WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF BJ 1581 76 WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF BOOKS BY WOODROW WILSON A HISTORY OF THE AMERICAN PEOPLE Profusely illustrated. 5 volumes. 8vo Three-quarter Calf Three-quarter Levant GEORGE WASHINGTON. Illustrated. 8vo Popular Edition WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF. 16mo HARPER & BROTHERS, NEW YORK WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF WOODROW WILSON PH.D., LITT.D., EE.D. PRESIDENT OP THE UNITED STATES HARPER fef BROTHERS NEW YORK AND LONDON M C M X V PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA PUBLISHED MARCH. 1915 WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF IT is a very wholesome and re- generating change which a man undergoes when he "comes to him- self." It is not only after peri- ods of recklessness or infatuation, when he has played the spendthrift or the fool, that a man comes to him- self. He comes to himself after ex- periences of which he alone may be aware: when he has left off being wholly preoccupied with his own HI WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF powers and interests and with every petty plan that centers in himself; when he has cleared his eyes to see the world as it is, and his own true place and function in it. It is a process of disillusionment. The scales have fallen away. He sees himself soberly, and knows un- der what conditions his powers must act, as well as what his powers are. He has got rid of earlier preposses- sions about the world of men and affairs, both those which were too favorable and those which were too unfavorable both those of the nursery and those of a young man's reading. He has learned his own paces, or, at any rate, is in a fair way to learn them; has found his footing and the true nature of the "going" he must look for in the [2] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF world; over what sorts of roads he must expect to make his running, and at what expenditure of effort; whither his goal lies, and what cheer he may expect by the way. It is a process of disillusionment, but it disheartens no soundly made man. It brings him into a light which guides instead of deceiving him; a light which does not make the way look cold to any man whose eyes are fit for use in the open, but which shines wholesomely, rather upon the obvious path, like the honest rays of the frank sun, and makes traveling both safe and cheer- ful. II There is no fixed time in a man's life at which he comes to himself, and [3] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF some men never come to themselves at all. It is a change reserved for the thoroughly sane and healthy, and for those who can detach them- selves from tasks and drudgery long and often enough to get, at any rate once and again, a view of the proportions of life and of the stage and plot of its action. We speak often with amusement, sometimes with distaste and uneasiness, of men who " have no sense of humor," who take themselves too seriously, who are intense, self-absorbed, over-confident in matters of opin- ion, or else go plumed with conceit, proud of we cannot tell what, en- joying, appreciating, thinking of nothing so much as themselves. These are men who have not suf- fered that wholesome change. They [4] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF have not come to themselves. If they be serious men, and real forces in the world, we may conclude that they have been too much and too long absorbed; that their tasks and responsibilities long ago rose about them like a flood, and have kept them swimming with sturdy stroke the years through, their eyes level with the troubled surface no hori- zon in sight, no passing fleets, no comrades but those who struggled in the flood like themselves. If they be frivolous, light-headed, men with- out purpose or achievement, we may conjecture, if we do not know, that they were born so, or spoiled by fortune, or befuddled by self-in- dulgence. It is no great matter what we think of them. It is enough to know that there [5] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF are some laws which govern a man's awakening to know himself and the right part to play. A man is the part he plays among his fellows. He is not isolated; he cannot be. His life is made up of the relations he bears to others is made or marred by those relations, guided by them, judged by them, expressed in them. There is nothing else upon which he can spend his spirit nothing else that we can see. It is by these he gets his spiritual growth; it is by these we see his character revealed, his purpose, and his gifts. Some play with a certain natural passion, an unstudied directness, without grace, without modulation, with no study of the masters or conscious- ness of the pervading spirit of the plot; others give all their thought [6] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF to their costume and think only of the audience; a few act as those who have mastered the secrets of a serious art, with deliberate sub- ordination of themselves to the great end and motive of the play, spending themselves like good ser- vants, indulging no wilfulness, ob- truding no eccentricity, lending heart and tone and gesture to the perfect progress of the action. These have "found themselves," and have all the ease of a perfect adjustment. Adjustment is exactly what a man gains when he comes to himself. Some men gain it late, some early; some get it all at once, as if by one distinct act of deliberate accommo- dation; others get it by degrees and quite imperceptibly. No doubt to most men it comes by the slow proc- [7] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF esses of experience at each stage of life a little. A college man feels the first shock of it at graduation, when the boy's life has been lived out and the man's life suddenly be- gins. He has measured himself with boys; he knows their code and feels the spur of their ideals of achieve- ment. But what the world ex- pects of him he has yet to find out, and it works, when he has discov- ered it, a veritable revolution in his ways both of thought and of action. He finds a new sort of fitness de- manded of him, executive, thorough- going, careful of details, full of drudgery and obedience to orders. Everybody is ahead of him. Just now he was a senior, at the top of a world he knew and reigned in, a finished product and pattern of good [8] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF form. Of a sudden he is a novice again, as green as in his first school year, studying a thing that seems to have no rules at sea amid cross- winds, and a bit seasick withal. Presently, if he be made of stuff that will shake into shape and fit- ness, he settles to his tasks and is comfortable. He has come to him- self: understands what capacity is, and what it is meant for; sees that his training was not for ornament or personal gratification, but to teach him how to use himself and develop faculties worth using. Henceforth there is a zest in action, and he loves to see his strokes tell. The same thing happens to the lad come from the farm into the city, a big and novel field, where crowds rush and jostle, and a rustic 2 [9] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF boy must stand puzzled for a little how to use his placid and unjaded strength. It happens, too, though in a deeper and more subtle way, to the man who marries for love, if the love be true and fit for foul weather. Mr. Bagehot used to say that a bachelor was "an amateur in life," and wit and wisdom are married in the jest. A man who lives only for himself has not be- gun to live has yet to learn his use, and his real pleasure, too, in the world. It is not necessary he should marry to find himself out, but it is necessary he should love. Men have come to themselves ser- ving their mothers with an unselfish devotion, or their sisters, or a cause for whose sake they forsook ease and left off thinking of themselves. [10] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF It is unselfish action, growing slowly into the high habit of devotion, and at last, it may be, into a sort of consecration, that teaches a man the wide meaning of his life, and makes of him a steady professional in living, if the motive be not necessity, but love. Necessity may make a mere drudge of a man, and no mere drudge ever made a pro- fessional of himself; that demands a higher spirit and a finer incentive than his. ra Surely a man has come to him- self only when he has found the best that is in him, and has satisfied his heart with the highest achievement he is fit for. It is only then that he knows of what he is capable and WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF what his heart demands. And, as- suredly, no thoughtful man ever came to the end of his life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And so men grow by having re- sponsibility laid upon them, the burden of other people's business. Their powers are put out at in- terest, and they get usury in kind. They are like men multiplied. Each counts manifold. Men who live with an eye only upon what is their own [12] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF are dwarfed beside them seem frac- tions while they are integers. The trustworthiness of men trusted seems often to grow with the trust. It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness: it affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a run for their minds, an exercise of spirit so various and refreshing; they have the freedom of so wide a tract of the world of affairs. But if they use power only for their own ends, if there be no unselfish service in it, if its object be only their personal aggrandizement, their love to see other men tools in their hands, they go out of the world small, disquieted, beggared, no enlargement of soul vouchsafed them, no usury of satis- faction. They have added nothing [is] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF to themselves. Mental and physi- cal powers alike grow by use, as every one knows; but labor for one- self alone is like exercise in a gym- nasium. No healthy man can re- main satisfied with it, or regard it as anything but a preparation for tasks in the open, amid the affairs of the world not sport, but busi- ness where there is no orderly ap- paratus, and every man must devise the means by which he is to make the most of himself. To make the most of himself means the multipli- cation of his activities, and he must turn away from himself for that. He looks about him, studies the face of business or of affairs, catches some intimation of their larger ob- jects, is guided by the intimation, and presently finds himself part of [14] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF the motive force of communities or of nations. It makes no difference how small a part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his powers begin to play outward, and he loves the task at hand, not because it gains him a livelihood, but because it makes him a life, he has come to himself. Necessity is no mother to enthu- siasm. Necessity carries a whip. Its method is compulsion, not love. It has no thought to make itself at- tractive; it is content to drive. Enthusiasm comes with the revela- tion of true and satisfying objects of