Strategy of Life 
 
 o* 
 
 ARTHUR PORRITT 
 
 rnia 
 il
 
 The Strategy of Life 
 
 UJTIV. OF CALIF. LIBRARY, LOS ANGELSS
 
 The Strategy of Life 
 
 A Book for Boys and Young Men 
 
 By 
 ARTHUR PORRITT 
 
 With a Foreword by 
 DR. J. H. JOWETT 
 
 "There is no art so difficult yet so lovely as living." 
 
 JOHN WATSON. 
 
 NEW YORK CHICAGO 
 
 Fleming H. Revell Company 
 
 LONDON AND EDINBURGH
 
 Copyright, 1920, by 
 FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 
 
 New York: 158 Fifth Avem 
 Chicago': 17 North Wabash Ave. 
 London : 21 Paternoster Square 
 Edinburgh: 75 Princes Street
 
 To 
 
 My Son ROY 
 
 In whom were he not lying in " some 
 
 corner of a foreign field" this little 
 
 book would have found at least one 
 
 appreciative reader 
 
 2131953
 
 s
 
 Foreword 
 
 I WISH that this little book might be placed in 
 the hands of every boy and young fellow 
 throughout the Anglo-Saxon world. Here we 
 have practical guidance in the essential secrets which 
 lie behind and beneath all Social Reconstruction: 
 even the fashioning of character and the nourishing 
 of life. I once wrote to Henry Drummond inviting 
 him to speak to my congregation in Newcastle-on- 
 Tyne. He very graciously declined, and he did so 
 for this very characteristic reason : " I do not know 
 the species." Drummond knew University men, he 
 knew them through and through; he professed he 
 had no intimacy with the mixed congregation. Mr. 
 Porritt knows the species when he seeks to be the 
 friendly counsellor of boys and young men. He is 
 not a spectator, looking upon their life from the out- 
 side. He knows it from within. His work among 
 them, and his friendship with them, has made him 
 familiar with their ground. He looks out of their 
 windows, and he sees their world, and he sets the 
 noblest ideals upon their horizon, luring them in pur- 
 suit of the better and the best. He champions an 
 ample and symmetrical life. He opens doors on 
 
 7
 
 8 FOREWORD 
 
 every side, and every avenue is lit up with the light 
 of the supreme relationship to Christ. There is a 
 central Altar and everything looks towards it, but 
 " the bells upon the horses " are also holiness to the 
 Lord. His spiritual world is a wide realm and its 
 sanctities embrace all the activities, of body, mind, 
 and soul. It is a healthy and wholesome book, and 
 I heartily hope it will be given to tens of thousands 
 of boys throughout the English-speaking world. 
 
 J. H. JOWETT. 
 Westminster Chapel, 
 
 London.
 
 Contents 
 
 I. MAKING A LIFE 
 
 II. THREE IDEALS . 
 
 III. CHARACTER 
 
 IV. JESUS AS HERO . 
 
 V. RELIGION IN ACTION . 
 
 VI. A MAN'S MAN . 
 
 VII. THE MARKS OF A GENTLEMAN 
 
 VIII. HABITS AND VICES . 
 
 IX. PURITY AND CHIVALRY 
 
 X. FRIENDSHIPS 
 
 XL CHOOSING A CAREER . 
 
 XII. BUSINESS APTITUDE . 
 
 XIII. PERSEVERANCE . 
 
 XIV. TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS 
 
 XV. OPEN-MINDEDNESS . 
 
 XVI. READING AND STUDY 
 
 XVII. KEEPING FIT . 
 
 XVIII. RECREATION 
 
 XIX. SPORTS AND HOBBIES 
 
 XX. AMUSEMENTS 
 
 XXI. WRITING AND SPEAKING . 
 
 XXII. CHEERFULNESS 
 
 XXIII. PUBLIC SERVICE 
 
 ii 
 
 19 
 26 
 
 34 
 40 
 
 49 
 55 
 62 
 68 
 72 
 
 79 
 86 
 
 9i 
 
 98 
 
 104 
 
 no 
 
 "5 
 
 122 
 
 127 
 
 134 
 
 140 
 148 
 154
 
 MAKING A LIFE 
 
 ONLY within prescribed limits can we claim 
 to be the architects of our own lives; but 
 we are free to make some most momentous 
 decisions, and one of these challenges a young man 
 very early in his career. He has to decide what 
 shall be his goal in life, the aim and object of his 
 ambition whether all the driving force of his energy 
 shall be thrown into money-making or into making 
 a worthy life. Ambition, in the best sense of the 
 word, is wholly commendable; but ambition ruth- 
 lessly pursued and directed to the single object of 
 making wealth spells the destruction of a man's 
 finest qualities. For ambition men will 
 
 "Wade through slaughter to a throne, 
 And shut the gates of mercy on mankind." 
 
 We are witnessing a sharp recoil from the hard in- 
 dividualistic commercialism of the Victorian age, and 
 a revolt from the gospel of " Self-Help " which Dr. 
 Samuel Smiles preached to his receptive generation. 
 The reaction has perhaps gone too far. We may 
 need to clear our minds from some cant. Success in 
 life is worth the wrestle. Wealth acquired honestly 
 is a boon. Prosperity is not an evil. These things 
 are among the rewards of effort and the incentives 
 to effort. They stir men to enterprise, energy, and 
 
 XI
 
 12 THE STEATEQY OP LIFE 
 
 inventiveness. Progress depends, in a large measure, 
 upon their encouragement. Idealism does not imply 
 poverty or inefficiency or stagnation. It is when 
 material prosperity becomes an obsession that am- 
 bition assumes a dangerous phase, and when " things " 
 get into the saddle and ride mankind. Success 
 bought at the price of character, wealth made by 
 chicanery or by ruthless exploitation of human lives, 
 property gained by anti-social methods are intrin- 
 sically evil. Their yield is bitter fruit they do not 
 make a life; they mar it. In making money a man 
 may unmake himself, and add immeasurably to the 
 sum of human misery. 
 
 " It is not," says Dr. G. H. Morrison, " the rare 
 gifts, the possession of the few ; it is not great wealth, 
 great learning, great genius, or great power it is 
 not these things that make the possessors happy; it 
 is health, it is friendship, it is love at home, it is the 
 voices of children, it is sunshine it is the blessings 
 that are commonest, not these that are rarest." 
 
 As long ago as Ancient Rome men said to their 
 sons : " Make money honestly if you can ; but if not, 
 by any means and every means make money." This 
 devil's doctrine has persisted through the centuries, 
 and has nourished distorted ambition in every age 
 and land. The idea that wealth is a sure avenue to 
 happiness has lured men like a syren's song to the 
 ruin of all that is worth cherishing in life. 
 
 The truest sources of happiness are to be found in 
 what Paley calls "the prudent constitution of the 
 habits," and in what a sage described as " the limi- 
 tation of aspirations." There is a common maxim 
 "If you have to do anything for nothing, do it for
 
 MAKING A LIFE 13 
 
 yourself," embodying a philosophy of sheer selfish- 
 ness which has perhaps made many millionaires. Few 
 great fortunes have been made without the harden- 
 ing of hearts and the stultifying of generous emotions. 
 Mr. B. Paul Neuman, in one of his character novels, 
 presents a highly-finished study of the processes of 
 fortune-making. His hero, Paul Dominy, a young 
 foreign Jew, left an orphan in New York, and brought 
 up by a Polish family, is given the choice of being 
 educated as a musician music is his chiefest joy or 
 being trained for business. He selects business, and 
 a passion to be wealthy soon devours his soul, and 
 overwhelms it. By one coup after another, Dominy 
 amasses riches beyond dreams of avarice. His mil- 
 lions become a burden to him ; but the zeal for dollar- 
 making has him enslaved. A girl he loves will not 
 marry him to divide his love between her and his 
 money, and in this great alternative he thrusts aside 
 love in his quest for gold. A child-lover, he is child- 
 less, and children who were once attracted to him are 
 repelled by a mysterious repugnancy. Illness assails 
 him, and loneliness depresses him. The end is 
 tragedy depression, drugs, desperation, suicide. The 
 profitlessness of a man gaining the whole world and 
 losing his own soul is driven home by Mr. Neuman's 
 novel. It ranks with George Eliot's Silas Marner as 
 an indictment of money- worship. 
 
 While gold can be bought too dearly, there are 
 many things gold cannot buy. The real treasures 
 of life are beyond money and beyond price. God 
 seems to have decreed that those things which make 
 life worth living love, friendship, sympathy, peace 
 of mind, joy of soul shall not be trafficked for gold
 
 14 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 in the market-place. Gold can pay for pleasure ; but 
 it cannot buy happiness. 
 
 The motives that move great men were discussed 
 in a suggestive way by Lord Haldane in the evidence 
 he gave before the Coal Commission. To the sug- 
 gestion that monetary reward alone made men ener- 
 getic, resourceful, and industrious, Lord Haldane 
 gave a strong denial. " Money," he said, " is not the 
 all-compelling motive, or even the most powerful in- 
 centive. The great dynamics of success in life are 
 honor and respect. The glory of a popular preacher 
 is very great: the glory of a successful politician is 
 very great. He is sometimes as poor as a rat ; but he 
 does not mind. He has got much more than money, 
 and he can dine with a millionaire every night if he 
 pleases." 
 
 Again, it is necessary perhaps to repeat that I am 
 not depreciating success in life even financial suc- 
 cess. But a young man has seriously to consider 
 what success really is, and to make sure that he is 
 not setting out in life to chase phantoms. When Dr. 
 Samuel Smiles preached " Self-Help " he did not 
 mean "Help Yourself"; but that fatal twist was 
 given, in practice, to his teaching. Quite unwittingly 
 Dr. Smiles paved the way for an even more selfish 
 doctrine " Get on or get out," which went one stage 
 further towards the hellishness of "Fire out the 
 fools." These are modern variants of the ancient 
 barbarism: "Every man for himself, and the devil 
 take the hindermost." The end of the Victorian age 
 found that doctrine again regnant, with expositors 
 even in the camp of organized Christianity. 
 
 A more sensitive social conscience is making us
 
 MAKING A LIFE 15 
 
 realize that some of Dr. Samuel Smiles's heroes 
 profited by cut-throat competition, and " made their 
 piles " by unblushingly sweating their employees. 
 They gathered fortunes as for Lanes were gathered 
 in the Victorian age with little concern for the 
 social or moral conditions of their workpeople. They 
 found the human machine cheaper than the machinery 
 it manipulated; and, as long as there was a margin 
 of labor in the market, it was far easier to replace 
 labor than machinery. By comparatively inexpensive 
 philanthropy they salved their consciences support- 
 ing enterprises for the victims immolated by the very 
 system which gave them affluence. 
 
 Nowadays, we are less concerned as to how a 
 wealthy man spends his money; but we are very 
 much concerned as to how he makes it. We hear 
 less of the stewardship of wealth than of the steward- 
 ship of life, which embodies the root principle that 
 wealth made by the exploitation of human beings is 
 wealth that no stewardship can make an honorable 
 possession. 
 
 At the beginning of his career a young man has 
 to face up to this fundamental question. Upon his 
 attitude to the ethics of money-making depends his 
 attitude to a thousand subsidiary things. It sets his 
 moral compass. The dividing line between the man 
 determined to make money, honestly or dishonestly, 
 and the man who, while eager enough to make money, 
 wants to make something else as well a life is a 
 frontier of conscience. " There is," says President 
 Wilson, " a great wind of moral force moving 
 through the world, and every man who opposes him- 
 self to that wind will go down in disgrace."
 
 16 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 In almost every profession and business there are 
 tricks of the trade and customs of the profession that 
 are equivocal, and even worse than dubious. Some 
 of them are so ingrained in the fibre of business life 
 that to fight single-handedly against them is to court 
 ruin. A scrupulous young man may find himself 
 compelled to compromise with his conscience, for we 
 live in an imperfect world in which compromises are 
 inevitable. Unless he makes the compromise, and 
 accepts the trade customs, he may be squeezed out 
 of his business without having shaken the custom 
 against which his conscience revolts. Wisdom sug- 
 gests another course of action. While the unscrupu- 
 lous business man makes every possible use of trade 
 tricks and customs to get rich quickly, the scrupulous 
 man acts on the principle of making the least possible 
 use of the dubious trade tricks and customs, and 
 holds himself ready whenever occasion arises to re- 
 pudiate them altogether. This attitude is the one 
 which in the long run will rid trade of trickery and 
 double-dealing. 
 
 The cynic may say that conscience in business is 
 a dead weight; but there are honorable men by the 
 thousand who carry their consciences into their of- 
 fices, and their religious principles into their trading. 
 Possibly they may fall a little behind in the fierce 
 competitive race ; but men of this type never live to 
 regret paying heed to the scruples of a sensitive con- 
 science. 
 
 Civilization is molten at the moment, and the re- 
 casting moulds have yet to set. Possibly the 
 twentieth century will be as noteworthy for the de- 
 velopment of cooperation in industry (even in in-
 
 MAKING A LIFE 17 
 
 ternational commerce) as the nineteenth century was 
 notable for the unblushing savagery of its unre- 
 stricted competitive commerce. Interdependence of 
 man on man, class on class, nation on nation, is one 
 lesson the war has taught. The whole world is fluid. 
 In very truth it may be said that " Bliss is it in this 
 dawn to be alive, but to be young is very heaven." 
 Almost it seems as if the age of wealth-obsession 
 were passing. Men's minds are bent on fashioning a 
 civilization that shall not confer vast fortunes on the 
 few, and grinding poverty on millions. The war ex- 
 posed the rottenness of the pillars of civilization; 
 Peace, it may be hoped, will usher in an era when 
 " goodwill to men " and " brotherhood of the classes " 
 will not be pious hypocrisy. 
 
 Just because the young man of to-day will have 
 a formative hand in the reconstruction of civilization, 
 his decision as to whether he purposes to make money 
 or make a life is of immense consequence. The al- 
 ternatives before him are vital to himself, and in a 
 measure to his age. While it is the positive duty .of 
 every young man to develop and exert every scrap of 
 talent he possesses, every gift he can cultivate, every 
 scrap of knowledge, skill, judgment, and wisdom he 
 can acquire, it is supremely important into what 
 channel his ambition should be directed. " Beware, 
 Dick," says one of Rudyard Kipling's characters to 
 an artist who was lowering his art standard for 
 money. " Beware, or you will fall under the damna- 
 tion of the check-book, and that is worse than 
 death." 
 
 Thomas Carlyle said it was a tragedy of human 
 life if one mind capable of knowledge should remain
 
 18 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 ignorant. It has taken us three-quarters of a cen- 
 tury to see that it is also economic waste for an 
 educable mind to be left uneducated. A young man 
 may have a brain, or a gift which, developed to the 
 uttermost, may make the world his debtor make him 
 a saviour of society. If he fails to grasp any oppor- 
 tunity for cultivating it, or if the opportunity is de- 
 nied him, his gift may go to waste, and the common- 
 wealth the world indeed may be poorer for the 
 neglect. 
 
 The highest ambition of a young man embarking 
 on his career, and working out the strategy of his 
 life, should be to win a reputation as one who never 
 dodges hard work, never shirks responsibility, and 
 never forfeits his self-esteem by lowering his stand- 
 ard of right dealing. To be known as a man whose 
 word is his bond, is far more precious than to have 
 the reputation of commanding a big bank balance. 
 These qualities make success worthy. Success with- 
 out them is failure. An honest man is still the 
 noblest work of God.
 
 II 
 
 THREE IDEALS 
 
 HAPPINESS, usefulness, goodness are three 
 ideals of life which a well-advised young 
 man will keep ever before him as lodestars. 
 Tolstoy, in War and Peace, sends his hero, Peter, the 
 richest man in Russia, through a grim experience of 
 misery that compels him to make a complete revalu- 
 ation of life's values. " He learned," says Tolstoy, 
 " that man is meant for happiness, and that this hap- 
 piness is in him, in the satisfaction of the daily needs 
 of existence ; and that unhappiness is the fatal result, 
 not of our need, but of our abundance." " Life," 
 Professor William James, after quoting Tolstoy's 
 dictum, adds, " is always worth living, if one have 
 responsive sensibilities." 
 
 Possibly one should vary the order of these three 
 ideals placing goodness first and usefulness second 
 allocating happiness to the third place, because it 
 is the reward of the other two virtues. With the 
 years there comes to most men an ever-deepening 
 conviction that the way of transgressors is hard, and 
 that the path to happiness is along the hard road of 
 duty, usefulness, and restraint. Maurice Maeterlinck, 
 in a poetical allegory, The Blue Bird, shows that the 
 quest for happiness always brings us back to the 
 beaten track of unselfishness and duty. 
 
 Whenever I am tempted to doubt the dependence
 
 20 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 of happiness on duty, I take down Boswell's Life of 
 Johnson, and revive my memories of the " old 
 straggler's " stern sense of duty. Johnson talked, or 
 rather thundered forth, on most subjects, but he 
 never said very much about duty. He simply did 
 it did it at all cost. I am not sure that he was a 
 wholly happy man; but, as Mr. Augustine Birrell 
 points out, he never whined over his hardships. Life 
 was an incessant struggle to him. He was poor, half- 
 blind, scrofulous, prone to melancholy, proud, re- 
 sentful of the patronage to which he had to submit, 
 fearful of death, especially death from the top down- 
 wards; but he went through a hard life, faithful to 
 what he felt was his duty a dutiful son, a dutiful 
 husband, and a dutiful citizen. 
 
 We know Dr. Johnson as we know few living men 
 our nearest friends, even and nobody knowing 
 him through Boswell's wonderful biography can 
 wholly escape his spell. There is a Johnson Club in 
 London, and once Bonner, the famous Australian 
 cricketer, was a guest at its annual dinner. Speaker 
 after speaker had extolled Johnson; but when 
 Bonner's turn to speak came, he naively confessed 
 he had never heard of Dr. Johnson till that evening. 
 Some one laughed, and Bonner hastily added by way 
 of vindication: " Well, I come from a country where 
 you could ride a whole day on horseback and never 
 find a man who ever did hear of Dr. Johnson. But, 
 after hearing about Dr. Johnson to-night, I will say 
 this if I were not Bonner, the cricketer, I would 
 like to be Dr. Samuel Johnson." 
 
 Glancing over " a wild moraine of forgotten books 
 of a glacier of days gone by," my eye caught the
 
 THEEE IDEALS 21 
 
 title of a volume, The Duty of Happiness. I did not 
 open it, or want to open it. But it recalled the story 
 of a cotton-operative who took his children for a 
 happy day in the country one holiday. The little fel- 
 lows were soon tired with walking, and, by the time 
 they reached their destination, were peevish and tear- 
 ful. " Look here," said their father impatiently, 
 " I've brought you boys out for a happy day, and 
 you've got to be happy ; go and play in that field, and 
 if you aren't happy in ten minutes I'll give you all 
 three of you a good hiding until (you are happy." 
 
 The happiness of duty done is a reality and there 
 is not much happiness without it. The happiness 
 that springs from a sense of usefulness in life is just 
 as real. Whatever may be a man's function in life 
 whether he is an architect, a doctor, a farmer, a 
 lawyer, a clerk, a miner, or a manual laborer he is 
 an asset to the commonwealth and a useful member 
 of society, if he does his duty efficiently and con- 
 scientiously. It is not sufficient to scrape through 
 work without incurring censure. Duty demands 
 more than that it demands that heart and soul 
 should be put into work. 
 
 On the very eve of her execution, Nurse Cavell 
 wrote a letter to the nurses with whom she had 
 worked so single-mindedly, in which the guiding 
 principle of her life found noble expression. She 
 reminded them that she had always taught them that 
 " devotion to duty would bring you true happiness ; 
 and that the thought that you had done your duty 
 earnestly and cheerfully before God and your own 
 conscience would be your greatest support in the try- 
 ing moments of life, and in the face of death."
 
 22 THE STEATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 One of the most perplexing problems of modern 
 mechanical industry is to invest drudgery with hope 
 and cheer and contentment. Repetitional work 
 breeds sheer boredom, and repetitional processes are 
 unavoidable in a manufactory. Only a very strong 
 sense of duty, and a full recognition of the usefulness 
 of such work, can keep such workers alive to the 
 necessity of conscientiousness. When a man has 
 schooled himself to regard monotonous duties, not 
 as task work for a livelihood, but as his individual 
 contribution to the total life of the community, half 
 his battle has been won. With talk about the 
 " blessedness of drudgery " I have scant patience. 
 It is sheer cant. Drudgery is and must always be 
 hateful; and were it not essential to the life of the 
 whole community, the imposition of drudgery on any 
 man would be an outrage. 
 
 It might be easier to endure drudgery, were it pos- 
 sible occasionally to see the fruits of drudgery faith- 
 fully done. Two friends motoring in Switzerland 
 ventured to cross one of the high passes in their car. 
 The narrow road wound down the mountain-side 
 a sheer abyss on the right hand, a precipitous alp on 
 the left. Half-way down, as the descent was being 
 slowly and carefully made, one man asked his friend : 
 " What, really, are we putting our faith in now ? " 
 The other man thought a moment. "At last," he 
 answered, " we are trusting to the honest workman- 
 ship of the unknown men who made this car." Pos- 
 sibly as they constructed that car the workmen 
 groaned over their drudgery, and possibly felt it a 
 grievance that they should toil to minister to some 
 one else's pleasure. But they had done their duty
 
 THEEE IDEALS 23 
 
 conscientiously, the motor-car stood the terrific strain, 
 and if they had heard of the two motorists who 
 risked their necks in confidence in their honest crafts- 
 manship, the mechanics might have enjoyed some 
 satisfaction from the sense of useful work dutifully 
 done. 
 
 Into the mouth of Stradivarius, George Eliot puts 
 the remark that " it would be purgatory to make 
 violins ill " 
 
 " When any man holds 
 'Twixt chin and hand a violin of mine, 
 He will be glad that Stradivari lived, 
 Made violins and made them of the best. 
 The masters only know whose work is good: 
 They will choose mine, and while God gives them skill 
 I give them instruments to play upon. 
 God choosing me to help Him." 
 
 " What, were God 
 At fault for violins, thou absent? 
 
 "Yes 
 He were at fault for Stradivari's violins 
 
 . . . 'Tis God gives skill, 
 But not without men's hands: He could not make 
 Antonio Stradivari's violins 
 Without Antonio." 
 
 Stradivarius here emphasizes the truth that man be- 
 comes a fellow-worker with God, when a high sense 
 of duty impels him to proficiency in his work. 
 
 The principle of conscientiousness in duty applies 
 to all work obscure or exalted. 
 
 " Who sweeps a room as for Thy laws 
 Makes that and the action fine."
 
 24 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 In one of her allegories Miss Olive Schreiner tells 
 of an artist who painted a great picture. It had a 
 wonderful red glow upon it. As the artist painted 
 he grew paler and paler, while the picture grew 
 redder and redder. Other artists came and admired 
 the picture. " We like his color," they said ; " where 
 does he get it from ? " His color tubes contained 
 nothing they had not got. One went to the Far East 
 and bought costly pigments, but on the canvas they 
 faded. Another mixed his colors from a recipe in a 
 rare book, but he did not get that red glow. They 
 asked the artist where he got the color ; but he shook 
 his head and went on painting. One day he was 
 picked up dead in front of his easel, and when they 
 came to put his grave-clothes upon him, they found 
 a wound on his breast an old wound but death had 
 sealed its edges. After a time the artist was for- 
 gotten, but his work lived. To put his life's blood 
 into his work should be a young man's ideal. 
 
 A schoolboy who plays no games and works in- 
 cessantly at his lessons is often despised as a " grind " 
 by his schoolfellows. In this, schoolboys have per- 
 haps hit the sound and healthy principle that poise 
 and balance are essentials in life. Certainly, school 
 " grinds " do not invariably win final distinction, or 
 even success in life. A loss of mental elasticity, and 
 often exhaustion of mental force, results. Relaxa- 
 tion is necessary ; but in working-hours a young man 
 should work. He will fail if he is content to do his 
 bare duty in a slap-dash, slip-shod fashion. The 
 duties in office and workshop, that fall to a boy or 
 young man, are often irksome routine-tasks which 
 seem to him trivial and inconsequent ; but, until they
 
 THREE IDEALS 25 
 
 are done conscientiously and well, a young man can 
 entertain very little hope of being trusted with more 
 responsible and congenial duties. " A little thing is 
 a little thing; but faithfulness in little things is a 
 very great thing." 
 
 No life devoted to useful duties is ill-spent and 
 it is the only life that is truly happy. " Hitch your 
 wagon to a star," said Emerson. Link your prosaic 
 job to a high ideal. So drudgery loses its horrors, 
 and life is enriched. A young man may not scale 
 the heights of success to which his ambition soars, 
 but all his early dreams will not be dissipated if he 
 is faithful to the ideal of being dutiful and useful. 
 As Browning says : " A man's reach must exceed his 
 grasp, or what's a heaven for ? "
 
 Ill 
 
 CHARACTER 
 
 IT is easier to recognize character than to define 
 it. When Dr. Samuel Smiles published an 
 elaborate book on Character, his critics com- 
 plained that he had not stated what character is. In 
 the preface to a later edition, he explained that he 
 took individual character to be " the highest embodi- 
 ment of the human being the noblest heraldry of 
 Man." A broader definition was given by Emerson 
 as " the moral order seen through the medium of an 
 individual nature," with the addition that "men of 
 character are the conscience of the society to which 
 they belong." But character has its negative as well 
 as its positive aspects. While we speak of " a man 
 of character," using the term as the embodiment of 
 the virtues, we often qualify the word by an adjec- 
 tive such as bad character, a queer character, and, 
 even when we mean an odd individual, " a character." 
 Occasionally we come into the presence of a man 
 from whose personality there radiates some mystic 
 influence which silences and quells our worst selves 
 a man who creates an atmosphere in which nothing 
 ignoble or ugly dare find expression. Then we rec- 
 ognize what character is. Mr. Harold Begbie told 
 me that when he spent a day with Mr. John Morley 
 (for a chapter in his Master Workers) they sat after 
 
 26
 
 CHAEACTEE 27 
 
 lunch smoking a cigarette over a cup of coffee. They 
 were discussing personality, and the rarity of really 
 great personalities, and the subtle spell they exercise. 
 " Mr. G. (Mr. Gladstone) was one," said Mr. Morley. 
 " We are sitting here at our ease, not wasting time, 
 but spending it in discussing high themes ; but if the 
 door opened and Mr. G. came into the room, we 
 should put down our cigarettes and sit upright in 
 our chairs to talk to him. Why we should do so, I 
 do not exactly know. It is a concession wejnvolun- 
 tarily make to a great personality." 
 
