THE UNCONQUERABLE
 Reporters in the war-smitten countries of Europe tell us that one effect of the horrors of death, wounds, and heartbreak is that the men are turning back to the churches. Out of the obscene muck of materialistic force is springing a revaluation of the spirit in man.
 
Man is a curious animal. He seems to give forth his finest product only when crushed. We expect him to “curse God and die,” and suddenly his face lights up with the heavenly vision.
 
We loathe poverty and fight disease and avoid wounds, tyranny, and oppression. Yet, somehow only when these come, do 6 the rarest flowers appear on the human bush.
 
I know a young man, twisted, crippled, paralyzed, unable to feed or dress himself, yet who sits daily by his window with a shining face. He is cheerful, helpful, a fountain of joy to all who know him. The boys love to gather in his room at night and play cards and tell stories. One would think he would be a gloom and a burden; he is an uplift. You soon forget his limitations. You soon cease to pity him, for he does not pity himself. He does not drain you; he inspires you.
 
In how many another family is the sickroom the shrine of the house. How many a stricken invalid woman is the resting-place for her worried husband, the delightful refuge for her children’s cares!
 
It is not the strong, wealthy, and powerful 7 that always gleam with optimism and radiate hope. Too often the house of luxury is the nest of bitterness, boredom, and snarling. Petulance waits on plenty. Luxury and cruelty are twins. Success brings hardness of heart.
 
The world could get along without its war lords, millionaires, and big men, with all their effective virility, better than it could do without its blind, deaf, hunchbacked, and bedridden. Some things we get from the first group, but the things we get from the second are more needed for this star-led race.
 
Little girl, with twisted spine and useless legs, with eyes always bright with golden courage, with heart ever high with undaunted love, we could spare all the proud beauties of the ballroom or the stage better than you.
 
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Their bodies are finer than yours; but then we are not bodies.
 
What a strange and strangely magnificent creature is man! And how proud his Maker must be of him, for all his faults! You cannot crush him. Put him in prison and in its half-light he writes a “Pilgrim’s Progress.” Strike him blind and he sings a “Paradise Lost.”
 
When Beethoven died, a post-mortem examination showed that since childhood he had suffered from an incurable disease, aggravated by improper medical treatment and by want of home comfort and proper food. His liver was shrunk to half its proper size. He always had family troubles that annoyed him beyond endurance. His finest works were produced after he was deaf. And this was the majestic soul that was unparalleled master of music, whose art was 9 immeasurable, will be immortal! Yet we have heard fat artists whine because they are mistreated!
 
What a piece of work is man! Too wonderful, too unconquerable, too divine for this earth! His home must be among the stars!
KINGDOM COME
 What do we want? What precisely do we mean by the Millennium, or the Golden Age, or Utopia? What sort of “Kingdom Come” is it we pray for?
 
Sit down sometime and think it over; try to get rid of the vagueness of the idea, and to determine exactly what conditions would satisfy you and all of us. The effort may not be without good results upon your present notions.
 
Just as a suggestion let me give one statement of the kind of Millennium that appeals to me.
 
It is that state of society and that perfection of government in which there shall be secured for every human being Intellectual 11 Liberty, Equality of Opportunity, Justice in all Human Relations, and free Spiritual Fraternity.
 
This is somewhat like the French motto, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, only the terms are defined a bit, and Justice is added.
 
First, Intellectual Liberty. The last element of coercion, direct or indirect, must be removed from the processes of the mind. The Ethics of the Intellect must be acknowledged. The mind must work absolutely unbribed by expediency, the opinions of others, fear, or authority. There can be no perfect unity of love and service that does not rest on perfect freedom of thought.
 
There must be entire Equality of Opportunity. The state ought to see to it that every baby coming into the world has an equal start with every other baby. All inheritance of wealth that interferes with this 12 should be abated. Every child should receive adequate training for the world’s work. There will never be equality of intelligence, of physical force, of genius, nor of any other kind of ability; inequality in these respects adds zest to life. And the advantages of personal ability do not cause injustice; it is custom-buttressed and law-intrenched privilege, unearned and undeserved yet perpetuated, that oppresses the world.
 
Justice is essential. When that comes, there shall be no more benevolence and charity as we now practise them. The great hunger of mankind is not for kindness and mercy and pity—it is for justice. When we have justice we shall have peace, as it is written: “Righteousness and peace kiss each other.”
 
Lastly, we shall have free Spiritual Fraternity. The problem of the race is one of 13 fraternizing. We now get together in sects and nations. Religiously and politically we as yet feel but faintly the universal breeze. We do not realize humanity. The human nerve is feeble. Some day the idea of universal brotherhood shall burn in the race with a heat and shine far stronger than the present sectarian, partisan, and patriotic enthusiasms.
 
I do not think human nature will have to be transformed to get these things. It is a question of vision. We need to see. When once we understand what we want we will organize and get it.
THE HUMANITIES VERSUS THE IDEALS
 The humanities are the ordinary universal feelings, such as family affection, aversion to cruelty, love of justice and of liberty.
 
The ideals are the so-called big enthusiasms, as religion, patriotism, reform, and the like.
 
The humanities are sometimes called the red passions; the ideals the white passions.
 
The great institutions of the race have been formed and kept alive by the white passions. These include churches, political parties, nations, and various societies and associations, secret and public.
 
The progress of mankind has been made through institutions, embodying ideals, 15 which we may call the centrifugal force. The humanities have always pulled against this, and may be termed the centripetal force.
 
Thus, although great ideals present themselves to men as beneficial, yet in the carrying out of them men often become cruel, unjust, and tyrannical. So the greatest crimes of earth are committed under the influence of movements designed to do the greatest good.
 
Under the church we have seen persecution, a ruthless disregard of human feeling, families torn asunder, opinion coerced, bodies tortured.
 
The humanities in time destroyed the baleful power of the religious ideal, its dreams of dominance and its inhuman fanaticism. Plain pity and sympathy battered down the monstrous structure of iron idealism. The horrors of the medieval inquisition 16 and the dark intolerance of puritanism had to yield to the humanities.
 
Most of the great tragedies have been the crushing out of human and natural feeling by some ideal which, once helpful, has become monstrous. Such were the Greek tragedies, where men were the victims of the gods.
 
War is the colossal force of an ideal, patriotism, where the check of the humanities has been entirely cut off.
 
It is supposed to ennoble men and states. It has always been the preferred occupation of the noble class, kings and courtiers, because the contempt of personal feelings and the merciless sacrifice of the humanities have seemed grand and royal.
 
But by and by war must yield to the eternal humanities. Sheer human sympathies will abolish it.
 
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The humanities are peculiarly of the common people. Therefore they find expression and come into political effect quickly in democracies. In the United States, for instance, the rule of a religious party or the program of patriotic militarism is impossible. We have too much red passion to permit the ascendency of white passions.
 
“Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a book of red passion, sympathy for the negro, overthrew the “white” ideals of the slave oligarchy.
 
The cry of a starving mother, the protest of wronged workmen, can defeat the apparently resistless power of massed capital.
 
One drop of blood outweighs the most splendid scheme of the theorist.
 
The history of the world is the unceasing struggle of the humanities against great ideals which, crystallized into institutions, have become inhuman.
PRECEDENT
 Precedent is solidified experience. In the realm of ideas it is canned goods.
 
It is very useful when fresh ideas are not to be had.
 
There are advantages in doing things just because they always have been done. You know what will happen. When you do new things you do not know what will happen.
 
Success implies not only sound reasoning, but also the variable factor of how a thing will work, which is found out only by trying it.
 
Hence, the surest road to success is to use a mixture of precedent and initiative. Just how much of each you will require is a matter for your judgment.
 
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To go entirely by precedent you become a mossback. You are safe, as a setting hen or a hiving bee is safe. Each succeeding generation acts the same way. There is a level of efficiency, but no progress.
 
Boards, trustees, and institutions lay great stress upon precedent, as they fear responsibility. To do as our predecessors did shifts the burden of blame a bit from our shoulders.
 
The precedent is the haven of refuge for them that fear to decide.
 
Courts of law follow precedent, on the general theory that experience is more just than individual decision.
 
Precedent, however, tends to carry forward the ignorance and injustice of the past.
 
Mankind is constantly learning, getting new views of truth, seeing new values in social justice. Precedent clogs this advance. 20 It fixes and perpetuates the wrongs of man as much as the rights of man.
 
Hence, while the many must trust to precedent, a few must always endeavor to break it, to make way for juster conclusions.
 
Precedent is the root, independent thinking is the branch of the human tree. Our decisions must conform to the sum of human experience, yet there must be also the fresh green leaf of present intelligence.
 
We cannot cut the root of the tree and expect it to live, neither can we lop off all the leafage of the tree and expect it to live.
 
The great jurist, such as Marshall, is one who not only knows what the law is, but what the law ought to be. That is, to his knowledge of precedent he adds his vision of right under present conditions.
 
Precedent is often the inertia of monstrous iniquity. War, for instance, is due 21 to the evil custom of nations who go on in the habit of war-preparedness. The problem of the twentieth century is to batter down this precedent by the blows of reason, to overturn it by an upheaval of humanity.
 
Evil precedent also lurks in social conditions, in business, and in all relations of human rights. The past constantly operates to enslave the present.
 
We must correct the errors of our fathers if we would enable our children to correct ours.
 
Our reverence for the past must be continually qualified by our reverence for the future.
 
We are on our way to the Golden Age. The momentum of what has been must be supplemented by the steam of original conviction, and guided by the intelligence and courage of the present.
THERE IS NO LABORING CLASS
 It cannot too often be stated that the labor problem is not a class affair, but that it concerns the entire human race. There may be a class of aristocrats, of plutocrats, of criminals, of society idlers, or of any such group whose instinct is to withdraw itself from the common mass of humanity. But for laborers this is an impossibility. They remain, and must remain, part and parcel of the whole people. They are the people. There can be no laboring class. It is a contradiction of terms.
 