devotion; and it is enthusiasm that sets the powers free. It is a sort of enlightenment. It shines straight upon ideals, and for those who see it the race and struggle are [is] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF henceforth toward these. An in- stance will point the meaning. One of the most distinguished and most justly honored of our great philan- thropists spent the major part of his life absolutely absorbed in the mak- ing of money so it seemed to those who did not know him. In fact, he had very early passed the stage at which he looked upon his business as a means of support or of material comfort. Business had become for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise and increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-board; the moves interested him like the manoeuvers of a game. More money was more power, a greater advantage in the game, the means of shaping men and events and markets to his own ends and [16] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF uses. It was his will that set fleets afloat and determined the havens they were bound for; it was his fore- sight that brought goods to market at the right time; it was his sug- gestion that made the industry of unthinking men efficacious; his sa- gacity saw itself justified at home not only, but at the ends of the earth. And as the money poured in, his government and mastery in- creased, and his mind was the more satisfied. It is so that men make little kingdoms for themselves, and an international power undarkened by diplomacy, undirected by parlia- ments. IV It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the great [17] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF organizers and directors of manu- facture and commerce and mone- tary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the idleness and ostentation of their wives and chil- dren, who "devote themselves," it may be, "to expense regardless of pleasure"; but we ought not to misunderstand even that, or con- demn it unjustly. The masters of industry are often too busy with their own sober and momentous call- ing to have time or spare thought enough to govern their own house- holds. A king may be too faithful a statesman to be a watchful father. These men are not fascinated by the glitter of gold: the appetite for power has got hold upon them. [18] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF They are in love with the exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they are organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the world. No wonder they are captivated. Business is more interesting than pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when once the mind has caught its zest, there's no disengaging it. The world has reason to be grateful for the fact. It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the man whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among mer- chants for the world forgets mer- chant princes but as a prince among benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude admiration, ad- miration fame, and the world re- members its benefactors. Business, [19] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF and business alone, interested him, or seemed to him worth while. The first time he was asked to subscribe money for a benevolent object he declined. Why should he subscribe? What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be simply given away, like water pour- ed on a barren soil, to be sucked up and yield nothing? It was not until men who understood benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and really helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind took hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that education was a thing of in- finite usury; that money devoted to it would yield a singular increase [20] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF to which there was no calculable end, an increase in perpetuity in- crease of knowledge, and therefore of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world's fitness for affairs an invisible but intensely real spir- itual usury beyond reckoning, be- cause compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age. Hencefor- ward beneficence was as interesting to him as business was, indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new forces in a com- merce which no man could bind or limit. He had come to himself to the full realization of his powers, the true and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its [21] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their right measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the keen zest, not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself had he not learned how to spend it; and ambition it- self could not have shown him a straighter road to fame. This is the positive side of a man's discovery of the way in which his faculties are to be made to fit into the world's affairs, and released for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction. There is a negative 1*1 WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF side also. Men come to themselves by discovering their limitations no less than by discovering their deep- er endowments and the mastery that will make them happy. It is the discovery of what they can not do, and ought not to attempt, that transforms reformers into states- men; and great should be the joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The spec- tacle is not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability of every reform is determined absolutely and always by "the circumstances of the case," and only