 There is an older story that every one knows, of 
 Charles Lamb and some of his friends discussing 
 what they would do if any great historic figure came 
 among them. If Shakespeare came they would all 
 bow their heads; but what, some one asked, would 
 they do if Jesus Christ came into the room? Charles 
 Lamb gave the answer : " We should go down on 
 our knees," he said ; " and, bending low, kiss the hem 
 of His garment." The character who stands supreme 
 among all the sons of men who have trod this earth 
 would, Lamb recognized, command the homage of 
 even that group of convivial Bohemians. 
 
 Exalted character is independent of wealth or 
 learning. Simplicity is almost invariably an element 
 in nobility of character. Truth, generosity, courage, 
 morality, benevolence, fortitude these are the im- 
 perishable and indispensable traits in the type of 
 character which wins respect, and by its contagious 
 influence exalts all who come within its sway. Suc- 
 cess, wealth, and position which, properly acquired, 
 are not to be despised give men power; but real 
 character is not something a man has it is some-
 
 28 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 thing that he is. And its presence makes a man rich 
 in things that money cannot buy, or success com- 
 mand, or influence secure for him. 
 
 A man's greatest inheritance is his character. 
 " What," asks Dr. Fairbairn, " shall a parent give to 
 his son ? The father says, a fortune. ' I will found a 
 family, make an estate, leave an inheritance to the 
 boy such as his father never knew.' Pray, what was 
 the father's inheritance? 'My father left me noth- 
 ing.' ' Nothing ! Didn't he leave you character ? ' 
 Many a son has been ruined because his father left 
 him a fortune. Who shall count the number of sons 
 saved because the father left a character? " 
 
 Many a young man's life is spoiled by the inher- 
 itance of prejudices that warp his judgment, of 
 blemishes of character that weaken his resistance to 
 evil, and of feebleness of will that hampers his efforts 
 to rise on stepping-stones of his dead self. Triumph 
 over such inheritances is the reward of moral effort. 
 Life is a continuous battle, and man has to fight 
 every hour of his life for his moral integrity, and 
 for that " mellow juice of life " which we call char- 
 acter. 
 
 " We do not need," said Theodore Roosevelt, " men 
 of unsteady brilliance or erratic power unbalanced 
 men. The men we need are the men of strong, 
 earnest, solid character, the men who possess the 
 homely virtues, and who, to those virtues, add cour- 
 age, rugged honesty, and high resolve." 
 
 Another noble preacher of righteousness, Bishop 
 Phillips Brooks, warned us against the blustering 
 goodness that often cloaks hypocrisy, and he re- 
 marked that " the noisy waves are failures, but the
 
 CHAEACTEB 29 
 
 great silent tide is a success." Character like Lord 
 Roberts', does not advertise : it influences by its quiet 
 persuasiveness. 
 
 Without moral courage high character is impos- 
 sible. By moral courage I do not mean ostentatious 
 heroics, but the quieter heroisms that court no pub- 
 licity. In The Lady of the Decoration there is a 
 story of a lady missionary who, after long years of 
 service in Japan, receives her furlough, and with 
 exultant heart sails for home. On the voyage she 
 calls at the Leper island, to make a report for her 
 society. A few days after reaching home and greet- 
 ing her friends, she notices a grey patch on her hand. 
 It is the first and terrible symptom of leprosy. She 
 knows only too well that there is no cure. With the 
 courage that reveals her character, she says farewell 
 to her friends and sails, without a whine, for the 
 Leper island, to spend her life with its drear victims. 
 
 Bret Harte, in his inimitable short stories of the 
 Forty-Niners, shows us the noble traits of character 
 that often cropped out from the rude, rough ad- 
 venturers in the gold camps. This nobility of soul 
 is common enough among the pioneers of empire 
 who build the roads and bridge the fords in the waste 
 places of the earth. 
 
 ' Who are the noble of the earth, 
 The true aristocrats, 
 Who need not bow their heads to kings, 
 Nor doff to lords their hats? 
 Who are they but the men of toil, 
 Who cleave the forests down, 
 And plant among the wilderness, 
 The hamlet and the town?
 
 30 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 These claim no god of chivalry, 
 And scorn the knighting rod. 
 Their coats of arms are noble deeds, 
 Their peerage is from God." 
 
 In the final analysis it is the character of its 
 common people that exalts a nation: and the soli- 
 darity of the social order rests on the moral quality 
 of the men and women who do the world's work in 
 obscurity. The character of the humblest citizen is 
 thus a vital factor in the moral health of the entire 
 community. 
 
 Attainment of character depends on moral muscle. 
 A young man is wise to pull himself up periodically 
 and subject himself to self-examination. 
 
 "What sin have I done? What left undone? 
 Examine all from first to last: 
 What is evil condemn; 
 What is good rejoice in." 
 
 Self-examination in a morbid introspective spirit is 
 to be deprecated; but an occasional honest stock- 
 taking of one's moral values is a healthy exercise in 
 character-building. As a youth grows from boy- 
 hood to manhood, he should acquire, unconsciously, 
 certain powers of automatic goodness. It should, 
 for example, need no exercise of will-power to be 
 honest, because dishonesty should be something he 
 never thinks possible; it should be a thing outside 
 his radius. The habit of resisting common tempta- 
 tions should become so fixed and automatic that re- 
 sistance calls for no exercise of will-power. He 
 should develop in himself reserves of resistance 
 to indolence, prejudice, vanity, censoriousness,
 
 CHABACTER 31 
 
 so that the virtues correcting and negativing 
 these vices come into operation without conscious 
 effort. So character is created, and stored as in a 
 moral reservoir. The will to high moral resolution 
 becomes a bank-balance to be drawn upon at call. 
 If, on self-examination, a young man finds that he 
 has still to grit his teeth and steel his nerve to over- 
 come some every-day temptation, he may well tremble 
 for his foothold on the rocks of moral integrity. Sam 
 Jones, the evangelist, used to say that the proper way 
 to start a religious revival was to take a piece of 
 chalk, draw a ring round oneself, and then pray: 
 " Lord, revive Thy work, and begin with the fellow 
 in this ring." 
 
 Character is a fruitage of slow growth and cease- 
 less vigilance. Declension in character may begin 
 slowly, but the pace accelerates so that many a man 
 finds himself " down and out " before he realizes that 
 his morale has even begun to deteriorate. The legend 
 persists that when Leonardo Da Vinci painted his 
 Christ in " The Last Supper," at Milan, he employed 
 as his model a chorister from the cathedral, whom 
 he had selected for the moral beauty reflected in his 
 face ; twenty-five years later Leonardo found a model 
 for his Judas in a ragged and dissolute wretch on the 
 Beggars' Staircase in Rome. As he was sitting for 
 Judas, the model told Leonardo that he had been the 
 model for his Christ. 
 
 Weakness of will-power is a certain source of a 
 desolated character. Flabby, invertebrate young men 
 are almost invariably moral failures. The power to 
 say " Yes " and mean it, or " No " and stick to it, 
 makes all the difference to character. Resistance and
 
 32 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 persistence are primary qualities in strong manhood. 
 During the severe and crucial fighting in July, 1918, 
 on the Western Front, a message was brought to 
 Marshal Foch that the Germans were pressing so 
 hard on one sector that the allied troops could not 
 hold on. The Generalissimo's counsel was a strange 
 one : " I cannot hold on : very well. Then I must 
 attack." He attacked, and began the sequence of 
 victories that broke the German army. In moral 
 spheres, as well as on the battle-field and in the box- 
 ing-ring, attack is the best defence. If a young man 
 is tempted to alcohol, his safety lies, not in mere de- 
 fence, but in attacking. Let him vow personal ab- 
 stinence from strong liquor, and take the field as a 
 Temperance worker. He lifts his battle from the 
 valley to the uplands, and becomes more than con- 
 queror. 
 
 At the roots of nearly all high character are 
 Christian faith and impulse. Not for a moment do 
 I suggest that agnosticism, and even atheism, have 
 not produced men of splendid moral quality. Charles 
 Bradlaugh was a worthy citizen and an unimpeach- 
 able character. Voltaire, the French Free-thinker, 
 was a chivalrous champion of right ; and one might 
 catalogue a long list of names of men who neglected 
 the altar, but whose upright bearing has put to shame 
 the lives of professing Christians whose conduct has 
 not adorned their doctrine. But the very virtues 
 these confessed opponents of Christianity manifested 
 were in their essence Christian virtues, derived, it 
 may be, from Christian parents who gave them their 
 initial velocity towards goodness. When, however, 
 this admission has been honestly made, one may as-
 
 CHAEACTEE 33 
 
 sert with assurance that the Christian virtues are the 
 stable foundations of nearly all noble character. A 
 firm hold on Christian principle helps a man to live 
 that life " for the highest possible purposes, and to 
 be absolutely unselfish in attaining it," which Dr. 
 Clifford declares to be the secret of power, happiness, 
 and youthfulness. 
 
 The career of Sir Harry Lauder is a modern 
 romance of character. I prefer to take my examples 
 from men of our own time. We admire the native 
 genius of the Scottish pit-boy, whose clean, simple, 
 homely songs move our hearts; but what we most 
 admire in Harry Lauder is the simple rugged 
 grandeur of character with which he has clung to the 
 sober virtues derived from his pious upbringing. In 
 the midst of a life exposed to such sharp temptations 
 as the music-hall stage, Harry Lauder has never 
 concealed his love of sobriety, his regard for Sunday, 
 his belief in thrift, and his delight in clean living and 
 hearty laughter. Like St. Paul, Sir Harry Lauder 
 can say : "I am not ashamed of the Gospel of 
 Christ." He has lived it on the boards of the music- 
 hall stage.
 
 IV 
 JESUS AS HERO 
 
 PROFESSOR HENRY DRUMMOND is 
 credited with saying that there is a religion 
 that is natural to a young man, and another 
 religion natural to his maiden aunt; and if you find 
 a young man professing the religion of his maiden 
 aunt, he is guilty of cant. After fifteen years' work 
 among boys, I can understand what Professor 
 Drummond meant. There are aspects of Christianity 
 that appeal to the heart and soul of a young man; 
 but there are other aspects that leave him quite un- 
 moved. I have never found a dogmatic presenta- 
 tion of Christianity a really effective approach to 
 young life; nor have I ever found young men un- 
 responsive to the personality of Jesus. Christ's call 
 is a young man's call to a life of splendid adventure 
 for all that is right and noble. The irresistible 
 glamour of Christ's personality appeals to the ideal- 
 ism of youth. He is, indeed, the vision splendid. 
 
 A Japanese General, who had just read the New 
 Testament for the first time, was asked what char- 
 acteristic of Jesus he most admired. Without hesi- 
 tation he answered : " His wonderful courage." 
 Perhaps we think too little of the heroism of Jesus. 
 If we could take up the Gospel of St. Mark, and, 
 banishing from mind and memory all that we have 
 
 34
 
 JESUS AS HERO 36 
 
 read and heard of, and traditionally associated with 
 Jesus, and read the Gospel right through at a sitting 
 (it would take about an hour) as if it were the 
 biography of a mere man, we should perhaps close 
 the book and say at once that Jesus was a hero 
 worthy of devotion for His mere heroism a hero 
 in every sense of the word, for His unflinching cour- 
 age, His spotless character, His gentle spirit, His 
 gracious nature, His reluctance to inflict pain, His 
 eagerness to help the weak, His yearning to comfort 
 the sorrowing, and His dignified grandeur of bearing 
 alike in triumph and adversity. We should end by 
 giving Him a place and the place of highest honor 
 in the gallery of all heroes. 
 
 The Founder of the Christian religion was young. 
 Traditional art, perhaps, has made us lose the thrill 
 of Christ's youthfulness. He died when the ordinary 
 man of to-day is just getting into his stride. He 
 gathered His disciples, exercised His wonderful 
 ministry, preached His great Evangel and died on 
 Calvary, in early manhood. It must stir the heart of 
 youth to realize that the conquering Galilean peasant 
 who turned the world upside down had finished His 
 work by the age of thirty-three. Even Alexander's 
 mighty military exploits after which the East 
 " plunged in thought again " are insignificant com- 
 pared with the world conquests of the youthful 
 Prince of Peace. Rev. C. Silvester Home, who 
 made Jesus so real a hero to thousands of young men 
 in London, once drew a picture of the appearance of 
 our Lord during His earthly ministry. 
 
 " Conceive," said Mr. Silvester Home, " a strong 
 and strenuous young Jewish workman, alive to all
 
 36 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 the delights of nature, and with the crowning joy 
 of a pure heart and a clear conscience, and an in- 
 vigorating consciousness of God; conceive a massive 
 head and rugged face strongly marked with thought 
 and sympathy, but with the mystic light of moral 
 victory always there; conceive dark, keen, flashing 
 eyes that can speak equally easily inspiration or 
 indignation : and you have the Figure that ' wanders 
 through my dreams/ the * Happy Warrior ' behind 
 Whom I hope to fight till I die." 
 
 Jesus was a lover of the open air. We have no 
 record that He ever slept in a walled city ; but there 
 is much in the Gospels to suggest that He and His 
 disciples camped out beneath the olive-trees under 
 the shining eyes of the Syrian stars. He loved the 
 fields, the birds, and the flowers, the fair green hills 
 that girdle quiet Nazareth and the stormy waters of 
 the Lake of Galilee. He was a lover of His kind, a 
 sociable Man who rejoiced in human companionship. 
 Conventionalism was foreign to His nature. How 
 He shocked the formalists of His time by His dis- 
 regard of the niceties of religious externals! That 
 He had a sense of humor we see in His conversation 
 with the Syro-Phoenician woman. He showed that 
 He preferred the Bohemian ways of publicans and 
 sinners to the suburban pharisaism of the Scribes. 
 And, preeminently, He was a lover of little children. 
 In fact, Jesus was, in the best sense of the word, a 
 man's man. To clothe Him in austerities and to 
 environ Him with severity, is to disguise and dis- 
 figure His winsome humanness. 
 
 I like to think of Jesus as the very best journey- 
 man carpenter in all Syria. Rev. J. G. Stevenson,
 
 JESUS AS HEEO 37 
 
 in The Christ of the Children, says Jesus must have 
 been a good workman, or we should have heard of 
 His enemies complaining that He made them bad 
 tables and doors and wooden ploughs. I like to 
 think of Him climbing the hill-slopes with the firm 
 steps of a mountaineer, and striding the fields with 
 the zest of youth -rejoicing in its strength. Nothing 
 in the Gospels suggests any effeminacy in Jesus of 
 Nazareth, though some of the great Master painters 
 have sentimentalized His face and figure. 
 
 Jesus came to offer us a full-orbed life, and He 
 lived one in the short years of His earthly ministry. 
 Far too much emphasis has been laid upon the meek- 
 ness and gentleness of Jesus. This explains the 
 anaemic hue of some presentations of Christianity. 
 Softness was not a characteristic of Jesus Himself. 
 Nietzsche's philosophy, " Be hard," was an inevitable 
 counterblast to sentimentalized Christianity. Jesus 
 was gentle and hard, meek and assertive, just as 
 occasion demanded. He forgave sinners freely, but 
 lashed hypocrisy mercilessly. Injustice, tyranny, 
 cowardice, stirred Him to a white heat of righteous 
 and scornful indignation ; but pain, sorrow, and weak- 
 ness moved Him to infinite compassion. No knight 
 of chivalry was ever so chivalrous as the Son of 
 Man. The majesty of Jesus leaps out at us, as Dr. 
 Fosdick says, when we compare the moral grandeur 
 of Jesus with the manufactured perfection of Tenny- 
 son's King Arthur. 
 
 As a young man's Hero, Jesus stands flawless. 
 But He is more than a hero He is a Guide. John 
 Stuart Mill, who was not a professing Christian, came 
 to the conclusion that he could imagine no better
 
 38 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 guide to conduct than that a man should, in every- 
 thing he says and does, seek so to act and so to speak 
 that his action and speech would command the 
 approval of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus is the guide 
 to God" The Way and the Life." His own claim 
 has no ambiguity. " He that hath seen Me hath 
 seen the Father," He said. This means that he that 
 hath seen in Jesus the champion of justice, the im- 
 placable foe of tyranny, the hater of evil, the healer 
 of pain, the consoler of the sorrowful, and the giver 
 of strength to the weak, has seen the personal 
 characteristics of God Himself. We can only realize 
 with our finite mind what the Infinite God is, by 
 giving Him, to the wth degree, all the very noblest 
 attributes that have ever been made manifest in man. 
 The Creator must surpass the highest qualities with 
 which He has endowed His creatures. Let a young 
 man imagine a combination of the finest elements of 
 all the great human heroes, and then think of God as 
 all that and even more, and he has a rudimentary 
 conception of God which will appeal to his worship, 
 his loyalty and his love. 
 
 Rank Jesus first in the gallery of heroes; make 
 Him Guide, Counsellor, and Friend, note and copy 
 His attitude of worship to God, His devotion to the 
 service of man; catch His spirit, learn His sweet 
 accents and a young man will find that he has made 
 Jesus Christ Lord of his life and Captain of his 
 salvation. A young man who has thus appropriated 
 Jesus Christ and given Him rule over him, need have 
 no difficulty about creeds. Dr. James Denney de- 
 clared that the day of elaborate creeds is over, and 
 that he would be content with this : " I believe in God
 
 JESUS AS HERO 39 
 
 through Jesus Christ, His only Son, our Lord and 
 Saviour." Here is a confession that a young man 
 may make 
 
 " So far as I know my own heart, I am convinced 
 of two things that I need a Saviour, and that Christ 
 is just the Saviour I need. I therefore do, with all 
 my heart, accept Him, and resolve to be henceforth 
 His true disciple and servant in all sincerity." 
 
 As Hero, Guide, and Saviour, Jesus Christ then 
 makes a threefold appeal to the mind, the will, and the 
 heart of (youth. For Jesus is far more than a guide 
 and a hero. His Saviourhood, the redemptive power 
 He exercises through His life and His Cross, sepa- 
 rates Him from all other heroes and guides. There 
 is the Jesus of history, who trod this earth for a 
 little while as a ministering and suffering Servant of 
 God and man; and there is the Christ of experience, 
 who persists through all time in the hearts and souls 
 of His followers the Christ eternal, who dwells in 
 the hearts of those who love Him, fights beside us in 
 our wrestle with temptation, sustains in adversity, 
 enriches our joys and softens our sorrows. This 
 richer, deeper experience of Christ is, in a normal 
 young man's life, a growth through hero-worship 
 and guidance. It cannot be forced, and it ought 
 not to be simulated.
 
 V 
 RELIGION IN ACTION 
 
 DONALD HANKEY said that a Christian is 
 a man who is prepared to bet his life that 
 there is a God. Paul Sabatier said that 
 " to be a Christian is to live over within ourselves 
 the inner spiritual life of Christ; and, by the union 
 of our life with His, to feel in ourselves the presence 
 of a Father and the reality of our filial relation to 
 Him, just as Christ felt in Himself the Father's 
 presence and His filial relation to Him." A learned 
 Bishop who defined Christianity as " Turn to the 
 right and keep straight on," gave a simple working 
 formula which a young man can appreciate. 
 
 Religion often suffers sadly from its expositors. 
 A soldier writing home from the front said : " If an 
 officer does not swear, or smoke, or drink, or chew, 
 or play cards, or go to the theatre, or attend the 
 company dances, we call him a Christian. If he is 
 brave, always just, considerate of his men, shares 
 their dangers and their hardships with them, and 
 looks after their provisioning and their comfort, we 
 call him a good officer." Obviously Christianity 
 had been presented to this soldier as a system of 
 negations, or he would have seen that the positive 
 qualities which he thought constitute a good officer 
 are exactly the characteristics of a sound Christian. 
 
 40
 
 EELIGION IN ACTION 41 
 
 Christianity is not a repressive code of restrictions 
 a call to forego so many of those things which 
 make life attractive to youth. " Entering the service 
 of Jesus Christ is not subjection," says Dr. Lyman 
 Abbott, " it is emancipation. Jesus told His disciples 
 that ' out of the heart of man proceed evil thoughts, 
 fornications, thefts, murders, adulteries.' Therefore 
 they cannot be cured by prohibitions from without: 
 they can be cured only by a new and Divine life 
 inspired within." Jesus broke away from the " Thou 
 shalt nots " of Judaism and gave us the " Blessed 
 are theys." His offer is of life more abundant ; a life 
 of clean joys, if of stern duties; of abiding satisfac- 
 tions if of moral discipline. Jesus was no ascetic, 
 and He does not call His followers to asceticism. He 
 calls us to be conquerors over our worst selves, and 
 gives us the dynamic power for the conquest. He 
 wants us to be robust men, with healthy bodies, clean 
 minds and bright spirits. That is the appeal He 
 makes to youth. 
 
 Robert Browning's gospel was a working gospel, 
 and he got it from Christ 
 
 "It's wiser being good than bad; 
 
 It's safer being meek than fierce; 
 It's fitter being sane than mad. 
 
 My own hope is, a sun will pierce 
 The thickest cloud earth ever stretched; 
 
 That after Last returns the First, 
 Though a wide compass round be fetched; 
 
 That what began best can't end worst, 
 
 Nor what God blessed once prove accurst." 
 
 The war has " done for atheism," it has been said. 
 Herbert Spencer's admission of a " first great cause,"
 
 42 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 and Thomas Huxley's confession that he found 
 Intelligence behind the cosmic order, had perhaps 
 shattered the glib atheism of the materialistic school 
 of science. But if atheism was not current, hazy 
 ideas of God were common among our soldiers. 
 Chaplains found few men doubting the existence of 
 God; but they found thousands of men with sadly 
 confused conceptions of God and His relations with 
 the Universe. An English schoolboy has recently 
 published a thoughtful little book in which he avows 
 that schoolboys crave for a personal God. They 
 want to " get at God." Mr. II. G. Wells makes the 
 hero in Joan and Peter seek an interview with God. 
 He is wounded and delirious, and he complains that 
 the very men who set themselves to show the way 
 to God do not help him to find Him. This prevailing 
 confusion and thick haziness about God is a chal- 
 lenge to Christian teachers and thinkers. 
 
 The need a young man feels is not for a formulated 
 creed, but for a God with whom he can have experi- 
 ence and make real contact. Formulas do not help 
 him. " Honest hearts," says George Eliot, " are 
 bound to accept no formula which their whole souls 
 and intellects, as well as their emotions, do not 
 embrace with entire assurance." The Christianity 
 that wins a young man's allegiance points him to a 
 life, not to a creed. For true religion is nine-tenths 
 conduct it is character vitalized by a spiritual 
 principle. 
 
 In sober truth a Christian is the only genuine 
 bon vvuant the only good liver. By substituting 
 freedom for license, religion establishes the principle 
 that makes men free. " The very limitations of the
 
 RELIGION IN ACTION 43 
 
 Christian life," says Professor Johnston Ross, " are 
 every one of them safeguards of liberty." The pro- 
 hibitions of Jesus are amazingly few in number. His 
 commands are affirmative, His injunctions are 
 promises. " People," said Henry Drummond, " talk 
 of giving up when they become Christians, as if they 
 were to be the losers; but the promise is of added 
 riches." Let no one nurse the delusion that license 
 is freedom. It is the exact opposite it is slavery. 
 Is the libertine free ? Is the drunkard free ? Neither 
 is free. He is the slave of his passion and his ap- 
 petite. When Goethe said that life begins with self- 
 renunciation, he meant the renunciation of those 
 things that enthral men and make them bond-slaves 
 to their lower selves. This is the heart of the mes- 
 sage of Faust. As Dr. W. B. Selbie says: "A 
 Christianity that puts a mask on a man, makes his 
 movements awkward and fetters his freedom, is as 
 false as it is unnatural. The Christian lives as no 
 other man can live, because his life is the most fruit- 
 ful in results, the broadest in outlook and the most 
 full of joy." 
 
 " The Lord let the house of a brute to the soul of a man. 
 And the man said, 'Am I your debtor? ' 
 1 Not yet/ said the Lord, ' but make it as clean as you can. 
 And then I will let you a better.' " 
 
 Principal John Caird, in that sermon on " Religion 
 in Common Life," which Dean Stanley described as 
 " the best single sermon in the language," affirms 
 that " Religion is mainly and chiefly the glorifying 
 God amid the duties and trials of the world the
 
 44 THE STRATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 guiding our course amid the adverse winds and cur- 
 rents of temptation by the starlight of duty and the 
 compass of Divine truth; the bearing us manfully, 
 courageously, wisely, for the honor of Christ our 
 great Leader in the conflict of life. Away, then, with 
 the notion that ministers and devotees may be re- 
 ligious, but that a religious and holy life is impracti- 
 cable in the rough and busy world. Nay, rather, be- 
 lieve me, that, in the proper sense, is the peculiar and 
 appropriate field for religion the place in which to 
 prove that piety is not a dream of Sundays and soli- 
 tary hours that it can bear the light of days ; that it 
 can wear well amid the rough jostlings, the hard 
 struggles, the coarse contacts of common life; the 
 place, in one word, to prove how possible it is for a 
 man to be at once ( not slothful in business,' and 
 ' fervent in spirit, serving the Lord/ " Religion con- 
 sists, Dr. Caird adds, not so much in doing spiritual 
 or sacred acts as in doing secular acts from a sacred 
 or spiritual motive. 
 
