mu Q}olbgc af ^Agriculture Kt QforneU itnioetstti} Stljata, W. 1. Htbrary Cornell University Library BJ 1581.S7 Personality, studies in personal develop ■'?i""l924 014 010_5Q2. The original of tliis book is in tine Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924014010502 PEESONALITY STUDIES IN PERSONAL DEVELOPMENT BY HARRY COLLINS SPILLMAN FOBMEKLY SPECIALIST IN COMMERCIAL EDUCATION FOR THE FEDBBAL BOARD FOR VOCATIONAL EDUCATION THE GREGG PUBLISHING COMPANY NEW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO SAN FKANCISCO England: 21 Harrington Street, Liverpool COPYRIGHT, 191 9, BV THE 6SEGG PUBLISHING COMPANY COPYRIGHT IN GREAT BRITAIN AND IRELAND □ 81 @.lbt^6 TO MY MOTHER PREFACE The essays comprising this volume are based upon a series of addresses delivered by the author before the New York high schools imder the joint auspices of the New York Board of Education and the New York Chamber of Commerce. These addresses were later given before schools and colleges through- out the country and, with some modification, before nearly a hundred Ad Clubs, Rotary Clubs, and Chambers of Commerce. The author's view- point and much of the information and data under- lying these addresses were gained by the writer ia placing more than twenty thousand stenographers and business assistemts in Greater New York. Because of the manner in which this material first appeared these chapters retain some of the characteristics of direct spoken address. The author has sought, however, through the medium of the questionnaire at the end of each chapter, to give to this book a practical character not to be found in the usual inspirational volume. The results ob- tained wiU depend upon the vigor of the reader or teacher in applying the questionnaires, and in supplementing these with illustrations and questio"=' drawn from personal experience. In the body of the text the writer has endeavored to give credit for aU material borrowed from others, 5 6 PREFACE but lest any quotation marks have been unintention- ally omitted and for the purpose of supplying a bibliography of the subject, more than seventy-five books have been recommended for reference. The author wishes to acknowledge his indebted- ness to his life-long benefactor, Professor J. Lewie Harman, for much valuable help in the preparation of the questionnaires of this work. Grateful ac- knowledgment is also made for the encouragement and valuable editorial eissistance contributed by Miss Pauline Goldbloom. H. C. S. Washington, D. C, January, 1919 CONTENTS Intboduction 11 <■ 1. SBLF-SxmVEY AND CoNTROL 17 It rests with every man to fix his own capitalization. It may be fifty thousand, a hmidred thousand; or even a million dollsirs. That depends upon how successful he is in analyzing and developing the human machine with which he must produce the dividends. ' 2. Thinking I Can 27 There is only one person whose respect is absolute indispensable to your success and that person is yourself. "What any other man may think of you or do for you will never make or break you. That job is highly personal. ' 3. Eyes That See 35 No characteristic so marks a man or woman for pre- ferment as the gift of sight. Every sunrise ushers in a new world of beauties and opportunities, and illiuni- nates them for our inspection. ' 4. "My Ships" 46 Our capacity for achievement is measured by our ability to imagine. We may visualize without realizing — we are taking a chance; but if we expect to realize without visualizing there is no chance to take. 5. The Standard Bearer 55 In every man there is a non-trainsferable idea — a knack which can never pass current until indorsed with the trade-mark of his own handiwork. - 6. Tides of Life 65 The arriving travelers along the highway of success have not always voyaged in an unbroken course, but have journeyed rather by systematic stages, marking and rssetting their mile-posts at epochal places. 7 8 CONTENTS ■ 7. Unlisted Assets 73 It seems strange that so many men will allow their self-interests to rest upon a financial basis, taking all inventory of life in terms of money, and giving to a dollar a mind and heart value out of all proportion to the worth-while things it will purchase. ' 8. Personality Poweb 83 Within the experience of the average individual a winning personality may be achieved by a careful study of two thiags — dress and address. - 9. Idealizing the Real 93 Happily men are judged by their capacities rather than their infirmities. ' Tis the mind that enriches or impoverishes the body and all is never lost until we have lost the will to win. 10. The Old Home Town 103 Too high a percentage of the American youth is in a constant state of locomotion. What the average man needs to do is to take root — to realize that ' 'the city of happiness is a state of mind"; that success is not yonder but here; not then but now; and that the sun that shines^ on New York and Chicago is also a riot of Ulumiqatisn. in the Old Home Town. 11. Winning with Words 114 In whatever field one may work if he has acqpiired an uncommon