Essays 29 through 34 of It's a Good Old World. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Recording by Stephen Escalera. It's a Good Old World by Bruce Barton. Essay number 29. Hezekiah is dead, but his formula still holds good. There is a certain man among my acquaintances who, with a little less ability, would have made a splendid success. That sounds strange, but employers of men will understand it. They will have a picture right away of the kind of man he is. In his boyhood he mowed lawns, like the other boys. Also he ran a lemonade stand, and managed a newspaper route, and was forever figuring out a new scheme. He graduated from high school, and entered business with great promise. But he had not been at work three months before he was running a couple of little private businesses on the side. So he has continued through life, cursed with the unhappy gift of being able to do three or four things at once. He ekes out a very fair income today, drawing it in little bits from half a dozen different sources. But he is getting along in life, and there is no one single business of which he can say, I made it. He has scattered himself so widely that there is not one spot in the world's life that bears the permanent imprint of his effort. Twice he is almost broken down from overwork. And four of the men who were his boyhood playmates, men who were satisfied to mow lawns and attempt nothing else, have plugged along, each in a single business, and with far less ability than he, have reached a higher place in the world. I was reminded of him last night in running across a reference to Lord Mount Stephen, in the new biography of James J. Hill. George Stephen, he became Lord Mount Stephen afterward, was the son of a carpenter in Dufftown, Scotland. He worked for a time in a shop in Aberdeen, but was brought to America at an early age and became one of the makers of Canada, and a power in the British Empire. In 1901, visiting Scotland, the carpenter's son was presented with the freedom of the city of Aberdeen, and this is what he said, Any success I may have had in life is due in great measure to the somewhat spartan training I received during my Aberdeen apprenticeship, on which I entered as a boy of fifteen. To that training, coupled with the fact that I seem to have been born utterly without the faculty of doing more than one thing at a time, is due that I am here before you today. I had but few wants and no distractions to draw me away from the work I had in hand. It was impressed upon me from my earliest years by one of the best mothers that ever lived, that I must aim at being a thorough master of the work by which I got my living, and to be that I must concentrate my whole energies on my work, whatever that might be, to the exclusion of every other thing. Concentration With the exception of honesty, it covers a larger measure of the secret of success than any other word. I once asked a very successful man how he was able to get so much done and still have leisure time. I pick up only one paper from my desk at a time, he said, and I make it a point not to lay that paper down until I have settled the business that it involves. I was present in his office when a friend came to offer him a participation in an enterprise that promised to be very profitable. He answered, I can't do it, Jim, I don't need the money, and no amount of money could possibly compensate me for the nuisance and inefficiency of having to carry two things on my mind at the same time. If you want a very good example of how big things are done, read the description of the creation of the world as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis. It is a fine little treatise on efficiency. An enormous job, but no hurry, no rush, no confusion. One day the creation of light, nothing else. The next day the firmament. The third day the creation of land and its division from the waters. One thing each day, followed by a good night's sleep, and a full day's rest at the end of the week. The world has never improved on that formula for success. It was the formula of Hezekiah who refused to dally with sidelines or attempt more than one thing at a time. And in every work that he began he did it with all his heart, and prospered. End of Essay Number 29 Essay Number 30 The Fine Rare Habit of Learning to Do Without Curious things come to light when men are dead and the lawyers are busy with their estates. Some months ago in New York a bank president died. I had never seen him, but his name was familiar enough, and I suppose that, of course, he must have left a considerable fortune. Apparently everyone else was of the same opinion, including even the business associates who knew him best. Imagine then their surprise when it was discovered that instead of an estate he had left debts of thousands of dollars. Had he lost heavily in the market? No. Apparently he never speculated at all. Foulouche Investments? No. Women and Wine? No. Incredible as it seemed, this man whose income was more than a hundred thousand dollars a year got rid of it all, not in gambling or dissipation, but in the everyday expenses of living. He had come up through the various stages of bank employment to the presidency of a great institution, and at every point in his career his expenses were in excess of his income. Even when the income crossed the hundred thousand dollar mark it was still a few steps behind. Never for one moment had he been the master of his life. At a hundred thousand a year he was as much the slave of circumstance as any twelve dollar a week clerk whose expenses are fourteen dollars. An extraordinary case, you exclaim. Yes, but extraordinary only in the size of the figures involved. In all other respects the gentleman was typical of a large percentage of his fellow countrymen. A general he was, in the unfortunate army of those who take orders of their fears and march day after day to the music of a piper whom they cannot afford to pay. What a curious phenomenon it is that you can get men to die for the liberty of the world who will not make the little sacrifice that is needed to free themselves from their own individual bondage. All of us are born into the world free, and immediately we begin to get ourselves into slavery to things. We let the number of things that are necessary for our daily life multiply to such an extent that we have neither time nor money for the things that really count. I stood the other night in a big store looking around at the shelves, and it came over me with a sudden shock that of all the hundreds of articles displayed on the shelves around me hardly a single one was considered a necessity by my grandfather. None of them were included in the lives of the ancient Greeks who gave birth to more great men than any similar period of history has been able to produce since. Once a year at least I like to get down Thoreau's Walden and read it over again, and I pass on that good tonic to any of you who may not have discovered it yet. Thoreau was a Harvard graduate who built a hut for himself on the shores of a little lake near Concord, Massachusetts, and lived in it for two years and two months. For eight months of the period he kept careful financial records, and in that time his total expenses, including the cost of his house, were sixty-one dollars and ninety-nine cents, of which he earned by raising vegetables and by occasional day labor more than half. He threw worry out the window, reduced his living expenses to a point where he could provide them with the labor of a very small part of his days, and so freed the remainder of his life for reading and writing and tramps through the woods and useful thought. We cannot all do what Thoreau did, but at least the war helped us to learn the lesson of his example. It set us to questioning of each element in our lives. Is this worth what I have been paying for it? And to pondering on the important truth that no man is so independent as he who was learned to do without. End of Essay No. 30 Essay No. 31 It ruined Michelangelo, and it can ruin you. Lincoln said a wonderfully wise thing one day. I have talked with great men, he said, and I cannot see wherein they differ from others. Too many of us have a distorted notion of great men.  As a matter of fact the great man is precisely like ourselves, a mixture of success and failure, of joy and deep depression. And very often if we would study him upon the side of his failures we might learn more useful lessons than those that his successes teach. No greater genius existed in his generation than Michelangelo. With such magnificent abilities he should have been a happy man. Yet he was of all men most miserable. His letters abound in melancholy laments. What was the secret of his misery? Failure to apply himself? From boyhood into old age he worked incessantly. Extravagance? He denied himself even the ordinary comforts, to say nothing of the luxuries of his life. No, his tragedy lay within himself, partly in a pessimistic temperament inherited from his father, but chiefly in this fatal weakness. He never had the spiritual courage to say no. Before he had well begun one work he allowed his patrons to force other commissions upon him. He undertook too many things, and as a result an agony of spirit over promises unfulfilled, over work begun and left half done, he passed his miserable days. Modern society is in a conspiracy to ruin men as Michelangelo was ruined. It comes with a thousand conflicting claims. Be chairman of this, it asks, or go on this committee, or leave what you're doing and tackle this new job. And no man accomplishes anything really worthwhile unless he learns early to harden his will and to utter that little word