GIFT OF 
 Estate of Florence Walr 
 
MORE POWER 
 TO YOU 
 
MORE POWER 
 TO YOU 
 
 FIFTY EDITORIALS 
 FROM EVERY WEEK 
 
 BY 
 
 BRUCE BARTON 
 
 NEW YORK 
 
 THE CENTURY CO. 
 
 1922 
 
Copyright, 1917, by 
 THE CENTURY Co. 
 
 Copyright, 1915, 1916, 1917, by 
 EVERY WEEK CORPORATION 
 
 Published September, 1917 
 
 Printed in U. S. A. 
 
To come down to the office in the morn- 
 ing and find letters from friends whom one 
 has never seen, but who prove by their 
 letters how very real is their friendship 
 
 To have the privilege of visiting in the 
 homes of hundreds of thousands such 
 friends every week, and saying frankly 
 whatever happens to be on one's mind, 
 with no fear of being misunderstood 
 
 This is almost more wealth than any one 
 man ought to enjoy. 
 
 I am very grateful. I wish I could 
 say it more convincingly so convincingly 
 that every one of the readers of " Every 
 Week " might feel that to him, or to her, 
 personally, I have dedicated this little 
 book. 
 
 -19801 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER PACE 
 
 ^ I "No ROOM IN THE INN" .... 3 
 
 II THE FABLE OF A CERTAIN KING WHO 
 
 SOUGHT A NEW PLEASURE ... 6 
 
 III YOUR BODY MAY LIVE IN A CELLAR; 
 
 BUT IT'S YOUR OWN FAULT IF YOUR 
 MIND LIVES THERE n 
 
 IV CUT DOWN YOUR NECESSITIES AND 
 
 You WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD A 
 FEW LUXURIES 16 
 
 V Do You BORE YOURSELF? .... 20 
 
 * VI ABOUT MAKING MONEY 25 
 
 VII SHOULD WE BE SENT TO JAIL FOR 
 
 EATING THE WRONG FOOD? ... 29 
 
 VIII Do You LIVE IN A HOME OR ONLY IN 
 
 A HOUSE? 33 
 
 - IX BEING A REAL PRODUCER .... 36 
 
 X PERHAPS You DON'T DREAM ENOUGH 39 
 
 XI A LESSON FROM LUICI 44 
 
 XII I WOULD IF HE WERE MY BOY . . 48 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XIII Music Is NOT MERELY ENTERTAIN- 
 MENT: IT Is ALSO MEDICINE ... 53 
 
 W 
 
 * XIV A FEW KIND WORDS FOR BUSINESS . 57 
 
 XV SOME POOR BLIND FOLK HAVE NEVER 
 
 SEEN A MIRACLE 62 
 
 XVI I REASSURE A MOTHER 66 
 
 XVII IF You WANT TO KNOW WHETHER 
 YOUR BRAIN Is FLABBY, FEEL OF 
 YOUR LEGS 70 
 
 XVIII Do BABIES LIKE You? THAT'S A 
 
 PRETTY GOOD TEST 74 
 
 XIX Now WILL You STOP THAT SUNDAY 
 
 WORK? 78 
 
 sf XX ASK ANY SUCCESSFUL MAN . . . 82 
 
 XXI IF You CAN GIVE YOUR SON ONLY 
 
 ONE GIFT, LET IT BE ENTHUSIASM 86 
 
 XXII HAVE You CEASED TO STUDY? IF so, 
 
 GOOD NIGHT 90 
 
 XXIII A MAN ASKS, "WHAT Is YOUR FAV- 
 
 ORITE BOOK?" 94 
 
 XXIV THIS HOARY-HEADED FALSEHOOD HAS 
 
 LIVED LONG ENOUGH 99 
 
 XXV IN APPRECIATION OF MOTHERS . . .103 
 */ XXVI THE LESSON OF A FAILURE . . . . 108 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 XXVII WHEN A BOY KNOWS MORE THAN His 
 
 FATHER m 
 
 XXVIII BUILDING MATERIALS FOR CASTLES IN 
 
 SPAIN HAVE NOT ADVANCED AT ALL 116 
 
 * XXIX Too MANY MEN STILL BELIEVE IN 
 
 PERPETUAL MOTION 121 
 
 XXX YOUR OWN LITTLE BED Is YOUR BEST 
 
 M. D 126 
 
 ^ XXXI THERE Is A GREAT DEAL OF ENCOUR- 
 AGEMENT IN HISTORY FOR MOST OF 
 Us 131 
 
 XXXII You SHOULD NOT WORRY . . . .135 
 
 XXXIII THOUGHTS ON LYING ON MY BACK AND 
 
 READING A SEED CATALOGUE . . .138 
 
 XXXIV ON TAKING MY OLD FISHING-POLE 
 
 OUT OF WINTER STORAGE . . .143 
 
 XXXV IT'S A GOOD OLD WORLD IF You KNOW 
 
 How TO BREATHE 148 
 
 XXXVI WM. HOHENZOLLERN, LOCK Box i, 
 
 BERLIN 153 
 
 XXXVII GENERALLY SPEAKING, A JOB Is GOOD 
 IN PROPORTION TO THE AMOUNT OF 
 STUDY REQUIRED TO MASTER IT . .158 
 
 XXXVIII THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S SOULS . 163 
 
 XXXIX "THEREWITH TO BE CONTENT" . . 167 
 
Contents 
 
 CHAPTER PAGE 
 
 ^ XL "THE BUSINESS ... Is UNDRA- 
 
 MATIC" 171 
 
 XLI SOME MEN LOSE FIVE MINUTES EARLY 
 IN LIFE AND NEVER FIND IT AFTER- 
 WARD 176 
 
 XLII THE IMMORTALITY OF INFLUENCE . .181 
 
 XLIII SOME DAY YOUR EMPLOYER WILL 
 WANT TO KNOW WHY You Do NOT 
 PLAY MORE 186 
 
 tf XLIV A LETTER TO A YOUNG MAN WHO 
 
 WANTS A BETTER JOB . . . .190 
 
 XLV IF You WERE TO WRITE YOUR OWN 
 EPITAPH, WHAT COULD You HON- 
 ESTLY SAY? 195 
 
 XLVI IF You WANT TO KNOW How MUCH 
 You OUGHT TO GET, FIND OUT How 
 MUCH You HAVE TO GIVE . . .199 
 
 XLVII DOES YOUR RESPECT FOR FOLKS GROW 
 
 GREATER OR LESS AS You Go ALONG 204 
 
 XLVIII OF COURSE THERE Is A SANTA CLAUS 209 
 XLIX "I DREAD THE END OF THE YEAR" . 213 
 
 L " IF A MAN DIE, SHALL HE LIVE 
 
 AGAIN?" 217 
 
MORE POWER 
 TO YOU 
 
MORE POWER TO YOU 
 
 " NO ROOM IN THE INN " 
 
 DID you ever stop to think of the tra- 
 gedy of the little hotel at Bethlehem 
 in Palestine the " inn " ? 
 
 The parents of Jesus of Nazareth 
 knocked at its doors, and could not come 
 in. It might have sheltered the greatest 
 event in the history of the world : and 
 it lost the chance. 
 
 Why? Why was Jesus of Nazareth 
 born in a stable? Because the people at 
 the inn were vicious or hostile? Not at 
 all. But the inn was full every room 
 was occupied by people who had money 
 to pay and so must be served it was full 
 of Business. 
 
 There was " no room in the inn." 
 3 
 
4 More Power to You 
 
 I know men whose lives are like that 
 inn. 
 
 " Arnold's heart is broken," said one 
 man to another recently; " his son is a 
 failure and a fool." 
 
 " What can you expect?" the other an- 
 swered. u Arnold has not given his boy 
 a minute's time for ten years." 
 
 Arnold thinks he is a good father: he 
 has often told his friends that he is work- 
 ing night and day in Business for his wife 
 and boy. 
 
 As a matter of fact, his Business is 
 working him. There is no room in his 
 life for anything else. And his son is a 
 fool. 
 
 " You had quite a taste for literature 
 when you left college, didn't you?" I 
 asked another man. 
 
 " Oh, yes," he answered sadly; "but I 
 had to give all that up. A man can't be 
 in Business and find room for anything 
 else." 
 
 " I hear Simpson's wife has left him," 
 I heard a third man say; and his compan- 
 ion replied; 
 
"No Room in the Inn" 5 
 
 " She got tired spending her evenings 
 alone, probably. You know, Simpson al- 
 ways says Business comes first." 
 
 In a little village church-yard in Eng- 
 land there is this inscription: 
 
 Here lies Peter Bacon, born a man ana 
 died a grocer. 
 
 Take care that it be not written over 
 you, " Born a man and died a Business 
 man." Make good; but do not sacrifice, 
 in making good, the gifts of life that are 
 best 
 
 Take care to have time for something 
 besides Business for your family, for 
 good books, for an occasional hour when 
 you merely walk under the stars and think. 
 
 For in Bethlehem, two thousand years 
 ago, there stood a little inn. And behold, 
 it was so full of Business that the great- 
 est event in the world knocked at its doors 
 and could not come in. 
 
II 
 
 THE FABLE OF A CERTAIN KING WHO 
 SOUGHT A NEW PLEASURE 
 
 NOW, in a great country there lived a 
 certain King who ruled over vast 
 possessions. 
 
 He had one daughter, a beautiful 
 princess. 
 
 And behold, though the King possessed 
 everything that money could buy, 
 houses and lands and cattle and servants 
 and automobiles, he was weary of life. 
 For he said, There is no pleasure in it. 
 
 And he wrote a proclamation, and 
 caused it to be published in his dominions, 
 that whoever would invent a new pleasure 
 for his amusement should receive the hand 
 of his daughter in marriage. 
 
 Thereupon appeared a young man who 
 bowed low and said: " O King, live for- 
 6 
 
The Fable of a King j 
 
 ever. I have invented a new pleasure; 
 but to enjoy it you must do precisely as I 
 say." 
 
 Whereupon the King's heart was very 
 glad. He smiled upon the young man 
 and promised. 
 
 The next morning the young man was 
 early at the palace, and had the King out 
 of bed before daybreak, and the princess 
 and all the little princes. 
 
 Together they journeyed a long way by 
 foot and street-car into the country. 
 They saw a wonderful sight in the sky, 
 and the young man explained to the King 
 that it was called a sunrise. They passed 
 brooks, and the princes took off their 
 shoes and stockings and waded in them. 
 They wandered through cool woods and 
 picked flowers. 
 
 Finally, at about the middle of the day, 
 the King said: " I have a strange feeling 
 under my belt which I have never felt be- 
 fore. 7 ' 
 
 And the young man answered and said: 
 
 * That, your Majesty, is called hunger. 
 
 You have never had it because you never 
 
8 More Power to You 
 
 got enough fresh air into your system be- 
 fore to create it." 
 
 And the little princes, too, began to 
 cry out that they also had queer feelings 
 under their belts. 
 
 Whereupon the young man produced a 
 large basket covered with a white cloth, 
 and opened it. And behold, there were 
 sandwiches, and fruits, and olives, and 
 cold chicken, and coffee in a tin bucket, 
 and cake, and divers other foods, all 
 daintily packed. 
 
 And the King could not restrain his 
 hand, but dove in and ate for half an hour 
 or more ; and then lay under the trees and 
 looked up at the sky and smoked. 
 
 And the princes raced about the woods 
 and played Indian, and no one watched 
 over them or bade them nay; for there 
 was nothing they could possibly harm. 
 
 And toward nightfall they journeyed 
 back to the palace; and the little princes, 
 who had always to be pampered and read 
 to at night to get them to sleep, fell asleep 
 on their beds with their clothes on. 
 
 And the King, having had a bath and a 
 
The Fable of a King 9 
 
 rub-down, settled back on the royal piazza 
 with a fifty-cent cigar in his mouth, and 
 smiled for the first time in months, and 
 called for the young man. 
 
 And the young man appeared and said : 
 
 * Your Majesty, it was some day, was it 
 
 not? " And the King admitted that it was. 
 
 4 Thou hast made good," saith the 
 
 King, " and my daughter, the beautiful 
 
 princess, is inside at the piano. But, first, 
 
 give me the bill for this wonderful new 
 
 pleasure; for I will pay for it." 
 
 And the young man handed him a bill 
 for one dollar and twenty-three cents. 
 
 Whereupon the King was exceeding 
 wroth, and cried out: " Dost think I am 
 a cheap skate? Is a pleasure that costs 
 only one dollar and twenty-three fit for a 
 king?" 
 
 And he called the Captain of the Guard 
 and ordered that the young man should 
 be shot at sunrise. 
 
 Moral: You and I had some bully 
 times, when we were kids, on those old 
 picnics with sandwiches that the ants 
 
io More Power to You 
 
 crawled over and coffee full of pine 
 needles. But we would n't dare take our 
 kids on a picnic perish the thought! 
 The neighbors would think we were cheap 
 skates. 
 
 Pack up the dinner-coat, mother. 
 We 're off to Atlantic City with the year's 
 savings. 
 
Ill 
 
 YOUR BODY MAY LIVE IN A CELLAR; BUT 
 
 IT 'S YOUR OWN FAULT IF YOUR 
 
 MIND LIVES THERE 
 
 THE other night my friend Ferrero 
 and I spent a few years with JulitJs 
 Caesar in ancient Rome. 
 
 We went with him on his campaigns in 
 Gaul. Those were wonderful battles 
 wonderful fighters. 
 
 From a hill-top we could watch the 
 whole battle thousands of men driving 
 at each other with their swords, hurling 
 their javelins at short range. No smoke, 
 no trenches; just primitive, hand-to-hand 
 conflict. 
 
 We came back to Rome. The city was 
 in a turmoil. Our great chariots thun- 
 dered through the streets in triumph; our 
 captives, our spoils, our banners made 
 a magnificent procession. The crowds 
 cheered wildly. 
 
 ii 
 
12 More Power to You 
 
 Another evening my friend Green and 
 I had a great time together in ancient 
 Britain. 
 
 We went down to Runnymede with a 
 group of English nobles. They were 
 powerful men, each a petty king in his 
 own section; but every one of them took 
 his life in his hand on that expedition. 
 
 And there we gathered around King 
 John, and forced him, against his will, to 
 put his name to the Magna Charta, the 
 Great Charter which is the foundation of 
 English liberties and our own. 
 
 I had a fine time with Napoleon a few 
 nights before. 
 
 I met him when he landed in France, 
 after the escape from Elba. 
 
 Up through the southern provinces he 
 came, gathering a few troops there, win- 
 ning over by the force of his eloquence 
 the regiments sent to capture him. 
 
 We arrived in Paris. Hurriedly, but 
 with supreme confidence that the Little 
 Corporal could never fail, we got together 
 a makeshift army and set out to strike the 
 winning blow at Waterloo. 
 
Your Mind 13 
 
 That battle I shall never forget it. 
 
 Another day I went over to old Con- 
 cord, and spent the whole afternoon with 
 Emerson. 
 
 We talked about Representative Men. 
 
 Well, well, you say, what foolishness is 
 this? What do you mean by saying you 
 lived with Caesar and Napoleon and Em- 
 erson all centuries apart, all long since 
 dead? 
 
 If you do not know what I mean, then I 
 pity you. 
 
 Have you never come home tired from 
 your office, and with a book transported 
 your foolish little mind clear out of the 
 present day? 
 
 Have you never learned the joy of sur- 
 rendering yourself to the companionship 
 of the great men of the past? 
 
 Have you never sat in the little London 
 Club and heard Sam Johnson thunder his 
 philosophy of life? 
 
 Have you never sailed up and down 
 the American coast with Captain John 
 Smith, dodging the Indians and opening up 
 a new continent? 
 
14 More Power to You 
 
 Are you one of the wretched, poverty- 
 stricken souls who have never learned to 
 escape from yourself through the blessed 
 magic of good books? 
 
 Have you contented yourself all your 
 life with the companionship of good 
 pinochle-players, when you might have 
 been a familiar friend of Socrates and 
 Milton and Napoleon and Cromwell and 
 Washington and Columbus and Shake- 
 speare and Lincoln and Rousseau? 
 
 If so, cut out this paragraph from a 
 great man and paste it in your hat : 
 
 / would rather be a beggar y and dwell 
 in a garret, than a king who did not love 
 books. 
 
 There are some marvelous experiences 
 coming to you. 
 
 You can in the evenings to come jar 
 yourself out of the petty rut where circum- 
 stance has placed you, and become a fa- 
 miliar of the immortals. 
 
 You may learn to face the world with a 
 new confidence, a new poise, a new self- 
 respect, because you have made yourself a 
 citizen of the ages. 
 
Your Mind 15 
 
 Do some real reading. 
 
 Do it for the joy it will give you: do it 
 for the good it will do you. 
 
 " Show me a family of readers/' said 
 Napoleon, " and I will show you the 
 people who rule the world." 
 
IV 
 
 CUT DOWN YOUR NECESSITIES, AND YOU 
 
 WILL BE ABLE TO AFFORD A 
 
 FEW LUXURIES 
 
 MOST of us do not have incomes 
 large enough to provide both the 
 things we need and the things we want. 
 
 We are forced to choose between our 
 necessities and our luxuries. 
 
 And, very foolishly, we choose to offer 
 up the luxuries. 
 
 Thus our existence becomes dull and 
 monotonous. 
 
 We can hardly be said really to live: 
 our lives are lived for us cut out and 
 sewed together by the habits and customs 
 of the class to which we belong. 
 
 I have established a very good rule, 
 which I pass on to you: Never do any- 
 thing just because other people do it. 
 
 Most of your friends live in city apart- 
 16 
 
Cut Down Your Necessities 17 
 
 ments. They pay so much for the use of 
 their rooms, and twice as much for the 
 location and the fine marble hallway. 
 
 To live in an apartment like theirs is 
 one of your " necessities." 
 
 If you cut out that necessity, and lived 
 in the country or in an apartment where 
 you had to stretch your legs up three flights 
 of stairs, you would have some money to 
 spend on luxuries. 
 
 So with many other things. 
 
 Every year, by cutting out a few foolish 
 necessities, I buy myself one big, wise 
 luxury. 
 
 Four years ago I bought an automobile. 
 
 Not much of an automobile. Many of 
 my friends said they would rather not have 
 any automobile than to have one like mine. 
 But it was an automobile. 
 
 It has done some wonderful things for 
 me. 
 
 For one thing, it has given me my little 
 summer place up in the country. 
 
 A modest old white Colonial house, with 
 a brook running behind it, and fruit trees 
 all around a place I had wanted for 
 
i8 More Power to You 
 
 years, but could not have because it was 
 two miles from the railroad. 
 
 But two miles is nothing, even to an 
 automobile like mine. 
 
 So I can work in the city and play all 
 summer in the country thanks to my 
 automobile. 
 
 It has done some other good things for 
 me. It has improved the country roads 
 between my little white house and town. 
 Before the automobiles began to go by, the 
 roads were very rough. But now all across 
 the country-side mud puddles and deep 
 ruts have vanished as if by magic. The 
 automobile has made the town " dress up." 
 
 And it has made me " dress up " my 
 place, also. 
 
 Have you ever noticed how many more 
 flowers are planted around farm-houses 
 than formerly were? Do you want to 
 know why that is ? I will tell you. 
 
 It used to make me mad because people 
 who whirled by my place in limousines 
 never stopped to look around. " I '11 
 make them turn their proud heads/' I said. 
 So I planted flowers and painted my house. 
 
Cut Down Your Necessities 19 
 
 Now, on Sunday afternoons, I lie in the 
 hammock on my porch and listen to 
 people in the cars saying to each other: 
 "What a pretty little place that is! I 
 wonder who lives there? " 
 
 That 's why there are more flowers than 
 there used to be the automobile has 
 done that. 
 
 With a tin pail full of coffee and a 
 basket of sandwiches, I have had more fun 
 exploring the wood roads around my place 
 than Columbus ever had in discovering 
 America. 
 
 My automobile has brought my office 
 and my little white house side by side. It 
 has given me a new pride in my place. It 
 has improved the roads around me. 
 
 Yes, and it has made me a good neigh- 
 bor to people whom I have wanted to call 
 on for years, and never brought myself to 
 it, because I hate long, hot rides on the 
 street cars. It has made me a better citi- 
 zen all around. 
 
 Gasoline is very high this year. 
 
 I shall have to cut out some other fool- 
 ish necessity. 
 
V 
 
 DO YOU BORE YOURSELF? 
 
 RIDING on a train the other day, 
 I got to watching a man whose con- 
 dition was really pathetic. 
 
 He had forgotten to bring a book or a 
 magazine ; there was no one in the car with 
 whom he could talk. For one of the few 
 times in his life, he was utterly alone in 
 the world: and he was utterly miserable. 
 
 Cast on his own resources, he discov- 
 ered that there were inside of him no 
 reservoirs of thought or interest where 
 his dusty soul might be refreshed. 
 
 He was thrown unexpectedly into his 
 own company, and he bored himself 
 terribly. 
 
 His was not an exceptional case : on the 
 contrary, he was rather typical of the 
 ordinary modern man. 
 
 In olden days, when towns were more 
 scattered, distances greater, and life less 
 20 
 
Do You Bore Yourself? 21 
 
 complex, men were accustomed to be 
 alone for hours and even days, and could 
 stand it. 
 
 The modern man must be talking, or he 
 must be reading, or he must be playing: 
 anything lest by accident he be left alone 
 for a little time and compelled to think. 
 
 * The world/' as Wordsworth said, " is 
 too much with us." 
 
 I would not have any man unsocial. 
 He who withdraws himself from his fel- 
 low men lessens his service and impover- 
 ishes his life, no matter what work of art 
 may come out of his solitude. 
 
 But it would do the world good if every 
 man in it would compel himself occasion- 
 ally to be absolutely alone. 
 
 Away from people, who blunt the edges 
 of his personality: away from books and 
 magazines, which give him his thinking 
 pre-digested : away on a long walk, where 
 he could face the world with a naked mind 
 and compel himself to think some things 
 through by himself. 
 
 Most of the world's progress has come 
 out of periods of such loneliness. 
 
22 More Power to You 
 
 Moses was a social being, a political 
 leader, whose success was in his power to 
 handle an unruly crowd. 
 
 But Moses' great contribution to the 
 world the Ten Commandments 
 came down from the mountain-top where 
 he had climbed alone. 
 
 It was out of the silence that Samuel's 
 call came; and Mohammed's; and Joan of 
 Arc's. 
 
 To Lincoln, poor struggling lawyer, 
 there once came an offer from a great rail- 
 road to become its general counsel at 
 $10,000 a year. 
 
 He did not seek advice, though friends 
 offered it freely. One day he appeared at 
 his office an hour later than usual, and 
 announced that he had made his de- 
 cision. 
 
 He had risen early and walked out to 
 the little grove on the edge of Springfield 
 where most of his decisions were made, 
 and there had wrestled the thing out 
 alone. 
 
