Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers

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EDITORIALS from the HEARST NEWSPAPERS {Arthur Brisbane}

CONTENTS
Why Are All Men Gamblers?
No Man Understands Iron
We Long for Immortal Imperfection--We Can't Have It.
Three Water-Drops Converse
Did We Once Live on the Moon?
William Henry Channing's Symphony
The Existence of God--Parable of the Blind Kittens
Have the Animals Souls?
Jesus' Attitude Toward Children
Study of the Character of God
The Fascinating Problem of Immortality
Discontent the Motive Power of Progress
The Automobile Will Make Us More Human
Let Us Be Thankful
The Harm That Is Done by Our Friends
Shall We Tame and Chain the Invisible Microbe As We Now Chain
Niagara?
The Elephant That Will Not Move Has Better Excuses Than We Have
for Folly Displayed
Let Us Be Thankful
What Will 999 Years Mean to the Human Race?
The Azores--A Small Lost World in a Universe of Water
No Napoleonic Chess Player on an Air Cushion
A Girl's Face in the Gaslight
The "Criminal" Class
The Wonderful Magnet
Who Is Independent? Nobody
When We Begin Using Land Under the Oceans
Where Your Body Came From
How Marriage Began
Man's Willingness to Work
The Human Brain Beats the Coal Mines
How the Other Planets Will Talk to Us
Shall We Do Without Sleep Some Day?
The Three Best Things in the World
The Value of Solitude
There Should Be a Monument to Time
A Mother's Work and Her Hopes
Your Work Is Your Brain's Gymnasium
The Steeple, Moving Like the Hand of a Clock
Cultivate Thought-Teach Your Brain to Work Early
The Wind Does Not Rule Your Destiny
One of the Many Corpses in the Johnstown Mine
"Limiting the Amount of a Day's Work"
Catching a Red-Hot Bolt
The Trusts and the Union--How Do They Differ?
France Has Learned Her Lesson
Union Men as Slave Owners
Again the Limited Day's Work
To the Merchants
What About the Chinese, Kind Sir?
150 against 150,000--We Favor the 150,000
To-day's World-Struggle
White-Rabbit Millionaires and Other Things
No Happiness Save in Mental and Physical Activity
The Owner of a Golden Mountain
The Human Weeds in Prison
Crime Is Dying Out
The Value of Poverty to the World
600 Teachers Now, 600,000 Good Americans in the Future
Education--The First Duty of Government
Poverty Is the Father of Vice, Crime and Failure
The Importance of Education Proved in Lincoln's Case
Knowledge Is Growth
A Whiskey Bottle
Those Who Laugh at a Drunken Man
Law Cannot Stop Drunkenness--Education Can
The Drunkard's Side of It
Drink a Slow Poison
To Those Who Drink Hard--You Have Slipped the Belt
Try Whiskey on Your Friend's Eyeball
What Are the Ten Best Books?
The Marvelous Balance of the Universe--A Lesson in the Texas Flood
The Earth Is Only a Front Yard
Last Week's Baby Will Surely Talk Some Day
The Good That Is Done by the Trusts
Trusts and the Senate
The Promising Toad's Head
Trusts Will Drive Labor Unions Into Politics
The Trusts Are National School Teachers
A Woman to Be Pitied
When Will Woman's Mental Life Begin?
The Cow That Kicks Her Weaned Calf Is All Heart
Respectable Women Who Listen to "Faust"
Why Women Should Vote
Astronomy- Woman's Future Work
Woman's Vanity Is Useful
To Editorial Writers--Adopt Ruskin's Main Idea
Imagination Without Dreaming the Secret of Material Success
The One Who Needs No Statue
The Vast Importance of Sleep
Woman Sustains, Guides and Controls the World
The Story of the Complaining Diamond
Don't Be in a Hurry, Young Gentlemen
hen the Baby Changed Into a Fourteen-year-old
The Eye That Weighs a Ton
What Animal Controls Your Spirit?
From Mammoths to Mosquitoes--From Murder to Hypocrisy
The Monkey and the Snake Fight
Too Little and Too Much
Do You Feel Discouraged?
Two Kinds of Discontent
What the Bartender Sees
What Should Be a Man's Object in Life?
Cruel Frightening of Children
It Is Natural for Children to Be Cruel
Two Thin Little Babies Are Left
A Baby Can Educate a Man

The articles in this book were published originally in the
editorial columns of the various Hearst newspapers throughout the
country.

