Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
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Men can deceive each other much more easily than they can deceive
women--the latter being providentially provided with the X-ray of
intuitional perception.
The blustering politician, preaching what he does not practise,
may hold forth on the street corner or in a saloon, and influence
the votes of others as worthless as himself. But among women his
home life will more than offset his political influence.
The bad husband may occasionally get the vote of a deluded or
frightened wife, but he will surely lose the votes of the wives
and daughters next door.
Voting by women will improve humanity, because IT WILL COMPEL
MEN TO SEEK AND EARN THE APPROVAL OF WOMEN.
Our social system improves in proportion as the men in it are
influenced by its good women.
As for the education of women, it would seem unnecessary to urge
its value upon even the stupidest of creatures. Yet it is a fact
that the importance of thorough education of girls is still
doubted--usually, of course, by men with deficient education of
their own and an elaborate sense of their own importance and
superiority.
Mary Lyon, whose noble efforts established Mount Holyoke College,
and spread the idea of higher education for women throughout the
world, put the case of women's education in a nutshell. She
said:
"I think it less essential that the farmers and mechanics
should be educated than that their wives, the mothers of their
children, should be."
The education of a girl is important chiefly because it means the
educating of a future mother.
Whose brain but the mother's inspires and directs the son in the
early years, when knowledge is most easily absorbed and
permanently retained?
If you find in history a man whose success is based on
intellectual equipment, you find almost invariably that his
mother was exceptionally fortunate in her opportunities for
education.
Well educated women are essential to humanity. They insure abler
men in the future, and incidentally they make the ignorant man
feel ashamed of himself in the present.
ASTRONOMY WOMAN'S FUTURE WORK
In the centuries to come, perhaps a thousand centuries from now,
perhaps a little sooner, woman will get her chance on earth.
Population will have reached its normal limit, and nature's wise
law, dealing with a really civilized race, will automatically
limit children to two in each family.
Schools and nurseries will be scientific and perfect. The care
of children will be the duty of the State. Very poor women will
be unknown, and unknown will be the woman burdened with the
isolated care of children in an isolated household.
In those distant days woman will do her share of the world's
intellectual and artistic work. Physical work of all kinds will
have been practically annihilated by machinery. Our big,
muscular bodies, developed hitherto with an eye to pursuing wild
animals, carrying heavy burdens and fighting each other like
dog-apes in the forest, will be refined and very different from
their present brutality.
It will be an agreeable earth, a very agreeable and much improved
human race. ----
Those millennial days, which are sure to come, will find us with
our little earthly problems solved. We shall have outgrown
our infancy, and, like a child that has learned to walk and
balance itself, we shall understand the forces of nature and use
them.
Our principal occupation will be harmonious life on this planet
and persistent investigation of the marvels of the universe
outside of our own little sphere.
As centuries have gone by on earth, power has dwelt with
different classes of human beings. In the days of the
Troglodytes, when one gentleman would crack another gentleman's
thigh-bone to get at the marrow, the most important man of course
was the one best able with physical force to murder his fellows.
At various times the great explorer, the great military
strategist, has been the most important of men. To-day the most
important man is the organizer of industry. He is really the
most important, not only in the size of his reward, but in the
service which he renders. Nature gives the biggest reward to him
who does the most important work.
A thousand centuries from now the most important human being will
be the most efficient astronomer.
The man who shall bring us accurate news of other worlds will be
welcomed as was Christopher Columbus or Drake or Raleigh in his
day.
Women will be very important factors in astronomical research.
The work of the astronomer is especially the work of patience, of
enthusiasm, of devotion.
Patience, enthusiasm and devotion are more highly developed in
women than in men.
Already, in view of her extremely limited opportunities, woman
has done admirably well in the field of astronomy. We note that
it is a woman at Cambridge whose stellar photographs first
located the new star in Perseus. In England, in Germany and in
France women astronomers are doing work almost equal to that of
the best men.
Everybody will remember the faithful labor of Herschel's sister,
working all through the night and sleeping through the day, month
after month and year after year, helping her great brother in his
studies.
There is a kind of small-fry man who dislikes the idea of mental
development among women. He is a mouselike kind of creature, so
thoroughly conscious of his own smallness, so thoroughly in love
with his own importance, that he dreads the intellectual woman,
who makes him feel microscopic.
Despite the protests of such men, some of whom are editors, women
are making progress. When they shall give to science, especially
to astronomy, the passionate, devoted attention which they have
given for ages to the care of children, they will rank among the
highest on earth.
WOMAN'S VANITY IS USEFUL
We'll waste no time in proving that women, from the cradle to the
grave, at all hours and all ages, are sincerely interested in
their personal appearance.
No man should object to this--the constitutional guarantee
referring to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness covers
the ground fully.
But it is not enough for men NOT TO OBJECT to woman's various
innocent vanities.
Every man should be delighted that women are vain. Each man
should do what he can to keep the vanity alive.
FOR WOMAN'S VANITY, DEARLY BELOVED, IS THE ONE AND INDISPENSABLE
PRESERVER OF HER HEALTH.
A woman cannot be pretty, according to her own notions, unless
HEALTHY.
If too fat, she is not pretty--and she is miserable until,
through self-control, she gets thin.
If too thin, she is not pretty. At present she has a crazy sort
of idea that to be "skinny" is to be attractive. That is a
passing delusion. In the long run women realize that there is
nothing beautiful about a female living skeleton, and they strive
through normal living to become normal.
Above all, no woman can have a good complexion unless she have
good health and live normally. This one absorbing question of
complexion does more for woman's health; it gives us more strong
mothers, and more sensible girls, than all the preachings,
beseechings, prayers and expostulations of all the world's male
advisers.
A woman's instinct is to eat buckwheat cakes, adding boiling hot
coffee and iced water. She likes to eat candy between meals, and
her idea of a fine luncheon is lobster salad and ice cream. But
small spots appear. Those fine pink cheeks get too pink or too
pale, and sensible eating is adopted as a life rule.
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."
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