Chapter 2

With railroad enterprise, such as that of J.J. Hill, lower Russia and southwestern Siberia could raise wheat for the world. But I believe that with the adoption of the new idea of participation of the people in the government so sincerely determined upon by the emperor, Russia will settle down to tranquilly building up the empire and developing the arts of peace instead of the arts of war.

The great difficulty in the Russian form of government is to find great men equal to the task of carrying it on. Public life, as we know it, has not existed there.

With the institution of the Douma, the strong men are bound to make themselves felt, and the results will be that the Czar will not lack for competent advisers and administrators.

I am convinced that as soon as the Douma gets going thoroughly a new day will dawn for Russia and her people. There is bound to be wonderful commercial development, and with this will come an awakening of intelligence and exercise of limited constitutional government, which is bound to result in peace and tranquillity and the restoration of Russia to her high place among the powers of the world.

DR. OSLER IN HIS MORE CHEERFUL PHASE.

Some Pet Philosophies of the Famous Physician Whose View on the Age-Limit Is Not His Only Idea.

When Dr. William Osler admitted his belief that man is fit for creative intellectual work only up to his fortieth year he gained an undeserved reputation for grimness. The age-limit theory is but one of many that he has formed on various subjects. In his book, "Counsels and Ideals," are many genial expressions of a ripe observation. Here is his advice as to "work":

How can you take the greatest possible advantage with the least possible strain? By cultivating system. I say cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds congenitally systematic; others have a life-long fight against an inherited tendency to diffusiveness and carelessness in work.

To counteract "the murmurings and whimperings of men and women over the non-essentials" he advises each of us to "consume his own smoke."

Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints. More than any other the practitioner of medicine may illustrate the great lesson that we are here not to get all we can out of life for ourselves, but to try to make the lives of others happy.... Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places of life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted, and will console you in the sad hours when, like _Uncle Toby_, you have "to whistle that you may not weep."

Of the end of life, speaking both as a physician and as a philosopher, he says:

With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but it is commonly no easy matter to get out of it, Sir Thomas Browne says; and, having regard to the uncertainties of the last stage of all, the average man will be of Cæsar's opinion, who, when questioned at his last dinner-party as to the most preferable mode of death, replied, "That which is the most sudden."

I have careful records of about five hundred death-beds, studied particularly with reference to the modes of death and the sensations of the dying. The latter alone concern us here. Ninety suffered bodily pain and distress of one sort or another, eleven showed mental apprehension, two positive terror, one expressed spiritual exaltation, one bitter remorse. The great majority gave no sign one way or the other; like their birth, their death was "a sleep and a forgetting." The preacher was right: in this matter man hath no preeminence over the beast--as the one dieth, so dieth the other.

PRACTICAL TRAINING FOR NATIONAL GUARD.

Good Soldiers Must Know How to Shoot Straight and How to Handle Themselves in the Field.

A large delegation of members of the Interstate National Guard Association was received by the President on January 22d. He strongly impressed certain practical recommendations in regard to the training of both militia and regular army. Parade-ground marching and tactical maneuvers are, he said, nowhere near as important as training which will make men good soldiers in time of war, and he continued:

As war is carried on nowadays, ninety per cent of the ordinary work done either on the parade ground or in the armory, either by a militia regiment or a regular regiment, amounts to nothing whatever in the way of training except so far as the incidental effect it has in accustoming the men to act together and to obey; but they are not going to fight shoulder to shoulder when they get out into the field. It is absolutely not of the slightest consequence what their alignment is, but it is of vital consequence that they shall know how to take cover, how to shoot, and how to make themselves at home under any circumstances.

THE NEGRO'S CHANCE IN THE SOUTH.

Booker T. Washington, the Negro Educator, of Tuskegee, Pleads the Right of His Race to Work.

Speaking of the future of the people of his race, President Booker T. Washington says in the _American Illustrated Magazine_:

Whatever special difficulties the negro has to face, whatever obstacles race prejudice or his own history may place in his way, the negro, under freedom, has the right to work, at least in the South, and work for the best things the world offers. He has the opportunity to make himself useful and to share the benefits that his genius and his labor confer on those around him. That is, it seems to me, what emancipation means, in practise, to the negro. That is, after all, nearly all that it could mean.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF COEDUCATION.

Mrs. Craigie Declares It Makes Girls Overbearing and Converts Boys Into Dandies or Weaklings.