These articles may have some interest for the student of modern
happenings, because of the fact that the newspapers publishing
them have an aggregate daily circulation of two millions of
copies, and are read each day by no fewer than five millions of
men and women. Such wide circulation of identical opinions on
current events, in different parts of the country, is a new
feature of our national life. The character of such writings, and
their probable influence upon the public mind, whatever their
lack of intrinsic merit, may be of sufficient importance to
justify the publication of this collection of ephemeral writings.

WHY ARE ALL MEN GAMBLERS?

The annual report of the gambling house at Monte Carlo shows a
profit of about $5,000,000.

A large collection of human beings travel from all parts of the
world to Monte Carlo for the sake of giving $5,000,000 to the
gambling concern there.

Wherever you look on earth to-day or in the past you find human
beings gambling, and you will find the gambling instinct stronger
than any other--stronger than the love of drink, infinitely
stronger than the love of normal, honest gain.

* * *

Christopher Columbus's sailors gambled on the way over, and the
Indians on this side were gambling while waiting to be
discovered.

In an office overlooking Trinity graveyard, in New York City, an
old man, past eighty, with a fortune of at least $50,000,000,
gambles every day with all the excitement of youth. The
fluctuations in his game bring to his sallow cheeks the color
that no other human emotion could bring there.

On his way home this old man passes crowds of children in the
streets and looks down, concerned and sorrowful, to find that
they, too, are gambling.

They are matching pennies or shaking dice.

* * *

Clergymen are startled and amazed to find that women are gambling
heavily.

They have gambled heavily ever since civilization has progressed
far enough to give them large sums to gamble with.

Marie Antoinette staked thousands of louis at a time at
Versailles.

She was so wrapped up in gambling she could not see that her neck
was in danger.

When the lava came down from Vesuvius it buried Pompeiians who
were gambling.

The men who dig up the old monuments in Africa find gambling
instruments crumbling away side by side with appliances for
taking human life.

* * *

Nowhere in the lower forms of animal life, so far as we know, is
there the slightest indication of the gambling instinct.

The monkey, the elephant, love whiskey, and easily become
drunkards.

The passion for alcohol seems innate in animal life; even the
wise ant can be readily induced to disgrace himself if alcohol is
put near him.

For all the human weaknesses and mainsprings--ambition,
affection, vanity, drunkenness, ferocity, greediness, cunning--we
can find beginnings among the lower animals.

But man appears to have evolved from within himself the gambling
instinct for his own especial damnation.

Where did the instinct come from? Why was it planted in us?

Like every other instinct with which intelligent nature endows
us, it must have its good purpose, and it must not be judged
merely in the corrupted form in which we study it at Monte Carlo
or in Wall Street.

Perhaps the spirit of gambling is really only an atrophied,
perverted form of the spirit of adventure.

Columbus staked his life and gambled, when he started across the
water.

The leaders of the American Revolution expressly staked their
lives, their fortunes and their "sacred honor" in signing the
Declaration of Independence. They were noble gamblers, working
for the welfare of their fellows.

Perhaps gambling is only a perverted form of intelligent
ambition--we are all natural gamblers because we have within us
the quality which makes us willing to risk our own comfort,
security and present happiness for a result that seems better
worth while.

The universality of the gambling instinct in human beings is
certainly worthy of our study.

NO MAN UNDERSTANDS IRON
HOW CAN WE HOPE TO UNDERSTAND GOD?

Is there laughter in heaven--or can nothing move the eternal
heavenly calm?

If mirth exists among the perpetually blissful, how must the
angels laugh when in idle moments they listen to our speculations
concerning the Divinity? They peer down at us as we look at ants
dragging home a fragment of dead caterpillar. They hear us say
things like this:

If God exists, why does He not reveal himself to ME?

How could God exist before He created the world? Force cannot
exist or demonstrate its existence without matter. How could a
creator exist except with creation around him?

Where did He live before He made heaven?

If He is all-powerful, could He in five seconds make a six
months' old calf? If He made it in five seconds it would not be
six months old.

Nonsense more subtle comes from the educated, from those who know
enough to be preposterous in a pretentious way.

Hear the wise man:

God does not exist, because I cannot prove His existence: I can
prove everything else. With my law of gravitation I point to a
speck in space and say: "You'll find a new planet there," and
you find it. If a God existed could I not also point to Him? If
I can trace a comet in its flight, could I not trace the comet's
maker?

