Chapter 16

Even the hideous corset squeezing is counteracted by the power of complexion. Woman likes to look like a wasp, and if she could she would move her poor system all out of place for the sake of a waist hideously small.

But, providentially, a waist squeezed too mercilessly gives a bright pink tip to the end of the nose; and for the sake of the color of that nose-tip the poor waist gets a rest--the corset is let out.

It cannot be denied that among idle, nervous women to-day there is a tendency to take stimulants to excess, and even to smoke abominable cigarettes.

Alcohol, fortunately, ruins the complexion. And for the sake of their looks women often deny themselves and show a strength of resolution that would not be called forth by any moral appeal.

Cigarettes in short order make the face sallow, spoil the shape of the mouth, make the eyes heavy, fill the hair with permanently unpleasant nicotine suggestions, develop a mustache--and women are cured of cigarette smoking by a look in the glass, when they could not be cured by tearful appeals of the wisest philosophers.

----

Do not, therefore, O men, despise the vanity of women. Praise and cherish it rather. Be grateful that nature works in a wonderful way through the power of attraction, making woman do for good looks' sake that which is most important to her welfare.

If you want to cure your wife or some other female relative of lacing, don't moralize. Say to her six or seven times:

"Isn't the end of your nose a little red?"

Should she act in any way unwisely, staying up too late, living foolishly, trying the silly and unwomanly habit of cigarette smoking, don't criticise the habit.

Criticise her complexion, or the look of her eyes, or her general lack of youthfulness. She will soon be cured, if you can follow this advice astutely.

TO EDITORIAL WRITERS--ADOPT RUSKIN'S MAIN IDEA

His pen is rust, his bones are dust (or soon will be), his soul is with the saints, we trust.

Ruskin is to be buried in Westminster Abbey. It is a fine home for a dead man, with Chatham and his great son Pitt in one tomb, and the other great skeletons of a great race mouldering side by side so neighborly.

The death of a wolf means a meal for the other wolves. The death of a great man means a meal--mental instead of physical--for those left behind. Wolves feed their STOMACHS--we feed our BRAINS--on the dead.

There is many a meal for the hungry brain in Ruskin's remains. We offer now a light breakfast to that galaxy of American talent called "editorial writers."

Editorial writing may be defined in general as "the art of saying in a commonplace and inoffensive way what everybody knew long ago." There are a great many competent editorial writers, and the bittern carrying on his trade by the side of some swamp is about as influential as ten ordinary editorial writers rolled into one.

Why is it that we are so worthless, O editorial writers? Why do we produce such feeble results? Why do we talk daily through our newspapers to ten millions of people and yet have not influence to elect a dog catcher?

Simply because we want to sound wise, when that is impossible. Simply because we are foolish enough to think that commonplaces passed through our commonplace minds acquire some new value. We start off with a wrong notion. We think that we are going to lead, that we are going to remedy, that we are going to DO THE PUBLIC THINKING FOR THE PUBLIC.

Sad nonsense. The best that the best editorial writer can achieve is to make the reader think for himself. At this point we ask our fellow editorial men--our superiors, of course--to adopt Ruskin's idea of a useful writer.

In a letter to Mrs. Carlyle, written when he was a young man, he outlined the purpose which he carried out, and which explains his usefulness to his fellow-men:

"I have a great hope of disturbing the public peace in various directions."

This was his way of saying that he hoped to stir up dissatisfaction, to provoke irritation, impatience and a determination to do better among the unfortunate. He did good, because he awoke thought in thousands of others, in millions of others.

Editorial writers, don't you know that stirring up dissatisfaction is the greatest work you can do?

Tell the poor man ten thousand times:

"There is no reason why you should be overworked. There is no reason why your children should be half-fed and half-educated. There is no reason why you should sweat to fatten others."

Tell them this often enough, stir up their determination sufficiently--they will find their own remedies.

If you want to drive out the handful of organized rogues that control politics and traffic in votes, don't talk smooth platitudes. Tell the people over and over again that the thieves ARE thieves, that they should be in jail, that honest government would mean happier citizens, that the INDIVIDUAL CITIZEN is responsible. Keep at it, and the country will be made better by those who alone can make it better--the people. ----

On the front platform a fat policeman said, after deep thought:

"Well, it's an ill wind that blows nobody good."

The driver, this writer and an Italian workman looked at the policeman in deep admiration. It was so evident that he had the making in him of an expensive editorial writer. He could say so solemnly and authoritatively what every living man knew by heart.

Suppose you stop spouting platitudes, editorial gentlemen, and try your hand at stirring up plain, everyday antagonism to existing false conditions. "Disturb the public peace," as Ruskin put it. You must know that you can't win the fights individually, so be like the Norse maidens that stirred up the real fighters to do their duty. Keep singing to the public that it is their duty to fight. They will fight and win, and thank you for the suggestion.