Especially is this true in America, where from the President of the country down to the coal-heaver everybody is supposed to 23 work. So strong is this supposition, that the inference is that whoever does not bear some part of the world’s burden is a diseased unit in humanity. The ultimate aim of all normal progress in social justice is to remove these units. All who have wealth in excess of a reasonable accumulation of the products of their own labor, all who live on endowment and inheritance, all who are sycophants, idlers, or holders of sinecures, must some day, when the terms of justice shall have been worked out, be put to work, and those who will not work shall not eat.
 
Just by what route the millennial state of simple equity shall come we cannot say, but come it surely will, and the profits of individual labor of brawn or brain shall go to the individual, and the profits arising from the state or social combination shall go to the state, to the people as a whole.
 
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One of the most far-reaching acts of 1914 was the statement by the national congress, in its passage of the anti-trust law preventing the use of the Sherman act against trade unions, that “the labor of a human being is not a commodity or article of commerce.”
 
The implications of this declaration it will be difficult to see for some time. It seems now to strike a blow at the very centre of the old system of business under which the world has operated for some six thousand years.
 
It means that humanity does not consist of employers and endowed persons, of nobles, wealthy people, and professional men—doctors, lawyers, priests, and squires; that culture, schools, courts, and senates are not for these only, and that the employed, the clerks, and workmen, who make the money for these upper classes, are not on the 25 same economic level as the spades and pens they handle; but that a man; any man, and his wage are direct concern of government; that the iron law of supply and demand may govern the grinding of flour, but not of human creatures, and that the brute law of competition shall some time, in some way, be changed to the human law of co-operation.
THE PATH TO PERFECTION
 The path to perfection, it has been said, leads through a series of disgusts.
 
The sinner is converted not when he reforms, but when he experiences revulsion.
 
Dr. Chalmers defined the renovating force as the “expulsive power of a new affection.”
 
Any form of pleasure carries with it a sickening element after it passes a certain point.
 
The drunkard is not really cured until the smell of liquor repels him.
 
The smoker has not broken off his bad habit for good until tobacco nauseates him.
 
You are never free from a thing as long as you like it.
 
The woman who claims to have reformed, 27 but who still likes to play with fire, lies; lies to herself probably as much as to you.
 
Disgust is the shadow cast by love. Where there is no shadow there is no substance.
 
The worth of a wife’s affection is exactly measured by her horror of disloyalty.
 
We climb by love; the rungs of the ladder are disgusts.
 
All adepts in soul matters have recognized the purifying and strengthening quality of renunciation. It is the gist of Buddhism. It is the meat of Christianity. It is the core of all important philosophies.
 
The wise of this world are they that avoid satiety.
 
The motto of Socrates was, “Never too much.”
 
The epicures of pleasure are those who are experts in the art of quitting.
 
The joys of wine are for those who know 28 how to take a little. Those who drink all they want are wretched.
 
The “Dial” gives an extract from Bronson Alcott’s “Fruitlands,” which sheds light upon the serious problem of enjoying one’s self.
 
“On a revision of our proceedings it would seem that if we were in the right course in our particular instance, the greater part of a man’s duty consists in leaving alone much that he is in the habit of doing. It is a fasting from the present activity, rather than an increased indulgence in it, which, with patient watchfulness, tends to newness of life. ‘Shall I sip tea or coffee?’ the inquiry may be. No; abstain from all ardent, as from alcoholic, drinks. ‘Shall I consume pork, beef, or mutton?’ Not if you value health and life. ‘Shall I stimulate with milk?’ No. ‘Shall I warm my bathing-water?’ Not if cheerfulness is 29 valuable. ‘Shall I clothe in many garments?’ Not if purity is aimed at. ‘Shall I prolong my hours, consuming animal oil and losing bright daylight in the morning?’ Not if a clear mind is an object. ‘Shall I teach my children the dogmas inflicted on myself, under the pretense that I am transmitting truth?’ Nay, if you love, intrude not these between them and the spirit of all truth.”
 
Whether or not we accept the rigor of these conclusions, certain it is that the only way to mount to perfection is by stepping upon our dead selves; the only way to a pleasure that is full of contentment is to have plenty of lively disgusts for pleasures of a lower order.
THE IDEAL WOMAN
 The ideal woman is lovable. She may not be beautiful of face, but she has charm.
 
She is attractive to men, not repellent.
 
She is the appeal of Nature. She draws men as the sun draws planets.
 
Her power is deep, cosmic, as strong and as mysterious as gravitation.
 
She is the embodiment of love, which is the most persistent, evergreen, and irresistible of human motives.
 
However forceful her individuality she cannot lose her strange drawing power.
 
She is passionate, but differs from her weakling sisters in that her passion is unswervingly loyal.
 
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All the cumulative morality of centuries of conscience centers in her love.
 
She clings, not from subservience, but from a loyalty as intense as sex itself.
 
She is free. No man owns her soul nor body. She gives, as sovereign queens give. She cannot barter as commoner women barter, she cannot obey as slaves obey, she cannot yield as cowards yield.
 
She is void of egotism; she is full of self-reverence.
 
She is happy in girlhood, contented in wifehood, glorified in motherhood.
 
She is proud to be a woman. She does not want to be a man.
 
She has wisdom. In every crisis her husband is guided by her instinct.
 
She has character. She secretly moulds the natures of her children. She is the power behind each one of them.
 
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She is the flowering rose-bush in times of pleasure. She is a high tower in times of trouble.
 
Her eyes are full of understanding. She knows the feeling back of your words.
 
Her smile is as the reward of heaven. It is worth more than gold.
 
She is intelligent as no man is intelligent.
 
She is brave as no man is brave.
 
Her vision has that clairvoyance that is bestowed upon no man.
 
She is variable as water; but as the water of the unfailing spring, of the eternal ocean, changing forever, forever fixed.
 
She is the best inheritance from the world that was. She is the matrix of the world to come.
 
In proportion as men look up to her they grow unafraid and wise. When they look down on her, as they treat her with contempt 33 or indifference, they become weak and cruel.
 
She is not the champion of religious doctrine; she is the incarnation of the religious instinct.
 
She is the ladder by the brook where man dreams; she reaches to heaven; upon the rungs of her soul angels ascend and descend.
 
NO
 No is next to the shortest word in the English language.
 
It is the concentrated Declaration of Independence of the human soul.
 
It is the central citadel of character, and can remain impregnable forever.
 
It is the only path to reformation.
 
It is the steam-gauge of strength, the barometer of temperament, the electric indicator of moral force.
 
It is an automatic safety-first device.
 
It has saved more women than all the knights of chivalry.
 
It has kept millions or young men from going over the Niagara Falls of drunkenness, profligality, and passion.
 
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It is the updrawn portcullis and barred gate of the castle of self-respect.
 
It is the dragon that guards beauty’s tower.
 
It is the high fence that preserves the innocence of the innocent.
 
It is the thick wall of the home, keeping the father from folly, the mother from indiscretion, the boys from ruin, and the girls from shame.
 
It is the one word you can always say when you can’t think of anything else.
 
It is the one answer that needs no explanation.
 
The mule is the surest footed and most dependable of all domestic animals. No is the mule-power of the soul.
 
Say it and mean it.
 
Say it and look your man in the eye.
 
Say it and don’t hesitate.
 
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A good round No is the most effective of known shells from the human howitzer.
 
In the great parliament of life the Noes have it.
 
The value of any Yes you utter is measured by the number of Noes banked behind it.
 
Live your own life. Make your own resolutions. Mark out your own program. Aim at your own work. Determine your own conduct. And plant all around those an impregnable hedge of Noes, with the jaggedest, sharpest thorns that grow.
 
The No-man progresses under his own steam. He is not led about and pushed around by officious tugboats.
 
The woman who can say No carries the very best insurance against the fires, tornadoes, earthquakes, and accidents that threaten womankind.
 
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Be soft and gentle as you please outwardly, but let the centre of your soul be a No, as hard as steel.
TIME
 
Old Father Time knows more than anybody.
 
He solves more problems than all the brains in the world.
 
More hard knots are unloosed, more tangled questions are answered, more deadlocks are unfastened by Time than by any other agency.
 
In the theological disputes that once raged in Christendom neither side routed the other; Time routed them both by showing that the whole subject did not matter.
 
After the contemporaries had had their say, Time crowned Homer, Dante, Wagner, Shakespeare, Whitman, Emerson.
 
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Almost any judgment can be appealed, but from the decision of Time there is no appeal.
 
Do not force issues with your children. Learn to wait. Be patient. Time will bring things to pass that no immediate power can accomplish.
 
Do not create a crisis with your husband, your wife. Wait. See what Time will do.
 
Time has a thousand resources, abounds in unexpected expedients.
 
Time brings a change in point of view, in temper, in state of mind which no contention can.
 
When you teach, make allowance for Time. What the child cannot possibly understand now, he can grasp easily a year from now.
 
When you have a difficult business affair to settle, give it Time, put it away and see 40 how it will ferment, sleep on it, give it as many days as you can. It will often settle itself.
 
If you would produce a story, a play, a book, or an essay, write it out, then lay it aside and let it simmer, forget it a while, then take it out and write it over.
 
Time is the best critic, the shrewdest adviser, the frankest friend.
 
If you are positive you want to marry a certain person, let Time have his word. Nowhere is Time’s advice more needed. Today we may be sure, but listen to a few tomorrows.
 
You are born and you will die whenever fate decides; you have nothing to do with those fatal two things; but in marriage, the third fatality, you have Time. Take it.
 
Do not decide your beliefs and convictions suddenly. Hang up the reasons to cure. 41 You come to permanent ideas not only by reasoning, but quite as much by growth.
 
