in the United States, in every city of the Republic. Certainly I
personally know of a score of such successes in my own home city. I
personally know of many such examples in other States. You ask for the
inspiration of example, young man who cannot go to college. Look
around you--they are on every hand.
Can you not find them in your own town? Or, if you live on a farm, do
you not see them in your own county? I personally know of country boys
who started out as farm hands at sixteen dollars per month and board,
who to-day own the farms on which they were employed, and yet who are
not now much past middle life. They have done it by the simple rules
that are as old as human industry.
Come, then, don't mope. Sleep eight hours. Then three hours for your
meals, and a chance for your stomach to begin digesting them after you
have eaten them. That makes eleven hours, and leaves you thirteen
hours remaining. Take one of these for getting to and from your
business. _Then work the other twelve._ Every highly successful man
whom I know worked even longer during the years of his beginnings.
What, no recreation? say you. Certainly I say recreation, and I say
pleasure, too. But remember that you have got to overcome the college
man's advantage over you--and that can only be done by hard work. But
what of that? For a young man like you, full of that boundless vigor
of youth, what higher pleasure can there be than the doing of your
work better than anybody else does the same kind of work?
And what finer happiness can there be than the certainty that such a
life as that will make realities of your dreams? For sure it is that
this is the road by which you can walk to unfailing success, even over
the bodies of your rivals who, with greater "advantages" than yours,
neglect them and fall upon the steep ascent up which, with harder
muscles, steadier nerves, and stouter heart, you climb with ease,
gaining strength with every step you take instead of losing power as
you advance, as did your flabbier fibered competitor.
Now for the other illustration: Three years ago a certain young man
came to me from New York, the son of a friend who occupied a
Government position. He was studying law. He was "quivering" with
ambition. But his lungs were getting weak. Would it be possible to get
him a place on some ranch for six or eight months? Yes, it was
possible. An acquaintance was glad to take him.
At the end of his time he returned, still "quivering" with ambition.
He was going to make a lawyer, that's what he was going to make--the
very best lawyer that ever mastered Blackstone. He already had a
clerkship promised in one of the great legal establishments in the
metropolis. This clerkship paid him enough to live on, and gave him
the chance to do the very work which is necessary to the making of a
lawyer.
Splendid thus far. But observe the next step. In about twelve months
this young man came to me again. Would I help to get a certain man who
held a Government position paying him $150 a month promoted? This last
man's record was admirable; he deserved promotion on his own account.
But why the interest of the would-be lawyer, who was "quivering" with
ambition?
It developed that if the other fellow was promoted, this embryo
Erskine could, with the aid of influential political friends, be
appointed in his place. But why did he want this position? Well,
answered the young man, it would enable him to take his law course at
one of the law schools of the Capitol and get his degree, and all that
sort of thing. Also, it would enable him to live at home with mother,
would it not? Yes, that was a consideration, he admitted.
But did he think that that was as good a training for his profession,
and would give him the chance of a business acquaintance while he was
getting that training, as well as the clerkship in the New York office
would? Perhaps not, but, after all, he didn't get very much salary in
the New York law office. Why, how much did he get? Only twenty dollars
a week.
But was not that enough to live on at a modest boarding-house, and get
a room with bed, table, one chair, and a washstand, and buy him the
necessary clothing? Oh, yes! of course he could scratch along on it,
but it was hardly what a young man of his standing and family ought to
have.
Oh! it didn't enable him to get out into society, was that it? Well,
yes, he must admit there was something in that. Washington had social
advantages, to be sure, and $150 a month would enable him to have some
of that life which a young man was entitled to and at the very same
time be getting his legal education. _Well!_ That young man did _not_
get what he wanted.
That young man had the wrong notion of life. Of course, no man would
do anything for him. Until he changed his point of view utterly,
success was absolutely impossible for him. What that young man needed
was the experience of going back to New York and having to apply for
position after position until his shoe soles wore out, and he felt
the pangs of hunger. He needed iron in his blood, that is what he
needed. All the colleges in the world would not enable that man to do
anything worth doing until he mastered the sound principles of living
and of working.
Right before him in New York was an illustration of this. One of the
most notable successes at the bar which that city or this country has
witnessed in the last fifteen years has been made by a young man who
had neither college education, money, nor friends. He was, I am told,
a stenographer in one of New York's great legal establishments. But
that young man had done precisely what I have been pounding at over
and over again in this paper. Very well. To-day he is one among half a
dozen of the most notable lawyers in the greatest city of the greatest
nation in the world.
It is all in the using of what you have. Let me repeat again what I
have said in a previous paper--the inscription which Doc Peets
inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished
"Wolfville" with its first funeral:
"JACK KING, DECEASED.
Life ain't the holding of a good hand,
But
The playing of a poor hand well."