no. How did you come to discover the law of gravitation, a pretty woman asked Sir Isaac Newton? By constantly thinking about it, madam, the great man replied. Newton might have served on a hundred committees. He might have invented a patent churn. He might have made some money in the stock market in those years when he was constantly thinking about gravitation. But he held himself firm to his single purpose and did the great thing, resolutely refusing the thousand tempting diversions. It's a curious fact that most children learning to talk can say no long before they can utter the syllable yes. Yet men find it so easy to say yes and almost impossible to say no. In that fact lies the secret of many failures. It ruined Michelangelo that fatal inability to say no. And it will ruin any man who does not set himself resolutely on guard against it. End of essay number 31. Essay number 32. Don't expect anything very startling from an oracle. In his home one evening I talked with a successful businessman, and he said to me something like this. Each year in business I learn a few new things, and each year I discover that a few of the things I learned the year before are not so very true after all. So when I come to strike a balance, the annual increase in wisdom isn't anything very great. But of four truths I am entirely sure. Very early in my business career I learned that it is never wise to say I will never work for so and so, or I will never live in such and such a place. Youth sets out with a good many such prejudices which it regards as convictions. But as time goes on one discovers that no man ever had a point of pride that was not a weakness to him. I will work for anyone today who is honest and who has something to give me in the way of advancement or knowledge that I do not already have. And I will live anywhere that my work calls me. A little later I added this second bit of knowledge. I quit trying to tell other men what they ought to do with their lives. A man's career is a matter to be settled by himself, his wife, and his creator. I will help when my help is asked, if I can. But I will not take the presumptuous chance of sticking my finger into the wheels of another life unless I am specifically invited. Later still I concluded never to say to any man, if you don't do so and so I will quit, because one day one of them answered quite properly, all right, then quit. Fourthly and finally, he said, I have learned never to slight a young man. There is a double reason for that, of course. In the first place it is good religion. Every older man ought to be a kind of unofficial trustee for youth. But in the second place it is good business. It may be an exaggeration to say that any boy can become President of the United States. But it is certain that any office boy may be purchasing agent or general manager or President of his company ten years from now. And when he arrives I want him on my side. Nothing very startling in all this, you say. Not a very imposing array of knowledge for a man to have gathered in thirty-five or forty years. Very true. But the more you listen to successful men, the more you are impressed by the fact that the only bits of truth they value are truths so old that most of us learn them all in Sunday school. Honesty is the best policy. No hard work is ever lost. What a man sows, that shall he reap. These are about all that the average wise man is sure of, and they are enough. The Greeks had an institution which they called an oracle, a place where the voice of the gods might be heard. Usually the utterances of the oracle ran somewhat after this fashion. Go at the enemy as hard as you can, and if you fight better than he does, you will win. Millionaires are the modern popular oracles. A good many men gather around them, thinking that someday the great one will give them a tip by means of which they may succeed. I have listened to several millionaires, and what they say is usually very sound and true. So sound and true indeed, that it has been long ago accepted by the race and may be found in any good first reader. End of Essay Number thirty-two. Essay Number thirty-three. On hearing from many unhappy husbands and wives. In an unguarded moment, when I was the editor of a magazine, I invited letters on the subject, my marriage. And the letters came, not in hundreds, but in thousands. I confess that the reading of them left me with a certain sense of depression. So large a percentage were from wives who do not like their husbands, and from husbands who wished they had never married their wives. Of course I might have expected that if I had thought about it in advance, and there is in it no real cause for discouragement. Happy nations, according to the old saying, have brief histories, and the same is true of contented couples. Oh, nothing ever happens to us, the happy wife or husband says a bit wistfully. We just float along from day to day. We hardly know where the time goes. But the individual who is not happy supposes himself something unique in the world. He broods over his troubles. He wonders why heaven has set him apart from all mankind to bear so great a disappointment. And feeling thus, he embraces every opportunity to ease his spirit by complaint. There are many men and women in the world, of course, who have no right to expect to be happily married. They misinterpret marriage. They embark upon it as if on some sort of picnic, whereas a single moment's serious thought ought to convince them that it is the greatest and most difficult profession in the world. They remind me of the man who was asked if he could play the violin, and answered, I don't know, I've never tried. Marriage is not a pleasure excursion. It is a business to be studied, a kingdom to be conquered, a mine of precious treasure which reveals itself only in response to patient work. Men who study years to master the comparatively simple professions of law or medicine or journalism suppose that the mere accident of their being males is all that is necessary to make them successful husbands. Girls who have never learned to carry through capably the simplest operations of life dance blithely into the most intimate and subtle and baffling of human relationships. And naturally, there are wrecks. People in disappointment in some degree come to all of us, deserving or undeserving. No couple can hope completely to avoid them. But there are certain rocks in the channel of the good ship marriage that ought to be cleared away at the very start. The rock called money, for example. I hate to ask John for money, said a wife to me last week, because if I don't ask him I'll probably get more. No woman ought ever to have to ask her husband for money.  Until the world recognizes that the business of contributing children to the race and training them is the most splendid of all professions, far more important than anything that any man does in any office, and ought to be paid for accordingly, we shall continue to have wives asking their husbands for money, and marriages going into the discard on that account. Most of all, no man or woman can be permanently happy unless each has within himself some green pastures on which his soul can feed, some reservoir of contentment and self-sufficiency created by himself for his own refreshment. The restlessness of the modern woman that we read so much about, the envy of men and women toward people who seem better off, rise largely from the false assumption that what is outside a man or woman has the power to create or destroy happiness. Nothing outside yourself can make you happy, if you are barren inside. The kingdom of heaven is within you. On that great undying truth successful marriages always have been, and always must be built. End of Essay No. 33 Essay No. 34 What Makes Medium-Sized Men Great A man had died, and the whole city mourned his going. At a club we were discussing him, reminding ourselves of one characteristic and another that had endeared him to us. Finally, a man whose name is famous spoke. You know our friend hardly had a fair start, he said quietly. Nature did not mean to let him be a big man. She equipped him with very ordinary talents. I can remember the first time I heard him speak. It was a very stumbling performance. Yet in his later years we regarded him as one of the real orators of his generation. His mind was neither very original nor very profound, but he managed to build a great institution, and the imprint of his influence is on ten thousand lives. The speaker stopped, and we urged him on. How then do you account for his success? We asked. It is simple, he replied. He merely forgot himself. When he spoke, his imperfections were lost in the glow of his enthusiasm. When he organized, the fire of his faith burned away all obstacles. He abandoned himself utterly to his task, and the task molded him into greatness. A few days afterward I spent some hours in the home of a very wealthy man. Many men come and ask me to use my influence in their behalf to secure them this or that promotion, he said. And I am amazed, not by their request, but by the attitude toward life which prompts them. I feel like saying to them, the very fact that you spend your time and thought campaigning for another position proves that you are not worthy even of the position that you now hold. Then he went on to speak about his own career, which started with the salary of an office boy, and has carried him so far. I never asked for an increase in salary, he said. I never asked for promotion or even thought about it. I had only one single thought. How to make that company as great and as influential as it could possibly be? I believed that by extending its influence we were extending