The Young Man and the World Part 4

II

THE OLD HOME

Do we not pay so much attention to mere material success that we exclude from mind and heart other things more precious? I am anxious that every young American should win in all the conflicts of life--win in college, win in business, etc.; but I am even more anxious that through all of his triumphs he should grow ever broader, sweeter, and more kindly. After all, we are human beings. We do not want to become mere machines of success, do we?

That is carrying our mechanical age a little too far. We want to keep that within us which makes our victory worth having after we have won it. What matters your mountains of wealth, or your network of political power, or those secrets which in your laboratory you have wrung from Nature--what matters all and everything that the world calls "success," if the human quality has been dried up in you?

Those are fine things that St. Paul says about a man not amounting to anything, no matter how talented and powerful he may be, if he have not charity: "And though I have the gift of prophecy, and understand all mysteries, and all knowledge; and though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing"; and you will recall the remainder of his admirable comments on this subject.

Everybody points out to you what you can get out of college, and how to get it; what you can get out of a "career," and how to get that.

But lest all of your getting turns to bitter emptiness in the end, you must pay attention to that elemental manhood exalted by those beautiful moralities that you get at but one place and at but one period in this world. That period is the early time of your young manhood before you enter college; and that place is the old home where influences angelic have been at work upon your character.

It could not be otherwise. Home--the home that you leave or the home you make--is the spot where most of your life is to be spent. Home was the place of your birth; and if the angel of death is kind to you, home will be the place of your farewell. It is to the home that you bring life's wages, whether those wages are opulence, glory, or merely daily bread.

It is the home which interprets the whole universe for you. And it is the home which not only furnishes a reason for your existence, but in itself const.i.tutes the motive for all manly effort. Quite naturally, therefore, the home is concerned with character more than it is with grosser things.

The instruction which the American mother gives her son is a training in honor rather than in success. Her pa.s.sion for righteousness creeps into the commonplaces of her daily speech. "Be a good boy" is what she says to the little fellow each day as he starts to school. "Be a good boy" is what she says to the youth when he leaves for college. "Be a good boy" is still her sacred charge when, standing at the gate, she gives him her blessing as he goes out into the world.

And, finally, "Be a good boy" is what her lips murmur when in after years, rich perchance in achievement, honor, power, or wealth, the man of the world returns to the old home to again get her benediction, and have his weary soul refreshed by the beauty of her almost holy presence.

For you never cease to be a boy to her; and her supreme wish and most pa.s.sionate prayer for you is not that you shall be a strong man, or a rich man, or an able man--she wants you to be all these, of course, and everything else that is fine--but chiefly she cares that you should be a good man.

And so it is that home is the temple of ideals, the sanctuary of the true, the beautiful, and the good. Or put it in scientific phrase, and say: Home is the laboratory of character. The home is the place where you get what the common people so pithily call your "bringing up." It is there where your conception of all human relationships is formed.

It is there where it is largely determined whether you will make your life worth the living.

Your future sits at the old fireside. The fate of the Nation abides beneath the roof-tree. And so it is that neither college, nor market-place, nor forum, nor editor's sanctum, nor traffic of the high seas, nor anything that you may do, nor any environment that may hereafter surround you, is so important to you as the old home and your early years. Yes, and not to you only, but to the Nation also.

Nothing means so much to the Republic as the influence of the American home upon the young manhood of the Nation.

We are about to enter upon the serious problem of the regulation of railway rates, which is a beginning in some sort of the national control of transportation. It is a problem whose weight and possibilities challenge and all but confound every thoughtful and serious mind. Every step in its solution must be taken with both wisdom and justice.

Our relations with the Orient daily increase, and the fixedness of our position in the Far East hourly becomes more definite. The public man wears a scarf about his eyes who does not see that our historic statesmanship during this century will deal with our growing mastery of the Pacific, and the weaving backward and forward across that ocean of our ever-multiplying relations with the East.

This paper might be entirely taken up with a statement of tangled situations and deep problems which will require the combined intelligence of the whole American people to solve.