verbal skill he goes through life a marked man. Poverty of words is the most embarrassing weakness one can have, while the remedy is pleasant and sure — a new word to-day and another to-morrow are credit entries in our bank books that wiU be found as handy as savings on a rainy day. 12. The Conqijest of Happiness 129 The world is athirst for spiritual sunshine; the gates of the market place are wide aswing to the man who is in love with the day. CONTENTS 9 13. Assembling the Fragmeptts 138 While America is just finishing a post-graduate course in the art of making money, she enters the kindergarten of the science of spending it. War's greatest by-product is thrift. " 14. Doing Unto Others 149 A mtui cannot travel far down the pathway of real success alone. He must go in company with his neigh- bors, encumbered with their joys and sorrows. He travels as his brother's keeper and if his brother would go with him a mile, he must take him twain. ' 15. The Habit of Harmony 158 The world's grandest harmony does not come from the keys of a piano or the strings of a violin, but finds expression in words and deeds of the work-a-day "Choir Invisible." 16. Making Friends with the Clock 169 Who steals your purse steals trash, but whoever bor- rows from your time-capital is trafficking in your life. To kill another's time is a form of murder; to kill your own, a form of suicide. - 17. Defying the Years 179 No man viewing life as an unending adventure can wisely wish to be younger. The golden age of to-morrow is always just around the comer. 18. That which is Caesar's 189 Second only to one's devotion to God and country should be his loyalty to that man or firm on whose pay- rolls his name has been written; " Whose bread I eat, his song I sing " should be proclaimed with lusty voice by every employee who would make his labor worthy of his hire. 19. Counting Your Friends 199 If by some sad stroke of the Fates I were bereft of all I possess of worldly goods, I would still be rich indeed if kind providence spared me the recollection of all that j sea of kind faces that passed me somewhere in the Vale \ of Yesterday. INTRODUCTION Surmounting the generally-accepted arts and sciences of our highly developed age is a super-art, recorded by Plato but by no means universally practiced since his day — The Art of Living. Man, nature's final effort in the scheme of evolution, the unchallenged conqueror of the world, is less efficient in many habits of life than the animals which centuries ago vanished in his path of progress. The only species of God's creatures that is capable of standing erect, of raising an issue, and of render- ing a decision, man, is just beginning "to respect that gleam of hght that flashes across his mind," and to force it to have a positive part in his own making. Robert Browning says that we can no more calculate the progress of the race by citing isolated flights of genius than we can estimate the light of the sky by taking the intensity of a single star. "Not until the host comes forward can we say that civiU- zation is in the infancy of its forward march." With our experts declaring that the average man is using only ten per cent of his intellectual power with corresponding wastage in his physical, financial, and social resources, the body politic has not yet reached what Browning would regard eis the adoles- cent stage. 11 12 INTRODUCTION While man is a group animal he has no more perfected his commmiity customs than he has his individual habits. The bloody years, 1914-18, gave emphatic evidence that the brute instinct has not disappeared from the human mind. Millions of lives were sacrificed and untold wealth destroyed because one large community refused to Hve peace- fully in the great family of nations; and that savage nation followed a leader whose predisposition to slay had survived all the civilized centuries that separate Cain from the Kaiser. But as this book goes to press the results of that war are being written. The Peace Conference at Paris is the principal world-event since the birth of Christ, and "the final enterprise of humanity." The Kaiser's war was personal not only because he decreed it but it was personal in its ramifications and effects on aU humanity. Not forgetting mil- lions of broken homes and hearts, future generations, can proclaim the war of 1914^18 a glorious war, if the lessons it has taught and the blessings it has preserved can be fabricated into the warp and woof of himaanity. But life, liberty, and the piu-suit of happiness may be found easier to die for than to live for. In the avenues of peace we lose the psychology of the crowd; there is a psychic lu-ge to lock-step — a superanimation for marching with bands behind us and the multitude at attention before us. A harder trial will come as a hundred million people INTRODUCTION 13 readjust themselves to prosaic peace tasks, while a liberated world awaits the personal application of new principles to the art of Uving. Those prin- ciples which have been worth defending on the field of battle for the good of the group axe worthy to be inculcated into the personal practices of the units that make up the group. If it is wrong for a powerful nation to assault a weaker state, to steal from it or in any way coerce it, then it is no less a crime in point of principle if one company of men conspires against another or one man ag£unst his neighbor iu restraint of trade. If it is right and equitable that the diplomatic intercourse of nations should be exposed to the pubUc view why not play the great game of commerce with fewer cards mider the table.