The Young Man and the World Part 26

Of course you will belong to some political party. That is all right.

Be a partizan. And be a hearty partizan while you are about it. But do not be a narrow one. Never forget that parties are only modes of political action. They are not sacred, therefore. So never mistake partizanship for patriotism. Remember always that your only reason for belonging to any particular party is because you find that the best method of being an American.

When your party is fundamentally wrong on some absolutely vital question of _principle_ which affects the fate of the Republic, do not hesitate to leave it. It has ceased to be of any use to you. Because your political a.s.sociation has been with certain men is no reason at all for continuing it. Or, rather, it is purely a sentimental reason, like that which makes the companionship of friends so dear, or the comradeship of soldiers so lasting.

But do not break away from your party merely because you think it wrong on minor questions. _If you think its general tendency right, stay loyally with it through its common mistakes._ Try to prevent those mistakes within the party. Fight like a man to make your party take the right course on every question, big or little, as you see it.

But when you are unable to convince the majority of your party a.s.sociates that they are wrong; when they think that you are the person who is wrong, fall in line with them and march in the ranks, battling even more vigorously than you would had you prevailed. If the majority were right and you were wrong, you ought to help execute their views. If the majority were wrong and you were right, the earlier that fact is demonstrated the better for you and everybody.

So keep step with your rank and file, whether your party does what you think it ought to do or not on matters of pa.s.sing moment. But I repeat, on large issues which come to your conscience--_on questions which you think affect the destiny of the Nation_, you are a traitor to the Republic if, in spite of your convictions, you stand by your party and against your country.

But to break with your party on minor issues is foolish. A certain cla.s.s is coming to regard leaving one's party as a smart thing. But it is not a smart thing. Quitting your party does not necessarily mean independence. It may mean that, and then again it may mean stupidity; and still again it may only mean a "sore head," as the political phrase has it.

In a country as old as ours there finally comes to be in politics a fundamental division. There is the constructive and progressive on the one side, and the destructive and reactionary on the other side. These are merely the centripetal and centrifugal forces of nature at work in human society. Usually it is found that one of these parties is naturally the Governing Party, and the other one is naturally the Party of Opposition.

Not only your judgment but your instincts will tell you, young man, to which one of these forces you belong. Each has its uses. You can well serve your country in either organization. It is merely a question as to whether you are in character and temperament a builder, a doer of things, or a critic of things done and the doing of them. Each is necessary.

I have no quarrel with your partizan creed, no matter what it is. That is your business. But whatever you are, be National. Be broad. Do not be deceived by catchwords. Remember that this is a Nation in the making. When the first railroad was built across the boundaries of states it modified old-time interpretations of our Const.i.tution.

Telegraph and telephone wires, steam and electric railways, all the means of instantaneous communication which this wizard-like age of ours is weaving from ocean to ocean, are consolidating the American people into a single family.

Natural conditions and the ordinary progress of industry and invention are making old methods inadequate and unjust. So keep abreast of the growing Nation in your political thinking. Solve all American problems from the view-point of the Nation, and not from the view-point of state or section. Consider the American people _as_ a People, and not as a lot of separate and hostile communities. Be National. Be an American. Know but one flag.

Whatever party you belong to, and whatever your views on public questions, you will never make a profound mistake as long as you keep your civic ideals high and pure. Believe in the mission of the American people. Have faith in our destiny. Never question that this Republic is G.o.d's handiwork, and that it will surely do His will throughout the earth.

Understand that we are not living for to-day alone. Keep in mind the future--the tasks, opportunities, and rewards of which for the American people will make our large performances of to-day seem like mere suggestions. Strive to make yourself worthy of this Nation of your ideals.

And of all your ideals, let the Nation itself be the n.o.blest. Fear not lest you pitch your thought too high for American realities and possibilities. No single mind can scale the heights the American people will finally conquer. No single imagination can compa.s.s the American people's combined activity, power, and righteousness even at this present moment.

We have defects and deficiencies; fear not, they will be remedied and supplied. We have perplexities and problems; fear not, they will be untangled and solved. We have burdens, foreign and domestic; fear not, we will bear them to the place appointed, and, at the hands of the Master who gave us those burdens to carry, receive the reward for the well-doing of our work, and, strengthened by our labor, go on to heavier and n.o.bler tasks which He will have ready and waiting for us.

