Read Ebook: The Call of the Twentieth Century an Address to Young Men by Jordan David Starr

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Another form of vulgarity is profanity. The habit of swearing is not a mark of manliness. It is the sign of a dull, coarse, unrefined nature, a lack of verbal initiative. Sometimes, perhaps, profanity seems picturesque and effective. I have known it so in Arizona once or twice, in old Mexico and perhaps in Wyoming, but never in the home, or the street, or the ordinary affairs of life. It is not that blasphemy is offensive to God. He is used to it, perhaps, for he has met it under many conditions. But it is offensive to man, insulting to the atmosphere, and destructive of him who uses it. Profanity and bluster are not signs of courage. The bravest men are quiet of speech and modest in demeanor.

The man who is successful will not be a dreamer. He will have but one dream and that will work itself out as a purpose. Dreaming wanes into sentimentalism, and sentimentalism is fatal to action. The man of purpose says no to all lesser calls, all minor opportunities. He does not abandon his college education because a hundred dollar position is offered him outside. He does not turn from one profession because there is money in another. He has his claim staked out, and with time he will only fill in the detail of its boundaries.

"Now that you are through college, what are you going to do?" asked a friend of a wise young man.

"I shall study medicine," was the grave reply.

"But isn't that profession already overcrowded?" asked the friend.

"Possibly it is," said the youth, "but I purpose to study medicine all the same. Those who are already in the profession must take their chances."

In this joke of the newspapers there is a sound philosophy. Men of purpose never overcrowd. The crowd is around the foot of the staircase waiting for the elevator.

The old traveller, Rafinesque, tells us that when he was a boy he read the voyages of Captain Cook, Le Vaillant, Pallas, and Bougainville, and "my soul was fired to be a great traveller like them, and so I became such," he adds shortly.

If you say to yourself: "I will be a traveller, a statesman, an engineer;" if you never unsay it; if you bend all your powers in that direction; if you take advantage of all helps that come in your way and reject all that do not, you will sometime reach your goal. For the world turns aside to let any man pass who knows whither he is going.

"Why should we call ourselves men," said Mirabeau, "unless it be to succeed in everything, everywhere. Say of nothing: 'This is beneath me,' nor feel that anything is beyond your power, for nothing is impossible to the man who can will."

Do not say that I am expecting too much of the effects of a firm resolution, that I give advice which would lead to failure. For the man who will fail will never take a resolution. Those among you whom fate has cut out to be nobodies are the ones who will never try!

Even harmless pleasures hurt if they win you from your purpose. Lorimer's old merchant writes to his son at Harvard: "You will meet fools enough in the day without hunting up the main herd at night." This plain business man's advice is worth every young man's attention.

The Twentieth Century will ask for men of instant decision, men whose mental equipment is all in order, ready to be used on the instant. Yes and no, right and wrong, we must have them labelled and ready to pack to go anywhere, to do anything at any time, or to know why we refuse to do it, if it is something we will not do. Ethelred the Unready died helpless a thousand years ago. The unready are still with us, but the strenuous century will grant them but short shrift.

The man of the Twentieth Century will be a hopeful man. He will love the world and the world will love him. "There is no hope for you," Thoreau once said, "unless this bit of sod under your feet is the sweetest for you in the world--in any world." The effective man takes his reward as he goes along. Nowhere is the sky so blue, the grass so green, the opportunities so choice as now, here, to-day, the time, the place where his work must be done.

"To-day is your day and mine," I have said on another occasion; "the only day we have, the day in which we play our part; what our part may signify in the great whole we may not understand, but we are here to play it, and now is the time. This we know: it is a part of action, not of whining. It is a part of love, not cynicism. It is for us to express love in terms of human helpfulness."

Whatever feeling is worthy and real will express itself in action, and the glow that surrounds worthy action we call happiness.

He will be a loyal man, considering always the best interests of him he serves, ready to lay down his life, if need be, for duty, ready to abandon whatever conflicts with higher loyalty, with higher duty.