And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of
the talents. After all, it is not what we have, but what we make out
of what we have that counts in this world of work. And, what's more,
that is the only thing that ought to count.
IV
THE NEW HOME
Your father made the old home. Prove yourself worthy of him by making
the new home. He built the roof-tree which sheltered you. Build you a
roof-tree that may in its turn shelter others. What abnormal egotism
the attitude of him who says, "This planet, and all the uncounted
centuries of the past, were made for _me_ and nobody else, and I will
live accordingly. I will go it alone."
"I wish John had not married so young," said a woman of wealth,
fashion, and brilliant talents in speaking of her son. "Why, how old
was he?" asked her friend. "Twenty-five," said she; "he ought to have
waited ten years longer." "I think not," was the response of the
world-wise man with whom she was conversing. "If he got a good wife he
was in great luck that he did not wait longer." "No," persisted the
mother, "he ought to have taken more time 'to look around.' These
early marriages interfere with a young man's career."
This fragment of a real conversation, which is typical of numberless
others like it, reveals the false and shallow philosophy which, if it
becomes our code of national living, will make the lives of our young
people abnormal and our twentieth century civilization artificial and
neurotic. Even now too many people are thinking about a "career."
Mothers are talking about "careers" for their sons. Young men are
dreaming of their "careers."
It is assumed that a young man can "carve out his career" if his
attention is not distracted and his powers are not diminished by a
wife and children whom he must feed, clothe, and consider. The icy
selfishness of this hypothesis of life ought to be enough to reject it
without argument. Who is any man, that he should have a "career"? and
what does a "career" amount to, anyway? What is it for? Fame? Surely
not, because
"Imperious Cæsar dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"
says Shakespeare. And Shakespeare ought to know; he is not quite three
centuries dead, and even now the world is sadly confused as to
whether he wrote Shakespeare. "Career!" Let your "career" grow out of
the right living of your life--not the living of your life grow out of
your "career." "Don't get the cart before the horse."
Is it to accomplish some good thing for humanity that you want this
"career," which is to keep you single until you are too old to be
interesting? Very well. Just what is it that you expect to do with
these self-centered and single years during which you intend so to
help the race? If you cannot tell, you are "down and out" on that
score.
And, besides, you will find that the enormous majority of men who by
their service have uplifted or enriched humanity have been men enough
to lead the natural life. They have been men who have founded homes.
And how can you better benefit mankind than by founding a home among
your fellow men, a pure, normal, sweet, and beautiful home?
That would be getting down to business. That would be doing something
definite, something "you can put your finger on." It would be "getting
down to earth," as the saying is. You would be "benefiting humanity"
sure enough and in real earnest by taking care of some actual human
being among this great indefinite mass called mankind. The making of
a home is the beginning of human usefulness.
The Boers were a splendid type of the human animal. It took all the
power of the greatest empire on earth to crush a handful of them; and
even then Great Britain was able to subdue them only at astonishing
loss of men and money, and irreparable impairment of prestige. They
were glorious fighting men, these Boers. The blood that flowed in
their veins was unadulterated Dutch--the only unconquered blood in
history; for you will remember that even Cæsar could not overcome
them, and, with the genius of the statesman-soldier that he was, he
made terms with them.
But these Boers were a good deal more than mere fighting animals; they
were perhaps the most religious people on earth. If they were mighty
creatures physically, they were also exalted beings spiritually. They
knew how to pray as well as to fight. They made their living, too, and
asked no favors. Also they builded them a state. It was a fine thing
in the English to acknowledge the high qualities of these African
Dutchmen, after the war with them was over.
It is said that there was not an unmarried man above twenty-one years
of age among them. Very generally the same thing was true of "The
Fathers" who founded this republic. Indeed, all great constructive
periods and peoples have lived in harmony with the laws of Nature. It
has been the races of marrying men that have made the heroic epochs in
human history. The point is that the man who is not enough of a man to
make a home, need not be counted. He is a "negligible quantity," as
the scientists put it.
So if your arm is not strong enough to protect a wife, and your
shoulders are not broad enough to carry aloft your children in a sort
of grand gladness, you are really not worth while. For it will take a
man with veins and arteries swollen with masculine blood pumped by a
great, big, strong heart, working as easily and joyfully as a Corliss
engine; with thews of steel wire and step as light as a tiger's and
masterful as an old-time warrior's; with brain so fertile and vision
so clear that he fears not the future, and knows that what to weaker
ones seem dangers are in reality nothing but shadows--it will take
this kind of a man to make any "career" that is going to be made.
Very well. Such a man will be searching for his mate and finding her,
planning a home and building it before he is twenty-five; and the man
who does not, is either too weak or too selfish to do it. In either
case you need not fear him. "He will never set the world afire."
