Chapter 18

A young man lost his money in stocks the other day and killed himself. Other young men lose heart when things go against them and drift through life helpless, useless derelicts. Let us give such men a bit of advice:

Don't let failure discourage you. Almost all the brilliantly successful characters of history have known early trials and reverses. The great philosopher, Epictetus, was a slave. Alfred the Great wandered through the swamps as a fugitive and got cuffed on the ears for letting the cakes burn. Columbus went from court to court like a beggar to try to raise money for the discovery of the New World and when he finally won the favor of the Spanish Queen he was so poor that he could not go to court until Isabella had advanced him money enough to buy decent clothes.

When Frederick the Great was fighting all Europe he fell into such desperate straits that he carried a bottle of poison about with him as the last way of escape from his enemies. If he had taken that dose the whole history of our time would have been different. Instead of shaking a "mailed fist" at the world, young William of Hohenzollern might have been a mediatized princelet on the lookout for an American heiress; there might never have been a Leipzig or a Waterloo, as there certainly would not have been a Sedan, and the heirs of Napoleon might now have been ruling over an empire covering all Central Europe, from the Tiber to the Baltic.

Nobody ever had greater cause for discouragement than George Washington had when he led the straggling remnants of his army across the Delaware in December, 1776. But in the very darkest hour, when absolute ruin seemed inevitable and a British gallows appeared the probable ending of his career, he struck a blow that cleared the way to the highest place in the world's history.

Andrew Jackson was born in a cabin, suffered every sort of adversity, lost his mother and two brothers from the sufferings of war, was cut with a sword for refusing to clean a British officer's boots, and grew up almost without education.

Abraham Lincoln, poor, ignorant, sprung from the lowliest stock, deprived of all advantages for culture or for money making, distressed by domestic troubles, might have had some excuse for discouragement. But he kept on, with what results the world sees.

If ever there was a man who seemed doomed to failure it was U. S. Grant in the spring of 1861. He had cut loose from the profession for which he had been trained, and, after drifting from one occupation to another and failing in all, he was now, at thirty-nine years old, a clerk in a country store and unable to make ends meet at that. Three years later he was Lieutenant-General of the armies of the United States, and five years after that he was President.

Solon said it was never safe to call any man happy until he was dead. Unhappiness is equally uncertain. If you are poor now you may be rich to-morrow. If you are unknown now you may be famous to-morrow. If you are even in the penitentiary now you may be running a street-car system to-morrow.

So don't be discouraged if your fortunes are in temporary eclipse. The savage is in despair when the sun goes into the moon's shadow, for he thinks that some monster has swallowed it, and that there will never be any daylight again. But to the astronomer an eclipse is merely an interesting opportunity to make scientific observations. Be as sure of the coming of daylight as the astronomer is, and your moments of darkness will trouble you no more than his trouble him.

TWO KINDS OF DISCONTENT

Emerson says:

"Discontent is the want of self-reliance; it is infirmity of will."

Another individual, at least as solemn if not as wise as Emerson, says:

"Discontent is the foundation of all human effort."

Both are right, for there are two kinds of discontent.

Almost everybody is afflicted with one kind of discontent or the other.

It would be well for you, Mr. Reader, to decide what kind of discontent afflicts you. If you have the wrong kind, hurry and get the other as fast as possible.

THE DISCONTENT THAT WHINES

This is the kind of discontent which Emerson refers to when he says that "discontent is the want of self-reliance."

The WHINING discontent ruins many lives; it is used as the excuse for much foolish conduct, much neglect of duty.

It is the discontent which reflects the feeble soul, the self-indulgent, worthless being.

A young man who gets drunk or dissipates otherwise, who offers as an excuse, "Well, I was feeling kind of DISCONTENTED and had to do something," is afflicted with the wrong kind of discontent in its most virulent form.

The office boy with small wages who is caught smoking cigarettes, or evading his duties, or undermining his moral character by gambling, will also say, "I was discontented and had to do something."