For this Nation of ours is here for a purpose. He did not give us our liberty for nothing, or our location or our physical resources, or any element of our material, intellectual, or spiritual power. No, the Father of Lights has thus highly endowed us that we may do the very things which are at our hands to-day, and those other and greater things which will follow. It is for us Americans to solve the problems that confront us now, and the still harder and deeper ones that we do not yet behold; and we will solve them, never doubt. Live up to this ideal of your Nation's place and purpose in the world, young man. Be an American.

CHAPTER XI

THE WORLD AND THE YOUNG MAN

There has been much counseling of the young man respecting the world.

But what of counseling the world respecting the young man? Do not men and women riper in years and richer in experience need to have their attention called to the young man and the potentialities of him. He faces the world with vigor, courage, and faith--this stout-hearted, hopeful young fellow with To-morrow and all its possibilities coiled up in his brain and heart.

The young man is the future incarnate. His soul is the abiding-place of uplifting ideals, and the world--that vast collective individuality to which you and I belong--too often dispels those sensitive enthusiasms by its neglect or disapproval. Do we not find in our daily speech a certain cynicism toward youth? Does not our skeptic wisdom paste the label "illusions" over the word "ideals" written on the young man's brow? Is there not a refusal to recognize young manhood's force until it compels recognition by sheer mastery?

If so, it is a fault that the world should remedy. Not that the young man should not prove himself before the world accepts him; not that he should not win his spurs before he is knighted. No one insists that he shall "make good" more than I do. But in the testing of him, let us give him the help of our kindly attention. Let us lend him the encouragement of our applause as he rides into the lists.

Countless young men have been needlessly discouraged by the indifference of the occupied and the sneers of the calloused. Let us not be so chary of our sympathy. Faith in most young men is a much safer hazard than infidelity. For all things strong and pure and helpful to the world _may_ be possible of those young fellows who must, in any event, very soon possess the earth.

So let not the frost of the world's unconcern fall upon young manhood's unfolding powers. Let us beware how we extinguish the feeblest of youth's idealisms. Let us check not the onset of his knight-errantry. And the world does these things--not purposely, not even knowingly, but thoughtlessly. Many a young man has had his life's work kept back and the ardor of it chilled by rebuff at the beginning.

Many another has had his faith in G.o.d and humanity and the effectiveness of the eternal verities in the world's work enfeebled and even shattered by what he felt was the world's disbelief in them.

No statistician can collect and cla.s.sify the instances of young lives impaired by the heedlessness and insensibility of the mature to the beat.i.tudes which glorify all youth.

This att.i.tude of the world toward young men is not caused by any distrust of them or by any undervaluing of the high qualities of the true, the beautiful, and the good which the young man brings to it.

Let no young man get the idea that the world of society and affairs is "down on him," to borrow the phrasing of the people again. Let him never for a moment feel that this world of experience and present power does not believe in him.

For the world does believe in you, young man. It is not "down on" you.

It is busy, that is all. It is engaged with the numberless and pressing concerns of its from-day-to-day existence. It is forgetful, no doubt, but its apathy does not go deeper than that.

With this caution to the young man that he may not misunderstand what is here written, I appeal to men and women, in whose faces the years have etched the lines and wrinkles of knowledge and understanding, to give more attention to young men; to encourage the n.o.bilities of them; to reach down a helping hand from your secure station on the heights to him who struggles upward toward you.

It will not hurt you, sir or madam, to closely watch for signs of developing power in the young men of your acquaintance and to cultivate that growing strength by your active and aggressive faith in the young giant whom you have thus discovered.

Men and women there are who search minutely for unknown powers in plant-life, and by infinite pains in the use of that power, when found, evolve newer, higher, and better types of fruit and flower. And this is a good work. Men and women there are who sweep the infinitudes of the skies that they may find a star hitherto unseen, or steal unawares upon a hidden planet or a flying comet swiftly, yet stealthily, emerging upon the field of the telescope's vision.

And that is a good work, too--yet fruitless, for the immensities of the universe will never be measured, nor the mysteries of the skies be solved, nor the stars give up their secrets. Most of us are on some quest which requires the very infinitesimalities of patience, quests that are grand and quests that are foolish, searchings that are useful and explorations that are frivolous.

But the n.o.blest of all prospecting is for strength and high purpose and thoroughbred quality among the young manhood of our Nation. For any one who helps some young man to make his life righteously successful has enriched humanity more than he who reveals a Klondike to the uses and the greed of the clans of trade.