I am assuming that you are man enough to be a man--not a mere machine
of selfishness on the one hand, or an anemic imitation of masculinity
on the other hand. I am assuming that you think--and, what is more
important, feel--that Nature knows what she is about; that "God is not
mocked"; and that therefore you propose to live in harmony with
universal law.
Therefore, I am assuming that you have established, or will establish,
the new home in place of the old home. I am assuming that you will do
this before there is a gray hair in your head or a wrinkle under your
eye. These new homes which young Americans are building will be the
sources of all the power and righteousness of this Republic to-morrow,
just as the lack of them will be the source of such weakness as our
future develops.
Within these new homes which young Americans are to build, the altar
must be raised again on which the sacred fire of American ideals must
be kept burning, just as it was kept burning in the old homes which
these young Americans have left. And precisely to the extent that
these new homes are not erected will American ideals pale, and finally
perish.
It is a question, you see, which travels quite to the horizon of our
vision and beyond it, and which searches the very heart of our
national purity and power. No wonder that Bismarck considered the
perpetuation of the German home, with its elemental and joyous
productivity, as the source of all imperial puissance on the one hand,
and the purpose and end of all statesmanship on the other hand.
It would be far better for America if our public men were more
interested in these simple, vital, elemental matters than in "great
problems of statesmanship," many of which, on analysis, are found to
be imaginary and supposititious. Yes, and it would be better for the
country if our literary men would describe the healthful life of the
Nation's plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial
careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort of thing.
They would sell more books, too. I never yet heard that anybody got
tired of "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I think it quite likely that
the Book of Ruth will outlast all the short stories that will be
written during the present decade. Yes, decidedly, our public men, and
our writers, too, ought to "get down to earth." There is where the
people live. The people walk upon the brown soil and the green grass.
They dwell beneath the apple-blossoms. How fine a thing it is that our
American President is preaching the doctrine of the American home so
forcefully that he impresses the Nation and the world with these basic
truths of living and of life.
It is a good deal more important that the institution of the American
home shall not decay, than that the Panama Canal be built or our
foreign trade increase. So, in considering the young man and the new
home, we are dealing with an immediate and permanent and an absolutely
vital question, not only from the view-point of the young man himself,
but from that of the Nation as well.
Of course nobody means that young men should hurl themselves into
matrimony. The fact that it is advisable for you to learn to swim does
not mean that you should jump into the first stream you come to, with
your clothes and shoes on. Undoubtedly you ought first to get
"settled"; that is, you ought to prepare for what you are going to do
in life and begin the doing of it. Don't take this step while you are
in college. If you mean to be a lawyer, you ought to get your legal
education and open your office; if a business man, you should "get
started"; if an artizan, you should acquire your trade, etc. But it is
inadvisable to wait longer.
It is not necessary for you to "build up a practise" in the
profession, or make a lot of money in business, or secure unusual
wages as a skilled laborer. Begin at the beginning, and live your
lives together, win your successes together, share your hardships
together, and let your fortune, good or ill, be of your joint making.
It will help you, too, in a business way.
Everybody else is, or was, situated nearly as you are, and there is a
sort of fellow-feeling in the hearts of other men and women who once
had to "hoe the same row" you are hoeing; and it is among these men
and women you must win your success. It is largely through their favor
and confidence that you will get on at all. If you are making a new
home you are in harmony with the world about you, and the very earth
itself exhales a vital and sustaining sympathy.
It is not at all necessary that you should be able to provide as good
a house and the furnishings thereof as that from which your wife
comes. Nobody expects you to be as successful in the very beginning of
your life as her father was at the close of his. Least of all does she
herself expect it. And even if this were possible, it is not from such
continuous luxury that the best character is made. The absolute
necessity to economize compels the ordinary young American couple to
learn the value of things--the value of a dollar and the value of
life.
They learn to "know how it comes," again to employ one of the wise
sayings of the common people. And the numberless experiences of their
first few years of comparative hardship are the very things necessary
to bring out in them sweetness, self-sacrifice, and uplifting
hardihood of character. In these sharp experiences, too, there is
greatest happiness. How many hundreds of times have you heard men and
women say of their early married years, "Those were the happiest days
of my life."
As a matter of good business on the one hand, and of sheer felicity on
the other hand, make the ideals of this new home of yours as high as
you possibly can. Don't make them so high that neither you nor any
other human being can live up to them, of course; but if you can put
them a notch beyond those even of the exalted standard of the old
home, by all means do it. Do it, that is, if you can live up to them.
It is remarkable what individual power grows out of clean living. It
is profitable also. The mere business value of a reputation for a high
quality of home life will be one of the best assets that you can
accumulate. "They are attending strictly to business and will make
their mark," said a wise old banker to a group of friends in
discussing a fine type of young business man, and the equally fine
type of the young American woman who was his wife.