human happiness. More than anything else I wanted to see it reach people in every corner of the world. We made that vision come true, and those of us who achieved it discovered that the company to which we had given our lives had given them back to us a hundred times richer than our own selfish thought and planning could possibly have made them. It is Emerson who somewhere says that the average run of men fret and worry themselves into nameless graves, while here and there a great unselfish soul forgets itself into immortality. Many hundred years before a much wiser man had said, for whosoever will save his life shall lose it, and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it. A rather cryptic utterance. So contradictory in sound that the majority of men pass it by unheeding. But now and then there comes a man who, sensing its truth, harnesses his life to it, forgetting every selfish thought and purpose. Even he knows himself to be a little man, or at best only medium-sized. But the world, beholding the marvel of his influence, remembers him and calls him great. End of Essay No. 34 Essays 35-42 of It's a Good Old World. This is the LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org, recording by Stephen Escalera. It's A Good Old World by Bruce Barton. Essay No. 35 The Greatest Sporting Proposition in the World Sir Walter Raleigh was one of the ablest and most attractive men of his time. Yet he made this fundamental mistake. He picked out the wrong thing to live for. Even about to see what was most worthwhile in life, he decided for fame and fortune and thought they might most surely be secured through the favor of Queen Elizabeth. For her favor he demeaned himself and neglected his wife and was constantly in petty intrigues unbecoming his talents. At the end the fickle queen turned upon him and cast him into London Tower, and her successor sent him to the block. Every age has its quota of Sir Walters. Young men who trade their lives for this or that and at the close have traded themselves empty-handed. And no man has more important business than to determine very early what is really worth having. Being sure that the object he selects is one that can be depended upon to satisfy him not merely through his full-blooded years, but up through the testing hours at the last. What is such an object? Money? I wished that every young man in the world could see, as I once saw, a man who had bartered his soul from money, and who woke one morning to discover that it had vanished overnight. Surely a possession that can so quickly fly away and that leaves such shriveled souls behind it cannot be the supreme good. Fame? Political preferment? Horace Greeley was as famous as any man of his period. He let his ambition carry him into the race for the presidency, and, losing the race, died of a broken heart. There is a finer formula than either of those. Plato stated it centuries ago, I, therefore, calliclyse, am persuaded by these accounts and consider how I may exhibit my soul before the judge in a healthy condition. Wherefore, disregarding the honors that most men value and looking to the truth, I shall endeavor to live as virtuously as I can, and when I die, to die so. And I invite all other men to the utmost of my power, and you too I in turn invite to this contest which I affirm surpasses all contests here. A great game in which the player is a man's best self on the one side, and on the other all the temptations and the disappointments and the buffeting of circumstance. The game of making yourself the best you can be. Let fate say what it will, of so investing the years and the talents you have as to cause the largest number of people to be glad, the fewest to be sorry, and coming to the end with the least regret. Be diligent, wrote Polycarp to Ignatius. Be diligent, be sober as God's athlete, stand like a beaten anvil. I do not know how any man can stand like a beaten anvil who has only money to stand upon, or only a reputation that may vanish as quickly as it came, or a ribbon which is pinned on his coat today and may be taken off tomorrow, but let him have invested his life in the mastery and the cultivation of his own best self, and he has laid up riches that cannot be lost. Whatever obstacles, whatever disappointments may come, are merely added chances against him, contributing to the zest of the contest. And in the end he has this surpassing reward, a clear conscience and a vision unafraid, the prize of the victor in the greatest sporting proposition in the world. End of Essay Number Thirty-Five Essay Number Thirty-Six To a can of beans, planted and canned by ourselves It is five o'clock on a winter afternoon. Going out from my office on the fifteenth floor, I see thousands of lights in the offices all about me. Thousands of offices, all full of people. And I wonder again to myself, as often before, how they all live. Through what intricate stages of evolution have we come from the days when our ancestors raised their own food, made their own shoes and clothes, and lived their simple, self-contained and self-supporting lives? What millions of artificial wants we have created to support this vast organization of modern business? Thousands of people, packed into great hives, one tear upon another. Retailers living off wholesalers, wholesalers living off manufacturers, and all living off the farmer. What would happen if for one single year the farmers should decide to quit work and come to town? I watch the lights flicker out as one man after another closes his desk and starts for home. And in my heart I cannot repress a slight feeling of superiority toward them. Poor dependent folk. They are going home to meals that come to them only by grace of the good nature and effort of honest tillers of the soil. Part of my meal will come to me in like manner. But part of it, part of it is beans. Last summer I delved in the earth and raised them with my own effort, and in the kitchen of our little white house we imprisoned their flavor and fragrance. Only food raised by one's own toil is perfect food. All beans have strings, all but the beans that we raise on our own place. I have eaten in the homes of the mighty, and never yet have I encountered sandless spinach. But the sand and the spinach that we raise, ah, just a trace of sand. A superior, far more edible sand. A kind of healthy sand to give strength and fiber to the system. As a favorite melody played in the evening brings back the memory of glad days, so those melodies in cans, our beans and corn and spinach, carry to us, even into the twilight of winter, the summer hours that were, and are to be again. Hours when we woke up with bird-notes in our ears and the fragrance of the rambler calling to us. And after breakfast, taking our hoe in hand, we went out to the little plot of land which a few weeks ago had been nothing, and which by our effort had become a part of the battle line of Europe, a feeder of the world. The winters no longer have any terror for me. I cut them short at either end. For the beans of last summer's canning carry the sunshine of that garden clear into February. And in February the seed catalogs arrive, with the scent and sunshine of the garden to come. I commend to you that system of robbing winter of its terrors. I counsel you to start today to warm the shaded places of your soul with the thought of next summer's garden. There is a greater need for food this year than ever in the modern world, so you shall have the satisfaction of those whose duty is well done. There will be better health for you in the digging, and that alone is reward enough. But more than all, you shall have that special sense of independence as you walk among the mass of your dependent fellow men, the proud elevation of one who needs not to ask of any man, since in his own cellar he hath beans raised on his own good soil, canned by his own right hand. End of Essay No. 36 Essay No. 37 Lincoln pulled through, and so shall we. One of the wisest observations in the world was made by our old friend Mr. Dooley. Looking around me, I see many great changes taking place, he said. But looking back fifty years, I see hardly any change at all. Unless one gets a certain perspective on what is taking place about him, his life will be one succession of panics. It is necessary to take a long look to realize that human nature does not change, that in any age the same set of circumstances will produce about the same results, and that, slowly but surely, certain great principles are working themselves out in the world. This is the value of reading history, and right now is a good time to do a little reading of history. A few hours spent with the life of Lincoln will be especially reassuring. You are worried because the government at Washington seems so dawdling and ineffective. See how Lincoln dawdled with the rebellion, postponing the relief of Sumter until it was too late, allowing things to drift while the South armed itself with government equipment and gained the advantage of superior preparation. It depressed you to see a United States senator making a vulgar attack upon a man like Herbert Hoover, who sacrificed every personal interest to serve the nation. Before you give up hope, turn back and read the attacks that were made upon Lincoln. Our enemies of the late war were 3,000 miles away, but the enemies of 1861 were at the very door of the capital, and still congressmen talked and senators worried about their patronage. Your faith in democracy is shaken because it seems impossible for the politicians to put aside their petty interest even in the face of national emergency. Lincoln, wrestling with the problem of saving the Union, was so besieged by office-seeking