** Is it not foUy to expect the Golden Rule to work among nations imless it also works among men.!* Again, if a man fiends it good to save for his country wiU he find it less expedient to save for his family? If vmder the lash of patriotic zeal he has learned to render a larger day's service for a larger day's pay, wiU he be less industrious and expectant with Goverimaent disciphne removed.** If the nation can create a Personnel Organization that precisely evaluates the man power of the army, and sets every soldier at the task he is best equipped to perform, are we to be less exacting in the conservation of human re- sources in times of peace.** And, finally, after the awful price we have paid that our nation might 14 INTRODUCTION remain free etad useful and happy, will the average man demand no share in the victory? In an eman- cipated world will he not strive as never before to become a self-discovered, self-directed unit — free, forwcird-facing, masterful? As the nations lay down their arms and concord becomes the universal coun- tersign, wiU the average man prove capable of personal reconstruction and attune his own life to the rhythm of the New Day? In the school of this new life our geographies are not the only textbooks that will need to be re- written. The whole instruction scheme will need to be pitched ia a higher key. Agencies of training must begia to talk less eibout short courses and more about long careers. Ambitious men and women must prepare to meet new standards of measure- ment — intellectually, physically, morally. Such quahties are non-existent except as attributes of manhood and womanhood. Whatever the ambition — to become a stenographer, an engineer, a banker, or even the President of the United States — one must first be a real man before he can build emy of these. This book has been written for those schools that recognize this truth and have grown weary in well-directed effort to train men and women for the professions by a composite of mathematics, language, science, shorthand, etc., homeopathically or hypodermically administered. In short, the book has been written for all men and women who concede that the best school can give only a poor INTRODUCTION 15 start in the direction of a real education; that we never graduate at edl but are always in a state of educational transit; that man's intellectual and spiritual unfoldment is a matter qpiite apart from books; and that the greatest school of all is the classroom wherein he finds himself both teacher and student — the school of self-discovery and development. Sad is the day for any man when he becomes absolutely satisfied with the life that he is living, the thoughts that he is thinking and the deeds that he is doing;, when there ceases to be forever beating at the doors of his soul a desire to do something larger which he feels and knows he was meant and intended to do. — Phillips Brooks PERSONALITY SELF-SURVEY AND CONTROL By all means use some times to be alone. Salute thyself: see what thy soul doth wear. Dare to look into the chest — for 'tis thine own. And tumble up and down what thou findest there. — Geohgb Herbert That man is to be pitied who, when alone, finds himself in poor company. Sir Walter Scott once said that if he were forced to choose between eternal company without the power of retiring within himself or solitary confinement for life, he would ask the turnkey to lock the cell. Whoever flees his own society elects to run away from a world — his own world — to study fife and work out his own destiny by the more difiScult process of indirection. Success is not a collective, but an abstract noun, detached, isolated, personal. If you are to know it in its fullest sense, the knowledge will not come to you as you walk with the battahon, but as you explore that great universe that is bounded on the north by the hair of your head, on the south by the soles of your feet, on the east and west by the out- stretched tips of your fingers. The world's greatest universities are not located at Oxford, at Princeton, 17 18 PERSONALITY or at Cambridge, but under the bats of self-searching men. The most any institution of learning can do is to hold the light by which you may ignite your own candle. A school may be richly endowed with libraries and labcHcatories, but these wiU have no meamng until your own world-equipment is added. Education means to lead out of yourself, not into somebody's schoolhouse. It is, then, a question not of whether a man has been through