Mrs. Craigie, better known to the literary world as John Oliver Hobbes, is an American woman who has spent many years in England. On her recent visit to her native land she gave her impressions of English life. Her keen observation, deepened and intensified by her life on two continents, and her wide and close association with great thinkers, lend weight to any subject upon which she expresses her opinions. She finds but two objections to coeducation: one is its effect on the boys, and the other on the girls.

Coeducation, she says, is not so dangerous to the working classes as to those of higher rank. The English working classes are a very sane lot, and, besides, the sexes seem better balanced among them than in the higher classes. In the board schools it may serve well enough, but in the higher classes coeducation is impossible. It is not only the girls that are to be considered. Coeducation not only makes English girls tomboys, overbearing and feverish in the pursuit of their masculine schoolmates, but it also has a very bad effect upon the boys. The boys, being inevitably outnumbered, five to one, either become silly little dandies, ruling a feminine court, or are tyrannized over by the girls until their spirits are broken and their ambition destroyed. All they care for is comfort.

It is dreadful that young boys should be cowed in this way and become submissive to their girl schoolmates, and yet even sturdy boys must bow to superior numbers, and twenty weak and sickly girls may tyrannize over four or five boys.

Mrs. Craigie's view seems to harmonize with that of Dr. G. Stanley Hall, president of Clark University, and one of America's greatest educators. In discussing higher education in this country, he says it reduces the rate of both marriage and offspring, so that barely three-fourths of our male graduates and only about half of our female graduates marry, and those who do so, marry late and have few children. In an article contributed to MUNSEY'S MAGAZINE, he says:

Recent studies show that a large per cent of girls actually wish they were boys. Their ideals grow masculine, and we seem slowly to be developing a female sex without a female character. So far have the actions against the old restraint gone that feminists still regard every effort to differentiate as endangering a relapse to old conditions.

Again, the rapid feminization of our schools encourages women teachers to give their own masculine traits and ideals free rein.

Once more, girls' manners are roughened, and they do not develop pride in distinctively feminine qualities, or the grace and charm of their young womanhood, or lack a little respect for their sex. Girls have much responsibility in bestowing the stimulus of their approval aright. It is said that association with boys makes high-school girls less poetic, impulsive, romantic, their conduct more thoughtful, but I maintain, women teachers to the contrary notwithstanding, that this is unfortunate; that something is wrong with the girl in the middle teens who is not gushy or sentimental, at least at times.

So it is said that the presence of girls is humanizing for boys, but there is something wrong with the boy at this age who can truly be called a perfect gentleman. I do not like to urge that he should be a little rowdy or barbaric, but vigor must not be sacrificed to primness, and masculinity at this age does not normally take a high polish. Nature impels boys to get away, in certain respects, from girls and women, whoever they are. Some suffer subtle eviration, while others react, with coarseness toward femininity, if held in too close quarters with girls.

THE LATE PRESIDENT HARPER AND HIS WORK.

Appreciations of the Man Who Built Up Out of a Fresh-Water College the Great University of Chicago.

The proposed monument to the late President William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago is to take the form of a library building. Thus will be fittingly suggested the practical trend of his life, in which scholarship was joined with utilitarianism. So businesslike were this educator's methods in building up a great university upon the foundation of a provincial college that he was severely criticized for the seeming incongruity between his aims and the means he used. And yet, as the New York _Evening Post_ has said:

Whatever may be thought of his policies, his personality now appears in a fine and heroic light. No one can consider the admirable fortitude and self-forgetting equanimity he displayed in his long and hopeless fight against pain and death, without perceiving that here was a heroic soul, to which epithets borrowed from trade had no proper application.

As his administration proceeded along the golden way laid by Mr. Rockefeller, it became evident that President Harper faced all problems as new problems, and that his optimism admitted no difficulties. When it was discovered that the University of Chicago lacked college life and spirit, college life and spirit were straightway improvised, or at least encouraged, by the appointment of a famous athlete to the faculty, and later by the building of dormitories. No detail of university life escaped him. If he lacked some of the finer sympathies and perceptions that go to make the ideal university president, he was a figure instinct with vital energy, ingenious and resourceful in all matters--in its qualities and defects thoroughly American and of our time. The present, in which he lived by preference, will give him an almost unbounded admiration; sober judgment based upon the past will gradually smooth the inequalities of his work.