Huxley says: "The cosmic process has no sort of relation to
moral ends." That's a philosopher's way of saying something
foolish. Lalande, the astronomer, remarked that he had swept the
entire heavens with his telescope and found no God there. That's
funnier than any ant who should say: "I've searched this whole
dead caterpillar and found no God, so THERE IS NO GOD." The
corner of space which our telescopes can "sweep" is smaller,
compared to the universe, than a dead caterpillar compared with
this earth.

Moleschott, an able physiologist, believed that phosphorus was
essential to mental activity. Perhaps he did prove that. But he
said: "No thought without phosphorus," and thought he had wiped
the human soul out of existence. Philosophers do not laugh at
Moleschott. But they would laugh at a savage who would say:

"I have discovered that there is a catgut in a fiddle. No fiddle
without catgut--no music without cats. Don't talk to me about
soul or musical genius--it's all catgut."

We peek out at this universe from our half-developed corner of
it. We see faintly the millions of huge suns circling with their
planet families billions of miles away. We see our own little
sun rise and set; we ask ourselves a thousand foolish questions
of cause and Ruler--and because we cannot answer, we decry faith.

Wise doubter, look at a small piece of iron. It looks solid.
You suppose that its various parts touch. But submit it to cold.

You make it smaller. Then the particles did not touch. Do they
touch now? No; relatively they are farther apart than this
planet from its nearest neighbor.

That piece of iron, apparently solid, consists of clusters of
atoms wonderfully grouped, each cluster called a molecule. The
molecular cluster is invisible, millions of clusters in the
smallest visible fragment. The atom is accepted by science as
the final particle of matter. Its name indicates that it is
supposed to be indivisible. When science gets to the atom it
calmly gives up and says: "That is so small that it can no
longer be divided." A reasonable enough conclusion on the
surface, considering that you might have millions of atoms of
iron in one corner of your eye and not know it.

But why should the atom be incapable of further division? If it
is any size at all it can be thought of as split.

Where does the divisibility of matter end, if anywhere? What is
there SOLID about iron? Nothing in reality, except that it seems
to us solid. Already, with the X-ray, we can look through it.
Forces such as heat and electricity pass through it more readily
than through free air.

Science, which gradually finds things out, denying as it goes
along everything one step beyond, tells you truly that the
clusters of atoms in iron float in a sea of ether, just as do our
planets going round the sun. Heat the iron intensely. What
happens? You get what you call white heat. The white heat and
the white light come from the increase of wave motion in this
ether, and this ether, absolutely imponderable, of a tenuity
inconceivable, possesses elasticity greater and more powerful
than that of coiled steel. ----

So much for one small piece of iron, such as you would kick to
one side in a junk heap. If it interests you, read pages 159 to
162 of John Fiske's admirable little book, "Through Nature to
God." You will finish the book the day you get it.

If you are surprised to learn how much you did not know about
iron--after living near bits of iron all your life--is it not
just possible that your mind may be too feeble to conceive of
God?

For the fly buzzing about the edge of Niagara Falls, the falls do
not exist. The fly's brain cannot grasp their grandeur. It can
understand only the speck of spray that falls on its wing.

You live with God around you, hopelessly incapable of perceiving
His existence save through that faint spark of unconscious faith
that was mercifully planted in you. Snuff that out with dull
efforts at reason, and you have nothing.

WE LONG FOR IMMORTAL IMPERFECTION-- WE CAN'T HAVE IT.

All our longings for immortality, all our plans for immortal life
are based on the hope that Divine Providence will condescend to
let us live in another world as we live here.

Each of us wants to be himself in the future life, and to see his
friends as he knew them.

We want to preserve individuality forever and ever, when the
stars shall have faded away and the days of matter ended.

But what is individuality except imperfection? You are different
from Smith, Smith is different from Jones. But it is simply a
difference of imperfect construction. One is more foolish than
another, one is more irresponsibly moved to laughter or
anger--that constitutes his personality.

Remove our imperfections and we should all be alike--smooth off
all agglomerations of matter on all sides and everything would be
spherical.

What would be the use of keeping so many of us if we were all
perfect, and therefore all alike? One talks through his nose,
one has a deep voice. But shall kind Providence provide two sets
of wings for nose talkers and chest talkers? Why not make the
two into one good talker and save one pair of wings?