In the economic struggles of to-day, well-meaning men are making two huge mistakes, which in time will undo whatever of good their efforts may accomplish. One of these is the struggle against education, the effort to limit the number of skilled laborers, and this in a free country where each man's birthright is the development of his skill. The other is the effort to destroy the feeling of personal loyalty on the part of the laborer. Half the value of any man's service lies in his willingness, his devotion to the man or the work. This old-fashioned virtue of loyalty must not be cheapened. The man whose service is worth paying for, gives more than his labor. He believes that what he does is right, and when anything goes wrong he will turn in and make it right. In the long run the laborer can get no more than he deserves, and disloyal labor is paving the way for its own subjugation. Unwilling service is a form of slavery, and unwilling employment is a slavery of the employer.

More than all this, the man in the Twentieth Century needs must be a man of character. It was said of Abraham Lincoln that he was a man "too simply great to scheme for his proper self." The man who schemes for his own advancement soon forfeits the support of others. He may lay pipes and pull wires, seeming for a little to succeed. "God consents, but only for a time." Sooner or later, if he lives to meet his fate, he finds his end in utter failure. And this failure is final: for those who have suffered will not help him again. Even rats desert a sinking ship. To be successful a man need take no heed for his own particular future. He will find his place in the future of his work.

In the ordinary business of life the smart man has had his day. He gives place to the man who can bring about results. Whatever the present menace of trust and monopoly, the business of the future must be conducted on large lines. The profits of the future will be the legitimate reward of economy, organization, and boldness of conception. To this end absolute honesty is essential to success. The merchant selling poor goods at high prices, an article which looks as good as the real thing but is something else, must give place to a larger system, with specialized service on a basis of absolute truthfulness. Business of a large scale must finally demand publicity and equity. Sooner or later even monopolies must grant this, whether we insist on it by statute or not. It is necessary for their own protection; for large structures cannot long stand on insecure foundations. In the long run trade is honest; for dishonest trade cuts its own throat.

Above all, because including all, the century will ask for men of sober mind. The finest piece of mechanism in all the universe is the brain of man and the mind which is its manifestation. What mind is, or how it is related to brain cells, we cannot say, but this we know, that as the brain is, so is the mind; whatever injury comes to the one is shown in the other. In this complex structure, with its millions of connecting cells, we are able to form images of the external world, truthful so far as they go, to retain these images, to compare them, to infer relations of cause and effect, to induce thought from sensation, and to translate thought into action. In proportion to the exactness of these operations is the soundness, the effectiveness of the man. The man is the mind, and everything else is accessory. The sober man is the one who protects his brain from all that would do it harm. Vice is our name for self-inflicted injury, and the purpose of vice is to secure a temporary feeling of pleasure through injury to the brain. Real happiness does not come through vice. You will know that which is genuine because it makes room for more happiness. The pleasures of vice are mere illusions, tricks of the nervous system, and each time these tricks are played it is more and more difficult for the mind to tell the truth. Such deceptions come through drunkenness and narcotism. In greater or less degree all nerve-affecting drugs produce it; alcohol, nicotine, caffeine, opium, cocaine, and the rest, strong or weak. Habitual use of any of these is a physical vice. A physical vice becomes a moral vice, and all vice leaves its record on the nervous system. To cultivate vice is to render the actual machinery of our mind incapable of normal action.

It is the brain's business to perceive, to think, to will, to act. All these functions taken together we call the mind. The brain is hidden in darkness, sheltered within a box of bone. All that it knows comes to it from the nerves of sense. All that it can do in this world is to act on the muscles it controls through its nerves of motion. The final purpose of knowledge is action. Our senses tell us what lies about us, that we may move and act, and do this wisely and safely. The sense-organs are the brain's only teachers so far as we know, the muscles are its only servants. But there are many orders which may be issued to these servants. Out of the many sensations, memories, imaginations, how shall the brain choose?