college, but of whether the college has been through the man. Experience is indeed the master teacher, and the great lessons of the late war have shown us how much more truly education goes on outside than inside the classroom. The correct interpretation of education holds that the mind of man is not a storehouse for the dead facts of other minds, but a hving fountain flowing always from an inexhaustible self-source. Every man is in life imprisonment until he is self-discovered, until he finds out who he really is and what he was created to do. Dr. Katherine M. H. Blackford says that three out of every four men over thirty-five years of age have chosen the wrong vocation. Among these are thousands of college men, well educated according to the popular notion, but still without the key of self- knowledge that woxild turn their souls out of bondage. In contradistinction to these misfits and among the twenty-five per cent who are progressing along the life's highway we find the Edisons, the SELF-SURVEY AND CONTROL 19 Schwabs, the Camegies, the Hills — a select com- pany with master's degrees from the miiversity of hard knocks. The human mind could not com- prehend the transformation if seventy-five per cent of the men over twenty years of age should really come to kaow themselves as these supermen have done. What would each life be worth to itself and to humanity if the best that is bound up in it were to be discovered and utilized? In the hurried self- appraisements that we make we omit from our inventories much that is vital. With field glasses over our shoulders we scurry away to distant lands that we may see what is fair and wonderful. "See America First" is the advertising slogan of a great continental railroad company. You should apply the same logic, personally — see your own imiverse first — take a personally conducted tour through the unexplored regions of your own kingdom. A man unrevealed to himself must remain forever imrevealed to the world. Dean Johnson of the New York University School of Commerce says: "You are a very complicated machine and you are the only person who can drive it or in any way improve it. Your friends may know a great deal about your powers mentally and physically but they carmot make you over. If you want your machine to be in the best possible running order and to do the work for which it is best fitted, you must know it more thoroughly than you do your horse or your dog." 20 PERSONALITY The average man who has never considered the value of his body may draw an iospiriag lesson from the accident insurance companies. On the cold business basis your arms are worth five thousand dollars, your legs, five thousand dollars, your eyes, five thousand dollars, even a finger is worth two hmidred fifty dollars. In such a schedule, certainly the great dynamo that drives the human machine, the mind, even though untrained, must be worth at least fifteen thousand doUars. In other words, you arose this morning, even if you did not have a dollar in the bank, with a working capital of not less than thirty thousand dollars. This capital you may increase manyfold by carefully studying and improving the basis of your present worth. Paderewski's hands are probably insured for a quarter of a miUion dollars and are worth many times that sum, because his own production is highly refined. It would be impossible to fix the true capital value of a mind like Edison's, or Bur- bank's, because the value is cumulative and will run on through the ages. President Henry U. Mudge of the Rock Island Raihoad capitalizes each man on a basis of wages, or salary, at a minimum of twenty-five thousand doUars. For example he capitaUzes every man earning nineteen doUars and twenty-three cents a week, or eighty-three doUarS and thirty-three cents a month, or one thousand dollars a year, at twenty-five thousand doUars, because at four per cent the man's wages or salary SELF-SURVEY AND CONTROL 21 is the interest on twenty-five thousand dollars. He appraises a man earning nineteen dollars and twenty-three cents a week as being worth as much as the cost of a locomotive, but he adds, "You can make yourself worth more, while a locomotive cannot. You can direct your own energies, while a locomotive must be directed by a driver." It rests with every man to fix his own capitaliza- tion. It may be fifty thousand dollars, one hundred thousand dollars, or even five hundred thousand dollars. It depends on how successful you are ia developing the human machine mth which you must do your work. Be courteous to yourself — to the wonderful intricate mechEinism of your body by not misusing it; to that indefinable delicate machinery of your mind by training it; to that indefinable but deeply real thing we must agree to call the spirit by not stifling its still small voice. Professor James of Harvard has said that the average man Tises only ten per cent of his brain power. Certainly only those men get one hundred per cent out of life who invest one hundred per cent of themselves in hfe, emd we cannot make our in- vestment imtU we have located our capital. A suc- cessful sales manager, in addressmg his men, said: I believe absolutely that if every salesman on this force would spend one single hour in his own room before his mirror and cold-bloodedly analyze himself our sales this month would be increased a hundredfold. 