If you have THAT discontent, try to get rid of it and get the other kind.

THE DISCONTENT THAT MEANS AMBITION

Alexander the Great lived and died discontented, but Emerson would scarcely have attributed that gentleman's discontent to lack of self-reliance.

Alexander was discontented, first, because he could not conquer the whole world, and, second, because there were no others that he could conquer. He was a vast genius, almost humorous in his ambitious discontent sometimes--especially when he looked at the stars and said, as alleged, that he was ashamed to look at all those other worlds when he had barely conquered this one little world that he lived on.

If you have in you Alexander's brand of discontent you may well be grateful.

You are still more to be envied if you have the discontent which has impelled thousands of great men to devote their lives ceaselessly to the discovery of truth, working for others. ----

When Taglioni, the great ballet dancer, was a little girl, with skinny legs and a skinnier future, being extremely homely and with no prospects of success, she was discontented.

Other skinny-legged little ballet dancers of her class were discontented also.

But Taglioni's discontent impelled her to spend every spare moment whirling on her big toe, practicing her entrechat, or laboring over the art of smiling, naturally, with aching toes, aching back, aching thighs, and solar plexus almost exhausted from the unnatural strain.

The other skinny-legged discontented ones exercised their discontent on their patient mothers, instead of exercising it on their own big toes. THEY never were heard of, whereas Taglioni pranced on HER big toe before every court in Europe, and her smile, which ultimately became natural, attracted the opera glasses of all the great men.

There are thousands of young musicians, young business men, young singers, young electricians--thousands and hundreds of thousands of human beings engaged in all kinds of effort in all directions.

ALL OF THEM ARE DISCONTENTED. Those that have the right kind of discontent will go at least as far as their natural capacity can take them, and those that have the wrong kind will collapse, achieve nothing and devote wasted lives to wasting pity on themselves. ----

Try to acquire the discontent of Alexander, Carlyle, Pagallini, Taglioni, or even that of the honest bootblack who "shines them up" so hard that the perspiration comes through his check jumper in cold weather.

WHAT THE BARTENDER SEES

A young man with a cold face, much nervous energy and a tired-of-the-world expression leans over the polished, silver-mounted drinking bar.

You look at him and order your drink.

You know what you think of him, and you think you know what he thinks of you.

Did you ever stop to think of ALL THE STRANGE HUMAN BEINGS besides yourself that pass before him?

He stands there as a sentinel, business man, detective, waiter, general entertainer and host for the homeless.

In comes a young man, rather early in the day.

He is a little tired--up too late the night before. He takes a cocktail. He tells the bartender that he does not believe in cocktails. He never takes them, in fact. "The bitters in a cocktail will eat a hole through a thin handkerchief--pretty bad effect on your stomach, eh?" and so on.

Out goes the young man with the cocktail inside of him.

And the bartender KNOWS that that young man, with his fine reasonings and his belief in himself, is the confirmed drunkard of year after next. He has seen the beginning of many such cocktail philosophers, and the ending of the same.

The way NOT to be a drunkard is never to taste spirits. The bartender knows that. But his customers do NOT know it. ----

At another hour of the day there comes in the older man. This one is the fresh-faced, YOUNG oldish man.

He has small, gray side-whiskers. He shows several people--whom he does not know--his commutation ticket.

He changes his mind suddenly from whiskey to lemonade. The bartender prepares the lemon slowly, and the man changes his mind back to whiskey.

Then he tries to look more dignified than the two younger men with him. In the midst of the effort he begins to sing "The Heart Bowed Down with Weight of Woe," and he tells the bartender "that is from 'The Bohemian Girl.'"

He sings many other selections, occasionally forgetting his dignity, and occasionally remembering that he is the head of a most respectable home--partly paid for.

The wise man on the outside of the bar suggests that the oldish man will get into trouble. But the bartender says: "No; he will go home all right. But he won't sing all the way there. About the time he gets home he'll realize what money he has spent, and you would not like to be his wife."