President Harper was a man who did things. It is doubtful whether he himself placed the highest importance upon his executive work; it is not unlikely that he would prefer to be remembered as a Hebrew scholar and the author of abstruse commentaries. But a man is not always himself the best judge of the relative values of his own work. Professor Albert Bushnell Hart, writing in the Boston _Transcript_, thus estimates President Harper's career:

To sum up, the great characteristic of President Harper was his unflagging and generous belief that things could be done. In his thirteen years of service he saw Chicago University rise to a place in the first rank of the world's institutions of learning. It never seemed to occur to him that a thing must be abandoned or even postponed because it was difficult. When he felt that the time had come for a law school, he created it. He found the Blaine School of Training for Teachers in existence, and absorbed it. Nothing seemed beyond his powers, yet he always had time for the visitor and the guest, kept up his teaching to the last, and was one of the chief citizens of Chicago and of Illinois. Who can doubt that President Harper's intensity of love and service for the university of which he was really the founder and always the principal force shortened his days, and yet who could wish to leave a more enduring monument than his life-work?

The presidents of several colleges have spoken of him as follows:

President Woodrow Wilson, of Princeton University: "President Harper's death deprives the country of one of the most extraordinary and attractive figures, and the last months of his life have added a touch of heroism through which he won the warm admiration of the whole country. His loss is very serious indeed."

President Schurman, of Cornell University: "President Harper was preeminent as an educational administrator, and was the greatest college president of the last fifteen years. The University of Chicago will remain for all time as a monument to his memory."

President Hadley, of Yale: "President Harper was a brilliant instructor, skilful organizer, and a man of rare business ability."

President Eliot, of Harvard: "His life, wonderfully active and energetic, was brought, by excessive work, to too early a close."

THE MEANING OF PUBLIC OWNERSHIP.

A Radical View of a Radical Policy, as Expressed by a Well-Known Radical of Chicago.

Publicists are generally agreed as to the meaning of the great changes now progressing in American political sentiment. The country, we are informed, after wrestling successfully with the problems of the accumulation of wealth, is ready to concern itself with the equitable distribution of what has been accumulated. We are growing rich almost too fast. We produce such vast quantities of everything needed by mankind that we hear of "production outrunning consumption."

In this new condition Clarence S. Darrow, the well-known Chicago lawyer and student of economics, sees the explanation of the growth of sentiment favoring public ownership. Writing in the _International Quarterly_, he takes advanced Radical ground as follows:

Public ownership sentiment has had a remarkable growth in the United States during the last ten years. This sentiment is one of the many manifestations of the deep conviction that the present division of wealth is at once unjust and absurd. All sorts of theories for the more equitable distribution of wealth have found ready advocates on the platform and in the press in every enlightened nation of the world. However various the plans and schemes of social change, it is beyond dispute that the tendency of all nations has been toward a wider and completer collective life. In every country in the world the people have been constantly enlarging the functions and duties of the State, and political organizations are more and more becoming industrial institutions.

In Europe, municipal and even national ownership of public utilities is no longer looked upon as radical or new, and the rapid growth of these ideas abroad has had much to do with sentiment in the United States.

The most casual student of social questions has likewise seen the enormous fortunes that have been built up by the private ownership of public utilities. The larger part of all the stocks and bonds issued by public-service corporations are based upon franchises and not on private property. By this means the public is constantly and systematically taxed upon its own property, and this vast tax, in the shape of interest on bonds and dividends on stock, is taken by a handful of exploiters and stock-jobbers--who have thus contrived to build up private fortunes from public wealth.

GOOD ADVICE, GRATIS, FROM A RICH MAN.

The Characteristic Philosophy of Russell Sage, the Most Contented Multi-Millionaire in New York.

Nearly ninety years of age and weighted with scores of millions, Russell Sage is to-day one of the most completely satisfied rich men in the world. This is true, for "he himself has said it, and 'tis greatly to his credit."

Russell Sage is now the oldest of the money-kings of New York. He was born seventeen years before Andrew Carnegie, who threw off the harness of business five years ago. The original John Jacob Astor died at eighty-four, and Commodore Vanderbilt at eighty-two. But Russell Sage still is standing at the tiller of his gold-ballasted craft, as keen and sharp-eyed as he ever was. Of all the famous figures of Wall Street, only Daniel Drew lived to greater years; and Drew lost all his millions before he ended his long career as a speculator.