Do not hobble your whole life by the immature certainties of youth. Give yourself room to change, for you must change, if you are to develop.
 
“Learn to labor and—to wait!” 
SALESMANSHIP
 Every young man should some time in his life have experience in salesmanship.
 
Selling goods is the best known cure for those elements in a man that tend to make him a failure.
 
The art of success consists in making people change their minds. It is this power that makes the efficient lawyer, grocer, politician, or preacher.
 
There are two classes of men. One seeks employment in a position where he merely obeys the rules and carries out the desires of his employer. There is little or no opportunity for advancement in this work. 43 You get to a certain point and there you stick.
 
Such posts are a clerkship in a bank, a government job, such as letter-carrier, a place in the police force, or any other routine employment requiring no initiative. These kinds of work are entirely honorable and necessary. The difficulty is, they are cramping, limiting.
 
Some day you may have to take a position of this sort, but first try your hand at selling things.
 
Be a book-agent, peddle washing-machines, sell life-insurance, automobiles, agricultural implements, or peanuts.
 
You shrink from it because it is hard, it goes against the grain, as you are not a pushing sort of fellow. And that is the very reason you need it.
 
Salesmanship is strong medicine. You 44 have to go out and wrestle with a cold and hostile world. You are confronted with indifference, often contempt. You are considered a nuisance. That is the time for you to buck up, take off your coat, and go in and win.
 
A young lawyer will gain more useful knowledge of men and affairs by selling real estate or fire-insurance than by law-school.
 
I have just read a letter from an office man fifty-seven years old. He has lodged at $1,600 a year for twenty years, while two of the salesmen who entered the business about the time he did own the concern.
 
Get out and sell goods. Hustle. Fight. Don’t get fastened in one hole. Take chances. Come up smiling. So the best and biggest prizes in America are open to you.
 
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Selling things, commercialism, business, is not a low affair; it is a great, big, bully game. It is a thoroughly American game, and the most sterling qualities of Americanism are developed by it, when it is carried on fairly and humanely.
 
There is incitement in it for all your best self, for your honesty, perseverance, optimism, courage, loyalty, and religion. Nowhere does a MAN mean so much.
 
I mean to cast no slurs upon faithful occupants of posts of routine. They have their reward.
 
But, son, don’t look for a “safe” place. Don’t depend upon an organization to hold your job for you. Don’t scheme and wire-pull for influence and help and privilege.
 
Get out and peddle maps. Make people buy your chickens or your essays. Get in the game. It beats football.
THE INWARD SONG
 The poet speaks of those
 
“Who carry music in their heart
Through dusty lane and wrangling mart,
Plying their daily task with busier feet,
Because their secret souls a holier strain repeat.”
It would be interesting to have the statistics of what number, out of all the human stream that pours into the city every morning coming to their work, are singing inwardly.
 
How many are thinking tunefully? How many are moving rhythmically? And how many are going, as dead drays and carts, rumbling lifelessly to their tasks?
 
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It is good that the greater part of the world is in love. For love is the Song of Songs. To the young lover Nature is transformed. Some Ithuriel has touched the deadly commonplace; all is miraculous. The moon, the dead companion to our earth, the pale and washed-out pilgrim of the sky, has been changed into a silver-fronted fairy whose beams thrill him with a heady enchantment. Every breeze has its secret. The woods, the houses, all men and women are notes of that sweet harmony that fills him.
 
“Orpheus with his lute made trees,
And the mountain tops that freeze,
Bow their heads when he did sing.”
Every man is an Orpheus, so he but carry about in him an inward melody. There is for him “a new heaven and a new earth.”
 
This world is an insolvable puzzle to human reason. It is full of the most absurd 48 antinomies, the most distressing cruelties, the most amazing contradictions. No wonder men’s minds take refuge in stubborn stoicism, in agnosticism, in blank unfaith.
 
There is no intellectual faith, no rational creed, no logical belief. FAITH COMES ONLY THROUGH MUSIC. It is when the heart sings that the mind is cleared. Then the pieces of the infinite chaos of things drop into order, confusion ceases, they march, dance, coming into radiant concord.
 
Marcus Aurelius, that curious anomaly of the Roman world, perfect dreamer in an age of iron, was rich in inner music. The thought in him beamed like a ray of creative harmony over the disordered crowd of men and events.
 
“Welcome all that comes,” he wrote, “untoward though it may seem, for it leads you 49 to the goal, the health of the world order. Nothing will happen to me that is not in accord with nature.”
 
None but so noble a mind can see a noble universe, a noble humanity, a noble God.
 
What a drop from such a level to the place of the mad sensualists and pleasure-mongers who only know
 
“To seize on life’s dull joys from a strange fear,
Lest losing them all’s lost and none remains!”
What a whirl of cabaret music, what motion and forced laughter, what wild discord of hot viands, drugged drinks, and myriad-tricked lubricity it takes to galvanize us when our souls are dry and cracked and tuneless!
 
Have you ever had the feelings of Hazlitt? “Give me,” he said, “the clear blue 50 sky over my head and the green turf beneath my feet, a winding road before me, and a three hours’ march to dinner—and then to thinking! I laugh, I run, I leap, I sing for joy.”
 
Whoever does something that makes the souls of men and women sing within them does more to make this earth habitable and this life tolerable than all the army of them that widen our comforts and increase our luxuries.
IDLENESS THE MOTHER OF PROGRESS
 Idleness is the mother of progress. So long as men were busy they had no time to think of bettering their condition.
 
Idleness is the mother of art. It was when men had leisure from the chase that they decorated the handles of their hunting-knives and the walls of their cave-dwellings.
 
Idleness is the mother of religion. It is in the relax and rebound from toil that men think of God.
 
We talk of all men’s right to work. There is a deeper right than that. It is the right to idleness.
 
The value of what we put upon the page 52 of life depends upon the width of the margin.
 
The great, useful, redeeming, and lasting work of the world is that work which is a reaction from idleness. The continent of labor is barren. It is the little island of labor that is green and fruitful in the sea of leisure.
 
The curse of America is its deification of labor. Our little gods are the men who are ceaselessly forthputting.
 
Most of all we deify capital, which never rests, but goes on producing day and night.
 
We are so occupied in getting ready to live that we have lost the art of living.
 
With us a man is a fool if he sets about to enjoy himself before he has laid up a fortune. We count the woman happy when she has married money, and the child accursed when he has no inheritance.
 
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Every morning we arise from our beds and charge bloodthirstily into the struggle. We all do it, millionaires and paupers. In his office the trust magnate sits at his scheming until his nerves are loosed, his arteries hardened, and his soul caked. The slaves of Rome never worked so hard as many of our laborers in mines and factories.
 
“After the Semitic fashion,” says Remy de Goncourt, “you make even the women work. Rich and poor, all alike, you know nothing of the joys of leisure.”
 
There ought to be two leisure classes, yea three: all children under twenty-one, all women, and all men over sixty.
 
The work of the world could be easily done by males between the ages of twenty-one and sixty. To accomplish this, all that is needed is to abolish militarism, that insane burden of men in idleness, abolish all piled-up 54 wealth-units that keep husky males workless, and abolish our worship of activity.
 
Then there would be plenty of work for every man to keep him from want, and plenty of leisure for every man to preserve in him a living soul.
 
If I were czar of the world, no woman should work except as she might elect for her amusement; no child should do aught but play.
 
Among savages the women do all the work. In the coming civilization they shall do none. The progress of the race is the progress of the female from toil to leisure.
 
Every woman is a possible mother. She should have only to grow and to be strong. She should be the real aristocracy, the real Upper Class, to give culture and beauty to life. She should have time to attend to the duties of her eternal priesthood.
 
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As for man, little by little, he also would lift himself from the killing grind of monotonous exertion. For he would make Steam and Electricity, and other giants not yet discovered, do the dirty work.
 
To bring all this to pass, you do not need to devise any cunning scheme of government, nor to join any party or specious ism. You need do only one thing.
 
And that is to establish Justice.
 
The end of fraud and wrong is fevered toil. The end of justice is the superior product of skill and genius, and their mother, leisure.
SELF-CURE
 “How,” writes a lady to me, “can I remove the following difficulties from my path?
 
“How can I overcome the lazy habit of oversleeping in the morning—laziness in general, in fact?
 
“How can I overcome the fear and worry habit?
 
“How can I ‘let go’ of the thoughts of past disappointments, mistakes, etc? I have tried all manner of ways to divert my mind by work and study.
 
“Do you believe in confession, in the case of a non-Catholic, for the purpose of relieving the mind?
 
“How can I overcome prejudice? I find 57 I am prejudiced against certain sects and races.”
 
Rather a stiff task, to answer all these questions. Of course, I cannot “answer” them fully. All I or any one can do is to give a few hints which may be useful.
 
Oversleeping is not necessarily laziness. Go to bed earlier, if you have to rise at a certain hour. It’s a safe rule to take all the sleep you can get. The rule in my own family is, “Let the sleepy sleep.”
 
Laziness is not a bad quality always. A lazy body often houses a most energetic mind. The real cure for physical laziness is fun; find some form of exercise that lures you. Mental laziness is a more difficult disease, and you can only cure it by taking yourself severely in hand. Usually, I should say, it is hopeless.
 
Fear can generally be mitigated, if not 58 altogether removed, by intelligence. It is a by-product of ignorance, as a rule. We are afraid of what we don’t know. Science (knowledge) has done much to alleviate superstition (ignorance).
 
Worry can only be remedied by adopting some rational theory of life, some common-sense philosophy. Maeterlinck and Emerson have done me more good, as worry-antidotes, than any other masters.
 
How to “let go” of bedevilling thoughts is a hard problem. Thoughts that burn, stew, ferment, and torment—who has not suffered from them? About all I can do is to let them run their course. I say, “This too shall pass!” and try to bear up against the pestiferous imaginings and memories until they wear themselves out.
 
