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+Project Gutenberg's The University of Hard Knocks, by Ralph Parlette
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The University of Hard Knocks
+
+Author: Ralph Parlette
+
+Posting Date: September 13, 2008 [EBook #455]
+Release Date: March, 1996
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS ***
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
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+
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+
+
+
+The University of Hard Knocks
+
+
+by
+
+Ralph Parlette
+
+
+The School That Completes Our Education
+
+
+
+"He that overcometh shall inherit all things; and I will be his God,
+and he shall be my son"--Revelation 21:7.
+
+  "Sweet are the uses of adversity;
+  Which, like the toad, ugly and venomous,
+  Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
+  And thus our life, exempt from public haunt,
+  Finds tongues in trees, books in running brooks
+  Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
+        Shakespeare
+
+
+
+
+Why It Is Printed
+
+MORE than a million people have sat in audiences in all parts of the
+United States and have listened to "The University of Hard Knocks." It
+has been delivered to date more than twenty-five hundred times upon
+lyceum courses, at chautauquas, teachers' institutes, club gatherings,
+conventions and before various other kinds of audiences. Ralph Parlette
+is kept busy year after year lecturing, because his lectures deal with
+universal human experience.
+
+"Can I get the lecture in book form?" That continuous question from
+audiences brought out this book in response. Here is the overflow of
+many deliveries.
+
+"What is written here is not the way I would write it, were I writing a
+book," says Ralph Parlette. "It is the way I say it. The lecture took
+this unconscious colloquial form before audiences. An audience makes a
+lecture, if the lecture survives. I wish I could shake the hand of
+every person who has sat in my audiences. And I wish I could tell the
+lecture committees of America how I appreciate the vast amount of
+altruistic work they have done in bringing the audiences of America
+together. For lecture audiences are not drawn together, they are pushed
+together."
+
+The warm reception given "The University of Hard Knocks" by the public,
+has encouraged the publishers to put more of Mr. Parlette's lectures
+into book form, "Big Business" and "Pockets and Paradises" are now in
+preparation as this, the third edition of "The University of Hard
+Knocks" comes from the press.
+
+
+
+Contents
+
+SOME PRELIMINARY REMARKS--The lecturer the delivery wagon--The sorghum
+barrel--Audience must have place to put lecture--Why so many words
+
+The University of Hard Knocks
+
+I. THE BOOKS ARE BUMPS--Every bump a lesson--Why the two kinds of
+bumps--Description of University--"Sweet are the uses of
+Adversity"--Why children are not interested
+
+II. THE COLLEGE OF NEEDLESS KNOCKS, the bumps that we bump
+into--Getting the coffee-pot--Teaching a wilful child--Bumps make us
+"stop, look, listen"--Blind man learns with one bump--Going up requires
+effort--Prodigals must be bumped--The fly and the sticky
+fly-paper--"Removed" and "knocked out"
+
+III.  THE COLLEGE OF NEEDFUL KNOCKS, the bumps that bump into us--Our
+sorrows and disappointments--How the piano was made--How the "red mud"
+becomes razor-blades--The world our mirror--The cripple taught by the
+bumps--Every bump brings a blessing--You are never down and out
+
+IV. "SHAKE THE BARREL"--How we decide our destinies--Why the big ones
+shake up and the little ones shake down--The barrel of life sorting
+people--How we hold our places, go down, go up--Good luck and bad
+luck--The girl who went up--The man who went down--The fatal rattle--We
+must get ready to get--Testimonials and press notices--You cannot
+uplift people with derrick--No laws can equalize--Help people to help
+themselves--We cannot get things till we get ready for them
+
+V. GOING UP--How we become great--We must get inside greatness--There
+is no top--We make ourselves great by service--the first step at
+hand--All can be greatest--Where to find great people--A glimpse of
+Gunsaulus
+
+VI. THE PROBLEM OF "PREPAREDNESS"--Preparing children for life--Most
+"advantages" are disadvantages--Buying education for children--The
+story of "Gussie" and "Bill Whackem"--Schools and books only give
+better tools for service--"Hard knocks" graduates--Menace of America
+not swollen fortunes but shrunken souls--Children must have struggle to
+get strength--Not packhorse work--Helping the turkeys killed them--the
+happiness of work we love--Amusement drunkards--Lure of the
+city--Strong men from the country--Must save the home towns--A school
+of struggle--New School experiment
+
+VII. THE SALVATION OF A "SUCKER"--You can't get something for
+nothing--The fiddle and the tuning--How we know things--Trimmed at the
+shell game--My "fool drawer"--Getting "selected to receive 1,000 per
+cent"--You must earn what you own--Commencement orations--My maiden
+sermon--The books that live have been lived--Singer must live
+songs--Successful songs written from experience--Theory and
+practice--Tuning the strings of life
+
+VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My first school
+teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll of my
+schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben Hur won the
+chariot race--Pulling on the oar
+
+IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi keeps
+on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but
+stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best day,
+tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just
+beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too busy
+to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not
+best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming
+obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not praise--Doing
+duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of Waters"--Go on south
+forever!
+
+X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--Climbing
+Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--Each day we
+rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into the eternal
+day--Going south is going upward
+
+
+
+
+Some Preliminary Remarks
+
+LADIES and Gentlemen:
+
+I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want to be heard. I am only
+the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon comes to your house, you
+are not much interested in how it looks; you are interested in the
+goods it brings you. You know some very good goods are sometimes
+delivered to you in some very poor delivery wagons.
+
+So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
+wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do not
+pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to the
+goods.
+
+Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to you
+some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours alone,
+but everybody's.
+
+
+Can Only Pull the Plug!
+
+
+Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a lecture go
+differently before every audience. The kind of an audience is just as
+important as the kind of a lecture. A cold audience will make a good
+lecture poor, while a warm audience will make a poor lecture good.
+
+Let me illustrate:
+
+When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
+mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to the
+woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.
+
+Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and the
+sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall when it
+was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not squirt. It
+would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would have to wait a
+long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real cold winter day I
+would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not run at all. It would
+just look out at me.
+
+I discovered it was the temperature.
+
+I have brought a barrel of sorghum to this audience. The name of the
+sorghum is "The University of Hard Knocks." I can only pull the plug. I
+cannot make it run. That will depend upon the temperature of this
+audience. You can have all you want of it, but to get it to running
+freely, you will have to warm up.
+
+
+
+
+Did You Bring a Bucket?
+
+
+No matter how the sorghum runs, you have to have a bucket to get it.
+How much any one gets out of a lecture depends also upon the size of
+the bucket he brings to get it in. A big bucket can get filled at a
+very small stream. A little bucket gets little at the greatest stream.
+With no bucket you can get nothing at Niagara.
+
+That often explains why one person says a lecture is great, while the
+next person says he got nothing out of it.
+
+
+
+
+What It's All About
+
+
+Here is a great mass of words and sentences and pictures to express two
+or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing
+up from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own
+personal overcoming, and that we never finish it.
+
+Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound
+life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No
+statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can
+alone solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a
+higher vision.
+
+We are told that the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would
+not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So
+abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental
+digestion like more bulk in the way of pictures and discussions of
+these truths. Here is bulk as well as nutriment.
+
+If you get the feeling that the first personal pronoun is being
+overworked, I remind you that this is more a confession than a lecture.
+You cannot confess without referring to the confesser.
+
+
+
+To Everybody in My Audience
+
+
+I like you because I am like you.
+
+
+I believe in you because I believe in myself. We are all one family. I
+believe in your Inside, not in your Outside, whoever you are, whatever
+you are, wherever you are.
+
+
+I believe in the Angel of Good inside every block of human marble. I
+believe it must be carved out in The University of Hard Knocks.
+
+
+I believe all this pride, vanity, selfishness, self-righteousness,
+hypocrisy and human frailty are the Outside that must be chipped away.
+
+
+I believe the Hard Knocks cannot injure the Angel, but can only reveal
+it.
+
+
+I hope you are getting your Hard Knocks.
+
+
+I care little about your glorious or inglorious past. I care little
+about your present. I care much about your future for that is to see
+more of the Angel in you.
+
+
+
+The University of Hard Knocks
+
+Chapter I
+
+The Books Are Bumps
+
+
+THE greatest school is the University of Hard Knocks. Its books are
+bumps.
+
+Every bump is a lesson. If we learn the lesson with one bump, we do not
+get that bump again. We do not need it. We have traveled past it. They
+do not waste the bumps. We get promoted to the next bump.
+
+But if we are "naturally bright," or there is something else the matter
+with us, so that we do not learn the lesson of the bump we have just
+gotten, then that bump must come back and bump us again.
+
+Some of us learn to go forward with a few bumps, but most of us are
+"naturally bright" and have to be pulverized.
+
+The tuition in the University of Hard Knocks is not free. Experience is
+the dearest teacher in the world. Most of us spend our lives in the
+A-B-C's of getting started.
+
+We matriculate in the cradle.
+
+We never graduate. When we stop learning we are due for another bump.
+
+There are two kinds of people--wise people and fools. The fools are the
+people who think they have graduated.
+
+The playground is all of God's universe.
+
+The university colors are black and blue.
+
+The yell is "ouch" repeated ad lib.
+
+
+
+
+The Need of the Bumps
+
+
+When I was thirteen I knew a great deal more than I do now. There was a
+sentence in my grammar that disgusted me. It was by some foreigner I
+had never met. His name was Shakespeare. It was this:
+
+"Sweet are the uses of adversity; Which, like the toad, ugly and
+venomous, Wears yet a priceless jewel in its head; And thus our life,
+exempt from public haunt, Finds tongues in trees, books in running
+brooks, Sermons in stones, and good in everything."
+
+
+"Tongues in trees," I thought. "Trees can't talk! That man is crazy.
+Books in running brooks! Why nobody never puts no books in no running
+brooks. They'd get wet. And that sermons in stones! They get preachers
+to preach sermons, and they build houses out of stones."
+
+I was sorry for Shakespeare--when I was thirteen.
+
+But I am happy today that I have traveled a little farther. I am happy
+that I have begun to learn the lessons from the bumps. I am happy that
+I am learning the sweet tho painful lessons of the University of
+Adversity. I am happy that I am beginning to listen. For as I learn to
+listen, I hear every tree speaking, every stone preaching and every
+running brook the unfolding of a book.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+Children, I fear you will not be greatly interested in what is to
+follow. Perhaps you are "naturally bright" and feel sorry for
+Shakespeare.
+
+I was not interested when father and mother told me these things. I
+knew they meant all right, but the world had moved since they were
+young, and now two and two made seven, because we lived so much faster.
+
+It is so hard to tell young people anything. They know better. So they
+have to get bumped just where we got bumped, to learn that two and two
+always makes four, and "whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also
+reap."
+
+But if you will remember some of these things, they will feel like
+poultices by and by when the bumps come.
+
+
+
+
+The Two Colleges
+
+
+As we get bumped and battered on life's pathway, we discover we get two
+kinds of bumps--bumps that we need and bumps that we do not need.
+
+Bumps that we bump into and bumps that bump into us.
+
+We discover, in other words, that The University of Hard Knocks has two
+colleges--The College of Needless Knocks and The College of Needful
+Knocks.
+
+We attend both colleges.
+
+
+
+Chapter II
+
+The College of Needless Knocks
+
+The Bumps That We Bump Into
+
+
+NEARLY all the bumps we get are Needless Knocks.
+
+There comes a vivid memory of one of my early Needless Knocks as I say
+that. It was back at the time when I was trying to run our home to suit
+myself. I sat in the highest chair in the family circle. I was three
+years old and ready to graduate.
+
+That day they had the little joy and sunshine of the family in his
+high-chair throne right up beside the dinner table. The coffee-pot was
+within grabbing distance.
+
+I became enamored with that coffee-pot. I decided I needed that
+coffee-pot in my business. I reached over to get the coffee-pot. Then I
+discovered a woman beside me, my mother. She was the most meddlesome
+woman I had ever known. I had not tried to do one thing in three years
+that that woman had not meddled into.
+
+And that day when I wanted the coffee-pot--I did want it. Nobody knows
+how I desired that coffee-pot. "One thing thou lackest," a
+coffee-pot--I was reaching over to get it, that woman said, "Don't
+touch that!"
+
+The longer I thought about it the more angry I became. What right has
+that woman to meddle into my affairs all the time? I have stood this
+petticoat tyranny three years, and it is time to stop it!
+
+I stopped it. I got the coffee-pot. I know I got the coffee-pot. I got
+it unanimously. I know when I got it and I also know where I got it. I
+got about a gallon of the reddest, hottest coffee a bad boy ever
+spilled over himself.
+
+O-o-o-o-o-o! I can feel it yet!
+
+There were weeks after that when I was upholstered. They put
+applebutter on me--and coal oil and white-of-an-egg and starch and
+anything else the neighbors could think of. They would bring it over
+and rub it on the little joy and sunshine of the family, who had gotten
+temporarily eclipsed.
+
+
+
+
+Teaching a Wilful Child
+
+
+You see, my mother's way was to tell me and then let me do as I
+pleased. She told me not to get the coffee-pot and then let me get it,
+knowing that it would burn me. She would say, "Don't." Then she would
+go on with her knitting and let me do as I pleased.
+
+Why don't mothers knit today?
+
+Mother would say, "Don't fall in the well." I could go and jump in the
+well after that and she would not look at me. I do not argue that this
+is the way to raise children, but I insist that this was the most kind
+and effective way to rear one stubborn boy I know of. The neighbors and
+the ladies' aid society often said my mother was cruel with that angel
+child. But the neighbors did not know what kind of an insect mother was
+trying to raise. Mother did know. She knew how stubborn and self-willed
+I was. It came from father's "side of the house."
+
+Mother knew that to argue with me was to flatter me. Tell me, serve
+notice upon me, and then let me go ahead and get my coffee-pot. That
+was the quickest and kindest way to teach me.
+
+I learned very quickly that if I did not hear mother, and heed, a
+coffee-pot would spill upon me. I cannot remember when I disobeyed my
+mother that a coffee-pot of some kind did not spill upon me, and I got
+my blisters. Mother did not inflict them. Mother was not much of an
+inflicter. Father attended to that in the laboratory behind the
+parsonage.
+
+
+
+
+"Stop, Look, Listen"
+
+
+And thru the bumps we learn that The College of Needless Knocks runs on
+the same plan. The Voice of Wisdom says to each of us, "Child of
+humanity, do right, walk in the right path. You will be wiser and
+happier." The tongues in the trees, the books in the running brooks and
+the sermons in the stones all repeat it.
+
+But we are not compelled to walk in the right path. We are free
+im-moral agents.
+
+We get off the right path. We go down forbidden paths. They seem easier
+and more attractive. It is so easy to go downward. We slide downward,
+but we have to make effort to go upward.
+
+Anything that goes downward will run itself. Anything that goes upward
+has to be pushed.
+
+And going down the wrong path, we get bumped harder and harder until we
+listen.
+
+We are lucky if we learn the lesson with one bump. We are unlucky when
+we get bumped twice in the same place, for it means we are making no
+progress.
+
+When we are bumped, we should "stop, look, listen." "Safety first!"
+
+One time I paid a seeress two dollars to look into my honest palm. She
+said, "It hain't your fault. You wasn't born right. You was born under
+an unlucky star." You don't know how that comforted me. It wasn't my
+fault--all my bumps and coffee-pots! I was just unlucky and it had to
+be.
+
+How I had to be bumped to learn better! Now when I get bumped I try to
+learn the lesson of the bump and find the right path, so that when I
+see that bump coming again I can say, "Excuse me; it hath a familiar
+look," and dodge it.
+
+The seeress is the soothing syrup for mental infants.
+
+
+
+
+Blind Man's Fine Sight
+
+
+The other day I watched a blind man go down the aisle of the car to get
+off the train. Did you ever study the walk of a blind man? He
+"pussyfooted" it along so carefully. He bumped his hand against a seat.
+Then he did what every blind man does, he lifted his hand higher and
+didn't bump any more seats.
+
+I looked down my nose. "Ralph Parlette," I said to myself, "when are
+you going to learn to see as well as that blind man? He learns his
+lesson with one bump, and you have to go bumping into the same things
+day after day and wonder why you have so much 'bad luck'!"
+
+
+
+
+Are You Going Up or Down?
+
+
+Let me repeat, things that go downward will run themselves. Things that
+go upward have to be pushed. Going upward is overcoming. Notice that
+churches, schools, lyceums, chautauquas, reform movements--things that
+go upward--never run themselves. They must be pushed all the time.
+
+And so with our own lives. Real living is conscious effort to go upward
+to larger life.
+
+If you are making no effort in your life, if you are moving in the line
+of least resistance, depend upon it you are going downward. Look out
+for the bumps!
+
+Look over your community. Note the handful of brave, faithful,
+unselfish souls who are carrying the community burdens and pushing
+upward. Note the multitude making little or no effort, and even getting
+in the way of the pushers.
+
+Majorities do not rule. Majorities never have ruled. It is the brave
+minority of thinking, self-sacrificing people that decides the tomorrow
+of communities that go upward. Majorities are not willing to make the
+effort to rule themselves. They are content to drift and be amused and
+follow false gods that promise something for nothing. They must be
+led--sometimes driven--by minorities.
+
+People are like sheep. The shepherd can lead them to heaven--or to hell.
+
+
+
+
+Bumping the Prodigals
+
+
+Human life is the story of the Prodigal Son. We look over the fence of
+goodness into the mystery of the great unknown world beyond and in that
+unknown realm we fondly imagine is happiness.
+
+Down the great white way of the world go the million prodigals, seeking
+happiness where nobody ever found happiness. Their days fill up with
+disappointment, their vision becomes dulled. They become anaemic
+feeding upon the husks.
+
+They just must get their coffee-pot!
+
+How they must be bumped to think upon their ways. Every time we do
+wrong we get a Needless Knock. Every time! We may not always get bumped
+on the outside, but we always get bumped on the inside. A bump on the
+conscience is worse than a bump on the "noodle."
+
+"I can do wrong and not get bumped. I have no feelings upon the
+subject," somebody says, You can? You poor old sinner, you have bumped
+your conscience numb. That is why you have no feelings on the subject.
+You have pounded your soul into a jelly. You don't know how badly you
+are hurt.
+
+How the old devil works day and night to keep people amused and doped
+so that they will not think upon their ways! How he keeps the music and
+the dazzle going so they will not see they are bumping themselves!
+
+
+
+
+Consider the Sticky Flypaper
+
+
+Did you ever watch a fly get his Needless Knocks on the sticky flypaper?
+
+The last thing Mamma Fly said as Johnny went off to the city was,
+"Remember, son, to stay away from the sticky flypaper. That is where
+your poor dear father was lost." And Johnny Fly remembers for several
+minutes. But when he sees all the smart young flies of his set go over
+to the flypaper, he goes over, too. He gazes down at his face in the
+stickiness. "Ah! how pretty I am! This sticky flypaper shows me up
+better than anything at home. What a fine place to skate. Just see how
+close I can fly over it and not get stuck a bit. Mother is such a silly
+old worryer. She means all right, of course, but she isn't up-to-date.
+We young set of modern flies are naturally bright and have so many more
+advantages. You can't catch us. They were too strict with me back home."
+
+You see Johnny fly back and forth and have the time of his naturally
+bright young life. Afterwhile, tho, he stubs his toe and lands in the
+stickiness. "Well, well, how nice this is on the feet, so soft and
+soothing!"
+
+First he puts one foot down and pulls it out. That is a lot of fun. It
+shows he is not a prisoner. He is a strong-minded fly. He can quit it
+or play in it, just as he pleases. After while he puts two feet down in
+the stickiness. It is harder to pull them out. Then he puts three down
+and puts down a few more trying to pull them out.
+
+"Really," says Johnny Fly bowing to his comrades also stuck around him,
+"really, boys, you'll have to excuse me now. Good-bye!" But he doesn't
+pull loose. He feels tired and he sits down in the sticky flypaper. It
+is a fine place to stick around. All his young set of flies are around
+him. He does like the company. They all feel the same way--they can
+play in the sticky flypaper or let it alone, just as they please, for
+they are strong-minded flies. They have another drink and sing, "We
+won't go home till morning."
+
+Johnny may get home, but he will leave a wing or a leg. Most of them
+stay. They just settle down into the stickiness with sleeping sickness.
+
+The tuition in The College of Needless Knocks is very high indeed!
+
+
+
+
+"Removed" or "Knocked Out"?
+
+
+The man who goes to jail ought to congratulate himself if he is guilty.
+It is the man who does not get discovered who is to be pitied, for he
+must get some more knocks.
+
+The world loves to write resolutions of respect. How often we write,
+"Whereas, it has pleased an all-wise Providence to remove," when we
+might reasonably ask whether the victim was "removed" or merely
+"knocked out."
+
+There is a good deal of suicide charged up to Providence.
+
+
+
+Chapter III
+
+The College of Needful Knocks
+
+The Bumps That Bump Into Us
+
+
+BUT occasionally all of us get bumps that we do not bump into. They
+bump into us. They are the guideboard knocks that point us to the
+higher pathway.
+
+You were bumped yesterday or years ago. Maybe the wound has not yet
+healed. Maybe you think it never will heal. You wondered why you were
+bumped. Some of you in this audience are just now wondering why.
+
+You were doing right--doing just the best you knew how--and yet some
+blow came crushing upon you and gave you cruel pain.
+
+It broke your heart. You have had your heart broken. I have had my
+heart broken more times than I care to talk about now. Your home was
+darkened, your plans were wrecked, you thought you had nothing more to
+live for.
+
+I am like you. I have had more trouble than anybody else. I have never
+known anyone who had not had more trouble than anyone else.
+
+But I am discovering that life only gets good after we have been killed
+a few times. Each death is a larger birth.
+
+We all must learn, if we have not already learned, that these blows are
+lessons in The College of Needful Knocks. They point upward to a higher
+path than we have been traveling.
+
+In other words, we are raw material. You know what raw material
+is--material that needs more Needful Knocks to make it more useful and
+valuable.
+
+The clothing we wear, the food we eat, the house we live in, all have
+to have the Needful Knocks to become useful. And so does humanity need
+the same preparation for greater usefulness.