politicians that he exclaimed, if the twelve apostles were to be chosen again, I suppose they would have to be distributed according to geographical divisions. And at another time he burst out upon a delegation of senators who wanted Seward's head. You gentlemen, to hang Mr. Seward would destroy the government. If the state of the public mind for the past few months were to be represented by a chart, the line would look like the record of a fever patient's temperature. One day we were excited by reports of German weakness and allied success, and up went our hopes of early peace. The next day, with no special developments, our thoughts turned to the inefficiencies of Washington, and we were thrown into deep despair. A long view is necessary. The sooner we train ourselves to take it, the happier and more effective we will be. The war was won by the allies, because democracy fought on their side, and the whole trend of the world since the Reformation has been toward democracy. But it had its ups and downs. There were days of good news, and days of bad. The wise man held his spirits in check on both days, looking toward the final result, and allowing himself to be neither unduly elated nor unduly depressed. A monarchy, as someone said, is like a trim, tight yacht. It is easily handled, and those on board are dry and warm. But once it hits a reef, it is a total loss. A democracy is a raft. Those on board have their feet in the water most of the time, but they cannot sink. The very things that serve to make us inefficient in war, free speech, unlimited debate, a government organized for peace instead of war, are the very things that make life worth living for us in normal times. And one reason we pray for the democratization of the world is just because democracies make war so ineptly. Our hope for the future is founded on this, that before two democracies can get in shape to hurt each other very much, the passions of their people will cool. Be patient with the ineptness, the inefficiencies, and the extravagances of democracy. Lincoln pulled through in spite of them, and so shall we. End of Essay Number 37 Essay Number 38 They Who Tearry by the Stuff Looking back over the history of some of the previous wars in the world, I came across the campaign which David waged against the Amalekites. They had swarmed down upon his home district during his absence on important business, and had burned his city, Ziklag. When he returned it was to find smoking ruins and the women of the city gone, including even his own wives. So he set out with six hundred men to seek revenge. Four hundred men he kept with him to do the fighting, and two hundred he ordered to tearry by the stuff. The battle was fought, the Amalekites defeated, and the victors returned laden with their spoils. They were flushed and greedy with their conquest. They looked with scorn upon the two hundred men who had not fought. Why should they who had risked their lives divide with those who had remained behind? But David, looking at both groups of men, those who had borne the burden of battle, and those who at home had kept the country and its possessions safe, replied, as his part is that goeth down to the battle, so shall his part be that tarried by the stuff. They shall part alike. And the account continues. It was so from that day forward that he made it a statute and an ordinance for Israel unto this day. I am thinking of those men who wanted to go to war and couldn't, of those who are compelled to tarry by the stuff. I know how they feel. I have talked with dozens of them. They read the stirring news of war in every paper. They heard the bands play and saw the flags wave. One after another their friends appeared in uniform. And inside themselves the fight went on. The call to the colors against the call of the duty that lay at home. I wish I might point out to those men this one great truth. Wars are full of curious phenomena, and one of the most curious is this. But often the nation that wins a war really loses it. Germany won the war with France in 1870. Her troops marched home triumphant. Out of Paris rolled a great train loaded with the indemnity of millions of marks. And what happened? The prosperity that followed that indemnity corrupted the moral fiber of Germany. The flush of conquest made militarism the national god. Out of that ill-gotten victory grew all the crassness that has had its final fruitage in the war just ended. And France, shorn of her egotism by defeat, forced by her indemnity to practice thrift, grew stronger and firmer and finer than she had ever been before. The years that followed our civil war make up the least attractive period of our history. Go through the country, and you can pick out almost unerringly the houses that were constructed in that period.   Spiritually it was noisy with agnosticism. Financially it's all speculation and corruption, ending in the panic of 73. We won the late war on the battlefield. The question is, shall we win it also at home? Shall there emerge from the war a thriftier nation living more simply and more wholesomely? A more unselfish nation trained to sacrifice? A more spiritual nation dedicated to a great ideal? The man who could not go to war, but devoted himself unselfishly to service here at home, need not feel that he had no part in the great conflict. Letting not for one moment forget that he was helping to make America's military victory a moral and a spiritual victory as well. Helping even while he tarried by the stuff. End of Essay number 38 Essay number 39 That fine old fake about the good old days. Several years ago I had a talk with a veteran of the Civil War. I can see him now as he sat on his piazza, stroking his white whiskers and talking to me legubriously. A crowd of high school boys passed us, shouting and jostling each other, and the old man, watching them with sad eyes, made them the text of his dissertation. The moral fiber of our youth is deteriorating, he said sorrowfully. Why at their age I was carrying a gun in the defense of my country. When I look at those thoughtless boys and think what might happen to our country if another war should come, I give you my word, sir, I shudder. The good old man is gone beyond all shuddering. But I wish so much he might have lived. Before another war came, and the poor old country that he worried about had nothing but those thoughtless boys to depend on. Nothing but those thoughtless boys. Indeed. One day I picked up the local paper from that town, and there were their pictures, hundreds of them, all in uniform, transformed overnight from thoughtless boys into men by their country's need. Just as he and his companions were transformed fifty years ago. The same sort of crisis, the same boy stuff, and the same glorious result. Of all the fine old fakes that have enslaved the human mind, there is none greater than the myth of the good old days. The Greeks were subject to it, looking back always to their fabled golden age. The Hebrews had it also. They worshipped the memory of Abraham who was dead, and made life miserable for Moses who was alive. Go unto you, because ye build the tombs of the prophets, and garnish the sepulchres of the righteous, said Jesus, and are yourselves the children of them which killed the prophets. We Americans are subject to the same delusion. We look back to the great departed days of the revolution when every man was a patriot, and nobody thought of anything but the glory of his country. Yet only the other day, in the letters of one of the founders of the Republic to another one, I read this sentence. What a lot of scoundrels we had in that second Congress, didn't we? A successful man recently said to me, my partner is very gloomy about the national outlook. He thinks that the government is in the hands of fools, and that we face very disastrous times. And I said to him, I have never met your partner, but I will describe him to you. He is about fifty-five years old, and his health is not as good as it was, and he has quite a good deal of property. My friend acknowledges the portrait. But how did you know, he asked. And I told him that you may guess a man's age by knowing in what direction his eyes are pointed. Youth looks straight ahead into the future, firm-eyed and confident. Middle age is likely to look to the side, saying to itself, so-and-so, who walks beside me seems to be better off than I. But this is the sign of old age, that it looks behind and talks sadly of the good old days. Let not that baneful sign be fastened on you. Let no one convince you that the world does not progress. For we live, as President Wilson says, in a time that calls for forward-looking men. Men who, looking through the eyes of faith and confidence, can see the coming of the good old days just over the next hill-top, straight ahead. End of Essay Number 39 Essay Number 40 Everybody Has Something Here is a passage from a very discouraged man. If what I feel were equally distributed to the whole human family, there would not be one cheerful face on earth. Whether I shall ever be better, I cannot tell. I awfully forbode, I shall not. To remain as I am is quite impossible. I must die to be better. It appears to me. Another man, equally spiritless, wrote this. Why, forsooth am I in the world? Since death must come to me, why should it not be as well to kill myself? Since I began life in suffering misfortune, and nothing gives me pleasure, why should I endure these days when nothing I am concerned in prospers? Poor, miserable failures. When the price of white paper is so high, why should I be allowed to soil a page with the outpourings of such incompetence? Well, the author of the first passage made a considerable