Editorials from the Hearst Newspapers
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Eventually they will disappear. Murder will be unknown, and
theft, rendered unnecessary by decent social organization, will
have disappeared also.
At that time we shall be fighting the smaller and more dangerous,
more elusive and more persistent moral troubles--HYPOCRISY,
CONCEIT, UNCHARITABLENESS. These are the mosquitoes and flies
of the world of immorality that will pursue us when the big
fellows--murder and theft--shall have been killed off.
THE MONKEY AND THE SNAKE FIGHT
We wish to tell you of the monkey and the snake fight, described
by a witness in the Lahore Tribune. ----
Before men arrived on earth, when all the animals were racing for
supremacy, the monkey seemed to have the smallest chance. No one
would have guessed that the descendants of this feeble,
defenseless little brute would eventually rule the earth, killing
off tigers, lions and the other huge monsters at pleasure.
We have before called your attention in this column to the fact
that the monkey, or some animal like him, had the honor of
contributing our proud human services as the world's rulers
BECAUSE HE COULD USE HIS BRAIN.
That fight between the monkey and the cobra illustrates this
quite clearly.
The monkey was a little monkey, with scarcely enough muscle to
strangle a hen.
His little black finger-nails could hurt nobody. His teeth were
fit only to nibble fruit or to chatter in rage at his fellow
monkeys.
This monkey had the misfortune to annoy a huge cobra.
Mr. Cobra is the most dangerous, the most formidably armed, of
all living animals. He is a solid mass of muscle, gifted with
lightning speed. The slightest touch of his fangs means death.
The brain of the cobra is about as big as a mustard seed. The
brain of the monkey--even a small one--is several hundred times
as big as the brain of the largest snake. We refer to the
cerebrum, the front brain, which does the thinking.
The monkey annoyed the snake, and the snake chased him. Mr.
Monkey, shrieking and chattering, rushed over the ground until he
came to a rock. He stood still in front of the rock.
The snake dashed its head at him to annihilate him; the monkey
jumped to one side and let the snake beat its head against the
rock.
Over and over, this operation was repeated, the monkey with
lightning speed avoiding the dart of the snake, and the snake,
with never-ending stupidity, dashing its head against the rock.
Eventually the powerful, dangerous snake was stretched out at
full length, bleeding and tired out.
The monkey was not bleeding and not tired. He was extremely
cheerful. He seized the snake by the neck, just back of the
head, and placidly proceeded to rub its head off on the stone.
When he had rubbed the head to a pulp. incidentally destroying
its primitive brain, he left the dead snake lying there, and
gratefully accepted the Indian corn and sugar-cane donated by
the admiring humans-his relatives-who had witnessed his
performance. ----
The monkey used his brain--the snake did not.
The monkey did not say, but he might as well have said:
"You need not wonder that my half-sister, Eve, crushed the
serpent's head. We monkeys and humans have soft hands and no
poison sacs, but WE KNOW HOW TO MAKE OUR BRAINS WORK, and
that means that we rule creation."
TOO LITTLE AND TOO MUCH
Here is a quotation from a very wise person called Aristotle.
This Greek philosopher was the teacher of Alexander the Great,
and incidentally he has been the teacher of millions of men since
he began to talk philosophy, more than twenty centuries ago.
"First of all, we must observe that in all these matters of
human action the too little and the too much are alike ruinous,
as we can see (to illustrate the spiritual by the natural)
in the case of strength and health. Too much and too little
exercise alike impair the strength, and too much meat and drink
and too little both alike destroy the health, but the fitting
amount produces and preserves them.... So, too, the man who
takes his fill of every pleasure and abstains from none becomes a
profligate; while he who shuns all becomes stolid and
insusceptible."
The next time you fall into a philosophical mood, and begin
reviewing the causes of your troubles, see if you can't find some
useful suggestion in the common-sense statement of Aristotle we
give today.
How about the "too much" of one thing and "too little" of
another?
Are you quite sure that you don't do too much talking and too
little thinking?
Are you sure that you don't do too much drinking and playing and
idling, and too little reading?
Are you sure that you don't do too much of things you like that
do you no good, and too little of things that you ought to like,
and that would help you to succeed? ----
We believe that every one of our readers has some friend or
brother or son who can be really helped by the reading of this
quotation from the old Greek wise man.
You can state to any young man or woman to whom you send this
advice that the man who gave it formed the character and judgment
of Alexander, the world's most successful young man.
DO YOU FEEL DISCOURAGED?
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.
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