+
+I should like to know every person in this audience. But the ones I
+should most appreciate knowing are the ones who have known the most of
+these knocks--who have faced the great crises of life and have been
+tried in the crucibles of affliction. For I am learning that these
+lives are the gold tried in the fire.
+
+
+
+
+The Sorrows of the Piano
+
+
+See the piano on this stage? Good evening, Mr. Piano. I am glad to see
+you. You are so shiny, beautiful, valuable and full of music, if
+properly treated.
+
+Do you know how you got upon this stage, Mr. Piano? You were bumped
+here. This is no reflection upon the janitor. You became a piano by the
+Needful Knocks.
+
+I can see you back in your callow beginnings, when you were just a
+tree--a tall, green tree. You were green! Only green things grow. Did
+you get the meaning of that, children? I hope you are green.
+
+There you stood in the forest, a perfectly good, green young tree. You
+got your lessons, combed your hair, went to Sunday school and were the
+best young tree you could be.
+
+That is why you were bumped--because you were good! There came a man
+into the woods with an ax, and he looked for the best trees there to
+bump. He bumped you--hit you with the ax! How it hurt you! And how
+unjust it was! He kept on hitting you. "The operation was just
+terrible." Finally you fell, crushed, broken, bleeding.
+
+It is a very sad story. They took you all bumped and bleeding to the
+sawmill and they bumped and ripped you more. They cut you in pieces and
+hammered you day by day.
+
+They did not bump the little, crooked, dissipated, cigaret-stunted
+trees. They were not worth bumping.
+
+But shake, Mr. Piano. That is why you are on this stage. You were
+bumped here. All the beauty, harmony and value were bumped into you.
+
+
+
+
+The Sufferings of the Red Mud
+
+
+One day I was up the Missabe road about a hundred miles north of
+Duluth, Minnesota, and came to a hole in the ground. It was a big
+hole--about a half-mile of hole. There were steam-shovels at work
+throwing out of that hole what I thought was red mud.
+
+"Kind sir, why are they throwing that red mud out of that hole?" I
+asked a native.
+
+"That hain't red mud. That's iron ore, an' it's the best iron ore in
+the world."
+
+"What is it worth?"
+
+"It hain't worth nothin' here; that's why they're movin' it away."
+
+There's red mud around every community that "hain't worth nothin'"
+until you move it--send it to college or somewhere.
+
+Not very long after this, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw some of
+this same red mud. It had been moved over the Great Lakes and the rails
+to what they call a blast furnace, the technological name of which
+being The College of Needful Knocks for Red Mud.
+
+I watched this red mud matriculate into a great hopper with limestone,
+charcoal and other textbooks. Then they corked it up and school began.
+They roasted it. It is a great thing to be roasted.
+
+When it was done roasting they stopped. Have you noticed that they
+always stop when anything is done roasting? If we are yet getting
+roasted, perhaps we are not done!
+
+Then they pulled the plug out of the bottom of the college and held
+promotion exercises. The red mud squirted out into the sand. It was not
+red mud now, because it had been roasted. It was a freshman--pig iron,
+worth more than red mud, because it had been roasted.
+
+Some of the pig iron went into another department, a big teakettle,
+where it was again roasted, and now it came out a sophomore--steel,
+worth more than pig iron.
+
+Some of the sophomore steel went up into another grade where it was
+roasted yet again and rolled thin into a junior. Some of that went on
+up and up, at every step getting more pounding and roasting and
+affliction.
+
+It seemed as tho I could hear the suffering red mud crying out, "O, why
+did they take me away from my happy hole-in-the-ground? Why do they
+pound me and break my heart? I have been good and faithful. O, why do
+they roast me? O, I'll never get over this!"
+
+But after they had given it a diploma--a pricemark telling how much it
+had been roasted--they took it proudly all over the world, labeled
+"Made in America." They hung it in show windows, they put it in glass
+cases. Many people admired it and said, "Isn't that fine work!" They
+paid much money for it now. They paid the most money for what had been
+roasted the most.
+
+If a ton of that red mud had become watch-springs or razor-blades, the
+price had gone up into thousands of dollars.
+
+My friends, you and I are the raw material, the green trees, the red
+mud. The Needful Knocks are necessary to make us serviceable.
+
+Every bump is raising our price. Every bump is disclosing a path to a
+larger life. The diamond and the chunk of soft coal are exactly the
+same material, say the chemists. But the diamond has gone to The
+College of Needful Knocks more than has her crude sister of the
+coal-scuttle.
+
+There is no human diamond that has not been crystallized in the
+crucibles of affliction. There is no gold that has not been refined in
+the fire.
+
+
+
+
+Cripple Taught by Bumps
+
+
+One evening when I was trying to lecture in a chautauqua tent in
+Illinois, a crippled woman was wheeled into the tent and brought right
+down to the foot of the platform. The subject was The University of
+Hard Knocks. Presently the cripple's face was shining brighter than the
+footlights.
+
+She knew about the knocks!
+
+Afterwards I went to her. "Little lady, I want to thank you for coming
+here. I have the feeling that I spoke the words, but you are the
+lecture itself."
+
+What a smile she gave me! "Yes, I know about the hard knocks," she
+said. "I have been in pain most of my life. But I have learned all that
+I know sitting in this chair. I have learned to be patient and kind and
+loving and brave."
+
+They told me this crippled woman was the sweetest-spirited, best-loved
+person in the town.
+
+But her mother petulantly interrupted me. She had wheeled the cripple
+into the tent. She was tall and stately. She was well-gowned. She lived
+in one of the finest homes in the city. She had everything that money
+could buy. But her money seemed unable to buy the frown from her face.
+
+"Mr. Lecture Man," she said, "why is everybody interested in my
+daughter and nobody interested in me? Why is my daughter happy and why
+am I not happy? My daughter is always happy and she hasn't a single
+thing to make her happy. I am not happy. I have not been happy for
+years. Why am I not happy?"
+
+What would you have said? Just on the spur of the moment--I said,
+"Madam, I don't want to be unkind, but I really think the reason you
+are not happy is that you haven't been bumped enough."
+
+I discover when I am unhappy and selfish and people don't use me right,
+I need another bump.
+
+The cripple girl had traveled ahead of her jealous mother. For
+selfishness cripples us more than paralysis.
+
+
+
+
+Schools of Sympathy
+
+
+When I see a long row of cots in a hospital or sanitarium, I want to
+congratulate the patients lying there. They are learning the precious
+lessons of patience, sympathy, love, faith and courage. They are
+getting the education in the humanities the world needs more than
+tables of logarithms. Only those who have suffered can sympathize. They
+are to become a precious part of our population. The world needs them
+more than libraries and foundations.
+
+
+
+
+The Silver Lining
+
+
+There is no backward step in life. Whatever experiences come to us are
+truly new chapters of our education if we are willing to learn them.
+
+We think this is true of the good things that come to us, but we do not
+want to think so of the bad things. Yet we grow more in lean years than
+in fat years. In fat years we put it in our pockets. In lean years we
+put it in our hearts. Material and spiritual prosperity do not often
+travel hand-in-hand. When we become materially very prosperous, so many
+of us begin to say, "Is not this Babylon that I have builded?" And
+about that time there comes some handwriting on the wall and a bump to
+save us.
+
+Think of what might happen to you today. Your home might burn. We don't
+want your home to burn, but somebody's home is burning just now. A
+conflagration might sweep your town from the map. Your business might
+wreck. Your fortune might be swept away. Your good name might be
+tarnished. Bereavement might take from you the one you love most.
+
+You would never know how many real friends you have until then. But
+look out! Some of your friends would say, "I am so sorry for you. You
+are down and out." Do not believe that you are down and out, for it is
+not true. The old enemy of humanity wants you to believe you are down
+and out. He wants you to sympathize with yourself. You are never down
+and out!
+
+The truth is, another chapter of your real education has been opened.
+Will you read the lesson of the Needful Knocks?
+
+A great conflagration, a cyclone, a railroad wreck, an epidemic or
+other public disaster brings sympathy, bravery, brotherhood and love in
+its wake.
+
+There is a silver lining to every hard knocks cloud.
+
+Out of the trenches of the Great War come nations chastened by
+sacrifice and purged of their dross.
+
+
+
+Chapter IV
+
+"Shake The Barrel"
+
+How We Decide Our Destinies
+
+
+NOW as we learn the lessons of the Needless and the Needful Knocks, we
+get wisdom, understanding, happiness, strength, success and greatness.
+We go up in life. We become educated. Let me bring you a picture of it.
+
+One day the train stopped at a station to take water. Beside the track
+was a grocery with a row of barrels of apples in front. There was one
+barrel full of big, red, fat apples. I rushed over and got a sack of
+the big, red, fat apples. Later as the train was under way, I looked in
+the sack and discovered there was not a big, red, fat apple there.
+
+All I could figure out was that there was only one layer of the big,
+red, fat apples on the top, and the groceryman, not desiring to spoil
+his sign, had reached down under the top layer. He must have reached to
+the bottom, for he gave me the worst mess of runts and windfalls I ever
+saw in one sack. The things I said about the grocery business must have
+kept the recording angel busy.
+
+Then I calmed down. Did the groceryman do that on purpose? Does the
+groceryman ever put the big apples on top and the little ones down
+underneath?
+
+Do you? Is there a groceryman in the audience?
+
+Man of sorrows, you have been slandered. It never occurred to me until
+that day on the train that the groceryman does not put the big ones on
+top and the little ones down underneath. He does not need to do it. It
+does itself. It is the shaking of the barrel that pushes the big ones
+up and the little ones down.
+
+
+
+
+Shake to Their Places
+
+
+You laugh? You don't believe that? Maybe your roads are so good and
+smooth that things do not shake on the road to town. But back in the
+Black Swamp of Ohio we had corduroy roads. Did you ever see a corduroy
+road? It was a layer of logs in the mud. Riding over it was the poetry
+of motion! The wagon "hit the high spots." And as I hauled a wagon-bed
+full of apples to the cider-mill over a corduroy road, the apples
+sorted out by the jolting. The big apples would try to get to the top.
+The little, runty apples would try to hold a mass meeting at the bottom.
+
+I saw that for thirty years before I saw it. Did you ever notice how
+long you have to see most things before you see them? I saw that when I
+played marbles. The big marbles would shake to the top of my pocket and
+the little ones would rattle down to the bottom.
+
+You children try that tomorrow. Do not wait thirty years to learn that
+the big ones shake up and the little ones shake down. Put some big ones
+and some little things of about the same density in a box or other
+container and shake them. You will see the larger things shake upward
+and the smaller shake downward. You will see every thing shake to the
+place its size determines. A little larger one shakes a little higher,
+and a little smaller one a little lower.
+
+When things find their place, you can shake on till doomsday, but you
+cannot change the place of one of the objects.
+
+Mix them up again and shake. Watch them all shake back as they were
+before, the largest on top and the smallest at the bottom.
+
+
+
+
+Lectures in Cans
+
+
+At this place the lecturer exhibits a glass jar more than half-filled
+with small white beans and a few walnuts.
+
+
+Let us try that right on the platform. Here is a glass jar and inside
+of it you see two sizes of objects--a lot of little white beans and
+some walnuts. You will pardon me for bringing such a simple and crude
+apparatus before you in a lecture, but I ask your forbearance. I am
+discovering that we can hear faster thru the eye than thru the ear. I
+want to make this so vivid that you will never forget it, and I do not
+want these young people to live thirty years before they see it.
+
+If there are sermons in stones, there must be lectures in cans. This is
+a canned lecture. Let the can talk to you awhile.
+
+You note as I shake the jar the little beans quickly settle down and
+the big walnuts shake up. Not one bean asks, "Which way do I go?" Not
+one walnut asks, "Which way do I go?" Each one automatically goes the
+right way. The little ones go down and the big ones go up.
+
+Note that I mix them all up and then shake. Note that they arrange
+themselves just as they were before.
+
+Suppose those objects could talk. I think I hear that littlest bean
+down in the bottom saying, "Help me! Help me! I am so unfortunate and
+low down. I never had no chance like them big ones up there. Help me
+up."
+
+I say, "Yes, you little bean, I'll help you." So I lift him up to the
+top. See! I have boosted him. I have uplifted him.
+
+See, the can shakes. Back to the bottom shakes the little bean. And I
+hear him say, "King's ex! I slipped. Try that again and I'll stay on
+top." So I put him back again on top.
+
+The can shakes. The little bean again shakes back to the bottom. He is
+too small to stay up. He cannot stand prosperity.
+
+Then I hear Little Bean say, "Well, if I cannot get to the top, you
+make them big ones come down. Give every one an equal chance."
+
+So I say, "Yes, sir, Little Bean. Here, you big ones on top, get down.
+You Big Nuts get right down there on a level with Little Bean!" And you
+see I put them down.
+
+But I shake the can, and the big ones go right back to the top with the
+same shakes that send the little ones back to the bottom.
+
+There is only one way for those objects to change their place in the
+can. Lifting them up or putting them down will not do it. But change
+their size!
+
+Equality of position demands quality of size. Let the little one grow
+bigger and he will shake up. Let the big one grow smaller and he will
+shake down.
+
+
+
+
+The Shaking Barrel of Life
+
+
+O, fellow apples! We are all apples in the barrel of life on the way to
+the market place of the future. It is a corduroy road and the barrel
+shakes all the time.
+
+In the barrel are big apples, little apples, freckled apples, speckled
+apples, green apples, and dried apples. A bad boy on the front row
+shouted the other night, "And rotten apples!"
+
+In other words, all the people of the world are in the great barrel of
+life. That barrel is shaking all the time. Every community is shaking,
+every place is shaking. The offices, the shops, the stores, the
+schools, the pulpits, the homes--every place where we live or work is
+shaking. Life is a constant survival of the fittest.
+
+The same law that shakes the little ones down and the big ones up in
+that can is shaking every person to the place he fits in the barrel of
+life. It is sending small people down and great people up.
+
+And do you not see that we are very foolish when we want to be lifted
+up to some big place, or when we want some big person to be put down to
+some little place? We are foolishly trying to overturn the eternal law
+of life.
+
+We shake right back to the places our size determines. We must get
+ready for places before we can get them and keep them.
+
+The very worst thing that can happen to anybody is to be artificially
+boosted up into some place where he rattles.
+
+I hear a good deal about destiny. Some people seem to think destiny is
+something like a train and if we do not get to the depot in time our
+train of destiny will run off and leave us, and we will have no
+destiny. There is destiny--that jar.
+
+If we are small we shall have a small destiny. If we are great we shall
+have a great destiny. We cannot dodge our destiny.
+
+
+
+
+Kings and Queens of Destiny
+
+
+The objects in that jar cannot change their size. But thank God, you
+and I are not helpless victims of blind fate. We are not creatures of
+chance. We have it in our hands to decide our destiny as we grow or
+refuse to grow.
+
+We shake down if we become small; we shake up if we become great. And
+when we have reached the place our size determines, we stay there so
+long as we stay that size.
+
+If we wish to change our place, we must first change our size. If we
+wish to go down, we must grow smaller and we shall shake down. If we
+wish to go up, we must grow greater, and we shall shake up.
+
+Each person is doing one of three things consciously or unconsciously.
+
+1. He is holding his place.
+
+2. He is going down.
+
+3. He is going up.
+
+In order to hold his place he must hold his size. He must fill the
+place. If he shrinks up he will rattle. Nobody can stay long where he
+rattles. Nature abhors a rattler. He shakes down to a smaller place.
+
+In order to stay the same size he must grow enough each day to supply
+the loss by evaporation. Evaporation is going steadily on in lives as
+well as in liquids. If we are not growing any, we are rattling.
+
+
+
+
+We Compel Promotion
+
+
+So you young people should keep in mind that you will shake into the
+places you fit. And when you are in your places--in stores, shops,
+offices or elsewhere, if you want to hold your place you must keep
+growing enough to keep it tightly filled.
+
+If you want a greater place, you simply grow greater and they cannot
+keep you down. You do not ask for promotion, you compel promotion. You
+grow greater, enlarge your dimensions, develop new capabilities, do
+more than you are paid to do--overfill your place, and you shake up to
+a greater place.
+
+I believe if I were so fortunate or unfortunate as to have a number of
+people working for me, I would have a jar in my office filled with
+various sizes of objects. When an employee would come into the office
+and say, "Isn't it about time I was getting a raise?" I would say, "Go
+shake the jar, Charlie. That is the way you get raised. As you grow
+greater you won't need to ask to be promoted. You will promote
+yourself."
+
+
+
+
+"Good Luck" and "Bad Luck"
+
+
+This jar tells me so much about luck. I have noted that the lucky
+people shake up and the unlucky people shake down. That is, the lucky
+people grow great and the unlucky people shrivel and rattle.
+
+Notice as I bump this jar. Two things happened. The little ones shook
+down and the big ones shook up. The bump that was bad luck to the
+little ones was good luck to the big ones. The same bump was both good
+luck and bad luck.
+
+Luck does not depend upon the direction of the bump, but upon the size
+of the bump-ee!
+
+
+
+
+The "Lucky" One
+
+
+So everywhere you look you see the barrel sorting people according to
+size. Every business concern can tell you stories like that of the
+Chicago house where a number of young ladies worked. Some of them had
+been there for a long time. There came a raw, green Dutch girl from the
+country. It was her first office experience, and she got the bottom job.
+
+The other girls poked fun at her and played jokes upon her because she
+was so green.
+
+Do you remember that green things grow?
+
+"Is not she the limit?" they oft spake one to another. She was. She
+made many blunders. But it is now recalled that she never made the same
+blunder twice. She learned the lesson with one helping to the bumps.
+
+And she never "got done." When she had finished her work, the work she
+had been put at, she would discover something else that ought to be
+done, and she would go right on working, contrary to the rules of the
+union! Without being told, mind you. She had that rare faculty the
+world is bidding for--initiative.
+
+The other girls "got done." When they had finished the work they had
+been put at, they would wait--O, so patiently they would wait--to be
+told what to do next.
+
+Within three months every other girl in that office was asking
+questions of the little Dutch girl. She had learned more about business
+in three months than the others had learned in all the time they had
+been there. Nothing ever escaped her. She had become the most capable
+girl in the office.
+
+The barrel did the rest. Today she is giving orders to all of them, for
+she is the office superintendent.
+
+The other girls feel hurt about it. They will tell you in confidence
+that it was the rankest favoritism ever known. "There was nothing fair
+about it. Jennie ought to have been made superintendent. Jennie had
+been here four years."
+
+
+
+
+The "Unlucky" One
+
+
+The other day in a paper-mill I was standing beside a long machine
+making shiny super-calendered paper. I asked the man working there some
+questions about the machine, which he answered fairly well. Then I
+asked him about a machine in the next room. He said, "I don't know
+nothing about it, boss, I don't work in there."
+
+I asked him about another process, and he replied, "I don't know
+nothing about it, I never worked in there." I asked him about the
+pulpmill. He replied, "No, I don't know nothing about that, neither. I
+don't work in there." And he did not betray the least desire to know
+anything about anything.
+
+"How long have you worked here?"
+
+"About twelve years."
+
+Going out of the building, I asked the foreman, "Do you see that man
+over there at the supercalendered machine?" pointing to the man who
+didn't know. "Is he a human being?"
+
+The foreman's face clouded. "I hate to talk to you about that man. He
+is one of the kindest-hearted men we ever had in the works, but we've
+got to let him go. We're afraid he'll break the machine. He isn't
+interested, does not learn, doesn't try to learn."
+
+So he had begun to rattle. Nobody can stay where he rattles. It is grow
+or go.
+
+
+
+
+Life's Barrel the Leveler
+
+
+So books could be filled with just such stories of how people have gone
+up and down. You may have noticed two brothers start with the same
+chance, and presently notice that one is going up and the other is
+going down.
+
+Some of us begin life on the top branches, right in the sunshine of
+popular favor, and get our names in the blue-book at the start. Some of
+us begin down in the shade on the bottom branches, and we do not even
+get invited. We often become discouraged as we look at the
+top-branchers, and we say, "O, if I only had his chance! If I were only
+up there I might amount to something. But I am too low down."
+
+We can grow. Everybody can grow.
+
+And afterwhile we are all in the barrel of life, shaken and bumped
+about. There the real people do not often ask us, "On what branch of
+that tree did you grow?" But they often inquire, "Are you big enough to
+fill this place?"
+
+
+
+
+The Fatal Rattle!
+
+
+Now life is mainly routine. You and I and everybody must go on doing
+pretty much the same things over and over. Every day we appear to have
+about the same round of duties.
+
+But if we let life become routine, we are shaking down. The very
+routine of life must every day flash a new attractiveness. We must be
+learning new things and discovering new joys in our daily routine or we
+become unhappy. If we go on doing just the same things in the same way
+day after day, thinking the same thoughts, our eyes glued to
+precedents--just turning round and round in our places and not growing
+any, pretty soon we become mere machines. We wear smaller. The joy and
+juice go out of our lives. We shrivel and rattle.
+
+The success, joy and glory of life are in learning, growing, going
+forward and upward. That is the only way to hold our place.
+
+The farmer must be learning new things about farming to hold his place
+this progressive age as a farmer. The merchant must be growing into a
+greater, wiser merchant to hold his place among his competitors. The
+minister must be getting larger visions of the ministry as he goes back
+into the same old pulpit to keep on filling it. The teacher must be
+seeing new possibilities in the same old schoolroom. The mother must be
+getting a larger horizon in her homemaking.
+
+We only live as we grow and learn. When anybody stays in the same place
+year after year and fills it, he does not rattle.
+
+Unless the place is a grave!
+
+I shiver as I see the pages of school advertisements in the journals
+labeled "Finishing Schools," and "A Place to Finish Your Child." I know
+the schools generally mean all right, but I fear the students will get
+the idea they are being finished, which finishes them. We never finish
+while we live. A school finishing is a commencement, not an end-ment.
+
+I am sorry for the one who says, "I know all there is to know about
+that. You can't tell me anything about that." He is generally rattling.
+
+The greater and wiser the man, the more anxious he is to be told.