The bartender KNOWS that the oldish man--about fifty-one or fifty-two--has escaped being a drunkard by mere accident, and that he has not quite escaped yet.

A little hard luck, too much trouble, and he'll lose his balance, forget that there IS lemonade, and take to whiskey permanently. ----

At the far end of the bar there is the man who comes in slowly and passes his hand over his face nervously. The bartender asks no question, but pushes out a bottle of everyday whiskey and a small glass of water.

The whiskey goes down. A shiver follows the whiskey and a very little of the water follows the shiver. The man goes out with his arms close to his sides, his gait shuffling and his head hanging.

It has taken him less than three minutes to buy, swallow and pay for a liberal dose of poison.

Says the bartender:

"That fellow had a good business once. Doesn't look it, does he? Jim over there used to work for him. But he couldn't let it alone."

The "it" mentioned is whiskey.

Outside in the cold that man, who couldn't let it alone, is shuffling his way against the bitter wind. And even in his poor, sodden brain reform and wisdom are striving to be heard.

His soul and body are sunk far below par. His vitality is gone, never to return.

The whiskey, with its shiver that tells of a shock to the heart, lifts him up for a second.

He has a little false strength of mind and brain and that strength is used to mumble good resolutions.

He THINKS he will stop drinking. He thinks he could easily get money backing if he gave up drinking for good. He feels and really believes that he WILL stop drinking.

Perhaps he goes home, and for the hundredth time makes a poor woman believe him, and makes her weep once more for joy, as she has wept many times from sorrow.

But the bartender KNOWS that that man's day has gone, and that Niagara River could turn back as easily as he could remount the swift stream that is sweeping him to destruction. ----

Five men come in together. Each asks of all the others:

"What are you going to have?"

The bartender spreads out his hands on the edge of the bar, attentive and prepared to work quickly.

Every man insists on "buying" something to drink in his turn. Each takes what the others insist on giving him.

Each thinks that he is hospitable.

But the bartender KNOWS that those men belong to the Great American Association for the Manufacture of Drunkards through "treating."

Each of those men might perhaps take his glass of beer, or even something worse, with relative safety. But, as stupidly as stampeded animals pushing each other over a precipice, each insists on buying poison in his turn. And every one spends his money to make every other one, if possible, a hard-drinking and a wasted man. ----

You, Sir. Reader, have seen all these types and many others, have you not?

WHY did you see them? What REASON had you for seeing them?

The bartender stands studying the procession to destruction, because he must make his living in that way. He is a sort of clean-aproned Charon on a whiskey Styx, ferrying the multitude to perdition on the other side of the river. But what is YOUR business there?

You might as well be found inside an opium den.

The drink swallowed at the bar braces you, does it? If you think you need a drink, you REALLY need sleep, or better nourishment, or you need to live more sensibly. Drink will not give you what you need. It may for a moment make your nerves cease tormenting you. It may do in your system for an hour what opium does in the Chinese for a whole day. But if it lifts you up high, it drops you down HARD.

And remember:

THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS MODERATE DRINKING AT A BAR.

You THINK you can take your occasional drink safely and philosophize about the procession that passes the bartender.

But the bartender KNOWS that you are no different from the others. They all began as you are beginning. They all, in the early stages, despised their own forerunners.

They were once as you are, and the bartender KNOWS that the chances are all in favor of your being eventually like one of them.

Even like the poor, thin, nervous drinker of hard whiskey, who once wondered why men drink too much. ----

The bartender's procession is a sad one, and you who still think yourself safe are the saddest atom in the line, for you are there without sufficient excuse.

It is a long procession, and its end is far off.

It is born of the fact that life is dull, competition is keen, and ambition so often ends in sawdust failure.

A better chance for strugglers, a more generous reward for hard work, better organization of social life, solution of the great unsolved problem of real civilization, will end the bartender's procession.