reputation for himself in later life. His name was Abraham Lincoln. And the cry of defeat was uttered by a gentleman named Napoleon Bonaparte. There is a very popular notion in the world that men are divided into two classes, the fortunate and the unfortunate. In the one class are those to whom every good gift has been given. They have health and joy in living and the natural capacity for achievement. The other class includes those who, by some handicap, beyond their ability to conquer, are kept from being the successes that they ought to be. This is the popular notion, I say, a notion invented by us ordinary folks as an alibi for our own shortcomings. We like to assume that the reasons for our mediocrity are beyond our control. That if only we had been given more health, or more money, or more education, or more something or other, we would have been something very different. It pleases us to indulge ourselves in envy toward those who just couldn't help succeeding. But what are the facts? If any man ever lived and attained remarkable success who did not have some serious handicap to contend with, I had failed to discover that man in my reading. Beethoven could not possibly become a great musician. He began to grow deaf at twenty-six. Pope had a wonderful alibi for not trying to amount to anything. He was a hunchback. Demosthenes stammered. Julius Caesar had fits. Lamb was tied to a clerk's desk. Byron had a club foot. Dr. Johnson was a constant sufferer. Having success is worth the effort and sacrifice to attain it has been much debated. You and I may, if we choose, decide that a comfortable mediocrity is the most satisfactory answer to the problem of living. We have a perfect right to that decision. But let's not fool ourselves with the idea that some handicap is responsible for our mediocrity. The difference between great men and the rest of us is chiefly a difference of spirit, the determination, and the will that refuses to recognize defeat. Nature is a very jealous distributor of gifts. Nobody gets one hundred percent equipment for life. The game is to see how much we can do with the cards we have to play. The real good sports do not talk about their handicaps. But you can depend on it that if you knew all the facts you would discover that every one of them has something. End of Essay Number 40 Essay Number 41 Working for it and making it work. This is the tale of two farmers, both of whom are dead. As a youngster I visited one of them. He and his wife were earnest folks who worked hard every day and saved money. The world thought them honest and thrifty. But honest and thrifty are better words than either of them deserved. Serious and sordid describe them better. Never in all my life have I entered a home where the worship of money was so constant and oppressive. At mealtime the talk was all of the cost of food, until the lettuce looked like dollar bills to me and the butter gleamed like gold. For money the woman denied herself every comfort and satisfaction. Dying dried up at forty-five. A little money spent for medical care would have saved the life of the son of the house, but the family debated the expenditure until it was too late and sacrificed the boy. So for the last twenty years of his life the old man lived alone, figuring over again the horde that might have represented so much happiness and growth and love. He told me once that he had more than sixteen thousand dollars in the bank, and even then he did not understand that the sixteen thousand dollars was the price of his soul. The other farmer left a good deal less than sixteen thousand dollars when he passed out. Most of the money he might have hoarded had been invested in things more endearing than stocks and bonds. Some of it went into the education of his children, who are the finest, most progressive citizens in their country today. Some of it went into books and into trips, while he and his wife were still young enough to get the largest enjoyment out of the trips. He had no slacker dollars which moth and rust corrupt. Every dollar that passed through his hands had to do its maximum work in buying happiness and friendships and family pleasure and growth. So openheartedly he lived and died as one who knew full well that life had withheld no good thing from him. John Ruskin tells this incident. Lately, in the wreck of a Californian ship, one of the passengers fastened the belt about him with two hundred pounds of gold in it, with which he was found afterward at the bottom. Now as he was sinking, had he the gold or had the gold, him. We are all passengers working our way on a ship that is destined in the end to sink. Some of us work for money. Some make their money work, and then the difference between those phrases lies often the difference between a successful and an unsuccessful trip. For real wealth, as Ruskin says again, is the possession of the valuable by the valiant. It may consist in gold and silver, or in books, or a home, or the love of little children, or the capacity to laugh. But it is never mere money hoarded at the sacrifice of life. Such money no man ever owns. It owns the owner, works him pitilessly, robs him of the joys of life, and in the end destroys him. End of Essay Number forty-one Essay Number forty-two When men come up to the end A very prominent manufacturer of pianos and pipe organs died some years ago, and this is the story that is told of him. He was very near to the end. The family were gathered about, when a maid entered the room hesitantly and announced that Joe, the organ tuner from the factory, was at the door. Send him up, said the dying man, and Joe came up. Joe, I want you to go downstairs and put the organ in first class condition, he commanded. We expect to have a large gathering of people here in a few days, and every note must be right. Can you picture the scene? Doesn't it make you a little prouder of belonging to the human race, when you think about it? Some weeks ago the directors of a national institution held their annual meeting in New York. The president, who has been kept alive for the past five years, only by the power of an indomitable will, addressed them. In order that the interests of the institution may be conserved, I feel that you should at this time consider who is to be my successor, he said, and with them he discussed quite impersonally various candidates who might fill his place when he should be dead. The doctors have told him that he cannot possibly live more than another two years, and may die at any moment. He knows their verdict. It affects him not at all. Up to the last breath he will keep going, all thought of himself buried in his devotion to his task.  There are those who run from the thought of death, as children run from the dark. No magazine should mention the word, they say. It is an unpleasant subject, morbid, and depressing. On the contrary it seems to me that there is nothing more inspiring than to see the way in which the brave men and women of the world have walked unflinchingly to the end. My friends, I die in peace, and with sentiments of universal love and kindness toward all men, said Robert Emmett, the great Irish patriot. With those words he shook hands with some persons on the scaffold, presented his watch to the hangman, and assisted in adjusting the rope around his own neck. Carry my bones before you on your march, for the rebels will not be able to endure the sight of me, alive or dead. Edward I instructed his son. Even at the end of the path his eyes were fastened on the future and fear was swallowed up in his determination for the success of his enterprise. Draw a line through human history at the time of the birth of Christ and compare the last words of men who died before that date with the words of those who passed on afterwards. The contrast is illuminating. Before he came men went shuttering into oblivion. After him the great souls of the world passed through the gate as conquerors, merely changing their armor in preparation for another and more glorious crusade. Sir Henry Havelach, approaching his last hour, called his son to the bedside. Come, my son, he cried, and see how a Christian can die. The object of Christianity is to teach men better how to live, but it would have justified itself a thousandfold had it done nothing except to teach men how worthily to die. Not as victims, not as baffled players in a game where all must finally lose, but as men, a little lower than the angels, faithful, self-confident, and unafraid. End of Essay Number 42. Essays 43 through 51 of It's a Good Old World. This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. From more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Essay Number 43. If you can't fall in love with your job, for goodness sake, change it. A young man writes me this letter. I am employed in the post office at $100 a month. The salary is sufficient to keep my family comfortable, but I simply loathe the work. I see no chance of promotion in it, and it demands so many of my evenings that I have practically no home life at all. Don't you think that under these circumstances I am justified in looking around for something more congenial? My answer to him is, every day you remain in that post office is a day lost out of your life. You are to live only once. What is the very best thing a man can get out of life? To be happy in his work and at home. You are happy neither in your work nor at home. You are wasting the only existence that will ever be yours in this world. You will come to the end of your road, and looking back will say to yourself, I was cheated. Other men had life and happiness. I only had life. No matter what the immediate sacrifice, find your real place in the world, the job that will call out your whole best self. For until you have found it, you bear on your forehead the mark of discontent that employers shun. The stars in their courses fight against you. No matter what your work is, let it be yours, said Emerson.  