+
+I am sorry for the one who struts around saying, "I own the job. They
+can't get along without me." For I feel that they are getting ready to
+get along without him. That noise you hear is the death-rattle in his
+throat.
+
+Big business men keep their ears open for rattles in their machinery.
+
+I am sorry for the man, community or institution that spends much time
+pointing backward with pride and talking about "in my day!" For it is
+mostly rattle. The live one's "my day" is today and tomorrow. The dead
+one's is yesterday.
+
+
+
+
+We Must Get Ready to Get
+
+
+We young people come up into life wanting great places. I would not
+give much for a young person (or any other person) who does not want a
+great place. I would not give much for anybody who does not look
+forward to greater and better things tomorrow.
+
+We often think the way to get a great place is just to go after it and
+get it. If we do not have pull enough, get some more pull. Get some
+more testimonials.
+
+We think if we could only get into a great place we would be great. But
+unless we have grown as great as the place we would be a great joke,
+for we would rattle. And when we have grown as great as the place, that
+sized place will generally come seeking us.
+
+We do not become great by getting into a great place, any more than a
+boy becomes a man by getting into his father's boots. He is in great
+boots, but he rattles. He must grow greater feet before he gets greater
+boots. But he must get the feet before he gets the boots.
+
+We must get ready for things before we get them.
+
+All life is preparation for greater things.
+
+Moses was eighty years getting ready to do forty years work. The Master
+was thirty years getting ready to do three years work. So many of us
+expect to get ready in "four easy lessons by mail."
+
+We can be a pumpkin in one summer, with the accent on the "punk." We
+can be a mushroom in a day, with the accent on the "mush." But we
+cannot become an oak that way.
+
+The world is not greatly impressed by testimonials. The man who has the
+most testimonials generally needs them most to keep him from rattling.
+A testimonial so often becomes a crutch.
+
+Many a man writes a testimonial to get rid of somebody. "Well, I hope
+it will do him some good. Anyhow, I have gotten him off my hands." I
+heard a Chicago superintendent say to his foreman, "Give him a
+testimonial and fire him!"
+
+It is dangerous to overboost people, for the higher you boost them the
+farther they will fall.
+
+
+
+
+The Menace of the Press-Notice
+
+
+Now testimonials and press-notices very often serve useful ends. In
+lyceum work, in teaching, in very many lines, they are often useful to
+introduce a stranger. A letter of introduction is useful. A diploma, a
+degree, a certificate, a license, are but different kinds of
+testimonials.
+
+The danger is that the hero of them may get to leaning upon them. Then
+they become a mirror for his vanity instead of a monitor for his
+vitality.
+
+Most testimonials and press-notices are frank flatteries. They magnify
+the good points and say little as possible about the bad ones. I look
+back over my lyceum life and see that I hindered my progress by reading
+my press-notices instead of listening to the verdict of my audiences. I
+avoided frank criticism. It would hurt me. Whenever I heard an adverse
+criticism, I would go and read a few press-notices. "There, I am all
+right, for this clipping says I am the greatest ever, and should he
+return, no hall would be able to contain the crowd."
+
+And my vanity bump would again rise.
+
+Alas! How often I have learned that when I did return the hall that was
+filled before was entirely too big for the audience! The editors of
+America--God bless them! They are always trying to boost a home
+enterprise--not for the sake of the imported attraction but for the
+sake of the home folks who import it.
+
+We must read people, not press-notices.
+
+When you get to the place where you can stand aside and "see yourself
+go by"--when you can keep still and see every fibre of you and your
+work mercilessly dissected, shake hands with yourself and rejoice, for
+the kingdom of success is yours.
+
+
+
+
+The Artificial Uplift
+
+
+There are so many loving, sincere, foolish, cruel uplift movements in
+the land. They spring up, fail, wail, disappear, only to be succeeded
+by twice as many more. They fail because instead of having the barrel
+do the uplifting, they try to do it with a derrick.
+
+The victims of the artificial uplift cannot stay uplifted. They rattle
+back, and "the last estate of that man is worse than the first."
+
+You cannot uplift a beggar by giving him alms. You are using the
+derrick. We must feed the hungry and clothe the naked, but that is not
+helping them, that is propping them. The beggar who asks you to help
+him does not want to be helped. He wants to be propped. He wants you to
+license him and professionalize him as a beggar.
+
+You can only help a man to help himself. Help him to grow. You cannot
+help many people, for there are not many people willing to be helped on
+the inside. Not many willing to grow up.
+
+When Peter and John went up to the temple they found the lame beggar
+sitting at the gate Beautiful. Every day the beggar had been "helped."
+Every day as they laid him at the gate people would pass thru the gate
+and see him. He would say, "Help me!" "Poor man," they would reply,
+"you are in a bad fix. Here is help," and they would throw him some
+money.
+
+And so every day that beggar got to be more of a beggar. The public
+"helped" him to be poorer in spirit, more helpless and a more hopeless
+cripple. No doubt he belonged after a few days of the "helping" to the
+Jerusalem Beggars' Union and carried his card. Maybe he paid a
+commission for such a choice beggars' beat.
+
+But Peter really helped him. "Silver and gold have I none; but such as
+I have give I thee: In the name of Jesus Christ of Nazareth rise up and
+walk."
+
+
+
+
+Fix the People, Not the Barrel
+
+
+I used to say, "Nobody uses me right. Nobody gives me a chance." But if
+chances had been snakes, I would have been bitten a hundred times a
+day. We need oculists, not opportunities.
+
+I used to work on the "section" and get a dollar and fifteen cents a
+day. I rattled there. I did not earn my dollar fifteen. I tried to see
+how little I could do and look like I was working. I was the Artful
+Dodger of Section Sixteen. When the whistle would blow--O, joyful
+sound!--I would leave my pick hang right up in the air. I would not
+bring it down again for a soulless corporation.
+
+I used to wonder as I passed Bill Barlow's bank on the way down to the
+section-house, why I was not president of that bank. I wondered why I
+was not sitting upon one of those mahogany seats instead of pumping a
+handcar. I was naturally bright. I used to say "If the rich wasn't
+getting richer and the poor poorer, I'd be president of a bank."
+
+Did you ever hear that line of conversation? It generally comes from
+somebody who rattles where he is.
+
+I am so glad now that I did not get to be president of the bank. They
+are glad, too! I would have rattled down in about fifteen minutes, down
+to the peanut row, for I was only a peanut. Remember, the hand-car job
+is just as honorable as the bank job, but as I was not faithful over a
+few things, I would have rattled over many things.
+
+The fairy books love to tell about some clodhopper suddenly enchanted
+up into a king. But life's good fairies see to it that the clodhopper
+is enchanted into readiness for kingship before he lands upon the
+throne.
+
+The only way to rule others is to learn to rule ourself.
+
+I used to say, "Just wait till I get to Congress." I think they are all
+waiting! "I'll fix things. I'll pass laws requiring all apples to be
+the same size. Yes, I'll pass laws to turn the barrel upside down, so
+the little ones will be on the top and the big ones will be at the
+bottom."
+
+But I had not seen that it wouldn't matter which end was the top, the
+big ones would shake right up to it and the little ones would shake
+down to the bottom.
+
+The little man has the chance now, just as fast as he grows. You cannot
+fix the barrel. You can only fix the people inside the barrel.
+
+Have you ever noticed that the man who is not willing to fix himself,
+is the one who wants to get the most laws passed to fix other people?
+He wants something for nothing.
+
+
+
+
+That Cruel Fate
+
+
+O, I am so glad I did not get the things I wanted at the time I wanted
+them! They would have been coffee-pots. Thank goodness, we do not get
+the coffee-pot until we are ready to handle it.
+
+Today you and I have things we couldn't have yesterday. We just wanted
+them yesterday. O, how we wanted them! But a cruel fate would not let
+us have them. Today we have them. They come to us as naturally today,
+and we see it is because we have grown ready for them, and the barrel
+has shaken us up to them.
+
+Today you and I want things beyond our reach. O, how we want them! But
+a cruel fate will not let us have them.
+
+Do you not see that "cruel fate" is our own smallness and unreadiness?
+As we grow greater we have greater things. We have today all we can
+stand today. More would wreck us. More would start us to rattling.
+
+Getting up is growing up.
+
+And this blessed old barrel of life is just waiting and anxious to
+shake everybody up as fast as everybody grows.
+
+
+
+Chapter V
+
+Going Up
+
+How We Become Great
+
+WE go up as we grow great. That is, we go up as we grow up. But so many
+are trying to grow great on the outside without growing great on the
+inside. They rattle on the inside!
+
+They fool themselves, but nobody else.
+
+There is only one greatness--inside greatness. All outside greatness is
+merely an incidental reflection of the inside.
+
+Greatness is not measured in any material terms. It is not measured in
+inches, dollars, acres, votes, hurrahs, or by any other of the world's
+yardsticks or barometers.
+
+Greatness is measured in spiritual terms. It is education. It is life
+expansion.
+
+We go up from selfishness to unselfishness.
+
+We go up from impurity to purity.
+
+We go up from unhappiness to happiness.
+
+We go up from weakness to strength.
+
+We go up from low ideals to high ideals.
+
+We go up from little vision to greater vision.
+
+We go up from foolishness to wisdom.
+
+We go up from fear to faith.
+
+We go up from ignorance to understanding.
+
+We go up by our own personal efforts. We go up by our own service,
+sacrifice, struggle and overcoming. We push out our own skyline. We
+rise above our own obstacles. We learn to see, hear, hold and
+understand.
+
+We may become very great, very educated, rise very high, and yet not
+leave our kitchen or blacksmith shop. We take the kitchen or blacksmith
+shop right up with us! We make it a great kitchen or great blacksmith
+shop. It becomes our throne-room!
+
+Come, let us grow greater. There is a throne for each of us.
+
+
+
+
+"Getting to the Top"
+
+
+"Getting to the top" is the world's pet delusion. There is no top. No
+matter how high we rise, we discover infinite distances above. The
+higher we rise, the better we see that life on this planet is the going
+up from the Finite to the Infinite.
+
+The world says that to get greatness means to get great things. So the
+world is in the business of getting--getting great fortunes, great
+lands, great titles, great applause, great fame, and folderol.
+Afterwhile the poor old world hears the empty rattle of the inside, and
+wails, "All is vanity. I find no pleasure in them. Life is a failure."
+All outside life is a failure. Real life is in being things on the
+inside, not in getting things on the outside.
+
+I weary of the world's pink-sheet extras about "Getting to the Top" and
+"Forging to the Front." Too often they are the sordid story of a few
+scrambling over the heads of the weaker ones. Sometimes they are the
+story of one pig crowding the other pigs out of the trough and
+cornering all the swill!
+
+
+
+
+The Secret of Greatness
+
+
+Christ Jesus was a great Teacher. His mission was to educate humanity.
+
+There came to him those two disciples who wanted to "get to the top."
+Those two sons of Zebedee wanted to have the greatest places in the new
+kingdom they imagined he would establish on earth.
+
+They got very busy pursuing greatness, but I do not read that they were
+half so busy preparing for greatness. They even had their mother out
+electioneering for them.
+
+"O, Master," said the mother, "grant that these my two sons may sit,
+the one on thy right hand, and the other on the left, in thy kingdom."
+
+The Master looked with love and pity upon their unpreparedness. "Are ye
+able to drink of the cup?" Then he gave the only definition of
+greatness that can ever stand: "Whosoever will be great among you, let
+him be your minister; and whosoever will be chief among you, let him be
+your servant."
+
+That is we cannot be "born great," nor "have greatness thrust upon" us.
+We must "achieve greatness" by developing it on the inside--developing
+ability to minister and to serve.
+
+We cannot buy a great arm. Our arm must become a great servant, and
+thus it becomes great.
+
+We cannot buy a great mind. Our mind must become a great servant, and
+thus it becomes great.
+
+We cannot buy a great character. It is earned in great moral service.
+
+
+
+
+The First Step at Hand
+
+
+This is the Big Business of life--going up, getting educated, getting
+greatness on the inside. Getting greatness on the outside is little
+business. Much of it mighty little.
+
+Everybody's privilege and duty is to become great. And the joy of it is
+that the first step is always nearest at hand. We do not have to go off
+to New York or Chicago or go chasing around the world to become great.
+It is a great stairway that leads from where our feet are now upward
+for an infinite number of steps.
+
+We must take the first step now. Most of us want to take the hundredth
+step or the thousandth step now. We want to make some spectacular
+stride of a thousand steps at one leap. That is why we fall so hard
+when we miss our step.
+
+We must go right back to our old place--into our kitchen or our
+workshop or our office and take the first step, solve the problem
+nearest at hand. We must make our old work luminous with a new
+devotion. We must battle up over every inch. And as fast as we solve
+and dissolve the difficulties and turn our burdens into blessings, we
+find love, the universal solvent, shining out of our lives. We find our
+spiritual influences going upward. So the winds of earth are born; they
+rush in from the cold lands to the warm upward currents. And so as our
+problems disappear and our life currents set upward, the world is drawn
+toward us with its problems.  We find our kitchen or workshop or office
+becoming a new throne of power. We find the world around us rising up
+to call us blessed.
+
+As we grow greater our troubles grow smaller, for we see them thru
+greater eyes. We rise above them.
+
+As we grow greater our opportunities grow greater. That is, we begin to
+see them. They are around us all the time, but we must get greater eyes
+to see them.
+
+Generally speaking, the smaller our vision of our work, the more we
+admire what we have accomplished and "point with pride." The greater
+our vision, the more we see what is yet to be accomplished.
+
+It was the sweet girl graduate who at commencement wondered how one
+small head could contain it all. It was Newton after giving the world a
+new science who looked back over it and said, "I seem to have been only
+a boy playing on the seashore * * * while the great ocean of truth lay
+all undiscovered before me." That great ocean is before us all.
+
+
+
+
+The Widow's Mites
+
+
+The great Teacher pointed to the widow who cast her two mites into the
+treasury, and then to the rich men who had cast in much more. "This
+poor widow hath cast in more than they all. For all these have of their
+abundance cast in unto the offerings of God: but she of her penury hath
+cast in all the living that she had."
+
+Tho the rich men had cast in more, yet it was only a part of their
+possessions. The widow cast in less, but it was all she had. The Master
+cared little what the footings of the money were in the treasury. That
+is not why we give. We give to become great. The widow had given
+all--had completely overcome her selfishness and fear of want.
+
+Becoming great is overcoming our selfishness and fear. He that saveth
+his life shall lose it, but he that loseth his life for the advancement
+of the kingdom of happiness on earth shall find it great and glorified.
+
+Our greatness therefore does not depend upon how much we give or upon
+what we do, whether peeling potatoes or ruling a nation, but upon the
+percentage of our output to our resources. Upon doing with our might
+what our hands find to do. Quit worrying about what you cannot get to
+do. Rejoice in doing the things you can get to do. And as you are
+faithful over a few things you go up to be ruler over many.
+
+The world says some of us have golden gifts and some have copper gifts.
+But when we cast them all into the treasury of right service, there is
+an alchemy that transmutes every gift into gold. Every work is drudgery
+when done selfishly. Every work becomes golden when done in a golden
+manner.
+
+
+
+
+Finding the Great People
+
+
+I do not know who fitted the boards into the floor I stand upon. I do
+not know all the great people who may come and stand upon this floor.
+But I do know that the one who made the floor--and the one who sweeps
+it--is just as great as anybody in the world who may come and stand
+upon it, if each be doing his work with the same love, faithfulness and
+capability.
+
+We have to look farther than the "Who's Who" and Dun and Bradstreet to
+make a roster of the great people of a community. You will find the
+community heart in the precious handful who believe that the service of
+God is the service of man.
+
+The great people of the community serve and sacrifice for a better
+tomorrow. They are the faithful few who get behind the churches, the
+schools, the lyceum and chautauqua, and all the other movements that go
+upward.
+
+They are the ones who are "always trying to run things." They are the
+happy ones, happy for the larger vision that comes as they go higher by
+unselfish service. They are discovering that their sweetest pay comes
+from doing many things they are not paid for. They rarely get thanked,
+for the community does not often think of thanking them until it comes
+time to draft the "resolutions of respect."
+
+I had to go to the mouth of a coal-mine in a little Illinois town, to
+find the man the bureau had given as lyceum committeeman there. I
+wondered what the grimy-faced man from the shaft, wearing the miner's
+lamp in his cap, could possibly have to do with the lyceum course. But
+I learned that he had all to do with it. He had sold the tickets and
+had done all the managing. He was superintendent of the Sunday school.
+He was the storm-center of every altruistic effort in the town--the
+greatest man there, because the most serviceable, tho he worked every
+day full time with his pick at his bread-and-butter job.
+
+The great people are so busy serving that they have little time to
+strut and pose in the show places. Few of them are "prominent clubmen."
+You rarely find their names in the society page. They rarely give
+"brilliant social functions." Their idle families attend to such things.
+
+
+
+
+A Glimpse of Gunsaulus
+
+
+I found a great man lecturing at the chautauquas. He preaches in
+Chicago on Sundays to thousands. He writes books and runs a college he
+founded by his own preaching. He is the mainspring of so many uplift
+movements that his name gets into the papers about every day, and you
+read it in almost every committee doing good things in Chicago.
+
+He had broken away from Chicago to have a vacation. Many people think
+that a vacation means going off somewhere and stretching out under
+trees or letting the mind become a blank. But this Chicago preacher
+went from one chautauqua town to another, and took his vacation going
+up and down the streets. He dug into the local history of each place,
+and before dinner he knew more about the place than most of the natives.
+
+"There is a sermon for me," he would exclaim every half-hour. He went
+to see people who were doing things. He went to see people who were
+doing nothing. In every town he would discover somebody of unusual
+attainment. He made every town an unusual town. He turned the humdrum
+travel map into a wonderland. He scolded lazy towns and praised
+enterprising ones. He stopped young fellows on the streets. "What are
+you going to do in life?" Perhaps the young man would say, "I have no
+chance." "You come to Chicago and I'll give you a chance," the man on
+his vacation would reply.
+
+So this Chicago preacher was busy every day, working overtime on his
+vacation. He was busy about other people's business. He did not once
+ask the price of land, nor where there was a good investment for
+himself, but every day he was trying to make an investment in somebody
+else.
+
+His friends would sometimes worry about him. They would say, "Why
+doesn't the doctor take care of himself, instead of taking care of
+everybody else? He wears himself out for other people until he hasn't
+strength enough left to lecture and do his own work."
+
+Sometimes they were right about that.
+
+But he that saveth his life shall lose it, and he that loseth his life
+in loving service finds it returning to him great and glorious. This
+man's preaching did not make him great. His college did not make him
+great. His books did not make him great. These are the by-products. His
+life of service for others makes him great--makes his preaching, his
+college and his books great.
+
+This Chicago man gives his life into the service of humanity, and it
+becomes the fuel to make the steam to accomplish the wonderful things
+he does. Let him stop and "take care of himself," and his career would
+stop.
+
+If he had begun life by "taking care of himself" and "looking out for
+number one," stipulating in advance every cent he was to get and
+writing it all down in the contract, most likely Dr. Frank W. Gunsaulus
+would have remained a struggling, discouraged preacher in the backwoods
+of Morrow county, Ohio.
+
+
+
+
+Give It Now
+
+
+Gunsaulus often says, "You are planning and saving and telling yourself
+that afterwhile you are going to give great things and do great things.
+Give it now! Give your dollar now, rather than your thousands
+afterwhile. You need to give it now, and the world needs to get it now."
+
+
+
+Chapter VI
+
+The Problem of "Preparedness"
+
+Preparing Children to Live
+
+THE problem of "preparedness" is the problem of preparing children for
+life. All other kinds of "preparedness" fade into insignificance before
+this. The history of nations shows that their strength was not in the
+size of their armies and in the vastness of their population and
+wealth, but in the strength and ideals of the individual citizens.
+
+As long as the nation was young and growing--as long as the people were
+struggling and overcoming--that nation was strong. It was "prepared."
+
+But when the struggle stopped, the strength waned, for the strength
+came from the struggle. When the people became materially prosperous
+and surrendered to ease and indulgence, they became fat, stall-fed
+weaklings. Then they fell a prey to younger, hardier peoples.
+
+Has the American nation reached that period?
+
+Many homes and communities have reached it.
+
+All over America are fathers and mothers who have struggled and have
+become strong men and women thru their struggles, who are saying, "Our
+children shall have better chances than we had. We are living for our
+children. We are going to give them the best education our money can
+buy."
+
+Then, forgetful of how they became strong, they plan to take away from
+their children their birthright--their opportunity to become strong and
+"prepared"--thru struggle and service and overcoming.
+
+Most "advantages" are disadvantages. Giving a child a chance generally
+means getting out of his way. Many an orphan can be grateful that he
+was jolted from his life-preserver and cruelly forced to sink or swim.
+Thus he learned to swim.
+
+"We are going to give our children the best education our money can
+buy."
+
+They think they can buy an education--buy wisdom, strength and
+understanding, and give it to them C. O. D! They seem to think they
+will buy any brand they see--buy the home brand of education, or else
+send off to New York or Paris or to "Sears Roebuck," and get a
+bucketful or a tankful of education. If they are rich enough, maybe
+they will have a private pipeline of education laid to their home. They
+are going to force this education into them regularly until they get
+them full of education. They are going to get them fully inflated with
+education!
+
+Toll the bell! There's going to be a "blow out." Those inflated
+children are going to have to run on "flat tires."
+
+Father and mother cannot buy their children education. All they can do
+is to buy them some tools, perhaps, and open the gate and say, "Sic
+'em, Tige!" The children must get it themselves.
+
+A father and mother might as well say, "We will buy our children the
+strength we have earned in our arms and the wisdom we have acquired in
+a life of struggle." As well expect the athlete to give them his
+physical development he has earned in years of exercise. As well expect
+the musician to give them the technic he has acquired in years of
+practice. As well expect the scholar to give them the ability to think
+he has developed in years of study. As well expect Moses to give them
+his spiritual understanding acquired in a long life of prayer.
+
+They can show the children the way, but each child must make the
+journey.
+
+Here is a typical case.