It is also a good idea to have some attractive, interesting, fascinating vision, of a 59 pleasant nature, to which we can turn our minds when annoying suggestions persist. The author of “Alice in Wonderland” (who was a great mathematician) used to work out geometrical tasks, which he called “pillow problems” (and wrote a book of that name), to get himself to sleep. Can’t you find some alluring things to think of when wooing slumber? Call for them, and by and by they will come.
 
Do I believe in confession? Nothing can so purge the soul. Still, it must be exercised with the extremest care, judgment, and discretion, else you may harm others in pacifying yourself.
 
“How can I overcome prejudices against such and such sects or races?” Just repeat over and over to yourself that all prejudice is stupid and ignorant. By and by you will, by auto-suggestion, get it into your subconsciousness 60 that prejudice shall have no place in you.
 
Prejudice means “judging before” you have the facts. Never judge till after you have the facts.
 
Nothing is so utterly devoid of reason as a passionate hatred of any race or class. All men are much the same when you come to know them. Class or race faults are superficial. The human qualities strike deep.
PERSONAL INFLUENCE
 Of all the forces that drive human beings, the greatest is personal influence.
 
By personal influence I mean that force that goes out from you, simply by virtue of what you are. It has nothing to do with what you do or say or try, except as these things express what you are.
 
Every person sends out what we might call dynamic rays or invisible electric-like impulses which are of such nature as to affect other persons. These rays from me can make other individuals gay or sad, good or bad, and so forth.
 
This is the only power that pulls souls, the only wind that bends them, the only fire 62 that warms them, the only stream that bears them along.
 
Emerson said that “what you are preaches so loudly that I cannot hear what you say”; which is a striking way of stating that one’s unconscious influence far outreaches in effect one’s conscious effort.
 
It would be well if we would keep this in mind; it would save us a lot of futile busying.
 
For instance, reformers bent on saving the world should not be so hot and impatient seeing that there is no real saving that ever has been or ever will be done that is not the result of the influence radiating from good people.
 
Laws are dead and wooden, but when a man incarnates a law it begins to work on other men. The “Word” is of no force until it is “made Flesh.”
 
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It is the personal influence of a teacher that affects all the real educating of the pupil. The wise man understood this who said that the best university was “a log with Mark Hopkins on one end and me on the other.”
 
I sometimes doubt if any real good has ever been done by didactic teaching or preaching. All the moral maxims in the world are poor beside one strong, sweet, normal life. And a good woman is worth, as a guide, the most select list of “virtues and their opposite vices.”
 
To create such a character in fiction as “John Halifax” or “Jean Valjean” or “Little Nellie” or the man in the “Third Floor Back,” is to exert a lasting and potent uplift agency, better than a thousand sermons.
 
It is fascinating to many minds, the idea of “doing good” and “working for the 64 Lord,” and devoting one’s time wholly to inducing people to become better; but it is not practical. The only way to improve mankind is to be something that inspires them; your argument and exhortation are of small avail. Just as the only way to dispel darkness is to shine, and the only way to electrify iron is to be a magnet.
 
Goodness is a contagion; we must “catch” it, we must have it and “give” it.
 
When you say in your creed that you believe in God, your declaration is of no help to you or to others unless what you mean is this: That you believe in the inherent potency of goodness, that it will live down, outwear, and destroy evil; that justice, cleanliness, honesty, and kindness will win in the long run against fraud, dirt, lying, and cruelty; and that persons who are upright and altruistic get more joy out of every 65 minute of their lives than idle, sporty, and self-coddling folk; and that there is altogether a vast tidal or subterranean movement in the human race toward health, strength, and beauty.
 
Therefore why worry over what you will say or do, since it makes no matter? Simply BE right, and then say whatever comes to your mind, and do whatever comes to your hand, and you cannot fail to do the most possible toward helping along.
 
MONEY-MAKERS
 Anybody can save; only a few can make money.
 
All you have to do, to save money, is to spend less than you get. And any human being that is healthy and “compos mentis” can live on, say, nine-tenths of what he is now living on and put by the other tenth. There may be exceptions to this rule; we must grant that for the severely accurate, but they are scarce as hen’s teeth. It is safe to say that those who say they need every cent of what they make, and that it is impossible to save anything at all, are victims of self-pity, weak will, and bad management.
 
And saving money is about all that most 67 of us can do. And that makes few rich.
 
If I make ten dollars a week I can lay aside one dollar. If I make a thousand dollars a week I may bank nine hundred and ninety dollars of it (though I certainly would not). But in either case I wouldn’t get rich.
 
Rich people are not those who earn large salaries. They are those who handle money, who make money earn money.
 
Of course, in this argument we exclude two classes—those who have money given them, by inheritance or otherwise, and those who get money by chance. These two classes merely step into money some one else has made.
 
But very few people get rich, for the simple reason that money-making requires a certain order of genius. Money-makers are born. They have a natural gift.
 
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They are like poets, mechanicians, orators, artists, in that they are endowed by their Creator with a peculiar capacity.
 
The money-makers are the real kings of modern life, because vulgarly we measure all things, including human worth, by dollars.
 
If you make ten thousand dollars a year at your job it is only because your employer is making more than that amount out of your services. He is the player; you are the chessman. He is the general; you are the private.
 
The best thing for us workers to do is to let money-making alone. Nine times out of ten when we go into that game we are stung.
 
Wall Street is strewn with the corpses of lambs who thought they could outwit the cunning old wolves that hunt there.
 
Many a shopkeeper has been ruined trying 69 to get rich, not realizing that he is not a money-maker, but a money-earner.
 
And many and many a widow has lost all her insurance money by imagining that, being possessed of a tidy lump sum, she could increase it rapidly by shrewd investment. She does not understand that in speculating in real estate or buying stocks she is pitting her inexperience against genius and trained ability.
 
Let the natural-born money-makers make money. Let us, you and me, content ourselves with the only thing wherein we have a prospect of sure success—that is, saving money.
 
Sometimes the money-making faculty is a racial heritage, as among the Hebrews. Sometimes it runs in a family, and sometimes it appears sporadically, and a money-making genius crops out in the most unexpected 70 place, just as a Lincoln, a Napoleon, or a Leonardo comes from a commonplace environment.
 
The thing for us to remember is that getting rich is but one small way in which human endeavor succeeds; that those who achieve riches are by no means certainly happy, and that their power to acquire luxuries is usually destructive to character.
 
And to remember also that the money-saver, if he be intelligent and if he have common sense and philosophy, is practically assured of contentment.
THE SUPREME MOMENT
 “But Leonardo,” says one writing upon the genius of the incomparable da Vinci, “will never work till the happy moment comes—that moment of bien-etre (feeling just fit) which to imaginative men is a moment of invention. On this moment he waits; other moments are but a preparation or after-taste of it.”
 
There are two kinds of work to be done in the world, which may be called routine work and creative work.
 
By routine work we mean the tending of machines, the discharge of office duties, and the maintenance of the ordinary; which includes care of engines, ploughing, housework, answering letters and keeping accounts, 72 tending the sick, digging mines, building bridges, and the like. All these—and the lives of all of us comprise such functions—are to be done whether we feel like it or not. The trombone-player in the band must go on, though his heart is lead. The servant must sweep the floors, no matter how the listless Spring has got into her blood. And the doctor must make his calls, the policeman walk his beat, and the elevator-boy run his car, for they are cogs in the social wheel.
 
By creative work we mean the writing of stories, the composition of music, the painting of pictures, the modelling of statues, the singing of songs, and doings of such quality.
 
These acts should await the supreme moment. Leonardo used to rush clear across Milan, when he was engaged in painting “The Last Supper” in the little out-of-the-way 73 church of S. M. delle Grazie, just to make three or four strokes with his brush, to add a touch that had occurred to him. That is one reason why the picture, now faded, is yet epochal in art.
 
One trouble with story magazines is that they are issued regularly. The ideal publication would appear “every little while.” One does claim to, but it is a fraud, for it is a regular monthly.
 
What a blessing if nobody wrote a story unless he had a story to write; if no parson preached unless the fire burned within him; if nobody made a political speech unless he were as white-hot as Patrick Henry when he gave his “Liberty or death” oration; if nobody played the piano or gave forth a song unless the compelling inspiration were there; if nobody built a house except to realize a beautiful dream, nor painted a picture 74 except to grasp and fix an entrancing vision.
 
Creative work is the scarcest in the world. And the most underpaid. And the amount of hard work a man puts upon a thing is no gauge of its value—often quite the contrary—for it is the same shrewd Leonardo who observed, Quante piu un’ arte porte seco fatica di corpo, tanto piu e vile, or “The more bodily fatigue goes into a work of art, the viler it is.”
 
Men must work. In the forepart of the Scriptures it is laid down that “in the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread,” and such labor perhaps will always be the most part of the world’s work.
 
But in the latter part of the Scriptures it is said that “man shall not live by bread alone,” and that sustenance other than bread, that diviner food that sustains souls, 75 and the ghost-wine that cheers them, is not produced by sweating labor at all, should not be called work, but is a sort of glorious PLAY.
 
Art, craftsmanship, inspiration—no one can work at such things; they are essentially play, the joy (and not work, the pain) of self-forthputting.
 
And one supreme moment is worth a lifetime.
EFFICIENCY
 Make good! Don’t explain! Do the thing you are expected to do! Don’t waste time in giving reasons why you didn’t, or couldn’t, or wouldn’t, or shouldn’t!
 
If I hire you to cook for me I expect my chops and baked potatoes on time, done to a turn and appetizing; I am not interested in the butcher’s mistake, nor the stove’s defect, nor in the misery in your left arm. I want food, not explanations. You can’t eat explanations.
 
