Of home influences it is hardly necessary to speak. The blessing of
a wise and good mother; the disaster of an ignorant, vicious, or
neglectful mother call for no reminder. The influence of husbands and
wives upon each other; the transformation wrought by a fortunate or
unfortunate love passion in the life of a woman or a man are equally
obvious and well understood. So with friendship: most men have known at
least one friend whose counsel, conversation, or example has affected
the entire current of their thoughts--perhaps has changed the direction
of their life. These instances being noted, it remains for us only to
remember that the influence of a wife, a lover, a mother, or a friend
may be as powerful for evil as for good.
But there are other personal influences as potent, but not so generally
nor so wisely recognised. Such are the influences of good or bad books,
and of great leaders and teachers--good and bad.
What tremendous powers over the lives and thoughts of millions
were wielded by such teachers as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Plato,
Aristotle, and Jesus Christ.
How vast a difference was wrought amongst the masses of humanity by
Caesar, Mahomet, Alexander, Oliver Cromwell.
Who can estimate the importance to the world of Copernicus, Galileo;
Luther, Calvin, Bacon, Darwin; of Rousseau, Wycliffe, Tyndall, Marx,
Homer, Harvey, Watt, Caxton, and Stephenson?
Which of us can assess his debt to such men as Shakespeare, Dante,
Shelley, Dickens, and Carlyle?
Then consider our account with the scientists, priests, and lawgivers of
Babylon and Egypt. Recall the benefits conferred upon us by the men who
invented written language; the wheel, the file, the plough. Think of
all the laborious and gradual building up of the arts, the ethics,
the sciences of the world. The making of architecture, mathematics,
sculpture, painting, agriculture, working in wood or metals; the
evolution of literature and music, the invention and improvement of
the many decencies, courtesies, and utilities of life; from the first
wearing of loin cloths, the fashioning of flint axes, to the steel pen,
the use of chloroform, and the custom of raising one's hat to a lady.
All the arts and crafts; the ethics, sciences, and laws; the
tools, arms, grammars; the literatures, dramas, and newspapers; the
conveniences and luxuries, the morals and the learning--all that goes
to the making of modern civilization we owe to the genius, the industry,
and the humanity of countless men and women whom we have never seen.
Into all the wealth of knowledge and freedom, of wisdom and virtue they
created and bequeathed, we are born, as we are born to the light and the
air. But for the labours and the sacrifices of the workers, fighters,
and thinkers of the past we were shorn of all our pride and power,
and reduced below the social, intellectual, and moral level of the
Australian Bushmen.
And yet, to see the airs and graces of many educated and superior
persons, one might suppose that they invented and discovered and
developed all the knowledge and wisdom, all the virtues and the graces
by which they benefit, of their own act and thought. One would suppose,
to behold the scorn of these superior persons for their more rude and
ignorant and unfortunate brothers and sisters, that _they_ had designed
and tailored all the moral and intellectual finery in which they are
arrayed. Whereas all their plumes are borrowed plumes; all they know
they have been taught by other men; all they have has been made by other
men; and they have become that which they are through the generosity and
the tenderness of other men and women.
The rich young scholar fresh from Harvard or Cambridge is blessedly
endowed with health, and strength and grammar, and mathematics, a
sprinkle of dead languages, and more or less graceful manners. He
despises the lout at the plough or the coster at the barrow because of
their lack of the benefits given to him as a dole. He forgets that the
University was there centuries before he was born, that Euclid, Lindley
Murray, Dr. Johnson, Cicero, Plato, and a million other abler men than
himself, forged every link of the chain of culture with which his proud
young neck is adorned. He forgets that it is to others, and not to
himself, that he owes all that makes him the man of whom he is so vain.
He forgets that the coster at the barrow and the hind at the plough
differ from him chiefly by the accident of birth, and that had they
been nursed and taught and trained like himself they would have been
as handsome, as active, as clever, as cultured, and very probably as
conceited and unjust as he.
For all the mighty dead, and the noble works they have bequeathed us,
and all the faithful living, and all the tender services they render us
and the shielding love they bear us, are parts of our environment.
And for the blessings these good men and gentle women, with their golden
heritage, have wrought in us, we are no more responsible and no
more praiseworthy than we are for the flowers of the field, or the
constellations in the sky, or the warmth of the beneficent sun that
shines alike upon the sinner and the saint.
And since we are but debtors to the dead, but starvelings decked out by
charity in the braveries made by other hands, and since we are deserving
of no praise for our grandeur and our virtues, how shall we lift up our
vainglorious and foolish faces to despise and contemn our less fortunate
brothers and sisters, who have been made evil, even as we have been
made good, who have been left uncouth and ignorant, even as we have been
polished and instructed?
"But for the grace of God," said the tinker of Elstow--but for the
graces of environment, say we--there, in the hangman's cart, in the
felon's jacket, in the dunce's cap, in the beggar's rags, in the
degradation of the drunkard or the misery of the degenerate weed of the
slums--go We.