+
+
+
+
+The Story of "Gussie"
+
+
+There was a factory town back East. Not a pretty town, but just a
+great, dirty mill and a lot of little dirty houses around the mill. The
+hands lived in the little dirty houses and worked six days of the week
+in the big mill.
+
+There was a little, old man who went about that mill, often saying, "I
+hain't got no book l'arnin' like the rest of you." He was the man who
+owned the mill. He had made it with his own genius out of nothing. He
+had become rich and honored. Every man in the mill loved him like a
+father.
+
+He had an idolatry for a book.
+
+He also had a little pink son, whose name was F. Gustavus Adolphus. The
+little old man often said, "I'm going to give that boy the best
+education my money can buy."
+
+He began to buy it. He began to polish and sandpaper Gussie from the
+minute the child could sit up in the cradle and notice things. He sent
+him to the astrologer, the phrenologer and all other "ologers" they had
+around there. When Gussie was old enough to export, he sent the boy to
+one of the greatest universities in the land. The fault was not with
+the university, not with Gussie, who was bright and capable.
+
+The fault was with the little old man, who was so wise and great about
+everything else, and so foolish about his own boy. In the blindness of
+his love he robbed his boy of his birthright.
+
+The birthright of every child is the opportunity of becoming great--of
+going up--of getting educated.
+
+Gussie had no chance to serve. Everything was handed to him on a silver
+platter. Gussie went thru that university about like a steer from Texas
+goes thru Mr. Armour's institute of packnology in Chicago. Did you ever
+go over into Packingtown and see a steer receive his education?
+
+You remember, then, that after he matriculates--after he gets the grand
+bump, said steer does not have to do another thing. His education is
+all arranged for in advance and he merely rides thru and receives it.
+There is a row of professors with their sleeves rolled up who give him
+the degrees. So as Mr. T. Steer of Panhandle goes riding thru on that
+endless cable from his A-B-C's to his eternal cold storage, each
+professor hits him a dab. He rides along from department to department
+until he is canned.
+
+They "canned" Gussie. He had a man hired to study for him. He rode from
+department to department. They upholstered him, enameled him, manicured
+him, sugar-cured him, embalmed him. Finally Gussie was done and the
+paint was dry. He was a thing of beauty.
+
+
+
+
+
+Gussie and Bill Whackem Gussie came back home with his education in the
+baggage-car. It was checked. The mill shut down on a week day, the
+first time in its history. The hands marched down to the depot, and
+when the young lord alighted, the factory band played, "See, the
+Conquering Hero Comes."
+
+A few years later the mill shut down again on a week day. There was
+crape hanging on the office door. Men and women stood weeping in the
+streets. The little old man had been translated.
+
+When they next opened up the mill, F. Gustavus Adolphus was at its
+head. He had inherited the entire plant. "F. Gustavus Adolphus,
+President."
+
+Poor little peanut! He rattled. He had never grown great enough to fill
+so great a place. In two years and seven months the mill was a wreck.
+The monument of a father's lifetime was wrecked in two years and seven
+months by the boy who had all the "advantages."
+
+So the mill was shut down the third time on a week day. It looked as
+tho it never could open. But it did open, and when it opened it had a
+new kind of boss. If I were to give the new boss a descriptive name, I
+would call him "Bill Whackem." He was an orphan. He had little chance.
+He had a new black eye almost every day. But he seemed to fatten on
+bumps. Every time he was bumped he would swell up. How fast he grew! He
+became the most useful man in the community. People forgot all about
+Bill's lowly origin. They got to looking up to him to start and run
+things.
+
+So when the courts were looking for somebody big enough to take charge
+of the wrecked mill, they simply had to appoint Hon. William Whackem.
+It was Hon. William Whackem who put the wreckage together and made the
+wheels go round, and finally got the hungry town back to work.
+
+
+
+
+Colleges Give Us Tools
+
+
+After that a good many people said it was the college that made a fool
+of Gussie. They said Bill succeeded so well because he never went to
+one of "them highbrow schools." I am sorry to say I thought that way
+for a good while.
+
+But now I see that Bill went up in spite of his handicaps. If he had
+had Gussie's fine equipment he might have accomplished vastly more.
+
+The book and the college suffer at the hands of their friends. They say
+to the book and the college, "Give us an education." They cannot do
+that. You cannot get an education from the book and the college any
+more than you can get to New York by reading a travelers' guide. You
+cannot get physical education by reading a book on gymnastics.
+
+The book and the college show you the way, give you instruction and
+furnish you finer working tools. But the real education is the journey
+you make, the strength you develop, the service you perform with these
+instruments and tools.
+
+Gussie was in the position of a man with a very fine equipment of tools
+and no experience in using them. Bill was the man with the poor,
+homemade, crude tools, but with the energy, vision and strength
+developed by struggle.
+
+
+
+
+The "Hard Knocks Graduates"
+
+
+For education is getting wisdom, understanding, strength, greatness,
+physically, mentally and morally. I believe I know some people
+liberally educated who cannot write their own names. But they have
+served and overcome and developed great lives with the poor, crude
+tools at their command.
+
+In almost every community are what we sometimes call "hard knocks
+graduates"--people who have never been to college nor have studied many
+or any books. Yet they are educated to the degree they have acquired
+these elements of greatness in their lives.
+
+They realized how they have been handicapped by their poor mental tools.
+
+That is why they say, "All my life I have been handicapped by lack of
+proper preparation. Don't make my mistake, children, go to school."
+
+The young person with electrical genius will make an electrical machine
+from a few bits of junk. But send him to Westinghouse and see how much
+more he will achieve with the same genius and with finer equipment.
+
+Get the best tools you can. But remember diplomas, degrees are not an
+education, they are merely preparations. When you are thru with the
+books, remember, you are having a commencement, not an end-ment. You
+will discover with the passing years that life is just one series of
+greater commencements.
+
+Go out with your fine equipment from your commencements into the school
+of service and write your education in the only book you ever can
+know--the book of your experience.
+
+That is what you know--what the courts will take as evidence when they
+put you upon the witness stand.
+
+
+
+
+The Tragedy of Unpreparedness
+
+
+The story of Gussie and Bill Whackem is being written in every
+community in tears, failure and heartache. It is peculiarly a tragedy
+of our American civilization today.
+
+These fathers and mothers who toil and save, who get great farms, fine
+homes and large bank accounts, so often think they can give greatness
+to their children--they can make great places for them in life and put
+them into them.
+
+They do all this and the children rattle. They have had no chance to
+grow great enough for the places. The child gets the blame for making
+the wreck, even as Gussie was blamed for wrecking his father's plant,
+when the child is the victim.
+
+A man heard me telling the story of Gussie and Bill Whackem, and he
+went out of my audience very indignant. He said he was very glad his
+boy was not there to hear it. But that good, deluded father now has his
+head bowed in shame over the career of his spoiled son.
+
+I rarely tell of it on a platform that at the close of the lecture
+somebody does not take me aside and tell me a story just as sad from
+that community.
+
+For years poor Harry Thaw was front-paged on the newspapers and
+gibbeted in the pulpits as the shocking example of youthful depravity.
+He seems never to have had a fighting chance to become a man. He seems
+to have been robbed of his birthright from the cradle. Yet the father
+of this boy who has cost America millions in court and detention
+expenses was one of the greatest business generals of the Keystone
+state. He could plat great coal empires and command armies of men, but
+he seems to have been pitifully ignorant of the fact that the barrel
+shakes.
+
+It is the educated, the rich and the worldly wise who blunder most in
+the training of their children. Poverty is a better trainer for the
+rest.
+
+The menace of America lies not in the swollen fortunes, but in the
+shrunken souls who inherit them.
+
+But Nature's eliminating process is kind to the race in the barrel
+shaking down the rattlers. Somebody said it is only three generations
+from shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves.
+
+How long this nation will endure depends upon how many Gussie boys this
+nation produces. Steam heat is a fine thing, but do you notice how few
+of our strong men get their start with steam heat?
+
+
+
+
+Children, Learn This Early
+
+
+You boys and girls, God bless you! You live in good homes. Father and
+mother love you and give you everything you need. You get to thinking,
+"I won't have to turn my hand over. Papa and mamma will take care of
+me, and when they are gone I'll inherit everything they have. I'm fixed
+for life."
+
+No, you are unfixed. You are a candidate for trouble. You are going to
+rattle. Father and mother can be great and you can be a peanut.
+
+You must solve your own problems and carry your own loads to have a
+strong mind and back. Anybody who does for you regularly what you can
+do for yourself--anybody who gives you regularly what you can earn for
+yourself, is robbing you of your birthright.
+
+Father and mother can put money in your pocket, ideas in your head and
+food in your stomach, but you cannot own it save as you digest it--put
+it into your life.
+
+I have read somewhere about a man who found a cocoon and put it in his
+house where he could watch it develop. One day he saw a little insect
+struggling inside the cocoon. It was trying to get out of the envelope.
+It seemed in trouble and needed help. He opened the envelope with a
+knife and set the struggling insect free. But out came a monstrosity
+that soon died. It had an over-developed body and under-developed
+wings. He learned that helping the insect was killing it. He took away
+from it the very thing it had to have--the struggle. For it was this
+struggle of breaking its own way out of that envelope that was needed
+to reduce its body and develop its wings.
+
+
+
+
+Not Packhorse Work
+
+
+But remember there is little virtue in work unless it is getting us
+somewhere. Just work that gets us three meals a day and a place to lie
+down to sleep, then another day of the same grind, then a year of it
+and years following until our machine is worn out and on the junkpile,
+means little. "One day nearer home" for such a worker means one day
+nearer the scrapheap.
+
+Such a worker is like the packhorse who goes forward to keep ahead of
+the whip. Such a worker is the horse we used to have hitched to the
+sorghum mill. Round and round that horse went, seeing nothing, hearing
+nothing, his head down, without ambition enough to prick up his ears.
+Such work deadens and stupefies. The masses work about that way. They
+regard work as a necessary evil. They are right--such work is a
+necessary evil, and they make it such. They follow their nose. "Dumb,
+driven cattle."
+
+But getting a vision of life, and working to grow upward to it, that is
+the work that brings the joy and the greatness.
+
+When we are growing and letting our faculties develop, we will love
+even the packhorse job, because it is our "meal ticket" that enables us
+to travel upward.
+
+
+
+
+"Helping" the Turkeys
+
+
+One time I put some turkey eggs under the mother hen and waited day by
+day for them to hatch. And sure enough, one day the eggs began to crack
+and the little turkeys began to stick their heads out of the shells.
+Some of the little turkeys came out from the shells all right, but some
+of them stuck in the shells.
+
+"Shell out, little turkeys, shell out," I urged, "for Thanksgiving is
+coming. Shell out!"
+
+But they stuck to the shells.
+
+"Little turkeys, I'll have to help you. I'll have to shell you by
+hand." So I picked the shells off. "Little turkeys, you will never know
+how fortunate you are. Ordinary turkeys do not have these advantages.
+Ordinary turkeys do not get shelled by hand."
+
+Did I help them? I killed them, or stunted them. Not one of the turkeys
+was "right" that I helped. They were runts. One of them was a regular
+Harry Thaw turkey. They had too many silk socks. Too many "advantages."
+
+Children, you must crack your own shells. You must overcome your own
+obstacles to develop your own powers.
+
+A rich boy can succeed, but he has a poorer chance than a poor boy. The
+cards are against him. He must succeed in spite of his "advantages."
+
+I am pleading for you to get a great arm, a great mind, a great
+character, for the joy of having a larger life. I am pleading with you
+to know the joy of overcoming and having the angels come and minister
+to you.
+
+
+
+
+Happiness in Our Work
+
+
+Children, I am pleading with you to find happiness. All the world is
+seeking happiness, but so many are seeking it by rattling down instead
+of by shaking up.
+
+The happiness is in going up--in developing a greater arm, a greater
+mind, a greater character.
+
+Happiness is the joy of overcoming. It is the delight of an expanding
+consciousness. It is the cry of the eagle mounting upward. It is the
+proof that we are progressing.
+
+We find happiness in our work, not outside of our work. If we cannot
+find happiness in our work, we have the wrong job. Find the work that
+fits your talents, and stop watching the clock and planning vacations.
+
+Loving friends used to warn me against "breaking down." They scared me
+into "taking care" of myself. And I got to taking such good care of
+myself and watching for symptoms that I became a physical wreck.
+
+I saved myself by getting busier. I plunged into work I love. I found
+my job in my work, not away from it, and the work refreshed me and
+rejuvenated me. Now I do two men's work, and have grown from a skinny,
+fretful, nervous wreck into a hearty, happy man. This has been a great
+surprise to my friends and a great disappointment to the undertaker. I
+am an editor in the daytime and a lecturer at night.
+
+I edit all day and take a vacation lecturing at night. I lecture almost
+every day of the year--maybe two or three times some days--and then
+take a vacation by editing and writing. Thus every day is jam full of
+play and vacation and good times. The year is one round of joy, and I
+ought to pay people for the privilege of speaking and writing to them
+instead of them paying me!
+
+If I did not like my work, of course, I would be carrying a terrible
+burden and would speedily collapse.
+
+You see, I have no time nowadays to break down. I have no time to think
+and grunt and worry about my body. And like Paul I am happy to be
+"absent from the body and present with the Lord." Thus this old body
+behaves just beautifully and wags along like the tail follows the dog
+when I forget all about it. The grunter lets the tail wag the dog.
+
+
+
+
+
+I have never known a case of genuine "overwork." I have never known of
+anyone killing himself by working. But I have known of multitudes
+killing themselves by taking vacations.
+
+The people who think they are overworking are merely overworrying. This
+is one species of selfishness.
+
+To worry is to doubt God.
+
+To work at the things you love, or for those you love, is to turn work
+into play and duty into privilege.
+
+When we love our work, it is not work, it is life.
+
+
+
+
+Many Kinds of Drunkards
+
+
+The world is trying to find happiness in being amused. The world is
+amusement-mad. Vacations, Coca Cola and moviemania!
+
+What a sad, empty lot of rattlers! Look over the bills of the movies,
+look over the newsstands and see a picture of the popular mind, for
+these places keep just what the people want to buy. What a lot of
+mental frog-pond and moral slum our boys and girls wade thru!
+
+There are ten literary drunkards to one alcoholic drunkard. There are a
+hundred amusement drunkards to one victim of strong drink. And all just
+as hard to cure.
+
+We have to have amusement, but if we fill our lives with nothing but
+amusement, we never grow. We go thru our lives babies with new
+rattleboxes and "sugar-tits."
+
+Almost every day as I go along the street to some hall to lecture, I
+hear somebody asking, "What are they going to have in the hall tonight?"
+
+"Going to have a lecture."
+
+"Lecture?" said with a shiver as tho it was "small pox." "I ain't
+goin.' I don't like lectures."
+
+The speaker is perfectly honest. He has no place to put a lecture. I am
+not saying that he should attend my lecture, but I am grieving at what
+underlies his remark. He does not want to think. He wants to follow his
+nose around. Other people generally lead his nose. The man who will not
+make the effort to think is the great menace to the nation. The crowd
+that drifts and lives for amusement is the crowd that finds itself back
+near the caboose, and as the train of progress leaves them, they wail,
+they "never had no chanct." They want to start a new party to reform
+the government.
+
+
+
+
+The Lure of the City
+
+
+Do you ever get lonely in a city? How few men and women there. A jam of
+people, most of them imitations--most of them trying to look like they
+get more salary. Poor, hungry, doped butterflies of the bright
+lights,--hopers, suckers and straphangers! Down the great white way
+they go chasing amusement to find happiness. They must be amused every
+moment, even when they eat, or they will have to be alone with their
+empty lives.
+
+The Prodigal Son came to himself afterwhile and thought upon his ways.
+Then he arose and went to his father's house. Whenever one will stop
+chasing amusements long enough to think upon his ways, he will arise
+and go to his father's house of wisdom. But there is no hope for the
+person who will not stop and think. And the devil works day and night
+shifts keeping the crowd moving on.
+
+That is why the crowd is not furnishing the strong men and women.
+
+We must have amusement and relaxation. Study your muscles. First they
+contract, then they relax. But the muscle that goes on continually
+relaxing is degenerating. And the individual, the community, the nation
+that goes on relaxing without contracting--without struggling and
+overcoming--is degenerating.
+
+The more you study your muscles, the more you learn that while one
+muscle is relaxing another is contracting. So you must learn that your
+real relaxation, vacation and amusement, are merely changing over to
+contracting another set of muscles.
+
+Go to the bank president's office, go to the railroad magnate's office,
+go to the great pulpit, to the college chair--go to any place of great
+responsibility in a city and ask the one who fills the place, "Were you
+born in this city?"
+
+The reply is almost a monotony. "I born in this city? No, I was born in
+Poseyville, Indiana, and I came to this city forty years ago and went
+to work at the bottom."
+
+He glows as he tells you of some log-cabin home, hillside or farmside
+where he struggled as a boy. Personally, I think this log-cabin
+ancestry has been over-confessed for campaign purposes. Give us steam
+heat and push-buttons. There is no virtue in a log-cabin, save that
+there the necessity for struggle that brings strength is most in
+evidence. There the young person gets the struggle and service that
+makes for strength and greatness. And as that young person comes to the
+city and shakes in the barrel among the weaklings of the artificial
+life, he rises above them like the eagle soars above a lot of
+chattering sparrows.
+
+The cities do not make their own steam. The little minority from the
+farms controls the majority. The red blood of redemption flows from the
+country year by year into the national arteries, else these cities
+would drop off the map.
+
+If it were not for Poseyville, Indiana, Chicago would disappear. If it
+were not for Poseyville, New York would disintegrate for lack of
+leaders.
+
+
+
+
+"Hep" and "Pep" for the Home Town
+
+
+But so many of the home towns of America are sick. Many are dying. Many
+are dead.
+
+It is the lure of the city--and the lure-lessness of the country. The
+town the young people leave is the town the young people ought to
+leave. Somebody says, "The reason so many young people go to hell is
+because they have no other place to go."
+
+What is the matter with the small town? Do not blame it all upon the
+city mail order house. With rural delivery, daily papers, telephones,
+centralized schools, automobiles and good roads, there are no more
+delightful places in the world to live than in the country or in the
+small town. They have the city advantages plus sunshine, air and
+freedom that the crowded cities cannot have.
+
+I asked the keeper who was showing me thru the insane asylum at Weston,
+West Virginia, "You say you have nearly two thousand insane people in
+this institution and only a score of guards to keep them in. Aren't you
+in danger? What is to hinder these insane people from getting together,
+organizing, overpowering the few guards and breaking out?"
+
+The keeper was not in the least alarmed at the question. He smiled.
+"Many people say that. But they don't understand. If these people could
+get together they wouldn't be in this asylum. They are insane. No two
+of them can agree upon how to get together and how to break out. So a
+few of us can hold them."
+
+It would be almost unkind to carry this further, but I have been
+thinking ever since that about three-fourths of the small towns of
+America have one thing in common with the asylum folks--they can't get
+together. They cannot organize for the public good. They break up into
+little antagonistic social, business and even religious factions and
+neutralize each other's efforts.
+
+A lot of struggling churches compete with each other instead of massing
+for the common good. And when the churches fight, the devil stays
+neutral and furnishes the munitions for both sides.
+
+So the home towns stagnate and the young people with visions go away to
+the cities where opportunity seems to beckon. Ninety-nine out of a
+hundred of them will jostle with the straphangers all their lives, mere
+wheels turning round in a huge machine. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of
+them might have had a larger opportunity right back in the home town,
+had the town been awake and united and inviting.
+
+We must make the home town the brightest, most attractive, most
+promising place for the young people. No home town can afford to spend
+its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the
+worst kind of soil impoverishment--all going out and nothing coming
+back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all
+the city mail order houses.
+
+America is to be great, not in the greatness of a few crowded cities,
+but in the greatness of innumerable home towns.
+
+The slogan today should be, For God and Home and the Home Town!
+
+
+
+
+A School of Struggle
+
+
+Dr. Henry Solomon Lehr, founder of the Ohio Northern University at Ada,
+Ohio, one of Ohio's greatest educators, used to say with pride, "Our
+students come to school; they are not sent."
+
+He encouraged his students to be self-supporting, and most of them were
+working their way thru school. He made the school calendar and courses
+elastic to accommodate them. He saw the need of combining the school of
+books with the school of struggle. He organized his school into
+competing groups, so that the student who had no struggle in his life
+would at least have to struggle with the others during his schooling.
+
+
+He pitted class against class. He organized great literary and debating
+societies to compete with each other. He arranged contests for the
+military department. His school was one surging mass of contestants.
+Yet each student felt no compulsion. Rather he felt that he was
+initiating an individual or class effort to win. The literary societies
+vied with each other in their programs and in getting new members,
+going every term to unbelievable efforts to win over the others. They
+would go miles out on the trains to intercept new students, even to
+their homes in other states. Each old student pledged new students in
+his home country. The military companies turned the school into a
+military camp for weeks each year, scarcely sleeping while drilling for
+a contest flag.
+
+Those students went out into the world trained to struggle. I do not
+believe there is a school in America with a greater alumni roll of men
+and women of uniformly greater achievement.
+
+I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools
+offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their
+way thru and to act upon their own initiative.
+
+
+
+
+Men Needed More Than Millions
+
+
+We are trying a new educational experiment today.
+
+The old "deestrick" school is passing, and with it the small academies
+and colleges, each with its handful of students around a teacher, as in
+the old days of the lyceum in Athens, when the pupils sat around the
+philosopher in the groves.
+
+From these schools came the makers and the preservers of the nation.
+
+Today we are building wonderful public schools with equally wonderful
+equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few
+great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are
+spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance.
+Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak
+the last word in every department of human research.
+
+O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this
+day! Many of them never saw a germ!
+
+But each student has the same definite effort to make in assimilation
+today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in
+the cushions of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with
+its splintered side up.
+
+I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and
+girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not
+be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they
+will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated
+and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired,
+not denatured but discovered.
+
+All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be
+men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern
+equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that
+each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life,
+not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives
+touch greater lives.
+
+A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and
+millions.
+
+Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is
+endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the
+spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when
+the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty
+degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in
+the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.
+
+Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by
+foundations? That is the question the age is asking.