 John C. Calhoun once told a friend that 
 he " had early subjected his mind to such 
 
Do You Bore Yourself? 23 
 
 a rigid course of discipline, and had per- 
 sisted without faltering until he had ac- 
 quired a perfect control over it; that he 
 could now confine it to any subject as long 
 as he pleased without wandering even for 
 a moment; that it was his habit, when he 
 set out alone for a walk or a ride, to select 
 a subject for reflection, and that he never 
 suffered his attention to wander from it 
 until he was satisfied with its exam- 
 
 ination." 
 
 " How do you wish to be shaved, sir? " 
 Daniel Webster's barber once asked 
 him. 
 
 To which the great man replied: " In 
 silence, sir." 
 
 There is no great success without con- 
 centration: and no concentration in minds 
 that have not been disciplined to long- 
 continued, self-reliant thought. 
 
 Store your mind with thoughts worth 
 while: be independent of the world of 
 chatter yes, even occasionally of the 
 world of books. For in this lies the secret 
 of a virile personality and the key to 
 contentment 
 
24 More Power to You 
 
 The mind is its own place, and in itself 
 Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven. 
 
 Wise men stock their heaven with 
 good things, and carry it always with 
 them. 
 
Tl 
 
 ABOUT MAKING MONEY 
 
 IT is easy to be hypocritical on the sub 
 ject of money. We have formed a 
 habit of pretending publicly to despise 
 money, while actually working our heads 
 off to get more of it. 
 
 We make speeches to young men advis- 
 ing them to " seek the higher good," and 
 hurry straightway to our offices to make 
 up for lost time. 
 
 Let us have done with such hypocrisy. 
 
 We are all out to make money; nor is 
 there anything reprehensible in that fact. 
 
 Wise old Sam Johnson said: " There 
 are few occupations in which men can be 
 more harmlessly employed than in mak- 
 ing money." 
 
 It is not " money " that is the " root of 
 all evil," as we often misquote, but " the 
 love of money." 
 
 25 
 
26 More Power to You 
 
 How much of yourself are you willing to 
 sell for money? 
 
 The answer to that question is none of 
 my business. It is a personal question - 
 a question for you to ask yourself. 
 
 But if you are the sort of person I think 
 you are, your answer to it will be some- 
 thing like this : 
 
 There are some things I am not willing 
 to sell for money. 
 
 / will not sell my health. Not for all 
 the money in the world will I die twenty 
 years before my time, as Harriman did; 
 nor spend my old age drinking hot water, 
 like John D. Rockefeller. 
 
 I will not sell my home. I will forget 
 my business when I leave my office. My 
 home shall be a place of rest and high 
 thinking and peace not a mere annex 
 to my factory or office, where the talk is 
 of nothing but gains and loss. 
 
 / will not sell my honor. I will not 
 engage in any business, no matter what the 
 profit, that does not contribute something 
 to the happiness and progress of the 
 world. 
 
About Making Money 27 
 
 King Midas, in a fit of covetousness, 
 prayed that everything he touched might 
 turn to gold. 
 
 And his prayer was granted. 
 
 The food he was lifting to his mouth 
 turned to gold : his wife, if he had touched 
 her, would have turned to gold. 
 
 There are too many King Midases loose 
 in the world. 
 
 They do not have the Midas touch: 
 they have the Midas look. 
 
 They see nothing but money. 
 
 A beautiful garden to them is merely 
 something that " must have cost a thou- 
 sand dollars." 
 
 They look on their homes and they see, 
 not a home, but an expense of so much a 
 month. 
 
 They look on their wives, and figure 
 how much less it cost them to live when 
 they lived alone. 
 
 The universe, to them, is a balance- 
 sheet: their minds are adding-machines : 
 their hearts beat in tune with the ticker. 
 
 God pity them the men with the 
 Midas look! 
 
28 More Power to You 
 
 Get money but stop once in a while 
 to figure what it is costing you to get it. 
 
 No man gets it without giving some- 
 thing in return. 
 
 The wise man gives his labor and 
 ability. 
 
 The fool gives his life. 
 
VII 
 
 SHOULD WE BE SENT TO JAIL FOR 
 EATING THE WRONG FOOD? 
 
 IN Erewhon people were sent to jail for 
 eating the wrong food. 
 Ever hear of Erewhon? 
 It is a mythical country which a man 
 named Samuel Butler wrote about. 
 
 This is what I gathered [says Samuel Butler], 
 That in that country, if a man falls into ill health 
 or catches any disorder, or fails bodily before he 
 is seventy years old, he is tried before a jury of 
 his countrymen, and if convicted is held up to 
 public scorn and sentenced to jail. . . . But if 
 a man forges a cheque, or sets a house on fire, or 
 does any other such things as are criminal in our 
 country, he is either taken to a hospital and most 
 carefully tended at the public expense, or, if he 
 is in good circumstances, he lets it be known to 
 all his friends that he is suffering from a severe 
 fit of immorality, just as we do when we are ill; 
 and they come and visit him with great solici- 
 29 
 
30 More Power to You 
 
 tude, and inquire with interest how it all came 
 about, what symptoms first showed themselves, 
 etc. questions which he will answer with per- 
 fect unreserve. 
 
 Butler says he visited a court in Ere- 
 whon, and saw prisoners being sentenced 
 for eating improperly and otherwise in- 
 juring their health. To one hardened 
 criminal the judge said: 
 
 " Prisoner at the bar, you have been accused 
 of the great crime of laboring under pulmonary 
 consumption, and, after an impartial trial before 
 a jury of your countrymen, you have been found 
 guilty. . . . This is not your first offense: you 
 have had a long career of crime. You were con- 
 victed of aggravated bronchitis last year; and I 
 find that, although you are now only twenty-three 
 years old, you have been imprisoned no less than 
 fourteen times for illnesses of a more or less hate- 
 ful character." 
 
 In Erewhon, you see, the man who lets 
 his health go to pieces is counted a greater 
 criminal than the man who burns down a 
 barn or forges a check. 
 
 His health is a part of the State's as- 
 
Eating the Wrong Food 31 
 
 sets: by ruining it he defrauds the State, 
 and makes himself liable to punishment. 
 
 There is something to be said in favor 
 of the Erewhon custom. 
 
 We are too sympathetic with certain 
 sorts of sick people. They are sick be- 
 cause of their own bad habits usually 
 because they eat too much or eat the wrong 
 kind of food. 
 
 They are very careful that the oil they 
 buy for their automobiles shall be of pre- 
 cisely the right grade, but they never stop 
 to ask themselves, " Am I eating the food 
 that is calculated to develop the maximum 
 efficiency in my particular body at this par- 
 ticular season of the year? " 
 
 Instead of sending such people flowers, 
 it would be better if we sent them to jail 
 on a healthful diet of plain bread and 
 water for a few weeks. They would come 
 out cured. 
 
 The Romans were wiser, as old Dr. 
 Thomas Moffett tells us: 
 
 The Romans once banished Physickians out of 
 Rome under pretense that physick drugs weak- 
 
32 More Power to You 
 
 ened the people's stomacks; and cooks for cor- 
 rupting and enforcing appetites with strange 
 sawces and seasonings. Yet they retained Cato, 
 chief dietiest of that time, and all of them that 
 were able (without physick) to prevent and cure 
 diseases. 
 
 If you would banish physickians and do 
 without physick, be your own Cato. 
 
 Find out whether your food is building 
 your system up or merely clogging it up. 
 
 Give a little attention to this subject 
 if you would be really well as much 
 attention, for instance, as you give to 
 discovering the proper oil for your 
 automobile. 
 
VIII 
 
 DO YOU LIVE IN A HOME OR ONLY IN 
 A HOUSE? 
 
 PEOPLE use words loosely. 
 They speak of " owning a house " 
 and " owning a home " as if both phrases 
 meant the same. 
 
 As a matter of fact, many a man who 
 pays rent all his life owns his own home; 
 and many a family has successfully saved 
 for a home only to find itself at last with 
 nothing but a house. 
 
 I knew one such case. 
 
 To " own their own home " became a 
 perfect obsession with the family a 
 false god to which everything else must 
 be sacrificed. 
 
 To swell the sacred fund, the father 
 wore clothes so shabby that his business 
 progress was retarded. The children 
 were under-nourished, and two of them 
 died. Life lost every vestige of sweet- 
 
 33 
 
34 More Power to You 
 
 ness in the driving struggle to scrimp and 
 to pay. 
 
 At length ambition was realized: they 
 stepped through the door of the house on 
 which the last cent had been paid. They 
 had bought their house : but in the process 
 they had destroyed their home. 
 
 What is the ideal home? 
 
 I should say, first of all, it is a " cozy " 
 place, a place not too large. 
 
 The Vatican has 15,000 rooms. The 
 Pope could, if he would, sleep every night 
 for forty years in a different room. The 
 Winter Palace at Petrograd is so vast that, 
 once when repairs were to be made on the 
 roof, peasants were found living there in 
 wooden shacks, their existence unsuspected 
 by the glittering tenants underneath. 
 
 But these palaces are not homes. 
 
 The turtle does not construct a shell ten 
 times larger than it needs; the bird does 
 not spread her nest across a whole tree-top 
 merely because materials happen to be 
 at hand. Only man commits the foolish 
 error of building a house too large to be a 
 home. 
 
A Home or a House? 35 
 
 The ideal home is a place of rest. 
 
 One can rest in a room simply furnished, 
 but not in a department store or a 
 museum. You would not fill your home 
 with warring visitors: do not crowd it 
 with pictures, bric-a-brac, and " souve- 
 nirs " that jar and clash. 
 
 And the home is a place of peace: 
 
 A place where the soul is " restored"; 
 where a few pictures suggest the fragrance 
 and healing of the out-of-doors; where 
 good books lift the tired mind out of it- 
 self into the companionship of the wise 
 and great of all ages; where love and sym- 
 pathy conquer care. 
 
 The cave-man who first piled stones to- 
 gether into a rude hut did it to provide 
 a shelter for his most precious possession, 
 the sacred fire. 
 
 There is a sacred fire that burns in every 
 real home; an altar to restfulness and for- 
 bearance and love. The man who can 
 claim that altar, whether the shelter built 
 about it be a mansion or only a single 
 room, he it is who owns his own home. 
 
IX 
 
 BEING A REAL PRODUCER 
 
 HAVE you ever in your whole life 
 raised anything out of the ground? 
 
 Have you with your own hands planted 
 a seed, watered it, tended it up through 
 inf ancy to full growth, and finally sat down 
 at your table to eat of its fruit? 
 
 In these days of the infinite division of 
 labor, when so many of us merely live off 
 each other, there are millions of men and 
 women who are born and die without ever 
 once tasting that transforming experience. 
 
 However much of books and travel they 
 may have known, such people die un- 
 educated. 
 
 To them a sunset is merely a color in 
 the west: a storm is an interference with 
 the routine of their going about 
 
 They have never looked into the sunset 
 yearningly for promise of a warm day that 
 will coax the buds upon their plants into 
 36 
 
Being a Real Producer 37 
 
 fuller life: they have never stood and 
 watched the leaves fairly leap to be 
 watered by the rain. 
 
 They have never once peeped back of 
 the curtain of external things to see the 
 miracle of God at work on His world. 
 
 Every man and woman who can have 
 access to a little piece of land no mat- 
 ter how small ought to make a garden. 
 Not for the sake of thrift alone, but for 
 the development of his or her own 
 character. 
 
 God was the first gardener: He started 
 the human race in a garden. 
 
 From that day to this, whenever man 
 has grown weary of the complexities of 
 life, whenever his spirit has been dis- 
 traught and sore, he has turned back to 
 the land, and, with its soil on his fingers 
 and its odor in his nostrils, has found heal- 
 ing and calm. 
 
 If you are the kind of man who thinks 
 at all, you must have periods of depres- 
 sion when it dawns on you that your job is 
 a very artificial thing, not at all essential 
 to the world's existence. 
 
38 More Power to You 
 
 " What 's the use?" you cry in such 
 periods. " I am not needed. Abolish my 
 store, or my factory, or my railroad, and 
 the world would still go on. It would 
 still be fed and clothed. I 'm not a pro- 
 ducer of wealth: I merely help in the dis- 
 tribution of what somebody else creates. 
 The farmer is the only real producer." 
 
 When that feeling comes over you, take 
 a spade and go into your back yard and dig 
 and plant something. Harvest time will 
 come, and you can stand with your throat 
 bared and shout defiance to the universe. 
 
 " Behold," you may cry, " I am no 
 longer a burden on any man; for I have 
 delved in the earth and raised my own 
 food. The world is richer this year by 
 five bushels of potatoes and ten pecks of 
 peas than it would have been had I not 
 lived. I can look every man in the eye 
 without shame. I have proved that I am 
 independent of circumstance. I can, if 
 need be, feed myself." 
 
PERHAPS YOU DON'T DREAM ENOUGH 
 
 A CERTAIN man went to work for 
 John D. Rockefeller in the early 
 days. 
 
 After he had been there a couple of 
 weeks, Rockefeller dropped into his office 
 one afternoon and said: 
 
 4 Just as soon as you get this job organ- 
 ized I want you to look around for some 
 one to turn it over to. Then you put your 
 feet on the desk and dream out some way 
 of making more money for the Standard 
 Oil Company." 
 
 It was a rather startling order for a new 
 man to receive from his boss. Appar- 
 ently it violated all the time-worn pre- 
 cepts of business progress. 
 
 Here was an employer willing to pay 
 only small salaries to the kind of men who 
 
 39 
 
40 More Power to You 
 
 keep their heads forever bent over the 
 desk, and reserving his big salaries for the 
 kind of men who sit with their feet piled 
 on the desk. 
 
 A curious contradiction of all the First 
 Reader stories. 
 
 Yet there must be something in it: for 
 on the foundation of that philosophy 
 Rockefeller built the biggest fortune in 
 the world. 
 
 As a matter of fact, there is a great 
 deal in it. 
 
 The world would not have advanced 
 very far had it not been for the contribu- 
 tions of its dreamers. 
 
 It would never have gained its steam- 
 boat, nor its Atlantic cable, nor its wire- 
 less telegraph, nor its electric light. 
 
 It would never have acquired any really 
 great enterprise. 
 
 For a little enterprise may be rustled 
 and worried into being: but a really great 
 program or movement or business must 
 be dreamed. 
 
 Over in West Orange, New Jersey, I 
 stood one day in Mr. Edison's laboratory, 
 
Do You Dream Enough? 41 
 
 talking with him. And as we talked I 
 looked out across the huge expanse of con- 
 crete factories stretching all around us. 
 Shop after shop, all full of men and 
 machines, all turning out their special part 
 of the product. 
 
 And a certain sense of awe came over 
 me. To think, I said to myself, that all 
 this huge pile of factories should have been 
 spun out of one single little human brain. 
 Thousands of tons of iron and concrete 
 and brick and mortar, all built on 
 what? On nothing but one man's ideas, 
 and faith and dreams. 
 
 Most of the work of carrying on the 
 world is necessarily hard and dull and 
 routine in character : and for it the world 
 needs us men and women who can steel 
 our souls against weariness and monotony, 
 and press forward with good cheer. 
 
 We are entitled to respect just in pro- 
 portion as we do our work without 
 grumbling, in a spirit of real devotion. 
 
 We can not by the mere wishing become 
 Edisons or Watts : it would be worse than 
 folly for us to pile our feet upon the desk 
 
42 More Power to You 
 
 and say, " Go to, now; I will not work any 
 longer : I will dream a dream." 
 
 But almost any one of us could vastly 
 increase the amount of imagination that 
 he uses in his daily life. The faculty of 
 vision, like any other human faculty, grows 
 through exercise. 
 
 It is easy to become so engrossed with 
 the mere mechanics of business as to lose 
 the habit of thought. Easy to say, 
 " Yours received and contents noted " a 
 certain number of times during the day, 
 and go home with the notion that one has 
 done a good day's work. When the really 
 valuable work of the day could have been 
 and should have been done under the 
 shower-bath in the morning, or in the fif- 
 teen minutes' walk across the park to the 
 office. 
 
 One man in a million wakes up, like 
 Lord Byron, to " find himself famous." 
 
 But the majority of famous men are not 
 taken unawares by fame. 
 
 On the wall of their minds hangs their 
 own vision of what they ought to be and 
 can be. 
 
Do You Dream Enough? 43 
 
 They are not surprised by success when 
 it comes; because they have seen it coming, 
 and planned out its coming, in their 
 dreams. 
 
XI 
 
 A LESSON FROM LUIGI 
 
 HERE is a recipe for living a hundred 
 years. 
 
 It is not based upon any theory of mine. 
 If it were it would be worthless. For I 
 have not lived a hundred years. 
 
 But Luigi Cornaro lived to be one hun- 
 dred and two, and " died painlessly, as one 
 who falls into sweet sleep." The formula 
 is his. 
 
 At thirty-six, the doctors said to Luigi : 
 " Make your will; you have only a few 
 months to live." 
 
 At the end of the few months they came 
 back expecting to sign his death certificate. 
 To their surprise, they found him well. 
 
 What had Luigi done? Taken medi- 
 cine ? No. 
 
 What he did was the simplest thing in 
 
 44 
 
A Lesson from Luigi 45 
 
 the world. He merely stopped eating. 
 
 Instead of three heavy meals a day, he 
 substituted three very light ones. Instead 
 of getting up from the table with a feel- 
 ing of fullness, he got up feeling still 
 hungry. 
 
 Instead of half a dozen different dishes, 
 he confined himself to one at each meal. 
 And each day he ate the same dish, at the 
 same time, and in the same amount. 
 
 Year after year he continued to grow 
 stronger. At seventy he was thrown from 
 his horse, and again the doctors said: 
 " No man of seventy can stand such an 
 accident; you will die. " But so strong 
 was Luigi that he was out of bed in no 
 time at all. 
 
 In his years of careful eating he made 
 some important discoveries. 
 
 He discovered, first, that the rule, 
 * Whatever your appetite craves is good 
 for you," is a bad rule. Many foods of 
 which he was very fond proved bad for 
 him : and some others which he had never 
 liked proved to have just the nourish- 
 ment that his system required. 
 
46 More Power to You 
 
 He discovered that u a man can not be 
 a perfect physician of any one save of him- 
 self alone. " In other words, that no 
 physician could prescribe for him offhand 
 a diet as well suited to his needs as he 
 could prescribe for himself, after years of 
 careful study of his own requirements. 
 
 All women have an idea that men ought 
 to eat a great deal. If a man is feeling 
 badly, a woman's remedy is always to 
 make him sit down to a large, appetizing 
 meal. 
 
 Luigi's women-folks were no different 
 from others. When he was about eighty 
 they gathered around him and persuaded 
 him to increase his daily food allowance 
 from twelve to fourteen ounces a day. As 
 a result he nearly died. 
 
 Then he went back to his twelve-ounce 
 diet, and lived twenty-two years longer. 
 
 " Most men," said a philosopher, " dig 
 their graves with their teeth." 
 
 Diogenes, seeing a young man going to 
 a banquet, caught him and took him home, 
 and rejoiced as if he had saved him from 
 some great danger. 
 
A Lesson from Luigi 47 
 
 " If I were to assign any one thing as 
 especially conducing to long life from a 
 study of the habits of centenarians/' says 
 Sir Henry Thompson, " it would be semi- 
 
 starvation." 
 
 " Semi-starvation " the word makes 
 you gasp, but have no fear. You can cut 
 down your eating a long way below where 
 it is now and still be in no danger. 
 
 Luigi's granddaughter reports that 
 " during the latter part of his life the yolk 
 of one egg sufficed for a meal and some- 
 
 times two." 
 
 If you would live long, eat very tem- 
 perately of a few pure foods. 
 
 This is one of the wisest lessons you can 
 ever learn. 
 
 It is the lesson from Luigi. 
 
XII 
 
 I WOULD IF HE WERE MY BOY 
 
 A MOTHER asked me recently to 
 recommend a list of books for her 
 boy to read. 
 
 I answered: 
 
 Start him with a u Life of Lincoln"; 
 then a " Life of Washington"; then a 
 "Life of Cromwell"; and Franklin's auto- 
 biography. When he has read these, I 
 will recommend some more. 
 
 Do not buy these books for him. Take 
 him to a book-store and let him buy them 
 for himself. Let his library be his own 
 library. The love of books is an intoxi- 
 cating habit, like the love of liquor. If 
 more boys were taught to haunt book- 
 stores, fewer of them would haunt saloons. 
 
 Then I went on to say: 
 
 And don't forget that the best and big- 
 gest and wisest book lies all around him 
 48 
 
// He Were My Boy 49 
 
 and costs nothing. Do not let your boy 
 grow up without some knowledge of the 
 miracle of creation as it is exhibited in the 
 growth of a garden of flowers. 
 
 These books that I have recommended 
 are the biographies of mighty men. Na- 
 ture is the autobiography of Almighty 
 God. 
 
 No matter where you live or how busy 
 you are, help your boy to make a garden. 
 Perhaps you are penned up in an apart- 
 ment. Never mind. Let him plant some- 
 thing, if it be only a packet of seeds in a 
 window-box. 
 
 If you would expand his soul, fill it full 
 of reverence. 
 
 4 The love of dirt," says Charles Dud- 
 ley Warner, " is among the earliest of 
 passions, as it is the latest. Mud pies 
 gratify one of our first and best instincts. 
 So long as we are dirty, we are pure. 
 Fondness for the ground comes back to a 
 man after he has run the round of pleas- 
 ures, eaten dirt, and sowed wild oats, 
 drifted around the world, and taken the 
 wind of all its moods. 
 
50 More Power to You 
 
 " The man who has planted a garden 
 feels that he has done something for the 
 good of the world. 
 
 " It is not simply beets and potatoes and 
 string-beans that one raises in his well kept 
 garden. There is life in the ground. It 
 goes into the seeds; and it also, when 
 stirred up, goes into the man who stirs 
 
 it" 
 
 Tell your boy the story of Antaeus. 
 
 Antaeus was a giant, and it was one of 
 Hercules' tasks to kill him. But Hercules 
 discovered that every time he threw 
 Antaeus to the ground, the giant came up 
 stronger than ever. He had only to touch 
 the soil to have his strength and courage 
 renewed. 
 
 Men are like that and boys. 
 
 There is, first of all, health for the boy 
 who digs in the ground. It is not by 
 chance that so large a percentage of our 
 successful men grew up bare-footed on the 
 farm. 
 
 There is discipline and respect for hon- 
 est toil. No boy who has weeded a 
 garden on his hands and knees, under the 
 
// He Were My Boy 51 
 
 hot sun, is likely to grow up to be a spend- 
 thrift or a snob. 
 
 And there is most of all rever- 
 ence. 
 
 " I often think, when working over my 
 plants," said John Fiske, " of what Lin- 
 naeus once said of the unfolding of a blos- 
 som : 4 I saw God in His glory passing 
 near me, and bowed my head in worship.' ' 
 
 By all means, teach your boy the love 
 of good books. But do not let him hold 
 his books so close to his eyes that he fails 
 to read the greatest mystery serial story 
 in the world the serial story of which 
 God writes a new and more wonderful in- 
 stalment every spring. 
 