The power of attention fixes the mind on those sensations or impressions of most worth, pushing the others into the background. Past impressions, memory-pictures, linger in the brain, and these, bidden or unbidden, crowd with the others. To know the relation of all these, to distinguish present impressions from memories, realities from dreams,--this is mental sanity. The sane brain performs its appointed task. The mind is clear, the will is strong, the attention persistent, and all is well in the world. But the machinery of the brain may fail. The mind grows confused. It mistakes memories for realities. It loses the power of attention. A fixed idea may take possession of it, or it may be filled by a thousand vagrant impressions, wandering memories, in as many seconds. In this case the response of the muscles becomes uncertain. The acts are governed not by the demands of external conditions but by internal whims. This is a condition of mania or mental irresponsibility. Some phase of mental unsoundness is produced by any of the drugs which affect the nerves, whether stimulants or narcotics. They may help to borrow from our future store of energy, but they borrow at compound interest and never repay the loan. They give an impression of joy, of rest, of activity, without giving the fact; one and all, their function is to force the nervous system to lie. Each indulgence in any of them makes it harder to tell the truth. One and all, their supposed pleasures are followed by reactions, subjective pains as unreal as the joys which they follow. Each of them, if used persistently, brings incapacity, insanity, and death. With each of them use creates appetite. To yield once it is easier to yield again. The harm of some of them is slight. Tea, coffee, beer, claret, in moderate quantities, do but moderate harm, but all of them are without other effect on the nerves save to work them injury. White lies at the best are falsehoods. These are the white lies of physiology. In regard to each of these, the young man must count the cost. Count all the cost and be prepared to pay. The song of Ulrich von H?tten, when he gave his life for religious freedom, is worth applying to all other costly things. He sang:--

"'Ich habe gewagt mit Sinnen Und trage des noch kein Reu.'"

"With open eyes have I dared it, and cherish no regret."

For all indulgence in wine and coffee and tobacco you will have a bill to pay. Perhaps not a heavy bill. The indulgence may be worth the while, but if so, find out for yourself beforehand whether others have found it so. If you dare, dare with open eyes and cherish no regrets. For regret is the most profitless thing to cherish. There is nothing more distressing than remorse without will. The only hope in the world is to stop, and by the time that the inebriate comes to realize where he is, it is too late to stop.

"There is joy in life," says Sullivan, the pugilist, "but it is known only to the man who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt." To know this kind of joy is to put one's self beyond the reach of all others.

The joy of the blue sky, the bright sunshine, the rushing torrent, the songs of birds, "sweet as children's prattle is," the breath of the meadows, the glow of effort, the beauty of poetry, the achievement of thought, the thousand and thousand real pleasures of life, are inaccessible to him "who has a few jolts of liquor under his belt," while the sorrows he feels, or thinks he feels, are as unreal as his joys, and as unworthy of a life worth living.

There was once, I am told, a man who came into his office smacking his lips, and said to his clerk, "The world looks very different to the man who has had a good glass of brandy and soda in the morning." "Yes," said the clerk, "and the man looks different to the world."

And this is natural and inevitable, for the pleasure, which exists only in the imagination, leads to action which has likewise nothing to do with the demands of life. The mind is confused, and may be delighted with the confusion, but the confused muscles tremble and halt. The tongue is loosened and utters unfinished sentences; the hand is loosened and the handwriting is shaky; the muscles of the eyes are unharnessed, and the two eyes move independently and see double; the legs are loosened, and the confusion of the brain shows itself in the confused walk. And if this confusion is long continued, the mental deterioration shows itself in external things,--the shabby hat and seedy clothing, and the gradual drop of the man from stratum to stratum of society, till he brings up some night in the ditch. As the world looks more and more different to him, so does he look more and more different to the world.