those who put them- selves into the midst of affairs, ei- ther by action or by observation, can know what those circumstances are or perceive what they signify. No statesman dreams of doing whatever [28] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF he pleases; he knows that it does not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends; and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so many minds to be consulted and brought to agree- ment, and that nothing can be wise- ly done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not been prepared. Social reform is a matter of co- operation, and, if it be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of con- verting to bring the efficient majority to believe in it and support it. With- out their agreement and support it is impossible. [24] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF It is this that the more imagina- tive and impatient reformers find out when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them. Oftentimes the most imme- diate and drastic means of bringing them to themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That will reduce over-sanguine per- sons to their simplest terms. Not because they find their fellow-legis- lators or officials incapable of high purpose or indifferent to the better- ment of the communities which they represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-in- formed persons. Nor is it because 3 [25] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF under our modern democratic ar- rangements we so subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one man can tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of the most instructive studies a poli- tician could undertake would be a study of the infinite limitations laid upon the power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding the despotic theory of the Russian constitution limi- tations of social habit, of official prej- udice, of race jealousies, of religious predilections, of administrative ma- chinery even, and the inconvenience of being himself only one man, caught amidst a rush of duties and responsibilities which never halt or pause. He can do only what can be done with the Russian people. He cannot change them at will. He [26] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF is himself of their own stuff, and immersed in the life which forms them, as it forms him. He is simply the leader of the Russians. An English or American states- man is better off. He leads a think- ing nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists and a caste of nobles and officials. He can explain new things to men able to understand, persuade men willing and accustomed to make independent and intelligent choices of their own. An English states- man has an even better opportunity to lead than an American states- man, because in England executive power and legislative initiative are both intrusted to the same grand committee, the ministry of the day. The ministers both propose what [27] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF shall be made law and determine how it shall be enforced when en- acted. And yet English reformers, like American, have found office a veritable cold-water bath for their ardor for change. Many a man who has made his place in affairs as the spokesman of those who see abuses and demand their reforma- tion has passed from denunciation to calm and moderate advice when he got into Parliament, and has turned veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown. Mr. Bright was a notable example. Slow and careful men had looked upon him as little better than a revolu- tionist so long as his voice rang free and imperious from the platforms of public meetings. They greatly feared the influence he should exer- [28] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF else in Parliament, and would have deemed the constitution itself un- safe could they have foreseen that he would some day be invited to take office and a hand of direction in affairs. But it turned out that there was nothing to fear. Mr. Bright lived to see almost every re- form he had urged accepted and em- bodied in legislation; but he assisted at the process of their realization with greater and greater temper- ateness and wise deliberation as his part in affairs became more and more prominent and responsible, and was at the last as little like an agitator as any man that served the queen. It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves charged with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which they [29] WHEJN A MAJN CUMES TU HIMSELF have held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic opinions. They have only learned discretion. For the first time they see in its entirety what it was that they were attempt- ing. They are at last at close quar- ters with the world. Men of every interest and variety crowd about them; new impressions throng them; in the midst of affairs the former special objects of their zeal fall into new environments, a better and truer perspective; seem no longer so sus- ceptible to separate and radical change. The real nature of the complex stuff of life they were seek- ing to work in is revealed to them its intricate and delicate fiber, and the subtle, secret interrelationship of its parts and they work circum- spectly, lest they should mar more [so] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF than they mend. Moral enthusiasm is not, uninstructed and of itself, a suitable guide to practicable and lasting reformation; and if the re- form sought be the reformation of others as well as of himself, the re- former should look