IMAGINATION WITHOUT DREAMING THE SECRET OF MATERIAL SUCCESS

"Marconi has imagination without being a dreamer."

Thus Mr. Serviss gave an explanation of material achievement and material success on big lines.

WITHOUT imagination a man may prosper relatively. He may live comfortably and die contented.

But at best such a man will only follow in beaten paths. He will only do what others have done before him.

He will not receive any of the great rewards which humanity offers to those whose IMAGINATION opens for the benefit of all new fields of thought, of successful material effort. ----

In material achievement there are two elements--executive force (which may be sub-divided into an indefinite number of classifications) and the great creative power, IMAGINATION.

Imagination enabled Marconi to see the possibility of sending electric messages without wires.

Had he been a dreamer, had he allowed his imagination to wander on indefinitely into notions of talking to other planets, the power of his imagination might have been in vain.

His imagination enabled him to SEE the possibility, and the lack of the dreamer's quality enabled him to REALIZE it.

There were many men centuries ago who, in an abstract kind of way, knew that the earth was round. Their imaginations led them to the discovery of facts--and long before Galileo's recantation many men knew vaguely the truth of what he taught.

It took Galileo, a man of great imagination, not a dreamer, to demonstrate his truth to all the world.

It took Columbus, with imagination and courage, but none of the dreamer about him, to sail around the world to America and prove practically what is now known to every child.

Wherever you see great material success on a new line, you see imagination without dreaming. It took real power of imagination in Rockefeller to conceive and execute the construction of the Standard Oil monopoly.

It took the financial imagination of Morgan to conceive the idea of taking $500,000,000 worth of steel mills and welding them into the Steel Trust--no dreamer could have done this thing.

Many a dreamer had foreseen the steam engine, the steamboat and other great inventions, without result. At the right moment a man of imagination like Fulton came along and did the actual work that the dreamer could not do.

If you want to succeed in the world, cultivate your imagination. And if you want your children to succeed encourage them in the development of their imaginations.

But let your imaginings and the imaginings of your children stop this side of dreamland.

Your brain's activity is divided into the conscious and sub-conscious departments. The conscious side of your mentality puts you into communication with the world, enables you to meet and to cope with conditions and individuals.

If you are to succeed materially the conscious mind must control, direct and limit the activities of the sub-conscious mind with which the imagination does its work.

If your sub-conscious brain, in the departments of abstract thought, imagination and dreaming, be allowed to run away with the practical side, you may be a very great man in the far-distant future, but you may be sure that you will not succeed now. ----

THE EARTH'S GREATEST MEN ARE DREAMERS.

The world never recognizes these dreamers. The successful man admits limitations. He accepts conditions as they are. He uses his imagination only as long as it can carry him to individual success and comfort.

But the very greatest spirits among men are the spirits of dreamers.

These are the men who refuse to acknowledge any limitations save the limitations of absolute truth and of absolute possibility.

When nine-tenths of human beings were slaves, these dreamers refused to recognize slavery, and they died for their belief. Every man who led a great moral reform ahead of his time was a dreamer. And these dreamers, whose lives are scattered through history, each a tragedy and each a milestone on the path of civilization, did for civilization what a frontiersman does for a new country.

Jesus Christ was a dreamer. He saw the truth and preached it, although it meant death, and He knew that it meant death. The brotherhood that He preached nineteen hundred years ago has not yet been realized, but it WILL be realized in His name, and His teachings and His death will be eternal factors in its realization.

Slowly through the centuries the men of imagination who do not dream are working and striving, each doing his little part to realize the prophecies of the Great Dreamer.

Each compared to Him is as a tiny tallow dip compared to the noonday sun, but each is necessary.

THE ONE WHO NEEDS NO STATUE

A movement is started in Italy to celebrate religiously the close of the nineteenth century.

The idea is to erect at different points on the Peninsula nineteen colossal statues of Christ. The statues, one for each century, are to be of cast-iron, gilded, heroic in size.

There can be no objection to the idea, since it gives expression to proper religious feeling. But should it fail of execution, that would be quite as well. ----

For one Man only in all the history of the world no statue is needed. To the glory of one Man we can add nothing save through obedience to the laws which He brought on earth. ----

Where a weak woman is kindly treated, where children are received with tenderness, where the hungry are fed and the old cared for, there is a monument to Christ--such a monument as He would ask to have built.

The wisdom of Confucius, the self-abnegation of Gautama, the lofty idealism of Zoroaster, may be fitly commemorated and perhaps magnified by human monuments or human praise.

But men can build nothing that shall add to the glory of that life which is the basis of good among all men.

THE VAST IMPORTANCE OF SLEEP

MIschievous stories are told about the ability of great men to do without sleep.