If I hire you to take care of my automobile, or factory, or shirtwaist counter, I do not want to hear why things are half-done; I want results.
 
So also if you come to me and hire me to 77 do a job of writing by the fifteenth of the month, you do not want me to show up on that day with a moving-picture story describing how I couldn’t do what I was paid for. You want the writing, and you want it first class, all wool and a yard wide.
 
This is cold, cruel, heartless talk. It is—to all second-raters and shirkers. But to real men it is a joy and gladness. They rejoice to make good themselves, they expect others to make good, and they like to hear preached the gospel of making good.
 
Mr. Yust, the Rochester librarian, in his report some time ago, spoke of the Parable of the Talents, in which we are told of the “three servants who had received talents, five, two and one, respectively. On the Master’s return they all rendered account of their stewardship. The first two had doubled their capital. Each of them said so in fourteen 78 words, and their work was pronounced, ‘Well done, good and faithful servant.’ Servant number three had accomplished absolutely nothing, but he made a full report in forty-two words, three times as long as the other reports.”
 
There you have it. The less you do the more you explain.
 
EFFICIENCY!
 
Learn that word by heart. Get to saying it in your sleep.
 
Of all the joys on this terrestrial sphere, there is none quite so soul-satisfying and so one-hundred-per-centish as MAKING GOOD.
 
Do your work a little better than any one else could do it. That is the margin of success.
 
Making good needs no foot-notes.
 
Failure requires forty-two words.
A DULL DAY
 The sun may be shining when you read this, but it was a dull day when it was written.
 
The sky is an ugly, drab smudge. There is no sun, no rain, no wind, nothing.
 
Across the street is a house. It is a stupid house, full of stupid people. I know them. I wish I didn’t. There are many people you are sorry to have met.
 
It’s too close to have a fire and too cold to do without one. Is anything hollower and drearier than a fireless fireplace?
 
A bird is on a tree outdoors. He is not singing. His head is all drawn down into his shoulders. He is just sitting there hating himself.
 
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A number of people have passed by the window. They are the dullest, homeliest bunch of human creatures I ever saw. I hate them all.
 
A crash—the hired girl has just smashed one of our best plates, an extra fine Sunday plate with gold on it. The only reason I don’t go out and give her a dressing-down is because I hate to move.
 
Why move? Such a day as this you are no happier anywhere than where you are. If you must be miserable why spread it around?
 
Old Mrs. Grumpet has just called. She has told the missus for the nth time about her troubles. She has all the diseases she ever heard of. As soon as she hears of a new one she goes and has it. She has more symptoms than a patent-medicine almanac. And it’s all along of that blue mass she took 81 just before Austey was born. She’s a dreadful, vast, steamy creature.
 
She has left an aroma of added wretchedness in the house. We opened the window to admit some fresh air, and the flies came in. I loathe flies.
 
I chased them with a fly-swatter and broke an expensive vase. All vases must some day be shattered, as all men must die.
 
All women must die, too, and all children, also all dogs, cats, horses, cows, and grizzly bears. A hundred years from now everybody and everything will be dead. There will be a new crop. After awhile they, too, will die. What’s the use?
 
The gas-stove is out of fix this morning. So am I. So is the universe.
 
There is no news in the paper. Newspapers are all poor. Why read? Aren’t you miserable enough as you are?
 
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I am trying to have a vacation and enjoy myself. This morning I played a game of tennis and was beaten by a poor boob that played worse than I. Then I played two games of solitaire. Lost both.
 
I went to the cupboard to see——. Nothing there but grape-juice.
 
The weather is thickening. It is going to rain. It is hours and hours till bedtime.
 
THE LITTLE GOD OF HAPPY ENDINGS
 Some woman who knows how to tell a story sends me the following:
 
This is a fairy-story, but it is not about a princess; princesses are always wonderfully beautiful and wise and good, and the little girl in this story was a rather silly little girl.
 
She lived in a little house, on a great highway, and watched and waited for the coming of the prince for whom all girls, big and small, great princesses and poor silly little spinners, watch and wait.
 
Many people passed the little house by the roadside, as they travelled along the great highway. Once or twice the girl who 84 watched thought she saw the prince in the distance, but always as he approached the likeness faded. Then came one traveller, who tarried for a while at the little house. He came quietly, unostentatiously, and the prince was to come riding on a white charger, clothed in the splendor of purple and gold. So she hid herself under a cloak until the traveller again set out on the great highway, alone.
 
But after he had gone she saw that he had left a shadow behind him, and for some contrary, woman-reason, she hid it, and guarded it carefully, in case he should return and claim it.
 
The days became weeks—the weeks months—the months years, and the prince did not appear. Gradually she gave up the hope of him ever appearing, and no longer watched for him, but occupied her days instead 85 with wholesome labor. And now she was no longer a silly little girl, but a lonely woman.
 
One evening she stood in the doorway, watching the sunset. The highway was quite deserted, save for one lone traveller, off in the distance, who seemed vaguely familiar. As he approached, she recognized in him the one who had tarried at her dwelling almost five years before.
 
She went back into the house, to get the shadow from its secret hiding-place, to return it to him. But when she had opened the door of the little room where she kept it she suddenly realized that she did not want to give it up. She had kept it so long, and had grown so used to considering it hers, that she never realized how precious it had become until she had to part with it. She went to the door once more and looked out 86 upon the highway. He was quite near now, and as she stared at him she saw with wonder what she had been blind to before—he was her prince!
 
She wanted to run out to meet him, with a great joy in her heart and a glad cry on her lips, but she was bound by convention. And she was filled with a great fear, lest he should pass by, merely thinking of her as a silly little girl who had hidden herself when he came the first time and let him go on alone. And she decided that, as she was not allowed to reveal herself to him, neither would she attempt to stop him and return the shadow which was rightly his, but would at least keep that, to help make the coming years less lonely.
 
And that is the end of this fairy-story. And after all, I am not sure that it is a REAL fairy-story, because most fairy-stories 87 end—“And they lived happy ever after.”
 
Perhaps you, who are so much wiser than the silly little woman, can think of a better ending for it.
 
I thank you, dear unknown sender of this tale, for your pretty compliment. If in any way I might claim to be wiser than you, or than any one who feels destiny has cheated him, it is because I have ceased to seek the shrine of the Little Cheating God of Happy Endings, and visit rather the Great God of Day by Day.
THE ART OF HAPPY MEMORY
 
 
The most significant step a mind takes is that wherein it realizes that it can control its own operation; when it learns that it can command those things in itself commonly considered automatic.
 
And in nothing does this appear with such striking results to happiness as in the discovery of one’s power to manage his memory.
 
Most people think they remember what they remember, and that is all there is to it. But it is possible to make memory a servant, and restrain its mastery.
 
In Italy a rare motto was found by Hazlitt upon a sun-dial: Horas non numero nisi serenas—“I mark only the shining hours.”
 
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The man whose increase of contentment is most assured, as he grows older, is the one who has discovered how to enjoy his past.
 
To many of us the past is always sad. We turn from it with impatience. “Man never is, but always to be, blest.” Naturally this habit of mind sees in the ever-shortening future nothing but tragedy. Accept, then, these hints on how to handle your past.
 
First, whatever it is, has been; it has brought you here. Your condition may not be all your impudent claims on the universe demand, but it might be worse. Better men than you are in jail, are stricken with unceasing pain. Better men than you have been hanged.
 
Out of the worst experiences you have had you may reap satisfaction. The dangers, sicknesses, accidents, and losses, one 90 who understands the art of living finds in the recalling of even these a certain thankfulness. Is there not pleasure in recounting your narrow escape?
 
You have had your pangs and pains; but the wise man knows that out of these have come his richest crops of understanding. Life has its stripes; but they are its healing.
 
The past is largely made by the present. If you are now soured and disappointed you are quite hopeless, for your diseased memory will go over your past and pick out from it only miserable things. But if you have adjusted yourself, if with a courageous heart you are trying to make the best of conditions as they are, your memory will aid you, and bring you stores of happy incidents.
 
Your past is the strongest asset of your present judgment. It is your best teacher. 91 Only from it do you learn whatever shrewdness you have in dealing with events.
 
Learn to forgive yourself, not in folly, but in a sane charity. The things you did wrong, the failures and mistakes, consider them as part of that tutelage of destiny that goes toward your present equipment.
 
What has happened to you has happened to all men. The question is, will you cull from it flowers or thorns?
 
“Everything considered,” says Renan, “there are few situations in the vast field of existence where the balance of debt and credit does not leave a little surplus of happiness.”
 
We have crossed the years. We are here. We have escaped what perils! We have landed with what residue of wisdom and of hope!
SUBCONSCIOUS FEARS
 A young man writes me that he is afraid of thunderstorms, and asks if there is no way for him to overcome this weakness. “I am normal in every other respect,” he adds, “but notwithstanding my endeavors to fight off this nervousness I find it to be of no avail; it appears to be a sort of subconscious fear.”
 
This is not a matter of ridicule, but a sample of very real and acute suffering to which many persons are subject by fear-panics due to various causes.
 
Many women scream with terror at the sight of a mouse. There is no use telling them that mice will not hurt them. So doing, you are addressing their reason, while 93 the trouble lies not in their intelligence—it is a nervous disease. They scare just as a horse shies at a newspaper flapping in the wind.
 
C?sar Augustus was almost convulsed at the sound of thunder.
 
Tycho Brahe changed color and his legs shook under him on meeting a rabbit.
 
Dr. Samuel Johnson would never enter a room left foot first.
 
Talleyrand trembled at the mention of the word—death.
 
Marshal Saxe was mortally afraid of a cat.
 
Peter the Great could never be persuaded to cross a bridge, and, though he tried to master his terror, was unable to do so.
 
I myself have never been able to rid myself of a fear of horses, and the tamest old nag gives me the creeps.
 