to it that he knows the true relation of his will to the wills of those he would change and guide. When he has discovered that relation, he has come to himself: has discovered his real use and plan- ning part in the general world of men; has come to the full command and satisfying employment of his faculties. Otherwise he is doomed to live for ever in a fool's paradise, and can be said to have come to himself only on the supposition that he is a fool. [311 WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF VI Every man if I may adopt and paraphrase a passage from Dr. South every man hath both an absolute and a relative capacity: an absolute in that he hath been endued with such a nature and such parts and faculties; and a relative in that he is part of the universal community of men, and so stands in such a rela- tion to the whole. When we say that a man has come to himself, it is not of his absolute capacity that we are thinking, but of his relative. He has begun to realize that he is part of a whole, and to know what part, suitable for what service and achievement. It was once fashionable and that not a very long time ago to speak [32] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF of political society with a certain distaste, as a necessary evil, an irri- tating but inevitable restriction upon the "natural" sovereignty and en- tire self-government of the individ- ual. That was the dream of the egotist. It was a theory in which men were seen to strut in the proud consciousness of their several and "absolute" capacities. It would be as instructive as it would be difficult to count the errors it has bred in political thinking. As a matter of fact, men have never dreamed of wishing to do without the "tram- mels" of organized society, for the very good reason that those tram- mels are in reality no trammels at all, but indispensable aids and spurs to the attainment of the highest and most enjoyable things man is ca- [38] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF pable of. Political society, the life of men in states, is an abiding natural relationship. It is neither a mere convenience nor a mere neces- sity. It is not a mere voluntary as- sociation, not a mere corporation. It is nothing deliberate or artificial, devised for a special purpose. It is in real truth the eternal and natu- ral expression and embodiment of a form of life higher than that of the individual that common life of mu- tual helpfulness, stimulation, and contest which gives leave and op- portunity to the individual life, makes it possible, makes it full and complete. It is in such a scene that man looks about to discover his own place and force. In the midst of men organized, infinitely cross- [34] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF related, bound by ties of interest, hope, affection, subject to authori- ties, to opinion, to passion, to visions and desires which no man can reckon, he casts eagerly about to find where he may enter in with the rest and be a man among his fellows. In mak- ing his place he finds, if he seek in- telligently and with eyes that see, more than ease of spirit and scope for his mind. He finds himself as if mists had cleared away about him and he knew at last his neigh- borhood among men and tasks. What every man seeks is satis- faction. He deceives himself so long as he imagines it to lie in self- indulgence, so long a she deems him- self the center and object of effort. His mind is spent in vain upon it- self. Not in action itself, not in 135] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF "pleasure," shall it find its desires satisfied, but in consciousness of right, of powers greatly and nobly spent. It comes to know itself in the motives which satisfy it, in the zest and power of rectitude. Chris- tianity has liberated the world, not as a system of ethics, not as a phi- losophy of altruism, but by its rev- elation of the power of pure and unselfish love. Its vital principle is not its code, but its motive. Love, clear-sighted, loyal, personal, is its breath and immortality. Christ came, not to save Himself, assuredly, but to save the world. His motive, His example, are every man's key to his own gifts and happiness. The ethical code he taught may no doubt be matched, here a piece and there a piece, out of other religions, other [36] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF teachings and philosophies. Every thoughtful man born with a con- science must know a code of right and of pity to which he ought to conform; but without the motive of Christianity, without love, he may be the purest altruist and yet be as sad and as unsatisfied as Mar- cus Aurelius. Christianity gave us, in the full- ness of time, the perfect image of right living, the secret of social and of individual well-being; for the two are not separable, and the man who receives and verifies that secret in his own living has discovered not only the best and only way to serve the world, but also the one happy way to satisfy himself. Then, in- deed, has he come to himself. Hence- forth he knows what his powers [37] WHEN A MAN COMES TO HIMSELF mean, what spiritual air they breathe, what ardors of service clear them of lethargy, relieve them of all sense of effort, put them at their best. After this fretfulness passes away, experience mellows and strengthens and makes more fit, and old age brings, not senility, not satiety, not regret, but higher hope and serene maturity. THE END 54774 DATE DUE 6 'imp APR 1976 RF(!p i MR \ t > s 1Q7f Ppll { Jg DP U I J \J \ ( J M 1 GAYLORD PRINTED IN U.S.A. .., U .,f.?. U E!? N . REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILITY A 000 847 029 6