 Religion, says Dr. R. W. Mackenna, is not some- 
 thing to be clutched at with despairing hands, like 
 a piece of flotsam, when the waters of affliction tend 
 to overwhelm one ; but an attitude of mind, an orien- 
 tation of soul, to be cultivated sedulously so that a 
 man may walk with unbowed head through all the 
 storms of life, stayed by a glad confidence in the 
 eternal justice and enduring love of God. 
 
 Heart, mind and will must all engage in the Chris- 
 tian life. Dr. James Stalker sees an appeal to each 
 in turn in Christ's thrice-asked question to Peter: 
 *' Lovest thou Me?" In one of his most beautiful 
 poems, Dr. George Matheson sees in heart, mind and
 
 KELIGION IN ACTION 46 
 
 will the three doors through which we may enter: 
 the Temple of God 
 
 " Three doors there are in the temple 
 
 Where men go up to pray, 
 And they that wait at the outer gate 
 May enter by either way. 
 
 There are some that pray by ASKING; 
 
 They lie on the Master's breast, 
 And shunning the strife of the lower life, 
 
 They utter their cry for rest. 
 
 There are some that pray by SEEKING; 
 
 They doubt where their reason fails, 
 But their minds' despair is the ancient prayer 
 
 To touch the print of the nails. 
 
 There are some that pray by KNOCKING ; 
 
 They put their strength to the wheel, 
 For they have not time for thoughts sublime, 
 
 They can only act what they feel. 
 
 Father, give each his answer 
 
 Each in his kindred way, 
 Adapt Thy light to his form of night, 
 
 And grant him his needed day." 
 
 A layman who ventures to write on Prayer an3 
 its place in Christian life, hesitates lest he should be 
 rushing in " where angels fear to tread." Christianity 
 without prayer without direct communion of the 
 soul with the Over-soul is unthinkable. " Our secret 
 thoughts are the prayers God hears," said Clement of 
 Alexandria ; but ordered prayer is the supreme source 
 of the moral power of the Christian soul. I should
 
 46 THE STKATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 hate to recommend prayer as a mere act of mental 
 discipline and for the sake of its salutary reflex in- 
 fluences ; but that aspect of prayer cannot be ignored. 
 One of the greatest authorities on mental diseases, 
 Dr. Bulkeley Hyslop, addressing a gathering of 
 doctors, declared that as an alienist of long experi- 
 ence he was satisfied that one of the surest prevent- 
 ives of diseases of the mind was the simple habit of 
 daily prayer. George Meredith says that " who rises 
 from prayer a better man, his prayer is answered." 
 But to expect only reflex influences such as Dr. 
 Hyslop and George Meredith indicate from our 
 prayers is to put " false limits of our own " upon the 
 power of prayer. We pray ourselves into heaven, 
 said Bishop Montgomery. In mysterious ways, by 
 strange, intangible telepathies, prayer releases forces 
 incalculable in their impetus. " More things are 
 wrought by prayer than this world dreams of." 
 Through prayer the human soul keeps in tune with 
 the Infinite and taps reservoirs of spiritual uplifting 
 that are inexhaustible and unfailing. 
 
 Laborare est orare to labor is to pray says a 
 Latin pun. It is equally true that to pray is to 
 labor. A prayer that costs no effort yields no re- 
 ward. " Don't be in a hurry," says William Law in 
 his Serious Call, " when you kneel down ; wait, and 
 shut your eyes and open the eyes of the soul and 
 look up, and don't begin until you have fairly got .a 
 hold with your eyes of Him and of the place to which 
 you direct your prayers. You will pray without 
 effort then." Prayer is an act of spiritual energy 
 and of mental concentration. 
 
 Some years ago, Professor Walter Rauschenbusch
 
 EELIGION IN ACTION 47 
 
 wrote, at the request of the headmaster of a boys' 
 school in America, a prayer which I make bold to 
 quote as a model prayer for young men : 
 
 Our Father, we thank Thee for this day, for its 
 work and its pleasure, for the zest of our youth and 
 the joy of living. May no mean word or foul act 
 cloud our satisfaction or humble our pride when this 
 day is done. 
 
 Grant that we may do our day's work with a will- 
 ing heart, looking forward to the larger tasks of our 
 life in the days to come; and may we go to meet the 
 future years with a trained body and mind, well able 
 to do a man's work. 
 
 May no idleness or love of easy ways, no hidden 
 vice or flaw of character, weaken our youth; lest 
 when we strain to run the race of life, ive be forced 
 to drop out before the goal is reached. 
 
 Make its loyal to our friends, our team-mates, our 
 school and our teachers, and lovingly loyal to our 
 parents and the dear folks at home. Save us from 
 bringing to shame the hope and pride with which 
 they think of us. 
 
 Give us a brave heart to say what is true and do 
 what is right, even to our own hurt, following in the 
 footsteps of the great Captain of our life, Jesus 
 Christ, in whose name we make our prayer. Amen. 
 
 For the ideals of character in a follower of Jesus 
 Christ, for a formula of Christianity in action, I 
 quote the words of St. Peter: 
 
 "Add to your faith courage; and to courage 
 knowledge; and to knowledge self-control; and to 
 self-control patience; and to patience godliness; and
 
 48 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 to godliness brotherly-kindness; and to brotherly- 
 kindness love." 
 
 If these qualities are in us and abound in us, we 
 know Jesus Christ. If they are not in us, we do not 
 know Jesus Christ. For the fruits of the Spirit are 
 the acid test of Christian reality.
 
 VI 
 
 A MAN'S MAN 
 
 A CHAPLAIN, who shared with his men the 
 hardships of the battle-fields, gave it to me 
 as his opinion that war had restored some 
 long-concealed virtues that were in danger of being 
 lost in a man engaged in competitive industry. We 
 have, he said, been over-emphasizing just those 
 gentler virtues in men that women like, and forgetting 
 to stress those rougher virtues that make a man " a 
 man's man." The chaplain ran over some of the 
 resuscitated virtues bred in the rough and tumble of 
 soldiering. One unwritten law among soldiers is 
 that you must not let down a pal ; that his ration is 
 a sacred thing; that if you are taking supplies to the 
 front line, those supplies must get there punctually 
 at whatever cost to yourself. They are elementary 
 principles, no doubt principles that primitive man 
 discovered and practised; but they have been over- 
 laid by the growth of gentler virtues and softer 
 manners. 
 
 What, then, do we mean by " a man's man " ? In 
 the very forefront men prefer men of action to men 
 of mere thought men of robust and virile char- 
 acter 
 
 " who are neither children nor gods 
 But men in a world of men." 
 49
 
 60 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 One explanation of Mr. Rudyard Kipling's 
 strangle-hold on his age, is his insistence in demand- 
 ing from men acts, not thoughts; deeds, not words. 
 He concentrates all his impatience with bookish 
 inertness in his poem " Tomlinson," the man with 
 the soul too pitiful to damn, with whom the devil 
 talks at heaven's gate : 
 
 " Ye have heard, ye have read, ye have thought," he said, 
 
 " and the tale is yet to run : 
 
 By the worth of the body that once ye had, give an- 
 swer what ha* ye done? 
 
 Go back to Earth with a lip unsealed go back with an 
 
 open eye, 
 And carry my words to the sons of men or ever ye come 
 
 to die; 
 That the sins they do by two by two, they must pay 
 
 for one by one, 
 And . . . the God that you took from a printed book 
 
 be with you, Tomlinson." 
 
 Even an excess of intelligence may delay the 
 world's progress if it leads men to indecisiveness and 
 inaction. The decisive characters in life, the men 
 who set the mills of God grinding, are men distin- 
 guished for their energy and vigor. In the new age 
 ushered in by the war, the world needs men of action, 
 not the ansemics " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of 
 thought." A man's man is emphatically and always 
 a man capable of resolute will, rapid decision and 
 decisive action. 
 
 Another quality that men rightly admire in men 
 is readiness for self-sacrifice. The records of the 
 war abound in noble instances of men yielding their
 
 A MAN'S MAN 61 
 
 lives for their fellows. Parallel with such an act as 
 the sub-lieutenant who threw himself upon a grenade 
 which would have scattered death in his trench, we 
 may put a victory of peace no less renowned than 
 war. In all the annals of chivalry we have no 
 grander story than that of Captain Gates, the " very 
 gallant gentleman" who, realizing that his sickness 
 was endangering the lives of his comrades on Scott's 
 expedition to the South Pole, announced that he was 
 going out of the hut for a little while, and stepped 
 into the swirling blizzard to meet his death. Contrast 
 this with the vain-glorious egotism of Balzac, who 
 loved to tell how, when he was in Russia, the com- 
 panion of a lady upon whom he was calling, hearing 
 the hostess say " M. Balzac," in addressing him, 
 dropped the tea-tray in her astonishment. " I know 
 what glory is," Balzac would add, with real happiness 
 in reviving that memory. 
 
 Men admire a man who can stand the pinch of 
 prosperity. On the whole, prosperity breaks the finer 
 morale of more men than does adversity. To bear 
 adversity is comparatively easy to a man " man is 
 born to trouble as the sparks fly upward"; but to 
 grow rich gracefully, to become famous without 
 growing bumptious, to carry honors unostentatiously 
 and to exercise power without becoming arbitrary, 
 these are real tests of manhood. Many a man be- 
 sides W. E. Henley can boast the captaincy of his soul 
 and say: 
 
 " In the fell clutch of circumstance 
 I have not winced, nor cried aloud; 
 Beneath the bludgeonings of chance 
 My head is bloody, but unbowed."
 
 62 THE STBATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 But the men who can honestly claim to have made 
 a signal success of life without being spoiled by their 
 prosperity are far fewer in number. 
 
 " If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue, 
 
 Or walk with kings nor lose the common touch; 
 If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you, 
 
 If all men count with you, but none too much; 
 If you can fill the unforgiving minute 
 
 With sixty seconds' worth of distance run, 
 Yours is the earth and everything that's in it, 
 
 And which is more you'll be a man, my son." 
 
 The man who can be trusted is always a man's 
 man. "A man's word should be as good as his bond." 
 We use the trite phrase without reflecting that if 
 every man's word were a guarantee of good faith, the 
 lawyers who draw up our contracts and agreements 
 would very soon be among the great unemployed. 
 
 Absolute reliability of word is unfortunately rare. 
 Judges are constantly deploring the patent perjury of 
 witnesses in law-courts. It was a very experienced 
 magistrate who, weary of the false evidence given 
 before him, snapped out the cynicism : " David said 
 in his haste, but I say deliberately, ' All men are 
 liars.' " This was an impatient exaggeration ; but it 
 is a painful fact that verbal contracts have to be 
 accepted very cautiously by business men. The late 
 Mr. Charles Frchman, the theatrical entrepreneur, 
 had a world-wide reputation as a man whose word 
 bound him. Dramatists who wrote plays for him 
 never concerned themselves about written contracts. 
 Frohman would talk an idea over with a playwright, 
 commission him to write the play, say what royalty he 
 would pay, and there the matter ended. Frohman
 
 A MAN'S MAN 53 
 
 was implicitly trusted on both sides of the Atlantic. 
 He always kept his word. But he died over head 
 and ears in debt! 
 
 I am not sure that any characteristic repels men 
 so sharply as cynicism especially in a young man. 
 Walpole's sneer that " every man has his price and 
 every woman " is a gross libel on human nature ; and 
 Lord Chesterfield's declaration that the heart of man 
 hardens as he grows older is a manifest slander on 
 mankind. A cynic has been defined as one who 
 knows the price of everything but the value of noth- 
 ing. Young men are often tempted into affecting 
 an airy cynicism. The habit is one of the worst a 
 young man can acquire. It usually brings upon him 
 the reproach of shallowness. Moreover it is a habit 
 that, beginning as an affectation, settles into a con- 
 firmed twist of mind, resulting in a low and distress- 
 ing estimate of all men and women. In Mr. Andrew 
 Burger's Thistledown and Mustard Seed there is an 
 illustrative story, called " The Motive-monger," of a 
 boy who as a child used to sit apart and wonder why. 
 His childish mind was always on the search for 
 motives. This frame of mind grew, and as Sir Ralph 
 was thrown among cunning people who confirmed 
 him in it, the habit gradually consumed him. " It 
 darkened the brightness of the sun, took the taste out 
 of food, and the merriment out of wine. One day, 
 in answer to his usual question, ' What's your 
 motive?' a friend said: 'What's your motive in ask- 
 ing my motive ? ' Sir Ralph caught the man's hand, 
 swore he was a splendid fellow, and refused his 
 request. But ever afterwards he took a keener 
 delight in seeking for motives. Nay, he would often
 
 64 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 stop in the road and say to himself: 'What's my 
 motive ? ' It did not take him many years to fret 
 him to the verge of the grave. And when the devil 
 came to take him, his first remark to the fiery gen- 
 tleman was ' What's your ' " But the devil did 
 
 not give Sir Ralph time to finish the question. Just 
 because cynicism paralyzes a man's better nature, and 
 vitiates his whole outlook on life, it is one of the vices 
 of character that men regard with aversion. 
 
 The qualities that commend a man to men are 
 reliability in act and word, a dutiful sense of obliga- 
 tion to his fellows, a joyful zest for action, a cheerful 
 acceptance of good fortune or ill fortune, and a 
 modest and frank appreciation of other men's good 
 points without censoriousness of their shortcomings. 
 These are the qualities that enable men to 
 
 ". . . be to other souls 
 The cup of strength in some great agony, 
 Enkindle generous ardor, feed pure love, 
 Beget the smiles that have no cruelty 
 Be the sweet presence of a good diffused 
 And in diffusion ever more intense." 
 
 So may we all join 
 
 " The choir invisible 
 Whose music is the gladness of the world."
 
 VII 
 
 THE MARKS OF A GENTLEMAN 
 
 "^T'lT'THAT is it to be a gentleman?" asks 
 % I\J Thackeray; and answering his own 
 V T question, he said : " It is to be honest, to 
 be gentle, to be generous, to be brave, to be wise; 
 and, possessing all these qualities, to exercise them in 
 the most graceful outward manner." A shorter and 
 truer definition is that " a gentleman is one who 
 never willingly inflicts pain." The black cook in 
 The Lady of the Decoration, who did not want to 
 " discomboberate " anybody inconvenience any- 
 body helps us to an understanding of the essence 
 of gentlemanliness. A whole hemisphere separates 
 gentlemanliness from gentility. Genteel is a word 
 that was often on the lips of our grandfathers, but 
 is now happily almost obsolete. It has horrible asso- 
 ciations. Miss Ellen Thorneycroft Fowler some- 
 where makes one of her girl characters ask her 
 mother the question: "Is Mrs. So-and-so a lady?" 
 " Well," comes the guarded reply, subtle in its cun- 
 ning differentiation, " not exactly. She belongs to 
 the class of people who pronounce the t in often. 
 Genteel is the word for her, I think." Gentlemanli- 
 ness involves a very different order of moral quality 
 from mere gentility. 
 
 55
 
 56 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 The war, it has been said, has stirred the muddy 
 depths of modern civilization, and left the world 
 badly in need of a moral spring-cleaning. Neces- 
 sarily in time of war the man of force leaps into the 
 forefront, and the man of sensitive instincts is over- 
 shadowed. War-time is the halcyon age of the 
 bounder, the man of push and energy and few 
 scruples. The marks of a gentleman get obliterated 
 or blurred out of recognition when brute forces are 
 contending. We shall have to retrace our paths to 
 recover the gentleman, and for the quest we must 
 clean our minds of false conceptions of his attributes. 
 
 The first essential mark of a gentleman is neither 
 the fashionable cut of his clothes nor the superfine 
 polish of his manners, but just that quality of heart 
 which restrains him from causing distress, inconveni- 
 ence, or pain to those who cross his path. Unself- 
 ishness is as the core of gentlemanliness. Now of 
 all the virtues unselfishness is the one most foreign to 
 the natural man. Selfishness, conscious or uncon- 
 scious, is instinctive it dates from the days when 
 men lived in trees and courted their sweethearts with 
 a club and it is only overcome by severe training, 
 and by firm moral resolution. A true gentleman does 
 not make life hard for any one. King Edward VII 
 gave a glorious example of his scrupulous regard for 
 the fine susceptibilities of others when M. Fallieres, 
 the French President, was making a State visit to 
 England. Anxious that nothing should jar upon his 
 visitor, the King gave express instructions that the 
 train bringing the President to England should not 
 arrive at Waterloo Station, and that the route of his 
 carriage should avoid Trafalgar Square. Both names
 
 THE MAKES OF A GENTLEMAN 57 
 
 commemorate victories over France that might be 
 unpleasant memories. 
 
 Charles Kingsley divided mankind into three 
 groups " honest men who mean to do right and do 
 it; knaves who mean to do wrong and do it; and 
 fools who mean to do whichever is pleasanter of the 
 two." The multitudes of men who mean to do right 
 often miss the mark, but are redeemed by their good 
 intentions. Especially is this true of speech. One 
 of the hall-marks of a gentleman is his instinctive 
 natural courtesy. He is reticent with reproof, slow 
 to anger, and reluctant to judge. The average man 
 reviewing his life finds few occasions of silence of 
 which he has to repent. We may often be left 
 mourning over our hasty utterances, but seldom over 
 the things we have left unsaid. Words are beyond 
 recall as soon as uttered. 
 
 " Tis vain to pull the trigger, 
 Then try to stop the ball." 
 
 In nothing does a man show the hall-mark of a 
 gentleman more than in his readiness to make ample 
 apology and honorable amends for any pain he has 
 unwittingly or inadvertently caused. Only a gentle- 
 man can really make an apology. One of the truest 
 apologies ever made is recorded by Dean Welldon. 
 When he was headmaster of Harrow, Mr. S. H. 
 Butcher the classical scholar who translated the 
 Odyssey with Mr. Andrew Lang came down from 
 the University to be master of a junior form. His 
 boys gave him a terrible time. They ragged him 
 unmercifully, but Butcher was gentle and patient 
 through it all, and melted the hearts of the young
 
 68 THE STKATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 cubs by his forbearing spirit. Near the end of the 
 term they felt ashamed of themselves, and, clubbing 
 together, bought a little present out of the last relics 
 of their pocket-money. The senior boy shuffled up 
 to the master's desk, and handed over the little peace- 
 offering with the apology " Please, sir, we've been 
 such brutes." 
 
 A new beatitude was offered the world by Mark 
 Rutherford. It ran : " Blessed are they who relieve 
 us of our self-despisings." To stimulate self-respect 
 in others is one of the gentlemanly virtues. Tur- 
 genieff, the Russian novelist, on his way home one 
 bitterly cold night, passed a shivering, half -clothed 
 beggar in the street. He turned back and felt in his 
 pocket for a coin, but found that he had no money 
 with him. But turning to the beggar he said : " I am 
 very sorry, brother, but I have nothing with me to 
 give you." The beggar, with whom no one had ever 
 claimed brotherhood, answered : " Never mind the 
 money. You have given me something better by 
 calling me brother." Such sympathy is another hall- 
 mark of a gentleman, for as Hazlitt says : " The ex- 
 tent of our sympathy is determined by our sensi- 
 bility." 
 
 Thoughtfulness, considerateness, forbearance, pa- 
 tience these are the qualities of a gentleman. I 
 once asked Dr. Macnamara, the Parliamentary Sec- 
 retary to the Admiralty, if Mr. A. J. Balfour who 
 was then First Lord of the English Admiralty ever 
 doffed the charming courtesy of manner which every 
 one observes in his bearing. " Never," replied Dr. 
 Macnamara. " He is always the same embodiment 
 of courtesy even to an elevator-boy. It is part of
 
 THE MARKS OF A GENTLEMAN 59 
 
 his character I doubt whether he could drop it now 
 it has become a sort of second nature." This ex- 
 quisite courtesy, as no one who remembers Mr. Bal- 
 four's rule in Ireland needs to be reminded, does not 
 imply any softness, or sentimentality, or effeminate- 
 ness. He can use the iron hand, even if he disguises 
 it under a velvet glove. Gentleness of manner may, 
 and should, cover firmness in action. There is no 
 contradiction or inconsistency in the natural gentle- 
 man's shrinkage from inflicting pain, and the strong 
 man's resolute will. 
 
 Sir Robert Baden Powell lays down one unalter- 
 able rule for Boy Scouts. It is the standing order 
 that a scout must do one good turn a day to some- 
 body else. And the founder of the Boy Scout move- 
 ment told me that nothing gives him greater joy than 
 the tradition which is being surely established 
 " Once a scout, always a gentleman." Boy Scouts 
 are trained in manliness, truth, bravery, and con- 
 siderateness, and these are the qualities of a gentle- 
 man. 
 
 Lord Roberts, who was another example of the 
 perfect gentleman, is credited with an historic act 
 of gentlemanliness. In one of his campaigns he 
 showed his appreciation of the valor of a young non- 
 commissioned officer by giving him commissioned 
 rank on the spot. Moreover, he made the new sub- 
 altern sit next to him at mess that night. The boy 
 was embarrassed by his unfamiliar surroundings, and 
 when ice was passed round, he took a lump and 
 dropped it in his soup! One of the other young 
 officers present snickered audibly; but Lord Roberts, 
 with infinite delicacy of feeling, quietly lifted a piece
 
 60 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 of ice and dropped it in his own soup. The ice went 
 round the table, and every officer present did ex- 
 actly the same thing. The story may be merely a 
 "plain tale from the hills," but anyway it is just 
 what Lord Roberts would have done. 
 
 Dr. R, F, Horton, who vouches for its perfect 
 truth, tells a story of a gentleman who had been ex- 
 tremely successful in the lumber trade, and had 
 gained by his superior ability a large proportion of 
 the great contracts of the colony. One of his men 
 set up an opposition business, and managed to draw 
 away many of the contracts which formerly went to 
 his employer. At a time when engaged on contracts 
 that admitted of no delay, the whole of his timber- 
 yard was burned down. On the day after the fire, 
 his former employer walked into his office, went 
 quietly up to him, and without wasting words in 
 sympathy or comment said : " I know your position, 
 and the contracts that are due, and I wish to put at 
 your disposal the timber in my yard, so that you may 
 save your position." According to the rules of polit- 
 ical economy that man behaved absurdly, but his act 
 was that of a very magnanimous gentleman. 
 
 Good-breeding and refined manners stamp a man ; 
 but these are the externals. True gentlemanliness is 
 the outward and visible sign of an inward and in- 
 visible grace of soul. Nevertheless, externals are 
 not to be discounted as irrelevant. John Oliver 
 Hobbes says the whole course of a man's life may 
 be affected by turning the toes in, or out, at a crucial 
 moment on such little things are first judgments 
 based. First judgments may be generally wrong, 
 but they have a habit of sticking, and they, repeat
 
 THE MAEKS OF A GENTLEMAN 61 
 
 themselves like recurring decimals. Awkwardness 
 and tactlessness create prejudices which have to be 
 lived down. 
 
 Manners are more than a mere gloss. They may 
 be used as a veneer, but they are often an instinctive 
 revelation of character. A nice distinction has to 
 be drawn between manners and etiquette. Etiquette 
 is merely an arbitrary code of conduct and behavior. 
 Lord Chesterfield was a past-master of etiquette, but 
 Dr. Johnson declared that Chesterfield's Letters to 
 his Godson taught only the manners of a dancing- 
 master. Rudeness may express itself in the boorish- 
 ness of an ignorant man, or in the veiled contemptu- 
 ousness of an educated man; but the essence is like 
 in both. " Icily regular, splendidly null " people may 
 be as rude as any boor; and the people who chill 
 others by that frigid, annihilating politeness, which 
 is " second cousin to downright rudeness," are more 
 offensive than those who practise brusqueness. 
 
 Ease with dignity are the marks of a gentleman, 
 and for both business and social life a combination 
 of an easy manner with quiet dignity is to be de- 
 sired. Familiarity is above all things to be avoided. 
 " I do not recognize your face," said a man who had 
 been siapped on the back by another, "but your 
 manners are very familiar." Good manners, like 
 courtesy which Emerson said has its foundations 
 in benevolence oil the wheels of human intercourse, 
 and they are as admirable in the affairs of the 
 market-place and the counting-house as in the draw- 
 ing-room or at the dining-table. They are an es- 
 sential element in the strategy of life, and among the 
 ineffaceable marks of a true gentleman.
 
 VIII 
 HABITS AND VICES 
 
 THE evils of alcoholism have been thrust 
 upon us so constantly that no sensible 
 young man needs any serious warning 
 against drink. Hardly a family escapes entirely the 
 curse of alcohol, and many of the brightest intellects 
 and most promising careers are blighted by this in- 
 sidious vice. 
 
 America and Canada have gone " dry," not for 
 sentimental reasons, but for the sake of industrial 
 prosperity. Long before the United States accepted 
 Prohibition the captains of industry were insisting 
 on the strict sobriety of their work-people. No en- 
 gine-driver would be engaged on some of the great 
 trunk railways if he used alcohol as a beverage. 
 Drinking even at meal-tables was frowned upon, and 
 insobriety was a social offence. Because they wanted 
 to keep their workers contented and efficient, Ameri- 
 can manufacturers were agreeing that it was a bad 
 proposition to build factories in " wet " areas. 
 
 Alcohol, except in the rare cases where medical 
 men still prescribe it, is the enemy of efficiency. Even 
 in tiny doses its effects are deleterious, and the stimu- 
 lus it supplies is inevitably succeeded by a depressive 
 reaction. 
 
 A young man anxious to develop his best 
 62
 
 HABITS AND VICES 63 
 
 potentialities ought sedulously to avoid alcohol. A 
 teetotaler benefits in health, in business prospects, and 
 in duration of life. So marked is total abstinence 
 on longevity that after actuarial tests, spread over 
 many years, several of the leading insurance offices 
 offer either additional benefits, or reduced premiums, 
 to teetotalers. A young man who declines wine, 
 beer, or spirits to-day is not regarded as an oddity. 
 Teetotalers are no longer exceptional people. They 
 are an increasing quantity. Of nothing is it truer 
 than of alcohol that 
 
 " in the field of destiny 
 We reap as we have sown." 
 