A prominent lawyer of Boston once told me that the great impulse to total abstinence came to him when a young man, from hearing his fellow lawyers talking over their cups. The most vital secrets of their clients' business were made public property when their tongues were loosened by wine; and this led him to the firm resolution that nothing should go into his mouth which would prevent him from keeping it closed unless he wanted to open it. The time will come when the only opening for the ambitious man of intemperate habits will be in politics. It is rapidly becoming so now. Private employers dare not trust their business to the man who drinks. The great corporations dare not. He is not wanted on the railroads. The steamship lines have long since cast him off. The banks dare not use him. He cannot keep accounts. Only the people, long-suffering and generous, remain as his resource. For this reason municipal government is his specialty; and while this patience of the people lasts, our cities will breed scandals as naturally as our swamps breed malaria. Already the business of the century recognizes the truth of all this. The bonding companies ask, before they sign a contract, whether the official in question uses liquor, what kind of liquor, whether he smokes, gambles, or in other ways so conducts himself that in five years he will be less of a man than he is now.

The great corporations ask the same questions as to all their employees. Even these organizations called "soulless" know the value of men, and that the vices of to-day must be reckoned at compound interest and charged against their estimate of the young man's future. The Twentieth Century must be temperate; for only sober men can bear the strain of its enterprises.

Equally dangerous is the search for the joys of love by those who would shirk all love's responsibilities. Just as honest love is the most powerful influence that can enter into a man's life, so is love's counterfeit the most disintegrating. Happiness cannot spring from the ashes of lust. Love looks toward the future. Its glory is its altruism. To shirk responsibility is to destroy the home. The equal marriage demands equal purity of heart, equal chastity of intention. Open vice brings with certainty disease and degradation. Secret lust comes to the same end, but all the more surely because the folly of lying is added to other sources of decay. That society is so severe in its condemnation of "the double life" is an expression of the bitterness of its experience. The real character of a man is measured by the truth he shows to women. His ideal of womankind is gauged by the character of the woman he seeks.

In general, the sinner is not the man who sets out in life to be wicked. Few men are born wicked; many are born weak. False ideas of manliness; false conceptions of good fellowship, which false ideas of the relationship of men and women give, wreck many a young man of otherwise good intentions. The sinner is the man who cannot say no. The fall through vice to sin is a matter of slow transition. One virtue after another is yielded up as the strain on the will becomes too great. In Kipling's fable of Parenness, the demon appears before the clerk in the Indian service, who has been too long a good fellow among the boys. It asks him to surrender three things in succession: his trust in man, his faith in woman, then the hopes and ambitions of his childhood. When these are given up, as they must be in the life of dissipation, the demon leaves him in exchange a little crust of dry bread. Bare existence without joy or hope is all that the demon can give when the forces of life are burned out.

In our colleges, the one ethical principle kept before the athlete by his associates is this: Never break training rules. The pitcher who smokes a cigarette throws away his game. The punter who spends the night at a dance loses his one chance of making a goal. The sprinter who takes the glass of convivial beer breaks no record. His record breaks him. Some day we shall realize that the game of life is more than the game of foot-ball. We have work every day more intricate than pitching curves, more strenuous than punting the ball. We must keep in trim for it. We must hold ourselves in repair. We must remember training rules. When this is done, we shall win not only games and races, but the great prizes of life. Almost half the strength of the men of America is now wasted in dissipation, gross or petty, in drink or smoke. This strength would be saved could we remember training rules. Through the training rules of our fathers we have come to consider as part of our inheritance the Puritan Conscience. As the success of our nation is built upon this conscience, so in like fashion depends upon it the success of our daily life.

I had a friend once, a mining man of some education, who made his fortune in bonanza days in Nevada, and who drank up what he had made with the boys who have long since passed away. As a hopeless sot he visited the gold cure at Los Gatos. Not finding much relief, he walked over to Palo Alto to borrow of me his fare to San Francisco. He said that he was going to pawn his goods for a fare to Nevada, where he meant to kill himself. Whether he did so or not, I do not know; for ten years have gone by and I have never heard of him again.

As he sat in my room, haggard, bloodshot, ragged, gin-flavored, a little boy who had then never known sin, came in, and being no respecter of persons, took him for a man and offered him his hand.

Being taken for a man, brought him back his manhood for a moment. The visions of evil left him, and from Dickens' poem of "The Children" he repeated almost to himself these words:--

"'I know now how Jesus could liken The Kingdom of God to a child.'"