Let it be in your bones, and you open the door by which the affluence of heaven and earth shall stream into you. I know of nothing so inspiring as to read the lives of men who were in love with their work. Agassiz, the great naturalist, used to say that he believed the fishes would die for him just to give him their skeletons. Edmund Haley, the astronomer, was another happy workman. Finding in his youth that other astronomers had undertaken to catalog the stars of the northern hemisphere, he loaded a telescope on a boat and started to the southern hemisphere. On shipboard he was busy every minute and made important discoveries. Then it occurred to him that if one could study the transit of Venus, that is, observe Venus at the time when her orbit crosses the orbit of the sun, one could gather data from which to figure the weight of the sun, its distance from the earth, and many other important facts about the solar system. But the next transit of Venus was not to occur until 1769. It was almost certain that Haley could not live that long. As a matter of fact he died in 1742. But when 1769 rolled round the astronomers of that day found already and waiting for them the formula which Haley had prepared. The man who had loved his work so wholeheartedly in life lived on triumphant over death. His devotion had won him immortality. I should want to be paid at least $50,000 a year to be president of a brewery or a civil engineer, because I hate beer and mathematics. But I write editorials at a few dollars less a year, because I love it. And loving it I know that I shall someday make a comfortable living, for there is a competency for any man in any job in the world into which he can put his whole self enthusiastically. He did it with all his heart, as I have quoted of Hezekiah before, and prospered. End of Essay No. 43 Essay No. 44 The business of distributing metals has rather got into a rut. I met him in the smoking-car, and he told me he was a steel worker on his way to find a job in one of the new shipyards. I remarked that the wages must be very large in the shipyards. On the contrary, he answered, I should be making less than I made at home, and I'll be away from my family besides.   When he left the train I reflected that this is one of the unfortunate facts of war, that it calls forth the sacrifice of the whole nation, and honors the sacrifice of only a very few. We have the congressional medal for the man who, in one moment of valor, hurls himself over the trench, and, nobly in truth, does he deserve it. But where is the medal for the man who, day after day, quietly, unobtrusively, does his job, as conscientiously as if the very safety of the Republic were dependent on it? The farther I go in the world, the more I distrust the mere outward signs of greatness, the titles and the bank rolls and the popular applause. More and more I pin my faith to the spirit in which a man's life job is done. If God were to send two angels to earth, said Stephen Tying, one to sit on the throne of England, and the other to sweep the streets of London, the service of the two would be equally honored in his sight. I am not writing to reconcile men who have failed to failure. I have no sympathy with any man who weakly contents himself with being less in the world than his best. But I grow very impatient with the kind of talk and writing which would make us believe that there is only one sort of courage, the courage of battlefield, and only one sort of success, the success of money and fame. Every man has in his heart the seeds of courage, and every man the possibilities of success. It may be success in finance, or in bricklaying, in government, or in gardening. It matters not. The measure of it is the same. And that measure consists not in wealth or titles, but in a man's own self-respect, his own deep-lined consciousness that he has with the tools that were given him done his level best. There lived one time a man named Moses, whose experience with democracy was not altogether encouraging. He saved his people from slavery, and a good part of the time they grumbled at him for doing it. Would to God that all the Lord's people were prophets, he exclaimed one day, by which I take it that he meant, would to God there were a spark of divinity in them that would make them capable of wider vision, a larger measure of self-sacrifice. Had he been able to see a little deeper, Moses might have discovered that his wish was fulfilled, that there is in every man precisely the divinity for which he yearned. War discovers that divinity as no other great experience can. All around me I see merchants, and day-labors, and farmers, who have risen to a height of self-sacrifice, which is a revelation to themselves and to all who know them. It is our misfortune that there is no outward symbol with which to reward that splendor. The business of awarding metals has fallen into certain well-defined ruts. Perhaps someday we shall see more clearly and reward with greater wisdom honoring equally the sacrifice of the battlefield and the sacrifice at home. For both are sparks of the same divinity, twin manifestations of the presence of the same great over-soul. End of Essay Number 44 Essay Number 45 The finest investment you can make is to help the right young man find the right job. In an office not far from mine is a man thirty-six years old, whose title is Office Manager. So far his salary is concerned he is not a failure. He makes a living for himself and family. He carries a little life insurance and saves a little money. But in his heart he knows he has failed.  Father intended him for a farmer. He wanted to go to an agricultural college and his father sent him to a business school instead. The call of the soil is in his ears and he must stifle it with the click of a typewriter. He is one of the vast army of those whose brief time on this earth has been largely lost because they never found the work for which they were made. When I consider how vast that army is and the bitterness of its tragedy, I marvel that fathers do not consider the question of their son's careers with prayer and fasting, instead of which there are many men who treat the lives of their sons as though they were mere pawns in the game, to be moved lightly, here or there. Michelangelo wanted to be an artist. From his earliest days in school he neglected everything to be busy with his pen. Yet his father and uncles, far from welcoming his interest as a direct gift from heaven, beat him cruelly, for they hated the profession of artist, and, in their ignorance of the nobility of art, it seemed a disgrace to have one in the house. John Adams' father tried by main force to settle the boy at a cobbler's bench for life. Handel's father despised music and would not have a musical instrument in the house. Tennyson's grandfather, tossing the lad ten shillings for an elegy on his grandmother, remarked, There, that's the first money you ever earn by your poetry and take my word for it, it will be the last. When Lowell's father learned that his son had won the prize offered by Harvard University for the finest poem written by an undergraduate, he received the news in sorrow. I had hoped, he said sadly, that under the steadying influence of college James would become less flighty. Lowell spoke out of the depths of personal experience when he wrote, It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough. Not all fathers, by any means, have been short-sighted. A great majority, fortunately for the world, have considered the selection of the right career by their sons as the most important problem of their lives. The business world is full of kindly, big-visioned men who have given time and thought, not merely to guiding their own sons' careers, but also to setting the feet of other men's sons on the path of success. There can be no more satisfactory employment. No man could have a finer epitaph than this. He was the friend and helper of young men. Organizations fail, stocks prove worthless, the most carefully made investments too often leak away. But a young life fitted into its proper place in the world is an investment whose power goes on through the years and even into eternity. Blessed is the man who has found his work, said Carlisle. And thrice-blessed is the man who helped that man to find it. End of Essay Number 45 Essay Number 46 The world is owned by men who cross bridges before they come to them. A young man came one day to Lauren F. DeLand, that wise advisor to businessman, and said this, I have been three years in the same job, and I feel that I am entirely lost sight of by my employers. There is no future ahead of me. I am discouraged and hopeless. What shall I do? Mr. DeLand answered, I will undertake to help you, but you must promise to do exactly as I say. The young man promised hopefully. For thirty days, said Mr. DeLand, I want you to concentrate every working minute on the following problem. What suggestion can I make to my employer by which he can in the next calendar year increase his sales fifty thousand dollars, or five thousand dollars, or five hundred dollars, or one hundred dollars? At the end of thirty days the young man returned crestfallen to report that he had not been able to think of one single suggestion. Mr. DeLand then gave him this problem for the second month. Devote every energy to discovering some way by which your employer can in the next year save five thousand dollars, or five