 The most hardened smoker admits that a strong 
 case can be made against smoking. He concedes 
 that it is a dirty practice and even if he denied it, 
 his teeth would bear witness against him. He knows, 
 too, that it is an extravagance. Without hesitation 
 he allows that over-ssnoking injures digestion and 
 impairs sleep, that it induces a mental and physical 
 lethargy, and that he fee^ls its injurious effects when- 
 ever he runs for a train. Yet he goes on smoking. 
 In theory he knows he should not; in practice he 
 declares that his moderate smoking and what man 
 ever admits that he is immoderate ? involves so little 
 risk that he does not mind taking it. Sir Benjamin 
 Ward Richardson's dictum that " smoking is a doubt- 
 ful pleasure with a certain penalty " leaves him un- 
 moved. A smoker's psychology is a thing incompre- 
 hensible. 
 
 In a book which came recently into my possession
 
 64 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 an anonymous author, writing in the year 1885, and 
 confessing that he had been a smoker for twenty- 
 three years, observed that " it is possible that in a few 
 years' time, the cigar and the pipe may be as com- 
 pletely things of the past, as the snuff-box is now." 
 Thirty-odd years have gone by since that opinion 
 was avowed, and smoking has become so general 
 that the proportion of non-smokers to smokers during 
 the war was calculated at one to every hundred. The 
 Y. M. C. A. became the largest retail tobacconist in 
 the whole wide world. Moreover, during the war, 
 women who had smoked in secret came out into the 
 open, till a Bishop was led to rebuke them by saying 
 that "one of the happy memories of childhood is 
 my mother's 'good-night' kiss, and I confess I am 
 thankful that I have not to associate it with the sug- 
 gestion of tobacco." 
 
 To a young man there is this to be said with 
 sincerity and emphasis : " You are better without 
 smoking. If tobacco has a certain social value, and 
 is conducive to real fellowship, that is the only case 
 that can be made out for it. In any case let no one 
 persuade you to smoke until you are eighteen, and 
 be on your guard against the habit gaining a mastery 
 over you. Make quite sure that you can give it up 
 whenever you want. Otherwise you are not captain 
 of your soul." Sir William Crookes, who lived to be 
 eighty-six, attributed his longevity to enjoying all 
 good things in moderation. If a young man smokes 
 at all, he should bring his smoking under the dis- 
 ciplinary rule of "moderation in all things." Mr. 
 Gladstone once said that the best maxim for a man 
 was Burke's saying, that "early and provident fear
 
 HABITS AND VICES 65 
 
 is the mother of safety." An early and provident 
 fear of becoming a docile slave to any habit should 
 be a young man's guiding principle. 
 
 Slang has worked its way so firmly into the warp 
 and woof of our language, that to protest against it 
 would be futility. Schoolboys have a vernacular of 
 their own, and even if it is not exactly pleasant, it 
 is rarely odious. The language of the drill-sergeant 
 and the lingo of the barrack-room have unhappily 
 become an obnoxious feature of " English as she is 
 spoke." Lurid phrases, scarcely veiled obscenities, 
 and rank blasphemy in common speech are a legacy 
 of the war. Even girls are " not particular " now in 
 their language. The habit of using loose language is 
 one against which a young man needs to guard. Bad 
 language is not altogether a question of mere wicked- 
 ness : rather it is a question of low and vulgar taste a 
 first stage in depravity of mind and declension of 
 character. 
 
 Professor Gilbert Murray sees evidence of de- 
 cadence in the rapidity with which tobacco and bad 
 language seem to be gaining on us. " Tobacco," he 
 said, addressing the Moral Education League, " is 
 a slight narcotic poison; the use of bad language, I 
 take to be due to a slight nervous convulsion mo- 
 mentarily destroying self-control and releasing certain 
 subconscious interests, such as extreme rage and love 
 of filth, which are normally suppressed. I do not 
 venture to pronounce whether the use of this slight 
 narcotic and the management of this slight nervous 
 convulsion are beneficial or otherwise, or whether, as 
 some suggest, they should be confined to women and
 
 66 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 people of sedentary habits ; but I would call attention 
 to what I think is the fact, that never in the history 
 of the world has there been a society in which both 
 men and women were so habitually under the in- 
 fluence of these two sedatives as at present." 
 
 Indolence may be temperamental, but it has to be 
 fought down. Nothing is so fatal to a young man's 
 prospects in life. An idle man has no place in a 
 healthy community, and unless he has riches he soon 
 finds this out. The habit of procrastinating never 
 doing anything to-day that can be deferred till to- 
 morrow has often been called " the thief of time." 
 In business matters and even in the minor affairs of 
 life, the habit should be learned of keeping fully 
 abreast with one's work. Nothing that can be done 
 one day should be thrown over until the next. I 
 have heard men say of a colleague : " He is a capable 
 man and conscientious, too ; but he lets his work get 
 on top of him." Work neglected or deferred accu- 
 mulates at a frightful pace, and the opportunities for 
 overtaking arrears never seem to come. Discourage- 
 ment and a sense of bewildered helplessness are bred 
 by postponing things that ought to be dealt with sum- 
 marily. A good business man leaves no loose 
 ends he is all too conscious of the perils they create. 
 
 When prostrated by Brazilian fever, complicated 
 by a fistula and abscesses in his ears, Theodore 
 Roosevelt lay on a couch in a New York hotel, dictat- 
 ing to his secretary. His face was grey, and his 
 secretary, seeing the Colonel was tired, suggested 
 leaving the rest of the letters until the next morning. 
 " No ; we'll finish up to-night," said Roosevelt.
 
 HABITS AND VICES 67 
 
 " When I was President I cleared decks every day, 
 and I'm going to clear decks now." He finished dic- 
 tating; then, fainting with pain, rolled on the floor, 
 leaving the couch drenched with blood. Keep your 
 decks clear, and take care that to-morrow is not 
 mortgaged by the neglects of to-day. This is one 
 of the golden rules of successful business. 
 
 Enthusiasts are often despised by people who affect 
 a leisured calm in all things. While excess of zeal, 
 and zeal in the wrong place, may be an irritating 
 characteristic in a man and even the mark of a bore 
 apathy is a soul-destroying habit of mind. A young 
 man without an enthusiasm of any sort develops into 
 an amorphous and stodgy personality. Cherish your 
 enthusiasms. Take sides, and hold your opinions 
 passionately. Let your work absorb your mental and 
 physical energies, and enter into your recreations with 
 all your might. The angel of death is said to have 
 waited upon a man, only to find that he had been 
 dead all his life dead to every enthusiasm. It is 
 much better to be alive than to be dead; and our 
 enthusiasms quicken our lives and enrich our spirits. 
 There are some things worth dying for; there are 
 many more things worth living for.
 
 IX 
 PURITY AND CHIVALRY 
 
 Y two wings," says Thomas a Kempis, " a 
 man is lifted up from things earthly by 
 simplicity and purity." During the last ten 
 years the whole question of sexual purity has been 
 faced from a new angle. The subject is not a 
 pleasant one; but the need for presenting the ideal 
 of purity to the young men of our time is urgent, and 
 to shrink from the task is an evasion of duty. 
 
 Dr. Woods Hutchinson declares his belief (in 
 The Doctor in War} that notwithstanding the old 
 popular delusions to the contrary the young are 
 clean-minded and more decent and sensible about 
 these matters than the middle-aged; and that once 
 possessed of sufficient knowledge, average humanity 
 is surprisingly sound and sensible in judgment. He 
 expresses approval of the emphasis which army doc- 
 tors placed upon two facts: (i) that sexual in- 
 dulgence is not in the least necessary to health, and 
 (2) that the greatest menace of such illicit pleasure 
 is to the welfare of the next generation. " The dan- 
 gers of the adolescent period," he declares, "have 
 been enormously exaggerated, and the hysterical de- 
 scriptions to boys and young men of the terrible 
 temptations and fierce struggles with these instincts 
 which they are sure to experience if they attempt to 
 
 68
 
 PUEITY AND CHIVALRY 69 
 
 behave decently and sensibly, do far more harm than 
 good." 
 
 I believe myself that infinite mischief is done by 
 leaving boys in ignorance as to their sexual nature. 
 The instinct of sex runs like a powerful current 
 through all nature. In the case of most animals the 
 instinct is controlled for them by mysterious physi- 
 ological laws, and man alone is left to control himself 
 by the force of will and conscience. This sex in- 
 stinct is a possession for which a young man carries a 
 responsibility to succeeding generations. The old 
 tradition, which happily has now passed away, that 
 " youth must be served," and " a young man must 
 sow his wild oats," has, as Dr. Hutchinson says, been 
 responsible for probably as many wrecks and mis- 
 fortunes as all the hot-headed and uncontrollable 
 impulses of youth put together. 
 
 Sexual immorality is one of the vices that are 
 individually degrading and socially desolating. No 
 warning is really needed by a young man against 
 sexual promiscuity. His own conscience condemns 
 it. He would want to shield his sister against it; 
 and he knows that when he comes to be the father 
 of sons, he will want his boys to have a high standard 
 of personal purity. A young man cannot indulge 
 his sexual propensities without injuring his most 
 sacred possession his own personality. Purity is 
 the crown of real manliness, and impurity of act, 
 speech or thought is the enemy of the noblest qualities 
 of young manhood. 
 
 Faith in the virtue of women is the foundation of 
 domestic happiness. That faith can only be pre- 
 served by maintaining towards all women a chivalrous
 
 70 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 respect which forbids sexual license. In the days 
 of chivalry purity in the young knight's relations to 
 women was impressed upon him, at his initiation, as 
 a religious ideal; and it was in the spirit of ancient 
 chivalry that Lord Kitchener, in his famous message 
 to his soldiers embarking for France, enjoined upon 
 them the duty of being courteous to all women, but 
 familiar with none. 
 
 No one conversant with the facts can blind his 
 eyes to the sinister truth that the war as all wars 
 have in the past has had a deteriorating effect on 
 sex morality. The conscientious young man of 
 to-day, desirous of taking his small part in restoring 
 the best elements of national character, should 
 quietly resolve that neither by speech nor act will he 
 have any responsibility for lowering moral standards. 
 Morality based on fear is not the soundest morality 
 for a young man. He requires a far higher impera- 
 tive than fear. Nothing, indeed, but an exalted ideal 
 of womanhood, and the dynamic of moral conviction 
 at the heart of which is the religious sanction 
 are adequate. The purity of the family, which is 
 the essential unit of a high civilization, should be 
 his knightly concern; and the thought that he may 
 in the future be the head of a family, with sons and 
 daughters of his own, should be with him as a safe- 
 guard against laxity. The standard of womanhood 
 is set by women themselves, and they are largely 
 responsible if men take a low one and treat them 
 lightly. 
 
 Reverence for his mother, affection for his sisters, 
 and respect for all women should be cultivated by 
 young men. Under no circumstances should a young
 
 PURITY AND CHIVALEY 71 
 
 man trifle with the affections of a young girl. The 
 friendship of women is a thing to be prized, not 
 abused by flirtation or levity. Perhaps it is not quite 
 so true of the modern girl as it was of the young 
 women of his time, but there is still much truth in 
 Washington Irving's observation that " a woman's 
 whole life is a history of her affections; . . . she 
 sends forth her affections on adventure, she embarks 
 her whole soul in the traffic of affection, and if 
 shipwrecked her case is hopeless for it is a bank- 
 ruptcy of the heart." Possibly the Twentieth Cen- 
 tury girl, who has turned two of the mincing steps 
 of her Nineteenth Century sister into one manly 
 stride, and who boasts of a hockey limp, is beyond 
 dying of a broken heart; but, though times have 
 changed, a girl's affections are very sacred things, 
 and trifling with them is wanton selfishness unworthy 
 of a chivalrous young man. 
 
 Perhaps all I need say here on Love and Marriage 
 is epitomized by the schoolboy who, on being given 
 the first line of a famous couplet and asked to com- 
 plete it, wrote: 
 
 " 'Twere better to have loved and lost, 
 Than not to have loved, and won."
 
 X 
 
 FRIENDSHIPS 
 
 LIFE is colored or discolored, embellished or 
 disfigured, by our friendships. Friendship 
 has been called the wine of life. We are 
 rich or poor, not as we are possessed of money and 
 what money can buy, but by the wealth of our friend- 
 ships. An Eastern proverb runs : 
 
 " He who has a thousand friends has not a friend to spare, 
 And he who has but one enemy shall meet him every- 
 where." 
 
 Upon our genius for friendship our happiness rests 
 in a very large measure. Heredity and environment 
 mould our tendencies. But environment is not merely 
 a matter of material surroundings : it is a question of 
 spiritual and moral influences. The impact of a 
 human soul upon other souls is a factor of immense 
 consequence. Some personalities have a mesmeric 
 quality, a power to magnetize those who come within 
 their sphere of attraction. They radiate their in- 
 fluence for good or evil. But influence is not exerted 
 merely by these powerful radiant personalities. The 
 gentlest, and the weakest, and the humblest exert their 
 own influence upon the lives of those around them. 
 It is a mere commonplace to say that most of us 
 " cause our ripples " through our friendships. It is 
 
 72
 
 FBIEETDSHIPS 73 
 
 upon our immediate personal friends that we exert 
 what influence we command, and it is upon us that 
 our friends in turn wield whatever influence they 
 exercise. 
 
 This influential quality in friendship makes the 
 choice of friends a matter of infinite consequence. 
 No one need drift haphazard into a friendship. Our 
 wills are free in the selection of companions and 
 friends. Business may compel us to associate in 
 working hours with men whose tastes, habits, out- 
 look and speech are inimical to us. We may feel 
 out of harmony with colleagues in an office, or mates 
 in a workshop; but the association can end there. 
 For our leisure hours we are free to seek the com- 
 panionship of kindred spirits en rapport with our 
 own moods and aspirations. Moreover, to this choice 
 of friends we can bring discretion and discrimination. 
 A young man should enter warily upon a friendship, 
 groping his way rather than plunging into an intimacy 
 whose consequences may be fatal to his whole life- 
 happiness. 
 
 It was Emerson who said that, to have a friend 
 we must be a friend, and it was the same essayist 
 who said that : " We take care of our health, we lay 
 up money, we make our roof tight and our clothing 
 sufficient; but who provides wisely that he shall not 
 be wanting in the best property of all friends?" 
 Friendship is essentially a give-and-take enterprise 
 between souls. No lasting friendship is lopsided. 
 Disparity of age is less of a hindrance to true friend- 
 ship than disparity of means. Friendship between a 
 rich man and a poor man is rare, just because it 
 presents a test few can survive. Half our social
 
 74 THE STBATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 injustice would be abolished if real fellowship could 
 exist between employer and employee; but it seems 
 as if it cannot be. The poor man looks out for 
 evidence of patronage on the rich man's part, and the 
 wealthy man is in incessant dread of some approach 
 to a suggestion of the deference which desolates 
 mutual intercourse. Friends must stand on a level 
 footing in their friendship, or the foundations of 
 their intimacy are rotten. This gulf between rich 
 and poor might be bridged in the Christian Church ; 
 but not even there is the chasm spanned. The divisive 
 power of money has to be recognized. There is no 
 escape from it. 
 
 Friendship cannot be soundly based on any other 
 foundation than sincerity. Other qualities may be 
 attractive intellectual, sympathetic or conversa- 
 tional ; but as a basis of friendship, sincerity is sheer 
 bed rock. " Friendship," says George Dawson in 
 one of his essays, " is the noblest, purest relation 
 that can exist between two human beings, and to be 
 able to make a friend is one of the most glorious 
 distinctions between man and the creatures beneath 
 him." Without sincerity, this noble and pure rela- 
 tionship is impossible. For, at long last, the test of 
 friendship is the sacrificial test. Rudyard Kipling 
 makes one of his soldiers cry 
 
 " O where would I be when my throat is dry? 
 O where would I be when the bullets fly? 
 O where would I be when I come to die? 
 
 Why, somewhere's anigh my chum ; 
 
 If he's liquor, he'll give me some; 
 If I'm wounded he'ij hold my 'ead, 
 And he'll write 'em 'ome when I'm dead. 
 
 Gawd send us a trusty chum 1 "
 
 FEIENDSHIPS 75 
 
 Mr. Jeffery Farnol, author of The Broad Highway, 
 observes that : " Friendship is a mighty factor in this 
 sad world, since by friendship comes self-forgetful- 
 ness, and no man can do great works unless he 
 forgets self." 
 
 Sudden friendships are almost invariably shallow 
 and transient. The growth of true friendship is 
 slow, and the association matures slowly and firmly, 
 like the growth of a forest oak whose roots are as 
 wide-spreading as its branches. Trees that make the 
 most rapid growth are shallow-rooted, and are the 
 first to succumb to the tempest. This is pre- 
 eminently true of friendship. Fair-weather friends 
 are better not classed as friends. They belong to 
 the category of passing acquaintances. The comrades 
 who can cling together in fair weather and foul, for 
 richer or poorer, in sickness or health, are the friends 
 who attain the splendid heights of friendship's loftiest 
 possibilities. 
 
 Friendship does not demand an incessant inter- 
 change of conversation. If you can be silent with 
 a friend for half an hour, on a country walk or by a 
 fireside, without any sense of embarrassment, your 
 friendship is built on rock, not sand. Who has not 
 heard of Carlyle and Tennyson spending a long even- 
 ing in silence, broken only by the puffing of their 
 tobacco pipes, and of Carlyle's farewell at the door, 
 " Well, Alfred; it's a grand evening we've been hav- 
 ing together?" There are times of reserve, and of 
 deep emotion, when anything but silence jars; be- 
 tween real friends that communion of silence is 
 respected. The best friendships, like the deepest 
 human loves, are sensitive to strain. George Mac-
 
 76 THE STEATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 Donald's familiar lines apply to friends as well as 
 to lovers : 
 
 " Alas, how easily things go wrong. 
 A sigh too deep or a kiss too long: 
 Then comes a mist and a blinding rain, 
 And life is never the same again." 
 
 There are times when words obscure thought, and 
 when sympathy can find no better expression than 
 the pressure of the hand. James Whitcomb Riley's 
 lines put this truth in homely words : 
 
 " When a man ain't got a coat, an' he's feelin' kind o' blue, 
 And the clouds hang dark and heavy, an* won't let the 
 
 sunshine through, 
 
 It's a great thing, O my brethren, for a feller just to lay 
 His hand upon your shoulder in a friendly sort of way. 
 
 It makes a man feel curious; it makes the tear-drops start, 
 An' you sort o' feel a flutter in the region of your heart. 
 You can't look up and meet his eyes; you don't know 
 
 what to say, 
 When his hand is on your shoulder in a friendly sort of 
 
 way. 
 
 Oh, the world's a curious compound with its h'oney and 
 
 its gall, 
 With its cares and bitter crosses; but a good world, after 
 
 all. 
 An' a good God must have made it leastways, that's 
 
 what I say, 
 When a hand rests on my shoulder in a friendly sort of 
 
 way." 
 
 The results of a friendship test its value. You 
 may judge the worth of a friend by the reaction he 
 sets up in yourself. If you leave him braced for 
 life's struggles by his companionship, you are happy
 
 FRIENDSHIPS 77 
 
 in your friend; if his influence is to make you tend 
 to the sordid and ignoble, that friendship is crippling 
 you for life's handicap. 
 
 There can be no friendship between human beings 
 except on the basis of truth. Between friends the 
 cards must be on the table, if I may use that phrase. 
 Perfect frankness there must be in friendship; but 
 even between the oldest and closest of friends, tact- 
 lessness, or the slightest approach to discourtesy, may 
 be fatal. As Charles Kingsley says : " Only the 
 great-hearted can be true friends; the mean and 
 cowardly can never know what true friendship 
 means." " We rejoice," said Cicero, " in the joy of 
 friends as much as we do in our own, and we are 
 equally grieved at their sorrows. The wise man, 
 indeed, feels towards his friend as he does towards 
 himself." Friendship does make these imperious 
 demands. It calls for sacrifice and is repaid by 
 sacrifice. But the comradeship that emerges from 
 a tried and proved friendship is reward without 
 parallel; and it is the love and sympathy of friends 
 that puts spring into our steps and joy into our hearts 
 as we trudge the dusty, main-traveled roads of life. 
 
 "The timid hand stretched forth to aid 
 
 A brother in his need, 
 A kindly word in grief's dark hour, 
 
 That proves a friend indeed; 
 The plea for mercy softly breathed 
 
 When justice threatens high, 
 The sorrow of a contrite heart 
 
 These things can never die." 
 
 Happy is the young man who, fortunate in his 
 early friendships, retains them through life, losing
 
 78 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 none save by the " dread reaper." But friendship is 
 a tender plant which nothing injures so quickly as 
 neglect. Circumstances separate us from friends, 
 and distance has to be bridged by interchange of 
 letters, and, in the press of things, letters sometimes 
 go unanswered, till the answer brings no abiding 
 satisfaction to the recipient. The old links wear 
 thinner, and time snaps them. " The friends we 
 never write to " are some of our most pathetic posses- 
 sions, for 
 
 "There's nothing worth the wear of winning 
 But laughter, and the love of friends."
 
 XI 
 
 ONLY a comparatively small proportion of our 
 boys are ever really given the unfettered 
 choice of a career. Nor, perhaps, is this so 
 great a misfortune as it appears. Within limits, a 
 boy should be permitted to follow his bent; but the 
 limits are and must be, save in exceptional cases 
 defined by the financial status of his parents. Even 
 if a boy is in the fortunate position of being free to 
 enter any one of the great professions, he is wise to 
 be guided, not merely by his inclinations at the 
 moment, but by his father or schoolmaster, whose 
 experience of the world gives their judgment a 
 wisdom youth cannot command. Boys less fortu- 
 nate in financial circumstances may have some 
 freedom of choice as to their occupations; but too 
 often an accidental opportunity, an accessible vacancy 
 in some business, makes the vital decision for a boy. 
 If later he has developed into a young man of inde- 
 pendent spirit and adventurous disposition, he may 
 perhaps throw up his first job and make his own 
 choice of a career. All honor to such a young man. 
 He at least has the courage to try to shape his own 
 destiny. 
 
 Not for a moment do I believe that it is always 
 79
 
 80 THE 8TEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 unwise to change from one occupation to another. 
 I exercised the liberty myself leaving one occupa- 
 tion which I disliked, at the age of eighteen, and 
 entering another which though the rewards may 
 have been less generous I have at least found con- 
 genial. The die is not cast when a young man takes 
 up his first situation. A fortune can be more easily 
 made by selling baby-linen than by writing books; 
 but a young man may find the baby-linen trade un- 
 endurable, and prefer to forego the fortune. He is 
 wise, however, not to abandon baby-linen for litera- 
 ture unless the literary gift has been granted him. 
 " What I can do " must wait on " What I would 
 like to do," and often " What I ought to do "what 
 George Eliot called inexorable, inescapable duty 
 may overrule both. Still, as a man has only one life 
 to live, and work absorbs so large a slice of that 
 one life, it must be conceded that to follow a pro- 
 fession or trade which is repellent, or even uncon- 
 genial, is to be condemned to a mild form of penal 
 servitude. 
 
 To wish to be engaged in useful work is a high 
 ideal. No one need envy the idle rich. Indeed one 
 may hope that the exhaustion of Europe by war will 
 abolish the idle rich classes altogether, and drive 
 every fit man into some form of useful work. Abra- 
 ham Lincoln said that the habits of our whole species 
 fall into three classes useful labor, useless labor, 
 and idleness. The latter two are indissolubly linked. 
 The idle classes call for the useless labor the men- 
 servants who devote their whole lives to superfluous 
 services, and the retinue of useless laborers who hang 
 on the fringe of sports and amusements. A book-
 
 CHOOSING A CAEEEE 81 
 
 maker's clerk, for example, may, at the races, work 
 very hard; but his labor is vain. It ministers not 
 to the happiness of the race, but to its demoralization. 
 
 The race of to-day is not so much with the strong 
 nations as with the disciplined nations. Machinery, 
 the product of mind, is displacing brawn. Power 
 and wealth will fall to the nations which best edu- 
 cate their young men, train them scientifically in 
 their crafts, and encourage them (by the fullest re- 
 wards in money, leisure, and opportunity of ad- 
 vancement) to bend all their mental energies to their 
 work. 
 
 Fifty years ago, the prospect of starting in busi- 
 ness for himself was a lodestar to a young man. It 
 should still be a young man's ambition to be his 
 own master; but circumstances have changed in the 
 last half-century, and that goal is not quite so acces- 
 sible as it was. All the signs point to the old fierce 
 competitive spirit with the ethics of the jungle and 
 with war at its heart yielding to a more coopera- 
 tive spirit, with a mellower view of human interde- 
 pendence. At the same time, a firm tendency is 
 manifest in the direction of specialized processes, 
 time-saving machinery, multiple-shops, and great de- 
 partmental stores, all of which, by effecting econo- 
 mies in production and distribution, tend to squeeze 
 out the small business man. Fifty years hence we 
 may all be either civil servants or the employees of 
 limited liab'l'ty companies. Necessarily this tend- 
 ency accentuates all the risks of establishing a new 
 business. 
 
 " All the professions are overcrowded," and " there 
 is always room at the top of every profession" are
 
 82 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 truisms now as they have been truisms for forty 
 years. They need convey no discouragement to 
 any young man who means to work hard, use his 
 brains, and employ the talents he possesses. A few 
 " plum " posts may still be secured by influence only, 
 but they are few, and they are a diminishing quantity. 
 World-competition will compel employers to open 
 their highest posts to the best men. Talent must 
 not run to waste. Competence commands its proper 
 place. 
 
 Merit tells now as it never told; and even better 
 times are coming for young men with ability, enter- 
 prise, and ambition. Only slackness, incompetency, 
 misfortune, and ill-health keep young men from high 
 attainment. The barriers to progress are down. 
 
 I do not propose to survey the professions and the 
 rewards they offer. To a youth of marked ability, 
 who can live without earning his own livelihood until 
 he is nearly thirty, the Bar offers tempting vistas. 
 The profession makes heavy demands on brain, nerve, 
 and physique; but success, if it comes, is often 
 dazzling, and always remunerative. The medical 
 profession offers great scope especially nowadays, 
 when the shortage of doctors is a positive peril to 
 the community. Again, it must be said that the life 
 of a medical practitioner is hard. 
 