XIII 
 
 MUSIC IS NOT MERELY ENTERTAIN- 
 MENT: IT IS ALSO MEDICINE 
 
 I LIKE grand opera music, and dislike 
 grand opera. In the first place, 
 grand opera costs too much. 
 
 In the second place, it seems to me a 
 hybrid art. Acting and singing no more 
 belong together for me than read- 
 ing and dancing. The acting of a play or 
 the narration of a story carries me along 
 with it. I can surrender myself to the 
 illusion: identify myself with the charac- 
 ters and forget everything in my interest 
 in their affairs. 
 
 But it is simply beyond me to feel any 
 illusion concerning a love scene between 
 two supposedly passionate young lovers, 
 when the parts are sung by a burly Italian 
 man and a burly German woman, both 
 52 
 
Music Is Medicine 53 
 
 over forty years old and more than forty 
 stone in weight. 
 
 The only way I can enjoy the acting 
 of opera is to close my eyes. 
 
 Furthermore, I like to be able to start 
 my opera and stop it when I want to; to 
 smoke if I like, or lie down if I like ; and, 
 finally, to be able to leave when I get 
 ready, without feeling that I am losing any 
 money by doing so. 
 
 In other words, I like my opera on a 
 machine. 
 
 Music is not merely entertainment: it 
 is medicine. 
 
 Pythagoras, who lived many hundred 
 years ago, discovered that. He was able 
 to work wonders in cases of violent in- 
 sanity with no other remedy than soothing 
 music. 
 
 Esquirol, the celebrated French alien- 
 ist, said: " Music acts most powerfully 
 on the physical and moral nature, and I 
 use it constantly in mental disease. It 
 soothes and calms the patient's mind, and, 
 though it may not cure, it is a most pre- 
 cious agent and ought not to be neglected." 
 
54 More Power to You 
 
 Gladstone, attacked by occasional 
 periods of nervous exhaustion, would have 
 his favorite hymns sung to him. 
 
 Herbert Spencer, when neuralgia shot 
 him through, lay down and ordered soft 
 music played, and invariably obtained re- 
 lief. 
 
 And I, in my humble fashion, have the 
 same experience. 
 
 I like to go home in the evening before 
 dinner, and lie down for half an hour and 
 listen to my favorite music. 
 
 If I need stimulation, there are stimulat- 
 ing pieces; if relaxation, there are selec- 
 tions that relax; if sleep, there are songs 
 that carry one over pleasant pastures and 
 lay one down under fragrant apple trees 
 to peaceful slumber. 
 
 Music is a mental and spiritual mas- 
 sage, or a bracing cold shower bath, ac- 
 cording to what you select. I personally 
 do not care to take my spiritual massage 
 in the Metropolitan Opera House, any 
 more than I would care to have my hair 
 cut in Madison Square Garden. 
 
 Every child should grow up in a home 
 
Music Is Medicine 55 
 
 where music is constantly played. Every 
 experience of a happy youth should have 
 some particular song bound up with it, so 
 that the playing of that song in after life 
 will reawaken that experience and cause 
 it to be lived again. 
 
 I can never hear Handel's " Largo " 
 without living over one of the quiet Sun- 
 days of my boyhood, because it was played 
 in our house almost every Sunday. 
 
 " Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," brings back a 
 memory to me that is peculiarly intimate 
 and sweet. There are a hundred favor- 
 ites each calling its own particular bit 
 of grand opera back into my memory a 
 fragment of the opera of my own life. 
 
 Do not deny your child the blessed min- 
 istry of music. It is one of the rarest 
 gifts. 
 
 Sweeten his soul with it. Perhaps you 
 may even be able to teach him to love 
 opera. If not, you can at least teach him 
 to love music in his own home. 
 
 And he will be in good company. That 
 is the way the prophet Elisha liked his 
 music. Of him it is written that, when 
 
56 More Power to You 
 
 driven to utter weariness by the perplexi- 
 ties of his business, he would cry: 
 
 " But now bring me a minstrel. 
 
 " And it came to pass, when the min- 
 strel played, that the hand of the Lord 
 came upon him." 
 
XIV 
 
 A FEW KIND WORDS FOR BUSINESS 
 
 I GRADUATED from college when 
 muckraking was in its greatest glory. 
 
 The magazines and newspapers and re- 
 formers had filled our youthful minds with 
 so much distressing information that we 
 hardly knew whether the world was a safe 
 place for us to step out into or not. 
 
 We looked askance on all the fellows 
 in college whose fathers had made money. 
 To be sure, the fathers seemed decent 
 enough old codgers when they visited us 
 at the fraternity house. But we felt that 
 something w r as dark and bad in their past 
 somewhere. 
 
 We would not have been seen walking 
 on the street with John D. Rockefeller 
 for anything. 
 
 I remember visiting Washington and 
 looking at the United States Senate. I 
 57 
 
^8 More Power to You 
 
 felt as if I were inside the gates of Sing 
 Sing. 
 
 There was So-and-So from Texas: we 
 had been told that the Oil Trust owned 
 him. There was So-and-So from Wiscon- 
 sin: the railroads owned him. And so on. 
 
 All there through some unholy alliance. 
 
 All city governments were corrupt; all 
 laws were passed from evil motives; all 
 business was yoked together in a vast un- 
 seen network, fashioned and fostered to 
 exploit the nation. 
 
 A business man was a being without con- 
 science or intelligence, like a slot-machine. 
 You gave him a nickel and he gave you a 
 nickel's worth of goods. 
 
 If he took your nickel and withheld the 
 goods, then he was a successful business 
 man. 
 
 Running a magazine was very easy in 
 those days. 
 
 All one had to do was to take down a 
 map of the United States and place his 
 finger on any spot say Owosso, Michi- 
 gan. Then call in a writer and say, " Get 
 
Kind Words for Business 59 
 
 on the train and go out and see what is 
 rotten in Owosso." 
 
 Muckraking did some good: but we 
 have come to realize now that it over- 
 played its hand. 
 
 In fact, I believe it could be shown that 
 the greatest force for righteousness in the 
 United States to-day is nothing more nor 
 less than the once maligned BUSINESS. 
 
 Certainly Business is the greatest force 
 in America working for temperance. 
 
 The young men of half a century ago 
 were pretty heavy drinkers. The young 
 men of to-day have given up drink. 
 
 Not altogether because they were ar- 
 gued into it or scared into it: but also be- 
 cause they know that it destroys their effi- 
 ciency and cripples their progress in Busi- 
 ness. 
 
 Business is the greatest ally and pro- 
 moter of Honesty. And more and more 
 I have come to feel that Honesty is, after 
 all, the corner-stone of all the virtues. 
 
 I have seen a business man refuse to 
 sign a document that contained the tiniest 
 
60 More Power to You 
 
 little misstatement a misstatement that 
 probably never would have been detected, 
 and might have meant thousands of dol- 
 lars in profits to him. 
 
 I have seen a man whose time is worth 
 - a thousand dollars a day spend half an 
 hour editing a single advertisement so 
 jealous was he of his firm's reputation 
 for never making a false claim or an ex- 
 travagant assertion. 
 
 Business has taught that honesty is the 
 best policy; and millions of young men 
 have been made better citizens by first 
 being made better business men. 
 
 Nothing has impressed me more than 
 this: Get to the top of a big business 
 enterprise, and nine times out of ten you 
 will find an idealist. 
 
 You will find a man who has long since 
 ceased to be interested in mere money- 
 making, who is staying in business because 
 of what he wants his business to do for 
 his employees, his community, and his 
 country. 
 
 I do not say that Business is perfect. 
 Far from it. 
 
Kind Words for Business 6 1 
 
 But I do say that the time is past when 
 the young man who goes into business 
 needs to feel that he is making a selfish 
 choice a choice that cuts him off from 
 service to his fellow men. 
 
 "Be not slothful in business" said St. 
 Paul, " fervent in spirit; serving the 
 Lord. 99 f 
 
 Many a man, building a big business in 
 America, has, as a by-product of his build- 
 ing, strengthened the character and lifted 
 the ideals of hundreds of his associates, 
 and helped in the regeneration of a whole 
 community. 
 
 And the number of such men the 
 idealists of BUSINESS in America is in- 
 creasing very fast. 
 
XV 
 
 SOME POOR BLIND FOLK HAVE NEVER 
 SEEN A MIRACLE 
 
 HERE is an important distinction 
 that many people overlook. 
 
 God made the world; but He does not 
 make your world. 
 
 He provides the raw materials, and out 
 of them every man selects what he wants 
 and builds an individual world for him- 
 self. 
 
 The fool looks over the wealth of ma- 
 terial provided, and selects a few plates 
 of ham and eggs, a few pairs of trousers, 
 a few dollar bills and is satisfied. 
 
 The wise man builds his world out of 
 wonderful sunsets, and thrilling experi- 
 ences, and the song of the stars, and ro- 
 mance and miracles. 
 
 Nothing wonderful ever happens in the 
 life of the fool. 
 
 62 
 
Speaking of Miracles 63 
 
 A primrose by a river's brim 
 A yellow primrose is to him, 
 And it is nothing more. 
 
 An electric light is simply an electric light; 
 a telephone is only a telephone nothing 
 unusual at all. 
 
 But the wise man never ceases to won- 
 der how a tiny speck of seed, apparently 
 dead and buried, can produce a beautiful 
 yellow flower. He never lifts a telephone 
 receiver or switches on an electric light 
 without a certain feeling of awe. 
 
 And think what a miracle it is, this 
 harnessing of electricity to the service of 
 man! 
 
 Who, unless his sense of awe had grown 
 blunt through constant familiarity, would 
 believe it? 
 
 The sun, the center of our universe, 
 goes down behind the western horizon. 
 I touch a button, and presto ! I have 
 called it back the room is flooded anew 
 with light. 
 
 The thunder that men once called the 
 voice of God rolls out its mighty waves 
 of sound, and the sound carries only a few 
 
64 More Power to You 
 
 score miles. But I puny speck upon 
 the face of the earth I lift a little in- 
 strument: and, behold, my whisper is 
 heard a thousand miles away. 
 
 Prometheus stole fire from the gods and 
 brought it down to earth. For that crime 
 the gods chained him to a lonely rock and 
 sent a huge bird to feed upon his vitals. 
 Each night the wound healed, and each 
 day it was torn open again. 
 
 That was the punishment of the man 
 who dared to wrest away the richest treas- 
 ure of the gods. 
 
 But fire the treasure of the gods > 
 has almost disappeared out of our daily 
 life : we scorn it. 
 
 Do we want heat? We press a but- 
 ton: and lo, heat, invisible, silent, all- 
 pervasive, flows into our homes over a 
 copper wire. 
 
 Do we need power? We have but to 
 press another switch, and giants come to 
 us over the same slender roadway. 
 Clothed in invisible garments, they cleanse 
 our homes, wash our clothes, crank our 
 automobiles do everything that once 
 
Speaking of Miracles 65 
 
 taxed the strength of men and hurried 
 women into unlovely old age. 
 
 Don't let your life become a prosaic 
 affair: don't let familiarity with the mar- 
 vels about you breed thoughtlessness and 
 contempt. 
 
 Let the fool build his world out of mere 
 food and drink and clothes: you fashion 
 yours out of marvelous experiences: fur- 
 nish and decorate it with miracles. 
 
 Exercise your mind in the wholesome 
 activity of wonder: train your soul to rev- 
 erent awe. 
 
 If you had stood with Moses on the 
 shore of the Red Sea, and had seen it 
 divide to let the children of Israel pass 
 over, you would have had no difficulty in 
 recognizing that as a miracle. 
 
 But every night when the sun goes down, 
 a man stands in a power-house in your 
 city and throws a switch, and instantly the 
 city and the country for miles around are 
 flooded with sunshine. 
 
 And you say to yourself casually: 
 " Oh, I see the lights are on." 
 
XVI 
 
 I REASSURE A MOTHER 
 
 A MOTHER writes me about her son's 
 reading. Among other things, she 
 says : 
 
 In spite of all I can do or say, he insists on 
 reading stories. How can I correct this habit? 
 
 Frankly, madam, I do not know. 
 
 It is about as easy to cure a boy of eat- 
 ing as it is to destroy his love for good 
 stories. 
 
 Centuries before there was any writ- 
 ing, story-tellers drifted about from vil- 
 lage to village, gathering the people to- 
 gether and telling them stories. 
 
 The love of fiction is as old as that 
 older than recorded history, older even 
 than civilization. It can not be rooted 
 out: its roots run back too far. 
 
 And why should you want to root it 
 out? 
 
 The greatest Teacher that ever lived 
 66 
 
I Reassure a Mother 67 
 
 spent half His time telling stories to His 
 disciples. " Without a parable [a story] 
 He taught them nothing." These stories 
 have transformed humanity. 
 
 One great story written in our own coun- 
 try, " Uncle Tom's Cabin," so stirred 
 men's hearts that they said, " Slavery must 
 
 go." 
 
 Good stories will not hurt your boy: 
 they may, if he is the right kind of boy, 
 inspire him to real achievement. 
 
 And they will do something else for 
 him, equally important. They will de- 
 velop his imagination. 
 
 We have too little regard for the high 
 value of the imagination, we Americans. 
 We are too matter-of-fact. We forget 
 that all great inventions, all great discov- 
 eries, all great achievements in science or 
 business, came to pass because some man 
 first had imagination enough to conceive 
 them. 
 
 Many men have been hit on the head 
 by a falling apple. Newton, when the 
 apple hit him, had imagination enough to 
 formulate the law of gravitation. 
 
68 More Power to You 
 
 Many men have been burned by their 
 wives' tea-kettles. Watt had imagination 
 enough to conceive the steam-engine. 
 
 Look through the pages of history, and 
 you will discover that the leaders of men 
 have been those who could dream great 
 dreams and carry them out the men of 
 powerful, intelligent imagination. 
 
 Because this is true, the editor of a mag- 
 azine that prints stories has a responsi- 
 bility that he must take seriously if he is 
 any sort of man at all. He is intrusted 
 with the duty of stimulating the imagina- 
 tion of thousands of children of mothers 
 like you. 
 
 He may, if he choose, publish stories 
 whose appeal is to the baser side of the 
 imagination and even achieve a certain 
 sort of circulation increase for his maga- 
 zine by so doing. Or he may regard 
 every mother among his readers as if she 
 were his own mother, and every mother's 
 son as a younger brother. 
 
 You need not concern yourself because 
 your boy likes stories. But are the stories 
 
/ Reassure a Moth^by 
 
 he reads the right kind of stories do 
 they appeal to his imagination on its best 
 and highest side? 
 
 That is the important question for you. 
 
XVII 
 
 IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHETHER 
 
 YOUR BRAIN IS FLABBY, FEEL 
 
 OF YOUR LEGS 
 
 THIS is one of the greatest tragedies 
 of modern life. Men are forget- 
 ting how to walk. 
 
 They travel by taxi-cabs and street cars; 
 they travel by automobile; they project 
 their personalities over a telephone wire. 
 
 But they do not walk. 
 
 There is a double loss in this. 
 
 A loss in health, first. Most of the 
 diseases of modern men originate in the 
 intestines. Formerly men and women 
 walked enough to keep the stomach mus- 
 cles firm, the intestines healthfully agi- 
 tated. 
 
 Now men and women even more so 
 sit all day slumped in. 
 
 Germs settle down inside them gladly; 
 TO 
 
// Your Brain Is Flabby 71 
 
 and Death, his work made easy for him, 
 laughs. 
 
 There is another loss, equally great. 
 A loss in mental keenness and mental 
 wealth. 
 
 Did you ever take a walk in the country 
 with some one who knows really how to 
 walk? 
 
 Some one of the type of the naturalist 
 Linnaeus, for instance ? 
 
 Linnasus walked into Oland, and found 
 the lands of the farmers ruined by sand 
 blown from the beaches. 
 
 He discovered that the roots of a cer- 
 tain beach grass were long and firm: he 
 taught the farmers to sow that grass along 
 the beach, and so preserved their lands 
 from ruin. 
 
 He walked into Thorne, and found that 
 at a certain period in every year the cattle 
 fell sick and died. 
 
 It was a curse, the people said the 
 act of angry spirits. 
 
 But Linnaeus, examining the pastures, 
 uncovered a noxious weed, and showed 
 the farmers how the work of one laborer 
 
72 More Power to You 
 
 for a few days every season would root it 
 out. 
 
 In his walks he examined and cata- 
 logued 8,000 plants, vegetables, and 
 flowers. 
 
 How many plants, vegetables, and 
 flowers do you think you could identify if 
 you were to see them in their native state ? 
 
 " Few men," said Dr. Johnson, " know 
 how to take a walk." 
 
 It was so in his day. It is even more 
 true now. 
 
 But those favored few enjoy a glorious 
 and mysterious privilege. 
 
 To discover where the violets first 
 bloom in the spring 
 
 To be able to tell directions in the 
 woods, by knowing that large pine trees 
 bear more numerous branches on their 
 southern side 
 
 Or that grass grows on the south side 
 of ant-hills and whortle-berries on the 
 north 
 
 To learn to greet the wild flowers by 
 name 
 
 There are few pleasures more richly sat- 
 
// Your Brain Is Flabby 73 
 
 isfying; none that pay larger dividends in 
 health. 
 
 The man who goes into the country 
 once a week is a better citizen than the 
 man who never goes, even though his eyes 
 see nothing more inspiring on his walk 
 than a golf ball. 
 
 But far more to be envied is that little 
 inner circle of Nature's favorites who 
 speak her language intimately; who read 
 her thoughts in her woods and brooks and 
 flowers. 
 
 " You shall never break down in a 
 speech," said a great English statesman, 
 " on the day that you have walked twelve 
 miles." 
 
 Flabby legs usually mean flabby brains. 
 
 If you would think clearly, speak force- 
 fully, work effectively, get out into the 
 country when you can and walk. 
 
XVIII 
 
 DO BABIES LIKE YOU ? THAT *S A 
 PRETTY GOOD TEST 
 
 *T TOW do you like babies?" some 
 JL JL woman asked Charles Lamb. 
 
 " B-b-oiled, madam/' stuttered Lamb. 
 
 In the beginning of the race nobody 
 except mothers liked babies. 
 
 The records of civilization's slow prog- 
 ress are written in babies' blood. 
 
 Babies had no rights: they were a neces- 
 sary evil. 
 
 In the South Sea Islands, when either 
 parent died, the children were slain and 
 buried also, to wait on the parent in the 
 other world. 
 
 In China it is estimated that 40 per 
 cent, of the girl babies in the provinces 
 of the interior were drowned. 
 
 In India, when a girl baby was born, the 
 mother put opium on her breasts, and the 
 74 
 
Do Babies Like You? 75 
 
 baby, inhaling it with the mother's milk, 
 died. 
 
 Inside the great brass statue of Moloch 
 a roaring fire was built on holy days. 
 And into the seething arms of the god 
 women hurled their screaming infants. 
 
 Even the Greeks, who established a 
 civilization higher than that of any other 
 ancient people, regularly u exposed " their 
 undesired infants on the mountain-sides. 
 
 And Socrates, their greatest man, saw 
 nothing in the practice to condemn. 
 
 Little by little, through the succeeding 
 centuries, the baby has been coming into 
 his own. 
 
 Romulus, who founded Rome, took the 
 first forward step; the Emperor Hadrian 
 made another advance. 
 
 But it was Christianity that discovered 
 the baby. 
 
 All motherhood became sanctified in 
 the worship paid to Mary, the mother of 
 Jesus. 
 
 All childhood was ennobled by the birth 
 in the manger. 
 
 To-day we measure the civilization of a 
 
j6 More Power to You 
 
 nation by the question : How does it treat 
 its babies? 
 
 And the civilization of an individual 
 can be measured by the same test. 
 
 Do you consider babies a nuisance? 
 Do you dislike them? Do they fear you? 
 
 Then though your culture may be- 
 long to the twentieth century your heart 
 still lingers in the first. 
 
 It ? s a question how much any one man 
 influences the world through his business 
 life or his public acts. 
 
 Alexander conquered the world. And, 
 before his ashes were cold, his kingdom 
 began to break up. 
 
 But one little section of the human race 
 is given into your care irrevocably: 
 
 Your babies. 
 
 What you make them they will be. 
 Through them and their descendants you 
 can perpetuate your influence to the end 
 of time. 
 
 If there is a baby in your home, 
 nursing-bottles ought to be more impor- 
 tant to you than stocks and bonds. 
 
 You ought to know more about the 
 
Do Babies Like You? 77 
 
 various kinds of baby foods than you know 
 about golf. 
 
 Your business is important because it 
 makes your living. 
 
 But your home is all-important because 
 there you make lives. 
 
 In it are molded the characters of the 
 future proprietors of the earth : your chil- 
 dren the most important citizens in the 
 world. 
 
XIX 
 
 NOW WILL YOU STOP THAT SUNDAY 
 WORK? 
 
 THIS is a " scientific " age. 
 The way to get a man married is 
 not to introduce him to a pretty girl. 
 
 You must prove to him by statistics 
 that married men are more successful and 
 live longer than single men. 
 
 Then he goes about it scientifically. 
 
 It used to be sufficient merely to tell a 
 child, " Remember the Sabbath day, to 
 keep it holy. In it thou shalt not do any 
 work." 
 
 But the modern child and man 
 asks, Why? 
 
 Well, here is one reason why a 
 scientific reason. 
 
 Dr. E. G. Martin, of the Harvard 
 Medical School, selected nine first-year 
 medical students, all in good health, and 
 78 
 
Stop That Sunday Work 79 
 
 tested them every day for eight weeks with 
 electric currents. 
 
 Each day he recorded the smallest shock 
 that they could feel. The smaller the 
 shock they could feel, the higher their 
 sensitiveness. A high sensitiveness means 
 high nervous efficiency. 
 
 You know that from your own experi- 
 ence. 
 
 You have been so " dead tired " you 
 could not taste the food you were eating; 
 so tired that you hardly felt a blow or a 
 prick which would otherwise have caused 
 you severe pain. Your sensitiveness was 
 low. 
 
 And Dr. Martin discovered this: 
 
 There was an unmistakable tendency for the 
 sensitiveness to be at its highest at the beginning 
 of the week and to sink steadily from day to day 
 until the week's end, reaching the lowest point 
 on Saturday. With the return of Monday fol- 
 lowing the Sunday recess the sensitiveness was 
 back at its former high point. 
 
 The chart on the next page shows the 
 results of the experiment: 
 
80 More Power to You 
 
 110 
 
 100 
 
 M Tu W TH F S 
 
 It shows what happens to your reservoir 
 of nervous energy every week. 
 
 Monday you are keen, alert, ready for 
 anything. 
 
 Tuesday you are not quite so fit. 
 
 Thursday and Friday and Saturday you 
 slump off very fast, each day a little less 
 fresh than the day before. And by Sat- 
 urday night you are dead tired. 
 
 Then, if you rest Sunday, you are back 
 to high-water mark again Monday morn- 
 ing. If you do not rest, you go down and 
 down. 
 