Yes; and he or she who, in the search for strong minds and pure hearts among young men, discovers to the world a _great_ man has in that achievement wrought immortality for himself and herself, while rendering to mankind a service like that of a Columbus or a Pasteur.

For Columbus discovered a new continent; but what of the man or woman who while looking through all the immaturities of his youth "discovers" a Columbus.

Thus would I direct the divining keenness of our men of affairs, so swift and sure to detect advantages in business, to the young men who wait at their outer gates for recognition and service. I would invite the world, whose hearing is so sensitive to the material things of commerce, to the exalted and eternal subject of human characters and human destinies as they are developing daily, hourly, all about us. In a word, I ask the ear of the world for its young men.

I read in some sermon--I think it was by Myron Reed--that the most pathetic thing in life is that a man of either thought or action must spend two-thirds of his time getting a hearing. "During this time,"

said the preacher, "the man of thought speaks his immortal word; the man of action does his immortal deed; all the time the World is refusing to listen or to heed; but finally, when the fires of genius have burned low, when the great thoughts have been uttered and the great works wrought, then it is willing to give ear and eye to the necessarily feebler acts and thoughts of the great man's later days."

It refuses to come near the fire when in full glow; it comes and puts its hands into the ashes after the flame has died out and the ashes themselves are growing cold. Do we not find ourselves worshiping echoes and ghosts in the persons of men who _once_ wrought splendidly, and denying the real forces of the present hour until they compel recognition by their overwhelmingness; and then, having exhausted themselves, become in their turn ghosts and echoes.

It is all right to honor those who have done big things and are "living on their reputations"; but it is all wrong to deny to those young men who are doing and will do big things, now and in the future, full and glad recognition of their power and possibilities.

The first thing that the world should remember about the young man who is confronting it, asking his daily bread of it, is the inestimable value of the qualities of freshness, of innocence, of faith, of confidence, of high honesty, of Don Quixote courage which the young man brings to it. These are qualities which in human character are worth all the wisdom of the market-place many million times multiplied. They are the qualities which, in spite of itself, keep the world young and tolerable.

The young man comes to the world fresh from his mother's knee. The Lord's Prayer is still in his mind; his mother taught it to him. The glorious fable of Washington and the cherry-tree is still in his heart; his mother taught it to him. A beautiful honor that makes him very foolish on the stock exchange and causes the shrewd ones to say, "He will know more after a while"--the splendid honor that makes him throw over what the world calls "advantages"--still glorifies his soul; his mother taught him that honor. The confidence that G.o.d is just, and that success is surely his if he will but do right, still beautifies him like the rose-tinted clouds of morning; it is the influence of his mother's teaching.

Let the world understand that these qualities with which the mother labors to endow her child, from the time the blessing of maternity is hers to the time the bright-eyed young fellow steps out from the old home, are more valuable to the world itself than all its gold-mines, all its scientific discoveries, all its electric railroads, all its games of politics, all its commerce. "Il mondo va da se," said a cynical Italian statesman--"the world goes by itself." But it does not.

If the world were not each year renewed, refreshed, glorified by the magnificent honor and fine expectancies of its young men, it would soon become simply fiendish in its sordidness, selfishness, and baseness. Let the world, then, preserve these fine qualities at which it too often idly sneers; not for the young man's sake--no, that is not to be expected--but for its own sake.

Let the world turn to the Master and think of what he said: "Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven." I am pleading for the tolerance of what, by a certain cla.s.s of men, are called impracticable business defects in youthful character, which in reality are the vital blood by which the world is kept morally alive.

The first att.i.tude that the world ought really to take toward the young man is charity. How parrot-like one is! Charity! "And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity." I defy any man who talks about the practical affairs of this life to get away from the Bible.

Let the world then have charity for the young man. Let it realize that for the particular moment there is nothing conceivable so helpless as he. He is just as helpless as, in time, he will become irresistible. I have already earnestly advised every young man, as a practical matter, to do at least one thing each day not only free from any selfish motive, but from which no possible material benefit could come to himself.

And now this is the reverse side of that shield. Let the world give to the young man a little start, a little help, a little foothold, a little encouragement. And I repeat that by the world I mean the great ma.s.s of men who have ceased to be young men, or who, still young in years, have achieved places of power--those who hold the reins of affairs and business, of industrial and social conditions.