The foolish young man reads that Napoleon slept only three or four hours at night--and he cuts down his hours of sleep. He might better open a vein and lose a pint of blood than lose the sleep, which is life itself.

Most of the stories told about great men doing without sleep are mere lies. Some of them are true. For instance, it is undoubtedly true that Napoleon--an inconceivably foolish, reckless man in matters affecting his physical welfare--did deprive himself of sleep in his early years. But he paid for it dearly. In his last battles his power of resistance was so slight that he actually went to sleep during the fighting. Chronic drowsiness weakened his brain, weakened his force of character. The foundation of his final ruin was laid in Russia, when lack of sleep, and unwise living generally, had taken away his mental elasticity and deprived him of the power to form and carry out resolutions. ----

It is mainly the young man who needs the lecture on sleep, for the experience of years soon proves to every human being the folly of cheating nature by adding a few hours of drowsy consciousness to the day.

You begin life with a certain amount of vitality, a certain initial vital VELOCITY, which carries you through life and makes possible certain accomplishments. When you deprive yourself of sleep you squander this original capital. Just as surely as the young spendthrift ruins himself financially when he throws away his money, just so surely you bring irreparable loss upon yourself when you go without sleep.

THE FOOD WHICH YOU EAT IS DIGESTED AND TRANSFORMED INTO NEW TISSUE, INTO BLOOD, NERVE, MUSCLES AND BRAIN WHILE YOU ARE SLEEPING.

Look at the men who engage in the atrocious six-day walks and bicycle races. They eat enormously, absorbing in one day five times as much as the ordinary man can possibly swallow. But the end of their task finds them extremely emaciated. Lack of sleep has made it impossible for them to TRANSFORM THE FOOD INTO NEW TISSUE.

Any man or woman who has suffered from insomnia will confirm this statement, that lack of sleep decreases weight and diminishes vitality more quickly than anything else. ----

Remember this when you brag foolishly about going without sleep!

A man can go forty days without solid food. He can live seven days, or even longer, without food or water. He cannot live seven days without sleep. The Chinese, ingenious in torments, discovered no worse death than killing their victims by depriving them of sleep.

Of course, every young man can go without sleep for a whole night occasionally and go on with his work. He can do this because, from his father and mother, he has inherited a certain amount of vitality, which, if he knows no better, he can squander stupidly, just as he can squander, if he will, what money is left to him.

But no man can deprive himself of sleep, or sleep irregularly, without suffering permanently, without diminishing his chances of success in the world. ----

Many a woman among those called "fashionable" looks at the healthy child of a gardener, and wonders that her child is so different.

The reason is simple. The gardener's wife did not cheat her child by giving to balls and late hours the vitality needed by her babies.

The woman who loses sleep will make a failure of her children.

The man who loses sleep will make a failure of his life, or at least diminish greatly his chances of success.

WOMAN SUSTAINS, GUIDES AND CONTROLS THE WORLD

Of all events here on earth, the greatest is the birth of a baby.

Great battles are fought, won and lost. Nations and religions rise and fall. Great cities flourish to-day, and to-morrow the sand lies heavy over them. And of all these events the eternal Niagara of new babies is the first and essential foundation.

He knows little of real life, its greatest happiness, deepest devotion, intensest suffering, who has never witnessed the arrival of a new human being in this life of progress and struggle.

There lies the new baby at last, its black face gradually turning pink, its first gasping breaths changing the color of its blood, its tiny fists opening and closing--reaching out for nourishment already, its face tying itself into the first philosophical, cosmos-interrogating knot. Its feet turn inward and its legs are crooked. Its head is so shapeless as to discourage any one but a mother; it has three years of gurgling, ten years of childhood, ten years of foolishness, ten years of vanity--and possibly a few years of real usefulness ahead of it.

Some one must be patient, hopeful, interested, proud, never discouraged, always devoted, through all these years.

That "some one," the mother, lies there weak and white on the bed.

Her forehead and all her body are wet with agony--but she thinks no longer of that.

She has heard her baby's first cry, and whether it be her first or her tenth, the feeling is the same. Her feeble, outstretched arms and her hollow, loving eyes are turned toward the helpless little creature.

Those arms and that love will never desert it as long as the mother shall live.

The mother's weak hand supports the heavy, dull baby head and guides it to its rest on her breast.

And that hand which supports the head of the new-born baby, the mother's hand, supports the civilization of the world.

THE STORY OF THE COMPLAINING DIAMOND

The Rev. David James Burrell, in "A Quiver of Arrows," presents a very interesting parable on the benefit of trials.

Here is the parable:

Trials are profitable.

The rough diamond cried out under the blow of the lapidary: "I am content; let me alone."

But the artisan said, as he struck another blow:

"There is the making of a glorious thing in thee."

"But every blow pierces my heart."

"Ay; but after a little it shall work for thee a far more exceeding weight of glory."