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And I know a senior in Wellesley College, a young lady of strong intelligence, who could be sent almost into convulsions by showing her a spider or a caterpillar.
 
To determine the cause of these fear-obsessions is a business for the psychologist. They seem to have nothing to do with the mind or the will, but to be, as my correspondent suggests, rooted somewhere in the subconsciousness.
 
That these weaknesses can be entirely eradicated in a grown person is doubtful. It is about as difficult to uproot an ingrained fear as to get rid of a distaste for mutton. Certain strong natures can perhaps cure themselves, but the average man has to accommodate himself to his weakness and resist it the best he can.
 
But the cruel part of this whole matter is that almost all of these fears are 95 TAUGHT US WHEN WE ARE CHILDREN. Many a child’s mind is deliberately poisoned by fear-suggestions that are to plague him his life long.
 
Whoever threatens a child, or frightens a child by the fear of thunder or lightning or the dark or ghosts or the bad man or death or hell or a vindictive Deity, should be flogged.
 
Many a delicate child has been more horribly tormented by suggested fears than he could ever have been hurt by corporal punishment.
 
The most deeply moral lesson any mother can instil into her child is that he be UNAFRAID—of anything in life or death. And whoso teaches a child a fear has made an incurable wound in his soul.
LAYING UP
 The thrifty man lays up money for his old age. The farmer lays up fodder for his winter feeding. The medical student lays up information for use in his future practise. The intelligent, by due exercise and diet, lay up health, and the wastrel lays up trouble and disease by his excesses.
 
All of us lay up something, willy-nilly.
 
It is a good idea to ask one’s self, in considering any act we are about to perform, not only what will be the immediate pleasure in it, but what sort of product we are laying up for ourselves by it.
 
We are always coming into our inheritance from our past deeds.
 
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Maeterlinck says, “There is one thing that can never turn into suffering, and that is the good we have done.”
 
This day you may have to decide between doing a thing that will gain you a thousand dollars and a thing that will cost you ten. In making up your mind it is well to take into consideration what happiness dividend the transaction is going to bring you ten years from now.
 
The world you live in is formed on the laying-up principle. Nature gains her ends as a child learns to walk and talk, by infinite repetitions. She does the same thing over and over. She is eternally learning how.
 
Think how many centuries she practised in fish-flappers, bird-wings, and animal fore-legs until she could make a human arm.
 
Let the scientist tell you of the infinite 98 trials that preceded the formation of an eye, an ear, a human brain.
 
The efficiency of every age depends upon what was laid up for it by the ages gone before. This age of coal and petroleum rests upon the long cycles of the carboniferous era, when summer after summer giant trees grew and fell, and in the crucible of earth were changed to coal and oil!
 
Nature never forgets. She never drops a stitch. What she does now is a part of what she has in mind for ten thousand years from now. The plan of the oak is in the acorn.
 
“The books were opened,” says the Apocalypse, describing the Day of Judgment, “and the dead were judged out of the things that were written in the books.” This parable is but a picture of the scientist’s declaration that our EVERY ACT 99 LEAVES ITS RUT IN THE BRAIN, making us prone to repeat; what we feel today we more readily feel tomorrow; every functioning of body or mind, in fact, having memory-making as a by-product. The whole process looks toward a future man.
 
Creation is cumulative. That is the meaning of evolution.
 
The human race is cumulative. That we learn from reading history.
 
The individual life is cumulative. Every day is for future days. Every sensation and every act of will, everything I do, has a bearing upon the me that shall be ten years from this time—a thousand, a million years hence—who knows?
 
Hence, if any one chooses to believe that, after this long getting-ready, Nature is going to throw me, body and soul, back into the scrap-heap, let him believe it.
 
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Nature ought to have as much sense as I have. And I certainly would not go to all the pains Nature takes in preparing a human spirit only to fling my product at last into the ditch.
 
HUMAN FLIES
 Oh for a human fly-swatter! That is, for some sort of a swatter that would obliterate the human fly.
 
The most prominent trait of a fly is his ability and disposition to bother. He is essential, concentrated botheraciousness.
 
He is the arch intruder. He is the type of the unwelcome. His business is to make you quit what you are doing and attend to him.
 
He makes the busy cook cease her bread-making to shoo him away. He disturbs the sleeper to brush him off. He is president and chairman of the executive committee of the amalgamated association of all pesterers, irritators, and nuisances.
 
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The human fly is the male or female of the genus homo who is like the housefly.
 
Some children are flies. They are so ill bred and undisciplined that they perpetually annoy their mother until her nerves are frazzled, and make life miserable for any guests that may be in the house. It may be well to be kind and thoughtful toward the little darlings, but the first lesson a child should be taught is to govern himself as not to be a bother.
 
There are respectful, considerate, and unobtrusive children alas—too few!
 
There are fly wives. Realizing their own pettiness they gain their revenge by systematically irritating the husband. They make a weapon of their weakness. They soon acquire the art of pestering, nipping, and buzzing, keep the man in a perpetual temper, and blame him for it. You can’t talk to 103 them. Nothing can cure them but an eleven-foot swatter. And these are not for sale.
 
Some men are just as bad. Married to a superior woman such a man is inwardly galled by his own conscious inferiority. So he bedevils her in ways indirect. He enjoys seeing her in a state of suppressed indignation. He keeps her on edge. His persecution is all the more unbearable because it is the unconscious expression of his fly nature. Also for him there is no cure but to wait till he lights some time and swat him with some giant, Gargantuan swatter. And they’re all out of these, too, at the store.
 
There are office flies, likewise, who get into your room, occupy your extra chair, and buzz you for an hour upon some subject that you don’t care a whoop in Halifax about. Your inherent politeness prevents you from kicking them out, humanity will 104 not let you poison them, and there is a law against shooting them. There ought to be an open season for office flies.
 
Where the human flies are proudest in their function of pestiferousness, however, is in a meeting. Wherever you have a conference, a committee meeting, or a convention, there they buzz, tickle, and deblatterate. They keep the majority waiting while they air their incoherence. They suggest, amend, and raise objections. They never do anything; it is their business to annoy people who do things.
 
I do not wish to seem unkind to my fellow-creatures, but it does seem as if to all legislatures, conventions, and other gatherings there should be an anteroom where the human flies could be gently but efficaciously swatted.
 
There are Senate flies, as well as House 105 flies, politicians whose notion of their duty appears to be that they should vex, tantalize, and heckle the opposing party at every point.
 
There are fly newspapers, whose only policy seems to be petty, vicious annoyance.
 
There are fly preachers, with a cheap efficiency in diatribe and sarcasm, and no wholesome, constructive message.
 
There are fly school-teachers, who hector and scold; fly pupils, who find and fasten upon the teacher’s sensitive spot; fly beggars, who will not be put aside; fly reformers, who can only make trouble; fly neighbors, who cannot mind their own business; fly shopkeepers, who will not let you buy what you want.
 
And the name of the devil himself is Beelzebub; which being interpreted means “Lord of Flies.”
 
KEEP FIT
 Ford, the automobile man, stated in his testimony before the Industrial Commission that he gets more and better work out of men at eight hours a day than at ten.
 
It is a law that holds good everywhere. The first duty of a worker is to keep himself fit. And an hour’s labor when he is up to the mark, bright, keen, and enthusiastic, is worth three hours’ effort when he is fagged.
 
“Keeping everlastingly at it brings success” is a lying motto; it rather brings poor results, slipshod products, and paresis.
 
Rest and recreation are the best parts of labor. They are the height to which the hammer is lifted; and the force of the blow depends on that height. To go ahead without 107 let-up is to deliver only a succession of feeble, ineffective blows.
 
Get all the sleep you can. Stay abed all day occasionally. Learn to be lazy, to dawdle, to enjoy an empty mind; then, when you are called to effort, you can hit with ten times the power.
 
The higher the quality of your work, the more necessary it is that you approach it only when you are at your best.
 
This is especially true of intellectual effort. You can tell, when you read a story or an article, whether it is tainted with exhaustion; it is dull, lifeless putty.
 
Those who court the quality of brightness, but do not keep their bodies in trim, often resort to artificial stimulants. Stephen Crane said that the best literature could be divided into two classes: whisky and opium.
 
Intelligent people ought not need to be 108 told that this is suicide. The best form of enthusiasm is the natural reaction of one’s system after a period of relaxation.
 
The pestiferous “work-while-you-rest” apostles are ever after us to “improve our spare time,” study French during lunch, geometry while going to sleep, and history during recess. But spare time ought to be wasted, not improved.
 
An hour or so at the ball-game, a contest at tennis, a long and aimless walk, a party at cards, a chess match, or a time spent in jolly talk with friends are not waste; they mean restored strength, upbuilt mental acumen, the doubling of efficiency when work is to do.
 
Learn to let go. Learn to relax utterly when you sit down. Learn to let every faculty lie down when you lie down, and rest whether you sleep or not.
 
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The more thoroughly you do nothing when there is nothing to do, the better you can do something when there is something to do.
 
The very cream of life comes from rest. The blush, the aroma, the shine of your best work lie in the hours of idleness massed behind it. The secret of brilliant work is in throwing every atom of your reserve force into it. Perpetual exertion begets mediocrity.
 
“Keep fit.”
 
That is a better rule than “Keep at it.”
THE SPIRITUAL STEAM-ROLLER
 The secret of prophecy is to find what is right, and prophesy that.
 
It is very simple. What is wrong will go down.
 
The cosmic spiritual laws are just as accurate, just as sure-footed, as the laws of gravitation and chemical reaction.
 
Any institution that is founded on non-facts, any government that is maintained in violation of plain human rights, any system, any propaganda, that depends upon cheating, lying, or injustice, is certain at length to fail.
 