Yet, for the purpose of this life, what are they all, compared with the character of individual Americans, and therefore with the influence of the American home upon American men in the making; for men in the making is what the youth of our land are. Gladstone stated a truth, wide and vital as English inst.i.tutions, when he said that the relation of the Church to the youth of Great Britain is a matter of more concern than all the problems of the Empire put together.

All this is commonplace, you say. I say so too. Yet it is the commonplaces, and those things alone, by which we live and move and have our being. For example, sunlight is commonplace, and so is air.

Who was it that spoke about the d.a.m.nable iteration of the seasons?

A storm is not commonplace, but how long could any of us live--how long would any of us choose to live--were each day and night a succession of thunder, lightning, and downpour? Good citizenship is commonplace, whereas a murder mystery excites us thrillingly. Yet none of us on that account would choose the society of criminals.

It is to the elemental commonplaces that I am now going to direct your attention. The world is kept alive by its monotonies. The trouble is that the indispensable things are so inevitable and persistent that we take them for granted, and yield them neither grat.i.tude nor even attention.

Take the beauty of daylight as our ill.u.s.tration once more. We had it yesterday, have it to-day, have had it ever since we were born, and will have it until we die. Note, too, the eternal stability of the heavens, which change not at all; and the endless pour of ocean's currents, warming certain coasts and leaving others chill. It is the same with the life intellectual and the life spiritual.

"What is the grandest thing in the universe?" asks Hugo. "A storm at sea," he answers, and continues, "And what is grander than a storm at sea?" "The unclouded heavens on a starry and moonless night." "And what is grander than these midnight skies?" "The soul of man!" A spectacular climax such as Hugo loved; and still, with all its dramatic effect, the picturesque statement of a vast and mighty truth!

Very well. The home is the place where character is to be formed, and therefore its influences on "the soul of man" are like those of the sun on the body of man. Let us get to those commonplaces, therefore, at which the cynic lifts his lip, but which are worth a good deal more to you, young man, than all your achievings will be.

As to the moralities, then, yield yourself utterly to the mother. She has an instinctive perception of righteousness as affecting your character that no other intelligence under heaven has, and that she does not have for any one else, not even for herself. She has her own way, too, of getting this nourishment of the verities into your character. It is done not so much by preaching to you, or lecturing you, as it is by her very presence.

She carries about with her an atmosphere of sweetness and light. The mother gives to her boy a kind of unspoken counsel. It is a very subtle thing, like electricity in the material world, and equally as powerful as that mysterious fluid. You get its effects by putting yourself eagerly and lovingly under its soothing yet enn.o.bling and tonic influence. It is a matter hard to describe, but more real than any other human force I know of.

So the first thing for you to do is to resolve to be "mother's own boy," as the sneering tongue of shallowness puts it, just as long as you possibly can. It will be the greatest luck you will ever have, if you are able to be "mother's own boy" as long as she lives. Don't be afraid that that will make you effeminate and soft; don't think for a moment that it will paralyze the force and power of your growing manhood.

I have seen one of this kind of fellows hold in awe a mob of cowboys and plainsmen when pa.s.sions were aroused and blows had already been struck. I have seen such a man put down, single-handed, by word of his fearless authority, fights among a score of woodmen who had known nothing but the rank vigor of their unruled male lives.

The man whose will and character has been tempered by this holy fire takes on something of the suppleness, hardness, and firmness of steel, of which a delicate blade will cut the grosser iron of which that blade itself was a part before it was subjected to the refining process that made it steel.

Some time ago I was privileged to read the letters that one of our naval heroes had, when a young man, despatched home to his mother during our civil war. He partic.i.p.ated in two or three of our most desperate fights. All of these letters showed him to have been--and, what is better, to have remained--a "mother's own boy" as long as she lived.

He never sailed far enough away to weaken that potent and sacred power. It reached around the world. The years did not diminish it.

When her hair of brown had turned to white, he found that the influence which to his boyhood and youth had been so delightful became to his manhood uplifting and glorious.