"I cannot understand," as blow fell upon blow, "why I should suffer in this way."

"Wait; what thou knowest not now, thou shalt know hereafter."

And out of all this came the famous Koh-i-noor to sparkle in the monarch's crown. ----

There is a lesson in the story of the diamond for every man, and there is an ESPECIALLY good lesson for the young man who is succeeding too fast.

That diamond became the extraordinarily beautiful stone that we read about, and that many of us would foolishly like to own, because of the trials through which it passed.

We do not mean to suggest that men, to succeed, should NECESSARILY undergo repeated poundings and hammerings, although, as a matter of fact, the really great men of the world have undergone such grinding and polishing and hard knocks as no diamond was ever submitted to. But we do say distinctly that almost every man needs in the course of his life a FIRST-CLASS FAILURE.

No man is more unfortunate than he who succeeds too quickly and too easily. His success makes him exaggerate his own importance and ability. It makes him underestimate the strength of those who compete with him, and the difficulty of winning in the long run.

The world is full of all kinds of disappointed beings--artists, writers, business men--workers of all sorts, who lead disappointed lives.

Of these men, a great many started out hopefully and promisingly.

But fate failed to do for them the work of the polishing lapidary that we all need.

They succeeded too soon, they made money too easily, they rose too suddenly.

Failure at the right time would have made them think, work and do better. But failure came too late, and when the energy to fight and overcome was no longer there.

If every young man who thinks well of himself will realize that he mistakes good fortune for great ability, and that the failure that has been put off will come sooner or later, unless he thinks of it and struggles to improve himself in spite of success, many disappointments will be saved in the future.

Discount your failure. Don't wait for it to discount you.

DON'T BE IN A HURRY, YOUNG GENTLEMEN

There are many young men on earth who fail because they lack ambition and determination to advance. There are many more whose trouble is hasty ambition. They fail to realize their present chances in their hurried reaching out for something better. You may see in any club, pool-room or other resort for wasting time crowds of young men smoking and deploring their lack of success.

"I've been working three years at the same job and the same salary," one will say, "and I don't see what chance I have for getting ahead."

The young man who talks in this way does not realize that success depends on developing the qualities which are in him. He can develop them if he will, no matter what his place in the world. Once he is ready to do good work, once he is developed, the work will find him out. ----

When Napoleon Bonaparte was resting from his labors at St. Helena he used to tell this story:

"One day on parade a young lieutenant stepped out of the ranks much excited to appeal to me personally. He said to me that he had been a lieutenant for five years and had not been able to advance in rank. I said to him, 'Calm yourself. I was seven years a lieutenant, and yet you see that a man may push himself forward, for all that.' " ----

Napoleon, when he preached this lesson to the young, dissatisfied officer, was the self-made Emperor of the French and of a great many other nations. He had come to Paris a thin, hollow-cheeked, under-sized boy from the conquered and despised island of Corsica. He stuck in the humble grade of lieutenant for seven years. When the time came he blossomed out.

When he was lieutenant he was developing himself. He studied and mastered the art of war. He wrote the history of Corsica, and no one would publish it. He wrote a drama which was never acted. He wrote a prize essay for the Academy of Lyons, and did not win the prize. On the contrary, his effort was condemned as incoherent and poor in style. These were a few failures; enough to make your ordinary young man throw up his hands and say: "I've done all I can do; now let the world look out for me."

Just as he became hopeful about the future when he knew that he had real military genius, he was dismissed from the army, and his career seemed to be ended. He made the thin soup upon which he and his brother lived. He could afford to change his shirt only once a week. He said:

"I breakfasted off dry bread, but I bolted the door on my poverty."

He kept at it, and all the time, successful or otherwise, he was developing himself. He developed into an emperor. Young men will please notice that fact, and the fact that Napoleon worked and tried under adversity and monotony instead of grumbling. ----

The newspaper reporter who does not get ahead very fast, the author whose manuscripts are treated as were Napoleon's first efforts, may study with considerable profit a young American writer named Richard Harding Davis. That young man had been a reporter in Philadelphia for seven years when he went to work on a New York evening newspaper at a small salary. He had written and was writing some of his best stories, but could not get ahead, apparently. Nevertheless, he kept on trying, and developed himself. When other young men were busy talking about themselves or deploring their lot Davis was writing and grinding away out of working hours at the effort to get out and realize what was in him. He succeeded. ----

A few cases have been mentioned for young men to think over. They are selected at random. No young man need worry about himself so long as he can honestly say that he is doing his best.

Being in the same place at the same salary for seven years can do you no harm, if you are developing during that time what is in you. But you may well worry if you are drifting aimlessly, pitying yourself, making no effort. If your mind stays in the same spot for years, that is dangerous. But don't worry about anything else.

WHEN THE BABY CHANGED INTO A FOURTEEN-YEAR-OLD