The certainty of the defeat of Prussian militarism is not based on its inferiority in numbers, wealth, and resources, but upon 111 the moral rottenness of its ideas. It will come to grief, not because of its lack of force—it would make no difference if it were a hundred times stronger—but because it is based on principles which to humanity are intolerable.
 
If the Hohenzollern crowd had met no resistance in Belgium, if they had conquered Paris as they hoped, if they had crushed England, if they had realized to the full their dream of dominance over Europe and the whole world, their structure would have crumbled just the same, because it would have been reared upon violence, inhumanity, faithlessness, and fraud.
 
In the little affairs of a day it seems sometimes as if the wicked prosper. The gambler is flush, the lecher flourishes, the swindler gets away with his swag, and the pirate, the assassin, and the robber feast on their booty. 112 But when this sort of thing is stretched out over any considerable space of time or territory, so that the cosmic laws, which move slowly, have a chance, it is sure to break down.
 
What we call righteousness and justice is just as much a part of nature as the physical laws. It is just as true and certain that lying brings disgrace, robbery cannot be made a permanent basis of business, uncleanness ends in shame, tyranny brings revolution, and cruelty eventuates in counter-cruelty and insecurity, as that water runs down hill and flame mounts upward.
 
It is the glory of the Hebrew that he first saw and made clear to the world these spiritual verities. His Bible is a book of spiritual chemistry and physics.
 
When he said that “the ungodly shall not stand,” “the covenant with hell shall be disannulled,” 113 “though hand join in hand the wicked shall not go unpunished,” and “be not deceived, God is not mocked, for whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap,” he was not indulging in sentiment, but he had a real vision of cosmic law.
 
It was the supreme genius of Jesus that He saw the majestic certainty and fatefulness of this law, and recommended to His followers that they let it alone, and trust in it.
 
“Vengeance is mine, I will avenge, saith the Lord.” Time, evolution, destiny, nature, God—all these flow onward as irresistible tides, and even the inventive ferocity of an efficient nation gone mad cannot stop nor delay them.
 
The Prussian military steam-roller could only get so far, then it had to stop. The steam-roller of spiritual law carries on.
HEAVEN
 I have discovered where heaven is.
 
Wherever you are, it is somewhere else.
 
It is the land of the unattainable, the island that has never been discovered, the shore no ship has ever reached.
 
Who has found that moment, spoken of by Goethe, where one can say, “Let this moment last forever”?
 
We were sitting on the top of the mountain, on the platform in front of the little inn, Anushka and I, looking far out over the successive ranges of the Sierras that extended wave-like everywhere. The sun was brilliant. The air was warm. Around us was spread a panorama as beautiful as mortal eyes had ever seen. I was about to ask 115 Anushka if she was happy, when she pointed to a spot over the farthest peaks where the clouds touched the mountain-tops and a gleam of sunshine blessed them, and said:
 
“There! My soul is yonder. Do you see that spot? It is the dwelling-place of light ineffable. All is peace and joy there. I think that must be heaven.”
 
“You are right,” I answered. “That is heaven—from here. But when you get there you will find it only mist. From here those clouds are white and gold, and angels fly among them. If you could reach them you would find it bleak and cold, with only rocks and snow-drifts and desolation about you.
 
“Then perhaps you might see, farther on in the distance, another point full of glory. If you flew to that you would find your glory-point just as far away as ever.
 
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“So heaven flies before us. To us heaven is on Venus, or Saturn, or Arcturus; to the inhabitants of those spheres, who knows? Maybe heaven is on Tellus.”
 
“That,” she said, “seems a bitter view.”
 
“Not at all,” I returned. “It is the only view that makes happiness eternal. The one everlasting faculty of mankind is anticipation. The one inexhaustible fountain of joy is hope. Those whose happiness is located in the land of hope will always be happy.
 
“Heaven is in the future, because the future is infinite. Besides, the future is the only time when we can be happy without alloy. The past, even as to the pleasantest moments of it, is always a little sad. So no one’s heaven is in the past. The present is fleeting, sinking every minute into the darkness of the past. So no man’s heaven is in 117 the present. In the future alone is pure, ideal, untainted joy.
 
“We are born pilgrims and strangers. The birds of the air have nests, and the foxes have holes, but man has not where to lay his head. He is the gypsy of the universe. He is the bird of passage of the world.”
 
“But I have been happy,” protested Anushka.
 
“Possibly,” I said. “But what keys you up to live, what stimulates and inspires you, is not the happiness you have had, but the happiness you expect to have.
 
“The surest, stablest thing in life is heaven. It rests upon the enduring stones of hope. Its pillars are all of the alabaster of anticipation. It is a city of eternity, not of time. Therefore it is that its gates are never shut, night nor day.”
THE BEST OF LIFE
 You say, my dear Anushka, that you have nothing but your dreams; you are full of dreams; drunk every day with ideals. And you speak of this as if it were a weakness, something to be ashamed of.
 
You are young. All your years slant upward. Before you life stretches out as a vast untried adventure. Love is yet to come, and success, and a career. Let me, who am over the hillcrest and on the westering slope, talk to you a bit.
 
And looking back on all that I have had and felt and lived, let me say to you that the best of all was the dream. Not what I got but what I longed for, not what I attained 119 unto but what I aimed at, these are my harvest, my treasures.
 
I fished in the sea, but the biggest fish got away. I hunted in the wood, but the brightest birds, the fleetest deer, were those I glimpsed and saw as they vanished.
 
The things I have seen, gazed at with full vision, were cheap and tawdry compared to those that flashed by and were caught only by the tail of my eye.
 
What I have done is a poor compromise. What I dreamed of doing was wonderful. I have composed music such as the angels might covet to sing. I have painted pictures, carved statues, built palaces, such as no hands of flesh could accomplish.
 
I have said words that broke hearts with their infinite tragedy, and healed them again with their divine accent of consolation. I have written books that swayed the world’s 120 heart as the summer wind bends the wheat-field.
 
But it was all in the realm of might-have-been, beyond the mountains of the possible.
 
This real self I am afraid for you to know. It is so commonplace. I am just a man, and the worse for wear. I am not a bit splendid nor dazzling, but by way of being shop-worn.
 
It is only my beautiful secret that comforts me to take of what I dreamed; it is only this that encourages me to take my journey hopefully among the stars when my release comes; perhaps there, in some cozy planet among the Pleiades, or dwelling as a pure flame among the fire-spirits that play about the petals of Dante’s Rose of Heaven, perhaps there I shall find a pot of gold at the end of my rainbow.
 
But as far as this earthly career is concerned, 121 Anushka, the rainbow has been more worth than the gold. Yet I am not sad nor disillusioned, for, listen, I still have my dreams, my skies of may-be still overarch with infinitude my earth that is.
 
What I have is pitiful enough. Ah, but what I thought I was getting! I am as one who gathers shells and sea-beauties and takes them home, and finds them withered, yet remembers the day on the shore. You recall what the poet said?
 
“I wiped away the weeds and foam,
I fetched my sea—born treasures home,
But the poor, unsightly, noisome things
Had left their beauty on the shore
With the sun and the sand and the wild uproar.”
So hold your dreams, Anushka, and never let them go, for when you are old they will be the best residue of life.
 
USE AND BEAUTY
 The Sabbath, said the Teacher, was made for Man, and not man for the Sabbath.
 
The bearin’s of which, as Dickens would say, is in its application.
 
Any Institution was made for Man, and not Man for the Institution.
 
The college, for instance. No, friend Procrustes, whilst we appreciate your zeal to make a record for yourself as President, yet we would remind you that we are sending our boy to your University for the good He can get out of it, and not for the benefit He can be to it. He is not there for you to find out how far He falls short of your standards, nor what glory He can add to his 123 Alma Mater; He is there for You to find out what’s in Him, and to develop that. We don’t care a hang about your grand old traditions and things, except as they help you in being the making of our particular pup.
 
The Church was made for Man, and not Man for the Church. And if your meeting-house is just occupied in keeping itself up, parson, why, close it up and start a hennery, and help Hoover. We don’t care about how much money you raise, nor how beautiful are your vestments, nor how high your theology, nor how numerous your membership, nor how gay your stained glass. Are you helping friend Man? Are you making him sober, industrious, clean, and honest? Are you developing in him a civic conscience? Or are you simply being good—so good you’re good for nothing? Come, produce! Or quit!
 
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The House was made for Man, Ma, and not Man for the House. Let the boys play marbles in the dining-room, and the girls have their beaux in the parlor, and grandpa smoke his pipe in the kitchen, and everybody raid the ice-box at 11 p. m. if they want to; what better use can carpets be put to than that children’s knees should wear them out a-gleemaking, and what are sofas for if not for spooning, and kitchen-warmth and cheer if not for old folk homing? Use the old home up, and get a better product—of love and laughter and undying memories.
 
Books were made for Man, and not Man for Books. Use ’em. Thumb ’em. Mark ’em. Go to bed with ’em. Carry ’em on trains. And don’t own books that cannot be carried down through the Valley of Every-day as the soul’s lunch-basket.
 
The most perfect Ornament is that which 125 is of the most perfect Service to Man. No cane is so beautiful as the one grandfather wore smooth on a thousand walks; no chair so lovely as that one mother consecrated by many a night of rocking the baby; no table so priceless as that one where father used to write; no pipe so pretty as the one he smoked; no dress so charming as that one that still has the wrinkles in it worn there by the little girl gone—gone forever into heaven, or womanhood.
 
It’s the human touch that beautifies. Nothing can be warmly beautiful that is not, or was not, useful.
 
And Democracy is beautiful because it exists for the welfare of the People that compose it, and not for the glory of the Dynasty that rules it.
 
The State was made for Man, and not Man for the State.
THE ETHICS OF CONTROVERSY
 Everything is disputable. I am willing to entertain arguments in support of any proposition whatsoever.
 