Meanwhile, keep out of it if you can. And be glad if it can be suspended, temporarily at least, on Sundays.

WHAT SHOULD BE A MAN'S OBJECT IN LIFE?

Sermons in stones are familiar, but few take the trouble to dig them out. Certainly none looks for sermons in a one-cent evening newspaper.

At the same time, will you kindly think over and answer the question that heads this column?

Here we are, marooned for a few days on a flying ball of earth. We don't know how we got here. We don't know where we are going.

We are full of beautiful and satisfying FAITH. But we don't KNOW.

Into this Universe, and WHY not knowing, Nor WHENCE, like Water, willy-nilly flowing; And out of it as Wind along the Waste, I know not WHITHER, willy-nilly blowing.

That's the way Omar, the old tent-maker, puts it. ----

We drift from dinner to the theatre, thence to bed, thence to breakfast, thence to work, and so on. Or, if in hard luck, we struggle and wail, "cursing our day," or more frequently cursing society.

We rarely stop to think what it is all about, or what we are here for. ----

We know the pig's object in life. It has been beautifully and permanently outlined in Carlyle's "pig catechism." The pig's life object is to get fat and keep fat--to get his full share of swill and as much more as he can manage to secure. And his life object is worthy. By sticking at it he develops fat hams inside his bristles, and WE know, though he does not, that the production of fat hams is his destiny. ----

But our human destiny is NOT to produce fat hams. Why do so many of us live earnestly on the pig basis? Why do we struggle savagely for money to buy our kind of swill--luxury, food, etc. --and cease all struggling when that money is obtained?

Is fear of poverty and dependence the only emotion that should move us?

Are we here merely to STAY here and EAT here?

A great German scientist, very learned and about as imaginative as a wart hog, declares that the human face is merely an extension and elaboration of the alimentary canal--that the beauty of expression, the marvellous qualities of a noble human face, are merely indirect results of the alimentary canal's strivings to satisfy its wants.

That is a hideous conception, is it not? But it is no more unworthy than the average human life, and the average existence has much to justify the German's speculations.

What SHALL we strive for? MONEY?

Get a thousand millions. Your day will come, and in due course the graveyard rat will gnaw as calmly at your bump of acquisitiveness as at the mean coat of the pauper.

Then, shall we strive for POWER?

The names of the first great kings of the world are forgotten, and the names of all those whose power we envy will drift to forgetfulness soon. What does the most powerful man in the world amount to standing at the brink of Niagara, with his solar plexus trembling? What is his power compared with the force of the wind or the energy of one small wave sweeping along the shore?

The power which man can build up within himself, for himself, is nothing. Only the dull reasoning of gratified egotism can make it seem worth while. ----

Then what IS worth while? Let us look at some of the men who have come and gone, and whose lives inspire us. Take a few at random:

Columbus, Michael Angelo, Wilberforce, Shakespeare, Galileo, Fulton, Watt, Hargreaves--these will do.

Let us ask ourselves this question: "Was there any ONE THING that distinguished ALL their lives, that united all these men, active in fields so different?"

Yes. Every man among them, and every man whose life history is worth the telling, did something for THE GOOD OF OTHER MEN.

Hargreaves, the weaver, invented the spinning-jenny, and his invention clothes and employs hundreds of millions.

Galileo perfected the telescope, spread out before man's intellect the grandeur of the universe. Wilberforce helped to awaken man's conscience. He freed millions of slaves. Columbus gave a home to great nations. We thrive to-day because of his noble courage. Michael Angelo and Shakespeare stirred human genius to new efforts, and fed the human mind--a task more worthy than the feeding of the human stomach. We ride in Fulton's steamboats, and Watt's engine pulls us along.

Men who are truly great have DONE GOOD to their fellow-man. And the greatest Soul ever born on earth came to urge but one thing upon humanity, "Love one another." ----

Get money if you can. Get power if you can. Then, if you want to be more than the ten thousand million unknown mingled in the dust beneath you, see what good you can do with your money and your power.