The old scene came back to him. When the Master was teaching, the children crowded about him, and there were those who would send them away. But the Master said, "No, let the little children come unto me, and do not forbid them; for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven." And again he said, "The Kingdom of Heaven is within you." And again those whose services the Lord of the centuries could use, he likened to little children.

And of the many ways in which this likeness can be used this is one. The child is born with brain and nervous system adequate to its many purposes in life, if it is suffered to grow naturally, to become what God meant it to be. There are not many children of sin not made so by vice, intemperance, lust, and obscenity. They are victims of their elders' folly, of our carelessness as to their environment. Half the troubles of men of our race come through self-inflicted injury to the nervous system. We are tormented by the "fool-killer." If we could revert to the child's simple purity, the free movement of its machinery of life, we should find ourselves in a new heaven on a new earth. We could understand for ourselves part of what the Master meant. We should know now how Jesus could liken the Kingdom of God to a child.

All forms of subjective enjoyment, all pleasures that begin and end with self, unrelated to external things, are insane and unwholesome, destructive alike to rational enjoyment and to effectiveness in life. And this is true of spurious emotions alike, whether the pious ecstasies of a half-starved monk, the neurotic imaginings of a sentimental woman, or the riots of a debauchee. He is the wise man who for all his life can keep mind and soul and body clean.

"I know of no more encouraging fact," says Thoreau, "than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do."

If it were ever my fortune in speaking to young men to become eloquent, with the only real eloquence there is, the plain speaking of a living truth, this I would say:--

Your first duty in life is toward your after-self. So live that your after-self--the man you ought to be--may in his time be possible and actual. Far away in the twenties, the thirties, of the Twentieth Century he is awaiting his turn. His body, his brain, his soul are in your boyish hands. He cannot help himself. What will you leave for him? Will it be a brain unspoiled by lust or dissipation, a mind trained to think and act, a nervous system true as a dial in its response to the truth about you? Will you, boy of the Twentieth Century, let him come as a man among men in his time, or will you throw away his inheritance before he has had the chance to touch it? Will you turn over to him a brain distorted, a mind diseased, a will untrained to action, a spinal cord grown through and through with the devil grass of that vile harvest we call wild oats? Will you let him come, taking your place, gaining through your experiences, hallowed through your joys, building on them his own, or will you fling his hope away, decreeing wanton-like that the man you might have been shall never be?

This is your problem in life, the problem of more importance to you than any or all others. How will you solve it? Will you meet it as a man or as a fool? When you answer this, we shall know what use the Twentieth Century can make of you.

"Death is a thing cleaner than Vice," Owen Wister tells us, and in the long run it is more profitable.

Those who control the spiritual thought of the Twentieth Century will be religious men. They will not be religious in the fashion of monks, ascetics, mystic dreamers, or emotional enthusiasts. They will not be active in debating societies, discussing the intricacies of creeds. Neither will they be sticklers as to details in religious millinery. They will be simple, earnest, God-fearing, because they have known the God that makes for righteousness. Their religion of the Twentieth Century will be its working theory of life. It will be expressed in simple terms or it may not be expressed at all, but it will be deep graven in the heart. In wise and helpful life it will find ample justification. It will deal with the world as it is in the service of "the God of things as they are." It will find this world not "a vale of tears," a sink of iniquity, but a working paradise in which the rewards of right doing are instant and constant. It will find indeed that "His service is perfect freedom," for all things large or small within the reach of human effort are done in His way and in His way only.

Whittier tells us of the story of the day in Connecticut in 1780, when the horror of great darkness came over the land, and all men feared the dreaded Day of Judgment had come at last.

The Legislature of Connecticut, "dim as ghosts" in the old State House, wished to adjourn to put themselves in condition for the great assizes. Meanwhile, Abraham Davenport, representative from Stamford rose to say:--

"This may well be The Day of Judgment for which the world awaits; But be it so or not, I only know My present duty and my Lord's command To occupy till He come. So at the Post where He hath set me in His Providence, I choose for one to meet Him face to face. Let God do His work. We will see to ours."

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