+
+You and I are very much interested in the answer.
+
+
+
+Chapter VII
+
+The Salvation of a "Sucker"
+
+The Fiddle and the Tuning
+
+HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years
+learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have
+not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.
+
+For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies
+every field of activity.
+
+What is knowing?
+
+One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles.
+Not violins--fiddles.
+
+A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.
+
+I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world
+like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That
+is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We
+have no strings. We have no bow--yet!
+
+When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary
+schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the
+little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think
+they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go
+fiddling thru life on this one string!
+
+We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go
+up thru all the departments and institutions necessary to give them the
+full complement of strings for their life symphonies.
+
+After all this there comes the commencement, and the violin comes forth
+with the E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a
+violin? To wear strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot of discord.
+The violin is to give music.
+
+So there is much yet to do after getting the strings. All the book and
+college can do is to give the strings--the tools. After that the violin
+must go into the great tuning school of life. Here the pegs are turned
+and the strings are put in tune. The music is the knowing. Learning is
+tuning.
+
+You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have
+vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience.
+
+Gussie says, "I have read it in a book." Bill Whackem says, "I know!"
+
+
+
+
+Reading and Knowing
+
+
+All of us are Christopher Columbuses, discovering the same new-old
+continents of Truth. That is the true happiness of life--discovering
+Truth. We read things in a book and have a hazy idea of them. We hear
+the preacher utter truths and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is
+so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not
+excited. Truth never excites--it is falsehood that excites--until we
+discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there
+is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the
+oldest, driest platitude crystallizes into a flashing jewel to delight
+and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the joy of
+living.
+
+There is such a difference between reading a thing and knowing a thing.
+We could read a thousand descriptions of the sun and not know the sun
+as in one glimpse of it with our own eyes.
+
+I used to stand in the row of blessed little rascals in the "deestrick"
+school and read from McGuffey's celebrated literature,
+"If--I-p-p-play--with--the--f-f-f-i-i-i-i-r-r-e--I--will--g-e-e-et
+--my-y-y-y-y--f-f-f-f--ingers--bur-r-r-rned--period!"
+
+I did not learn it. I wish I had learned by reading it that if I play
+with the fire I will get my fingers burned. I had to slap my hands upon
+hot stoves and coffee-pots, and had to get many kinds of blisters in
+order to learn it.
+
+Then I had to go around showing the blisters, boring my friends and
+taking up a collection of sympathy. "Look at my bad luck!" Fool!
+
+This is not a lecture. It is a confession! It seems to me if you in the
+audience knew how little I know, you wouldn't stay.
+
+
+
+
+"You Can't Get Something for Nothing"
+
+
+Yes, I was thirty-four years learning that one sentence. "You can't get
+something for nothing." That is, getting it in partial tune. It took me
+so long because I was naturally bright. It takes that kind longer than
+a human being. They are so smart you cannot teach them with a few
+bumps. They have to be pulverized.
+
+That sentence takes me back to the days when I was a "hired man" on the
+farm. You might not think I had ever been a "hired man" on the farm at
+ten dollars a month and "washed, mended and found." You see me here on
+this platform in my graceful and cultured manner, and you might not
+believe that I had ever trained an orphan calf to drink from a copper
+kettle. But I have fed him the fingers of this hand many a time. You
+might not think that I had ever driven a yoke of oxen and had said the
+words. But I have!
+
+I remember the first county fair I ever attended. Fellow sufferers, you
+may remember that at the county fair all the people sort out to their
+own departments. Some people go to the canned fruit department. Some go
+to the fancywork department. Some go to the swine department. Everybody
+goes to his own department. Even the "suckers"! Did you ever notice
+where they go? That is where I went--to the "trimming department."
+
+I was in the "trimming department" in five minutes. Nobody told me
+where it was. I didn't need to be told. I gravitated there. The barrel
+always shakes all of one size to one place. You notice that--in a city
+all of one size get together.
+
+Right at the entrance to the "local Midway" I met a gentleman. I know
+he was a gentleman because he said he was a gentleman. He had a little
+light table he could move quickly. Whenever the climate became too
+sultry he would move to greener pastures. On that table were three
+little shells in a row, and there was a little pea under the middle
+shell. I saw it there, being naturally bright. I was the only naturally
+bright person around the table, hence the only one who knew under which
+shell the little round pea was hidden.
+
+Even the gentleman running the game was fooled. He thought it was under
+the end shell and bet me money it was under the end shell. You see,
+this was not gambling, this was a sure thing. (It was!) I had saved up
+my money for weeks to attend the fair. I bet it all on that middle
+shell. I felt bad. It seemed like robbing father. And he seemed like a
+real nice old gentleman, and maybe he had a family to keep. But I would
+teach him a lesson not to "monkey" with people like me, naturally
+bright.
+
+But I needn't have felt bad. I did not rob father. Father cleaned me
+out of all I had in about five seconds.
+
+I went over to the other side of the fairgrounds and sat down. That was
+all I had to do now--just go, sit down. I couldn't see the mermaid now
+or get into the grandstand.
+
+Sadly I thought it all over, but I did not get the right answer. I said
+the thing every fool does say when he gets bumped and fails to learn
+the lesson from the bump. I said, "Next time I shall be more careful."
+
+When anybody says that he is due for a return date.
+
+
+
+
+I Bought the Soap
+
+
+Learn? No! Within a month I was on the street a Saturday night when
+another gentleman drove into town. He stopped on the public square and
+stood up in his buggy. "Let the prominent citizens gather around me,
+for I am going to give away dollars."
+
+Immediately all the prominent "suckers" crowded around the buggy.
+"Gentlemen, I am introducing this new medicinal soap that cures all
+diseases humanity is heir to. Now just to introduce and advertise, I am
+putting these cakes of Wonder Soap in my hat. You see I am wrapping a
+ten-dollar bill around one cake and throwing it into the hat. Now who
+will give me five dollars for the privilege of taking a cake of this
+wonderful soap from my hat--any cake you want, gentlemen!"
+
+And right on top of the pile was the cake with the ten wrapped around
+it! I jumped over the rest to shove my five (two weeks' farm work) in
+his hands and grab that bill cake. But the bill disappeared. I never
+knew where it went. The man whipped up his horse and also disappeared.
+I never knew where he went.
+
+
+
+
+My "Fool Drawer"
+
+
+I grew older and people began to notice that I was naturally bright and
+therefore good picking. They began to let me in on the ground floor.
+Did anybody ever let you in on the ground floor? I never could stick.
+Whenever anybody let me in on the ground floor it seemed like I would
+always slide on thru and land in the cellar.
+
+I used to have a drawer in my desk I called my "fool drawer." I kept my
+investments in it. I mean, the investments I did not have to lock up.
+You get the pathos of that--the investments nobody wanted to steal. And
+whenever I would get unduly inflated I would open that drawer and "view
+the remains."
+
+I had in that drawer the deed to my Oklahoma corner-lots. Those lots
+were going to double next week. But they did not double I doubled. They
+still exist on the blueprint and the Oklahoma metropolis on paper is
+yet a wide place in the road.
+
+I had in that drawer my deed to my rubber plantation. Did you ever hear
+of a rubber plantation in Central America? That was mine. I had there
+my oil propositions. What a difference, I have learned, between an oil
+proposition and an oil well! The learning has been very expensive.
+
+I used to wonder how I ever could spend my income. I do not wonder now.
+I wonder how I will make it.
+
+I had in that drawer my "Everglade" farm. Did you ever hear of the
+"Everglades"? I have an alligator ranch there. It is below the
+frost-line, also below the water-line. I will sell it by the gallon.
+
+I had also a bale of mining stock. I had stock in gold mines and silver
+mines. Nobody knows how much mining stock I have owned. Nobody could
+know while I kept that drawer shut. As I looked over my gold and silver
+mine stock, I often noticed that it was printed in green. I used to
+wonder why they printed it in green--wonder if they wanted it to
+harmonize with me! And I would realize I had so much to live for--the
+dividends. I have been so near the dividends I could smell them. Only
+one more assessment, then we will cut the melon! I have heard that all
+my life and never got a piece of the rind.
+
+
+
+
+Getting "Selected"
+
+
+Why go farther? I am not half done confessing. Each bump only increased
+my faith that the next ship would be mine. Good, honest, retired
+ministers would come periodically and sell me stock in some new
+enterprise that had millions in it--in its prospectus. I would buy
+because I knew the minister was honest and believed in it. He was
+selling it on his reputation. Favorite dodge of the promoter to get the
+ministers to sell his shares.
+
+I was also greatly interested in companies where I put in one dollar
+and got back a dollar or two of bonds and a dollar or two of stock.
+That was doubling and trebling my money over night. An old banker once
+said to me, "Why don't you invest in something that will pay you five
+or six per cent. and get it?"
+
+I pitied his lack of vision. Bankers were such "tightwads." They had no
+imagination! Nothing interested me that did not offer fifty or a
+hundred per cent.--then. Give me the five per cent. now!
+
+By the time I was thirty-four I was a rich man in worthless paper. It
+would have been better for me if I had thrown about all my savings into
+the bottom of the sea.
+
+Then I got a confidential letter from a friend of our family I had
+never met. His name was Thomas A. Cleage, and he was in the Rialto
+Building, St. Louis, Missouri. He wrote me in extreme confidence, "You
+have been selected."
+
+Were you ever selected? If you were, then you know the thrill that rent
+my manly bosom as I read that letter from this man who said he was a
+friend of our family. "You have been selected because you are a
+prominent citizen and have a large influence in your community. You are
+a natural leader and everybody looks up to you."
+
+He knew me! He was the only man who did know me. So I took the cork
+clear under.
+
+"Because of your tremendous influence you have been selected to go in
+with us in the inner circle and get a thousand per cent. dividends."
+
+Did you get that? I hope you did. I did not! But I took a night train
+for St. Louis. I was afraid somebody might beat me there if I waited
+till next day. I sat up all night in a day coach to save money for Tom,
+the friend of our family. But I see now I need not have hurried so.
+They would have waited a month with the sheep-shears ready. Lambie,
+lambie, lambie, come to St. Louis!
+
+I don't get any sympathy from this crowd. You laugh at me. You respect
+not my feelings. I am not going to tell you a thing that happened in
+St. Louis. It is none of your business!
+
+O, I am so glad I went to St. Louis. Being naturally bright, I could
+not learn it at home, back in Ohio. I had to go clear down to St. Louis
+to Tom Cleage's bucket-shop and pay him eleven hundred dollars to
+corner the wheat market of the world. That is all I paid him. I could
+not borrow any more. I joined what he called a "pool." I think it must
+have been a pool, for I know I fell in and got soaked!
+
+That bump set me to thinking. My fever began to reduce. I got the
+thirty-third degree in financial suckerdom for only eleven hundred
+dollars.
+
+I have always regarded Tom as one of my great school teachers. I have
+always regarded the eleven hundred as the finest investment I had made
+up to that time, for I got the most out of it. I do not feel hard
+toward goldbrick men and "blue sky" venders. I sometimes feel that we
+should endow them. How else can we save a sucker? You cannot tell him
+anything, because he is naturally bright and knows better. You simply
+have to trim him till he bleeds.
+
+
+
+
+I Am Cured
+
+
+It is worth eleven hundred dollars every day to know that one sentence,
+You cannot get something for nothing. Life just begins to get juicy
+when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad,
+"Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I stop my subscription to that
+paper. I simply will not take a paper with that ad in it, for I have
+graduated from that class.
+
+I will not grasp a fortune now. Try me, I dare you! Bring a fortune
+right up on this platform and put it down there on the floor. I will
+not grasp it. Come away, it is a coffee-pot!
+
+Today when somebody offers me much more than the legal rate of interest
+I know he is no friend of our family.
+
+If he offers me a hundred per cent. I call for the police!
+
+Today when I get a confidential letter that starts out, "You have been
+selected--" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is
+adjourned. I select the waste-basket. Here, get in there just as quick
+as you can. I was selected!
+
+
+O, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it early in life. The law of
+compensation is never suspended. You only own what you earn. You can't
+get something for nothing. If you do not learn it, you will have to be
+"selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally
+bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to receive a
+thousand per cent. dividends," it means you have been selected to
+receive this bunch of blisters because you look like the biggest sucker
+on the local landscape.
+
+The other night in a little town of perhaps a thousand, a banker took
+me up into his office after the lecture in which I had related some of
+the above experiences. "The audience laughed with you and thought it
+very funny," said he. "I couldn't laugh. It was too pathetic. It was a
+picture of what is going on in our own little community year after
+year. I wish you could see what I have to see. I wish you could see the
+thousands of hard-earned dollars that go out of our community every
+year into just such wildcat enterprises as you described. The saddest
+part of it is that the money nearly always goes out of the pockets of
+the people who can least afford to lose it."
+
+Absalom, wake up! This is bargain night for you. I paid eleven hundred
+dollars to tell you this one thing, and you get it for a dollar or two.
+This is no cheap lecture. It cost blood.
+
+Learn that the gambler never owns his winnings. The man who accumulates
+by sharp practices or by undue profits never owns it. Even the young
+person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We only own
+what we have rendered definite service to bound. The owning is in the
+understanding of values.
+
+This is true physically, mentally, morally. You only own what you have
+earned and stored in your life, not merely in your pocket, stomach or
+mind.
+
+I often think if it takes me thirty-four years to begin to learn one
+sentence, I see the need of an eternity.
+
+To me that is one of the great arguments for eternal life--how slowly I
+learn, and how much there is to learn. It will take an eternity!
+
+
+
+
+Those Commencement Orations
+
+
+The young person says, "By next June I shall have finished my
+education."  Bless them all! They will have put another string on their
+fiddle.
+
+After they "finish" they have a commencement, not an end-ment, as they
+think. This is not to sneer, but to cheer. Isn't it glorious that life
+is one infinite succession of commencements and promotions!
+
+I love to attend commencements. The stage is so beautifully decorated
+and the joy of youth is everywhere. There is a row of geraniums along
+the front of the stage and a big oleander on the side. There is a
+long-whiskered rug in the middle. The graduates sit in a semicircle
+upon the stage in their new patent leather. I know how it hurts. It is
+the first time they have worn it.
+
+Then they make their orations. Every time I hear their orations I like
+them better, because every year I am getting younger. Damsel Number One
+comes forth and begins:
+
+"Beyond the Alps (sweep arms forward to the left, left arm leading)
+lieth Italy!" (Bring arms down, letting fingers follow the wrist. How
+embarrassing at a commencement for the fingers not to follow the wrist!
+It is always a shock to the audience when the wrist sweeps downward and
+the fingers remain up in the air. So by all means, let the fingers
+follow the wrist, just as the elocution teacher marked on page 69.)
+
+Applause, especially from relatives.
+
+Sweet Girl Graduate Number 2, generally comes second. S. G. G. No. 2
+stands at the same leadpencil mark on the floor, resplendent in a filmy
+creation caught with something or other.
+
+"We (hands at half-mast and separating) are rowing (business of
+propelling aerial boat with two fingers of each hand, head inclined).
+We are not drifting (hands slide downward)."
+
+Children, we are not laughing at you. We are laughing at ourselves. We
+are laughing the happy laugh at how we have learned these great truths
+that you have memorized, but not vitalized.
+
+You get the most beautiful and sublime truths from Emerson's essays.
+(How did they ever have commencements before Emerson?) But that is not
+knowing them. You cannot know them until you have lived them. It is a
+grand thing to say, "Beyond the Alps lieth Italy," but you can never
+really say that until you know it by struggling up over Alps of
+difficulty and seeing the Italy of promise and victory beyond. It is
+fine to say, "We are rowing and not drifting," but you cannot really
+say that until you have pulled on the oar.
+
+O, Gussie, get an oar!
+
+
+
+
+My Maiden Sermon
+
+
+Did you ever hear a young preacher, just captured, just out of a
+factory? Did you ever hear him preach his "maiden sermon"? I wish you
+had heard mine. I had a call. At least, I thought I had a call. I think
+now I was "short-circuited." The "brethren" waited upon me and told me
+I had been "selected": Maybe this was a local call, not long distance.
+
+They gave me six weeks in which to load the gospel gun and get ready
+for my try-out. I certainly loaded it to the muzzle.
+
+But I made the mistake I am trying to warn you against. Instead of
+going to the one book where I might have gotten a sermon--the book of
+my experience, I went to the books in my father's library. "As the poet
+Shakespeare has so beautifully said," and then I took a chunk of
+Shakespeare and nailed it on page five of my sermon. "List to the poet
+Tennyson." Come here, Lord Alfred. So I soldered these fragments from
+the books together with my own native genius. I worked that sermon up
+into the most beautiful splurges and spasms. I bedecked it with
+metaphors and semaphores. I filled it with climaxes, both wet and dry.
+I had a fine wet climax on page fourteen, where I had made a little
+mark in the margin which meant "cry here." This was the spilling-point
+of the wet climax. I was to cry on the lefthand side of the page.
+
+I committed it all to memory, and then went to a lady who taught
+expression, to get it expressed. You have to get it expressed.
+
+I got the most beautiful gestures nailed into almost every page. You
+know about gestures--these things you make with your arms in the air as
+you speak. You can notice it on me yet.
+
+I am not sneering at expression. Expression is a noble art. All life is
+expression. But you have to get something to express. Here I made my
+mistake. I got a lot of fine gestures. I got an express-wagon and got
+no load for it. So it rattled. I got a necktie, but failed to get any
+man to hang it upon. I got up before a mirror for six weeks, day by
+day, and said the sermon to the glass. It got so it would run itself. I
+could have gone to sleep and that sermon would not have hesitated.
+
+Then came the grand day. The boy wonder stood forth and before his
+large and enthusiastic concourse delivered that maiden sermon more
+grandly than ever to a mirror. Every gesture went off the bat according
+to the blueprint. I cried on page fourteen! I never knew it was in me.
+But I certainly got it all out that day!
+
+Then I did another fine thing, I sat down. I wish now I had done that
+earlier. I wish now I had sat down before I got up. I was the last man
+out of the church--and I hurried. But they beat me out--all nine of
+them. When I went out the door, the old sexton said as he jiggled the
+key in the door to hurry me, "Don't feel bad, bub, I've heerd worse
+than that. You're all right, bub, but you don't know nothin' yet."
+
+I cried all the way to town. If he had plunged a dagger into me he
+would not have hurt me so much. It has taken some years to learn that
+the old man was right. I had wonderful truth in that sermon. No sermon
+ever had greater truth, but I had not lived it. The old man meant I did
+not know my own sermon.
+
+
+
+
+
+So, children, when you prepare your commencement oration, write about
+what you know best, what you have lived. If you know more about peeling
+potatoes than about anything else, write about "Peeling Potatoes," and
+you are most likely to hear the applause peal from that part of your
+audience unrelated to you.
+
+Out of every thousand books published, perhaps nine hundred of them do
+not sell enough to pay the cost of printing them. As you study the
+books that do live, you note that they are the books that have been
+lived. Perhaps the books that fail have just as much of truth in them
+and they may even be better written, yet they lack the vital impulse.
+They come out of the author's head. The books that live must come out
+of his heart. They are his own life. They come surging and pulsating
+from the book of his experience.
+
+The best part of our schooling comes not from the books, but from the
+men behind the books.
+
+We study agriculture from books. That does not make us an
+agriculturist. We must take a hoe and go out and agricult. That is the
+knowing in the doing.
+
+
+
+
+You Must Live Your Song
+
+
+  "There was never a picture painted,
+  There was never a poem sung,
+  But the soul of the artist fainted,
+  And the poet's heart was wrung."
+
+
+So many young people think because they have a good voice and they have
+cultivated it, they are singers. All this cultivation and irritation
+and irrigation and gargling of the throat are merely symptoms of a
+singer--merely neckties. Singers look better with neckties.
+
+They think the song comes from the diaphragm. But it comes from the
+heart, chaperoned by the diaphragm. You cannot sing a song you have not
+lived.
+
+Jessie was singing the other day at a chautauqua. She has a beautiful
+voice, and she has been away to "Ber-leen" to have it attended to. She
+sang that afternoon in the tent, "The Last Rose of Summer." She sang it
+with every note so well placed, with the sweetest little trills and
+tendrils, with the smile exactly like her teacher had taught her.
+Jessie exhibited all the machinery and trimmings for the song, but she
+had no steam, no song. She sang the notes. She might as well have sung,
+"Pop, Goes the Weasel."
+
+The audience politely endured Jessie. That night a woman sang in the
+same tent "The Last Rose of Summer." She had never been to Berlin, but
+she had lived that song. She didn't dress the notes half so beautifully
+as Jessie did, but she sang it with the tremendous feeling it demands.
+The audience went wild. It was a case of Gussie and Bill Whackem.
+
+All this was gall and wormwood to Jessie. "Child," I said to her, "this
+is the best singing lesson you have ever had. Your study is all right
+and you have a better voice than that woman, but you cannot sing "The
+Last Rose of Summer" yet, for you do not know very much about the first
+rose of summer. And really, I hope you'll never know the ache and
+disappointment you must know before you can sing that song, for it is
+the sob of a broken-hearted woman. Learn to sing the songs you have
+lived."
+
+Why do singers try to execute songs beyond the horizon of their lives?
+That is why they "execute" them.
+
+
+
+
+The Success of a Song-Writer
+
+
+The guest of honor at a dinner in a Chicago club was a woman who is one
+of the widely known song-writers of this land. As I had the good
+fortune to be sitting at table with her I wanted to ask her, "How did
+you get your songs known? How did you know what kind of songs the
+people want to sing?"
+
+But in the hour she talked with her friends around the table I found
+the answer to every question. "Isn't it good to be here? Isn't it great
+to have friends and a fine home and money?" she said. "I have had such
+a struggle in my life. I have lived on one meal a day and didn't know
+where the next meal was coming from. I know what it is to be left alone
+in the world upon my own resources. I have had years of struggle. I
+have been sick and discouraged and down and out. It was in my little
+back-room, the only home I had, that I began to write songs. I wrote
+them for my own relief. I was writing my own life, just what was in my
+own heart and what the struggles were teaching me. No one is more
+surprised and grateful that the world seems to love my songs and asks
+for more of them."