Mr. Sage is as saving in his opinions as in his money, and it is seldom that he can be persuaded to make his mind an open book for the general public. But recently he consented to give the New York _World_ the full story of life as he sees it. It is the most complete description of the Sage philosophy that he has ever given to the public. Whatever this advice may be worth to you, it has been worth about a hundred millions to Russell Sage:

I think, if I had my life to live over again, it would be as honest, as simple, as home-loving as I could make it. I would try with all my power for home-like comfort, happiness, and long life, as against show, shallow pleasure, and a short existence. Home life is best. Clubs are only a place for idle old men and wasteful young men.

Great wealth is not everything, by any means. The mere making of money is not the only criterion of success. Many men whose names are our common heritage have died in very moderate circumstances, or even in poverty. Money is not a measure of brains.

Real success is often achieved after many failures. An active man builds success upon a foundation of failure; a passive man does not. A real man is not hurt by hard knocks. Hard knocks make character.

I think, had I my life to live over again, I would make charity a life study. It is a science. It cannot be learned in a day. The older a man lives the more he gets to realize this. From my own investigations I have found that there is a large class of professional mendicants that prey upon the well-to-do and charitably inclined.

From time to time I have taken a whole month's batch of appealing letters and have had them thoroughly investigated by trained agents. Very few have been found to possess real merit. Most of the appeals were from persons who would not help themselves even with the aid of a helping hand.

Real charity is dispensed without the blare of trumpets. Notoriety and professional philanthropy, indiscriminate alms-giving in any guise, have always been repugnant to me. I have never asked for any publicity for what I have done. Silence has invariably been my rule and practise.

If I had my life to live over again I am sure I should not attempt to move in what is termed "society." I would rather be one of a few gathered together by a bond of friendship than to partake of all the glitter and hollowness of what is called the "Four Hundred." The friendship of a few outlives life itself. Friendship remembers; society forgets. In the home only is there true happiness. It is there that a man's best ideas get their birth and grow.

If I had my life to live over again I would marry even earlier than I did. The tender care of a good wife is the finest thing in the world. I am thankful, indeed, that I have had this in the fullest measure.

Thrift is the first element of successful manhood. When you have made your fortune, it is time enough to think about spending it. Two suits of clothes are enough for any young man. The only thought that a young man need spend about his clothes is to look out for bargains at the lowest price.

Let him be on the lookout for cheap hats, bargains in shoes, knockdowns in suits. He is fostering business traits that augur well for his success in years to come.

The boy who knows bargains in socks makes the man who knows bargains in stocks.

Fifty cents is enough for a straw hat; it will last two seasons. You can get for thirty-nine cents an unlaundered white shirt which is excellent. You can get a good undershirt for twenty-five cents. Silk is not for salaried men. Fine clothes bring sham pleasure. Don't try to rival the flowers of the field.

A rich man does not work for himself alone. He is really the nation's agent. He turns his wealth over constantly in a way that helps others. No one need be alarmed over the constant increase in the wealth limit. Big enterprises require big men.

There is no such thing as a money-curse. It is the man, not the money, that makes the amount of individual wealth wrong. A good man cannot have too much money.

And so let me say in conclusion, if I had my life to live over again, I would try just as hard as I knew how to turn my money over and over again, that it might do the most good to other men.

I would live no differently. I would do as hard a day's work as I knew how. I would not feel it necessary to take vacations to recuperate. I would get my pleasure simply. I would dine simply on plain food. After dinner there would be a little reading of the papers or of good books, a chat with friends that might drop in, and maybe a game of whist. I get plenty of relaxation from an exciting rubber. When the game is over, my day is done. I sleep like a top till morning.

That would be my life if I had it to live over. All my life my home has been my haven of happiness.

Roosevelt and the Labor-Unions.

BY ELISHA JAY EDWARDS.

An Authoritative Statement of the President's Views Upon the Greatest Industrial Question of the Day.

_An original article written for_ THE SCRAP BOOK.

In the unseasonable heat of Labor Day, 1898, a committee, small in numbers, but somewhat self-conscious and of impressive dignity, ventured to Montauk Point that it might discuss with Colonel Theodore Roosevelt, of the First United States Volunteer Cavalry, the expediency of nominating him on an independent ticket for Governor of New York.

As these perspiring committeemen, who were followed by other politicians, mounted the sand-dunes beyond which lay the camp of the Rough Riders, they saw, silhouetted against a sky whose horizon is the sea, the commander of that historic regiment.

A Commander of Men.