Why not, in fact, keep just one perfect sample, and let all the
rest placidly drift back to nothingness? Or, better, why not
take all the goodness that there is in all the men and women that
ever were and melt it all down into one cosmic human being? ----

The rain drops, the mist and the sprays of Niagara all go back to
the ocean in time. Possibly we all go back at the end to the sea
of divine wisdom, whence we were sent forth to do, well or badly,
our little work down here:

Future punishment? We think not.

One drop of water revives the wounded hero--another helps to give
wet feet and consumption to a little child. It all depends on
circumstances.

Both drops go back to the ocean. There is no rule that sends the
good drop to heaven and the other to boil forever and ever in a
sulphur pit. ----

Troubles beset us when we think of a future state and our reason
quarrels always with our longings. We all want--in heaven--to
meet Voltaire with his very thin legs. But we cannot believe
that those skinny shanks are to be immortal. We shall miss the
snuff and the grease on Sam Johnson's collar. If an angel comes
up neat and smiling and says "Permit me to introduce myself --I
am the great lexicographer," we shall say "Tell that to some
other angel. The great Samuel was dirty and wheezy, and I liked
him that way."

And children. The idea of children in heaven flying about with
their little fluffy wings is fascinating. But would eternal
childhood be fair to them? If a babe dies while teething, shall
it remain forever toothless? How shall its mother know it if it
is allowed to grow up?

Listen to Heine--that marvellous genius of the Jewish race:

"Yes, yes! You talk of reunion in a transfigured shape. What
would that be to me? I knew him in his old brown surtout, and so
I would see him again. Thus he sat at table, the salt cellar and
pepper caster on either hand. And if the pepper was on the right
and the salt on the left hand he shifted them over. I knew him
in a brown surtout, and so I would see him again."

Thus he spoke of his dead father. Thus many of us think and
speak of those that are gone. How foolish to hope for the
preservation of what is imperfect!

How important to have FAITH, and to feel that reality will
surpass anticipation, and that whatever IS will be the best thing
for us and satisfy us utterly.

THREE WATER DROPS CONVERSE

Three drops of water, stranded in a crevice on the side of an
inland mountain, talked in this way:

First Drop--"They say there is an ocean whence we came and to
which we shall return."

Second Drop--"They say we three drops are made in the image of
that ocean; that as far as we go, which is not far, we are
miniature oceans."

Third Drop--"Bosh and nonsense. There is no ocean. It is all
superstition. Before we were born here, from the mist, what were
we? When we evaporate in a few minutes what becomes of us? You
two drops make me feel sorry for you. I know that when I cease
reflecting that white cloud up there, that ends ME. I have no
delusions about oceans or going back to anything." ----

You know what happened. The cloud formed into rain and our three
drops were washed into a tiny trickling stream. The thin stream
of rain ran into a brook, the brook into a river. Soon the three
drops were back in the ocean--possibly without knowing it.

Shall we some day go rolling back to the ocean of cosmic wisdom
whence we came?

Is it possible that man is indeed made in the image of God, as
drops are made in the ocean's image--the individual men, like the
individual drops, being sent forth to do necessary cosmic work
through the universe, going back to the ocean after each errand
is done, and so going back and forth, forever and ever?

That would not be such a mean destiny, we should say. It would
certainly be a very democratic form of cosmic government. ----

Inferior men, inferior women, unworthy of comparison with
perfect, cosmic wisdom?

Not at all. Not inferior men and women, but inferior mediums,
inferior brains, bodies and planets through which to work.

Is one drop of water inferior to another? Is any inferior to the
purest drop in the ocean?

No. But one drop runs through the gutter of a stable, another
rolls from a mountain spring, a third carries in solution the
germ of typhus. But all three came pure from the ocean and all
will go back to the ocean pure.

DID WE ONCE LIVE ON THE MOON?
AND SHALL WE MOVE ON TO THE SUN SOME FINE DAY?

The most interesting questions are such as these:

Whence did we come?

Whither are we going?

And, by the way, what are we? Are we of any true importance?
Are we a permanent part of the universal scheme, privileged to
move along through the ages and see the end as we have seen the
beginning? Or are we, as advanced science says, merely like the
weevil in the biscuit--no part of the Baker's plan?