+
+The woman was Carrie Jacobs-Bond, who wrote "The Perfect Day," "Just a
+Wearyin' for You," "His Lullaby" and many more of those simple little
+songs so full of the pathos and philosophy of life that they tug at
+your heart and moisten your eyes.
+
+Anybody could write those songs--just a few simple words and notes. No.
+Books of theory and harmony and expression only teach us how to write
+the words and where to place the notes. These are not the song, but
+only the skeleton into which our own life must breathe the life of the
+song.
+
+The woman who sat there clad in black, with her sweet, expressive face
+crowned with silvery hair, had learned to write her songs in the
+University of Hard Knocks. She here became the song philosopher she is
+today. Her defeats were her victories. If Carrie Jacobs-Bond had never
+struggled with discouragement, sickness, poverty and loneliness, she
+never would have been able to write the songs that appeal to the
+multitudes who have the same battles.
+
+The popular song is the song that best voices what is in the popular
+heart. And while we have a continual inundation of popular songs that
+are trashy and voice the tawdriest human impulses, yet it is a tribute
+to the good elements in humanity that the wholesome, uplifting
+sentiments in Carrie Jacobs-Bond's songs continue to hold their
+popularity.
+
+
+
+
+Theory and Practice
+
+
+My friends, I am not arguing that you and I must drink the dregs of
+defeat, or that our lives must fill up with poverty or sorrow, or
+become wrecks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me
+in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real
+success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the
+fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of
+Carrie Jacobs-Bond.
+
+The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who
+have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical
+realities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking
+upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or
+trampling upon their fellow men they dream of helping. Their ideas must
+be forged into usefulness available for this day upon the anvil of
+experience.
+
+Many of the most brilliant theorists have been the greatest failures in
+practice.
+
+There are a thousand who can tell you what is the matter with things to
+one person who can give you a practical way to fix them.
+
+I used to have respect amounting to reverence for great readers and
+book men. I used to know a man who could tell in what book almost
+anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was
+a walking library index. I thought him a most wonderful man. Indeed, in
+my childhood I thought he was the greatest man in the world.
+
+He was a remarkable man--a great reader and with a memory that retained
+it all. That man could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you
+almost any date. He could finish almost any quotation. His conversation
+was largely made up of classical quotations.
+
+But he was one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical
+life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could
+quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one
+sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was
+liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He
+seemed never to have digested any of the things in his memory. Since I
+have grown up I always think of that man as an intellectual cold
+storage plant.
+
+The greatest book is the textbook of the University of Hard Knocks, the
+Book of Human Experience the "sermons in stones" and the "books in
+running brooks." Most fortunate is he who has learned to read
+understandingly from it.
+
+
+
+
+
+Note the sweeping, positive statements of the young person.
+
+Note the cautious, specific statements of the person who has lived long
+in this world.
+
+Our education is our progress from the sweeping, positive, wholesale
+statements we have not proved, to the cautious, specific statements we
+have proved.
+
+
+
+
+Tuning the Strings of Life
+
+
+Many audiences are gathered into this one audience. Each person here is
+a different audience, reading a different page in the Book of Human
+Experience. Each has a different fight to make and a different burden
+to carry. Each one of us has more trouble than anybody else!
+
+I know there are chapters of heroism in the lives of you older ones.
+You have cried yourselves to sleep, some of you, and walked the floor
+when you could not sleep. You have learned that "beyond the Alps lieth
+Italy."
+
+A good many of you were bumped today or yesterday, or maybe years ago,
+and the wound has not healed. You think it never will heal. You came
+here thinking that perhaps you would forget your trouble for a little
+while. I know there are people in this audience in pain.
+
+Never do this many gather but what there are some with aching hearts.
+
+And you young people here with lives like June mornings, are not much
+interested in this lecture. You are polite and attentive because this
+is a polite and attentive neighborhood. But down in your hearts you are
+asking, "What is this all about? What is that man talking about? I
+haven't had these things and I'm not going to have them, either!"
+
+Maybe some of you are naturally bright!
+
+You are going to be bumped. You are going to cry yourselves to sleep.
+You are going to walk the floor when you cannot sleep. Some of you are
+going to know the keen sorrow of having the one you trust most betray
+you. Maybe, betray you with a kiss. You will go through your
+Gethsemane. You will see your dearest plans wrecked. You will see all
+that seems to make life livable lost out of your horizon. You will say,
+"God, let me die. I have nothing more to live for."
+
+For all lives have about the same elements. Your life is going to be
+about like other lives.
+
+
+
+
+
+And you are going to learn the wonderful lesson thru the years, the
+bumps and the tears, that all these things somehow are necessary to
+promote our education.
+
+These bumps and hard knocks do not break the fiddle--they turn the pegs.
+
+These bumps and tragedies and Waterloos draw the strings of the soul
+tighter and tighter, nearer and nearer to God's great concert pitch,
+where the discords fade from our lives and where the music divine and
+harmonies celestial come from the same old strings that had been
+sending forth the noise and discord.
+
+Thus we know that our education is progressing, as the evil and
+unworthy go out of our lives and as peace, harmony, happiness, love and
+understanding come into our lives.
+
+That is getting in tune.
+
+That is growing up.
+
+
+
+
+Chapter VIII
+
+Looking Backward
+
+Memories of the Price We Pay
+
+
+WHAT a price we pay for what we know! I laugh as I look backward--and
+weep and rejoice.
+
+I was not born with a silver spoon in my mouth, altho it is quite
+evident that I could have handled a pretty good-sized spoon. But father
+being a country preacher, we had tin spoons. We never had to tie a red
+string around our spoons when we loaned them for the ladies' aid
+society oyster supper. We always got our spoons back. Nobody ever
+traded with us by mistake.
+
+Do you remember the first money you ever earned? I do. I walked several
+miles into the country those old reaper days and gathered sheaves. That
+night I was proud when that farmer patted me on the head and said, "You
+are the best boy to work, I ever saw." Then the cheerful old miser put
+a nickel in my blistered hand. That nickel looked bigger than any money
+I have since handled.
+
+
+
+
+That "Last Day of School"
+
+
+Yet I was years learning it is much easier to make money than to handle
+it, hence the tale that follows.
+
+I was sixteen years old and a school teacher. Sweet sixteen--which
+means green sixteen. But remember again, only green things grow. There
+is hope for green things. I was so tall and awkward then--I haven't
+changed much since. I kept still about my age. I was several dollars
+the lowest bidder. They said out that way, "Anybody can teach kids."
+That is why I was a teacher.
+
+I had never studied pedagogy, but I had whittled out three rules that I
+thought would make it go. My first rule was, Make 'em study. My second,
+Make, em recite. That is, fill 'em up and then empty 'em.
+
+My third and most important rule was, Get your money!
+
+I walked thirteen miles a day, six and a half miles each way, most of
+the time, to save money. I think I had all teaching methods in use.
+With the small fry I used a small paddle to win their confidence and
+arouse their enthusiasm for an education. With the pupils larger and
+more muscular than their teacher I used love and moral suasion.
+
+We ended the school with an "exhibition." Did you ever attend the old
+back-country "last day of school exhibition"? The people that day came
+from all over the township. They were so glad our school was closing
+they all turned out to make it a success. They brought great baskets of
+provender and we had a feast. We covered the school desks with boards,
+and then covered the boards with piles of fried chicken, doughnuts and
+forty kinds of pie.
+
+Then we had a "doings." Everybody did a stunt. We executed a lot of
+literature that day. Execute is the word that tells what happened to
+literature in District No. 1, Jackson Township, that day. I can shut my
+eyes and see it yet. I can see my pupils coming forward to speak their
+"pieces." I hardly knew them and they hardly knew me, for we were
+"dressed up." Many a head showed father had mowed it with the
+sheepshears. Mother had been busy with the wash-rag--clear back of the
+ears! And into them! So many of them wore collars that stuck out all
+stiff like they had pushed their heads on thru their big straw hats.
+
+I can see them speaking their "pieces." I can see "The Soldier of the
+Legion lay dying in Algiers." We had him die again that day, and he had
+a lingering end as we executed him. I can see "The boy stood on the
+burning deck, whence all but he had fled." I can see "Mary's little
+lamb" come slipping over the stage. I see the tow-headed patriot in
+"Give me liberty or give me death." I feel now that if Patrick Henry
+had been present, he would have said, "Give me death."
+
+There came a breathless hush as "teacher" came forward as the last act
+on the bill to say farewell. It was customary to cry. I wanted to yell.
+Tomorrow I would get my money! I had a speech I had been saying over
+and over until it would say itself. But somehow when I got up before
+that "last day of school" audience and opened my mouth, it was a great
+opening, but nothing came out. It came out of my eyes. Tears rolled
+down my cheeks until I could hear them spatter on my six-dollar suit.
+
+And my pupils wept as their dear teacher said farewell. Parents wept.
+It was a teary time. I only said, "Weep not for me, dear friends. I am
+going away, but I am coming back." I thought to cheer them up, but they
+wept the more.
+
+
+Next day I drew my money. I had it all in one joyous wad--$240. I was
+going home with head high and aircastles even higher. But I never got
+home with the money. Talk about the fool and his money and you get very
+personal.
+
+For on the way home I met Deacon K, and he borrowed it all. Deacon K
+was "such a good man" and a "pillar of the church." I used to wonder,
+tho, why he didn't take a pillow to church. I took his note for $240,
+"due at corncutting," as we termed that annual fall-time paying up
+season. I really thought a note was not necessary, such was my
+confidence in the deacon.
+
+For years I kept a faded, tear-spattered, yellow note for $240, "due at
+corncutting," as a souvenir of my first schoolteaching. Deacon K has
+gone from earth. He has gone to his eternal reward. I scarcely know
+whether to look up or down as I say that. He never left any forwarding
+address.
+
+I was paid thousands in experience for that first schoolteaching, but I
+paid all the money I got from it--two hundred and forty
+thirteen-mile-a-day dollars to learn one thing I could not learn from
+the books, that it takes less wisdom to make money, than it does to
+intelligently handle it afterwards. Incidentally I learned it may be
+safer to do business with a first-class sinner than with a second-class
+saint.
+
+Which is no slap at the church, but at its worst enemies, the foes of
+its own household.
+
+
+
+
+Calling the Class-Roll
+
+
+A lyceum bureau once sent me back to my home town to lecture. I imagine
+most lecturers have a hard time lecturing in the home town. Their
+schoolmates and playmates are apt to be down there in the front rows
+with their families, and maybe all the old scores have not yet been
+settled. The boy he fought with may be down there. Perhaps the girl who
+gave him the "mitten" is there.
+
+And he has gotten his lecture out of that home town. The heroes and
+villains live there within striking distance. Perhaps they have come to
+hear him. "Is not this the carpenter's son?" Perhaps this is why some
+lecturers and authors are not so popular in the home town until several
+generations pass.
+
+I went back to the same hall to speak, and stood upon the same platform
+where twenty-one years before I had stood to deliver my graduating
+oration, when in impassioned and well modulated tones I had exclaimed,
+"Greece is gone and Rome is no more, but fe-e-e-e-ear not, for I will
+sa-a-a-a-ave you!" or words to that effect.
+
+
+Then I went back to the little hotel and sat up alone in my room half
+the night living it over. Time was when I thought anybody who could
+live in that hotel was a superior order of being. But the time had come
+when I knew the person who could go on living in any hotel has a
+superior order of vitality.
+
+I held thanksgiving services that night. I could see better. I had a
+picture of the school in that town that had been taken twenty-one years
+before, just before commencement. I had not seen the picture these
+twenty-one years, for I could not then afford to buy one. The price was
+a quarter.
+
+I got a truer perspective of life that night. Did you ever sit alone
+with a picture of your classmates taken twenty-one years before? It is
+a memorable experience.
+
+A class of brilliant and gifted young people went out to take charge of
+the world. They were so glad the world had waited so long on them. They
+were so willing to take charge of the world. They were going to be
+presidents and senators and authors and authoresses and scientists and
+scientist-esses and geniuses and genius-esses and things like that.
+
+There was one boy in the class who was not naturally bright. It was not
+the one you may be thinking of! No, it was Jim Lambert. He had no
+brilliant career in view. He was dull and seemed to lack intellect. He
+was "conditioned" into the senior class. We all felt a little sorry for
+Jim.
+
+As commencement day approached, the committee of the class appointed
+for that purpose took Jim back of the schoolhouse and broke the news to
+him that they were going to let him graduate, but they were not going
+to let him speak, because he couldn't make a speech that would do
+credit to such a brilliant class. They hid Jim on the stage back of the
+oleander commencement night.
+
+Shake the barrel!
+
+The girl who was to become the authoress became the helloess in the
+home telephone exchange, and had become absolutely indispensable to the
+community. The girl who was to become the poetess became the goddess at
+the general delivery window and superintendent of the stamp-licking
+department of the home postoffice. The boy who was going to Confess was
+raising the best corn in the county, and his wife was speaker of the
+house.
+
+Most of them were doing very well even Jim Lambert. Jim had become the
+head of one of the big manufacturing plants of the South, with a lot of
+men working for him. The committee that took him out behind the
+schoolhouse to inform him he could not speak at commencement, would now
+have to wait in line before a frosted door marked, "Mr. Lambert,
+Private." They would have to send up their cards, and the watchdog who
+guards the door would tell them, "Cut it short, he's busy!" before they
+could break any news to him today.
+
+They hung a picture of Mr. Lambert in the high school at the last
+alumni meeting. They hung it on the wall near where the oleander stood
+that night.
+
+Dull boy or girl--you with your eyes tear-dimmed sometimes because you
+do not seem to learn like some in your classes can you not get a bit of
+cheer from the story of Jim?
+
+
+Hours pass, and still as I sat in that hotel room I was lost in that
+school picture and the twenty-one years. There were fifty-four young
+people in that picture. They had been shaken these years in the barrel,
+and now as I called the roll on them, most of them that I expected to
+go up had shaken down and some that I expected to stay down had shaken
+up.
+
+Out of that fifty-four, one had gone to a pulpit, one had gone to
+Congress and one had gone to the penitentiary. Some had gone to
+brilliant success and some had gone down to sad failure. Some had found
+happiness and some had found unhappiness. It seemed as tho almost every
+note on the keyboard of human possibility had been struck by the one
+school of fifty-four.
+
+When that picture was taken the oldest was not more than eighteen, yet
+most of them seemed already to have decided their destinies. The
+twenty-one years that followed had not changed their courses.
+
+The only changes had come where God had come into a life to uplift it,
+or where Mammon had entered to pull it down. And I saw better that the
+foolish dreams of success faded before the natural unfolding of
+talents, which is the real success. I saw better that "the boy is
+father to the man."
+
+The boy who skimmed over his work in school was skimming over his work
+as a man. The boy who went to the bottom of things in school was going
+to the bottom of things in manhood. Which had helped him to go to the
+top of things!
+
+Jim Lambert had merely followed the call of talents unseen in him
+twenty-one years before.
+
+The lazy boy became a "tired" man. The industrious boy became an
+industrious man. The sporty boy became a sporty man. The domineering
+egotist boy became the domineering egotist man.
+
+The boy who traded knives with me and beat me--how I used to envy him!
+Why was it he could always get the better of me? Well, he went on
+trading knives and getting the better of people. Now, twenty-one years
+afterwards, he was doing time in the state penitentiary for forgery. He
+was now called a bad man, when twenty-one years ago when he did the
+same things on a smaller scale they called him smart and bright.
+
+The "perfectly lovely" boy who didn't mix with the other boys, who
+didn't whisper, who never got into trouble, who always had his hair
+combed, and said, "If you please," used to hurt me. He was the
+teacher's model boy. All the mothers of the community used to say to
+their own reprobate offspring, "Why can't you be like Harry? He'll be
+President of the United States some day, and you'll be in jail." But
+Model Harry sat around all his life being a model. I believe Mr.
+Webster defines a model as a small imitation of the real thing. Harry
+certainly was a successful model. He became a seedy, sleepy, helpless
+relic at forty. He was "perfectly lovely" because he hadn't the energy
+to be anything else. It was the boys who had the hustle and the energy,
+who occasionally needed bumping--and who got it--who really grew.
+
+I have said little about the girls of the school. Fact was, at that age
+I didn't pay much attention to them. I regarded them as in the way. But
+I naturally thought of Clarice, our social pet of the class--our real
+pretty girl who won the vase in the home paper beauty contest. Clarice
+went right on remaining in the social spotlight, primping and flirting.
+She outshone all the rest. But it seemed like she was all out-shine and
+no in-shine. She mistook popularity for success. The boys voted for
+her, but did not marry her. Most of the girls who shone with less
+social luster became the happy homemakers of the community.
+
+But as I looked into the face of Jim Lambert in the picture, my heart
+warmed at the sight of another great success--a sweet-faced irish lass
+who became an "old maid." She had worked day by day all these years to
+support a home and care for her family. She had kept her grace and
+sweetness thru it all, and the influence of her white, loving life
+radiated far.
+
+
+
+
+The Boy I Had Envied
+
+
+Frank was the boy I had envied. He had everything--a fine home, a
+loving father, plenty of money, opportunity and a great career awaiting
+him. And he was bright and lovable and talented. Everybody said Frank
+would make his mark in the world and make the town proud of him.
+
+I was the janitor of the schoolhouse. Some of my classmates will never
+know how their thoughtless jeers and jokes wounded the sensitive,
+shabby boy who swept the floors, built the fires and carried in the
+coal. After commencement my career seemed to end and the careers of
+Frank and the rest of them seemed to begin. They were going off to
+college and going to do so many wonderful things.
+
+But the week after commencement I had to go into a printing office,
+roll up my sleeves and go to work in the "devil's corner" to earn my
+daily bread. Seemed like it took so much bread!
+
+Many a time as I plugged at the "case" I would think of Frank and
+wonder why some people had all the good things and I had all the hard
+things.
+
+How easy it is to see as you look backward. But how hard it is to see
+when you look forward.
+
+Twenty-one years afterward as I got off the train in the home town, I
+asked, "Where is he?" We went out to the cemetery, where I stood at a
+grave and read on the headstone, "Frank."
+
+I had the story of a tragedy--the tragedy of modern unpreparedness. It
+was the story of the boy who had every opportunity, but who had all the
+struggle taken out of his life. He never followed his career, never
+developed any strength. He disappointed hopes, spent a fortune, broke
+his father's heart, shocked the community, and finally ended his wasted
+life with a bullet fired by his own hand.
+
+
+
+Why Ben Hur Won
+
+
+It revived the memory of the story of Ben Hur.
+
+Do you remember it? The Jewish boy is torn from his home in disgrace.
+He is haled into court and tried for a crime he never committed. Ben
+Hur did not get a fair trial. Nobody can get a fair trial at the hands
+of this world. That is why the great Judge has said, judge not, for you
+have not the full evidence in the case. I alone have that.
+
+Then they condemn him. They lead him away to the galleys. They chain
+him to the bench and to the oar. There follow the days and long years
+when he pulls on the oar under the lash. Day after day he pulls on the
+oar. Day after day he writhes under the sting of the lash. Years of the
+cruel injustice pass. Ben Hur is the helpless victim of a mocking fate.
+
+That seems to be your life and my life. In the kitchen or the office,
+or wherever we work we seem so often like slaves bound to the oar and
+pulling under the sting of the lash of necessity. Life seems one
+futureless round of drudgery. We wonder why. We often look across the
+street and see somebody who lives a happier life. That one is chained
+to no oar. See what a fine time they all have. Why must we pull on the
+oar?
+
+How blind we are! We can only see our own oar. We cannot see that they,
+too, pull on the oar and feel the lash. Most likely they are looking
+back at us and envying us. For while we envy others, others are envying
+us.
+
+But look at the chariot race in Antioch. See the thousands in the
+circus. See Messala, the haughty Roman, and see! Ben Hur from the
+galleys in the other chariot pitted against him. Down the course dash
+these twin thunderbolts. The thousands hold their breath. "Who will
+win?" "The man with the stronger forearms," they whisper.
+
+There comes the crucial moment in the race. See the man with the
+stronger forearms. They are bands of steel that swell in the forearms
+of Ben Hur. They swing those flying Arabians into the inner ring. Ben
+Hur wins the race! Where got the Jew those huge forearms? From the
+galleys!
+
+Had Ben Hur never pulled on the oar, he never could have won the
+chariot race.
+
+Sooner or later you and I are to learn that Providence makes no
+mistakes in the bookkeeping. As we pull on the oar, so often lashed by
+grim necessity, every honest effort is laid up at compound interest in
+the bank account of strength. Sooner or later the time comes when we
+need every ounce. Sooner or later our chariot race is on--when we win
+the victory, strike the deciding blow, stand while those around us
+fall--and it is won with the forearms earned in the galleys of life by
+pulling on the oar.
+
+
+That is why I thanked God as I stood at the grave of my classmate. I
+thanked God for parents who believed in the gospel of struggle, and for
+the circumstances that compelled it.
+
+I am not an example of success.
+
+But I am a very grateful pupil in the first reader class of The
+University of Hard Knocks.
+
+
+
+Chapter IX
+
+Go On South!
+
+The Book in the Running Brook
+
+THERE is a little silvery sheet of water in Minnesota called Lake
+Itasca. There is a place where a little stream leaps out from the lake.
+
+"Ole!" you will exclaim, "the lake is leaking. What is the name of this
+little creek?"
+
+"Creek! It bane no creek. It bane Mississippi river."
+
+So even the Father of Waters has to begin as a creek. We are at the
+cradle where the baby river leaps forth. We all start about alike. It
+wabbles around thru the woods of Minnesota. It doesn't know where it is
+going, but it is "on the way."
+
+It keeps wabbling around, never giving up and quitting, and it gets to
+the place where all of us get sooner or later. The place where Paul
+came on the road to Damascus. The place of the "heavenly vision."
+
+It is the place where gravity says, "Little Mississippi, do you want to
+grow? Then you will have to go south."
+
+The little Mississippi starts south. He says to the people, "Goodbye,
+folks, I am going south." The folks at Itascaville say, "Why,
+Mississippi, you are foolish. You hain't got water enough to get out of
+the county." That is a fact, but he is not trying to get out of the
+county. The Mississippi is only trying to go south.
