No idle life can produce a real man. A life of luxury calls out only the effeminate, destructive qualities. The creative forces are developed only by stem endeavor to better one’s condition in the world. No wealth or efforts of the parents can bring the latent energies out in the son which make for sturdy manhood. He must work out his problem himself. It can never be done for him.
How little Harry Thaw’s parents realized the cruelty of bringing their son up in idleness, without a trade or a profession, helpless to earn his own living in case of necessity I One would think they would have learned wisdom from the tens of thousands of lessons which ruined lives have taught; that there is no getting around God’s fiat, no evading the law, that work, exercise of faculty, self-effort are the only things that will develop a real man.
The Creator has put an enormous penalty upon idleness—the penalty of weakness, of deterioration, of destruction, of annihilation. “Use or lose” is Nature’s edict.
The idle man is like an idle machine. It destroys itself very quickly. A score of enemies are in readiness to attack anything as soon as it is at rest. Rust, decay, and all sorts of disintegrating processes start in a man just as soon as he becomes idle. Self-destruction begins in the mind the moment it ceases to work. There is no power in heaven or on earth that can save an idle brain from deterioration, no power that can make a man strong and vigorous unless he obeys the natural laws of his life, written in his very constitution. Work, steady, persistent, with a purpose, with zeal, with enthusiasm, with a love for it, is the only thing that can save a man from the disgrace of being a nobody. Work is the inexorable law of growth. There is no getting away from it
The time will come when an able-bodied man who has the audacity, the presumption, to try to get all the good things out of the world and give nothing in return will be looked upon as a monstrosity, an enemy to civilization, and will be ostracized by all decent people.
The youth who thinks he is going to go through this world on what somebody else has produced or done, and still develop into the highest type of a man, is attempting to fight against his Maker. The very laws of the universe have made it forever impossible. Leave this vast, living, complicated machine idle, if you will, try to divert it to some other use, try to make a pleasure machine out of it when it was intended for a work machine, but all nature protests.
One of the most demoralizing features of our American civilization to-day is found in the influence of the idle rich—great human drones, who refuse to work, but who demand the best products of other men’s labor and brains.
I have heard rich fathers boast that necessity was the spur which made men of them, which gave them the foresight, the stamina, the shrewdness, the creative power, the ability necessary to make and protect their fortune; and yet they turn right around and leave a fortune to a son, which is likely to take away his energy, to take the spring out of his ambition, to rob him of the zest, the enthusiasm which can only come from the exercise of earnest, honest effort.
No man is so rich, no matter how honestly he got his money, as to be able to confer immunity from work upon his offspring. The very nature of things, the eternal law of the universe has made it forever impossible for you to transfer the stamina, the vigorous manhood, the stability, the character, everything that is of real value which you have gained in your struggle to get on in the world, to your son or daughter. Your offspring owes a debt to civilization which goes back of the parent. It is a debt which can only be wiped out by the individual. It cannot be discharged by proxy. Personal effort is the condition of the child’s development. It is the inevitable price of manhood.
No, there are some things you rich fathers cannot do for your boy. There is a law of nature which prohibits it, an omnipotent principle which protests against it.
If a phrenologist should examine the heads of the idle, grown-up sons of rich men, he would find very marked deficiencies, an underdevelopment of nearly all of the qualities which make strong men. He would usually find selfishness very largely developed; self-reliance, originality, inventiveness, resourcefulness, and all the other qualities which are drawn out and strengthened only by self-help and the struggle to make one’s way in the world, little developed.
If he should compare them with the heads of their self-made fathers, he would find very marked inferiority, so marked that there would apparently be no relationship between the owners of the heads. The contrast would be as great as that between the hard, tough, firm fiber of the mountain oak and the fiber of the soft, spongy sapling which never struggled with the storm and tempest because sheltered by surrounding trees.
How little a father realizes that it is one of the crudest things he could do to his boy to practically rob him of the opportunity of making a real man of himself, of developing qualities which make strength, power, which build vigorous, stalwart manhood!
There is something about the actual making of one’s way in the world, of burning behind one all bridges which others have built, throwing away all crutches and refusing to lean, to be boosted, refusing all assistance and standing erect upon one's own feet, thinking his own thoughts, fighting his own battles, bringing out his own latent possibilities by actual exercise, bringing into action every bit of one’s inventiveness, resourcefulness, ingenuity and originality, tact, that makes a man strong, vigorous, and stalwart, which indicates that this is the normal life of a man, the only life which can develop the true man.
The army of inefficients the namby-pambies, the dressed-up nobodies, with soft hands and softer heads, who are expert only in saying “silly nothings to silly women,” or in the practice of some useless fad, the “amount-to-nothings” everywhere, ought to convince you that there is no way of getting something for nothing.
If you will not do a man’s work, if you will not pay a man’s price for manhood, you will be only an apology for a man. Of course, you can live the life of the idle if you will. If you are the son of a foolish rich father, no one may be able to hinder you; but you must take the idler’s reward. You must go through life branded with the shame, labeled with the weakness, marked with the deformities of idleness. You must pay the penalty of your choice and be a nobody.
Chapter XVI.
What Has Luck Done For You?
“FORTUNE brings in some boats that are not steer’d.” People may say what they will about there not being any such thing as “luck,” or “chance,” but we must all admit there is such a thing. We must all concede that things over which a man has no control, unforeseen happenings, or events with which he has had nothing to do and on which he had not calculated, often change the whole course of his career. Good positions do not always come by merit, or as the result of one’s own direct efforts. It is now a poor laboring man or washerwoman who falls heir to a fortune by the death of some relative; or, again it is a poor girl who is suddenly raised to wealth and what the world calls high position by marrying a man of rank or fortune.
Every schoolboy knows that there is a great advantage in being in the right place in just the nick of time, and that being there is often a matter of chance. Men are constantly being moved up into positions which they did not get wholly by merit Their elevation is due, perhaps, to a railroad accident, a stroke of paralysis, or the death of men in high places. We had a striking instance of this, recently, in the death of two presidents of the Long Island Railroad within a few months, which led to unexpected promotions. Everyone knows that men are constantly being put at the head of large concerns because of kinship with the owners of the business, when perhaps a score of those who are working in the establishments, at the time, are much better fitted to fill the positions.
But,