Are we indestructible specks of cosmic intelligence, lighting up
and animating one material body after another--never
destroyed--or do we play on this earth the passing part of the
microbe in the Brie cheese, which gives that cheese its flavor?
----

A great scientist, coldly analyzing the chemical processes
essential to the creation of each new human being, scoffs at any
possibility of immortality. With the microscope at his eye, he
magnifies nature's mysteries; he sums up the investigations of
the Hertwig brothers; he discourses learnedly of the nucleolus of
the Cytula--or progeny cell. He declares that science is able to
watch the creation of a human being, as it watches the progress
of a chick in the egg. He asserts that each new creature is
merely the result of a chemical process blending qualities of the
mother and father. Having a "final beginning," man must have a
final end. Man--a mixture of two sets of qualities--has no more
chance of immortality than has beer, which is a mixture of malt
and hops.

Read and think over this cold summing-up of our mean, limited
destiny as science farthest advanced now sees it:

"It must appear utterly senseless now to speak of the immortality
of the human person, when we know how this person, with all its
individual qualities of body and mind, has arisen. How can this
person possess an eternal life without end? The human person,
like every other many-celled individual, IS BUT A PASSING
PHENOMENON OF ORGANIC LIFE. With its death, the series of its
vital activities ceases entirely, just as it began."

That certainly is discouraging to a man who for fifty years has
sung "I want to be an angel."

Yet that is what Haeckel has to say about our chance of
immortality. But the other side of the grave has the LAST say,
and we think it will discredit Haeckel. We should even undertake
to do that now and here in two columns of a yellow journal. But
we are DETERMINED before the column ends to ask you what you
think of our moon-earth-sun transmigration notion.

The sun is now a blazing mass, inconceivably huge, inconceivably
fierce in our eyes. Its flames leap hundreds of thousands of
miles into space. If our earth fell to the sun, it would melt as
a snow-flake falling upon a blazing forest. We certainly do not
readily look upon the sun as our future home, if we accept its
present condition as permanent.

But once upon a time, hundreds of millions of years back, this
earth used to look TO THE MOON, on a smaller scale, as the sun
now looks to us. If there were on the moon at that time inferior
human beings, in a low state of cosmic evolution, they
undoubtedly had to thank the earth for their life, as we thank
the sun. To them the earth, then incandescent, blazing with the
heat that now reveals itself through volcanoes, was simply a
whirling ball of fire, put in its place to warm them.

They could no more think that men would ever come to live here
than we can now think of moving on to the sun. ----

In course of time this earth cooled off. It cooled so thoroughly
that the moon died of cold. Life could no longer continue there.

The dead satellite's destiny thenceforward was to show gratitude
for past heat by moving our tides and cheering our poets. As
life died out on the cold moon which had given us temporary
hospitality, life sprang into being on this planet, now fitted to
support it.

Here, on a larger sphere, with greater opportunities, mankind is
growing, and will far outstrip all that it could have done on the
poor little moon.

Meanwhile, as we struggle on, improving slowly, the sun, as
science proves, is cooling off in its turn. The flames become
less fierce as the thousands of centuries roll by. When we shall
have developed as much as possible on this limited planet, our
home will be cooled and ready on the sun, centre of our life in
this corner of space.

We shall move up a step--as boys do in the public schools. We
shall have been moon men, earth men, and shall graduate into sun
men. Think of a home so vast! On that grand star we shall lead
lives worth while, and justify Huxley's belief that men exist
somewhere compared to whom we should "be as black beetles
compared to us."

The excitement of meeting our brothers from other planets as they
move up to the sun in batchcs will be great.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING'S SYMPHONY

THE THOUGHT--

To live content with small means; to seek elegance rather than
luxury, and refinement rather than fashion; to be worthy,
not respectable, and wealthy, not, rich; to listen to stars and
birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard; to
think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry
never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious,
grow up through the common--this is my symphony.

WILLIAM HENRY CHANNING.

TO LIVE CONTENT WITH SMALL MEANS.

This means to realize to the full the possibilities of life.
Contentment means ABSENCE OF WORRY. It is only when free from
worry that the brain can act normally, up to its highest
standard. The man content with small means does his best work,
devotes his energies to that which is worth while, and not to
acquiring that which has no value.

TO SEEK ELEGANCE RATHER THAN LUXURY.

The difference between elegance and luxury is the difference
between the thin, graceful deer, browsing on the scanty but
sufficient forest pasture, and the fat swine revelling in
plentiful garbage.

REFINEMENT RATHER THAN FASHION.

The difference between refinement and fashion is the difference
between brains and clothing, the difference between an Emerson or
a Huxley and a Beau Brummel or other worthless but elaborately
decked carcass.

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