If you want to defend theft, mayhem, adultery, or murder, state your case, bring on your reasons; for in endeavoring to prove an indefensible thing you discover for yourself how foolish is your thesis.
 
But it is essential to any controversy, if it is to be of any use, first, that the issue be clearly understood by both sides.
 
Most contentions amount merely to a difference of definition. Agree, therefore, exactly upon what it is you are discussing. If possible, set down your statements in writing.
 
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Most argument is a wandering from the subject, a confusion of the question, an increasing divergence from the point. Stick to the matter in hand.
 
When your adversary brings in subjects not relevant, do not attempt to answer them. Ignore them, lest you both go astray and drift into empty vituperation.
 
For instance, President Wilson, in the “Lusitania” incident, called Germany’s attention to the fact that her submarines had destroyed a merchant ship upon the high seas, the whole point being that this had been done without challenge or search and without giving non-combatant citizens of a neutral country a chance for their lives. Germany’s reply discussed points that had no bearing upon this issue, such as various acts of England. Mr. Wilson, in his reply, wisely refused to discuss these irrelevant 128 things, an example of intelligent controversy.
 
Keep cool. The worse your case, the louder your voice.
 
Be courteous. Avoid epithets. Do not use language calculated to anger or offend your opponent. Such terms weaken the strength of your position.
 
A controversy is a conflict of reasons, not of passions. The more heat the less sense.
 
Keep down your ego. Do not boast. Do not emphasize what you think, what you believe, and what you feel; but try to put forth such statements as will induce your opponent to think, believe, and feel rationally.
 
Wait. Give your adversary all the time he wants to vent his views. Let him talk himself out. Wait your turn, and begin only when he is through.
 
Agree with him as far as you can. Give 129 due weight, and a little more, to his opinions. It was the art of Socrates, the greatest of controversialists, to let a man run the length of his rope, that is, to talk until he had himself seen the absurdity of his contention.
 
Most men argue simply to air their convictions. Give them room. Often when they have fully exhausted their notions they will come gently back to where you want them. They are best convinced when they convince themselves.
 
Avoid tricks, catches, and the like. Do not take advantage of your opponent’s slip of the tongue. Let him have the impression that you are treating him fairly.
 
Do not get into any discussion unless you can make it a sincere effort to discover the truth, and not to overcome, out-talk, or humiliate your opponent.
 
Do not discuss at all with one who has his 130 mind made up beforehand. It is usually profitless to argue upon religion, because as a rule men’s opinions here are reached not by reason but by feeling or by custom. Nothing is more interesting and profitable, however, than to discuss religion with an open-minded person, yet such a one is a very rare bird.
 
If you meet a man full of egotism or prejudices, do not argue with him. Let him have his say, agree with him as you can, and for the rest—smile.
 
Controversy may be made a most friendly and helpful exercise, if it be undertaken by two well-tempered and courteous minds.
 
Vain contention, on the contrary, is of no use except to deepen enmity.
 
Controversy is a game for strong minds; contention is a game for the weak and undisciplined.
LETTING THINGS ALONE
 There are times, said Eb Hopkins, when you want to Let Things Alone, and then again there are times when you want to Meddle.
 
I lean mostly to lettin’ ’em alone, myself.
 
As I git older I notice that most things sorta cure ’emselves, if you leave ’em lay.
 
I used to butt in frequent when young, but since I passed the draft age I kinda lost my taste for fixin’ things.
 
I suppose they’s some would call me a coward, and a sidestepper, and an opportunist, and a trimmer, and all that—I dunno—maybe I am—but I’ve had my eye on old Mr. Time for lo, these many years, and I’ve 132 observed that, as a mender of bones, hearts, political differences, and religious quarrels, he is like A. Ward’s kangaroo, “seldom ekaled and never surpassed.”
 
The way to teach a boy how to swim is to throw him into the water and go away. Then he has to learn, right off.
 
There was old man Eustis and his wife, over Sanford way, that had no end o’ trouble over their boy. They was always workin’ with him and lecturin’ him and rasslin’ in prayer over him, and he was just carousin’ and actin’ up like all the time; till the old folks up and died, and then they was nobody cared a whoop for the boy, whether he hung hisself or not, and he had the first good spell o’ lettin’ alone he’d ever had in his life, and he just turned right around and straightened up and now he owns a bank, and is deacon in the church, and everything.
 
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Of course, you can’t always let things alone, but in case of doubt it’s trumps.
 
As I read history, it seems to me that Lettin’ Folks Alone has been the secret of the success of the English-speakin’ peoples. Gov’ment Control of everything from wheat-cakes to railroads may be comin’, and it may be best, but I’m personally a leetle skittish of it.
 
The English race’s idea of Law and Gov’ment is to have as leetle of ’em as possible. The German idea is to have everything and everybody regulated, down to drawin’ their breath. And they’re tryin’ it out now, to see which idea will whip.
 
The Almighty does a heap o’ Lettin’ Folks Alone. Anybody can go to the dogs that wants to. The gates of the Bad Place are open day and night. It looks to me very much as if what saves a man must come 134 from the inside of him, and if he ain’t got nothin’ inside that will rouse up and save him, he ain’t worth savin’, and Nature is anxious to shovel him out in the discard just as soon as possible.
 
So I says, Let ’em Alone. The good ones’ll come to the top, and the bad ones will drown, and they’ll make fertilizer, and p’raps that’s what they’re intended for.
 
Thus spake Eb Hopkins.
THE PLEASURES OF OUTLAWRY
 The hand of civilization has lain hard upon those professions wherein the outlaw spirit once found expression. The riproaring pirates have been swept from the seven seas. Bandits have been chased from the mountains. Robbers no longer infest the woods, and smugglers have deserted the caves. About all that is left for the poor wicked man is the gypsy bands in the country and the criminal class in the city.
 
Too little attention has been given to that primeval and persistent trait of human nature, the love of outlawry. That it is in the blood of all of us is shown by the fact that it breaks out in every boy. No boy wants to be a banker or a grocer when he grows up; 136 they all want to become pirates, bandits, or circus clowns.
 
They are supposed to get over this as they mature, but a lot of it still lingers under the vests of the most respectable members of society.
 
It is doubtful whether any human being wants to sin. What he wants is to escape from respectability.
 
Few men drink liquor for the love of it. A vast deal of alcohol is consumed just because it seems devilish. When the host tips his guest the wink and stealthily leads the way to the back-closet under the stairs and produces a black bottle, how the flavor of the liquor is improved by the vicious delight in evading the watchfulness of the members of the Women’s Temperance Society gathered in the parlor!
 
Few boys would learn to smoke if it were 137 not impressed upon them that smoking perverts their morals and brings them to an early grave. For just the wild waywardness of doing something desperate they will sneak behind the barn and make themselves sick with father’s pipe.
 
How many a marriage has gone wrong because of the irrepressible desire of human beings to make moral excursions might be an interesting subject for speculation. There is a cantankerous rebellion in the average human being toward anything that is legalized, even ecstatic bliss.
 
The criminal class is supposed to be confined to a few low-browed persons well known to the police. But all criminality does not lie within this corral. There are propensities in all of us that differ but little from those in the professional law-breaker.
 
JUSTICE
 There are many earnest souls occupied in trying to do people good.
 
There are nine million societies, more or less, organized to improve and to ameliorate.
 
There are preachers, missionaries, evangelists, reformers, exhorters, viewers-with-pride, and pointers-with-alarm without number wrestling with sinners.
 
All forms of industry are booming these days in the U. S. A., but the uplift business is still several laps ahead.
 
It seems ungracious to say a word to any enthusiastic person who is engaged in so laudable an enterprise as that of rescuing the perishing, feeding the hungry, and healing the sick.
 
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And yet, when you take time to think right through to the bottom of things, you must come to the conclusion that there is but one real, radical and effective way to help your fellow-men, and that is the way called justice.
 
If I want to redeem the world I can come nearer my object, and do less harm, by being just toward myself and just toward everybody else, than by “doing good” to people.
 
The only untainted charity is justice.
 
Often our ostensible charities serve but to obscure and palliate great evils.
 
Conventional charity drops pennies in the beggar’s cup, carries bread to the starving, distributes clothing to the naked. Real charity, which is justice, sets about removing the conditions that make beggary, starvation, and nakedness.
 
Conventional charity plays Lady Bountiful; 140 justice tries to establish such laws as shall give employment to all, so that they need no bounty.
 
Charity makes the Old Man of the Sea feed sugar-plums to the poor devil he is riding and choking; justice would make him get off his victim’s back.
 
Conventional charity piously accepts things as they are, and helps the unfortunate; justice goes to the legislature and changes things.
 
Charity swats the fly; justice takes away the dung-heaps that breed flies.
 
Charity gives quinine in the malarial tropics; justice drains the swamps.
 
Charity sends surgeons and ambulances and trained nurses to the war; justice struggles to secure that internationalism that will prevent war.
 
Charity works among slum wrecks; justice 141 dreams and plans that there be no more slums.
 
Charity scrapes the soil’s surface; justice subsoils.
 
Charity is affected by symptoms; justice by causes.
 
Charity assumes evil institutions and customs to be a part of “Divine Providence,” and tearfully works away at taking care of the wreckage; justice regards injustice everywhere, custom-buttressed and respectable or not, as the work of the devil, and vigorously attacks it.
 
Charity is timid and is always passing the collection-box; justice is unafraid and asks no alms, no patrons, no benevolent support.
 
“It is presumed,” says Henry Seton Merriman, “that the majority of people are willing enough to seek the happiness of others; which desire leads the individual to 142 interfere with his neighbor’s affairs, while it burdens society with a thousand associations for the welfare of mankind or the raising of the masses.”
 
The best part of the human race does not want help, nor favor, nor charity; it wants a fair chance and a square deal.
 
Charity is man’s kindness.
 
Justice is God’s.

The End