 Analytical chemistry and electrical engineering 
 are comparatively new professions which offer il- 
 limitable opportunities especially for young men 
 who are studious and possessed of initiative. The 
 field for young architects and surveyors seems to 
 have no boundaries. Banking has in the past dangled 
 the glamour of extreme respectability before the eyes
 
 CHOOSING A CAEEEE 83 
 
 of young men; but the financial rewards have been 
 paltry in the extreme. Accountancy, to a young 
 man with an aptitude for figures, offers a fair chance ; 
 but the work is monotonous, and calls for close, un- 
 remitting desk work. If he is a really good mathe- 
 matician, a young man may achieve notable success 
 as an actuary. The plums of the profession are few ; 
 but then there are very few good actuaries to capture 
 the plums. This profession calls for a positive genius 
 for figures, and a joyous zest for abstruse calcula- 
 tions. 
 
 Art, music, journalism, literature what shall I 
 say of these? They are vocations, like the Christian 
 ministry, upon which, as Henry Ward Beecher said, 
 a young man should not enter unless he receives a 
 call from within and a push from without. Art is 
 a fickle mistress, who bestows her smiles and rewards 
 capriciously. Music spells drudgery even to genius. 
 The great composers had, with scarcely an exception, 
 to accept the dreary donkey work of teaching. 
 Journalism has been described as " an excellent pro- 
 fession to get out of;" yet journalists derive a joy 
 from their work which rarely wears stale. Here, 
 again, the work is exacting, precarious, and unre- 
 warding. Commercialized journalism has robbed the 
 profession of much of its old lustre, and what was 
 once a free Bohemian life has been converted into 
 a somewhat monotonous routine, relieved only when 
 a journalist has specialized and become captain of 
 his soul. Literature into which journalism often 
 proffers a right of way is like politics, a noble pro- 
 fession in its higher branches, but a life of unre- 
 deemed slavery for the man who cannot emerge
 
 84 THE STEATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 from the ruck. A third-rate author may talk of his 
 art, but he eats the bread of penury. 
 
 Many young men despise a trade, and by doing 
 so betray their foolishness. Most of the skilled 
 trades offer fairer opportunities for success, and 
 better earnings in many cases than clerical occupa- 
 tions do. A good mechanic is never short of a good 
 job at good wages. Carpenters, bricklayers, plumb- 
 ers, painters, and electricians are highly paid and in 
 constant demand. By their Trades Union regula- 
 tions they control their own conditions of employ- 
 ment. The printing trades can always absorb the 
 supply of intelligent young men who seek to enter 
 them, and, if the work does involve strain, it is al- 
 ways interesting, and the pay is good. Compositors 
 all seem to reach a very high degree of intelligence, 
 and it is not surprising that journalists are so often 
 recruited from the composing frames. I have over- 
 heard compositors discuss abstruse subjects with an 
 acumen and breadth of view which would have put 
 many a college debating society to shame. 
 
 If he enters a trade, a young man should do so 
 with a stout determination to make himself a com- 
 plete master of his craft, and to take a real pride 
 in its traditions. An expert craftsman is entitled to 
 share the joys of an artist over any piece of work 
 into which he has put all his skill, knowledge, and 
 enthusiasm. A well-built wall, a well-made cup- 
 board, a sound piece of plumber's work, or a taste- 
 fully set " stick " of type, is as worthy a product of 
 man's skill as a painting, a statue, a sonnet, or a 
 sonata. 
 
 The healthiest and perhaps the happiest occupa-
 
 CHOOSING A CAREER 86 
 
 tion for a man is farming. Man was meant to be 
 a farmer, and land-hunger is his most natural appe- 
 tite. Modern farming is, however, a highly scientific 
 business, and must become more so in the future. 
 The old rule-of-thumb and hand-to-mouth methods 
 of agriculture are destined to pass away, perhaps in 
 our own generation. Motor-traction, mechanical 
 appliances, chemical fertilization, intercropping, in- 
 tensive culture, with all the new apparatus for dairy- 
 farming, have transformed agriculture, and almost 
 exalted it into a learned profession. While large 
 farming with ample capital is in the ascendant, the 
 small holding for market-gardening, carried out on 
 the French method, presents opportunities for ener- 
 getic young men; especially if the French plan of 
 grouping the holdings around an attractive village 
 offering some social life is adopted and facilitated 
 by Government action. Fruit-farming on scientific 
 lines is another attractive occupation for young men 
 of intelligence, but it, too, needs to be taken very 
 seriously and made at once a study and a hobby. 
 Silviculture the cultivation of trees for timber is 
 generally associated with estate management; but if 
 afforestation is taken seriously in hand by the Gov- 
 ernment, a healthy and delightful occupation will be 
 opened to young men of good education. Horti- 
 culture is almost too delightful an occupation to be 
 made a business. It ought to be spared us as a God- 
 given recreation.
 
 XII 
 
 BUSINESS APTITUDE 
 
 A SOUND memory and the power of concen- 
 tration are the first attributes of success in 
 business. Without them a young man is 
 handicapped. While some people have a good 
 memory as a natural endowment and they should 
 count themselves fortunate a defective memory can 
 be trained by care and application. Learning poetry 
 by heart is excellent gymnastic exercise for the 
 memory; but scientific systems of memory-training 
 have been introduced, and have helped many to over- 
 come shortcomings in this respect. Mnemonics have 
 their advocates, and the various memory systems 
 have helped thousands of men, young and old, to 
 develop their powers of memory. At all cost a 
 reliable memory should be acquired by a young busi- 
 ness man. Without it, he will flounder in the lower 
 ranges of commercial life. 
 
 Concentration of mind demands self-discipline. 
 Psychologists, in describing the working of the mind, 
 liken it to a circle, the centre of which is the point 
 of concentration. Around the circumference are 
 thoughts, known as marginal thoughts, which persist 
 in obtruding themselves upon the central idea. Only 
 by concentration of mental effort are the marginal 
 thoughts kept outside the circumference. This ac- 
 
 86
 
 BUSINESS APTITUDE 87 
 
 counts for the incapacity of the undisciplined mind 
 to concentrate on an idea or a piece of work. The 
 young man who cannot keep thoughts of cricket or 
 football, or any other distracting interest, from ob- 
 truding themselves when he is at work on figures 
 or correspondence or any other business duty, is 
 dissipating mental energy. No one gets far in life 
 without concentration. Things done by halves are 
 badly done, and often have to be done again, or re- 
 vised by some one who has the power of concentra- 
 tion. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing 
 whole-heartedly. I am conscious that what I am 
 saying is platitudinous; but first principles are al- 
 ways platitudes. Some one has said that even the Ten 
 Commandments are merely platitudes; but they are 
 the fundamentals of true human relationship. 
 
 Early in his business life a young man should 
 recognize that all necessary labor is dignified. Little 
 duties are irksome; but if they are necessary they 
 fall into the economy of organized life and how- 
 ever trivial they may seem, they can be done with- 
 out loss of dignity. I have known the editor of a 
 great newspaper leave his desk to fit a new wire into 
 an electric switch that had fused. The little acci- 
 dent had thrown a room into darkness, and at a 
 crucial moment was delaying the work of two or 
 three men. An electrician might have been called 
 in, but that would have spelled half an hour's delay. 
 So the Chief applied his knowledge of electric light- 
 ing, and, mounting a step-ladder, did the little me- 
 chanical duty himself. There are times when to 
 serve as a messenger is not undignified work for a 
 highly-placed senior in an office. Whatever has to be
 
 88 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 done may be done without any sacrifice of prestige, 
 however humble the little task may be. 
 
 A certain merchant-prince often stops during his 
 daily round of his warehouse to pick up and tie 
 together odd bits of string that might be lying about. 
 A sense of economy made him hate the waste of even 
 trivial oddments, and though his own time was in- 
 valuable, he felt it worth while to show his employees 
 that he thought no work beneath him. President 
 Roosevelt, holiday-making on a ranch, blacked the 
 boots of every one in the family. No one thought 
 that to do so was derogatory to his dignity, but they 
 asked him not to do it again " because he had 
 blacked the boots so badly ! " 
 
 Punctuality ranks among the highest of virtues in 
 business life. A young man who is erratic in his 
 hour of arrival is usually unreliable in his work. 
 Punctuality in keeping appointments oils the wheels 
 of business. Without it, time is frittered away. If 
 you have an engagement, be on the spot a minute or 
 two before the time. A few minutes late may upset 
 a busy man's time-table, and waste the time of half 
 a dozen other people who have subsequent appoint- 
 ments with him. 
 
 Arrive punctually at business in the morning, and 
 again after lunch. Sometimes it is not possible to 
 be as punctual in leaving business. Do not be im- 
 patient if you are delayed a little at the end of the 
 day. The young man whose eyes are everlastingly 
 on the clock, and who grumbles if he cannot be off 
 the premises before it has done striking, is generally 
 known as a mere clock-servant; and that does not 
 mark him out for early promotion. When Charles
 
 BUSINESS APTITUDE 89 
 
 Lamb was admonished for arriving late at the India 
 Office, he stuttered out his famous excuse that he 
 made up for coming late by going away early. But 
 Lamb was a chartered libertine, and the British India 
 Office was a lotus-land where it was always after- 
 noon. 
 
 Little carelessnesses are inexcusable in business, 
 and a junior should be vigilant against committing 
 them. I remember a lawyer's office being dislocated 
 for three days by a general search for a missing copy 
 of a document. It had been withdrawn from a parcel 
 of deeds for inspection months before, and then, 
 when finished with, been carelessly packed away in 
 a wrong parcel. Nearly every parcel in the safety 
 vault had to be opened, examined, and packed again 
 before the document was recovered. That act of 
 carelessness of a junior clerk caused endless work 
 for the whole staff, and endangered a litigation case 
 which was coming before the Courts. 
 
 Shorthand, if not an essential, is eminently useful 
 to a junior in a business house. Even though he 
 may not have to use it in the ordinary course of his 
 work, shorthand is handy for making notes as aids 
 to memory, or to take down the exact terms of an 
 instruction. So with typewriting it is distinctly an 
 advantage to be able to type out a letter or a memo- 
 randum. Shorthand and typewriting are now, how- 
 ever, specialties of which girls have proved them- 
 selves supremely capable, and have, indeed, almost 
 established a monopoly. I have even heard it plau- 
 sibly argued that too proficient a knowledge of short- 
 hand and typing is an actual handicap to a young 
 man entering business, as he runs the risk of being
 
 90 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 put upon this more or less mechanical work and kept 
 at it without much hope of promotion. 
 
 Observation is an unfailing aid to business apti- 
 tude. A young man should keep his eyes open and 
 observe all he can of the processes of business. If 
 he is content to know only just what is done in his 
 own department he will stay there. What he ought 
 to do is to master all the details of his own branch, 
 and learn, incidentally, all that he can about other 
 departments in the business house. Opportunities 
 for promotion come unexpectedly ; and the wider the 
 range of a young man's business knowledge, the 
 greater are his chances of early preferment. 
 
 Every business has its secrets, and every com- 
 mercial house expects its employees to keep their 
 own confidence. The affairs of a business should 
 not be discussed outside. A junior clerk often has 
 access to letters and papers containing information 
 that ought not to be noised abroad. He must learn 
 to keep silent, and to be worthy of confidence. A 
 junior should be as economical of stationery and 
 materials as if they were his own property. Waste 
 of paper, string, electric light, postages and odd ex- 
 penses, has to be obviated; and a young man who 
 shows himself careful of his employer's materials 
 earns appreciation. 
 
 As a general rule, a young man who shows him- 
 self really eager to fulfil his duties has rarely to put 
 up a serious fight for his rights. They get respected 
 without assertion on his part.
 
 XIII 
 
 PERSEVERANCE 
 
 PPORTUNITY," says a Latin proverb, 
 " has hair in front; if you seize her by the 
 forelock, you may hold her; but if suf- 
 fered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her up." 
 Perseverance is the exploitation of opportunity to 
 the uttermost. An apt and descriptive word for 
 perseverance has been coined; it is referred to as 
 stick-at-it-ive-ness. Reminting a word or a phrase 
 often gives it fresh currency as verbal coinage. Dr. 
 John Kelman, who has only recently transferred his 
 residence from Edinburgh to New York, applied the 
 Scriptural words, " faint, yet pursuing," to the per- 
 severing soldiers in France; but he put it into their 
 slang, and said they were " fed up but sticking it." 
 All history is a record of human persistency, and 
 scarcely a single possession treasured to-day is not 
 due to the perseverance of some distant ancestor. 
 Every worthy achievement is the outcome of per- 
 severance, the reward of perseverance. Our liberties 
 were won by the perseverance of men who fought 
 down ancient tyrannies, and the equality of oppor- 
 tunity towards which civilization is now sweeping 
 steadily will be a heritage from men who refused to 
 believe that 
 
 " The rich man in his castle, 
 
 The poor man in his gate, 
 God made them high and lowly, 
 And ordered their estate." 
 
 91
 
 92 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 The rich treasures of literature, the amazing 
 triumphs of science, the choice products of art, were 
 born of perseverance. Capacity to stick-at-it lifts 
 a man out of the ruck. Even genius has been de- 
 scribed as merely a capacity for taking infinite pains. 
 Giotto's hand-drawn circle that, attracting the notice 
 of the Pope, led the artist to fortune, was the result 
 of patient perseverance in freehand drawing. 
 
 The story of John Lockhart's first glimpse of Sir 
 Walter Scott is almost threadbare by much usage, 
 but it is still a staple example of perseverance. Scott, 
 whose early success had made him a rich man, rashly 
 embarked on a business enterprise that failed dis- 
 astrously and involved the novelist in financial ruin. 
 He was too honorable to escape liability by seizing 
 upon a legal technicality that would have freed him. 
 Instead, Scott, well advanced in years, set himself 
 to pay the debts of his firm, and to restore his own 
 fallen fortunes by writing more novels. Lockhart, 
 a law-student, had his lodgings opposite Scott's 
 rooms, and from his window he could see under a 
 blind a hand only a right hand writing hard all 
 day long, and often into the night. It was the hand 
 of Scott penning the novels that were to restore his 
 self-esteem. Upon Lockhart's mind that hand drove 
 home the indelible lesson of perseverance : and later, 
 when he had married Sir Walter's daughter, and was 
 writing Scott's biography, he told the now familiar 
 story. 
 
 Charles Darwin called one day on his publisher 
 with the manuscript of a small book that he wanted 
 published. He explained that he did not imagine 
 that it would ever have a large sale or be in any
 
 PEBSEVEBANCE 93 
 
 sense popular, but he thought it was a useful con- 
 tribution to scientific knowledge. Anyway, he said, 
 it was the product of a quarter of a century's patient 
 research. The book was on earthworms, whose 
 amazing functions in the creation of fertile soil 
 Darwin explains to the world in a perfectly fascinat- 
 ing little classic. For years the great scientist had 
 studied the operations of earthworms, and divined 
 the secret of their mysterious borings. Now, through 
 Darwin's laborious perseverance, we have a profound 
 respect for the humble worm, and shrink from tread- 
 ing on one or cutting it with a spade in digging. 
 He made us realize our obligations to the little crea- 
 tures, and left us incapable of scoffing at Browning's 
 lines : 
 
 "The loving worm within its clod 
 Were diviner than a loveless God 
 Amid His worlds." 
 
 The late Sir William Crookes had a high ideal of 
 perseverance. " To stop short in any research that 
 bids fair to widen the gates of knowledge, to recoil 
 from fear of difficulty or adverse criticism," he said, 
 " is to bring reproach on science." How faithfully 
 he lived up to his own high standard of perseverance, 
 all the world knows. We owe to it the X-rays, 
 which have multiplied the powers of surgery and 
 lifted diagnosis to a new plane of certainty. While 
 experimenting with the electrical apparatus which 
 he had invented and given the name " the Crookes 
 tube," Professor Roentgen accidentally interposed his 
 hand between the screen and the tube, and to his 
 amazement saw on the screen the shadow of the
 
 94 THE 8TEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 bones of his hand. Thus by mere chance another 
 investigator made the discovery of Roentgen photog- 
 raphy, reaping where Sir William Crookes' persever- 
 ance had sown. To the same indefatigable worker 
 we owe the discovery of radium by M. and Madame 
 Curie, whose investigations were made possible by 
 Sir William Crookes' persevering research into the 
 radio-active properties of uranium salts. 
 
 When German Gothas were raining bomb-shells 
 on London, the people were in no mood to think of 
 the patient and persevering endeavors of the pioneers 
 of aviation by aeroplane. But the story of the 
 Brothers Wright, who saw in the invention of the 
 internal combustion gas-engine the conquest of the 
 air Nature's last element to submit to man's yoke 
 is a record of perseverance. In a little engine-shed, 
 in Dayton, Ohio, these two engineers worked with 
 undying zeal to make the first heavier-than-air flying 
 machine. Failure followed failure, but they stuck 
 at it till at last the first reluctant aeroplane made its 
 first mad plunge through the air. From that mo- 
 ment started the shrinkage of earthly distance, until 
 to-day the whole world is becoming just a parish. 
 
 In every phase of life, men, by their perseverance, 
 have overwhelmed difficulties, broadened the range 
 of knowledge, and carried further man's triumph 
 over natural forces. Edison with the vacuum electric 
 lamp, and later with the phonograph, won his vic- 
 tories by patient persistence. David Livingstone 
 fought his way into Central Africa, and opened the 
 dark continent for commerce and civilization by 
 sheer perseverance. 
 
 John Burns, an engineer stranded on the West
 
 PEESEVEEANCE 95 
 
 African coast, found a copy of Adam Smith's 
 Wealth of Nations in the sand, and laid the founda- 
 tions of that knowledge of political economy which 
 made him preeminent among Labor leaders, and 
 finally landed him on the Treasury Bench and in the 
 Privy Council of Great Britain. 
 
 Genius may be denied us; we may even possess 
 only one talent ; but perseverance opens the doors of 
 opportunity, or ministers to the gladness of the 
 world. 
 
 By perseverance, man, in some fields, has virtually 
 become a creator. It is argued that all that man can 
 do is to move matter about ; but movement of matter 
 is a process in transformation, amounting almost to 
 creation. The chemist who distils perfumes from 
 coal-tar may have succeeded only in separating one 
 element from another in matter ; but he has achieved 
 a modern miracle. 
 
 The Shirley poppies in all their delicate ranges 
 of color are all derived from the common red poppy 
 of the cornfield. But their name enshrines the 
 memory of one man's perseverance. It was the 
 Vicar of Shirley who found a wind-sown poppy 
 growing in one of his flower-beds. A ring of cream 
 on the red petals of the poppy attracted the keen 
 horticulturist's attention, and he set himself to culti- 
 vate the curious departure from type. In the process 
 of years, by tender nursing, the patient vicar had 
 produced a cream poppy, and the Shirley poppy, in 
 all its variety of hues, was the ultimate outcome 
 of his assiduity. 
 
 A Polish Jew, David Lubin, while farming in 
 California, saw the need for an international clearing-
 
 96 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 house of agricultural information. He was per- 
 sistent in advocating the idea, but could find no one 
 far-sighted enough to promote it. At last he heard 
 of the King of Italy's genuine interest in agriculture, 
 and by persevering efforts he secured an interview 
 with the monarch. Lubin had no dress-suit for the 
 royal audience, and the King was evidently disturbed 
 by the unconventional appearance of a visitor in his 
 business suit. But having done so much by his per- 
 severance, Lubin was bent on being heard. " King," 
 he said, " some folks may think you a second-class 
 monarch. I don't. I've got a scheme. If you adopt 
 it, it will make you a first-class king." What the 
 Italian King said in reply goes undisclosed, but Lubin 
 left the palace with his scheme well on the way to 
 being an accomplished fact. Victor Emanuel erected 
 the Agricultural Institute in the Villa Borghia, at 
 which fifty-three nations are now represented. 
 
 When Sir Ernest Shackleton returned from his 
 great South Polar exploration, he displayed cine- 
 matograph films showing himself and two com- 
 panions pulling a heavily-loaded sledge over the 
 snowy waste. For half a minute, a minute, two 
 minutes, the film ran on, showing no change in the 
 monotonous scene. Then the audience got impatient. 
 Shackleton smiled. " Exactly," he said, " you are 
 tired of it in two minutes. We went on doing it 
 for twenty-eight days. And we were always hungry. 
 We scarcely talked of anything but eating, and we 
 were always discussing the dinner we would have 
 when we got back to civilization. We generally de- 
 cided to begin it with two steaks as hors d'oeuvre." 
 The interjection brought home to the audience the
 
 PERSEVERANCE 97 
 
 almost unexampled perseverance called for in Polar 
 exploration. 
 
 Ten years ago, William Willett, a London builder, 
 struck a new idea. He thought it was brilliant, but 
 it was laughed to scorn. He persevered with it, 
 published pamphlets upon it, worried Chambers of 
 Commerce to discuss it, stirred up correspondence in 
 newspapers upon it, until Willett's Daylight-Saving 
 Scheme was forced upon every one's notice. Willett 
 died while he was still dubbed a crank for imagining 
 that people would be so absurd as to tamper with 
 solar time. Now almost all the world puts its clock 
 forward an hour in spring and back again in the 
 autumn, and Willett's " Summer Time " has become 
 all but universal. Without Willett's perseverance 
 the benefit of an extra hour's daylight in summer 
 might never have been enjoyed. 
 
 The habit of perseverance involves self-conquest 
 and stern discipline. It is the secret of success in 
 business and profession alike. Without it the world 
 would stand still. 
 
 " Better to strive and climb, 
 
 And never reach the goal, 
 Than to drift along with time 
 
 An aimless, worthless soul. 
 Aye, better to climb and fall, 
 
 Or sow though the yield is small, 
 Than to throw away day after day, 
 
 And never strive at all."
 
 XIV 
 TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS 
 
 AT the base of all fine character lie truth and 
 truthfulness. The highest education looks 
 to truth as the supreme thing in life. 
 
 " Truth," says Emerson, " is our only armor in 
 all passages of life and death." Of all the virtues 
 truthfulness has most enemies. The little lies of 
 civilization encircle us from childhood. A child 
 hears his mother tell a servant that she is " not at 
 home" when an unwelcome visitor calls, and the 
 childish mind is mystified. A little boy in a diffi- 
 culty caught in some little act of wrong-doing 
 finds in evasion or falsehood a first line of defence. 
 The schoolboy who said that " a lie is an abomina- 
 tion unto the Lord, but a very present help in 
 trouble" had yet to make the discovery that truth- 
 fulness is the acid test of moral courage. 
 
 Untruth fulness is the first stage of insincerity, 
 because a lie strikes at the very foundations of human 
 relationships. Without truthfulness, confidence be- 
 tween man and man is unthinkable. At an early 
 stage in his business career, a young man may dis- 
 cover that the commercial ethic does not condemn 
 deception, and that " tricks of the trade " are em- 
 ployed which strike at the basis of truth. His success 
 in life may seem to depend on his willingness to 
 
 98
 
 TEUTH AND TBUTHFULNESS 99 
 
 stifle his conscience and comply with the usages of 
 the world into which he is plunged. But moral 
 courage always wins respect in the long run, and the 
 establishment of a character for truth and rectitude 
 in business is worth all it costs. More and more 
 the business world is recognizing that honesty and 
 truthfulness are the bases of confidence, and that the 
 man whose word is his bond, and always to be trusted, 
 is the bulwark of prosperous trade. " I had rather 
 suffer for speaking the truth," said John Pym, " than 
 that the truth should suffer for want of my speak- 
 ing." 
 
 But truth is something far greater than veracity in 
 speech. It is a matter of honesty in thought as well 
 as in utterance. 
 
 " They are slaves who will not choose 
 Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, 
 Rather than in silence shrink 
 From the truth they needs must think." 
 
 One thing is sure, as F. W. Robertson said : " It is 
 not for a man to say which of a hundred jarring 
 creeds all plausible constitute truth, but it is for 
 each of us to do the right that lies before us. 
 Whatever else may be wrong, it must be right to be 
 pure, to be just and tender and merciful and honest. 
 It must be right to love and to deny oneself. Let a 
 man do the will of God, and he shall know." 
 
 Pilate's question, "What is truth?" has rung 
 down the centuries, and received a thousand answers. 
 The question was put to Jesus the very standard 
 of truth and we may profitably take notice of the 
 place Jesus gave to truth in His scale of valuations.
 
 100 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 The highest courage that can be displayed is the 
 courage to tell unpopular truths. Jesus manifested 
 that courage. With what relentless truthfulness He 
 told His followers of the penalties of discipleship. 
 " Whosoever doth not bear his cross, and come after 
 Me cannot be My disciple." No wonder (as St. 
 John records) the multitudes disappeared when 
 Jesus told the naked truth so bluntly. The moment 
 of this candid utterance dates the beginning of the 
 unpopularity of Jesus. His via dolorosa began there. 
 To withhold the hardest truth was impossible to 
 Him. A lie, even a silence suppressing the truth was 
 outside His scheme of things. 
 
 History is crammed with instances of men who 
 have burked the truth and, in the long run, suffered 
 eclipse. But a few gorgeous examples of men with 
 the courage to state the worst and risk the con- 
 sequences illumine history's pages. Garibaldi's 
 heroism was not greatest in the battle-fields when 
 actually fighting against Austria for Italy's liberation. 
 It was shown in the magnificently courageous truth- 
 fulness of his call for his red-shirt volunteers : " I 
 call you not to honors and rewards, but to forced 
 marches, short rations, bloody battles, wounds, im- 
 prisonments, death." And the men who answered 
 that call were men whose moral courage proved in- 
 vincible. They emancipated Italy. 
 
 Lord Kitchener showed the same moral intrepidity 
 when, as war broke out in August, 1914, he warned 
 the volunteers that the struggle would last three 
 years. He could not descend to deception. England 
 was dreaming of a short war talking of a march 
 to Berlin as if it were to be a gleeful picnic but
 
 TBUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS 101 
 
 Lord Kitchener knew the truth, and would not dis- 
 guise it. He had a standard of truth, as well as of 
 valor, and he raised it high without counting the 
 cost. 
 