Stop That Sunday Work 81 
 
 The results [says Dr. Martin] show that the 
 repose of a single night following a day of toil 
 does not afford complete restoration of the im- 
 paired nervous tissues; and furthermore that the 
 longer period furnished by the Sunday recess 
 gives, under ordinary conditions, the longer time 
 needed for the expulsion of the accumulated fa- 
 tigue products and the recovery of efficiency. 
 
 Arnold Bennett, in " The Truth About 
 an Author," tells how, after working 
 seven days a week for several years, he 
 learned that a day of complete rest greatly 
 added to his efficiency. 
 
 The man who carries his work home with him 
 and dwells on it in the time devoted ostensibly to 
 rest [concludes Dr. Martin] is defeating the very 
 purpose he seeks increased efficiency. 
 
 " Remember the Sabbath day," says 
 modern Science. 
 
 But the Bible said it thousands of years 
 ago. 
 
 Some day, when you have had enough 
 scientific proof, you will begin to believe 
 that there are quite a good many things 
 in the Bible worth knowing and believing. 
 
I 
 
 XX 
 
 ASK ANY SUCCESSFUL MAN 
 
 SHOULD like to have this carved on 
 my tombstone : 
 
 Here lies a man who edited a magazine: he 
 made many mistakes, but we forgive him for 
 them, because year after year he preached Thrift 
 to his readers, he encouraged several million peo- 
 ple to save money. 
 
 We are not a thrifty people, as com- 
 pared with other nations. 
 
 Belgium before the war was known as 
 a " country without paupers " ; of France's 
 10,000,000 voters nine tenths are owners 
 of government bonds. There are 12,- 
 500,000 savings accounts in France, and 
 half of them little ones less than $4. 
 
 But only one in ten of us have savings 
 accounts: the rest of us are " good 
 fellows." 
 
 82 
 
Ask Any Successful Man 83 
 
 I attended the funeral of a " good fel- 
 low " recently. He had always " lived 
 up to his income.'* When the company 
 for which he worked was reorganized ten 
 years ago, the president said to him: 
 " Have you a thousand dollars? " 
 
 A thousand dollars put into that busi- 
 ness ten years ago would be earning a com- 
 petence for his widow to-day. But the 
 u good f ellow " did not have it: he had 
 never learned to save. And now we are 
 raising a fund to buy his daughter a piano, 
 so that she can give music lessons. 
 
 I came away from the funeral with an- 
 other man whose salary has never been 
 as large as the " good fellow's." We 
 rode in his automobile. 
 
 " Do you know how I paid for this automo- 
 bile ?" he asked. "Out of the dividends that 
 came to me last year from my savings. When 
 I was getting eighteen dollars a week, my wife 
 took two of it every week and put it into the 
 savings bank, where we could n't touch it. 
 When I was raised to twenty-five, she raised the 
 savings fund to five a week ; and so on. I J m 
 forty-seven years old now. I Ve never had a big 
 
84 More Power to You 
 
 salary, as you know; but I could retire to-mor- 
 row, if I wanted to, and have more than thirty 
 dollars a week in dividends from the money I Ve 
 saved. I tell you, I don't know anything that 
 makes a man face the world with so much confi- 
 dence as the knowledge that he has made himself 
 independent of it." 
 
 There you have them side by side the 
 " good fellow " and the " wise fellow." 
 All of us belong in one class or the other. 
 Which class are you in? 
 
 "If you want to know whether you are going 
 to be a success or a failure in life," said James J. 
 Hill, " you can easily find out. The test is sim- 
 ple and infallible. Are you able to save money? 
 If not, drop out. You will lose. You may not 
 think it, but you will lose as sure as you live. 
 The seed of success is not in you." 
 
 There is not a single man, woman, or 
 child in America who can not save some 
 money if he or she will set out de- 
 terminedly to do it. 
 
 " Ah," you object. " How can you say 
 that? You do not know my circum- 
 stances." 
 
Ask Any Successful Man 85 
 
 No, I do not. But if circumstances dic- 
 tate your life, this is not written for you. 
 You will not succeed anyway: you do not 
 count. 
 
 " Circumstances! " exclaimed Napoleon. 
 " I make circumstances." 
 
XXI 
 
 IF YOU CAN GIVE YOUR SON ONLY ONE 
 GIFT, LET IT BE ENTHUSIASM 
 
 A LITTLE while ago I was in charge 
 of a large organization of salesmen. 
 
 My chief sent me to a Western city to 
 appoint a manager for that territory. 
 
 There were two candidates. We had 
 their records in detail, but we had never 
 met either of them. I was to look them 
 over, form my judgment, and appoint the 
 better man. 
 
 I met one man in Cincinnati, the other 
 in St. Louis. 
 
 The man in Cincinnati said to me: 
 " What does this position pay?" I told 
 him. " That is more than I am getting 
 here," he said, " and I should like the job. 
 Every man wants to better himself when 
 lie can." 
 
 The St. Louis man did not wait for me 
 86 
 
Give Your Son Enthusiasm 87 
 
 to arrive in the city. He found out on 
 what train I was coming, rode out on the 
 line, and surprised me by walking down 
 the aisle of my car. He began to talk. 
 He told me about himself, his training and 
 his selling experience. He had drawn up 
 plans in detail for the development of our 
 territory ; he told me how many men he ex- 
 pected to have working by the end of the 
 year, and just how he thought he could 
 increase our volume of business. 
 
 I had to hire him, finally, in order to 
 get a chance to go to bed at night. And 
 in his enthusiasm he forgot to ask me 
 and I forgot to tell him what the salary 
 would be. 
 
 The first man had wanted a better job, 
 which is commendable enough. But I 
 hired the man who was enthusiastic about 
 the opportunity. 
 
 Napoleon's adversaries used to speak 
 of him as " the 100,000 man" mean- 
 ing that his spirit infused into an army 
 was equal to an additional 100,000 troops. 
 
 They criticized his tactics; they accused 
 him of disregarding all the rules of sue- 
 
88 More Power to You 
 
 cessful warfare : yet he won and they lost. 
 Because his enthusiasm carried his soldiers 
 to impossible achievements. 
 
 We are told a great deal about the 
 necessity for controlling our emotions, for 
 being self-contained, for not letting our 
 enthusiasm sweep us off our feet. 
 
 Much of this advice is very wise. 
 
 But don't forget that the Indians 
 were very self-contained. They controlled 
 their emotions so successfully that it was a 
 point of pride among them never to ex- 
 hibit pleasure or pain or love or en- 
 thusiasm. 
 
 And the Indians used to own this coun- 
 try and do not own it any more. 
 
 It was taken away from them 
 
 By men like Columbus, who believed so 
 enthusiastically that the world was round, 
 in an age when other people believed it 
 flat, that he risked tumbling off into space 
 in order to discover a new continent. 
 
 By men like Fulton, who believed that 
 steam could be made to run a boat in spite 
 of wind or tide. 
 
 By men like Marcus Whitman, who 
 
Give Your Son Enthusiasm 89 
 
 was so enthusiastic about the great un- 
 known West that he rode alone across the 
 continent to add the Western empire to 
 our country. 
 
 By men like James J. Hill, whose en- 
 thusiasm could picture towns and farms 
 where other men saw only useless prairies. 
 
 Take your son on trips; show him 
 the big men of his own time, such as the 
 President of the United States; and the 
 great sights of the world, such as Niagara 
 Falls. 
 
 Encourage him to express his enthu- 
 siasm and delight. Let him believe that 
 the world is full of wonderful things, and 
 he himself full of splendid possibilities. 
 
 He can learn self-repression in later 
 years: but enthusiasm, once lost, is lost 
 forever. 
 
 " Men are nothing," said Montaigne, 
 " until they are excited." 
 
 And Montaigne was right. 
 
 Of two boys with equal ability, the one 
 who can be excited about his work, day 
 after day and year after year, is the boy 
 that is going to win. 
 
XXII 
 
 HAVE YOU CEASED TO STUDY? 
 IF SO, GOOD NIGHT 
 
 A MAN named Brown and a man 
 named Black graduated from high 
 school and entered business in New York 
 at the same time. 
 
 Both made rapid progress. At twenty- 
 five each of them was drawing $2,500 a 
 year. 
 
 " Coming men," said their friends. 
 " If they are so far along at twenty-five, 
 where will they be at fifty? " 
 
 Black went on. At fifty he is president 
 of his company, with an income of 
 $25,000 a year. 
 
 But something happened to Brown. He 
 never fulfilled the large promise of his 
 youth: at fifty he had hardly advanced be- 
 yond his thirty mark. 
 
 What was it that happened to these two 
 
 00 
 
Have You Ceased to Study? 91 
 
 men, of equal education and so far as 
 the world could judge equal ability? 
 
 I will tell you. 
 
 Brown became satisfied. He ceased to 
 study: which means that he ceased to 
 grow. 
 
 Black has told me that when he reached 
 $5,000 a year he said to himself: " I have 
 made a good start. Nothing can stop me 
 if I keep my health and keep growing. I 
 must study, study, study: I must be the 
 best informed man on our business in the 
 United States. 1 ' 
 
 There is the difference. One stayed in 
 school: one did not. 
 
 The position you attain before you are 
 twenty-five years old is of no particular 
 credit to you. You gained that simply on 
 the education your parents gave you 
 education that cost you no sacrifice. 
 
 But the progress you make in the world 
 after twenty-five that is progress that 
 you must make by educating yourself. It 
 will be in proportion to the amount of 
 study you give to your work in excess of 
 the amount the other man gives. 
 
92 More Power to You 
 
 Analyze any successful man and you 
 will find these three great facts : 
 He had an aim: 
 
 Lord Campbell wrote to his father, as an 
 excuse for not coming home over the holi- 
 days: 
 
 " To have any chance of success, I must be 
 more steady than other men. I must be in cham- 
 bers when they are at the theater: I must study 
 when they are asleep: I must, above all, remain 
 in town when they are in the country." 
 
 He worked: 
 
 " I have worked," said Daniel Webster, " for 
 mose than twelve hours a day for fifty years." 
 
 He studied: 
 
 Vice-President Henry Wilson was born in the 
 direst poverty. 
 
 " Want sat by my cradle," he says. " I know 
 what it is to ask my mother for bread when 
 she had none to give. I left home when ten 
 years of age, and served an apprenticeship of 
 eleven years, receiving one month's schooling 
 each year, and at the end of eleven years of hard 
 work a yoke of oxen and six sheep, which brought 
 me $84." 
 
Have You Ceased to Study? 93 
 
 Yet in those eleven years of grueling 
 labor he found time to read and study 
 more than one hundred books. 
 
 Really big men check themselves up 
 each autumn, at the beginning of a new 
 business year. 
 
 " This year," they say, " I am going to 
 master one new subject. I am going to 
 pursue such and such studies, which will 
 increase my ability and earning power." 
 
 The bigger they are, the longer they 
 keep themselves in school. Gladstone 
 took up a new language after he had 
 passed seventy. 
 
 Have you left school? 
 
 As a matter of fact, did you grow men- 
 tally last year at all? What definite sub- 
 ject are you planning to devote your eve- 
 nings to this year? 
 
 " As a rule," said Disraeli, " the most 
 successful man in life is the man who has 
 the most information." 
 
 How much will you increase your stock 
 of useful information in the next business 
 year? 
 
XXIII 
 
 A MAN ASKS, u WHAT IS YOUR 
 FAVORITE BOOK? " 
 
 OF course, no man wants the same 
 book for every mood, any more 
 than he wants the same food for every 
 meal or the same medicine for every 
 disease. 
 
 But the book to which I come back 
 again and again was written several hun- 
 dred years ago. 
 
 It is called Ecclesiastes: you will find 
 it about the middle of the Bible. Fred- 
 erick the Great called it the " Book of 
 Kings," and said every monarch should re- 
 read it constantly. 
 
 He should have said every man; for 
 every man is the monarch of his own life. 
 And this is the book of life, written by a 
 king who had everything that life can give. 
 
 04 
 
What Is Your Favorite Book? 95 
 
 It is the answer to the eternal question: 
 " What's the use ?" 
 
 What profit hath a man of all his labor 
 
 Which he taketh under the sun? 
 
 One generation passeth away, 
 
 And another generation cometh: 
 
 But the earth abideth for ever. . . . 
 
 All the rivers run into the sea; 
 
 Yet the sea is not full ; 
 
 Unto the place from whence the rivers come. 
 
 Thither they return again. . . . 
 
 The eye is not satisfied with seeing, 
 
 Nor the ear filled with hearing. 
 
 The thing that hath been, 
 
 It is that which shall be; 
 
 And that which is done 
 
 Is that which shall be done: 
 
 And there is no new thing under the sun. 
 
 In other words, life is not just one thing 
 after another. It is the same thing again 
 and again. Get up, worry and work; eat> 
 lie down, sleep. What 's the use of it all? 
 
 The man who is never tempted to ask 
 that question has no imagination. 
 
 Solomon, the writer, determined to find 
 out what is worth while in life. 
 
96 More Power to You 
 
 Is wisdom the thing greatly to be de- 
 sired? He made himself the wisest man 
 in the world, and discovered what ? 
 
 In much wisdom is much grief: 
 And he that increaseth knowledge 
 Increaseth sorrow. 
 
 From wisdom he turned to mirth, only 
 to find, as an end of living, that " this also 
 is vanity." 
 
 He sought to give his heart unto wine, 
 and "to lay hold on folly": and in this 
 too there was no satisfaction. 
 
 Perhaps, then, he said to himself, per- 
 haps work is the one thing worth while. 
 To achieve something great to leave a 
 monument for posterity to wonder at. 
 
 I made me great works; I builded me houses; 
 I planted me vineyards: . . . 
 
 Then I looked on all the works that my hands 
 had wrought, and on the labor that I had 
 labored to do: and, behold, all was vanity and 
 vexation of spirit, and there was no profit under 
 the sun. 
 
 Wisdom, mirth, work, fame 
 
What Is Your Favorite Book? 97 
 
 The man who has not at some time 
 sought each one as a solution of the puzzle 
 of life has in him no spirit of adventure. 
 
 But none of them satisfied Solomon. 
 
 What, then, is the answer to the riddle? 
 What will satisfy the soul of man ? What 
 will make his life seem to have been worth 
 while when he comes to give it up ? 
 
 The answer is in the great last chapter, 
 which begins : 
 
 Remember now thy Creator 
 In the days of thy youth, 
 While the evil days come not, 
 Nor the years draw nigh, 
 When thou shalt say, 
 I have no pleasure in them. 
 
 To live straight and simply; to do a 
 little kindness as one moves along; to love 
 useful work; to raise a worthy family; 
 and to leave the world a little better 
 than you found it to do one's daily 
 duty in simple reverence this is the final 
 answer. 
 
 And the man who, having passed 
 through his periods of questioning, and 
 
98 More Power to You 
 
 made his false excursions into the varied 
 
 by-paths, does not come finally to this 
 
 true road, has failed to find real great" 
 ness. 
 
XXIV 
 
 THIS HOARY-HEADED FALSEHOOD HAS 
 LIVED LONG ENOUGH 
 
 THERE are a few hoary-headed 
 falsehoods that have lived too long. 
 
 One of them is this : 
 
 " Ninety-five per cent, of the men who 
 go into business in this country fail." 
 
 I have heard speakers get that off at 
 dinners with ponderous gravity: I have 
 seen it again and again in magazine 
 articles. 
 
 Recently a statistician has examined the 
 records of business success and failure in 
 this country, and has proved conclusively 
 that the statement is not true. 
 
 Ninety-five per cent, of the men who en- 
 ter business do not fail; and, of those who 
 do fail, a good many start over again, pay 
 up their debts, and die successful. 
 
 We have fallen into the habit of talking 
 
 99 
 
loo More Power to You 
 
 about success as if it were something ex- 
 ceptional. 
 
 In America success is not the exception 
 it is the rule. 
 
 I am continually amazed by the 
 mediocre men men of one idea, men 
 who bore you to death if you have to talk 
 with them half an hour who win out. 
 
 Five years ago a group of us used to 
 wag our heads sadly about the fate of 
 poor Horton. He was buried alive in a 
 great corporation. To be sure, we did not 
 think he deserved much of the world: he 
 had no genius, only a dogged sort of 
 loyalty. 
 
 The other day I received an engraved 
 notice that Horton had been made general 
 manager of his concern. 
 
 I picked up the latest copy of a trade 
 paper yesterday. On the cover was the 
 name of a poor stick I used to know. 
 
 We wondered, when he married, how 
 he could ever find a job that would pay 
 him enough to support a wife. 
 
 That was six or seven years ago. Yes- 
 terday in this trade paper I found a full- 
 
A Hoary-Headed Falsehood 101 
 
 length picture of him, seated in his 
 mahogany-trimmed office. He has been 
 made his company's president. 
 
 We need to get two things firmly in 
 mind about American business. 
 
 First : In a country growing as fast as 
 this, the earning power of money is very 
 great. Your banker will point out to you 
 that if, at twenty-one, you begin saving 
 money regularly, systematically, you will 
 at fifty have as large an income from your 
 savings as you now have from your salary. 
 
 In other words, any man in America 
 who will set himself doggedly at it can 
 acquire a competence. 
 
 And second: Business in America is 
 expanding so fast that any man who will 
 take the trouble to equip himself, and who 
 will work determinedly, can win a fair 
 measure of success. 
 
 Luck? you ask. Yes. 
 
 " I believe there are lucky men," said 
 Charles M. Schwab. " I have made it a 
 rule of my life to surround myself with 
 lucky men : to have no other kind in posi- 
 tions of importance that I control." 
 
IO2 More Power to You 
 
 But when you come to ask Charles M. 
 Schwab what he means by luck, you will 
 discover from his own career that he 
 means, first, hard work; second, an un^ 
 shakable conviction that he deserves to be 
 lucky and is going to be lucky. 
 
 Many men have the work without the 
 conviction. 
 
 Get that conviction to-day. 
 
 Get it firmly implanted in your mind 
 that in this country a majority of the men 
 your age, who have less brains than you, 
 are going to be successful men at fifty. 
 
 If you believe that you are going to be 
 one of that majority, if you save money 
 and work, you will win. 
 
 Don't tell me that you won't 
 
 I have never met you ; but I have met a 
 good many self-made rich men. And, 
 without knowing you at all, I tell you con- 
 fidently that you have more brains than 
 some of them have. 
 
XXV 
 
 IN APPRECIATION OF MOTHERS 
 
 A LADY asks me whether I am in favor 
 of woman suffrage. 
 
 My answer is that I am in favor of 
 mothers. 
 
 Having been a voter for a number of 
 years, and something of a student of poli- 
 tics, I am under no illusions about the 
 ballot. 
 
 It is a very clumsy weapon. Politics 
 accomplishes a minimum of progress with 
 a maximum of expense and noise. There 
 are many other avenues of influence more 
 quiet, more pleasant, and far more 
 effective. 
 
 But if the mothers of America believe 
 that the ballot will help them to widen 
 their influence; if suffrage will extend the 
 atmosphere of the home into politics in- 
 stead of extending the atmosphere of poli- 
 103 
 
104 More Power to You 
 
 tics into the home; if the ballot will help 
 women to make the working conditions of 
 girls better, enable them to lead happier, 
 bigger lives, and found finer homes 
 then I am for suffrage now and forever. 
 
 It is an interesting thing to remember 
 that the whole process of evolution has 
 been devoted to one single accomplishment 
 the development of a mother. 
 
 Nature began with the protozoa, the 
 simplest form of life : then she made the 
 worms: then the mollusks: then the am- 
 phibia: then the reptiles: then the birds: 
 and last of all, what? 
 
 The mammalia, as science calls them - 
 the mothers. 
 
 Having made the mothers, Nature has 
 never made anything since. She consid- 
 ered her task complete. 
 
 All up through the various stages of 
 life she had struggled gradually toward 
 motherhood. 
 
 In the lower stages there is no mother- 
 hood, because there is no infancy. With 
 the ephemeridae the moment of birth is 
 also the moment of death: they are born, 
 
In Appreciation of Mothers 105 
 
 live, and die all in a single instant. Not 
 much chance for motherhood there. 
 
 The land-crab marches down from her 
 mountain home to the seashore once a 
 year, lays her eggs in the sand, and 
 marches up again. (There are Femin- 
 ists, by the way, who contend that the land- 
 crab has the right idea that mother- 
 hood ought to be only an incident in the 
 woman's life, as it is in the land-crab's 
 life.) 
 
 Even with the higher animals the young 
 are dependent on the mother for only a 
 few days or weeks or months. They 
 come quickly to self-reliance: they are 
 ready almost immediately to feed them- 
 selves. 
 
 For man alone Nature reserved infancy. 
 And infancy created motherhood. 
 
 For years the child is dependent upon its 
 mother absolutely. It is weak, helpless, 
 unable to feed itself, unable to walk, an 
 easy victim to a single hour's neglect. 
 
 Out of its helplessness, unselfishness 
 was born into woman's heart; out of its 
 pain grew sympathy; out of its long years 
 
106 More Power to You 
 
 of weakness came patience and self-sacri- 
 ficing devotion. 
 
 Women, bending over the cradles of 
 their young, learned these virtues first: 
 little by little, they have passed them on to 
 men. And the world's progress is meas- 
 ured by the slow record of their growth 
 in the world the growth of a patience 
 and unselfishness and devotion and love. 
 
 Unless each new generation of women 
 gathered these golden virtues all over 
 again at the cradles of their young, the 
 world would soon forget. 
 
 The weakness of infancy is the source 
 of all social progress. " Of such is the 
 kingdom of heaven. " 
 
 We men in business get to thinking of 
 ourselves as important in the scheme of 
 things: but we are not. Harriman dies, 
 and the trains on his railroads stop for five 
 minutes and then rush on again. We men 
 can be killed by millions, and the ranks 
 close up and move forward. The world 
 can not be permanently damaged, so long 
 as it has its mothers. 
 
 " What does France need most? " they 
 
In Appreciation of Mothers 107 
 
 asked Napoleon. " Mothers,'' was his 
 reply. 
 
 " All that I am I owe to my mother," 
 Lincoln said a hundred times. 
 
 And what was true of Lincoln is true in 
 large degree of every other good man in 
 the world. 
 
 Fortunate are those men who know it. 
 
XXVI 
 
 THE LESSON OF A FAILURE 
 
 DO you want to do some reading that 
 will be intensely interesting as well 
 as profitable? Read the story of some 
 of the great failures of the world. Find 
 out what caused them. 
 
 I have recently been reading the story 
 of a colossal failure the defeat of the 
 Spanish Armada, as told by the historian 
 Froude. 
 
 The Armada was the greatest fleet the 
 medieval world had ever seen. It con- 
 sisted of 130 ships, and carried more than 
 30,000 sailors and soldiers. 
 
 It was fitted out by Philip II of Spain 
 to conquer England, and was meant to 
 overwhelm all resistance by its size. It 
 mounted more than 2,500 guns. 
 
 Yet this magnificent fleet, the mightiest 
 in the world, was met by a little fleet un- 
 108 
 
The Lesson of a Failure 109 
 
 der Lord Howard and decisively defeated. 
 
 Why? 
 