And yet no buccaneer that rioted afloat with Morgan had courage more ferocious. Yes, and, on the other hand, no Bayard "without fear and without reproach"; no Sydney who, when dying, handed his canteen to a wounded comrade that he might moisten his lips, while Sydney's own were crackling with fever, was ever more tender or considerate.

What was it the expiring Nelson said when his decks ran blood, and crimson victory placed upon his whitening brow laurels of triumph, whose leaves were mingled with cypress? "Kiss me, Hardy," was what he said. Strange words, were they not, for a scene of carnage? Yes, but words which touched the hearts of the English people.

They showed that upon the mind of England's greatest captain of the sea the tender influence of the old mother, and the old home in distant England, survived all the variableness of his character, all the supreme efforts of his career, and that a gentleness and an almost womanly yearning for affection were the qualities that ruled the soul of the most desperate ocean fighter the world had seen since Drake. They showed that the heart of the sternest warrior may be beautiful with the humanities. How does the old song go?--"The bravest are the tenderest"--that is it.

So fear not that mother's influence will weaken you. It will do nothing of the kind. It will strengthen you. It will make you want to fight only for something worth fighting for. But when you fight for that, it will make you fight to the death. And what is the use of fighting at all unless it be to the death. A brawl is not conflict, bravado is not bravery.

I know there is another side to this question. It has been recently stated by a resourceful Oriental. He said that the influence of women on the Occidental man is effeminizing our civilization. He declared that the mother gives the boy his first training, teaches him to talk, etc., which is natural and therefore right and proper.

But then, said our Asiatic critic, we give our boys to women school-teachers, who educate them until they are ready for college, and then, as soon as they are ready for college, they begin to "call on the young women," and generally frequent the society of the softer s.e.x until the time arrives for them to marry.

So that, according to this Oriental, we are under the direct influence of woman from the cradle to the grave; and he points out that gradually (imperceptibly, perhaps, to our own eyes) an effeminizing process occurs in mind and character. As a result of this, he maintains, our men increasingly fear hardships and seek to avoid them; and life and even personal appearance are given a value which is absurd, considering the inevitableness of death in any event, the perfectly unthinkable number of myriads of human beings who exist, have existed, and will exist hereafter.

This philosopher of the East, therefore, claims that we will in the end be no match at all for the Orientals, and that the yellow race, which has been merely resting while we Caucasians have been having our brief innings, is now to the bat again. And there was a lot more to the same effect.

This is of course the Asiatic way of looking at things. There may be something in what he says about the continuity of female influence softening our Western civilization. Certainly the present war shows that the j.a.panese women, who were only yesterday altogether Oriental in habits and ideals, have produced a race of strong men, so far as physical daring and hardihood is concerned. The influence of women on these men ceased with childhood--even then it was a Spartan influence.

More than this, the j.a.panese generals and statesmen, nearly all of whom are above sixty, were the product of j.a.panese civilization before modern ideas had even been sown in the Island Empire. Oyama and Kuroki, Ito and Katsura, and all the rest, are the offspring of purely Asiatic conditions, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by Western thought or custom; and yet the state of society which brought forth these men is unfamiliar to American and European peoples.

But even if what this Oriental a.s.sailant of our customs terms the overcharge of femininity in Occidental society does mellow us, it does not follow that it weakens us. Anyhow it does not affect what I say about the influence of the mother upon the purposes and "principles"

of young men. And, in any event, our Western civilization const.i.tutes those human conditions in which you, young man, must spend your life, and you must be in harmony with it if you are going to accomplish anything.

Don't try to be an Oriental in the midst of Occidental surroundings.

The yellow theory and the white theory of life must fight for the mastery, and the one which is nearest the truth will prevail.

Meanwhile, stick to your own race and the ideals of it. I do not mean that you should ignore any true thing you may learn from the East.

Welcome knowledge from every source. Light is light, no matter whence it comes.

And this brings back to us the little mother and the old home. If she wishes it, be her companion. In any event, make her your confidant.