 An unpalatable truth is always unpopular, and 
 men who take the risk of telling unpleasant truths 
 take their lives in their hands. Twenty years ago 
 Mr. Lloyd George believed that the Boer War was 
 an unrighteous war. He said so boldly, and narrowly 
 escaped death at the hands of angry mobs for his 
 temerity. It required just the same courage to tell 
 the working-men of England that their drinking 
 habits were as much an enemy to England as the 
 German army itself; but Mr. Lloyd George did not 
 shrink from the duty truth laid upon him. A hero 
 has been defined as " one who taking both reputa- 
 tion and life in his hand will, with perfect urbanity, 
 dare the gibbet and the mob by the perfect truth of 
 his speech and the rectitude of his behavior." 
 
 In every age the fight for truth has to be refought. 
 " The thoughts of men are widen'd with the process 
 of the suns," and truth is never static. As knowledge 
 grows, truth changes, and only cowards shrink from 
 adjusting their perception of truth to the new facets. 
 There is an allegory of a hunter who strove to scale 
 a steep mountain in quest of the white bird of 
 truth, which he believed made its habitation on the 
 summit. His ascent was painful, arduous, protracted. 
 The sun and the winds beat upon him as he cut 
 his steps laboriously up the sloping rock. From 
 the crannies in the wall ugly creatures peeped out 
 and tempted him aside. He knew that men follow- 
 ing him would curse him for the clumsiness of ffie
 
 102 THE STRATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 steps he had cut at such infinite pain; but he toiled 
 on till, reaching the summit, he fell exhausted. He 
 lay dying, alone and desolate; but as the breath left 
 his body a single white feather from the bird of truth 
 floated through the air and fell upon his breast. The 
 allegory embodies a truth for all time. But Lowell 
 supplies a correcting idea in his familiar lines : 
 
 " Careless seems the great avenger : history's pages but 
 
 record 
 One death-grapple in the darkness, 'twixt old systems and 
 
 the word ; 
 Truth for ever on the scaffold, Wrong for ever on the 
 
 throne 
 Yet that scaffold sways the future, and behind the dim 
 
 unknown 
 Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above 
 
 His own." 
 
 Evasion of the truth spells moral bankruptcy: 
 honesty in facing the truth breeds moral courage. 
 Rupert Brooke, the gallant young poet who died in 
 the Gallipoli Campaign, gave beauty a second place 
 to truth. His one desire, we are told, was to tell 
 the truth at all costs, and let beauty take care of 
 itself. To Herbert Spencer truth was a religion, 
 and in praise of truth he burst into at least one 
 passage of poetic ecstasy : " Truth, like Venus, the 
 embodiment of all moral beauty, is born on the 
 clashing waves of public opinion." Browning sacri- 
 ficed the form of his poetry to his passion for truth. 
 Dean Farrar jeopardized his popularity with the 
 Evangelicals in the Church of England by his pas- 
 sionate proclamation of what he conceived to be a 
 vital truth. Loyalty to the truth has cost martyrs
 
 TRUTH AND TRUTHFULNESS 103 
 
 their lives in every century of the Christian era. In 
 the quest for truth mere reason is inadequate. If 
 not actually discredited, pure reason " makes hum- 
 bler claims on men's allegiance" to-day than it did 
 forty years ago. The spiritual principle has re- 
 asserted itself the moral sense and the human con- 
 science have restored themselves. " For the determi- 
 nation of truth," says Mrs. De Bunsen, " much more 
 is needed than reason alone will, imagination, emo- 
 tion, each has its part to play. Reason is not the sole 
 judge of truth. By some minds deliberately, by 
 many more unconsciously, she has been dethroned." 
 " Truth begets truth as confidence wins con- 
 fidence." 
 
 " Give truth, and your gift will be paid in kind, 
 And honor will honor meet." 
 
 " What you are speaks so loud I cannot hear what 
 you say," says Emerson. What we are speaks so 
 loudly, that what we say rarely matters.
 
 XV 
 
 OPEN-MINDEDNESS 
 
 OPEN-MINDEDNESS is the exact antithesis 
 of dogmatism. There are some issues in life 
 upon which boys and men alike must take 
 their stand, and be adamant if they are to be worthy 
 citizens. Truth, charity, temperance these are 
 fundamentals of character upon which no one can 
 boast that he is " a Gallic, caring for none of these 
 things." But there are other matters upon which 
 open-mindedness an attitude of suspended judg- 
 ment is both wise and desirable. The raw amateur 
 risks a fall if he dogmatizes where only specialists 
 have the right to express an opinion. 
 
 If I take Spiritualism as an example of the type 
 of subject upon which open-mindedness is a sensible 
 attitude for a young man, it is not because I have 
 the faintest sympathy with spiritualism. Belief in 
 the continuance of personality after death without 
 which life would be a horror rests on deep in- 
 tuition, religious faith, and some scientific evidence. 
 Spiritualists are groping for the means to hold 
 communication with those who have passed through 
 the valley of the shadow. Some of them are work- 
 ing on what they believe to be strictly scientific lines, 
 and applying to spiritualistic phenomena the tests 
 they apply to scientific experiments in other fields 
 
 104
 
 OPEN-MINDEDNESS 105 
 
 than the psychic. It appears to me that the attitude of 
 the agnostic of " I do not know," which is the exact 
 meaning of the word is wise. Reservation of judg- 
 ment is commendable open-mindedness while such 
 questions are being probed by earnest and devout 
 savants. Attaching any sort of label to a thing does 
 not dispose of it. Theologians may derive happiness 
 from tacking the name of an old heresy to a new 
 thought; but no heresy persists unless it enshrines 
 some element of truth. Developments should be 
 awaited open-mindedly, and evidence should be 
 weighed with judicial patience. It may even be that 
 God is allowing men to penetrate into the secrets of 
 the Unseen, and it may possibly be that, as Francis 
 Thompson says 
 
 "The drift of pinions, would we hearken, 
 Beats at our own clay-shuttered doors." 
 
 Let it be clearly understood, however, that open- 
 mindedness is not credulity that it does not imply 
 readiness to accept convictions without testing the 
 validity of the evidence on which they must rest. 
 Credulity is becoming one of the dangers of our age. 
 The impossible has been achieved so often, that we 
 have passed through an age of scepticism into what 
 may become something even worse an age of blind 
 credulity. We must guard against letting convictions 
 rest on mere conjectures, and against snapping con- 
 clusions from the air. Every brilliant guess at truth 
 is not to be hailed as a revelation. The Athenians, 
 who were ever in quest of some new thing, missed the 
 durable satisfaction of fidelity to any established 
 truth. They plunged through fogs of doubt into bogs
 
 106 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 of despair. It is open-minded to cling to old faiths 
 till new truths have made them untenable. 
 
 Even in keeping an open mind on such an issue as 
 spiritualism, it is quite legitimate to remember the 
 chicanery which has discredited almost all spiritualis- 
 tic mediums. " The whole subject," it has been well 
 said, " is entangled with trickery and charlatanism, 
 and there is something very suspicious about the sick- 
 ening puerility of the unutterable tosh in many of the 
 alleged messages." Browning had some equally 
 scathing things to say of spiritualists in " Mr. Sludge 
 the Medium." Again, however, it must be borne in 
 mind that God, in His infinite wisdom, has, in the 
 processes of His self-revelation to the souls of men, 
 used some very earthen vessels as culverts of His 
 grace. The cardinals who fixed the canon and 
 framed the creeds were not all immaculate charac- 
 ters ; and the history of religious revivals reveals that 
 evangelists who have had many ignoble traits them- 
 selves have been the means of changing ugly lives into 
 gracious characters. Open-mindedness impels a man 
 to balance pros and cons in this fashion and to reach 
 his final conclusions unbiased by a priori prejudices. 
 
 The labeling method of dealing with a new thing 
 settles nothing. Wherever any new subject comes 
 under discussion in a company of men, some one, who 
 perhaps " recommends as wildly as he spells," oracu- 
 larly remarks: "That is just Socialism," or "That 
 is nothing but sheer Bolshevism." He may have 
 strayed into the truth; but the truth of a label does 
 not guarantee the fallacy of the thing labeled. Dur- 
 ing the war, when America to a moderate extent and 
 Great Britain to the fullest degree took over railways
 
 OPEN-MINDEDNESS 107 
 
 and mines, commandeered factories, controlled ex- 
 ports and imports, regulated what we should eat and 
 how much of it, and generally supplied (or supervised 
 the supply of) almost all necessaries, we lived under 
 a socialistic regime. But it worked in the circum- 
 stances of war; and the men who believe it would 
 work in peace times also, pin their faith to a theory 
 which does not perish when it has been duly labeled 
 and contemptuously pooh-poohed. 
 
 In the region of organized religion there is a wide 
 sphere for open-mindedness. Happily, sectarian divi- 
 sions are not so acute now as they were twenty years 
 ago. Denominational barriers are being lowered; 
 and it is no longer the mark of a good denomination- 
 alist to despise all other denominations. The Con- 
 gregational chairman who said, " We have had a bad 
 year in the Church ; but thank God the Baptists have 
 had a worse," belongs to an age that has passed. A 
 new Catholicity, stamped with the imprimatur of 
 open-mindedness, is gaining ground. We are coming 
 to see that each branch of the Christian Church meets 
 the spiritual needs of its own particular adherents, 
 and that the sum of all the Churches is the Church 
 Catholic. 
 
 Hostility to things new is a sign of dogmatic tem- 
 per. Christianity suffered grievously during the nine- 
 teenth century by the antagonism of its defenders to 
 the discoveries of science. Though God has always, 
 as John Robinson said to the departing Pilgrim 
 Fathers, new light to throw upon His Word, the 
 Church has, unfortunately, all through the ages, been 
 inhospitable to new knowledge. Galileo, persecuted 
 for declaring that the earth moves, had his nine-
 
 108 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 teenth-century parallel in the fierce assaults made 
 upon Charles Darwin for proclaiming the results of 
 his researches into the origin of species. The world 
 is God's epistle to man, said an ancient sage, and 
 through scientific discovery God continues His reve- 
 lation of His processes. Revelation is not confined 
 within the pages of a book, and the footprints of the 
 Creator are revealed by geology as surely as by Gene- 
 sis. A closed mind, bolted and barred against new 
 truth, is a mind enslaved by intellectual cowardice. 
 
 Sir Oliver Lodge has said that the day may come 
 when we shall think it just as irrational to administer 
 drugs without prayer as we now think it foolish to 
 use prayer without drugs in illness. Such a dictum 
 suggests the wisdom of keeping an open mind on this 
 point. It may be that Christianity has lost, in the 
 intervening centuries, some element of the faith that 
 " made men whole " in apostolic times, and that a 
 pathway to its recovery is being found. The whole 
 question of the power of mind over matter has still to 
 be explored, and Christianity has nothing to fear 
 from the investigation. 
 
 In the early days of wireless telegraphy a young 
 man nearing New York in an Atlantic liner found 
 himself short of money. The purser could not, by 
 his regulations, cash a check sufficient for his needs ; 
 but when the purser heard that the traveler's mother 
 was on a sister ship, with which he would be within 
 wireless radius that night, the problem was solved. 
 By a marconigram the mother was asked to deposit 
 five hundred dollars with the purser of her ship, and 
 next morning the young American received that sum 
 from his own purser. Now if any one had told our
 
 OPEN-MINDEDNESS 109 
 
 grandfathers that such a miracle (as it would have 
 seemed to them) would be an ordinary sort of event 
 in the twentieth century, they would have derided the 
 idea. The story is a parable for this generation. 
 
 Vested prejudices, Mr. Lloyd George has said, are 
 more to be feared than vested interests. We all in- 
 herit, or early in life absorb, some prejudices that 
 tend to cabin, crib, and confine our minds. Open- 
 mindedness is consequently a characteristic not ac- 
 quired without prayer and fasting. Party, sectarian, 
 and class prejudices crop up unconsciously and stran- 
 gle fair judgment unless fought down. Dr. Richard 
 Glover used to say, in expressing an opinion, that 
 while convinced for the moment that his view was 
 sound, he reserved the right to differ from himself if 
 later and fuller light justified that course. It is a 
 habit of mind to be commended. 
 
 Lest I may be suspected in pleading for open- 
 mindedness to be favoring an indeterminate undeci- 
 siveness of mind, I would urge that a young man 
 should take a definite side on the great issues of poli- 
 tics and religion. This should be done not precipi- 
 tately, but after earnest thought. What was known 
 as a mugwump i. e., a man who sits on the fence 
 is a pitiable creature. He who hesitates to come to 
 conclusions because he sees both sides of a case so 
 strongly, belongs to the class of men who, having the 
 choice of two evils, chooses both.
 
 XVI 
 READING AND STUDY 
 
 FRIENDSHIP with books offers the most abid- 
 ing companionship in life. Friends may fail 
 us, or depart, leaving the heart solitary, but 
 a few bookshelves lined with good books are a per- 
 manent source of fellowship and delight. A distinc- 
 tion must be drawn between reading and study. 
 Reading is a recreation; study a serious enterprise. 
 The book-lover turns to his books when the day's 
 duty has been done; the student uses his books as a 
 mechanic uses his tools in pursuit of a definite end. 
 A political student reads history because, as Lord 
 Morley puts it, a knowledge of the past enables him 
 to see his way through what is happening now. Few 
 men are called to be students, but it should be every 
 intelligent young man's ambition to be " well read." 
 At least he should know world-history in outline, the 
 story of his own country, and the classics of his own 
 language. He should have his own collection of 
 books, however small, and they should have been col- 
 lected by himself. No volumes have such personal 
 value as the books, new or second-hand, that have 
 been bought at perhaps a little self-sacrifice. 
 
 Some young men have the natural instinct for read- 
 ing, inheriting the taste, it may be, or acquiring it by 
 living in a bookish atmosphere. With others the love 
 of books is acquired by diligence and persistence. 
 
 IIQ
 
 BEADING AND STUDY 111 
 
 And there are others who would prefer sawing wood 
 to reading. Mr. Herbert Spencer told a Royal Com- 
 mission on Copyright that ninety-nine out of a hun- 
 dred average Englishmen, if given the option of read- 
 ing a page of his writings or taking a daily dose of 
 castor-oil, would say, " Pass me the castor-oil." The 
 test is hardly a fair one, as Mr. Spencer's books are 
 abstruse philosophical treatises written in a singularly 
 unattractive and technical style, and a daily dose of 
 Herbert Spencer would probably make most average 
 men hate books altogether. 
 
 Reading for pleasure should also be profitable for 
 the mind. To read shoddy books is to waste time. 
 But it must be recognized that to draw a distinction 
 between a good book and a bad one implies a standard 
 of taste that not every young man possesses. Liter- 
 ary taste is a gift of the gods, like a true sense of color 
 and an eye for line. Providing the books are not evil 
 and pernicious, a boy should, at the outset, be left to 
 read whatever suits his taste. Then, as his love of 
 reading grows, his taste may be molded by advice. 
 Prohibitions may destroy his inclination to read, but 
 by gently exerted influence he may be weaned away 
 from rubbish and lured into the paths of good litera- 
 ture. But as Mr. Augustine Birrell says, if a reader 
 really likes the works of Miss Betty Balderdash and 
 likes no other, let him by all means stick to Miss 
 Betty. 
 
 Generally, however, a boy of any intelligence is 
 only too willing to be guided along the literary routes 
 that offer him the fairest landscapes, introduce him 
 to the most congenial characters, and invite him to 
 linger in the pleasantest halting-places. Friendly
 
 112 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 counsel is not wasted in such a case. Possibly I have 
 known cases it may be necessary to caution a young 
 man against becoming a mere bookworm to the exclu- 
 sion of all interests outside books. Unless he is pur- 
 suing literature as a serious study, it is not wise to 
 press upon him any severe systematic course of read- 
 ing. Warning against reading merely snippety or 
 sloshy stuff may on the other hand be necessary. 
 Light reading, and nothing but light reading, is like a 
 dinner of sweets an unsatisfying meal. A young 
 man should steer an even keel between that Scylla 
 and Charybdis, and endeavor to make his range of 
 reading as wide, varied, and catholic as possible. 
 Happy is he who can browse in a good old library. 
 
 A wealth of profitable reading is offered by history, 
 biography, travel, poetry, and fiction. Variety adds 
 immeasurably to the joy of reading. Most book- 
 lovers vary their diet by passing from branch to 
 branch in literature, sometimes even having four or 
 five books belonging to varying categories at the same 
 time. How rapidly should one read? No unquali- 
 fied answer is possible. An ordinary novel takes me 
 four or five hours, but upon a good one I should not 
 grudge twelve hours. Reading without reflecting is 
 like eating without digesting, neither a pleasure nor a 
 satisfaction. And it is the quality of the book that 
 dictates the time to be devoted to reflection. As it is 
 not what we eat, but what we digest, that nourishes us 
 physically, so it is not what we read, but what we ab- 
 sorb, that stores the mind and develops the imagina- 
 tion. 
 
 The question of the best books crops up as inev- 
 itably as King Charles's head in Mr. Dick's writings.
 
 BEADING AND STUDY 113 
 
 At one time or another every book-lover, I imagine, 
 compiles a list of what he regards as the best books. 
 And the lists are as various as the idiosyncrasies of 
 their compilers. 
 
 Between stern study and merely general reading on 
 lines I have sketched, a wide gulf yawns. The trend 
 of the age is against classics, and for the moment the 
 commercial view of education is dominant. But the 
 battle of the humanities will be refought, and the 
 place of Greek and Latin in an all-round education is 
 not permanently lost. As life wears on, men of 
 " little Latin and less Greek " deplore their own de- 
 ficiencies, and their sense of classical lost-ness will be 
 pressed upon their sons. The value of modern lan- 
 guages grows as the earth shrinks through new me- 
 chanical means of communication. French, Spanish, 
 and German in spite of war hates, I include Ger- 
 man have immense commercial uses. 
 
 Whatever serious study a young man decides to 
 pursue, he should seek competent initial guidance, 
 even if he does not have continuous tuition. Modern 
 scholastic methods have simplified such studies as 
 mathematics, chemistry, and physics, and an out-of- 
 date text-book may cause a young student much un- 
 necessary labor. Nor ought I to omit to advise any 
 young man with the necessary educational equipment 
 to study for matriculation at one of the universities. 
 
 Though a little knowledge of science may be dan- 
 gerous, even a passing acquaintance is a pleasant pos- 
 session. Scientific text-books are almost invariably 
 written in a readable and even entertaining style ; and 
 a little scientific reading encourages exactness of defi-
 
 114 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 nition and a distaste for what has been called " incur- 
 able sloppiness " of thought. 
 
 A maxim of Thomas a Kempis on reading should 
 be kept well in mind: " If thou wouldst profit by thy 
 reading, read humbly, simply, honestly and not desir- 
 ous to win a character for learning." And a confes- 
 sion of George John Romanes is also worth remem- 
 bering: "The more I know the less my wisdom 
 grows." A true bookman is ever a modest man.
 
 XVII 
 KEEPING FIT 
 
 NOWADAYS a young man hates to confess 
 that he is not " as fit as a fiddle." To be 
 unable to say, in the soldier's familiar 
 idiom, that he is in the very pink of condition, carries 
 with it, he feels, a stigma of disgrace. As he grows 
 older he finds that anxiety to keep fit is a carking care 
 with nearly every man he meets. Physical robust- 
 ness may depend to some extent, no doubt, on hered- 
 ity or early environment, or on such factors outside a 
 man's control as wise feeding in childhood, judicious 
 nursing through infantile complaints, and conditions 
 of early employment; but all these initial handicaps 
 may be largely overcome by the systematic pursuit of 
 health-giving exercises and by wisdom in diet and 
 clothing. Science has shed much of its early dog- 
 matism, and biologists are not now haunted as they 
 were thirty years ago by the doctrine of heredity, 
 which was pressed until it almost undermined moral 
 responsibility. Scientists at least admit now that Na- 
 ture casts a new matrix for each child born into the 
 world. Every baby is a new creature and the natural 
 law of variation cuts across any fixed theory of con- 
 tinuity; so that each child has possibilities of mind 
 and body outside the radius of scientific speculation. 
 Early environment is influential ; but not so influential 
 as to be incapable of remedy by wisely administered 
 
 "5
 
 116 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 correctives. Many a child, delicate to fragility, has 
 lived to confound the forebodings of his family doc- 
 tor by tough virility developed by sensible exercises. 
 
 No time can be better spent by a young man than a 
 few minutes devoted, first thing in the morning, to 
 one or two simple exercises. One, that requires no 
 apparatus, may be recommended after a morning 
 bath. It is to lie flat on the back, stretched to full 
 length on the floor, with hands under the head. One 
 leg should then be lifted ever so slowly, and while 
 kept absolutely rigid, raised to the perpendicular, and 
 at right angles to the body. Then the leg should be 
 dropped slowly to the floor. The other leg should be 
 similarly exercised, and then both legs should be 
 raised simultaneously and dropped together. This 
 exercise repeated three or four times is exceedingly 
 beneficial to the leg and abdominal muscles, and is 
 conducive to digestion. Another exercise which ren- 
 ders similar service to the muscles of the arms and 
 chest, is to lie face downwards on a rug and with the 
 body rigid. The body should then be raised by the 
 arms until they are outstretched and the weight of the 
 body is resting on the palms of the hands and the tips 
 of the toes. Then, just as slowly, the body should 
 drop to the horizontal position. Two or three times 
 repeated makes this exercise almost sufficient to keep 
 the muscles healthy. The efficacy of both these exer- 
 cises depends on the movements being carried out 
 with extreme slowness. Hurry them, and they are 
 merely a waste of time. 
 
 A morning dip in cold water followed by brisk rub- 
 bing with a rough towel is a bracing tonic and a moral 
 stimulant. But to make a fetish of the cold bath is a
 
 KEEPING FIT 117 
 
 blunder. Cold baths are either a positive joy, which 
 to miss is a sore deprivation, or a source of discom- 
 fort and even risk. Unless within five minutes the 
 whole body is a-tingle with warmth from the reaction, 
 the cold bath should be abandoned. If toes and fin- 
 gers remain chilly, it is a mistake to persist in the 
 salutary habit of the morning cold dip. Care should 
 be taken after all baths, hot or cold, or after swim- 
 ming to dry the toes and between the toes very care- 
 fully. Neglect of this precaution encourages rheu- 
 matic tendencies. More enjoyable than even a cold 
 bath is a morning plunge in the sea or a swimming- 
 bath, followed by a cold " shower." Swimming is an 
 excellent exercise as well as a desirable accomplish- 
 ment which no sensible boy fails to acquire. 
 
 Between the age of fifteen and twenty-five a young 
 man needs some violent exercise every few days, and 
 a little gentle exercise every day, or his muscles will 
 get flabby, and that lithe and supple poise of body 
 which breathes sheer joy in life is soon lost. A good 
 rule for a townsman is never to ride when he can walk, 
 and for a boy never to walk if he can run. Rise early 
 enough to spare time for a brisk walk to school, col- 
 lege, or business. Up to twenty-five, a young man 
 should engage in some sport necessitating hard run- 
 ning. It is as natural for a young man to run as for 
 a fox-terrier. Cinder-path running is, however, a 
 doubtful form of exercise. Sprinters rarely make 
 robust men in their maturity. 
 
 Keeping fit depends largely on good digestion. Up 
 to twenty, a boy should have the digestion of an os- 
 trich and the appetite of a commissariat camel. But 
 even in boyhood, carelessness as to food may lay up
 
 118 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 the seeds of indigestion, and even dyspepsia. There 
 is only one secret of sane feeding. Food should be 
 simple, and meals should be taken at regular hours. 
 It is a delusion to imagine that the omission of a meal 
 can be repaired by heartier eating at the next meal. 
 It cannot! That way ill-health lies. People gener- 
 ally digest easiest what they enjoy most; but to this 
 general rule there are many glaring exceptions. 
 Twice-cooked foods should be avoided. Canned 
 food maj be healthy enough experience in the army 
 during the war showed that it is wholesome but 
 fresh meats, vegetables, and fruits are better. Green 
 vegetables should be eaten when available in prefer- 
 ence to starchy root-crops. Beans are better than po- 
 tatoes, and cabbage is superior to carrots. Whatever 
 is eaten, it should be masticated thoroughly and eaten 
 slowly. On the whole, it is safer to bolt a beefsteak 
 than a rice pudding or any other starchy diet. 
 
 Reading over solitary meals is a thoroughly per- 
 nicious habit i. e., serious reading and the habit, 
 common among young business men, of playing an 
 exacting mental game like chess over lunch, is a 
 defiance of all principles of dietetics. 
 
 Vegetarianism and fruitarianism have stout advo- 
 cates, and were making rapid strides as food reforms 
 before the war. Possibly many people eat too much 
 meat, especially red meat, but the idea that flesh food 
 is conducive to rheumatic and gouty disorders seems 
 to have been exploded by the experience of the sol- 
 diers. Dr. Woods Hutchinson declares emphatically, 
 in The Doctor in War, that the men in the war areas 
 had practically all the meat they could eat, twice and 
 sometimes three times a day, not merely for months,
 
 KEEPING FIT 119 
 
 but for years : and yet gout, rheumatism, and the har- 
 dening of the arteries known as arterio sclerosis 
 often attributed to a meaty diet were conspicuous by 
 their absence. " A more complete and overwhelming 
 exposure of the vegetarian delusion and the uric-acid 
 myth could hardly," he adds, " be imagined." 
 