 Because the Spanish were not so brave 
 as the English? No. Because their guns 
 were inferior? Not at all. 
 
 The Spanish Armada failed because its 
 commander had no faith in himself. 
 Read this letter, which he wrote to the 
 King when he was notified of his appoint- 
 ment: 
 
 My health is bad [he wrote], and from my 
 small experience of the water I know that I am 
 always seasick. I have no money which I can 
 spare. [As a matter of fact, he was the richest 
 nobleman in Spain.] The expedition is on such 
 a scale and the object of it is of such high im- 
 portance, that the person at the head of it ought 
 to understand navigation and sea-fighting, and 
 I know nothing of either. I have not one of 
 these essential qualifications. I have no acquaint- 
 ance among the officers who are to serve under 
 me. Were I competent otherwise, I should have 
 to act in the dark by the opinion of others, and 
 I can not tell to whom I may trust. The 
 Adelantado of Castile would do better than I. 
 Our Lord would help him, for he is a good 
 
no More Power to You 
 
 Christian and has fought in naval battles. If 
 you send me, depend upon it, I shall have a bad 
 account to render of my trust. 
 
 Think of Philip II appointing a man to 
 command his fleet who would write a let- 
 ter like that! 
 
 How could such a commander expect 
 30,000 men to have any faith in him, when 
 he had absolutely none in himself? 
 
 Yet the headstrong King did send him; 
 and the result was one of the most monu- 
 mental disasters of history. 
 
 Men fail for many reasons. 
 
 Some because they overreach them- 
 selves because they have too much self- 
 confidence. 
 
 But there is another kind of failure that 
 is far worse the failure of those who, 
 as Goethe says, " make no mistakes, be- 
 cause they never wish to do anything 
 worth doing." 
 
 For goodness' sake, make mistakes. 
 
 If you are going to fail at all, let it be 
 because you believe too much in yourself. 
 
 That, at least, is a man's way to fail. 
 
XXVII 
 
 WHEN A BOY KNOWS MORE THAN 
 HIS FATHER 
 
 SOMETIMES a boy does know more 
 than his father. 
 
 Ours would have been a very different 
 history if Abe Lincoln, age sixteen or so, 
 had been guided by the wisdom of Thomas 
 Lincoln, age thirty-six or so. 
 
 " Now, Abe," we can imagine him say- 
 ing, " don't waste time readin' them books. 
 Readin' never done me any good, and 
 what was good enough for me 's good 
 enough for you." 
 
 Lincoln knew more than his father. It 
 was a divine disobedience that led him to 
 close his ears to the man who had brought 
 him into the- world, and open his heart to 
 the vision that was to help him conquer 
 the world. 
 
 in 
 
112 More Power to You 
 
 Robert Louis Stevenson knew mora 
 than his father. 
 
 That father would have shackled him to 
 engineering. He could not understand 
 the obstinacy of the boy who refused to 
 apply himself. That obstinacy saved a 
 great author from misery as a mediocre 
 engineer. It was an obstinacy that en- 
 riched the ages. 
 
 Jesus Christ knew more than His 
 father. 
 
 " Thy father and I have sought thee 
 sorrowing," said His mother to Him. 
 
 And neither His mother nor His father 
 could hear the Voice that was calling Him 
 away from them, the Voice that was to 
 find fathers and mothers and brothers and 
 sisters for Him among all those who 
 should do His will. 
 
 " Let no man despise thy youth," wrote 
 Paul to Timothy. 
 
 The boy who has not some firm convic- 
 tions and a willingness to defend them, 
 even against the arguments of those older 
 t than himself, is not likely to amount to 
 much, either as a boy or as a man. 
 
When a Boy Knows More 113 
 
 But they must be convictions, not mere 
 prejudices, not selfish impulses or passions. 
 
 I know two men who " knew more " 
 than their fathers. 
 
 One boy is the office manager of a large 
 manufacturing concern, and his salary is 
 $40 a week. 
 
 " Better go on in school," said his 
 father to him when he was seventeen 
 years old. " Better go to college: better 
 get all the education you can while you 
 have the chance. You '11 need it after- 
 wards." 
 
 But the boy quit school and went to 
 work. 
 
 He was promoted from office-boy to 
 bookkeeper, from bookkeeper to head 
 bookkeeper, from head bookkeeper to 
 office manager. 
 
 His path looked golden and long. And 
 then suddenly he stopped. 
 
 4 You see that man?" said the presi- 
 dent of his concern to me the other day. 
 ' There is a man who might have become 
 general manager of this business if he 
 had had a college education. His salary 
 
114 More Power to You 
 
 might have been $20,000 a year: instead 
 it 's $2,000. He 's reached his limit. 
 What a shame that he has n't education 
 enough to go on." 
 
 He " knew more " than his father. 
 And his boyish obstinacy is costing him 
 $18,000 a year. 
 
 " Keep yourself clean, my son," said 
 the father of another boy. " You '11 
 never regret it. And some day you '11 
 thank heaven you did." 
 
 But the boy knew more than his father. 
 He knew that every young man who is 
 worth his salt must sow his wild oats. 
 
 So he sowed right merrily. 
 
 I saw him the other day. He came to 
 me about getting a job. 
 
 He was pale, and anemic, and his hands 
 twitched, and he was forever rolling 
 cigarettes. He could not concentrate his 
 mind on one subject for even a couple of 
 minutes. 
 
 I could not give him a job: no man 
 could. God knows what will become of 
 him. He would starve if it were not for 
 the few dollars he gets from his father 
 
When a Boy Knows More 115 
 
 The father who, he thought, knew ever 
 so much less than he. 
 
 YOUTH is the mainspring of the world. 
 
 Its insurgency, its inquisitiveness, its 
 eagerness to try the untried and do the im- 
 possible, drives the world forward in 
 spite of the conservatism of age. 
 
 Fortunate are those of us who recog- 
 nize the divine importance of youth's cock- 
 sureness and conceit, and yet know how, 
 gently and appreciatively, to temper it 
 with the riper judgment of added years. 
 
XXVIII 
 
 BUILDING MATERIALS FOR CASTLES IN 
 SPAIN HAVE NOT ADVANCED AT ALL 
 
 I HAVE been reading the story of Cecil 
 Rhodes. 
 
 His life was full of adventure : it makes 
 excellent reading. 
 
 But the passage that interested me most 
 was this: 
 
 Riding to the Matoppos one day at the usual 
 four miles an hour, Rhodes had not said a word 
 for two hours, when he suddenly remarked: 
 " Well, le Sueur, there is one thing I hope for 
 you, and that is that while still a young man you 
 may never have everything you want. 
 
 " Take myself, for instance : I am not an old 
 man, and yet there is nothing I want. I have 
 been Prime Minister of the Cape, there is De 
 Beers [the diamond mines that Rhodes con- 
 trolled] and the railways, and there is a big coun- 
 try called after me, and I have more money than 
 I can spend. 
 
 116 
 
Castles in Spain 117 
 
 "You might ask, 'Wouldn't you like to be 
 Prime Minister again ? ' Well, I answer you 
 very fairly I should take it if it were offered 
 to me, but I certainly don't crave for it." 
 
 At twenty-five he was so rich that he 
 did not want for any of the things that 
 money can buy; at thirty-five he did not 
 want anything at all; at forty-nine he 
 died. 
 
 I hope I may never be guilty of writing 
 anything intended to make poor people 
 contented with their lot. 
 
 I would rather be known as one who 
 sought to inspire his readers with a divine 
 discontent. 
 
 To make men and women discontented 
 with bad health, and to show them how, 
 by hard work, they can have better 
 health. 
 
 To make them discontented with their 
 intelligence, and to stimulate them to con- 
 tinued study. 
 
 To urge them on to better jobs, better 
 homes, more money in the bank. 
 
 But it does no harm, in our striving 
 
n8 More Power to You 
 
 after these worth-while things, to pause 
 once in a while and count our blessings. 
 
 Prominent among my blessings I count 
 the joys of anticipation the delights of 
 erecting Castles in Spain. 
 
 " There would be few enterprises of 
 great labor or hazard undertaken/' says 
 Dr. Johnson, " if we did not have the 
 power of magnifying the advantages 
 which we persuade ourselves to expect 
 from them." 
 
 Divine power! Blessed gift of the 
 gods ! How largely are they to be pitied 
 who have it not. 
 
 Aladdin did not have it. Nero did not 
 have it. Anything he wanted he could 
 have at the instant when he wanted it. 
 And, far from finding joy in life, he 
 found insanity and the detestation of 
 mankind. 
 
 If you would discover the really happy 
 men of history, look for those who have 
 striven forward from one achievement to 
 another, drawn by the power of their own 
 anticipations. 
 
 They have made every day yield a 
 
Castles in Spain 119 
 
 double pleasure the joy of the present, 
 and the different but no less satisfying joys 
 provided by a wise imagination. 
 
 I believe in day-dreams. I am strong 
 for Castles in Spain. I have a whole 
 group of them myself, and am constantly 
 building improvements and making altera- 
 tions. 
 
 I do not let my work upon them inter- 
 fere with my regular job. Rather, it re- 
 inforces the job. My castles are an 
 incentive to efficiency: they give added 
 reason and purpose to the business of 
 being alive. 
 
 I trust that before I am ready to stop 
 I may have considerably more money than 
 I now have. 
 
 But I trust also that I may never have 
 too much money. I should not, for in- 
 stance, like to have as much as Mr. Rocke- 
 feller. 
 
 Indeed, I feel an almost snobbish sense 
 of superiority when I think of Mr. Rocke- 
 feller and Cecil Rhodes and Croesus and 
 all the others of that ilk. 
 
 For I have everything that they have 
 
I2O More Power to You 
 
 a roof over my head, and three meals a 
 day, and work that I like, and the love of 
 good friends. 
 
 And I have something else that they do 
 not have and can not know. 
 
 I have wants. 
 
XXIX 
 
 TOO MANY MEN STILL BELIEVE IN 
 PERPETUAL MOTION 
 
 SOME day, go into the Patent Office in 
 Washington and look at the applica- 
 tions that have been made for patents on 
 perpetual-motion machines. 
 
 You will see some very ingenious de- 
 vices. 
 
 For instance, a machine to be run by 
 the power of gravity iron balls drop- 
 ping down a chute and turning a wheel. 
 
 The inventor of that machine provided 
 for everything. He even added a brake 
 to stop the machine, in case it should run 
 so fast as to become unmanageable. 
 
 He forgot only one thing that it re- 
 quires just as much energy to lift the balls 
 up against gravity as they develop by fall- 
 ing down. 
 
 121 
 
122 More Power to You 
 
 In England, between 1617 and 1903, 
 more than six hundred separate applica- 
 tions for patents were made on perpetual- 
 motion machines. 
 
 Every single year brings its inevitable 
 crop of new applications. 
 
 They stand this unending procession 
 as a magnificent monument to the 
 unchangeableness of human nature. 
 
 A testimony to man's unquenchable be- 
 lief that somehow, somewhere, it is pos- 
 sible in this world to get something for 
 nothing. 
 
 It is a mistake to gather all these per- 
 petual-motion machines together in Wash- 
 ington, D. C. 
 
 One of them should be set up at the 
 busiest .corner of every American city. 
 And twelve should be distributed along 
 Wall Street, New York. 
 
 Every man who goes downtown to busi- 
 ness in the morning should pass a per- 
 petual-motion machine and be reminded 
 of its lesson. 
 
 There is one great law that runs 
 through all life. Many men have discov- 
 
Perpetual Motion 123 
 
 ered it: Emerson named it the Law of 
 Compensation. 
 
 Everywhere that law is operative. In 
 physics, action and reaction are equal. 
 In electricity, if the north end of a magnet 
 attracts, the south end repels. 
 
 If, as Emerson points out, a govern- 
 ment is bad, the governor's life becomes 
 unsafe. If taxes are too high, they yield 
 no revenue; if laws are too severe, juries 
 will not convict; if they are too lenient, 
 private vengeance steps in and metes out 
 justice. 
 
 Compensation everywhere. 
 
 When I started in business I used to be 
 somewhat worried by the good fortune 
 of the wicked. I saw men who worked 
 one half as hard as I and were paid twice 
 as much money. 
 
 I saw other men lift themselves into 
 the good graces of the boss on the golden 
 wings of golf and funny stories. 
 
 But I have seen the Law of Compensa- 
 tion get in too much deadly work ever to 
 concern myself any more about anybody 
 else's success. 
 
124 More Power to You 
 
 I have seen good fellows who thought 
 they were perfectly secure because they 
 called the boss by his first name, be fired 
 by the same boss, who called them by their 
 first name when he did it. 
 
 And I have seen men grow very rich 
 and I know that there are many ways in 
 which the Law of Compensation can work 
 when a man has the ambition to become 
 very rich. 
 
 It can make him pay in health. It can 
 turn his home into a counting-room. It 
 can make his children snobs and hypo- 
 crites. It can destroy his joy in simple 
 things. 
 
 Another gentleman discovered the Law 
 of Compensation even before Emerson. 
 He stated it in this form : 
 
 Be not deceived; God is not mocked: for 
 whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he 
 also reap. 
 
 There are many seeming exceptions to 
 this law; but the longer I live the more 
 sure I am that if most of the exceptions 
 were analyzed they would be found not to 
 be exceptions at all. 
 
Perpetual Motion 125 
 
 There is no such thing as perpetual mo- 
 tion. No man ever for very long gets 
 more than he deserves, without paying for 
 it something equally as valuable as he gets. 
 
 " Nothing can work me damage except 
 myself," said St. Bernard. " The harm 
 that I sustain I carry about in me, and 
 never am a real sufferer except by my own 
 fault" 
 
 " And " he might have added 
 " never a real gainer for very long, except 
 by my own hard work." 
 
XXX 
 
 YOUR OWN LITTLE BED IS YOUR 
 BEST M. D. 
 
 ONE reason for many of the world's 
 tribulations is simply lack of sleep. 
 
 Men who ought to be firm-nerved and 
 resolute are vacillating and irritable, ready 
 to believe the worst about one another, 
 quick to take offense. 
 
 Troubles that would be laughed away 
 by rested men are bungled into bigness 
 by sluggish brains. 
 
 The world is too much ruled by tired- 
 eyed men. 
 
 Look at the newspaper pictures of Mr. 
 Asquith if you would know why England 
 did not make more progress in the first 
 year of the war. His face looks as if he 
 were 7,000 hours behind in his sleep. 
 
 Study any one of the flash-lights taken 
 of our prominent men at public banquets. 
 126 
 
Your Best M. D. 127 
 
 It will help you to understand why 
 our own government is not more efficient. 
 
 To avoid overeating and alcohol and the ciga- 
 rette habit are matters of self-control [says Dr. 
 Richard Cabot in the American Magazine]. To 
 get the sleep one needs (which means all that one 
 can possibly soak into one's system in twenty-four 
 hours) often takes courage the courage to re- 
 fuse invitations, to invite ridicule, to seem odd or 
 " puritanic." I believe that more minor illnesses 
 are due to lack of sleep than to any other recog- 
 nizable factor. A person catches cold, gets lum- 
 bago, is constipated or headache-ridden because 
 his vitality is below par, his physical expenditure 
 beyond his physical income. Sleep would set him 
 square with the world; but to get sleep means 
 sacrificing the evening's fun. This he won't do, 
 and so he runs in debt, and is chronically edging 
 toward a breakdown. 
 
 A few men seem to be able to operate 
 indefinitely with very little sleep. Edison 
 is one of these. Napoleon seemed to be. 
 
 But Napoleon in his later years showed 
 plainly a loss of virility due to accumu- 
 lated fatigue. He often dropped asleep 
 in the midst of vital matters. 
 
ia8 More Power to You 
 
 Gladstone, on the other hand, consid- 
 ered regular sleep of first importance, and 
 sacrificed everything to it. 
 
 When Perseus, the last king of ancient 
 Macedonia, was confined as a prisoner at 
 Rome, his guards wished to put him out 
 of the way without leaving any marks on 
 his person or bringing down the dis- 
 pleasure of their superiors upon them. 
 
 They accomplished their purpose by 
 making it impossible for the poor prisoner 
 to get a single moment's sleep. 
 
 Napoleon sent 30,000 of his trained 
 veterans to Haiti at one time to reduce 
 the negro population, who were being led 
 by the redoubtable Toussaint L'Ouverture. 
 A few months later 5,000 of them all 
 that were left withdrew, bedraggled 
 and defeated. 
 
 What had happened to the other 
 25,000? Shot? Not many of them. 
 Toussaint did not have ammunition enough 
 to shoot very many. 
 
 No. He adopted the simpler and more 
 effective plan of starving them to death 
 for lack of sleep. Night after night, 
 
Your Best M. D. 129 
 
 when the French lay down to snatch a few 
 moments' rest, he would threaten an at- 
 tack. All night long a few of his men 
 would continue the pretense and all 
 night long the French would toss in sleep- 
 lessness. 
 
 They had faced the best men of Europe 
 and won: but they could not conquer the 
 loss of sleep. 
 
 I have seen an abject coward lie down 
 to sleep, and rise up a strong, courageous 
 man. I have seen a liar go to bed, and 
 awake ready to tell the truth and take the 
 consequences. I have seen vigorous, de- 
 termined executives step out of the same 
 beds where faltering ineffectives lay down 
 the night before. 
 
 ' Those who are habituated to full and 
 regular sleep are those who recover most 
 readily from sickness," says Dr. Benjamin 
 W. Richardson, and adds: " The obser- 
 vation of this truth led Menander to teach 
 that sleep is the natural cure of all 
 diseases." 
 
 Menander was right. We should have 
 fewer doctor bills; fewer deaths of men 
 
130 More Power to You 
 
 between forty and fifty; fewer quarrels 
 yes, even fewer wars if the nerves of 
 all men were kept toned and sweet by a 
 generous measure of sleep. 
 
 In all the world of literature there is 
 no finer line than this : 
 
 He giveth His beloved sleep. 
 
XXXI 
 
 THERE IS A GREAT DEAL OF ENCOURAGE- 
 MENT IN HISTORY FOR MOST OF US 
 
 A MOTHER writes me a very dis- 
 couraged letter. Her boy is good 
 and hard-working, but he is very backward 
 in school. 
 
 In fact, his teachers have about given 
 him up in despair. 
 
 Both the boy's father and his mother 
 stood well in their classes: they are fond 
 of books and study. They can not un- 
 derstand what is the matter with their boy. 
 
 Fortunately, there are two very en- 
 couraging things that can be said in reply 
 to a letter like this. 
 
 One of them I have just been reading in 
 a Life of Kitchener by Harold Begbie: 
 
 Nothing in Herbert Kitchener created passion- 
 ate friendships or stirred the admiration of 
 
132 More Power to You 
 
 smaller men among the cadets. He was remark- 
 able for quickness in mathematics, but in every- 
 thing else was accounted thick-headed a slow 
 coach, climbing the dull hill of duty, which has 
 no dazzle of adventure on the crest. 
 
 He managed to scramble into Woolwich: he 
 was not high on the lists; and no one thought 
 anything about him. After leaving Woolwich 
 he got his commission in the Royal Engineers; 
 and still no one thought much about him. 
 
 The boy who was dull and thick-headed 
 whom nobody thought much about 
 grew up to become the idol of an empire. 
 
 Cardinal Wiseman, as a boy, was termed 
 " dull and stupid." 
 
 Charles Darwin, who changed the whole 
 channel of thought in the scientific world, 
 was so lazy and do-less in boyhood that 
 his father predicted he would be a disgrace 
 to the family. 
 
 Heine, by his own confession, " idled 
 away his school days and was horribly 
 bored " by the instruction given him. 
 
 Wordsworth was so lazy up to the age 
 of seventeen as to be " incapable of con- 
 tinued application to prescribed work." 
 
Encouragement in History 133 
 
 Henry Ward Beecher barely succeeded 
 in graduating from Amherst, having stood 
 almost at the foot of his class; and James 
 Russell Lowell was suspended by Harvard 
 " on account of continued neglect of his 
 college duties." 
 
 First of all, to this mother of a " back- 
 ward " boy I would say: Have courage. 
 He travels in good company. Hundreds 
 of those of whom the world is most proud 
 have been almost given up in despair by 
 their parents in youth. 
 
 Only when the spark of their special in- 
 terest was struck have they shown the stuff 
 that was in them. 
 
 And the second thing that may be said 
 to such a mother is even more encourag- 
 ing. 
 
 Dullness is the rule in the world: bril- 
 liance is the exception. 
 
 Business and government and law and 
 medicine and the church are ruled by 
 mediocrities. 
 
 " I have talked with great men," said 
 Lincoln, " and I do not see how they dif- 
 fer from others." 
 
134 More Power to You 
 
 The truest bit of business philosophy 
 ever penned is contained in the story of 
 the tortoise and the hare. 
 
 Any one who watches business life care- 
 fully for any length of time is continually 
 seeing brilliant, unstable men overtaken 
 and surpassed by men with half their in- 
 herent ability, whose very mental slowness 
 has inculcated in them a mastering persist- 
 ency. 
 
 The mother of the boy who invariably 
 leads his class has reason to be concerned: 
 the mother of the dull boy might wish him 
 more cleverly endowed, but she need not 
 despair if only his slowness to learn fos- 
 ters thoroughness. 
 
 " My master whipped me very hard/' 
 says Dr. Johnson. " Without that, sir, I 
 would have done nothing." 
 
 Yet he who as a boy had to be whipped 
 to learn, set himself in later life doggedly ' 
 and unrelentingly to a task that raised him 
 high above the brilliant men of his time in 
 literary prominence, and made him a 
 citizen of the ages. 
 
XXXII 
 
 YOU SHOULD NOT WORRY 
 
 HARRIMAN died twenty years be- 
 fore his time. He was a tremen- 
 dous worker, but work did not kill him. 
 
 What killed Harriman was thinking in 
 bed. 
 
 Thinking in business hours is a construc- 
 tive process. Thinking in bed is usually 
 worry. 
 
 One reason why every man should read 
 history is in order that he may know the 
 folly of worry. 
 
 Read the History of Rome by Ferrero, 
 especially those chapters following the as- 
 sassination of Caesar. See the pitiful 
 worry of poor Cicero. 
 
 Should he follow the dictates of his 
 conscience and throw in his lot with the 
 friends of Caesar, who had shown him so 
 much kindness? 
 
 135 
 
136 More Power to You 
 
 Or should he take what seemed to be 
 the safer course, and join with Caesar's 
 assassins? 
 
 Day after day he tortured his soul with 
 worry. 
 
 How pitifully unimportant all that 
 worry seems to us, two thousand years 
 afterward. How clearly we can see that 
 if Cicero had simply followed his con- 
 science he could have spared himself all 
 that worry and probably saved both his 
 life and his honor. 
 
 A greater man than Cicero lived 
 through a far greater period of trial. 
 And he did not worry. 
 
 That man was Abraham Lincoln. 
 
 He was depressed, yes; heartsick, yes. 
 But worried? No! 
 
 When he was tempted to worry by some 
 trial that seemed overwhelming, he would 
 say to himself, " This too will pass." 
 