If you are one of the many millions who have not and can't get money or power, see what good you can do without either.

You can help carry a load for an old man. You can encourage and help a poor devil trying to reform. You can set a good example to children. You can stick to the men with whom you work, fighting honestly for their welfare.

Time was when the ablest man would rather kill ten men than feed a thousand children. That time has gone. We do not care much about feeding the children, but we care less about killing the men. To that extent we have improved already.

The day will come when we shall prefer helping our neighbor to robbing him--legally--of a million dollars.

Do what good you can NOW, while it is unusual, and have the satisfaction of being a pioneer and an eccentric.

CRUEL FRIGHTENING OF CHILDREN

The most acute suffering is that produced by FEAR, and those who suffer most acutely from fear are YOUNG children.

Who does not remember the intense agony in youth based upon the superstitious teachings of some foolish older person?

And how many children are made miserable through the hideous fear that comes from threats and from punishment postponed?

If a man should be whipped incessantly for three or four hours he would think his tormentor a monster of brutality.

Yet you say to a child:

"I will whip you for that to-morrow."

You sentence that child to hours of the most acute mental suffering, and if the child be nervous and unusually sensitive, you may permanently injure its health. ----

Here is a scene unfortunately not rare in this country:

A thin, nervous little boy, perhaps ten years old, was walking along a suburban street. Suddenly, on turning a corner, he was confronted by a man, apparently his father.

The child stood trembling. The man, in a voice of cold, concentrated anger, said:

"Didn't I tell you to come early. You go to the house and WAIT THERE TILL I COME BACK AND FIX YOU."

The man walked on, to get the drink of beer or whiskey that should add to his natural cruelty, and the poor child, without a word, started for home to await the coming punishment.

No more cruel treatment was ever endured by any human being than the punishment inflicted by that thoughtless man on the nervous, helpless child placed in his power.

Later, of course, there followed the punishment; a huge, powerful man striking repeatedly the delicate body of the child, emphasizing the brutality of his blows with more brutal words, and feeling when it was over that he had gloriously done his duty as a typical American father.

Of course, the actual brutal beating was only a small part of the child's ordeal.

The most horrible part was the waiting for the punishment. No man in the death cell ever suffered more than thousands of children suffer every day waiting for the brutality which is to exemplify our savage notions concerning the education of children.

If such a monstrous parody on a father should be met in some lonely wood by a huge gorilla and treated as that father treats his own son, he would complain bitterly of the gorilla's ferocity. Yet it would not equal in any way his own brutal and less excusable cruelty. ----

If a parent says that he cannot bring up his children and control them without beating them, you may say to that parent:

You never struck a child in your life except when you were angry, and you would not have dared to strike it if it had been of your own size.

Children born of decent parents can be brought up, and ARE brought up, without beatings, and if yours are a different kind of children it is a reflection on YOU, and on your whole brood and family.

The poor, ignorant hen can teach its young ones to scratch and hunt worms, and acquire whatever education they need without hurting them, and a human being should be able to do for his own as much as a hen can do.

IT IS NATURAL FOR CHILDREN TO BE CRUEL

You have perhaps read that Mrs. Isabelle Bailey, of Palmyra, N.J., was cruelly tortured by three little girls.

The unfortunate woman was eighty-five years old, paralyzed, and confined to her bed.

The three children, two of them eight and one eleven years old, tormented the poor woman in a brutal manner, of which details shall not be published here.

The helpless woman ultimately died, and the children were charged with murder. ----

This horrible story is mentioned in the hope of concentrating the minds of mothers and fathers on the fact that children are naturally more cruel, more vicious, than grown people.

The children mentioned in this case were, perhaps, abnormal and unusual monstrosities. But they serve to illustrate the fact that infancy and childhood duplicate, in the individual, the primitive animal life on earth.