I do not know whether that young man was borrowing money for his
business from that particular bank or not, but I do know that he could
borrow it if he wanted it. And one reason why his credit was
established with the money-wise old financier was the ideal home life
which he and his wife were leading.
For, mark you, they were not "living beyond their means." That was the
first thing. That is one of the best rules you can follow. Who has not
known of the premature withering of young business men and lawyers
(yes, and sometimes men not so young, alas!) who have suddenly
blossomed out with houses and clothes and horses, and a lot of other
things which their business or practise ought not reasonably to stand.
On the other hand, do not begin your life as a miser. Do not let the
new home proclaim by its barrenness that it is the abode of a poor
young man asking sympathy and aid of his friends. "Yes, rent a piano,
by all means. Do not economize on your wife and your home," advised an
old Methodist preacher noted for his horse-sense. And he was right.
After all, what is the purpose and end of all your labor? If it is not
that very home, I do not know what it is. Put on a little more steam,
therefore, and earn enough extra to buy a picture. And get a good one
while you are at it. It will not break you up to buy a really good
etching. A fine "print" is infinitely better than a poor painting.
Anything is better than a poor painting. If she has good taste, your
wife will make the walls of that new home most attractive with an
astonishingly small amount of money.
It is the new _home_ you and she are making, remember that. Very well;
you cannot make it in a flat. "Apartments" cannot by any magic be
converted into a home. For the purposes of a _home_, better a separate
dwelling with dry-goods box for table and camp-stools for chairs than
tapestried walls, mosaic floors, and all luxuriousness in those modern
structures where human beings hive.
These buildings have their indispensable uses, but home-making is not
one of them. "Apartments" are not cheaper for you and easier for her
than a house to yourselves--no, not if you got the finest apartments
for nothing, not even if you were paid to live in gilded rooms. For
the making of a home is priceless. And that cannot be done in flats or
hotels or other walled and roofed herding places. Every man would like
to have a picture of "the house he was born in"; but who would choose
a hotel for a birthplace? Boniface himself would not "admire" (to use
one of our Westernisms) to have you select his hostelry for that
purpose.
Of course you will spend all of your extra time at home. That is what
home is for. Live in your home; do not merely eat and sleep there. It
is not a boarding-house, remember that. Books are there, and music and
a human sympathy and a marvelous care for you, under whose influence
alone the soul of a young man grows into real grandeur, power, and
beauty. And be sure that you let each day have its play-hour.
"I would not care to live," said one of the very ablest and most
eminent members of the American Catholic priesthood--"I would not care
to live," said he, "if I could not have my play-hour, music, and
flowers. They are God's gifts and my necessity. Every young man who
has a home commits a crime if he does not each day bring one hour of
joy into his household."
The man who said that is not only brilliant and wise, but one of the
most exalted souls it has ever been my fortune to know. And his words
have good sense in them, have they not? Make that good sense yours,
then. Make a play-hour each day for yourself and wife and children. I
say children, for I assume, of course, that when you are making a new
home you are making a _home_ indeed.
Very well. The absence of children is either unfortunate or immoral. A
purposely childless marriage is no marriage at all; it is merely an
arrangement. Robert Louis Stevenson calls it "a friendship recognized
by the police." A house undisturbed and unglorified by the wailings
and laughter of little ones is not a home--it is a habitation.
There is in children a certain immortality for you. Most of us believe
in life after death; and that belief is a priceless possession of
every human being who has it. But even the man who has not this faith
beholds his own immortality in his children. "Why of course I am
immortal," said a scientist who believed that death ends all. "Of
course I am immortal," said he, "there goes my reincarnation"; and he
pointed to his little son, glorious with the promise of an exhaustless
vitality.
There is no doubt at all that association with infancy and youth puts
back the clock of time for each of us. Besides all this, it is the
natural life, and that is the only thing worth while. The "simple
life" is all right, and the "strenuous life" excellent. The "artistic
life" is charming, no doubt, and all the other kinds of "lives" have
their places, I suppose. I am interested in all of them. But I am much
more interested in the natural life. That alone is truthful. And,
after all, only the truthful is important.
Get into the habit of happiness. It is positively amazing how you can
turn every little incident into a sunbeam. And, mark you, it is quite
as easy to take the other course. But what a coward a man is who
releases in his home all the pent-up irritability and disappointment
of the day.
There is no sense in it, either. It does not make you less black of
spirit to fill your home with gloom. You ought not to do it, even from
the view-point of good health. If you eat your meal in a sour silence
which almost curdles the cream and scares your wife half to death, you
do not and cannot digest your food. If you have had a hard day, say to
yourself, "Well, that was a hard day. Now for some rest and some fun."