 By which he meant that a thousand such 
 trials had visited men in centuries gone 
 by, and had passed away. His trial was 
 important enough to make him think. 
 
You Should Not Worry 137 
 
 But no trial could be important enough to 
 make him worry. 
 
 A certain business man faced his board 
 of directors recently. He had done his 
 best but he had lost them a large sum 
 of money. 
 
 One of the directors said to him: 
 ' You don't seem to be much worried." 
 
 He replied: 
 
 " You gentlemen don't pay me any 
 money to worry about your business. You 
 pay me to do my best according to my 
 judgment and conscience. I have done 
 that. To worry would not add one penny 
 to your balance sheet." 
 
 Learn this lesson from history: In all 
 the six thousand years of history, worry 
 has accomplished nothing. 
 
 Your worry will accomplish no more e 
 
XXXIII 
 
 THOUGHTS ON LYING ON MY BACK 
 AND READING A SEED CATALOGUE 
 
 IT is snowing outside; the sky is leaden; 
 no birds sing. 
 
 The winter wind howls. 
 
 And I have been lying on my back, read- 
 ing a seed catalogue, and laughing to my- 
 self at poor old winter. 
 
 He is my hereditary enemy. The Eng- 
 lish have not watched the reports of Ger- 
 many's condition more intently than I have 
 marked the various stages of his. 
 
 They are hoping that Germany will give 
 in before next autumn. I do not have to 
 hope. I know positively that I have win- 
 ter beaten. I have even marked down on 
 my calendar the date in April when I shall 
 celebrate my victory by my annual tri- 
 umphal march. 
 
 When that date arrives, I pack my old 
 138 
 
On Reading a Seed Catalogue 139 
 
 corduroy trousers in a suit-case, with the 
 two shirts I bought from the United States 
 Army store for sixty-five cents each, my 
 old curved pipe and a can of the mixture 
 that my wife lets me use outdoors but not 
 inside the house, and set forth for my lit- 
 tle farm in Massachusetts. 
 
 People wonder why I have a farm in the 
 rockiest spot in the world, when I might 
 have selected one of the fertile counties 
 of Massachusetts or Connecticut or New 
 York. 
 
 The trouble with these fertile farms is 
 that they constantly tempt one to grow 
 something useful. One feels conscience- 
 stricken not to be trying to make the place 
 pay. 
 
 I know that my place can not possibly 
 pay. I know that nothing will grow on 
 it but pine trees and flowers. I can plant 
 all the vacant places to posies without one 
 single twinge of conscience. I have a 
 magnificent alibi for my inherent laziness. 
 Why work, I say to myself, when it 's no 
 use? Why try to fight against Nature? 
 Why fly in the face of Providence? 
 
140 More Power to You 
 
 Yet a little sleep, a little slumber, 
 A little folding of the hands to sleep. 
 
 Slumber and flowers what more can 
 one ask of a farm? 
 
 It is hard for me to understand people 
 who have even one foot of land and who 
 do not raise any flowers. 
 
 Just as a back yard full of rubbish al- 
 ways seems to me to suggest a rubbishy 
 soul, and a barren back yard a more or 
 less desolate character, so a back yard run- 
 ning over with flowers cries out that in 
 this house dwell beauty and peace and 
 content. 
 
 For myself, I have already planned out 
 just where the pansies are to be this sum- 
 mer, and the hollyhocks, and the sweet- 
 williams, and the nasturtiums, and the 
 roses. 
 
 I get right out after breakfast, and by 
 nine o'clock the sweat is pouring down 
 every degree of my longitude. I rejoice. 
 I say to my soul, " Surely, soul, every drop 
 of this sweat that rolls out of your system 
 lengthens your life." I feel my neck get- 
 
On Reading a Seed Catalogue 141 
 
 ting sunburned, and I do not care. It is 
 as if health were being poured into me 
 from the great source of all health, as 
 power is poured into a storage battery. 
 
 And Sundays, after church, I take a 
 book and lie down in the midst of my flow- 
 ers, and look at the marvel of their color- 
 ing, and wonder how it is that out of the 
 little black seeds I planted could have come 
 such yellows and reds and purples and 
 greens. 
 
 And people go by and see me stretched 
 there, and I hear them tell each other that 
 I am a fellow from New York who is sort 
 of crazy, and who must have married a 
 rich wife, as he never does any work. 
 
 And then I turn over and listen to the 
 much more satisfying conversation of the 
 flowers, who bend their heads and whis- 
 per in my ear : 
 
 Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; 
 they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet 
 I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his 
 glory was not arrayed like one of these. Where- 
 fore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which 
 to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, 
 
142 More Power to You 
 
 shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little 
 faith? . . . Take therefore no thought for the 
 morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for 
 the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is 
 the evil thereof. 
 
XXXIV 
 
 ON TAKING MY OLD FISHING-POLE 
 OUT OF WINTER STORAGE 
 
 I HAVE examined the high cost of liv- 
 ing cloud inside and out, and I have 
 been able to discover only this one single 
 patch of silver lining: 
 
 Meat prices are so high that the fish 
 which I shall catch this summer will have 
 some chance of being treated by my family 
 with respect. 
 
 No more shall I be met at the door with 
 the cruel taunt: "If you expect to eat 
 those little things, you will have to clean 
 them yourself." Instead I shall be hailed 
 as one who, in his slender way, is aiding 
 the Allies, and fighting for liberty, by help- 
 ing to feed the world. 
 
 Slinking in at the back gate with my 
 string of fish is a humiliation that I shall 
 never have to endure again. I shall march 
 H3 
 
144 More Power to You 
 
 home proudly, as the cave-man used to 
 march, bearing the fruits of his prowess 
 to his woman and cubs. 
 
 I am told by eminent doctors that since 
 1900 there has been a frightful increase 
 in the percentage of deaths among middle- 
 aged men from diseases of the heart and 
 liver and kidneys. 
 
 In the same years I have noted a fright- 
 ful increase in golf and other forms of 
 violent outdoor exercise. 
 
 I see men of forty and even younger 
 rushing off to the links for a game that 
 used to be thought safe only for hardened 
 survivors of ninety or more. 
 
 I watch them hurl themselves feverishly 
 from hole to hole, returning exhausted to 
 their club-houses or being driven home in 
 limousines, supposing they have done them- 
 selves good. 
 
 And I shake my head sadly and fondle 
 my fishing-pole. 
 
 No man ever died at forty-five from 
 over-exertion at fishing. There is not a 
 single recorded case of a man's heart 
 being adversely affected by the sight of a 
 
My Old Fishing-Pole 145 
 
 cork pulled under the surface of a pond. 
 
 If one loves life and would continue 
 long in it, let him fish. Fishermen grow 
 in wisdom as they grow in years. 
 
 As Izaak Walton hath it: 
 
 I have found it to be a real truth, that the sit- 
 ting by the river's side is not only the quietest 
 and fittest place for contemplation, but will in- 
 vite an angler to it; and this seems to be main- 
 tained by the learned Peter Du Moulin, who in 
 his discourse of the fulfilling of the Prophecies, 
 observes, that when God intended to reveal any 
 future events or high notions to his prophets, he 
 then carried them either to the deserts or the sea- 
 shore, and having so separated them from amidst 
 the press of people and business, and the cares of 
 the world, he might settle their mind in a quiet 
 
 repose, and there make them fit for revelation. 
 v 
 
 No great philosophy, as far as I know, 
 has been born on either the bleachers or 
 the links: but how many of the ideas that 
 have made men truer and nobler have 
 come out of long days on the bank, when 
 there were no bites! 
 
 Fishing is human life epitomized. 
 
 There is the water, calm, inscrutable, 
 
146 More Power to You 
 
 impenetrable, the symbol of fate, into 
 which every man casts his line. 
 
 What lies at the bottom of it for him 
 no man may see. The tiny minnow of 
 misfortune which nibbles away his bait, 
 may be followed the next moment by a 
 monstrous catch of good luck, sweeping 
 him almost off his feet. 
 
 What happened yesterday in this very 
 spot is no augury of what may take place 
 to-day. Always there is the hope that the 
 next fling of the line will bring the reward: 
 always the lure of the one more try. 
 
 And as one grows older in fishing, even 
 as one grows older in living, there comes 
 the same consoling truth that one need 
 not catch big fish in order to be happy: 
 that the spirit of the fishing is more im- 
 portant than the size of the catch: that 
 he who fishes well must fish with a calm 
 and tranquil soul, drawing his reward 
 from the joy of his fishing rather than 
 from the weight of his fish. 
 
 To one who can tune his soul to it, there 
 is consolation in fishing, and healing and 
 peace. 
 
My Old Fishing-Pole 147 
 
 After their Great Friend had gone, the 
 disciples of Jesus were desolate. Where 
 should they turn? What could they do? 
 
 And Simon Peter, seeking comfort, an- 
 swered: " I go a-fishing." 
 
 Every true fisherman in the world 
 knows exactly how he felt. 
 
XXXV 
 
 IT 'S A GOOD OLD WORLD IF YOU 
 KNOW HOW TO BREATHE 
 
 I ONCE had the misfortune to know a 
 pessimist. There was some excuse 
 for his pessimism. He was a narrow- 
 chested chap threatened with tuberculosis. 
 
 He had given himself up for lost. 
 
 But one night somebody induced him to 
 go to a singing school. 
 
 I saw him a year later. His chest was 
 filled out; there was a sparkle in his eye; 
 his laugh could be heard a city block away. 
 He was a resurrected and transformed 
 man. 
 
 What had happened to him? The sim- 
 plest thing in the world. 
 
 He had simply learned how to breathe. 
 
 The average man or woman goes 
 through life with one third of his or her 
 lung capacity totally unused. 
 148 
 
How to Breathe 149 
 
 That is why, when you run, you get a 
 " stitch in your side." The stitch is 
 caused by the unfolding of some of the 
 lung tissue that you ought to use but do 
 not. 
 
 Even when you practise deep breathing 
 exercises you probably do not fill your en- 
 tire lung capacity. At least, so Dr. Wil- 
 liam Lee Howard says in his interesting 
 book, " Breathe and Be Well." 
 
 You expand your chest: but the really 
 important part of your breathing is done 
 with your diaphragm a big flat muscle 
 that forms the floor of your chest. 
 
 And the abdominal muscles are the boys 
 you need to train if you are to get the most 
 out of your diaphragm. 
 
 Fill your lungs until you feel your stom- 
 ach muscles pressing hard against your 
 belt. 
 
 That means that your diaphragm has 
 straightened down and is massaging the 
 top of your stomach and intestines 
 helping along with the process of elimina- 
 tion. 
 
 When you breathe out, do it forcibly, 
 
150 More Power to You 
 
 with the stomach muscles: like a horse 
 snorting but without the snort 
 
 Your stomach and intestines will be 
 forced up against the diaphragm again and 
 given another massage. 
 
 Breathing in is important, but breath* 
 ing out is much more important. 
 
 A majority of the ills to which modern 
 man is victim originate in the intes- 
 tines. 
 
 And the chief of them auto-intoxica- 
 tion, constipation would disappear if 
 the stomach muscles got the exercise they 
 ought to get through deep, forcible breath- 
 ing. 
 
 Doctors have long known that massage 
 of the abdomen actually increases the num- 
 ber of red corpuscles. 
 
 Formerly it was thought that the mas- 
 sage simply located and chased into cir- 
 culation a lot of red corpuscles that were 
 lying around in blind alleys. 
 
 That is part of the explanation : here is 
 the other part. 
 
 There is secreted in the suprarenal 
 glands, as Dr. Howard explains, a sub- 
 
How to Breathe 151 
 
 stance called epinephrin, a very powerful 
 stimulant to the red corpuscles. 
 
 " Massage of the abdomen drives the 
 epinephrin into action, which forces the 
 blood-cells to take up oxygen // by 
 proper breathing you are furnishing the 
 oxygen" 
 
 Read sometime a book by a man like 
 Thoreau, or John Burroughs, or Stewart 
 Edward White one of the great open- 
 air writers. 
 
 Then, while the impression of its rich, 
 bounding optimism is still strong upon 
 you, pick up a book written by one of the 
 Russian novelists, or by one of our mod- 
 ern long-haired writers who believe that 
 realism necessarily means murder and 
 drunkenness and prostitution. 
 
 What a difference! And what makes 
 the difference? 
 
 The realist will tell you that it is be- 
 cause he thinks deeply, while the optimistic 
 writer thinks superficially. 
 
 As a matter of fact, the difference is not 
 in the brains of the two men, but in their 
 livers. 
 
152 More Power to You 
 
 It is not the depth of their thinking so 
 much as the depth of their lungs. 
 
 The corpuscles of the one are red and 
 fed with oxygen: the corpuscles of the 
 other are pale and fed with cigarette smoke 
 and germs. 
 
 " For what, after all, is Life? " asks an 
 old Sanskrit quotation. And answers : 
 
 " Life is the interval between one breath 
 and another he who only half breathes 
 only half lives." 
 
XXXVI 
 
 WM. HOHENZOLLERN, LOCK BOX I, 
 BERLIN 
 
 DEAR WlLHELM: 
 On the day I write this the Presi- 
 dent is about to ask Congress to vote that 
 you and my folks are at war. 
 
 I see by the papers that some of your 
 employees do not take this very seriously. 
 So I think I ought to write you, and tell 
 you exactly what it means. 
 
 It means I say it without rancor, Wil- 
 helm, and purely as a matter of giving you 
 the customary notice it means that your 
 services as King will no longer be required. 
 
 So far as we are concerned, you might 
 as well begin right now to clean out your 
 desk. When our government writes to 
 Berlin next time, the envelop may go to 
 the same address, but it will bear a differ- 
 ent name. 
 
 i53 
 
More Power to You 
 
 We have come to this conclusion sol- 
 emnly, Wilhelm. No nation ever went 
 into war with so little flag-waving and 
 cheering. 
 
 We are not fighting for revenge, nor for 
 territory, nor to win a " place in the sun." 
 We are going to war to win peace for the 
 world for this generation and all gen- 
 erations to come. 
 
 We have made up our minds, very so- 
 berly, that permanent peace must rest on 
 certain fixed foundations. That is the 
 reason we can not make a permanent peace 
 with you, Wilhelm. 
 
 For the first of these foundations is 
 Truth. 
 
 I am not going to chide you with the 
 " scrap of paper" incident: nor remind 
 you of all the shifty, halting explanations 
 you made when our boats were sunk. 
 Zimmermann's last effort is enough to re- 
 member. 
 
 On the very day when he was telling 
 us how friendly you are to us, he was 
 promising to help Mexico take our 
 
To Wilhelm Hohenzollern 155 
 
 Southwest away and Japan our Pacific 
 Coast. 
 
 Your people we are willing to trust, Wil- 
 helm; but we have had enough of your 
 employees. The new world peace must be 
 written on a whole sheet of paper, not a 
 scrap. 
 
 And the second foundation of the new 
 world peace, Wilhelm, is Democracy. 
 
 Kings may have been all right for the 
 little one-cylinder States of the Middle 
 Ages. But there will never be a succes- 
 sion of men strong enough and wise 
 enough to drive the big twin-six modern 
 State. 
 
 You may point to your splendid ances- 
 tor, Frederick the Great; and I admit his 
 ability. But who came after him, Wil- 
 helm? Do you remember? Frederick 
 William the Fat! 
 
 Charlemagne was pretty successful at 
 kinging: but a few years after Charle- 
 magne whom do we see? Charles the 
 Simple! 
 
 Even granting that you have governed 
 
156 More Power to You 
 
 your people more wisely than they could 
 govern themselves look at your oldest 
 boy, Wilhelm. And, honestly, just be- 
 tween ourselves, has n't the king business 
 pretty well run out ? 
 
 As long as Russia was ruled by a Czar, 
 I did not mind you so much. There 
 seemed no real hope for universal peace, 
 anyhow. 
 
 But the world is going democratic, Wil- 
 helm : and universal peace seems, at last, to 
 be within the range of possibility. For if 
 history teaches any lesson at all, it is this 
 that it is tremendously difficult to get 
 democracies into war. 
 
 When the smoke of war has cleared 
 away, and you are farming quietly some- 
 where, Wilhelm, you will begin to see 
 things more clearly. 
 
 You will begin to understand that what 
 is to blame for the loss of your job is, after 
 all, nothing less than the Christian religion 
 itself. 
 
 Nineteen hundred years ago Jesus Christ 
 went about telling men that they were 
 children of God. 
 
To Wilhelm Hohenzollern 157 
 
 If that is true, if all men are children 
 of God, then all men are the equals of 
 their kings. 
 
 And now, after nineteen hundred years, 
 Wilhelm, all men are about to find that 
 great truth out. 
 
XXXVII 
 
 GENERALLY SPEAKING, A JOB IS GOOD 
 
 IN PROPORTION TO THE AMOUNT OF 
 
 STUDY REQUIRED TO MASTER IT 
 
 YESTERDAY morning, when I rode 
 up in the elevator, the starter was 
 breaking in a new elevator-boy. 
 
 At noon, when I went out to lunch, the 
 new boy was running the car alone. He 
 had on a uniform, and was starting and 
 stopping with the confidence of a veteran. 
 
 From apprentice to professional in a 
 couple of hours. 
 
 Last week I saw a veteran motorman 
 teaching his work to a youngster. On 
 Tuesday and Wednesday the two were on 
 the front platform together: on Thurs- 
 day the new man was operating the car 
 alone. 
 
 It is a sight I have seen very often: yet 
 I never see it without a feeling of wonder. 
 158 
 
Price of a Good Job 159 
 
 What thoughts are in that young fel- 
 low's head as he receives his instructions 
 from the gray-haired veteran? 
 
 How can he fail to look forward and 
 see in the older man a picture of himself 
 twenty years from now? 
 
 He is taking up a low paid job a job 
 with no future. Twenty years from now 
 he will be just where he is to-day only 
 older, with a grasp on the job somewhat 
 less secure. His experience will count for 
 nothing, because it is experience that any 
 other man can gain in a couple of days. 
 
 He may, from time to time, force an 
 increase in his pay. But the increases will 
 not be large. Why? 
 
 Because he learned the job in two days. 
 And in any other two days the company 
 can find plenty of men who will learn 
 just as fast and take the job away from 
 him. 
 
 Recently I met in a hotel restaurant a 
 friend of mine who has just come back 
 from England after taking special work in 
 surgery under some of the greatest men in 
 the world. 
 
160 More Power to You 
 
 He is thirty-one years old: it is fourteen 
 years since he entered college. 
 
 For ten of those fourteen years he has 
 been in medical schools, in hospitals, and in 
 foreign countries studying. 
 
 Fourteen long years of hard, uninter- 
 rupted study. Years made more difficult 
 by the necessity for self-support: and filled 
 sometimes with questionings, as he has seen 
 his college class-mates moving forward to 
 their places as well paid physicians, and 
 he lingering still in school. 
 
 Yet with what result? 
 
 He has acquired a specialized training 
 such as only a few other men in New York 
 possess. 
 
 He will begin life with an income of 
 several thousands ; he will pay back his edu- 
 cational debts in a couple of years; in ten 
 years his income will be tens of thousands. 
 
 Fourteen years of his life went into the 
 mastery of his profession. But he need 
 have no fear of losing what he has gained. 
 No other man can displace him, except at 
 the cost of fourteen years of work. 
 
 I would not say one word in deprecia- 
 
Price of a Good Job 161 
 
 tion of honest toil in humble places. The 
 routine activities of life must be carried 
 on: the world has need of elevator-men 
 and motormen. And, according to the 
 loyalty and courage with which these do 
 their work, they are entitled to the world's 
 gratitude and respect. 
 
 My quarrel is not with the elevator-boy 
 who can not be anything but an elevator- 
 boy: but with the boy who might fill a 
 larger place in life if only he were not too 
 lazy to try. 
 
 I would see every young man filled, if 
 possible, with a divine discontent, which 
 would make him unwilling to be less than 
 his very best. 
 
 Every young man in the United States 
 ought to read the autobiography of Ben- 
 jamin Franklin. 
 
 See with what painful diligence he 
 taught himself to write good English. 
 Watch him, at fourteen, attacking again 
 the arithmetic that he had three times 
 failed to pass in school, and conquering it. 
 
 See Michelangelo, old and blind, still 
 being wheeled into the great galleries, that 
 
162 More Power to You 
 
 he might with his fingers trace the outlines 
 of the statuary true to his life's motto 
 to the very end: Ancora impara " Still 
 learning." 
 
 4 The gods sell anything to everybody 
 at a fair price," said Emerson. 
 
 And when he said it he epitomized the 
 philosophy of Business. 
 
 The job that the gods sell for two hours' 
 training is worth just what it costs. 
 
 Only that job is worth much which has 
 tied to it the price-tag of constant, unceas- 
 ing study and work. 
 
XXXVIII 
 
 THE TIMES THAT TRY MEN'S ' SOULS 
 
 MOST of us had our little spiritual 
 worlds in apple-pie order in July, 
 1914. 
 
 We had figured out a comfortable phi- 
 losophy for ourselves. 
 
 The world was a good place to live in : 
 it was gradually growing better. 
 
 War was a thing of the past. With 
 woman suffrage, widows' pensions, mini- 
 mum wage laws, direct primaries, national 
 prohibition, and all the rest, we were al- 
 most within sight of the millennium. 
 
 God in His Heaven, all right with the 
 world. 
 
 And then, suddenly, out of the clouds 
 there burst upon us the most terrible war 
 in history, shattering our comfortable phi- 
 losophies, rocking our faith. 
 
 We saw school-teachers, lawyers, bank- 
 
164 More Power to You 
 
 ers, and clergymen marching forth in clean 
 new uniforms cultured, civilized human 
 beings. A day or two of war, and presto ! 
 mud and blood spattered, they were tear- 
 ing at one another like savages. 
 
 I remember once talking to an ex-mis- 
 sionary who had worked in Turkey. 
 
 He had come back to this country, re- 
 signed from the ministry, and entered busi- 
 ness. 
 
 " I should like to go on believing," he 
 said; " but how can I, when I have seen 
 the helpless Armenians massacred in the 
 streets for no crime except that of being 
 Christians? How can I continue to be- 
 lieve in a God who allows His people to 
 perish because they worship Him? " 
 
 B. Fay Mills, the great evangelist, trav- 
 eled in his middle years through some of 
 the towns where he had held meetings as 
 a young man and gained thousands of 
 converts. 
 
 His converts had back-slidden : there 
 was almost nothing to show that the towns 
 had ever been swept by a great religious 
 revival. 
 
Times that Try Men's Souls 16$ 
 
 Mills, saddened, exclaimed: "If the 
 work was of God, why did not God 
 preserve it?" And he lost his hold on 
 faith. 
 
 Thousands of men have, in the quiet of 
 their own hearts, gone through a searching 
 process in the past two years. 
 
 Is all civilization, then, a sham? Is all 
 our faith in a gradual progress toward bet- 
 ter things a mere delusion? Is there no 
 God? Or, if there be a God, is He One 
 who does not care who sits idly in His 
 Heaven, watching the evil in the world blot 
 out the good? 
 