 Care of the teeth is an essential element in keeping 
 fit. Our physical tissues are renewed every seven 
 years, the physiologists tell us, but the enamel on our 
 teeth is expected to last a lifetime. Decayed teeth 
 are not only a disfigurement; they are a source of 
 positive danger to health. Upon the slightest appear- 
 ance of decay in a tooth, a dentist should be con- 
 sulted, and either the cavity should be filled or the 
 offending tooth should be extracted. Another wise 
 precaution is to keep a vigilant lookout for any re- 
 traction of the gums from the teeth. This is the first 
 symptom of pyorrhoea, a widely prevalent disease, 
 whose insidiousness has only comparatively recently 
 been fully realized even by bacteriologists. There is 
 now, however, good reason to believe that the suppu- 
 rations from gums affected by pyorrhoea are the root- 
 causes of malnutrition, acute indigestion, and per- 
 nicious anaemia. Deposits of tartar along the gum 
 margins are contributing causes to pyorrhoea, and 
 should be promptly removed. Some one has said that 
 teeth should be brushed in the morning as a duty to 
 society, and at night as a duty to oneself. A good 
 tooth-brush, whose bristles are not too stiff, should be 
 used with a brisk up and down movement. Tooth- 
 soap is preferable to gritty powder, unless the teeth 
 need a thorough cleansing, when a mixture of cuttle- 
 fish and bicarbonate of soda is sufficiently drastic to
 
 120 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 remove even tobacco staining. A cheap and effica- 
 cious tooth-wash is diluted peroxide o hydrogen. 
 This has valuable antiseptic properties, and keeps the 
 mouth healthy. 
 
 To keep perfectly fit, a young man should have at 
 least eight hours' sleep. The old adage " early to bed 
 and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, 
 worthy, and wise" may err on the side of over- 
 emphasis, and the notion than an hour before mid- 
 night is better than two hours in the morning has 
 gone overboard with much other discredited wisdom- 
 lumber. On the other hand, a comparatively early 
 bedtime is conducive to general regularity of life. 
 Moreover no one can doubt the invigorating quality 
 of early morning hours spent out-of-doors. Sleep in 
 darkness is healthier than sleep in the daytime. Even 
 plants languish if subjected to too n uch light. Dark- 
 ness has a tonic quality, as one discovers on a Mid- 
 night Sun cruise in Norway. A healthy boy, or 
 youth, should fall asleep almost as soon as his head 
 touches the pillow. If sleep should be reluctant, a 
 glass of hot milk, or even hot water, will often woo 
 " Nature's sweet restorer." It is a good habit for a 
 young man to get up in the morning as soon as he 
 wakes. Lying awake in bed in the morning is debili- 
 tating, not to say demoralizing. 
 
 A common cold ought not to be treated lightly. 
 Catarrh is a highy infectious disease, and the potential 
 mother of a thousand ills. A dose of ammoniated 
 quinine is a safe and generally efficacious remedy for 
 a feverish cold ; and a gargle of permanganate of pot- 
 ash in weak solution will often cure a sore throat in 
 the early stages. Prevention is better than cure: and
 
 KEEPING FIT 121 
 
 to obviate colds, stuffy rooms should be avoided, and 
 bedrooms should be freely ventilated. Draughts 
 cause fewer colds than vitiated air does. Weather- 
 tight boots ward off many colds, and mufflers round 
 the neck cause many. Overcoat collars should not be 
 turned up except in a blizzard, or the neck and throat 
 are sensitized. Coddling oneself is the surest way 
 not to keep fit it breeds only valetudinarians, the 
 people who enjoy bad health.
 
 XVIII 
 RECREATION 
 
 MAN was destined to work, but not to work 
 all his time. His task in the world, it al- 
 most seems, is to conquer and harness 
 Nature, and in that conquest to win a victory over his 
 own worst self. But man was meant to work to live, 
 not to live to work ; and it is an indictment of a social 
 order when it condemns men and women to unceasing 
 labor. Pleasure and recreation have a rightful place 
 in every life, and a life from which they are squeezed 
 by the fell clutch of circumstance becomes gnarled 
 and desolated. Literally it is true that " you can 
 work a man's body till his soul dies." Charles Dar- 
 win concentrated himself upon scientific research till 
 he lost all ear for music, and all capacity to enjoy 
 poetry. Only by a judicious balance of work and 
 recreation can we attain that poise which is the true 
 strategy of life. 
 
 If all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy, all 
 play and no work makes Jack worse than dull it 
 makes him a parasite and a danger to society. Any 
 one who fancies that he would be happier if he had 
 nothing to do but amuse himself, is simply harboring 
 a delusion. The idle are not people to be envied. 
 Perpetual pleasure-seeking becomes desperately mon- 
 otonous. A study of faces leads to the conclusion 
 that the most miserably bored people are those whose 
 
 122
 
 BEOREATION 123 
 
 whole life is an unending round of pleasure. Pleas- 
 ure palls quicker than toil. Idleness, however dis- 
 guised, grows irksome, and unearned leisure is worth 
 very little. Moral degeneracy la often due to a desire 
 to whet jaded appetites to which wholesome pleasures 
 have ceased to minister. 
 
 Recreation, while it is a necessity, must be the re- 
 ward of the worker. The very word recreate empha- 
 sizes its necessity. Just as the body calls for replen- 
 ishment by food and sleep, the mind and nerves, after 
 prolonged effort, need restoration by some recreative 
 relaxation. It is idle to dogmatize as to recreation. 
 Varying temperaments demand varying recreations. 
 Outdoor sports and hobbies offer one form of whole- 
 some recreation ; reading and indoor games offer an- 
 other form. The essential thing in recreation is that 
 it ensures change. Mr. Gladstone, after the exhaus- 
 tion of political warfare, recreated himself by felling 
 trees or by translating Homer. Almost any recrea- 
 tion is good and profitable if it directs one's thoughts 
 and energies into fresh channels. 
 
 A young man bent on making the best of himself 
 cannot afford to devote all his leisure to merely pleas- 
 urable recreation. To spend every evening in games, 
 however innocent and recreative, is a species of dissi- 
 pation and a wanton waste of opportunity. Time 
 ought always to be reserved for some useful reading, 
 if not for serious study. There are games that merely 
 squander energy of mind or body: other games by 
 their excellence are so absorbing that a young man 
 runs a certain risk in cultivating them. Billiards, for 
 example, is unsurpassed as an indoor game'; but a 
 young man who determines to leave it alone is prob-
 
 124 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 ably wise. The billiard cue sticks to the han'd like 
 glue, and tempts a young man to waste time and 
 money. Moderation in bilKards is not easy. The 
 green cloth exercises a weird fascination. Unfortu- 
 nately the delicacy of touch needed by a good billiard 
 player can only be acquired in early life. 
 
 Certain games of cards are, to some, a rich source 
 of intellectual recreation as long as the game is ab- 
 solutely dissociated from the slightest tinge of gam- 
 bling. The case against cards is the case against 
 playing them in a bad environment and against the 
 gambling too often, but not necessarily, associated 
 with them. As General Booth used to ask: Why 
 should the "devil always have the best games and the 
 best tunes? If, however, gambling really is a sore 
 temptation to a young man, he should utterly refuse 
 to play cards in any circumstances. He " can no 
 other." 
 
 Chess, dominoes, and checkers are sometimes 
 bunched together as if they were in the same cate- 
 gory. This is a libel on chess an inexhaustible game 
 if indeed it is not a science in itself. As recreation, 
 chess is open to one objection only it is as exacting 
 mentally as any professional occupation. A mere 
 smattering of the game is not worth acquiring the 
 game needs to be studied with the help of a text-book. 
 Not from fear of a crushing defeat, but from a sensi- 
 tive dread of wounding his opponent's feelings by his 
 undisciplined plunging, a tyro at chess should never 
 venture on a game with an expert player. 
 
 For sheer recreative excellence, gardening is almost 
 outside the range of challenge. The idea that gar- 
 dening, like golf, is a middle-aged man's outlet for his
 
 BECEEATION 125 
 
 none too superfluous physical energies, died a natural 
 death during the war, when many youngish men " did 
 their bit" with fork, spade, and hoe. The joys of 
 gafdening are anticipatory, immediate and retrospec- 
 tive. Half the pleasure a true gardener derives from 
 his flowers is realized long before they open their 
 petals. A rosarian sees opening rosebuds in his mind's 
 eye when he is trenching the ground before even a 
 bush is planted. The aroma of the newly-turned 
 earth is as incense to his nostrils. Even a small gar- 
 den walled around offers scope for endless ingenuity 
 and enterprise. The floral possibilities of a towns- 
 man's backyard are almost inexhaustible. Roses, 
 carnations, and lilies three of the most rewarding 
 gems in the whole world of flowers will grow within 
 the dreary walls of a suburban garden patch, if only 
 the gardener will treat them as Izaak Walton says a 
 true angler must treat his worms as if he loved them. 
 Of the refining influence of flowers I leave the poets 
 Of all ages to sing. 
 
 Recreation and delight for a young man of a more 
 utilitarian cast of mind, can be found in vegetable 
 gardening. In essence there is not much distinction 
 in satisfaction between cultivating hybrid tea-roses 
 and potatoes, or perpetual carnations and cauli- 
 flowers, or auratum lilies and tomatoes. I have 
 turned from my own flower-beds to my vegetable 
 patch without any sense of forsaking the poetical for 
 the prosaic. The skill, assiduity, and thought re- 
 quired are identical. And no chasm yawns, to the 
 eye of a horticulturist, between the loveliness of shape, 
 scent, and color of, say, a perfectly grown rose and 
 the beauty of shape, color, and taste of, say, a cor-
 
 126 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 rectly cultivated Sunrise tomato. Mr. W. S. Gilbert 
 satirized the aesthete for his 
 
 "attachment d la Plato 
 For a bashful young potato, 
 Or a not too French French bean." 
 
 But the passion of a really enthusiastic gardener for 
 the products, floral and edible, of his efforts is almost 
 too sacrosanct for even a Bab Ballad. 
 
 With the spread of garden suburbs, speedier means 
 of transport, and the gradual reduction of working 
 hours, one may hope for a swift revival, in the com- 
 ing years, of the joys of rural life. Happy is the 
 young man who can escape the " twice-breathed air " 
 of a crowded city to spend his evenings in a garden or 
 on an allotment. To such an one I commend small 
 fruit-culture as a recreation that is at once health- 
 restoring and remunerative. The work is light and 
 pleasant, and comes as near to fun as any work can 
 come. Begin with a few raspberry and gooseberry 
 bushes, then add red, black, and white currants. A 
 strawberry bed may follow ; but strawberries, I find, 
 involve more care and space than the results justify. 
 Somehow all fruit-culture has a measure of fascina- 
 tion which makes it recreative. The distinction I 
 draw is, that work is recreation when it is a change 
 from one's daily occupation, and when it is a pleasure.
 
 XIX 
 SPORTS AND HOBBIES 
 
 " iy /C OST vice," Dr. W. J. Dawson once said, 
 \/ 1 " is due to suppressed perspiration " 
 
 JL- T JL putting into arresting words the truth 
 that physical and moral health are in a large measure 
 interdependent. The aim of youth should be to pos- 
 sess a sane mind in a sound body ; and because vigor- 
 ous sports are conducive to bodily health, they are 
 contributory to healthy morals. As a boy, Theodore 
 Roosevelt was asthmatical, frail, and timid, too deli- 
 cate even to go to school. He determined to build up 
 his constitution, and he did it by boxing and outdoor 
 life, till he became almost incapable of physical fa- 
 tigue. He worked, says his biographer, Mr. Her- 
 mann Hegedorn, to build up his body, not for the sake 
 of mere bodily strength ; he worked to build up his 
 mind, not for the sake of mere mental agility; but 
 both together as muscle and sinew for that spiritual 
 power which constitutes the backbone of great men. 
 
 Boxing, baseball, cricket, and football are the most 
 health-giving sports for a boy and a young man. As 
 a sport, boxing has been degraded by professionalism 
 and betting, but as a pastime and as an exercise for 
 the training of muscle, eye, and temper, boxing has 
 no superior. The idea that it fosters pugnacity is, I 
 think, mistaken. Given a sportsmanlike spirit, no 
 personal antagonism is created; and every boxer 
 
 127
 
 '128 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 knows that loss of temper exposes him to punishment 
 from an opponent who keeps his head cool and his 
 temper under control. The qualities that make a 
 good amateur boxer are just the qualities that stand a 
 man in good stead through life. 
 
 Baseball, football, and cricket have a high moral 
 value, because they are team games from which a 
 young player learns to subordinate his individual in- 
 clinations to the welfare of the nine, eleven, or fifteen, 
 in which he is playing. This cultivates unselfishness, 
 and the sense of interdependence of man on man : and 
 it engenders the cooperative instinct and community 
 pride two virtues of incalculable value, to village, 
 city, state, and race. The exception taken to the 
 roughness and dangers of football either Rugby or 
 Association is exaggerated. The number of serious 
 accidents on football-fields does not compare with the 
 mishaps of cycling. If comparative figures were 
 available, it would probably be found that orange-peel 
 and banana-skins thrown on pavements cause more 
 fractured limbs and contused skulls than football. 
 
 Cycling lost some of its attraction when the motor- 
 car came and drove the cyclist off the roads. The 
 bicycle is now a means of easy communication rather 
 than a source of pleasure. Cycling as a pastime is 
 being rapidly revived by the motorcycle, which is also 
 resuscitating the cycle tour as a holiday recreation. 
 Certainly there is no cheaper and pleasanter way of 
 getting to know the highways and byways of the 
 country than by cycle. Against the motor-bicycle, it 
 has to be said that it affords no exercise. Still it is 
 extremely doubtful whether the bicycle was ever 
 really as beneficial for exercise as its votaries im-
 
 SPOETS AND HOBBIES 129 
 
 agined. It was always a bad second to walking. The 
 oldest and most primitive means of locomotion is still 
 the healthiest and, I think, the jolliest. Given good 
 weather, dry roads free from dust, a comfortable pair 
 of stout boots, and a congenial companion, a walking 
 holiday is an undiluted joy. In my pedestrian days, 
 I found that wearing two pairs of socks, a thick and 
 a thin pair, almost doubles one's walking capacity by 
 obviating chafed heels. 
 
 Golf is hardly a young man's game though young 
 men with ample leisure pursue it with passionate zest. 
 I know only one argument against golf, and that is its 
 fatal fascination. Every one knows the old story of 
 the Scottish minister who came to the conclusion that 
 he could not find time for both golf and the ministry, 
 and said he had serious thoughts of giving up one of 
 them. " What, give up golf ? " asked a friend. 
 " Nay," replied the golf-infatuated parson, " it's the 
 ministry I should give up." I found golf a source of 
 both joy and health ; but its cost, and the inroads it 
 was making on my time and perhaps my incapacity 
 to gain a single-figure handicap led me to relinquish 
 what I think is one of the grandest games ever de- 
 vised for man's recreation. But it certainly is not a 
 game that a young man with his career in the making 
 should take up, unless his occupation affords him far 
 more than the scanty leisure that usually falls to one 
 on the threshold of life. Learning to play golf is not 
 a simple matter. The self-taught golfer rarely at- 
 tains any proficiency, and, in his golfing vices, betrays 
 his want of tuition all his days. A few lessons from 
 a professional are advisable: indeed they are almost 
 an essential.
 
 130 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 Though a delightful game and exhilarating exer- 
 cise, lawn-tennis is not recommended to schoolboys, 
 because it is not a team game, and does not encourage 
 combination. But there are few better games for a 
 young man following a sedentary occupation. Played 
 vigorously, it offers splendid exercise. 
 
 Any opportunity to learn rowing and sculling 
 should be seized, as to be a good waterman is very 
 desirable. The beginner should learn to row in the 
 broad-beamed, inrigged boats somewhat disrespect- 
 fully called " tubs." A little instruction is to be wel- 
 comed, as rowing vices once acquired are almost in- 
 eradicable, and a clumsy oarsman cuts a ludicrous 
 figure. Not until he has learned to pull his blade 
 cleanly through the water, to clear his oars by drop- 
 ping his wrists (feathering, it is called) at the end of 
 the stroke, and to move his body slowly forward into 
 position for the next stroke, should the tyro pass 
 from the homely tub into any outrigged boat with a 
 narrower beam and shallower draught. Then the 
 real joys of watermanship begin. After learning to 
 row, the art of sculling is soon added. Punting is 
 immensely enjoyable, but for exercise purposes is use- 
 less. The trick of propelling a flat-bottomed boat 
 with a long pole has to be acquired, and the beginner 
 may be advised to make his first attempt " at the dead 
 of night with the lanterns dimly burning." An audi- 
 ence is embarrassing, as in learning to punt any one 
 or all of three mishaps may occur. He may lose 
 hold of the pole, or he may part company with the 
 punt, or he may leave both the pole and the punt. 
 Happily, to overturn a punt is a feat for a Goliath. 
 Sailing is one long thrill of ecstasy. The movement
 
 SPOETS AND HOBBIES 131 
 
 of gliding under canvas, noiselessly and effortlessly, 
 over rippling water, with sails filled by a gentle but 
 steady breeze, has indescribable fascinations. Un- 
 fortunately, sails are flappy and inconstant things, 
 and winds are variable and wayward. So even river- 
 sailing is risky to the inexperienced. The vagaries of 
 boats under canvas keep coroners busy. 
 
 In turning from sports to hobbies, the consideration 
 of physical exercise yields to that of mental recrea- 
 tion. The best hobby, I always think, is microscopy, 
 because any one possessing a microscope soon seeks 
 to mount his own object-slides. Almost before he 
 knows it, he is studying botany, geology, entomology, 
 and biology. A world of mystery, wonder and, I 
 had almost said, miracle unfolds itself. The quest 
 for objects for slides drives the amateur microscopist 
 into the country and the woods and the roadsides for 
 specimens, while mounting them teaches him to be 
 scrupulously clean and meticulously exact. The run- 
 ning expenses of microscopy are small, and the hobby 
 is perennially rewarding since it almost gives one the 
 power 
 
 " To see a world in a grain of sand 
 
 And heaven in a flower. 
 To hold infinity in the palm of the hand, 
 Eternity in an hour." 
 
 The possession of even a cheap telescope is a joy 
 forever to a boy or young man, and, again, a scientific 
 bent is encouraged by the hobby. When Tennyson 
 saw the heavens through Sir Norman Lockyer's tele- 
 scope, he said that " a sight like that makes one think 
 less of our county families." Telescopy has a subtly 
 sobering effect on its devotees. It takes the conceit
 
 133 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 out of a man to realize his infinitesimal place in the 
 mighty universe. A hand-telescope, in the absence of 
 a more scientific instrument, opens a wide door to 
 knowledge. Only a few years ago, a new planet was 
 first discovered by an amateur astronomer working 
 with a hand-telescope showing that in this field 
 costly equipment is not an absolute necessity. 
 
 A beginner taking up photography should seek ad- 
 vice before buying a camera or any necessary equip- 
 ment. He should resist the blandishments of " You 
 press the shutter and we do the rest " advertisers, nor 
 should he yield to the allurements of mere snap-shot- 
 ting. A good stand-camera with a doublet (rapid 
 rectilinear, or symmetrical) lens is the best invest- 
 ment. A mechanical shutter is an expensive super- 
 fluity at the outset, as a lens cap is all that is neces- 
 sary. Plates are cheaper than films, and are easier to 
 manipulate in the dark-room and printing-frame. 
 The amateur photographer who does not develop his 
 own negatives misses half the delight of the hobby. 
 The process is simple, involving only care and cleanli- 
 ness. Select a recognized developer and stick to it. 
 Pyro-soda is still the best. Much money may be 
 wasted on trying various printing processes. Ordi- 
 nary printing-out paper presents fewest difficulties. 
 Gaslight papers are simple, but unequal. Every ama- 
 teur should ultimately master platinotype-printing, 
 though I think the carbon process is even more allur- 
 ing. 
 
 Stamp-collecting encourages boys to interest them- 
 selves in geography the most tedious subject in the 
 school curriculum until the new regional geography 
 transformed it into a fascinating human study. When
 
 SPOETS AND HOBBIES 13S 
 
 school-days end, stamp-collecting usually ceases, be- 
 cause it is really a hobby that, taken seriously, is be- 
 yond the purse of average young men. Philately is 
 a cult for kings, or for millionaires whose tastes do 
 not lie in the direction of pictures, china, furniture, or 
 curios. 
 
 A hobby that combines intellectual interest with 
 open-air life is the best hobby for a young man. Col- 
 lecting moths and butterflies is better, for that reason, 
 than making a collection of stamps. But no hobby is 
 bad if it tends to broaden a young man's horizon, 
 quicken his observation, and enrich his mind. Were 
 I a boy again, living in these ample times, I should 
 want to have a lathe; and I should want to try my 
 'prentice hand at generating and harnessing electricity 
 with a small dynamo and motor; nor should I rest 
 contented until I had fixed up a wireless telegraphy 
 receiver, and perhaps a short-distance transmitter. 
 Even then I should dream of some day being the pos- 
 sessor of an X-ray apparatus and perhaps a liquid-air 
 outfit. The young man of to-day has an endless vista 
 of inexhaustible hobby-interests within his reach. 
 Never could it be said so truly that the portals of 
 knowledge have been flung wide open for any way- 
 farer to ramble through.
 
 XX 
 
 AMUSEMENTS 
 
 PROBABLY it was contemplating the tragedy 
 of misspent leisure that led Robert Louis 
 Stevenson to indulge in the hyperbole that 
 " there should be nothing so much a man's business 
 as his amusements." Wholesome amusement, how- 
 ever, is almost as necessary to a young man as whole- 
 some food. The whole question of amusements 
 turns upon their nature and degree. Obviously any 
 pleasure that demoralizes the individual is, in the long 
 run, injurious to the community, just as any pleasure 
 which involves degradation of those who provide it, is 
 inimical to public well-being. These two interlocked 
 principles should guide us in the selection of our 
 amusements. If any entertainment inflicts loss of 
 manly self-esteem, or involves deprivation of womanly 
 virtue, the amusement they tender us is offered at too 
 high a cost. Again, any amusement that tends to dis- 
 incline a man to work is wasteful of energy that ought 
 to be directed to fruitful channels. Even innocent 
 recreations may be destructive of character, if they 
 are pursued so eagerly as to push aside serious work 
 and thought. 
 
 The gravamen of the charge society has a right to 
 bring against the idle rich, is that lives of indolence, 
 
 '34
 
 AMUSEMENTS 135 
 
 ease, and pleasure must, in a highly organized society, 
 divert the labor of others from useful channels. The 
 pleasures of the idle are bought at the price of the 
 toil and deprivation of workers whose labor produces 
 nothing. The laboring poor always pay for the lux- 
 uries of the idle rich ; and though, as Mr. G. K. Ches- 
 terton says, the kindness of the poor to the rich is one 
 of the most touching features in life, there is a grow- 
 ing impatience on the part of the workers with those, 
 either at the top or bottom of the social scale, who 
 " toil not, neither do they spin." 
 
 Amusement is only legitimate as a relaxation from 
 industry. A just Providence, says Leonardo da Vinci, 
 sells all good things unto us at the price of labor. 
 Work whets our appetite for amusement and is its^only 
 real justification. A daily round of amusement, a life 
 devoted to nothing but amusement, becomes as dreary 
 as the most mechanical task work. Only as work 
 and amusement are poised in a sane counterbalance 
 do we get the true satisfactions of effort and play. 
 A young man should seriously consider what share 
 of his leisure he should devote to mere amusement, 
 and in this consideration he should bear in mind the 
 .principle that, to be thoroughly enjoyed, amusement 
 should have been thoroughly earned. 
 
 The Puritan attitude of hostility to the theatre has, 
 it must be recognized, undergone modification in re- 
 cent years. The Seventeenth Century Puritans ob- 
 jected to acting in any form. Here they cut deeply 
 into an ingrained human instinct and one which can- 
 not be crushed down by argument or prohibition. 
 Every child is a play actor, and nearly all savages 
 have their crude tribal dramas. What gave force
 
 136 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 and vitality to the Puritan objection to the theatre 
 was the shameless indecency of the lesser Restoration 
 dramatists and the notorious licentiousness of the 
 actors and actresses of that time. Not prudery but 
 a wholesome sense of the decency of things drove the 
 Puritans to a determination to have none of the evil 
 thing. 
 
 This stern protest against unseemliness led to the 
 austere and perhaps lugubrious view of life with 
 which Puritanism came to be associated. Even in the 
 nineteenth century this Puritanic tendency warped 
 the Christian view of the arts. 
 
 But long before the age of Puritanism the Church 
 was the patron of the stage as she was of the arts. 
 The Catholic Church kept painting alive through the 
 dark Middle Ages. The old morality plays were 
 staged under Church auspices, and regarded by their 
 pious patrons as popular means of presenting the 
 Christian virtues. In our own time a new alliance 
 of Church and stage, an honest attempt to encourage 
 the creation of a new drama, and a new conception of 
 acting, has been created though its progress has 
 been tediously slow. The moral tendency of the 
 modern theatre is certainly not uplifting: indeed the 
 famous playwright Mr. Henry Arthur Jones has de- 
 clared that English drama has never been in so de- 
 graded a condition as it is to-day. 
 
 A public that wants clean, healthy plays does exist, 
 just as there is a public that prefers clean, healthy 
 fiction to the erotic and neurotic novels that crowd 
 the bookstores. A clean theatre might be an inspira- 
 tional influence on the life of to-day. 
 
 The birth of the moving-picture theatre is one of
 
 AMUSEMENTS 137 
 
 the mightiest facts in recent history. It is still in its 
 infancy, and it has been abused both by films that 
 tend to degeneracy and by films that irritate by their 
 didactic propagandism. The future of the moving- 
 picture theatre is in the hands of the public. Ex- 
 hibitors of films unite in declaring that they have no 
 wish to present films associated with crime and im- 
 morality, and are indeed anxious to raise the standard 
 of moving-picture programs. The higher tastes of 
 their patrons have, however, to be cultivated, and the 
 responsibility for this culture rests with educationists 
 and even with the Christian Church. 
 