+
+The Mississippi knows nothing about the Gulf of Mexico. He does not
+know that he has to go hundreds of miles south. He is only trying to go
+south. He has not much water, but he does not wait for a relative to
+die and bequeath him some water. That is a beautiful thought! He has
+water enough to start south, and he does that.
+
+He goes a foot south, then another foot south. He goes a mile south. He
+picks up a little stream and he has some more water. He goes on south.
+He picks up another stream and grows some more. Day by day he picks up
+streamlets, brooklets, rivulets. Business is picking up! He grows as he
+flows. Poetry!
+
+My friends, here is one of the best pictures I can find in nature of
+what it seems to me our lives should be. I hear a great many orations,
+especially in high school commencements, entitled, "The Value of a Goal
+in Life." But the direction is vastly more important than the goal.
+Find the way your life should go, and then go and keep on going and
+you'll reach a thousand goals.
+
+We do not have to figure out how far we have to go, nor how many
+supplies we will need along the way. All we have to do is to start and
+we will find the resources all along the way. We will grow as we flow.
+All of us can start! And then go on south!
+
+Success is not tomorrow or next year. Success is now. Success is not at
+the end of the journey, for there is no end. Success is every day in
+flowing and growing. The Mississippi is a success in Minnesota as well
+as on south.
+
+You and I sooner or later hear the call, "Go on south." If we haven't
+heard it, let us keep our ear to the receiver and live a more natural
+life, so that we can hear the call. We are all called. It is a divine
+call--the call of our unfolding talents to be used.
+
+Remember, the Mississippi goes south. If he had gone any other
+direction he would never have been heard of.
+
+
+Three wonderful things develop as the Mississippi goes on south.
+
+1. He keeps on going on south and growing greater.
+
+2. He overcomes his obstacles and develops his power.
+
+3. He blesses the valley, but the valley does not bless him.
+
+
+
+
+Go On South and Grow Greater
+
+
+You never meet the Mississippi after he starts south, but what he is
+going on south and growing greater. You never meet him but what he
+says, "Excuse me, but I must go on south."
+
+The Mississippi gets to St. Paul and Minneapolis. He is a great river
+now--the most successful river in the state. But he does not retire
+upon his laurels. He goes on south and grows greater. He goes on south
+to St. Louis. He is a wonderful river now. But he does not stop. He
+goes on south and grows greater.
+
+Everywhere you meet him he is going on south and growing greater.
+
+Do you know why the Mississippi goes on south? To continue to be the
+Mississippi. If he should stop and stagnate, he would not be the
+Mississippi river, he would become a stagnant, poisonous pond.
+
+As long as people keep on going south, they keep on living. When they
+stop and stagnate, they die.
+
+That is why I am making it the slogan of my life--GO ON SOUTH AND GROW
+GREATER! I hope I can make you remember that and say it over each day.
+I wish I could write it over the pulpits, over the schoolrooms, over
+the business houses and homes--GO ON SOUTH AND GROW GREATER. For this
+is life, and there is no other. This is education--and religion. And
+the only business of life.
+
+You and I start well. We go on south a little ways, and then we retire.
+Even young people as they start south and make some little knee-pants
+achievement, some kindergarten touchdown, succumb to their press
+notices. Their friends crowd around them to congratulate them. "I must
+congratulate you upon your success. You have arrived."
+
+So many of those young goslings believe that. They quit and get canned.
+They think they have gotten to the Gulf of Mexico when they have not
+gotten out of the woods of Minnesota. Go on south!
+
+We can protect ourselves fairly well from our enemies, but heaven
+deliver us from our fool friends.
+
+Success is so hard to endure. We can endure ten defeats better than one
+victory. Success goes to the head and defeat goes to "de feet." It
+makes them work harder.
+
+
+
+
+The Plague of Incompetents
+
+
+Civilization is mostly a conspiracy to keep us from going very far
+south.
+
+The one who keeps on going south defies custom and becomes unorthodox.
+
+But contentment with present achievement is the damnation of the race.
+
+The mass of the human family never go on south far enough to become
+good servants, workmen or artists. The young people get a smattering
+and squeeze into the bottom position and never go on south to
+efficiency and promotion. They wonder why their genius is not
+recognized. They do not make it visible.
+
+Nine out of ten stenographers who apply for positions can write a few
+shorthand characters and irritate a typewriter keyboard. They think
+that is being a stenographer, when it is merely a symptom of a
+stenographer. They mangle the language, grammar, spelling,
+capitalization and punctuation. Their eyes are on the clock, their
+minds on the movies.
+
+Nine out of ten workmen cannot be trusted to do what they advertise to
+do, because they have never gone south far enough to become efficient.
+Many a professional man is in the same class.
+
+Half of our life is spent in getting competents to repair the botchwork
+of incompetents.
+
+No matter how well equipped you are, you are never safe in your job if
+you are contented to do today just what you did yesterday. Contented to
+think today what you thought yesterday.
+
+You must go on south to be safe.
+
+I used to know a violinist who would say, "If I were not a genius, I
+could not play so well with such little practice." The poor fellow did
+not know how poor a fiddler he really was. Well did Strickland
+Gillilan, America's great poet-humorist, say, "Egotism is the opiate
+that Nature administers to deaden the pains of mediocrity."
+
+
+
+
+This Is Our Best Day
+
+
+Just because our hair gets frosty or begins to rub off in spots, we are
+so prone to say, "I am aging rapidly." It pays to advertise. We always
+get results. See the one shrivel who goes around front-paging his age.
+Age is not years; age is grunts.
+
+We say, "I've seen my best days." And the undertaker goes and greases
+his buggy. He believes in "preparedness."
+
+Go on south! We have not seen our best days. This is the best day so
+far, and tomorrow is going to be better on south.
+
+We are only children in God's great kindergarten, playing with our
+A-B-C's. I do not utter that as a bit of sentiment, but as the great
+fundamental of our life. I hope the oldest in years sees that best. I
+hope he says, "I am just beginning. Just beginning to understand. Just
+beginning to know about life."
+
+We are not going on south to old age, we are going on south to eternal
+youth. It is the one who stops who "ages rapidly." Each day brings us a
+larger vision. Infinity, Eternity, Omnipotence, Omniscience are all on
+south.
+
+We have left nothing behind but the husks. I would not trade this
+moment for all the years before it. I have their footings at compound
+interest! They are dead. This is life.
+
+
+
+
+Birthdays and Headmarks
+
+
+Yesterday I had a birthday. I looked in the glass and communed with my
+features. I saw some gray hairs coming. Hurrah!
+
+You know what gray hairs are? Did you ever get a headmark in school?
+Gray hairs are silver headmarks in our education as we go on south.
+
+You children cheer up. Your black hair and auburn hair and the other
+first reader hair will pass and you'll get promoted as you go on south.
+
+Don't worry about gray hair or baldness. Only worry about the location
+of your gray hair or baldness. If they get on the inside of the head,
+worry. Do you know why corporations sometimes say they do not want to
+employ gray-headed men? They have found that so many of them have quit
+going on south and have gotten gray on the inside--or bald.
+
+These same corporations send out Pinkertons and pay any price for
+gray-headed men--gray on the outside and green on the inside. They are
+the most valuable, for they have the vision and wisdom of many years
+and the enthusiasm and "pep" and courage of youth.
+
+The preacher, the teacher--everyone who gets put on the retired list,
+retires himself. He quits going on south.
+
+The most wonderful person in the world is the one who has lived years
+and years on earth and has perhaps gotten gray on the outside, but has
+kept young and fresh on the inside. Put that person in the pulpit, in
+the schoolroom, in the office, behind the ticket-window or on the
+bench--or under the hod--and you find the whole world going to that
+person for direction, advice, vision, help, sympathy, love.
+
+
+I am happy today as I look back over my life. I have been trying to
+lecture a good while. I am almost ashamed to tell you how long, for I
+ought to know more about it by this time. But when anybody says, "I
+heard you lecture twenty years ago over at----" I stop him. "Please
+don't throw it up to me now. I am just as ashamed of it as you are. I
+am trying to do better now."
+
+O, I want to forget all the past, save its lessons. I am just beginning
+to live. If anybody wants to be my best friend, let him come to me and
+tell me how to improve--what to do and what not to do. Tell me how to
+give a better lecture.
+
+Years ago a bureau representative who booked me told me my lectures
+were good enough. I told him I wanted to get better lectures, for I was
+so dissatisfied with what little I knew. He told me I could never get
+any better. I had reached my limit. Those lectures were the "limit." I
+shiver as I think what I was saying then. I want to go on south
+shivering about yesterday. These years I have noticed the people on the
+platform who were contented with their offerings, were not trying to
+improve them, and were lost in admiration of what they were doing, did
+not stay long on the platform. I have watched them come and go, come
+and go. I have heard their fierce invectives against the bureaus and
+ungrateful audiences that were "prejudiced" against them.
+
+Birthdays are not annual affairs. Birthdays are the days when we have a
+new birth. The days when we go on south to larger visions. I wish I
+could have a birthday every minute!
+
+Some people seem to string out to near a hundred years with mighty few
+birthdays. Some people spin up to Methuselahs in a few years.
+
+From what I can learn of Methuselah, he never grew past copper-toed
+boots. He just hibernated and "chawed on."
+
+The more birthdays we have, the nearer we approach eternal youth!
+
+
+
+
+Bernhardt, Davis and Edison
+
+
+The spectacle of Sarah Bernhardt, past seventy, thrilling and gripping
+audiences with the fire and brilliancy of youth, is inspiring. No
+obstacle can daunt her. Losing a leg does not end her acting, for she
+remains the "Divine Sarah" with no crippling of her work. She looks
+younger than many women of half her years. "The years are nothing to
+me."
+
+Senator Henry Gassaway Davis, West Virginia's Grand Old Man, at
+ninety-two was working as hard and hopefully as any man of the
+multitudes in his employ. He was an ardent Odd Fellow, and one day at
+ninety-two--just a short time before his passing--he went out to the
+Odd Fellows' Home near Elkins, where he lived. On the porch of the home
+was a row of old men inmates. The senator shook hands with these men
+and one by one they rose from the bench to return his hearty greetings.
+
+The last man on the bench did not rise. He helplessly looked up at the
+senator and said, "Senator, you'll have to excuse me from getting up.
+I'm too old. When you get as old as I am, you'll not get up, either."
+
+"That's all right. But, my man, how old are you?"
+
+"Senator, I'm old in body and old in spirit. I'm past sixty."
+
+"My boy," laughed Senator Davis, "I was an Odd Fellow before you were
+born."
+
+The senator at ninety-two was younger than the man "past sixty,"
+because he was going on south.
+
+
+When I was a little boy I saw them bring the first phonograph that Mr.
+Edison invented into the meeting at Lakeside, Ohio. The people cheered
+when they heard it talk.
+
+You would laugh at it today. It had a tinfoil cylinder, it screeched
+and stuttered. You would not have it in your barn today to play to your
+ford!
+
+But the people said, "Mr. Edison has succeeded." There was one man who
+did not believe that Mr. Edison had succeeded. His name was Thomas Alva
+Edison. He had gotten to St. Paul, and he went on south. A million
+people would have stopped there and said, "I have arrived." They would
+have put in their time litigating for their rights with other people
+who would have gone on south with the phonograph idea.
+
+Mr. Edison has said that his genius is mainly his ability to keep on
+south. A young lady succeeded in getting into his laboratory the other
+day, and she wrote me that the great inventor showed her one invention.
+"I made over seven thousand experiments and failed before I hit upon
+that."
+
+"Why make so many experiments?"
+
+"I know more than seven thousand ways now that won't work."
+
+I doubt if there are ten men in America who could go on south in the
+face of seven thousand failures. Today he brings forth a
+diamond-pointed phonograph. I am sure if we could bring Mr. Edison to
+this platform and ask him, "Have you succeeded?" he would say what he
+has said to reporters and what he said to the young lady, "I have not
+succeeded. I am succeeding. All I have done only shows me how much
+there is yet to do."
+
+That is success supreme. Not "succeeded" but "succeeding."
+
+What a difference between "ed" and "ing"! The difference between death
+and life. Are you "ed-ing" or "ing-ing"?
+
+
+
+
+Moses Begins at Eighty
+
+
+Moses, the great Hebrew law-giver, was eighty years old before he
+started south. It took him eighty years to get ready. Moses did not
+even get on the back page of the Egyptian newspapers till he was
+eighty. He went on south into the extra editions after that!
+
+If Moses had retired at seventy-nine, we'd never have heard of him. If
+Moses had retired to a checkerboard in the grocery store or to pitching
+horseshoes up the alley and talking about "ther winter of fifty-four,"
+he would have become the seventeenth mummy on the thirty-ninth row in
+the green pickle-jar!
+
+Imagine Moses living today amidst the din of the high school orations
+on "The Age of the Young Man" and the Ostler idea that you are going
+down hill at fifty. Imagine Moses living on "borrowed time" when he
+becomes the leader of the Israelite host.
+
+I would see his scandalized friends gather around him. "Moses! Moses!
+what is this we hear? You going to lead the Israelites to the Promised
+Land? Why, Moses, you are an old man. Why don't you act like an old
+man? You are liable to drop off any minute. Here is a pair of slippers.
+And keep out of the night air. It is so hard on old folks."
+
+I think I would hear Moses say, "No, no, I am just beginning to see
+what to do. Watch things happen from now on. Children of Israel,
+forward, march!"
+
+I see Moses at eighty starting for the Wilderness so fast Aaron can
+hardly keep up. Moses is eighty-five and busier and more enthusiastic
+than ever. The people say, "Isn't Moses dead?" "No." "Well, he ought to
+be dead, for he is old enough."
+
+They appoint a committee to bury Moses. You cannot do anything in
+America without a committee. The committee gets out the invitations and
+makes all the arrangements for a gorgeous funeral next Thursday. They
+get ready the resolutions of
+respect--"Whereas,--Whereas,--Resolved,--Resolved."
+
+Then I see the committee waiting on Moses. That is what a committee
+does--it "waits" on something or other. And this committee goes up to
+General Moses' private office. It is his busy day. They have to stand
+in line and wait their turn. When they get up to Moses' desk, the great
+prophet says, "Boys, what is it? Cut it short, I'm busy."
+
+The committee begins to weep. "General Moses, you are a very old man.
+You are eighty-five years old and full of honors. We are the committee
+duly authorized to give you gorgeous burial. The funeral is to be next
+Thursday. Kindly die."
+
+I see Moses look over his appointments. "Next Thursday? Why, boys,
+every hour is taken next Thursday. I simply cannot attend my funeral
+next Thursday."
+
+They cannot bury Moses. He cannot attend. You cannot bury anybody who
+is too busy to attend his own funeral! You cannot bury anybody until he
+consents. It is bad manners! The committee is so mortified, for all the
+invitations are out. It waits.
+
+Moses is eighty-six and the committee 'phones over, "Moses, can you
+attend next Thursday?" And Moses says, "No, boys, you'll just have to
+hold that funeral until I get this work pushed off so I can attend it.
+I haven't even time to think about getting old."
+
+The committee waits. Moses is ninety and rushed more than ever. He is
+doing ten men's work and his friends all say he is killing himself. But
+he makes the committee wait.
+
+Moses is ninety-five and burning the candle at both ends. He is a
+hundred. And the committee dies!
+
+Moses goes right on shouting, "Onward!" He is a hundred and ten. He is
+a hundred and twenty. Even then I read, "His eye was not dim, nor his
+natural force abated." He had not time to stop and abate.
+
+So God buried him. The committee was dead. O, friends, this is not
+irreverence. It is joyful reverence. It is the message to all of us, Go
+on south to the greater things, and get so enthused and absorbed in our
+going that we'll fool the "committee."
+
+
+All the multitudes of the Children of Israel died in the Wilderness.
+They were afraid to go on south. Only two of them went on south--Joshua
+and Caleb. They put the giants out of business.
+
+The Indians once owned America. But they failed to go on south. So
+another crop of Americans came into the limelight. If we modern
+Americans do not go on south we will join the Indians, the auk and the
+dodo.
+
+
+
+
+The "Sob Squad"
+
+
+I am so sorry for the folks who quit, retire, "get on the shelf" or
+live on "borrowed time."
+
+They generally join the "sob squad."
+
+They generally discover the world is "going to the dogs." They cry on
+my shoulder, no matter how good clothes I wear.
+
+They tell me nobody uses them right. The person going on south has not
+time to look back and see how anybody uses him.
+
+They say nobody loves them. Which is often a fact. Nobody loves the
+clock that runs down.
+
+They say, "Only a few more days of trouble, only a few more
+tribulations, and I'll be in that bright and happy land." What will
+they do with them when they get them there? They would be dill pickles
+in the heavenly preserve-jar.
+
+They say, "I wish I were a child again. I was happy when I was a child
+and I'm not happy now. Them was the best days of my life childhood's
+palmy days."
+
+Wake up! Your clock has run down. Anybody who wants to be a child again
+is confessing he has lost his memory. Anybody who can remember the
+horrors of childhood could not be hired to live it over again.
+
+If there is anybody who does not have a good time, if there is anybody
+who gets shortchanged regularly, it is a child. I am so sorry for a
+child. Hurry up and go on south. It is better on south.
+
+
+
+
+Waiting till the "Second Table"
+
+
+I wish I could forget many of my childhood memories. I remember the
+palmy days. And the palm!
+
+I often wonder how I ever lived thru my childhood. I would not take my
+chances living it thru again. I am not ungrateful to my parents. I had
+advantages. I was born in a parsonage and was reared in the nurture and
+admiration of the Lord. I am not just sure I quoted that correctly, but
+I know I was reared in a parsonage. About all I inherited was a Godly
+example and a large appetite. That was about all there was to inherit.
+I cannot remember when I was not hungry. I used to go around feeling
+like the Mammoth Cave, never thoroly explored.
+
+I never sit down as "company" at a dinner and see some little children
+going sadly into the next room to "wait till the second table" that my
+heart does not go out to them. I remember when I did that.
+
+I can only remember about four big meals in a year. That was "quart'ly
+meeting day." We always had a big dinner on "quart'ly meeting day."
+Elder Berry would stay for dinner. His name was Berry, but being
+"presiding elder," we called him Elder Berry.
+
+Elder Berry always stayed for dinner. He was one of the easiest men to
+get to stay for dinner I ever saw.
+
+Mother would stay home from "quart'ly meeting" to get the big dinner
+ready. She would cook up about all the "brethren" brought in at the
+last donation. We had one of those stretchable tables, and mother would
+stretch it clear across the room and put on two table-cloths. She would
+lap them over in the middle, where the hole was.
+
+I would watch her get the big dinner ready. I would look over the long
+table and view the "promised land." I would see her set on the jelly.
+We had so much jelly--red jelly, and white jelly, and blue jelly. I
+don't just remember if they had blue jelly, but if they had it we had
+it on that table. All the jelly that ever "jelled" was represented. I
+didn't know we had so much jelly till "quart'ly meeting" day. I would
+watch the jelly tremble. Did you ever see jelly tremble? I used to
+think it ought to tremble, for Elder Berry was coming for dinner.
+
+I would see mother put on the tallest pile of mashed potatoes you ever
+saw. She would make a hollow in the top and fill it with butter. I
+would see the butter melt and run down the sides, and I would say,
+"Hurry, mother, it is going to spill!" O, how I wanted to spill it! I
+could hardly hold out faithful.
+
+And then Elder Berry would sit down at the table, at the end nearest
+the fried chicken. The "company" would sit down. I used to wonder why
+we never could have a big dinner but what a lot of "company" had to
+come and gobble it up. They would fill the table and father would sit
+down in the last seat. There was no place for me to sit. Father would
+say, "You go into the next room, my boy, and wait. There's no room for
+you at the table."
+
+The hungriest one of that assemblage would have to go in the next room
+and hear the big dinner. Did you ever hear a big dinner when you felt
+like the Mammoth Cave? I used to think as I would sit in the next room
+that heaven would be a place where everybody would eat at the first
+table.
+
+I would watch them thru the key-hole. It was going so fast. There was
+only one piece of chicken left. It was the neck. O, Lord, spare the
+neck! And I would hear them say, "Elder Berry, may we help you to
+another piece of the chicken?"
+
+And Elder Berry would take the neck!
+
+Many a time after that, Elder Berry would come into the room where I
+was starving. He would say, "Brother Parlette, is this your boy?" He
+would come over to the remains of Brother Parlette's boy. He would
+often put his hand in benediction upon my head.
+
+My head was not the place that needed the benediction.
+
+He would say, "My boy, I want you to have a good time now." Now! When
+all the chicken was gone and he had taken the neck! "My boy, you are
+seeing the best days of your life right now as a child."
+
+The dear old liar! I was seeing the worst days of my life. If there is
+anybody shortchanged--if there is anybody who doesn't have a good time,
+it's a child. Life has been getting better ever since, and today is the
+best day of all. Go on south!
+
+
+
+
+It's Better on South
+
+
+Seeing your best days as a child? No! You are seeing your worst days.
+Of course, you can be happy as a child. A boy can be happy with fuzz on
+his upper lip, but he'll be happier when his lip feels more like mine
+like a piece of sandpaper. There are chapters of happiness undreamed of
+in his philosophy.
+
+A child can be full of happiness and only hold a pint. But afterwhile
+the same child will hold a quart.
+
+I think I hold a gallon now. And I see people in the audience who must
+hold a barrel! Go on south. Of course, I do not mean circumference. But
+every year we go south increases our capacity for joy. Our life is one
+continual unfolding as we go south. Afterwhile this old world gets too
+small for us and we go on south into a larger one.
+
+So we cannot grow old. Our life never stops. It goes on and on forever.
+Anything that does not stop cannot grow old or have age. Material
+things will grow old. This stage will grow old and stop. This hall will
+grow old and stop. This house we live in will grow old and stop. This
+flesh and blood house we live in will grow old and stop. This lecture
+even will grow old--and stop! But you and I will never grow old, for
+God cannot grow old. You and I will go on living as long as God lives.