 A hundred years ago the wars of Na- 
 poleon tried men's souls as the war with 
 Germany is trying them to-day. 
 
 The finest young men of Europe bled to 
 death, the wealth of civilization spilled in 
 war to feed one man's crazed ambition. 
 
 Why were such things allowed to be? 
 
 In the search for the answer to that 
 question, men lost their faith. 
 
 But one man, Baron Stein, did not lose 
 faith. It was his influence on Prussia and 
 Austria, and later on the unstable Czar, 
 
i66 More Power to You 
 
 that did as mux:h as anything else to corn- 
 pass the downfall of Napoleon. 
 
 " His whole conduct at this period," 
 says Andrew D. White, " and indeed 
 throughout all the years of his official life, 
 was due, not merely to his hatred of the 
 oppressor of his country, but to a deep 
 faith that Napoleon's career was a chal- 
 lenge to the Almighty, and that it there- 
 fore could not continue." 
 
 Against that faith Napoleon fought in 
 vain. 
 
 We have passed through trying days: 
 we face days even more difficult. 
 
 It is no time jto lose faith. It is a time 
 to know, as Stein knew, that we fight to 
 win, because there fight against us those 
 whose whole career in this war has been 
 <c a challenge to the Almighty " *- such a 
 challenge as never has and never can finally 
 prevail. 
 
XXXIX 
 
 " THEREWITH TO BE CONTENT " 
 
 LAST night I ran across this paragraph 
 in the newly published note-books of 
 Samuel Butler : 
 
 I imagine that life can give nothing much bet- 
 ter or much worse than what I have myself ex- 
 perienced. I should say I have proved pretty 
 well the extremes of mental pleasure and pain; 
 and so I believe, each in his own way, does al- 
 most every man. 
 
 That, when you come to think about it, 
 is wholly true. Some men have more of 
 the luxuries of life than others: but those 
 experiences which are richest in pleasure 
 are the common heritage of us all. 
 
 Charles M. Schwab, at last reports, had 
 more money than I but just what can he 
 buy with it ? 
 
 Three meals a day, first of all. They 
 will doubtless cost more to serve than my 
 167 
 
i68 More Power to You 
 
 three, but if Charlie enjoys them any more 
 he is going some. 
 
 A roof over his head. It will be a 
 wider and steeper roof than mine, and 
 more rain will run off it ; but the rain that 
 runs off mine will be just as wet, and 
 underneath I shall be just as dry. 
 
 A good night's sleep if he 's lucky. 
 
 He can own more of the world's surface 
 than I. But, try as he may, he can not 
 breathe up any more of its air; he can 
 not absorb any more of its sunshine; he 
 can not bribe the ocean to give him any 
 more invigorating bath; nor the evening 
 stars to shine any brighter over his estate. 
 
 The world is full of pleasant sights and 
 sounds and smells, and his ears and nose 
 and eyes do not bring him any sensation 
 a particle more sweet than mine bring to 
 me. 
 
 The world is full of lovely women, and 
 each of us can love and marry only one. 
 
 Compared with the blessings we have in 
 common, the few paltry blessings which he 
 has and I have not are insignificant. 
 
 I have tasted these rich men's blessings. 
 
'Therewith to be Content" 169 
 
 I have driven an automobile, and sat in 
 the front row at the Winter Garden, and 
 met Teddy Roosevelt, and worn silk hose, 
 and had my finger-nails manicured. And 
 none of these luxuries is one, two, three 
 with a good night's sleep, or a swim at 
 Coney, or corned beef and cabbage when 
 one has worked all the morning in a gar 
 den and is really hungry. 
 
 The habit of contentment is formed, not 
 from without, but from within ; and it is a 
 wonderfully satisfying habit to own. 
 
 There is no duty we so much underestimate 
 [says Stevenson] as the duty of being happy. 
 By being happy, we sow anonymous benefits upon 
 the world which remain unknown even to our- 
 selves; or, when they are disclosed, surprise no- 
 body so much as the benefactor. A happy man 
 or woman is a better thing to find than a five- 
 pound note. He or she is a radiating focus of 
 good will, and their entrance into a room is as 
 though another candle had been lighted. 
 
 It is strange that contentment should not 
 be more widespread, considering how very 
 common and close at hand are the elements 
 that go into it. 
 
170 More Power to You 
 
 Work first of all. 
 
 Get work, get work be sure 't is better far 
 Than what you work to get. 
 
 Simple tastes the power of finding 
 great satisfaction in little things is an- 
 other ingredient. 
 
 To watch the corn grow or the blossoms set 
 [as Ruskin has it] ; to draw hard breath over 
 plowshare or spade; to read, to think, to love, 
 to pray: these are the things that make men 
 happy. 
 
 I would not have any man slothful: 
 there is a difference between the soul that 
 does not worry and the soul that merely 
 does not care. The man who stands still, 
 or slides back, is entitled to no respect. 
 
 But he who is wise enjoys the various 
 stages of his progress while he is passing 
 through them. St. Paul, for instance, did 
 a pretty good-sized job in the world, and 
 left a shining record. 
 
 He was forever " pressing forward to 
 his goal." Yet it was he also who wrote : 
 
 " For I have learned, in whatsoever 
 state I am, therewith to be content." 
 
XL 
 
 " THE BUSINESS ... IS UNDRAMATIC " 
 
 1LIKE Mr. Roosevelt, but I am glad he 
 is not to be allowed to raise an army. 
 
 He would unquestionably put glamour 
 and picturesqueness and glory into the war. 
 Glamour and picturesqueness and glory are 
 just the qualities that I want to see taken 
 away from war. 
 
 " The business in hand," said the Presi- 
 dent, in refusing the Roosevelt division, 
 " is undramatic" 
 
 Never before has war had that word 
 applied to it. 
 
 Always people have entered on war with 
 bands playing, and red fire, and fervid 
 speeches, and cries of " Remember the 
 Maine" or " Fifty-four Forty or Fight," 
 or " On to Canada," or " On to Paris." 
 
 They have been thrilled by the spectacle 
 of heroes leaping to their nation's call. 
 171 
 
172 More Power to You 
 
 This, so far as possible, is to be a war 
 without heroics. Men will not leap to 
 arms; they will be assigned to arms. 
 Troops will be sent quietly away in the 
 night. We shall see nothing of the fabled 
 glory of war: only the somberness of war 
 the hard, drab, unpleasant necessity. 
 
 We shall fight efficiently, but it will be 
 the fight of men who do a bitter duty with 
 solemn hearts. 
 
 And, going into war in this spirit, we 
 shall have struck a blow against war. 
 
 It is the reproach of historians [says John 
 Richard Green] that they have often turned his- 
 tory into a mere record of butchery of men by 
 their fellow men. 
 
 If that is true, if the wars of the na- 
 tions have been allowed to overshadow 
 everything else in history, it is because 
 men have been taught to believe that war 
 is glorious, and the achievements of peace 
 prosaic. 
 
 To this war we are assigning men as if 
 they were assigned to jury service or to 
 mending the State highways. We are re- 
 
An Undramatic War 173 
 
 ducing glamour to a minimum. It is a 
 business undramatic. 
 
 I have read many of the books that have 
 been written in extenuation of war. 
 
 I have read John Ruskin, who says : 
 
 The common notion that peace and the vir- 
 tues of civil life flourish together I have found 
 to be wholly untenable. Peace and the vices of 
 civil life only flourish together. 
 
 And again : 
 
 All healthy men like fighting and like the sense 
 of danger. All brave women like to hear of 
 their fighting and of their facing danger. 
 
 And still again: 
 
 No great art ever rose on earth but among a 
 nation of soldiers. 
 
 We shall doubtless hear much talk of 
 this kind in the months to come : I mean to 
 oppose such talk at every opportunity. 
 
 I believe the present war was forced 
 upon us; and that, being in it, it is our 
 duty to push it, with every ounce of energy 
 in us, to a speedy and successful end. 
 
174 More Power to You 
 
 But that war itself is either beneficial or 
 glorious I deny. 
 
 I agree with Seeley that " the Roman 
 Empire perished for lack of men." 
 
 Marius and Cinna had slain the aristo- 
 crats : Sulla had slain the democrats. And 
 when there were none left but cowards and 
 slaves to breed sons for Rome, the bar- 
 barians overwhelmed and destroyed them. 
 
 I believe that one reason England has 
 grown so great is because she has managed 
 to avoid serious losses of men in most of 
 the wars of the Continent. While Europe 
 was bleeding, her people were busy attend- 
 ing to their business at home. 
 
 The Civil War yielded an abundant 
 crop of heroes, and likewise spread its 
 hateful shadow over our public life for a 
 quarter of a century. No man could run 
 for office unless he wore a uniform: there 
 was no argument but the bloody shirt. 
 
 We want no such after-math to this war. 
 
 We shall do our greatest service to 
 America and to civilization if we fight, so 
 far as possible, without hate. If, while 
 bending every energy to winning this war, 
 
An Undramatic War 175 
 
 we keep alive in our hearts a horror of all 
 wars. 
 
 If we do not allow ourselves to forget 
 for a single instant that, through the un- 
 dramatic business of war, we are fighting 
 for the glories and the blessings of univer- 
 sal peace. 
 
XLI 
 
 SOME MEN LOSE FIVE MINUTES EARLY IN 
 LIFE AND NEVER FIND IT AFTERWARD 
 
 I LIKE to reach the station a few min- 
 utes early in the afternoon, and watch 
 the commuters running for the trains. 
 
 I have been watching them now for al- 
 most two years, and I know a lot of them 
 by sight. 
 
 There are the ladies and old men, in- 
 frequent visitors to the city, unused to busi- 
 ness, who arrive long before train-time. 
 
 There are the regular business men, who 
 arrive one minute ahead. 
 
 And just as the gate is about to slam 
 there come piling across the station, 
 breathless, coat-tails flying, the members of 
 the Just a Little Late Club. 
 
 I used to sympathize with them at first, 
 supposing them to be unfortunates who had 
 missed a car or lost their watches. 
 176 
 
Just a Little Late 177 
 
 But after almost two years of watching 
 I know different. 
 
 The membership of the Just a Little 
 Late Club does not change appreciably 
 from day to day. Night after night it is 
 the very same crowd of men who have to 
 run the last few blocks for the train. 
 
 Membership in the Just a Little Late 
 Club is not a misfortune: it is a habit. 
 And one of the most exasperating habits in 
 the world. 
 
 Napoleon said: " I beat the Austrians 
 because they did not know the value of 
 five minutes." 
 
 He beat the Austrians, but he did not 
 exterminate them. Thousands of their 
 descendants and relatives still wave still 
 with no appreciation of the value of time; 
 still a nuisance in the business world. 
 
 There should be some way of marking 
 them. They should be compelled to wear 
 a button or a distinctive uniform of some 
 sort, so that the man who makes an ap- 
 pointment with one of them might be pro- 
 tected against taking the appointment too 
 seriously. 
 
178 More Power to You 
 
 " Never be on time," said Mark Twain. 
 " You waste too much time waiting for the 
 other fellow." 
 
 He had in mind the enormous member- 
 ship of the Just a Little Late Club. 
 
 I was lunching the other day in a hotel 
 with a man who has much more money 
 than I have. And a man passed us who 
 has much more than both of us together. 
 
 He is a captain of other people's indus- 
 try as well as of his own. He began work 
 twenty years ago as an office-boy, and to- 
 day heads one of the great manufacturing 
 concerns of his city. 
 
 " A wonderful fellow," said my friend, 
 pointing to him. " Last year I had a long 
 series of negotiations with him about the 
 formation of a new company. It was 
 necessary for us to meet practically every 
 day for nearly three months. In all that 
 time he was never late but twice, and then 
 only for a few minutes. And each time 
 he sent word to me from his office telling 
 me that he would be late." 
 
 J. P. Morgan figured that every hour of 
 
Just a Little Late 179 
 
 his time was worth $1,000, and he had no 
 patience with men who were late for ap- 
 pointments, or who, when they came to see 
 him, did not give him his money's worth 
 in exchange for the time they took. 
 
 " It is not necessary for me to live," 
 said Pompey, " but it is necessary that I be 
 at a certain point at a certain time." 
 
 And Lord Nelson said: " I owe all my 
 success in life to having been a quarter of 
 an hour before my time." 
 
 I hold up the record of these famous 
 men, in the faint hope that it may do some 
 good. 
 
 And yet, the hope is very faint. The 
 habit of unpromptness is so very tenacious, 
 so difficult to break. 
 
 If I am fortunate enough to be inside 
 when the pearly gates are closed on the 
 judgment-day, I shall know what to ex- 
 pect. 
 
 Five minutes later there will be a terrific 
 battering on the gate. St. Peter may be 
 surprised, but I shall not be. 
 
 When the gates swing open again, there 
 
180 More Power to You 
 
 they will be some of the most lovable 
 and exasperating people who ever lived 
 the members of the Just a Little Late Club 
 panting, apologetic, explanatory to the 
 last 
 
XLII 
 
 THE IMMORTALITY OF INFLUENCE 
 
 I HAVE been reading a wonderfully 
 illuminating essay on Bismarck, by 
 Andrew D. White. 
 
 And I thought to myself: " It is not 
 an army that the Allies are fighting, but an 
 idea. It is the Bismarckian conception of 
 the right of kings, and the right of might 
 in the world, which must be blotted out 
 before this war is won." 
 
 Bismarck believed in the divine right of 
 kings, when even kings themselves had al- 
 most ceased to believe in it. 
 
 King William of Prussia had actually 
 signed his abdication, and was preparing 
 to flee his throne, because a majority of 
 Parliament was against him. 
 
 Bismarck made him ashamed of his 
 weakness. What right had Parliament to 
 interfere with the government? he de- 
 181 
 
182 More Power to You 
 
 manded. What right had the people to 
 question their King? Rule in spite of 
 Parliament: defy its majority: send its 
 members home. 
 
 So the King stuck to the throne: and 
 Bismarck, governing in spite of Parlia- 
 ment, made him Emperor of Germany. 
 
 It was he who transformed the German 
 people from a discordant, factious mass 
 into a compact unit, aggressively demand- 
 ing their place in the sun. 
 
 It was he who picked the quarrel with 
 Austria, not for any principle, but because 
 the boundaries of Germany must be 
 rounded out. 
 
 When the yearned-for war with France 
 seemed about to dissolve into peace, it was 
 he who altered the reading of a telegram, 
 and so goaded the French to a declaration. 
 
 It was he who first used the German 
 fleet to bully weaker peoples; he who rat- 
 tled the sword whenever German interests 
 were, even in the least degree, encroached 
 upon. 
 
 Curious mixture that he was of medieval 
 ideals and modern efficiency. Deeply re- 
 
The Immortality of Influence 183 
 
 ligious, and unsparingly brutal. Acknowl- 
 edging God, and trampling on the rights 
 of his brothers. Believing the Almighty 
 on his side, and scrupling at nothing. 
 Gentle and considerate in his family life, 
 boorish in his public manners; a scholar in 
 his library, a glutton at his table. 
 
 It has taken the blood of millions to 
 wash out of the world the continuing in- 
 fluence of Bismarck. 
 
 I know a certain college fraternity whose 
 senior delegation ten years ago had a 
 strong man in it who ought to have been its 
 leader. Instead of which, he drank, and 
 left the fraternity leaderless. 
 
 As a result, a weak group of freshmen 
 was chosen that year. 
 
 Three years later, when those freshmen 
 were about to become seniors, they, in turn, 
 chose a weak group of freshmen. 
 
 For ten years weak delegations followed 
 one another in that fraternity, the influence 
 of one bad man perpetuating itself long 
 after he himself had passed. 
 
 A hundred and fifty years ago there 
 lived a man called Martin Kalikak. 
 
184 More Power to You 
 
 He was a soldier in the Revolutionary 
 army. He married a feeble-minded 
 woman, and they had a feeble-minded 
 daughter. Of their 480 descendants, 143 
 were feeble-minded; 36 were illegitimate; 
 24 were confirmed alcoholics; 3 were epi- 
 leptics; 82 died in infancy; 3 were criminal. 
 
 For more than a hundred and fifty years 
 the evil that Martin Kalikak did has in 
 increasing volume lived after him. 
 
 I know of no more solemn thought than 
 this that no man's influence in the world 
 really ends with his life; that the most in- 
 consequential acts may reach down, from 
 generation to generation, through the ages. 
 
 Of course there is the brighter side. If 
 the evil that men do lives after them, so 
 does the good. 
 
 If sins live forever, so also do righteous 
 acts; if unkindness perpetuates itself, 
 smiles, and pleasant words, and the deed 
 done in mercy, but soon forgotten, likewise 
 are immortal. 
 
 Jefferson's idea that " governments de- 
 rive their just powers from the consent of 
 the governed," Lincoln's idea of an equal 
 
The Immortality of Influence 185 
 
 chance for every man, still live in the 
 world, side by side with Bismarck's idea. 
 The good living with the evil 
 And slowly, little by little, outliving it. 
 
XLIII 
 
 SOME DAY YOUR EMPLOYER WILL WANT TO 
 KNOW WHY YOU DO NOT PLAY MORE 
 
 WHENEVER one is hard up for a 
 subject, he can always write dis- 
 couragingly about the Fall of Rome. 
 
 He can point out with what awful speed 
 America is hastening to the same destruc- 
 tion. 
 
 Rome fell because its citizens became too 
 soft and craven to defend it. 
 
 America has been full of those who 
 cried out that we should be committing a 
 crime against civilization if we were pre- 
 pared to defend ourselves. 
 
 Rome fell because thrift was swallowed 
 up in luxury. 
 
 Of all the nations of the earth, America 
 is the least thrifty. 
 
 Rome fell because its citizens ceased 
 work and devoted themselves to play. 
 186 
 
Concerning Play 187 
 
 Rome spent millions on her sports: we 
 spend hundreds of millions. 
 
 See how perfectly the shoe fits? 
 
 But there are several important dis- 
 tinctions to be made. 
 
 One is this: 
 
 The Romans did not play : they watched 
 other men play. 
 
 America is still a nation where every- 
 body works. It is rapidly becoming a 
 nation where everybody also plays. 
 
 And that is a sign of virility : it is whole- 
 some. 
 
 Fifty years ago a man felt like apolo- 
 gizing to his boss if he played: the time is 
 coming when he will have to explain why 
 it is he does not play. 
 
 Employers want men who can bring to 
 their work more than mere dogged loyalty. 
 
 They want enthusiasm; a fresh point of 
 view; a mind that leaps and sparkles. 
 
 Play does more than build sturdy bodies 
 more than cleanse tired minds. 
 
 It builds character; self-control. 
 
 The school and the office, as Dr. Luther 
 Gulick has pointed out, are not democ- 
 
i88 More Power to You 
 
 racies: they are monarchies. You may 
 not like the rules, but you must abide by 
 them nevertheless. You may want to quit, 
 but you can't. 
 
 But play is different. 
 
 You enter it of your own volition: you 
 may withdraw when you will. If you 
 abide by the rules, it is because you control 
 yourself, not because a master controls you. 
 
 If you want to quit in a huff, there is no 
 one to prevent it. If you pout under de- 
 feat, or become arrogant with victory, you 
 are answerable to yourself alone. 
 
 In business you are controlled: in play 
 you must be self-controlled. 
 
 '* The Battle of Waterloo was won first 
 on the English cricket fields." 
 
 Many a man on Monday morning, when 
 business would not go as it should, has 
 held himself steady and won out because 
 on Saturday afternoon, when a little ball 
 would not do what it should, he lost 
 neither his temper nor his nerve. 
 
 It is possible to overdo play, of course. 
 
 Herbert Spencer was very proud of his 
 
Concerning Play 189 
 
 game of billiards. One evening he invited 
 a strange young man to play. 
 
 The young man beat him three games 
 straight. At the end of the third game 
 Herbert Spencer put up his cue and said: 
 4 Young man, to play a good game of bil- 
 liards is the accomplishment of a gentle- 
 man: to play too good a game of billiards 
 is the sign of a misspent youth." 
 
 But most of us are in no danger of over- 
 doing play. 
 
 We are much more likely to go pound- 
 ing along, saying to ourselves: 'To- 
 morrow, when I have accumulated my pile, 
 I will retire from business and play." 
 
 And some day they will carve over us: 
 " He was going to retire to-morrow." 
 
 Don't wait for to-morrow. Retire 
 from business this afternoon at four 
 o'clock. 
 
 By to-morrow morning at nine you '11 be 
 back at your desk, keen as a fighting cock. 
 
XLIV 
 
 A LETTER TO A YOUNG MAN WHO WANTS 
 A BETTER JOB 
 
 YOU ask me how you can get a better 
 job. 
 
 My answer is that you can't. 
 
 All over the country are millions of 
 young men who, in a vague sort of way, 
 want a better job: and here and there 
 among them are the worth-while few who 
 want the better job. 
 
 And the millions wonder why the few 
 move on, while they stand stationary year 
 after year. 
 
 You must, first of all, pick out the better 
 job some particular job that is better 
 than yours. Then train your guns on that 
 and capture it. 
 
 You tell me that you are a bookkeeper 
 and that you earn $15 a week. 
 190 
 
A Better Job 191 
 
 I know certified public accountants who 
 earn $10,000 a year and more. 
 
 If I were a bookkeeper earning $15 a 
 week, I should go out for a public account- 
 ant's job. I might die on the road, but 
 whoever found my body would notice that 
 my face was toward the summit. 
 
 Second: You can never make anybody 
 pay you more money until you have more 
 to sell. 
 
 I can advertise in a newspaper to-mor- 
 row morning and have a hundred bright 
 young men here at eight o'clock. Each 
 one will have just as much to offer me as 
 you have: the same two years of high 
 school; the same experience in keeping 
 books ; the same good record. Every one 
 of them will be willing to work for $15, 
 and some of them for $12. 
 
 The only way you can lift yourself out 
 of that $15 class is by giving yourself an 
 equipment that the rest of the fellows in 
 that class do not have. In other words, 
 by study by education by specialized 
 training. 
 
 Third: When you have picked out the 
 
192 More Power to You 
 
 one particular better job that you want, 
 when you have fitted yourself for it, then 
 be careful of your letter of application. 
 
 If Judge Gary or Charles M. Schwab 
 applied for a job by letter to-morrow, they 
 would get it in almost any big business in 
 this country, even if their applications were 
 written in lead pencil on a sheet of butcher 
 paper. 
 
 Their personalities and abilities are 
 known. Yours are not. Your letter is 
 your representative. For heaven's sake, 
 if you have in you any spark of originality 
 that other men have not, make your letter 
 a tiny bit different from the other letters 
 that the other men will write. 
 
 Go downtown and pick out a shade of 
 paper and a size of envelop that will be 
 different. Make your letter stick out 
 among the hundred letters that your pros- 
 pective employer will receive, so that it 
 will be the first letter he opens. When he 
 does open it, be sure he finds it typewritten, 
 even if you have to spend money you can 
 ill afford to spend. 
 