hundred dollars, or fifty dollars, in the cost of conducting his affairs. At the end of the second month the young man was back again with a second confession of failure. He said also that he had decided not to ask for any further help. Then Mr. DeLand spoke his mind. So, Mills, you don't care for any more of my advice, he said. Well, this time I'm going to give it to you without your wanting it. My boy, just realize a moment where you stand. With the enormous amount of clothing business that is being done, you are not able, though you have been three years in this house, to increase the volume of business one hundred dollars a year. With the elaborate and necessarily wasteful methods in which that great business is transacted, you are not near enough to it to point out a better system in any department whereby the small sum of fifty dollars a year may be saved. My boy, lie low. Attract just as little attention to yourself as you can. Don't let the manager remember that you have been there three years in his employ if you can help it. If he knew how incapable you are of development or progress, he would change you off for some young man of greater promise. Lie low, my boy, lie low. That young man was typical of thousands, the great, unimaginative horde who have never in the slightest degree developed their imaginations. I do not like the phrase, never cross a bridge until you come to it. It is used by too many men as a cloak for mental laziness. The world is owned by men who cross bridges on their imagination, miles and miles in advance of the procession. Some men are born with more of imagination than others, but it can, by hard work, be cultivated. Not by mere daydreaming, not by lazy wondering, but by hard study and earnest thought. You and I said to ourselves idly, I wonder what is going to happen when the war is over? But one day, during the war, I had luncheon with a group of men who said, at least a thousand different developments are coming at the clothes of the war, each one of which will make men rich. Beginning today we start to study. I met another man who has recently been added to the staff of a great concern engaged in exporting goods to South America. That man has never seen South America. But on the day war was declared in Europe, he said to himself, Europe's trade with South America is coming to us. I am going to learn everything there is to know about that continent. He crossed his bridge four years in advance. Looking into the future, what bridges do you see? End of essay number 46. Essay number 47. We shall win if our sense of humor lasts. A serious-minded reader took me to task because a remark and an article of mine during the war seemed to him too facetious. In ordinary times this might be all right, he reminded me, but we are in the midst of a great war and it is no time for jokes. To which I replied that we were in the midst of a great war, therefore we should have twice as many jokes and they should be twice as funny. Only yesterday I was reading about a cabinet meeting held at the White House in one of the most critical hours of our history. The incident was recorded by Secretary Stanton, not a particularly sympathetic reporter. Around the table the various secretaries gathered, solemn face and silent. To their amazement the President, instead of turning to the business in hand, began reading aloud a chapter from the humorous works of Artemis Ward. The cabinet members were too astonished to speak. Stanton was tempted to leave the room in angry protest. The President, unheeding, read the chapter through. Then laying the book down he heaved a deep sigh and said, Gentlemen, why don't you laugh? With the fearful strain that is upon me night and day if I did not laugh I should die, and you need this medicine as much as I. So saying he turned to his tall hat, which was on the table beside him, and drew out what Stanton described as a little white paper. That little white paper was the emancipation proclamation. The members of the cabinet never could fathom the mingling of laughter and tears that was the secret of Lincoln's greatness. They were afraid of laughter. They regarded it as dangerous, and, in times like those, almost immoral. But Lincoln knew better. More to him, as to many other overburdened man, was the great shock absorber of life. Without its kindly ministrations the hard places of the road would have wrenched his soul beyond endurance. Napoleon seldom smiled. Cromwell had little sense of humor. Either of them would be a dangerous man to handle our affairs in times like these. Such men become too profoundly impressed with their own importance, and in the critical moment their self-importance often betrays their better judgment. Give us rather men like Washington, who, as Irving writes, frequently lean back and laughed until the tears ran down his face. Men like Lincoln, whose point of view is so detached that they can laugh even at themselves. A saving sense of humor is the fourth great Christian virtue, says A.C. Benson, and that is so true that I wish it had been written in the Bible instead of in one of Mr. A.C. Benson's books. A man may have faith, and hope, and charity, and still be a prig and a bore. Jesus was none of these. He was the most popular dinner-guest in Jerusalem. No one ever criticized him for being too serious-minded and respectable. Instead, he was criticized for dining out too much, for not compelling his disciples too fast, and for being too much with the loud, laughing crowd of publicans and sinners. I have some righteous friends who are going to feel greatly shocked at the conduct of the saints in heaven. They have never read that verse in the Bible, which says, He that sitteth in the heavens shall laugh. With all my heart I would urge them to begin right now, even in serious days like these, to cultivate that fourth great Christian virtue, lest perchance they die, and in a heaven presided over by a God who dearly loves a laugh shall find themselves lonesome and ill at ease. End of Essay No. 47 Essay No. 48 Living in a limousine and living in a tub There was quite a little group of people on the curb-stone waiting for a break in the stream of passing automobiles. Among them two shop-girls and I. The girls recognized a woman in one of the limousines as the wife of a very rich New Yorker, and their comments were distinctly envious. I smiled to myself as I listened. For only a few days before I had been at a party where the lady in the limousine was present, and I wished that the girls might have been there too, and heard the remarks she made. She came dressed in a thousand dollars worth of clothes, with five or ten thousand dollars worth of jewels sprinkled over her. And from the minute of her arrival until she left, her conversation consisted of nothing but cynicism and complaint. She had just moved in to a new apartment. It was noisy, she said, and she hated it already. The limousine her husband had given her as a birthday surprise, and he ought to have known that she loathed a pholstery of that color. She had seen all the new shows, and they bored her to death.  What feelings would have been in their hearts if they had lived in Athens about four hundred B.C., and had seen a poorly dressed man living in a wooden tub? Pity, probably, perhaps contempt. Yet, when Alexander the Great visited that man and offered him any favor in the world, the man replied that he wanted only one thing, that Alexander should step out of his sunlight. A curious old world, isn't it, where a lady in her limousine, possessed of everything, is still dissatisfied, and the Iogenes, in his tub, owning nothing, can be so content. We are on the threshold of a period when the struggle to get things is going to take on a new, perhaps more bitter, phase. The men who have carried the hard, unpleasant burdens of the world learned, during the war, their power over the world. They have learned from Russia that the most strongly entrenched government cannot stand against them. They have learned from England that labor can dictate to cabinets. In America, as Samuel Gompers says, they have made in three years a generation of progress. I do not see how any real lover of the race can fail to find satisfaction in this great forward movement of the common man. The movement will have its excesses, but has capitalism had no excesses? It will frequently prove expensive, but so has every previous regime. My fear for the common man is not that he will cost the world too much, but that, when he gets what he wants, he will find that he has still somehow failed of happiness. I would have him study a little the strange case of Diogenes and of the limousine lady. Before he sets forth on his journey to the top, I would have him cut out these lines of Milton and paste them in his hat. He that has light within his own clear breast may sit in the center and enjoy bright day, but he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts benighted walks under the midday sun. Himself is his own dungeon. From the dungeons of poverty and hunger and want the common man is going to be delivered. I would put him on his guard, lest, in escaping from these, he be plunged into the worst dungeon of spiritual death. His mind is filled now with the thought of a day when everyone will have his own limousine. I ask him to remember that a world in which we all lived in tubs would be a first class world if we all had the spirit of Diogenes, and that where there is no vision the people perish just as surely as where there is no food. Essay No. 49 Democracy is a new show, and every citizen is the stage manager. A very patriotic citizen came to me during the war, much perturbed. These investigations in Washington