+
+I am not worried today over what I do not know. I used to be worried. I
+used to say, "I have not time to answer you now!" But today it is such
+a relief to look people in the face and say, "I do not know."
+
+And I have to say that to many questions, "I do not know." I often
+think if people in an audience only knew how little I know, they would
+not stay to hear me.
+
+But some day I shall know! I patiently wait for the answer. Every day
+brings the answer to something I could not answer yesterday.
+
+It will take an eternity to know an infinity!
+
+What a wonderful happiness to go on south to it!
+
+
+
+
+Overcoming Obstacles Develops Power
+
+
+As the Mississippi River goes on south he finds obstacles along the
+way. You and I find obstacles along our way south. What shall we do?
+
+Go to Keokuk, Iowa, for your answer.
+
+They have built a great concrete obstacle clear across the path of the
+river. It is many feet high, and many, many feet long. The river cannot
+go on south. Watch him. He rises higher than the obstacle and sweeps
+over it on south.
+
+Over the great power dam at Keokuk sweeps the Mississippi. And then you
+see the struggle of overcoming the obstacle develops light and power to
+vitalize the valley. A hundred towns and cities radiate the light and
+power from the struggle. The great city of St. Louis, many miles away,
+throbs with the victory.
+
+So that is why they spent the millions to build the obstacle--to get
+the light and the power. The light and the power were latent in the
+river, but it took the obstacle and the overcoming to develop it and
+make it useful.
+
+That is exactly what happens when you and I overcome our obstacles. We
+develop our light and power. We are rivers of light and power, but it
+is all latent and does no good until we overcome obstacles as we go on
+south.
+
+Obstacles are the power stations on our way south!
+
+And where the most obstacles are, there you find the most power to be
+developed. So many of us do not understand that. We look southward and
+we see the obstacles in the road. "I am so unfortunate. I could do
+these great things, but alas! I have so many obstacles in the way."
+
+Thank God! You are blessed of Providence. They do not waste the
+obstacles. The presence of the obstacles means that there is a lot of
+light and power in you to be developed. If you see no obstacles, you
+are confessing to blindness.
+
+I hear people saying, "I hope the time may speedily come when I shall
+have no more obstacles to overcome!" When that time comes, ring up the
+hearse, for you will be a "dead one."
+
+
+Life is going on south, and overcoming the obstacles. Death is merely
+quitting.
+
+The fact that we are not buried is no proof that we are alive. Go along
+the street in almost any town and see the dead ones. There they are
+decorating the hitching-racks and festooning the storeboxes. There they
+are blocking traffic at the postoffice and depot. There they are in the
+hotel warming the chairs and making the guests stand up. There they
+are--rows of retired farmers who have quit work and moved to town to
+block improvements and die. But they will never need anything more than
+burying.
+
+For they are dead from the ears up. They have not thought a new thought
+the past month. Sometimes they sit and think, but generally they just
+sit. They have not gone south an inch the past year.
+
+Usually the deadest loafer is married to the livest woman. Nature tries
+to maintain an equilibrium.
+
+They block the wheels of progress and get in the way of the people
+trying to go on south. They say of the people trying to do things. "Aw,
+he's always tryin' to run things."
+
+They do not join in to promote the churches and schools and big brother
+movements. They growl at the lyceum courses and chautauquas, because
+they "take money outa town." They do not take any of their money "outa
+town." Ringling and Barnum & Bailey get theirs.
+
+I do not smile as I refer to the dead. I weep. I wish I could squirt
+some "pep" into them and start them on south.
+
+But all this lecture has been discussing this, so I hurry on to the
+last glimpse of the book in the running brook.
+
+
+
+
+Go on South From Principle
+
+
+Here we come to the most wonderful and difficult thing in life. It is
+the supreme test of character. That is, Why go on south? Not for
+blessing nor cursing, not for popularity nor for selfish ends, not for
+anything outside, but for the happiness that comes from within.
+
+The Mississippi blesses the valley every day as he goes on south and
+overcomes. But the valley does not bless the river in return. The
+valley throws its junk back upon the river. The valley pours its foul,
+muddy, poisonous streams back upon the Mississippi to defile him. The
+Mississippi makes St. Paul and Minneapolis about all the prosperity
+they have, gives them power to turn their mills. But the Twin Cities
+merely throw their waste back upon their benefactor.
+
+The Mississippi does not resign. He does not tell a tale of woe. He
+does not say, "I am not appreciated. My genius is not understood. I am
+not going a step farther south. I am going right back to Lake Itasca."
+No, he does not even go to live with his father-in-law.
+
+He says, "Thank you. Every little helps, send it all along." Go a few
+miles below the Twin Cities and see how, by some mysterious alchemy of
+Nature, the Mississippi has taken over all the poison and the
+defilement, he has purified it and clarified it, and has made it a part
+of himself. And he is greater and farther south!
+
+He fattens upon bumps. Kick him, and you push him farther south. "Hand
+him a lemon," and he makes lemonade.
+
+Civilization conspires to defeat the Mississippi. Chicago's drainage
+canal pollutes him. The flat, lazy Platte, three miles wide and three
+inches deep; the peevish, destructive Kaw, and all those streams that
+unite to form the treacherous, sinful, irresponsible lower Missouri;
+the big, muddy Ohio, the Arkansas, the Red, the black and the blue
+floods--all these pour into the Mississippi.
+
+Day by day the Father of Waters goes on south, taking them over and
+purifying them and making them a part of himself. Nothing can
+discourage, divert nor defile him. No matter how poisonous he becomes,
+he goes a few miles on south and he is all pure again.
+
+
+Wonderful the book in the running brook! We let our life stream become
+poisoned by bitter memories and bitter regrets. We carry along such a
+heart full of the injuries that other people have done us, that
+sometimes we are bank to bank full of poison and a menace to those
+around us. We say, "I can forgive, but I cannot forget."
+
+Oh, forget it! Drop it all. Purify your life and go on south all sweet
+again. We forget what we ought to remember and remember what we ought
+to forget. We need schools of memory, but we need schools of
+forgettery, even more.
+
+As you go on south and bless your valley, do you notice the valley does
+not bless you very much? Have you sadly noted that the people you help
+the most often are the least grateful in return?
+
+Don't wait to be thanked. Hurry on to avoid the kick! Do good to others
+because that is the way to be happy, but do not wait for a receipt for
+your goodness; you will need a poultice every time you wait. I know,
+for I have waited!
+
+
+We get so discouraged. We say, "I have gone far enough south." There is
+nobody who does not have that to meet. The preacher, the teacher, the
+editor, the man in office, the business man, the father and
+mother--every one who tries to carry on the work of the church, the
+school, the lyceum and chautauqua, the work that makes for a better
+community, gets discouraged at times.
+
+We fail to see what we are doing or why we are doing it. Sometimes we
+sit down completely discouraged and say, "I'm done. I'm going to quit.
+I have done my share. Nobody appreciates what I do. Let somebody else
+do it awhile."
+
+Stop! You are not saying that. The evil one is whispering that into
+your heart. His business is to stop you from going south. His most
+successful tool is discouragement, which is a wedge, and if he can get
+the sharp edge started into your thought, he is going to drive it
+deeper.
+
+You do not go south and overcome your obstacles and bless the valley
+for praise or blame, for appreciation or lack of it. You do it to live.
+You do it to remain a living river and not a stagnant, unhappy pond or
+swamp.
+
+YOU ARE SAVING YOURSELF BY SAVING OTHERS. GO ON SOUTH!
+
+
+Almost everybody is deceived. We work from mixed motives. We fool
+ourselves that we are working to do good, when as we do the good, if we
+are not praised or thanked for it, if people do not present us a medal
+or resolutions, we want to quit. That is why there are so many
+disappointed and disgruntled people in the world. They worked for
+outside thanks instead of inside thanks. They were trying to be
+personal saviours. They say this is an ungrateful world.
+
+O, how easy it is to say these things, and how hard it is to do them!
+
+
+
+
+Reaching the Gulf
+
+
+But because the Mississippi does these things, one day the train I was
+riding stopped in Louisiana. We had come to a river so great science
+has not yet been able to put a bridge across it.
+
+I watched them pile the steel train upon a ferry-boat. I watched the
+boat crossing a river more than a mile wide. Standing upon the
+ferry-boat, I could look down into the lordly river and then far north
+perhaps fifteen hundred miles to the little struggling streamlet
+starting southward thru the forests of Minnesota, there writing the
+first chapter of this wonderful book in the running brook.
+
+I thank God that I had gone a little farther southward in my own life.
+Father of Waters, you have fought a good fight. You are conquering
+gloriously. You bear upon your bosom the commerce of many nations. I
+know why. I saw you born, saw your struggles, saw you get in the right
+channel, saw you learn the lessons of your knocks, and saw that you
+never stopped going southward.
+
+And may we read it into our own lives. May we get the vision of which
+way to go, and then keep on going south--on and on, overcoming, getting
+the lessons of the bumps, the strength from the struggle and thus
+making it a part of ourselves, and thus growing greater.
+
+
+
+
+Go on South Forever!
+
+
+Where shall we stop going south? At the Gulf of Mexico?
+
+The Mississippi knows nothing about the gulf. He goes on south until he
+reaches the gulf. Then he pushes right on into the gulf as tho nothing
+had happened. So he pushes his physical banks on south many miles right
+out into the gulf.
+
+And when he comes to the end of his physical banks, he pushes on south
+into the gulf, and goes on south round and round the globe.
+
+When you and I come to our Gulf of Mexico, we must push right on south.
+So we push our physical banks years farther into the gulf. And when
+physical banks fail, we go on south beyond this mere husk, into the
+great Gulf of the Beyond, to go on south unfolding thru eternity.
+
+WE NEVER STOP GOING SOUTH.
+
+
+
+Chapter X
+
+Going Up Life's Mountain
+
+The Defeats that are Victories
+
+HOW often we say, "I wish I had a million!" Perhaps it is a blessing
+that we have not the million. Perhaps it would make us lazy, selfish
+and unhappy. Perhaps we would go around giving it to other people to
+make them lazy, selfish and unhappy.
+
+O, the problem is not how to get money, but how to get rid of money
+with the least injury to the race!
+
+Perhaps getting the million would completely spoil us. Look at the wild
+cat and then look at the tabby cat. The wild cat supports itself and
+the tabby cat has its million. So the tabby cat has to be doctored by
+specialists.
+
+If the burden were lifted from most of us we would go to wreck.
+Necessity is the ballast in our life voyage.
+
+When you hear the orator speak and you note the ease and power of his
+work, do you think of the years of struggle he spent in preparing? Do
+you ever think of the times that orator tried to speak when he failed
+and went back to his room in disgrace, mortified and broken-hearted?
+Thru it all there came the discipline, experience and grim resolve that
+made him succeed.
+
+When you hear the musician and note the ease and grace of the
+performance, do you think of the years of struggle and overcoming
+necessary to produce that finish and grace? That is the story of the
+actor, the author and every other one of attainment.
+
+Do you note that the tropics, the countries with the balmiest climates,
+produce the weakest peoples? Do you note that the conquering races are
+those that struggle with both heat and cold? The tropics are the
+geographical Gussielands.
+
+Do you note that people grow more in lean years than in fat years? Crop
+failures and business stringencies are not calamities, but blessings in
+disguise. People go to the devil with full pockets; they turn to God
+when hunger hits them. "Is not this Babylon that I have builded?" says
+the Belshazzar of material prosperity as he drinks to his gods. Then
+must come the Needful and Needless Knocks handwriting upon the wall to
+save him.
+
+You have to shoot many men's eyes out before they can see. You have to
+crack their heads before they can think, knock them down before they
+can stand, break their hearts before they can sing, and bankrupt them
+before they can be rich.
+
+Do you remember that they had to lock John Bunyan in Bedford jail
+before he would write his immortal "Pilgrim's Progress"? It may be that
+some of us will have to go to jail to do our best work.
+
+Do you remember that one musician became deaf before he wrote music the
+world will always hear? Do you remember that one author became blind
+before writing "Paradise Lost" the world will always read?
+
+Do you remember that Saul of Tarsus would have never been remembered
+had he lived the life of luxury planned for him? He had to be blinded
+before he could see the way to real success. He had to be scourged and
+fettered to become the Apostle to the Gentiles. He, too, had to be sent
+to prison to write his immortal messages to humanity. What throne-rooms
+are some prisons! And what prisons are some throne-rooms!
+
+Do you not see all around you that success is ever the phoenix rising
+from the ashes of defeat?
+
+Then, children, when you stand in the row of graduates on commencement
+day with your diplomas in your hands, and when your relatives and
+friends say, "Success to you!" I shall take your hand and say, "Defeat
+to you! And struggles to you! And bumps to you!"
+
+For that is the only way to say, "Success to you!"
+
+
+
+
+Go Up the Mountain
+
+O UNIVERSITY OF HARD KNOCKS, we learn to love you more with each
+passing year. We learn that you are cruel only to be kind. We learn
+that you are saving us from ourselves. But O, how most of us must be
+bumped to see this!
+
+I know no better way to close this lecture than to tell you of a great
+bump that struck me one morning in Los Angeles. It seemed as tho twelve
+years of my life had dropped out of it, and had been lost.
+
+Were you ever bumped so hard you were numb? I was numb. I wondered why
+I was living. I thought I had nothing more to live for. When a dog is
+wounded he crawls away alone to lick his wounds. I felt like the
+wounded dog. I wanted to crawl away to lick my wounds.
+
+That is why I climbed Mount Lowe that day. I wanted to get alone.
+
+
+It is a wonderful experience to climb Mount Lowe. The tourists go up
+half a mile into Rubio Canyon, to the engineering miracle, the
+triangular car that hoists them out of the hungry chasm thirty-five
+hundred feet up the side of a granite cliff, to the top of Echo
+Mountain.
+
+Here they find that Echo Mountain is but a shelf on the side of Mount
+Lowe. Here they take an electric car that winds five miles on towards
+the sky. There is hardly a straight rail in the track. Every minute a
+new thrill, and no two thrills alike. Five miles of winding and
+squirming, twisting and ducking, dodging and summersaulting.
+
+There are places where the tourist wants to grasp his seat and lift.
+There is a wooden shelf nailed to the side of the perpendicular
+rockwall where his life depends upon the honesty of the man who drove
+the nails. He may wonder if the man was working by the day or by the
+job! He looks over the edge of the shelf downward, and then turns to
+the other side to look at the face of the cliff they are hugging, and
+discovers there is no place to resign!
+
+The car is five thousand feet high where it stops on that last shelf,
+Alpine Tavern. One cannot ride farther upward. This is not the summit,
+but just where science surrenders. There is a little trail that winds
+upward from Alpine Tavern to the summit. It is three miles long and
+rises eleven hundred feet.
+
+To go up that last eleven hundred feet and stand upon the flat rock at
+the summit of Mount Lowe is to get a picture so wonderful it cannot be
+described with this poor human vocabulary. It must be lived. On a pure,
+clear day one looks down this sixty-one hundred feet, more than a mile,
+into the orange belt of Southern California. It spreads out below in
+one great mosaic of turquoise and amber and emerald, where the miles
+seem like inches, and where his field-glass sweeps one panoramic
+picture of a hundred miles or more.
+
+Just below is Pasadena and Los Angeles. To the westward perhaps forty
+miles is the blue stretch of the Pacific Ocean, on westward the faint
+outlines of Catalina Islands. The ocean seems so close one could throw
+a pebble over into it. How a mountain does reduce distances. You throw
+the pebble and it falls upon your toes!
+
+And Mount Lowe is but a shelf on the side of the higher Sierras. The
+granite mountains rise higher to the northward, and to the east rises
+"Old Baldy," twelve thousand feet high and snow eternally on his head.
+
+This is one of the workshops of the infinite!
+
+
+All alone I scrambled up that three-mile trail to the summit. All alone
+I stood upon the flat rock at the summit and looked down into the
+swimming distances. I did not know why I had struggled up into that
+mountain sanctuary, for I was not searching for sublimity. I was
+searching for relief. I was heartsick.
+
+I saw clouds down in the valley below me. I had never before looked
+down upon clouds. I thought of the cloud that had covered me in the
+valley below, and dully watched the clouds spread wider and blacker.
+
+Afterwhile the valley was all hidden by the clouds. I knew rain must be
+falling down there. The people must be saying, "The sun doesn't shine.
+The sky is all gone." But I saw the truth--the sun was shining. The sky
+was in place. A cloud had covered down over that first mile. The sun
+was shining upon me, the sky was all blue over me, and there were
+millions of miles of sunshine above me. I could see all this because I
+had gone above the valley. I could see above the clouds.
+
+A great light seemed to break over my stormswept soul. I am under the
+clouds of trouble today, BUT THE SUN IS SHINING!
+
+I must go on up the mountain to see it.
+
+The years have been passing, the stormclouds have many times hidden my
+sun. But I have always found the sun shining above them. No matter how
+black and sunless today, when I have struggled on up the mountain path,
+I have gotten above the clouds and found the sun forever shining and
+God forever in His heavens.
+
+Each day as I go up the mountain I get a larger vision. The miles that
+seem so great down in the valley, seem so small as I look down upon
+them from higher up. Each day as I look back I see more clearly the
+plan of a human life. The rocks, the curves and the struggles fit into
+a divine engineering plan to soften the steepness of the ascent. The
+bumps are lifts. The things that seem so important down in the smudgy,
+stormswept valley, seem so unimportant as we go higher up the mountain
+to more important things.
+
+Today I look back to the bump that sent me up Mount Lowe. I did not see
+how I could live past that bump. The years have passed and I now know
+it was one of the greatest blessings of my life. It closed one gate,
+but it opened another gate to a better pathway up the mountain.
+
+Late that day I was clambering down the side of Mount Lowe. Down in the
+valley below me I saw shadows. Then I looked over into the southwest
+and I could see the sun going down. I could see him sink lower and
+lower until his red lips kissed the cheek of the Pacific. The glory of
+the sunset filled sea and sky with flames of gold and fountains of
+rainbows. Such a sunset from the mountain-side is a promise of heaven.
+
+The shadows of sunset widened over the valley. Presently all the valley
+was black with the shadow. It was night down there. The people were
+saying, "The sun doesn't shine." But it was not night where I stood. I
+was farther up the mountain. I turned and looked up to the summit. The
+beams of the setting sun were yet gilding Mount Lowe's summit. It was
+night down in the valley, but it was day on the mountain top!
+
+
+Go on south!
+
+
+That means, go on up!
+
+
+Child of humanity, are you in the storm? Go on upward. Are you in the
+night? Go on upward.
+
+
+For the peace and the light are always above the storm and the night,
+and always in our reach.
+
+
+I am going on upward. Take my hand and let us go together. Mount Lowe
+showed the way that dark day. There I heard the "sermons in stones."
+
+
+Some day my night will come. It will spread over all this valley of
+material things where the storms have raged.
+
+
+But I shall be on the mountain top. I shall look down upon the night,
+as I am learning to climb and look down upon the storms. I shall be in
+the new day of the mountain-top, forever above the night.
+
+
+I shall find this mountain-top just another shelf on the side of the
+Mountain of Infinite Unfolding. I shall have risen perhaps only the
+first mile. I shall have millions of miles yet to rise.
+
+
+This will be another Commencement Day and Master's Degree. Infinite the
+number on up. "Eye hath not seen nor ear heard, neither have entered
+into the heart of man, the things which God hath prepared for them that
+love Him."
+
+We are not growing old. We are going up to Eternal Life.
+
+Rejoice and Go Upward!
+
+
+
+
+
+ANOTHER BEGINNING
+
+
+
+The Big Business of Life Turning work Into Play
+
+By Ralph Parlette
+
+This book proves that the real big business is that of getting our
+happiness now in our work, and not tomorrow for our work.
+
+Judge Ben B. Lindsey, the kids' Judge, says: "It is a great big boost
+for everybody who will read it. People ought to buy them by the gross
+and send them to their friends."
+
+Dr. J. G. Crabbe, President of the State Teachers College, Greeley,
+Colo., says: "The Big Business of Life is a real joy to read. It is big
+and ought to be read today and tomorrow and forevermore every where. It
+is truly 'A Book of Rejoicing'."
+
+The Augsberg Teacher, a Magazine for Teachers, says: "In The Big
+Business of Life we have the practical philosophy that it is everyone's
+business to abolish work and turn this world into a playground. Who
+will not confess that many mortals take their work too seriously, and
+that to them it is a joyless, cheerless thing? To be able to find
+happiness, and to find it when we are bending to our duties is to
+possess the secret of living to the full. And happiness is to be sought
+within, and not among the things that lie at our feet. The book before
+us is wholesome and vivacious. It provokes many a smile, and beneath
+each one is a bit of wisdom it would do us a world of good to learn. It
+recalls the saying of the wise man 'A merry heart doeth good like a
+medicine'."
+
+
+Many who have read The Big Business of Life write us that they think it
+is even better than "The University of Hard Knocks," which, they add,
+is mighty hard to beat.
+
+
+
+It's Up To You!
+Are You Shaking Up or Rattling Down?
+
+Go On South!
+The Best is Yet to Come
+
+The Salvation of a Sucker
+You Can't Get Something for Nothing
+
+
+These booklets by Ralph Parlette are short stories adapted from
+chapters in "The University of Hard Knocks."
+
+
+John C. Carroll, President of the Hyde Park State Bank of Chicago,
+bought 1000 copies of the booklet "It's Up to You!" and of it he says,
+"Parlette's Beans and Nuts is just as good as the Message to Garcia and
+will be handed around just us much. I have handed the book to business
+men, to young fellows, bond salesmen and such, to our own vice
+president, and they all want another copy to send to some friend. I
+would rather be author of it than president of the bank."
+
+
+Employers in every line of business are buying quantities of "It's Up
+to You!" for their workers.
+
+
+William Jennings Bryan says of the booklet "Go On South": "It is one of
+the great stories of the day."
+
+
+Charles Grilk of Davenport, says: "My two children and I read the
+Mississippi River story together and we were thoroly delighted."
+
+
+Instruct us to send one of these booklets to your friends. It will
+delight them more than any small present you can make.
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The University of Hard Knocks, by Ralph Parlette
+
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