 Fourth: I receive many letters of ap- 
 
A Better Job 193 
 
 plication. In one form or another, they 
 usually say something like this: " I want 
 a better job: I am thinking of getting 
 married " ; or, " I have a mother to sup- 
 port " ; or, " I have been three years in this 
 place without a raise and see no future." 
 
 All of which interests me not at all. 
 
 For when it comes to spending my em- 
 ployer's money I am fundamentally selfish. 
 
 Much as I should like to give jobs to all 
 the young men who have mothers to sup- 
 port, or who see no future where they are, 
 I can not do it. 
 
 The only letter that I read with interest 
 is the letter of the young man who has 
 studied my business and who points out to 
 me how I can make more money for my 
 employer by employing him. 
 
 One of the biggest business men I know 
 said to me: "I have private secretaries 
 to relieve me of many details; but one de- 
 tail I never delegate: 
 
 " I make it a rule to see all applicants 
 for positions" 
 
 Why did he have that rule? 
 
 Because his business, and every business 
 
194 More Power to You 
 
 in America, is built on youth, enthusiasm, 
 and ideas. And any applicant may bring 
 him an idea that would be worth thousands 
 of dollars. 
 
 Ideas are the keys that unlock big men's 
 doors. 
 
 When you have fitted yourself for the 
 better job, let your letter of application 
 contain an Idea. 
 
XLV 
 
 IP YOU WERE TO WRITE YOUR OWN EPI- 
 TAPH, WHAT COULD YOU HONESTLY SAY? 
 
 IN Ashland, Ohio, a monument was 
 erected a little while ago bearing this 
 inscription : 
 
 In Memory of 
 Ashland County's Pioneers 
 Including Johnny Appleseed 
 
 JOHN CHAPMAN 
 
 An Ohio Hero, Patron Saint 
 
 Of American Orchards 
 
 and 
 Soldier of Peace. 
 
 Who was John Chapman? 
 
 A simple man like you and me. Born 
 in New England, he roamed to Ohio. He 
 held no public office; he accumulated no 
 fortune. 
 
 But everywhere he went he carried a 
 pocketful of apple-seeds. He dropped 
 195 
 
196 More Power to You 
 
 them into the rich Ohio soil, along the 
 roadways. At his home he reared one 
 apple orchard after another, giving the 
 young trees freely to settlers. 
 
 And to-day, in a hundred widely scat- 
 tered sections of Ohio, the roads are 
 shaded with fruit trees and the children 
 eat of the fruit because Johnny Apple- 
 seed once passed that way. 
 
 Have you ever heard the legend of how 
 the Mosque of St. Sophia got its name ? 
 
 The Emperor Justinian built it. It 
 was to be his monument, to bear his name 
 forever. 
 
 Every bit of the work was paid for by 
 him; every operation he supervised. He 
 would not divide the credit for it with any 
 other living soul, though there were many 
 others who would gladly have contributed. 
 It was to be his, and his alone. 
 
 At length, in the incredibly short period 
 of five years and ten months, it was 
 finished. All was ready for the unveiling 
 of the tablet that was to bear the Em- 
 peror's name as builder to the end of time. 
 
 The crowds gathered. The Emperor 
 
Your Own Epitaph 197 
 
 stepped forward and tore away the veil 
 then drew back again, aghast. 
 
 For on the tablet where he had ordered 
 his name inscribed was found the name 
 Sophia. 
 
 Who was this Sophia? 
 
 The Emperor ordered the city searched. 
 Let them discover the culprit whose name 
 had displaced his. 
 
 The second day they brought to him a 
 poor, cringing washerwoman, who lived in 
 a hovel near the wharves. Trembling and 
 tearful, she confessed. 
 
 She knew the decree that no one should 
 contribute anything to the building of the 
 temple but Justinian alone. Nevertheless 
 she had wanted to have a little share in 
 the rearing of the building to her God. 
 
 Having nothing to give, she had torn 
 the straw from her mattress, and held it 
 out to the weary horses as they passed, 
 drawing their heavy loads of stone to the 
 hilltop. 
 
 And the angels, witnessing her gift, had 
 erased the name of Justinian and carved 
 the name " Sophia " instead. 
 
198 More Power to You 
 
 I like to think of Johnny Appleseed and 
 St. Sophia. I like to believe that there 
 never lived a man or a woman so humble 
 but that he or she could contribute some- 
 thing permanent to the world, if they 
 would. 
 
 What could be written over you if you 
 were dead to-morrow? 
 
 Could it be said: 
 
 Here lies a man who established a clean 
 grocery store and left it as his monument. 
 
 Or: 
 
 Here lies a woman who gave three sons to the 
 world, all God-fearing, all with a little better 
 start than she had. 
 
 Or would it be written : 
 
 Here lies John Jones, who held a succession 
 of jobs, all of which he hated, and who died 
 from heart failure while hurrying away from his 
 work. 
 
 Will there be some one good thing left 
 in the world when you are gone a cre- 
 ation of your love? 
 
 What will it be? 
 
XLVI 
 
 IP YOU WANT TO KNOW HOW MUCH YOU 
 
 OUGHT TO GET, FIND OUT HOW 
 
 MUCH YOU HAVE TO GIVE 
 
 A GREAT word has been added to the 
 vocabulary of Business in recent 
 years. 
 
 It is being overworked, as all new 
 words are. We shall doubtless become 
 very tired of it, as we have become tired 
 of " psychology " and " efficiency " and 
 " merchandising " and other overworked 
 words. 
 
 But the idea that the word represents 
 has come to stay. 
 
 The word itself is SERVICE. 
 
 I was in the office of the general mana- 
 ger of a great corporation recently. The 
 business he manages has departments in 
 almost every large city. It is a business 
 199 
 
aoo More Power to You 
 
 that has unquestionably been of enormous 
 benefit to the people of America, and has 
 incidentally made millions for its 
 founder. 
 
 The general manager read me a letter 
 from the " Old Man." I obtained per- 
 mission to copy four paragraphs. 
 
 Here they are. What do you think of 
 them as the confession of faith of a mil- 
 lionaire? 
 
 I can honestly say now that I have never 
 worked at the business for profit as the main 
 motive. % 
 
 My profits have been incidental, though ab- 
 solutely necessary. 
 
 I have always conducted my business solely 
 for the purpose of what I considered " public 
 service." 
 
 Had I conducted my business for the purpose 
 of making profit, I might have made as much 
 money as I have made, although I doubt it. I 
 am sure that I would not have made any more. 
 / am pretty sure that I would not have made 
 a quarter as much. 
 
 I know a man who has grown rich by 
 building and operating great hotels. 
 
How Much You Ought to Get 201 
 
 I slept in one of his hotels the other 
 night, and in the morning I dropped into 
 my pocket a copy of his book of instruc- 
 tions to his employees. Here are some 
 quotations from that book: 
 
 A hotel has just one thing to sell. 
 
 That one thing is Service. 
 
 The Hotel that sells Poor Service is a Poor 
 Hotel. 
 
 The Hotel that sells Good Service is a Good 
 Hotel. 
 
 It is the object of this Hotel to sell its guests 
 the very best service in the world. 
 
 The Service of a Hotel is not a thing sup- 
 plied by any single individual. It is not Special 
 Attention to any one guest. 
 
 Hotel Service means the limit of Courteous, 
 Efficient Attention from Each Particular Em- 
 ployee to Each Particular Guest. 
 
 This is the kind of service the Guest pays for 
 when he pays his bill whether it is for $2 or 
 $20 a day. It is the kind of Service^he is en- 
 titled to, and he need not and should not pay 
 any more. 
 
 It is interesting to note how, in the 
 course of time, the practical men of the 
 
2O2 More Power to You 
 
 world finally come around to the point of 
 view of the world's dreamers. 
 
 Napoleon, the practical man, refused to 
 see the dreamer Fulton, with his absurd 
 claim that he could make a boat run against 
 tide and wind. 
 
 But to-day all practical men pay tacit 
 tribute to that dreamer. 
 
 For two thousand years practical men 
 have looked with a superior sort of tol- 
 erance on the teachings of a certain Car- 
 penter of Nazareth. What He said was 
 very good, of course, but utterly imprac- 
 tical. 
 
 Yet the service idea, which is the big 
 new idea in modern business, was first dis- 
 covered and announced by that Carpenter : 
 
 Whosoever will be great among you, let him 
 be your minister; and whosoever will be chief 
 among you, let him be your servant. 
 
 It is the one solid, practical rule for 
 building a business or a business career. 
 
 If you want to know how far you will 
 go in business, take account of stock : find 
 
How Much You Ought to Get 203 
 
 out how much service you are equipped to 
 perform. 
 
 If you want to figure what you are 
 likely to get, first figure what you have 
 to give. 
 
XLVII 
 
 DOES YOUR RESPECT FOR FOLKS GROW 
 GREATER OR LESS AS YOU GO ALONG? 
 
 1HAVE made no change in the follow- 
 ing letter except to erase the writer's 
 name. Read it all the way through : 
 
 It is not an easy thing to put into writing 
 an experience that lies as close to one's heart as 
 this one does to mine. But if its fortunate out- 
 come will bring cheer to some other similarly 
 situated, I shall be glad that I wrote to you 
 about it. 
 
 Two winters ago my doctor broke the news 
 to me that I was tubercular. One lung and both 
 kidneys were affected. I had to give up my po- 
 sition at once and put myself absolutely under 
 the doctor's care. 
 
 I was engaged to be married at the time. My 
 doctor told me that marriage was out of the 
 question. I decided to disregard his advice on 
 this point, feeling that I could never give up the 
 man I loved. My fiance felt the same way. He 
 204 
 
Your Respect for Folks 205 
 
 wanted more than ever to be my helpmate, and 
 urged me not to obey the doctor in this one 
 matter. 
 
 We consoled ourselves* a bitter consolation 
 with the thought that perhaps we would never 
 have any children. Even if we had, they would 
 not necessarily inherit tuberculosis. 
 
 Then, as I lay thinking, there came to me this 
 thought: Suppose that I should have a baby 
 after all, and that some day that child should be 
 told, " You have tuberculosis." Not for any- 
 thing in the world would I want a child of mine 
 to go through that first terrible agony of despair 
 that I had gone through. 
 
 The next day I told my fiance my decision. 
 Oh, it was hard, Mr. Barton. We separated. 
 We have not seen each other since. I dare not 
 trust the strength of my will too far. 
 
 Of course I thought of death, the speedier the 
 better. I contemplated every method of suicide, 
 from sitting on the third rail to breakfasting on 
 bichloride. But with returning spring there 
 came the renewed desire for life. 
 
 I followed the doctor's instructions to the let- 
 ter milk and eggs, fresh air and sunshine, and 
 absolute rest. By the end of the year my lung 
 was entirely cured. The kidneys were better, 
 but they could probably never be entirely well. 
 
206 More Power to You 
 
 Through the efforts of a friend I obtained a 
 half-time position in a hospital, which leaves my 
 afternoons free for the rest that I still must take. 
 So for the present I am self-supporting, obtain 
 free medical treatment, and am slowly but surely 
 regaining health. 
 
 Best of all, I am cheerful; I am happy in my 
 work, which is largely among children. And I 
 am full of plans for the future. 
 
 Some day, if God is willing, I ana going to 
 have a bungalow in the country- a bungalow 
 that has a flower garden in front of it and a 
 vegetable garden in back. And then I am going 
 to adopt a baby. Not a hundred per cent, bet- 
 ter baby, but a little tubercular girl, Mr. Barton, 
 and give her a fair chance in life, even as has been 
 given me. 
 
 The heartache is still there, of course. I sup- 
 pose it always will be. But if I had to go 
 through it all again, I am not sure that I would 
 not choose the same way. 
 
 What feelings are stirred up in you as 
 you read that letter? 
 
 Merely a momentary irritation that a 
 stranger should waste your time in telling 
 you her troubles? 
 
Your Respect for Folks 207 
 
 Or does it start you to thinking how 
 much of patience and fidelity and quiet 
 heroism is hidden away under every com- 
 monplace life? 
 
 There is a verse in the Bible that reads: 
 ' What is man, that thou art mindful of 
 him? and the son of man, that thou visitest 
 him?" 
 
 Some people read that verse to mean: 
 ' What can you see in a poor creature like 
 man, that should make you pay any atten- 
 tion to him? " 
 
 And others read: " What a wonderful 
 thing is man, that even God Himself likes 
 to visit and talk to him." 
 
 Which interpretation is yours? 
 
 As you grow older, do you find yourself 
 becoming less patient with your fellow 
 men and women, more critical of their 
 faults, more cynical about their goodness, 
 more inclined to see them as only a higher 
 form of animal, living a meaningless life, 
 dying a cowardly death ? 
 
 Or do you marvel more and more at the 
 patience with which they bear their bur- 
 dens, the unfaltering faith that makes 
 
208 More Power to You 
 
 them continue to hope for the best, even 
 after a life-time of disappointments; the 
 unshaken fidelity that fixes their eyes on 
 a heaven out of which has issued so little 
 pleasure mingled with so much of suffer- 
 ing? 
 
 I have sometimes thought that one 
 measure of success is a man's increasing 
 power to find cause for reverence in the 
 lives of his fellow men. 
 
 Judged by that standard, have you 
 passed the peak of your success, or are 
 you climbing toward it year by year? 
 
XLVIII 
 
 OF COURSE THERE IS A SANTA CLAUS 
 
 Dear Sir: Do you really think there is 
 a Santa Claus? My mother sa)'s there is. 
 A girl in the seventh grade told me there 
 is n't any Santa Claus. Do you really think 
 there is any Santa Claus? 
 
 MARION THAYER (age seven). 
 
 DO I think there is a Santa Claus? 
 Why, Marion, I know it. 
 I have had four times as many Christ- 
 mases as you, and every single Christmas 
 Santa Claus has remembered me. Do you 
 think I would be ungrateful to him now 
 by pretending to believe any stories that 
 any girl in the seventh grade might tell? 
 Of course I have never seen Santa Claus. 
 I don't want to see him. It would take 
 all the fun away from Christmas if I ever 
 did. 
 
 209 
 
2io More Power to You 
 
 But just because I never saw him 
 what does that signify? 
 
 I never saw electricity. But I can turn 
 a button and the light goes on, and I 
 know electricity is there, even if I don't 
 see it. 
 
 I know that girl in the seventh grade, or 
 at least I know her kind. And I don't like 
 her, Marion. I advise you to keep away 
 from her. 
 
 She will meet you some day, when you 
 are engaged to be married. And you will 
 tell her that your boy is the most wonder- 
 ful boy in the world, and that you know 
 you are going to be happy forever and 
 ever. 
 
 And she will pull a long face and an- 
 swer: " Don't be too sure. You '11 feel 
 different after you have been married a 
 few years." 
 
 But you won't feel different, Marion. 
 It 's only folks that don't believe in Santa 
 Claus that feel different. You and I 
 we '11 just go on feeling the same happy 
 way as long as we live. 
 
 And some time you '11 meet that girl 
 
There Is a Santa Glaus 211 
 
 who has lost her faith in Santa Claus, and 
 you '11 find that a terrible thing has hap- 
 pened to her. She has lost her faith in 
 women and in men. 
 
 It seems impossible, doesn't it? 
 
 You and I know that women are pure 
 and clean and sweet, just like your mother 
 all except witches, of course, and bad 
 fairies. 
 
 And men are strong and handsome and 
 noble, like your father all except pirates 
 and robbers that live on desert islands. 
 
 We love women and men, you and I, 
 because we know how good they are, and 
 how kind, in spite of the troubles they 
 have. 
 
 But some of the girls who don't believe 
 in Santa Claus grow up and don't believe 
 in men and women, either. 
 
 And sometimes sometimes those girls 
 grow up and don't even believe in angels 
 and in God. 
 
 I don't see how they dare to go to bed 
 in the dark. 
 
 Your mother is right, Marion, and 
 don't you ever doubt it. And I 'm right. 
 
212 More Power to You 
 
 And that girl in the seventh grade is 
 wrong. 
 
 The best things in your whole life 
 love, and faith, and friendship, and trust, 
 and God are things you never see. 
 
 But they 're the only things worth be- 
 lieving in. Life does n't mean very much 
 when they begin to disappear. 
 
 You and I won't let them begin to dis- 
 appear. Not one of them. Not even 
 good old Santa Claus. 
 
 I hang up my stocking every year, 
 Marion. All sensible people do. It 's 
 only the foolish ones, who say " seeing 's 
 believing," that don't. 
 
 And they 're awfully foolish, Marion. 
 I would n't give anything for the things I 
 can see in life compared with the things 
 that I never can see. 
 
XLIX 
 
 " I DREAD THE END OF THE YEAR " 
 
 1 T DREAD to come to the end of the 
 1 year," said a friend to me recently; 
 " it makes me realize I am growing old." 
 
 That suggests a question: When is a 
 man old? 
 
 In Shakespeare's time a man was old at 
 forty, and often, because of the gay life, 
 invalided long before that. 
 
 Sir Walter Scott at fifty-five bemoaned 
 the fact that he was an old man. 
 
 Montaigne retired to his castle at 
 thirty-eight to spend his declining years in 
 peace and study. 
 
 Dr. Samuel Johnson once remarked 
 that at thirty-five a man had reached his 
 peak, and after that his course must be 
 downward. 
 
 Physiologists tell us that in all mam- 
 mals except man the period of life is five 
 213 
 
214 More Power to You 
 
 times the period of growth. A dog gets 
 its full growth in two years, and lives ten; 
 a horse in five years, and lives twenty- 
 five. On this basis a man should live 
 from one hundred to one hundred and 
 fifty years. 
 
 Why were these three men Scott, 
 Montaigne, and Johnson old while still 
 comparatively young? 
 
 The answer is, because they felt old 
 and acted old. 
 
 William James, the great psychologist, 
 said that most men are " old fogies at 
 twenty-five." 
 
 He was right. Most men at twenty- 
 five are satisfied with their jobs. They 
 have accumulated the little stock of preju- 
 dices that they call their " principles/' and 
 closed their minds to all new ideas: they 
 have ceased to grow. 
 
 The minute a man ceases to grow, no 
 matter what his years, that minute he 
 begins to be old. 
 
 On the other hand, the really great man 
 never grows old. 
 
 Bismarck, who died at eighty-three, did 
 
" / Dread the End of the Year " 215 
 
 his greatest work after he was seventy. 
 
 Titian, the celebrated painter, lived to 
 be ninety-nine, painting right up to the 
 end. 
 
 Goethe passed out at eighty-three, and 
 finished his " Faust " only a few years 
 earlier; Gladstone took up a new language 
 when he was seventy; Commodore Van- 
 derbilt increased the mileage of his lines 
 from 1 20 to more than 10,000 between 
 his seventieth birthday and his death at 
 eighty-three. 
 
 Laplace, the astronomer, was still at 
 work when death caught up with him at 
 seventy-eight. He died crying, " What 
 we know is nothing: what we do not know 
 is immense. " 
 
 And there you have the real answer to 
 the question, When is a man old? 
 
 Laplace at seventy-eight died young. 
 He was still unsatisfied, still growing, still 
 sure that he had a lot to learn. 
 
 As long as a man can keep himself in 
 that attitude of mind, as long as he can 
 look back on every year and say, " I 
 grew/' he is still young. 
 
216 More Power to You 
 
 The minute he ceases to grow, the day 
 he says to himself, " I know all that I need 
 to know " that day youth stops. He 
 may be twenty-five or seventy-five, it makes 
 no difference. On that day he begins to 
 be old. 
 
" IF A MAN DIE, SHALL HE 
 LIVE AGAIN? " 
 
 IT is the age-old question, asked at the 
 side of every bier asked by all the 
 Christian world at Easter-time. 
 
 And what can one say in answer to it? 
 
 Every one of us is taught in childhood 
 to believe in God and an after life. 
 
 I remember, when I was beginning to 
 read and think a little, it occurred to me 
 that, though I had been told there is a 
 future life, nobody had ever given me any 
 proof. 
 
 So industriously I set to work in the 
 public library to read the works of the 
 greatest men who ever lived and find 
 proofs for myself. 
 
 And I remember how, slowly at first, 
 then faster and faster, I turned through 
 one wise man's book after another. 
 217 
 
21 8 More Power to You 
 
 " Surely this one will know/' I said to my- 
 self; " or this one; or this." 
 
 And suddenly the bitter truth flashed 
 over me. They did not know, any more 
 than I did. All their proofs were not 
 proofs at all. In all history there had 
 never lived a man wise enough to prove 
 immortality. Almost everybody believed: 
 nobody really knew. 
 
 It was a discovery that left me helpless 
 at first: then slowly out of my helplessness 
 I began to evolve a little system of my 
 own. 
 
 In the first place, it seems to me easier 
 to believe than to disbelieve. 
 
 " The world just happened," say some 
 men. " It created itself through the 
 operation of natural laws." 
 
 And that sounds very scientific and sat- 
 isfactory. 
 
 But who or what established the natural 
 laws and set them to operating? 
 
 When you can dump a load of bricks 
 on a corner lot, and let me watch them ar- 
 range themselves into a house when 
 you can empty a handful of springs and 
 
"If a Man Die" 219 
 
 wheels and screws on my desk, and let me 
 see them gather themselves together into 
 a watch it will be easier for me to be- 
 lieve that all these thousands of worlds 
 could have been created, balanced, and set 
 to moving in their separate orbits, all with- 
 out any directing intelligence at all. 
 
 Moreover, if there is no intelligence in 
 the universe, then the universe has created 
 something greater than itself for it has 
 created you and me. 
 
 Is it easy to believe that a universe with- 
 out personality could have created us who 
 have personality? 
 
 Is n't it easier to believe that our per- 
 sonality is a little part of the great per- 
 vading Personality that has created and 
 now permeates the universe? 
 
 And if there be a Personality in the uni- 
 verse a God what kind of a God is 
 He? 
 
 He must be at least as good as you or 
 I. He could not have made us better 
 than Himself. The worse can not create 
 the better. 
 
 And if He is a good God, is it reason- 
 
220 More Power to You 
 
 able to suppose that He would have 
 planted in human hearts this unquenchable 
 yearning for immortality, and left that 
 yearning unsatisfied? 
 
 You and I would not have done so. 
 
 Go where you will, from the most sav- 
 age race to the most cultured, you find that 
 same instinctive assurance that death is not 
 the end. Would a good God plant that 
 assurance in his creatures merely to mock 
 them? 
 
 Without immortality the world is an 
 answerless riddle. We are born; we 
 struggle up through slow years of develop- 
 ment; and just as we have reached our 
 highest point of usefulness we are cut 
 off. 
 
 What inefficiency ! What waste ! 
 
 It is hard for me to believe in a universe 
 that made itself, and that ruthlessly casts 
 away its most precious possession hu- 
 man personality. 
 
 It is easier to believe that back of the 
 universe is a guiding Intelligence, of whose 
 personality my own is a tiny spark that 
 shall not go out while He lives. 
 
"If a Man Die" 221 
 
 If I can not prove that this is so, neither 
 can any one prove to me that it is not so. 
 
 And, until some one can disprove it, I 
 find it easier, more helpful, more efficient, 
 to believe. 
 
 THE END 
 
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