are outrageous, he exclaimed. Suppose there have been mistakes. Is that any reason why we should advertise them to our enemies? Is there any sense in crying from the housetops that we have only nine browning machine guns and that our men are inadequately clothed and equipped? Such matters ought to be kept secret. And I remark to him that in Germany such matters were kept secret. There are only two families living on the world's main street, I said to him. There is the autocracy family, who keep the front door locked and the front curtains drawn. The lawn looks tidy and the house is well kept, but no one knows what's going on behind those curtains. It may be only a friendly game of pinnacle, but it may be counterfeiting, or a bomb plot, or murder. And there is the old widow democracy. Her lawn is covered with tin cans and her children are scrapping all over it, and she does her washing right out on the front porch. But she's in sight every minute, and she has to be pretty honest whether she wants to or not. One of the reasons we were fighting, I said to him, was to make the autocracy family pull up those curtains and bring their corn cob pipes and their laundry out on the porch. And while our boys were over in autocracy's front yard, breaking the windows and letting sunlight into the back rooms, we didn't want anybody, the president, or anyone else, to be staying at home and locking our doors or pulling our curtains down. The criticism is always noisy, sometimes unpleasant and frequently mistaken. But it is an inseparable feature of democratic control. And in the long run it works well, even for the men who are criticized. "'And now, my dear Morley,' wrote Gladstone to John Morley, "'there is one more thing I wish to say to you. Take it from me that to endure trampling on with patience and self-control is no bad element in the preparation of a man for walking firmly and successfully in the path of great public duty. Be sure that discipline is full of blessings.' It is a good thing also for business. One of the great captains of industry of the old school died a few years ago. A little while before his death he attended a meeting of the directors of one of the country's largest industries. There he said something like this, "'I am convinced that I have been wrong and that you younger men who have stood for full publicity have been right. I am too old now to change, but if I had my life to live over again I would take the public and to my confidence straight through.' Most of all, publicity is a good thing for governments. In the first place it is necessary to open up the processes of our politics. They have been too secret, too complicated. They have consisted too much of private conference and secret understandings. If there is nothing to conceal, then why conceal it? If it is a public game, then why play it in private? Publicity is one of the purifying elements of politics. The gentleman who made these remarks is now president of the United States, the same gentleman whom many tenderhearted people are seeking to shield from the publicity in which he so thoroughly believes. Autocracy is a very old performance. When the curtain of history rose six or seven thousand years ago, kings were playing their part in the spotlight and they have been on the stage ever since. Democracy is a new show, still in rehearsal. Every individual citizen regards himself as the stage manager, with full liberty to shout directions at the actors or protest at the top of his voice that their performance is rotten. The result is noise and confusion, but there is no doubt that gradually the show is getting better just the same. End of essay number 49. Essay number 50. Is your conversation a good advertisement for you? As we rode up from Washington together, a man who is a personal friend of President Wilson talked to me about him. One thing that always impresses me, he said, is the wonderful precision of his speech. His mind seems to reach out and grasp the needed word with unfaltering accuracy. I have never known him to hesitate for a word or employ one that required the slightest modification or explanation. I once asked him to what he attributed this power. He answered that it was due to the early training of his father. My father never allowed any member of his household to use an incorrect expression, said the President. Any slip on the part of one of the children was at once corrected. Any unfamiliar word immediately explained, and each of us encouraged to find a prompt use for it in our conversation so as to fix it in our memories. As we stepped off the train and walked through the station, we passed a group of smartly dressed young women. Their conversation, as we caught it, was something after this fashion. Not really? Sure I thought I'd die. You don't mean it, not really.  An unjust prejudice has grown up in the world against the man who talks well and in favor of the wise-looking individual, who sits solid, saying nothing. My observation is that, generally speaking, poverty of speech is the outward evidence of poverty of mind. The individual whose communication is confined to half a dozen worn expressions has a mind that is not working. It is merely sliding along in well-oiled grooves. A mind constantly reaching out along new paths of thought will of necessity find new language with which to clothe that thought. There is a certain New York businessman among my friends who makes it a rule to ask every applicant for a position. Can you write well? A strange question one would think to put to a prospective elevator, boy. Yet the man has a reason for it. No man can write clearly, he says, who does not think clearly. I want to see a man's mind at work before I can give him a place in my organization. A mastery of good, clean-cut English is possible to anybody. One very good way to acquire it is by reading aloud. Select some author whose work is worth reading and keep your mind fixed not merely on the meaning of the words but on the words themselves. Another good exercise is the one that Benjamin Franklin used. He would read a page from some English classic and then, putting away the book, seek to reproduce it in writing. By comparing his own version with the original he learned wherein he could improve. Emerson said that Montaigne's words had so much vitality that if one were to cut them they would bleed. Michael Webster used to study the dictionary as other men study the financial page. It paid him, it will pay you. For good or ill your conversation is your advertisement.  Do they see it well-clothed, neat, business-like, or is it slouching along in shoes run down at the heel with soiled linen and frazzled trousers shabbily seeking to avoid real work. End of Essay Number Fifty. Essay Number Fifty One. And the dog runs out and barks. Strange how a sound will sometimes set the cords of memory to vibrating. It may be a woman's laugh, or a snatch of song, or even the barking of a dog at twilight. The other night I left the train two stations away from my home and started to walk the rest of the way across the hills. It began to snow after a little. From the houses along the road lights flickered through the haze and as I rounded a curve a little dog ran out and barked. In an instant my mind leaped back twenty years or more to the days when I carried a newspaper route in Boston. I remembered how long the way used to seem, two miles out and two miles back, and how dark it was in winter when the sun had gone, and how I hated one newspaper that used to issue a great edition of twenty-four pages on Saturday evenings. The editors must be heartless creatures, I thought to myself. Surely they had never been boys and compelled to travel a paper route. In a big house up on the hills in the district where rich men lived there were two dogs that every night barked at me. Oh, they won't bite, said the owner. They barked, but they are perfectly good-natured.  Every night I had to gird up my courage to start out on that route, thinking of those two dogs that would run out and bark. I was just a little fellow in short pants, and the space between my knees and my ankles seemed pathetically unprotected, just made for dogs to bite. The owner caught them snapping at me one night, and I remember yet how he laughed. It seemed to him a bully joke, a little boy worried by two big barking dogs. And I shall never forget that owner, nor the man whose house stood next to his. It was the night before Christmas. Snow was coming down, and it seemed more dark than usual, and the papers were heavy, and the route more long. I had just come out of the yard of the man with the dogs, and as I stepped onto the porch of the next house, suddenly the door opened and a big, jolly-faced man stood smiling in the lamp-light. "'Hello, kid,' he cried jovially, "'I've been waiting for you. Do you know what day to-morrow is?' "'Yes, sir,' I answered, "'it's Christmas.' "'Right you are,' he shouted, and here's something from Santa Claus. He opened his hand, and there was a big silver dollar. I do not know his name. I have not seen him in twenty years. But last night, walking home in the snow, I remembered him with a warm feeling around my heart, and I felt to thinking that I must be pretty nearly as big now as he was when he gave me that dollar, and about as old. And I wondered how I looked to the kid that brings my paper, and the other kids I meet, and whether I am the kind of man that is always too busy to take time to be kind to them, or whether I am the kind that they would sort of like to run into when it's cold and the route is long and the burden is heavy, and a dog runs out and barks. End of Essay Number Fifty-One End of It's a Good Old World by Bruce Barton