 Music is an amusement, but it is much more than 
 an amusement. It is an educational and spiritualiz- 
 ing art which, in one form or another, a young man 
 should cultivate in his own highest interests. A wit 
 has said that music is the most expensive form of 
 noise, and another humorist has observed that clas- 
 sical music is that form of music which is so much 
 better than it sounds. However economical of his 
 leisure a young man may be, time should be found to 
 master the elements of music, to learn to sing, or play 
 a musical instrument, and to hear good music ren- 
 dered. Ears and tastes differ, and in music one man's 
 joy is another's anathema. A devotee of Sullivan 
 may squirm under Bach, and a votary of Beethoven's 
 sonatas may yawn even over the honeyed sweetness 
 of Handel's Messiah. Avoid affectation and follow 
 your bent is the best advice as to music that I can 
 offer a young man. Do not praise Debussy if you 
 really prefer Balfe, nor pretend to be ecstatic over 
 Tschaikovsky's " 1812 " if " There's a long long trail 
 a-winding" is more to your fancy. Be honest in
 
 138 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 your tastes, but cultivate them. Your joy in jazz- 
 tunes may end in appreciation of the " Moonlight 
 Sonata." 
 
 The literature of music is rich in romance and 
 human interest, and I commend Grove's Dictionary 
 of Music to a young man with any musical interests. 
 Great musicians are curiously interesting personali- 
 ties. Their life-stories abound in unexpectedness. 
 In his way Beethoven was a sort of Dr. Johnson, an- 
 other rough-hewn struggler, brusque, peevish, even 
 harsh, but likeable, for all his foibles. In all biog- 
 raphy there are few episodes more melting than the 
 splendid courage with which old Beethoven faced the 
 tragedy of his deafness ; and his last moments, when 
 he whispered with grim humor, " Comedia finita est " 
 (the comedy is played out), rang down the curtain on 
 a human drama of entrancing interest. Schubert, the 
 inspired vagabond who wrote immortal song-tunes on 
 restaurant menu-cards and other odd scraps of paper, 
 and did not recognize one week the music he had com- 
 posed a week before, is a titanic figure in a real Bo- 
 hemia. Mozart immortalized by Don Giovanni 
 the boy genius who died of starvation in early man- 
 hood just as he had finished his deathless " Re- 
 quiem " ; Handel, pompous and egotistical, staggering 
 us by his amazing fecundity as he captivates us by the 
 majesty of his mighty chorals; the gentle, effeminate 
 Schumann, supreme in writing lieder, dying in a mad- 
 house from insanity caused by a false chord of music 
 that wounded and obsessed his brain; Mendelssohn, 
 rightly named Felix, lovely in countenance, lofty in 
 soul, smiled upon by the gods, and tripping happily 
 through life all these and many more fascinatingly
 
 AMUSEMENTS 139 
 
 varied characters flit across the stage of musical his- 
 tory and offer a reader of musical biography 
 
 "A perpetual feast of nectar'd sweets 
 Where no crude surfeit reigns." 
 
 Other arts offer fair fields of amusement. Pic- 
 tures, statues, miniatures, even beautiful furniture, 
 minister to our highest instincts, and to neglect them 
 is to rob life of its embellishing graces. Travel is it- 
 self a liberal education and, par excellence, the surest 
 means of acquiring that polish of mind and manners 
 distinctive of a man of broad culture. It furnishes, 
 as Dr. Johnson puts it, " variety to the eye and ampli- 
 tude to the mind."
 
 XXI 
 WRITING AND SPEAKING 
 
 THE arts of writing and speaking are an in- 
 valuable accomplishment for any young 
 man. They are at once sources of joy and 
 springs of power. While it may be quite true that a 
 great writer, like a poet, is born and not made, the 
 capacity to give written expression in pleasant and 
 effective form to one's thoughts and ideas can be cul- 
 tivated by any one of moderate education. With a 
 little assiduity and some patience a young man will 
 find that writing grows easier, and that with practice 
 thoughts which seemed inarticulate take shape on 
 paper. Later in life he will discover a thousand uses 
 for the art of writing, and he will never lament as 
 misspent any hours he may have devoted to its ac- 
 quirement. 
 
 As a concise text-book to writing, I advise Nichol's 
 English Composition (Macmillan), which is lucid 
 and compact, and excellently arranged, as a guide and 
 counsellor. Then certain models of composition 
 should be read. The Authorized Version of the Bible 
 has no equal. The late W. T. Stead caught his flex- 
 ible English style from constant study of the Bible. 
 Read carefully the latter half of Isaiah, the Psalms, 
 the Book of Job, the Gospels of St. Mark, St. Luke, 
 and St. John, and the Book of the Revelation; note 
 
 140
 
 WKITING AND SPEAKING 141 
 
 the unaffected simplicity of the Saxon English and 
 the unerring fitness of every word. Another great 
 model of English pure and undefiled is John Bunyan's 
 Pilgrim's Progress. Bunyan's English all came from 
 the Authorized Bible, but his own genius gave it a 
 character of his own. P"or chaste beauty and deli- 
 cacy of expression, go to John Ruskin ; for the study 
 of glow and color in language, read Macaulay's Es- 
 says and also his History. Swinburne's poetry re- 
 veals the majesty and music of words, even though, 
 sometimes, the thoughts they clothe seem scarcely 
 worthy of their gorgeous robes. 
 
 But the best practice in writing is to write. And 
 one of the best methods of learning to write is to 
 practice the short essay. Begin with familiar sub- 
 jects. Describe in 500 words your daily walk to 
 business. In the same number of words say which is 
 your favorite newspaper, and explain why it is your 
 favorite. Put on record in a short essay your recol- 
 lections of a holiday, or describe a football match you 
 have watched or played in. Then, exercising a little 
 more ambition, attempt a description of your favorite 
 view, or describe what arrested your attention in a 
 wood in spring. This is an excellent test of observa- 
 tion, memory, and literary ability. You may find 
 yourself in one of two difficulties. Nature may cast 
 no cunning spell over you for as Mrs. Browning 
 says 
 
 " Earth's crammed with heaven, 
 And every common bush afire with God : 
 But only he who sees, takes off his shoes : 
 The rest sit round it, and pluck blackberries." 
 
 Should you belong to the Philistines who " sit round
 
 142 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 it and pluck blackberries," a Nature essay will tax 
 your mental ingenuity, and the result may be a bald 
 and unconvincing narrative without any sacred fire 
 in it. On the other hand, you may be deeply moved 
 by Nature's mysteries, and then you may be tempted 
 into sheer grandiloquence and verbal florescence. 
 This is a vice in writing that must be avoided. A 
 flamboyant style is a bad style. Aim at expressing 
 yourself simply and directly, but gracefully and with- 
 out banality. Of a certain living bishop it is said that 
 he never uses one word if six will do. Good writing 
 has freedom with restraint, and color without re- 
 splendence. Above all, it is the natural expression 
 of the writer's personality, and not merely the out- 
 growth of affectation. 
 
 Certain vices in writing should be avoided. Use 
 Saxon words when you can. Say "begin" rather 
 than " commence." Use a short word when it will 
 express your thought quite as well as a long one. 
 Be very careful with metaphors and similes. Take 
 care that they do not get mixed. The best instance I 
 know of a mixed metaphor is that of a one-time mem- 
 ber of the House of Lords, who said that : " Now that 
 we have cleared all the barbed-wire fences, it is to be 
 hoped we are in smooth water at last." A horrible 
 example of mere verbosity is the essay of a student 
 who wrote of a fading lily as " a sweet, mellifluous 
 flower retreating into the airy mansions of annihila- 
 tion." Such writing is merely vulgar abuse of words. 
 Turn up Sheridan's plays and read The Rivals just 
 to smile over and be warned by Mrs. Malaprop's 
 mixed metaphors, or " derangements of epitaphs " as 
 she called them.
 
 WEITING AND SPEAKING 143 
 
 Another useful and perhaps less exacting 
 method of learning to write, is to condense down a 
 political speech. Take one of Mr. Asquith's orations 
 it will probably contain about 4,000 words in the 
 verbatim report and try to give all its main points 
 in 1,000 words or even 500 words. This conden- 
 sation, known as precis writing, is by no means so 
 simple as it looks, but it is excellent practice for a 
 young writer. Moreover, a good precis-writer is a 
 valued man in a business house, when the gist of a 
 memorandum or the outline of a document has to be 
 given in an abbreviated form. In a true precis, th 
 digest follows almost slavishly the language of the 
 original only the non-essentials are omitted, and the 
 somewhat redundant passages are condensed into a 
 more compact form. 
 
 Letter-writing is a fine art which the telegraph and 
 the telephone have sadly injured. But if our private 
 correspondence has been robbed of its former graces, 
 our business correspondence has assumed vaster pro- 
 portions and magnified importance. However lim- 
 ( ited may be a young man's literary gifts, he should at 
 least be capable of writing a simple, clear, intelligent 
 letter of a personal or business character. Many a 
 good business opening has been lost to an eminently 
 suitable candidate through his inability to make appli- 
 cation for it by a fitting letter. Mr. John Morley, 
 when editing The Pall Mall Gazette, had a leader- 
 writer whose florid style he had constantly to check 
 by the instruction " No dithyrambs, s'il vous plait." 
 Mr. Morley's counsel stands good for all business 
 letters. Dithyrambs are out of place in commercial 
 correspondence. Learn to write a compact letter,
 
 144 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 without any superfluous phrases and without any ugly 
 contractions, stating what you want to say, in words 
 and phrases as clear as sunlight. Conciseness with- 
 out the omission of any essential facts is the main 
 requisite in business correspondence. It need hardly 
 be added that a young man should take pains to write 
 a legible hand, and, above everything, that he should 
 spell correctly and punctuate decently. He should be 
 careful to give names and addresses accurately. Fail- 
 ure on this point is interpreted as evidence of care- 
 lessness, and is a sure barrier to progress. 
 
 Possibly the art of public speech has not great com- 
 mercial value, and a young man who may think he 
 is " no orator as Brutus is " will imagine that its cul- 
 tivation is not worth while. I suggest, however, that 
 to make commercial value the test of all things is to 
 plunge into the blunder against which I have tried 
 to warn young readers of setting out merely to 
 make a livelihood instead of a life. Moreover, the 
 ability to speak in public often proves to have a very 
 definite commercial value. I have a friend who, 
 when a junior bank-clerk, made a speech criticizing a 
 paper read by an eminent banker before the Institute 
 of Bankers, and that speech opened the portals for 
 him into the higher ranges of banking, in which to- 
 dny he is a distinguished expert himself. By his 
 speech that night he caught at the flood the tide 
 which, Shakespeare says, comes into the affairs of 
 men, and it bore him on to fortune. It was David 
 Lloyd George's capacity to speak in public that led 
 his uncle to deny himself so that his orphan nephew 
 might become a lawyer and, through the law, be- 
 come a Member of Parliament and Prime Minister of
 
 WBITING AND SPEAKING 145 
 
 England. Dismissing altogether the utilitarian as- 
 pect of public speaking, I recommend young men to 
 learn to speak for the pleasure and satisfaction that 
 the accomplishment lends to life. Occasions arise 
 when some little duty of public speech is thrust upon 
 a man, and to be unable to propose a toast at a family 
 wedding, or to move a vote of thanks at a meeting, 
 with creditable grace and without embarrassment, is 
 a manifest disability and deprivation. 
 
 To a young man desirous of acquiring the art of 
 public speech, my advice is to join a debating society, 
 and attend the meetings whenever you can. Do not 
 be too eager to speak at first. Listen and observe 
 until some subject is under discussion upon which 
 you have some ideas of your own. Then speak 
 speak briefly, make just the point, or points, you want 
 to make, and sit down as soon as you have done so. 
 Do not go on speaking when you have nothing further 
 to say. It is easier to begin a speech than to end one. 
 As you acquire practice you will want to do some- 
 thing more ambitious. Then you should prepare a 
 few notes to give you the sequence into which you 
 want to cast your points. Do not write your speech 
 and read it. But it may be wise to write out your 
 first sentence and your last sentence, so that you know 
 how you will begin and how you will end your speech. 
 Brevity is the soul of wit; but brevity to the point of 
 baldness suggests poverty of thought. Speak clearly, 
 not too quickly, and do not " clip " the ends of your 
 phrases. You may be nervous: but do not fear that. 
 No one ever made a decent speech without being 
 nervous before he began it, and many great speakers 
 are nervous all the while they are speaking. Stand
 
 146 THE STRATEGY OP LIFE 
 
 straight and still apart from any natural ges- 
 ture and avoid listlessness or lethargy while speak- 
 ing. 
 
 To be effective a speech must be delivered with 
 vivacity. Mere fluency of speech is very perilous, 
 because it tempts a man to unconsidered utterances. 
 " Think before you speak, young man," said a public 
 man of experience to his son, " and it will do you no 
 harm if you go on thinking while you are speaking." 
 Mere eloquence wedded to poverty of thought is the 
 worst vice of a public speaker. 
 
 Clear enunciation and correct pronunciation are 
 among the first requisites in a public speaker. The 
 National Assemblies of all lands expect nervousness 
 in a member who is making his maiden speech it 
 takes him to its heart if he only narrowly escapes 
 breaking down, possibly because it detects a compli- 
 ment to its awe-inspiring augustness as an assembly 
 but it is contemptuous of a speaker who blunders in 
 pronunciation. A false quantity or a misplaced ac- 
 cent is an unforgivable offence against oratorical good 
 manners. A young speaker should eschew words of 
 whose pronunciation he is not perfectly sure. It is a 
 good plan to note any strange word read in print or 
 heard in conversation, and turn up a dictionary to 
 make certain how it is pronounced, and what are its 
 exact connotations. But use a reliable dictionary. 
 In its earliest edition a somewhat popular English 
 dictionary made hyperbole rhyme with pole a ghastly 
 blunder that would have ruined a speaker who trusted 
 to its accuracy. Some years ago I heard a popular 
 preacher use the word Zeus half a dozen times, pro- 
 nouncing it eacK time as a word of two syllables.
 
 WEITINQ AND SPEAKING 147 
 
 Attention to the correct sound and exact meaning of 
 words also helps a young speaker in ordinary conver- 
 sation, where betises jar on hearers and reflect on the 
 utterer.
 
 XXII 
 CHEERFULNESS 
 
 WE all owe to mankind the duty of being as 
 bright and happy as our temperament and 
 circumstances will allow. Cheerfulness 
 is a matter of temperament in the first instance; but 
 cheerfulness is a quality of character that may be 
 cultivated. No moral quality is more appreciated by 
 our fellow-men. Mr. Philip Gibbs, the famous war 
 correspondent, insisted that only the cheerfulness of 
 the British soldier made the long, dreary waiting in 
 the trenches of Flanders endurable. This cheerful- 
 ness was certainly a miracle of habit overcoming 
 temperament. The British race is not, by nature, 
 buoyant and ardent. Climate, latitude, and racial 
 characteristics all tend in the opposite direction. 
 Englishmen are said to take even their pleasures 
 sadly. Only by supreme effort of will, often quite 
 unconsciously exerted, were soldiers able to face 
 the horrible discomforts and the appalling risks of 
 trench warfare " the sodden years of heaped-up 
 weariness " without falling into a melancholy which 
 would have destroyed their military morale. Cheer- 
 fulness is a habit we can all acquire. It is an 
 anodyne against life's hardest buffets. 
 
 A visitor to a British prison picked up a Bible in 
 one of the cells for long-term-service convicts. He 
 
 148
 
 CHEERFULNESS 149 
 
 turned over its leaves, and his eye caught a penciled 
 note on the pages, " Cheer up, Jeremiah," that some 
 waggish prisoner had scribbled on the last page of the 
 Lamentations. It was just another manifestation of 
 the spirit of the soldiers in the trenches an uncon- 
 querable resolution not to be downhearted in the most 
 adverse conditions. 
 
 The habit of looking at the best side of every event 
 was declared by Dr. Johnson to be better than a thou- 
 sand pounds a year. It was blind George Matheson 
 who sang, " I trace the rainbow through the rain." 
 
 Six years ago, a dear friend of my own was dying 
 of cancer in the throat. She had devoted her life and 
 her money to helping " the weakest things." In the 
 midst of her busy concern with efforts for ameliorat- 
 ing the lot of slum children she had been seized with 
 cancer of a most malignant type. A week or two 
 before her death she asked me to come and say a last 
 farewell. " I have cast aside all earthly things," she 
 wrote, " and am patiently awaiting the end." I ar- 
 rived when she was under the influence of morphia, 
 medically administered to allay her excruciating 
 agonies, and I had to wait until the effects of the drug 
 had passed away. Then I was shown into her room. 
 She greeted me with that radiant smile which no one 
 who knew her ever forgets ; and before I could speak 
 she said in a perfectly calm and steady voice : " Now, 
 please, let us be cheerful. I am not going to allow 
 anything or anybody to interfere with my enjoying 
 my dying." Surely such cheerfulness has never been 
 surpassed. All my memories of that last quarter of 
 an hour with my dying friend are memories of quiet 
 cheerfulness. I never understood before what Brown-
 
 150 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 irig really meant by " greeting the Unseen with a 
 cheer." 
 
 For ten years I had as an office colleague the late 
 Rev. Jonathan Brierley (" J. B."), a man whose whole 
 career was dogged by nervous weakness and uncer- 
 tain physical health. Yet there never was a more 
 incorrigible optimist than this minister- journalist, 
 who never knew when he got up in the morning 
 whether he might not be stricken by illness before, 
 night and condemned to his bed for weeks. But he 
 used to tell us that every morning as he got up he 
 said to himself, " Brierley, you old sinner ; you get 
 heaps better than your deserts ! " His maxim in life 
 was to " make your own inside weather." Whatever 
 the elements might be doing, however cloudy the 
 skies, or piercing the wind, or depressing the political 
 outlook, or exacting the day's work, he insisted that 
 if you made your own inside weather and kept your 
 mental barometer at " set fair " and your spiritual 
 thermometer well above summer heat, you were 
 happy, and no one could rob you of your cheerful- 
 ness. By this maxim Jonathan Brierley lived. He 
 advocated cheerfulness by word and pen, but above 
 all by his sunny temperament. 
 
 Adam Lindsay Gordon wrote four lines that have 
 cheered many wayfarers along life's hard ways. 
 
 "In this world of froth and bubble, 
 
 Two things stand like stone: 
 Kindness in another's trouble, 
 Courage in your own." 
 
 " It is quite wonderful in this age," said Thomas 
 Carlyle, " to find a man so happy and so serenely con-
 
 CHEEBFULNESS 151 
 
 fident as Browning is ; but he is very different from 
 me." Carlyle's remark is a combination of worthy 
 envy and honest confession. The perennial cheerful- 
 ness with which Robert Browning confronted life 
 contrasts sharply with Thomas Carlyle's incessant 
 whining. Browning lived in the faith that " God's 
 in His heaven : all's right with the world." Thomas 
 Carlyle wondered daily if life was really worth liv- 
 ing. True, Browning had the digestion of an ostrich, 
 while Carlyle suffered from chronic dyspepsia: and 
 " while Browning basked in Italian sunshine, Carlyle 
 lived in Chelsea." Still, the poet's experiences of life 
 had not all been happy. He had endured neglect, 
 seen poets of baser metal leap into popularity while 
 he worked in comparative obscurity. He had had 
 disappointments, rebuffs, and setbacks. But Brown- 
 ing's was a cheerful soul; Carlyle's a sombre spirit. 
 Browning found life " smacking sweet." At seventy 
 he sang: 
 
 " I find earth not grey, but rosy ; 
 
 Heaven not grim, but fair of hue. 
 Do I stoop ? I pluck a posy ! 
 Do I stand and stare? All's blue!" 
 
 At seventy, Carlyle, morose and embittered, shrieked 
 and sobbed over life's disillusionments and petty 
 worries ; and only rose into an heroic figure when he 
 cried over his dead wife: "Ah, if I could but have 
 five minutes with her, only to assure her that I loved 
 her all through that ! " 
 
 The cheerfulness that most readily wins our ad- 
 miration is cheerfulness in adversity. Ella Wheeler 
 Wilcfox puts it into the familiar rhyme :
 
 162 THE STEATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 " It is easy enough to be pleasant 
 
 When life flows by like a song; 
 But the man who's worth while 
 
 Is the man who will smile 
 When everything goes dead wrong." 
 
 I always like to recall the philosophical cheerfulness 
 of the famous Lord Westbury when his horses ran 
 away with him in the brougham. " I can't hold these 
 horses in," the alarmed coachman cried to his master. 
 Lord Westbury looked up from a book he was read- 
 ing. " Then drive them into something cheap," he 
 replied. The Law Lord had an economical as well 
 as a cheerful mind. 
 
 Cheerfulness has immense bearings on health 
 bodily health no less than mental health. Nurses de- 
 clare that cheerful patients make quicker recoveries 
 from illness than fretful or irritable patients. This 
 is as true of children as of adults. A cheerful habit 
 of mind induces sleep, and it assuredly aids diges- 
 tion " Laugh and grow fat ! " The secret of suc- 
 cess in happiness, holiness, or health, has been said to 
 be cultivation from within. 
 
 A thousand definitions of optimism have been 
 coined, and one I like best defines it as cheerfulness 
 in active operation in an unquenchable confidence 
 that the worst is past. This mood of mind is the 
 best antidote to worry the besetting sin of our 
 civilization. Joseph Cowan's description of an op- 
 timist as " a man of cheerful yesterdays and confident 
 to-morrows," holds the field against many wittier 
 definitions. Confidence in to-morrow drives worry 
 afield. George MacDonald truly says that it is only 
 when to-morrow's burden is added to the burden of
 
 CHEERFULNESS 163 
 
 to-day that the weight is more than a man can bear. 
 There is sound sense in the maxim that we should 
 neither borrow trouble nor anticipate anxieties. 
 " I've had a heap of troubles in my lifetime," sighed 
 an old lady, " but most of them never came." Half 
 our worries are born of needless fears that prove 
 liars. 
 
 What an example of cheerfulness Theodore Roose- 
 velt presented to the world in his last year of life! 
 A friend called to condole with him when his son 
 was killed. Roosevelt anticipated the condolence. 
 In a cheery voice he cried : " Haven't I some bully 
 boys : one dead and two in hospital ! " Sciatica laid 
 him low, and he was threatened with rheumatoid 
 arthritis. The possibility that he might have to 
 spend the rest of his life in an invalid chair was 
 broken gently to this man of action. "All right," 
 was his cheerful answer, " I can live that way, too." 
 But the strenuous liver was spared that. In three 
 weeks he was dead. 
 
 A few cheerful rules of life are worth living by. 
 Make your own inside weather, shoulder your own 
 burdens, cultivate a blithe spirit, and keep a clean 
 conscience. So fortified a man can face trouble 
 without capitulation. 
 
 " For the test of the heart is trouble 
 
 And it always comes with the years, 
 And the smile that is worth the praise of earth, 
 Is the smile that shines through the tears."
 
 XXIII 
 PUBLIC SERVICE 
 
 THE goal of a successful life should be a large 
 measure, not of personal ease, but of public 
 service. " What strikes me as a very per- 
 fect ideal of life," said Dr. John Watson (" Ian Mac- 
 laren"), "is that a man born into a country should 
 carry that country continually in his heart and mind. 
 It matters not on what side of politics he may be, but 
 it does matter that a man should seek to serve his 
 country by all the advice and help in his power ; and 
 that in the political world he should be an example of 
 wisdom, charity, moderation, and high dignity, sancti- 
 fying the politics of the land. Service is the crown- 
 ing glory of man, and however humble a man's 
 sphere, he can, by exercising to the fullest possible 
 degree his responsibilities as a citizen, render worthy 
 service -to his day and generation." 
 
 The European War was fought to make the world 
 safe for democracy; the task of the future is to make 
 democracy safe for the world. By conferring a vote 
 upon a man, the State thrusts upon him a tremendous 
 power for good or ill, and no young man who aspires 
 to be a worthy citizen will exercise his franchise with- 
 out a deep sense of his responsibility to the common- 
 wealth. This is the truest patriotism. Unfortu- 
 nately, many young men find themselves possessed of 
 the vote before they have learned either to value it 
 
 '54
 
 PUBLIC SEBVICE 155 
 
 rightly or use it wisely. They inherit a party-political 
 tradition ; without thinking things out for themselves 
 they echo party shibboleths and assimilate party 
 prejudices. By breaking up the old party system the 
 European War is compelling men to go over the 
 political fundamentals afresh and seek new align- 
 ments of party and ideals. 
 
 Selfishness enters into politics as it enters into 
 every human activity; but high idealism glistens oc- 
 casionally from its drab levels like gold from the 
 quartz rock. Let a young man cherish what idealism 
 he can discern in the politics of his day, and then let 
 him strive, as far as opportunities allow, to push for- 
 ward the causes that appeal most to his idealism. 
 " Every young man," says Dr. James Stalker, " should 
 try to have in him the passion for making the world 
 better: only he must see to it that it is a practical 
 thing, and not mere wind and words. It is possible 
 to go on dreaming and vaporing about the improve- 
 ment of the world without doing a single act of real 
 kindness to any human being." 
 
 Patriotism that waves flags and wears conspicuous 
 national emblems is discounted nowadays it is gen- 
 erally the suspicious patriotism of the profiteer and 
 the exploiter. But patriotism that seeks to serve in 
 humbleness of heart and purity of motive is a sacra- 
 mental thing. 
 
 A young man's first public service may take simple 
 forms and yet be effectual. Leadership of a Scouts' 
 troop, or lieutenancy of a Boys' Brigade, or help in 
 a boys' club, or even teaching in a Sunday school are 
 forms of service of profound value to the common- 
 wealth'. Moreover, they are excellent training-
 
 156 THE STRATEGY OF LIFE 
 
 grounds for larger, later service. Every kind of work 
 that contributes to the moral uplift of our generation 
 is worthy of all acceptance. 
 
 All service to humanity is religious work, though 
 in the past the Christian Church has been grudging 
 in its recognition of this inter-union of the sacred 
 and the secular. A broader vision is laying hold of 
 the Church. " During the sixty years of my life," 
 said Dr. Lyman Abbott recently, " I have seen a 
 radical revolution in the thought and spirit of the 
 Christian Church. In 1859, tne question which the 
 evangelists endeavored to provoke in the minds of 
 their hearers was, 'What shall I do to be saved?' 
 To-day the fundamental question is coming to be, 
 ' What can I do to serve others ? ' Then the emphatic 
 word was salvation; to-day the emphatic word is 
 service. And in service we are finding salvation." 
 
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