 
 138
 
 Getting to Life's Summit 
 
 up or straight down. And no place to re- 
 sign! 
 
 We were five thousand feet when the car 
 stopped. We were on another shelf they 
 call Alpine Tavern. Science here surren- 
 dered. Mount Lowe's summit was eleven 
 hundred feet above three miles more of a 
 climb up that wriggling trail. 
 
 All alone that forenoon I went up that 
 
 trail. 
 
 * * * 
 
 Getting Above the Clouds 
 
 And finally I got on a rock flat as this 
 floor Mount Lowe's summit, more than a 
 mile above the plain. You can't describe 
 such a wonderful experience with this poor 
 human vocabulary. You must live it. That 
 pure, clear day I could look down thru the 
 swimming, quivering space into the citrus 
 empire of Southern California, all spread out 
 in one great mosaic of turquoise and amber 
 and emerald. My field-glass swept vistas 
 of many miles in one great panoramic pic- 
 tiu-e. The miles were an inch long on my 
 Mount Lowe map. It took an hour to look 
 
 139
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 in any direction, there was so much to seel 
 
 Right below me Los Angeles, and Pasa- 
 dena ! To my right, perhaps forty miles, the 
 Pacific Ocean. It seemed so near I could 
 throw a pebble into the waves. But when I 
 tried it, it fell on my toes. How a mountain 
 does deceive! 
 
 To my back the granite cliff rising higher. 
 And I discovered that Mount Lowe's sum- 
 mit is just another shelf on the side of the 
 higher Sierras. Over at my left "Old Baldy," 
 twelve thousand feet, and snow eternally on 
 his head. 
 
 I get a better vision of the Infinite. I am 
 in one of His great workshops I 
 
 Presently clouds come in the valley below 
 me. I had gotten above the clouds! The 
 clouds grew blacker and spread out until 
 they covered the valley. Presently it 
 dawned on me that rain is falling in the val- 
 ley. It is a real storm down there. The 
 people are saying, "It is raining; the sun 
 doesn't shine; the sky is all gone." 
 
 But I was standing on the mountain top. 
 The sun was shining on me, and the sky was 
 all serene over my head. The storm was all 
 
 140
 
 Getting to Life*8 Summit 
 
 down under my feet. I had gotten above the 
 storm, into the sunshine I 
 
 I had gotten a mile above the valley and 
 there were millions of miles of sunshine 
 
 above me. 
 
 
 
 Presently the storm was over. The val- 
 ley came out all the brighter for the wash- 
 ing. I went clambering down the mountain- 
 side. But before the journey was done, the 
 shadows came spreading again over the val- 
 ley. 
 
 Then I looked over in the southwest and 
 saw the sun sinking. Lower and lower it 
 dipped until its red lips kissed the blue cheek 
 of the ocean. The molten glory and the 
 liquid rainbows spread out over the south- 
 west, and the shadows came eastward over 
 the valley, wider and wider, until presently 
 the valley was black with shadows. The 
 lights began to twinkle in the cities of the 
 valley, and I knew it was night down there. 
 The people were saying, "The sun doesn't 
 shine; the night has come." 
 
 But as I turned and looked back up the 
 mountain, I saw the glorious radiance of the 
 
 141
 
 The University of Hard Knocks 
 
 sun bathing Mount Lowe's summit, while 
 the darkness filled the valley. It was night 
 in the valley and day on the mountain-top! 
 
 * * * 
 
 OGOD! I HEAR THY VOICE. I 
 hear it in the valley and on the moun- 
 tain-top. I hear it in the storm, in 
 the night and the light ! 
 
 Child of humanity, are you in the storm? 
 Climb higher and you come to the calm. 
 
 Are you in the night? Climb yet higher, 
 and you come to the light. 
 
 For the peace and the light are right above 
 us above the storm and the night. 
 
 And life is the journey from the storm 
 and the night to the peace and the light. 
 
 I have been climbing my life-mountain 
 these years. I have stumbled and fallen so 
 many times. I have said, "I cannot carry 
 my burden longer." But now I find myself 
 farther up the mountain-side, and my eyes 
 open wider and I look back and see that all 
 the bumps were lessons. All the rocks were 
 steps in the great stairway that somehow had 
 to be built to make me climb higher. 
 
 142
 
 Getting to Lifers Summit 
 
 Every day gets better, because every day 
 we get a Kttle farther up. Every day we 
 look down upon some storms that used to 
 terrify us. Every day we rise above the 
 legacy of our limitations. None of these 
 things move us now. 
 
 Today is our best day, because today we 
 are highest up. 
 
 So our last days of earth become our best. 
 
 Some day my night will come. It will 
 spread over the valley of material things. 
 But I shall stand on the mountain-top, my 
 Nebo, in the day, and the night will be down 
 in the valley with the storms. I shall find 
 life's mountain-top just another shelf on the 
 side of the Mountain of Infinite Unfolding. 
 
 I shall have risen but the first mile. I 
 shall have the millions of miles yet above me ! 
 
 I shall find this mountain-top day just a 
 grander Commencement Day, with Com- 
 mencement Daj^s and Master's Degrees 
 never ending as I rise thru Eternity! 
 
 143
 
 3
 
 
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