22 PERSONALITY The world gives its largest rewards to those exceptional young men and women who have the poise and self-possession necessary to carry on the important work of self-survey. Life is so multi- farious, and the counter-attractions so great, that our moments of meditation are made up, for the most part, of unconnected impressions. Our minds are always "at home" to those fleeting visitors who can be entertained with the least mental effort. Payot says: The majority of men know as little of themselves as they do of the comitries of Central Africa. They never voluntarily turn their attention from the outside world to examine themselves; or rather as they have thrown their consciousness wide open to everything outside, they have never had the courage to fathom this torrent of outside interests, and ascertain the actual rock-bottom depth of their own beings. The result is that they go through life drawn hither and thither by outside hap- penings, with scarcely any originality, or without any more control of their direction than have the leaves which are whirled about by the autumn wind. The great psychologist recognized that there is Uttle of value to be had in making self-discovery, unless one is able to command what one has dis- covered. To compile an inventory of self-assets is a promising investment only to the man who is capable of self-government. It matters not how straight the gate How charged with punishment the scroll; I am the master of my fate I am the captain of my soul. SELF-SURVEY AND CONTROL 23 Every maB is born a king, but he decides for himself whether he is to be a ruling or merely a reigning monarch. No greater by-product will come out of the world war than the lesson of discipline which it has taught to nations and to individuals. Discipline is a rigorous trcuning that causes us to do willingly the things we formerly disliked to do. The average vdll is limp from iuaction, but it may be strengthened by proper exercise even as the muscles of our arms. Payot noting, ia his "Educa- tion of WiU," the relation of desire to action, gave the following suggestion: When a favorable sentiment passes through con- sciousness we must prevent it from disappearing too quickly; we must fix the attention on it and make it waken all the ideas and sentiments which it can arouse. In other words, cause it to become as prolific as possible and to yield everything it has to give. Across the Hudson, a few nules away from the bright lights of New York City lies the " Self Masters' Association" made up of the "Monks of Vaga- bondia." Gathered here are the down-and-outers, broken in spirit and spent ia body, rejected and despised of men and society. As a last resort they go to Andress Floyd's colony, an institution where men are made over by themselves. There is no sleight of hand, no miracle wrought by them, just the old philosophy — " Know thyself " — applied and supplemented by self-rule. So from the four comers they come, they see, they conquer. 24 PERSONALITY To the young life umnarred by the habits of self-abuse, the process of self-exploration and con- quest is simple but never easy. He who conies to know himself and command himself has Uttle else to learn. It will be easy enough to attain to success by continued application of brain and b^awn. But he who is able to discover and to command himself will be a king for that. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Are you spending as much as thirty minutes a week apart from books or companions in your own society? 2. Can you be happy in your own company? Do you know your, greatest asset and your greatest weak- ness? 1/^ 3. Have you practiced the art of concentration until you can hold your mind steadily upon a given thought even in a crowded car or a busy railway station? 4. According to President Madge's basis of calcula- tion, what is your personal capitalization? What has been the average percentage of increase during the last three years? * 5. Give yourseK an honest percentage rating on the following characteristics: F.nergetic ^ or Lazy^ Spasmodic or Continuous '^ Accurate or Inaccurate ** Neat f or Slovenly Conserving or Wasteful of energy of energy * Tests suggested by Roger W. Babson, The Statistician. SELF-SURVEY AND CONTROL 25 * 6. Give yourself an honest rating as to financial capacity. Acquisitive or Nonacquisitive Conservative or Speculative Economical or Extravagant Appreciative of Value |pQQr Make more than you spend Spend more than you make * 7. What average do you make as to type of mind? Broad Constructive Orderly Practical ' Scientific High Ideals ' or Narrow or Destructive or Disorderly *^ or Impractical or Unphilosophical or Low Ideals * 8. What is your percentage rate on the following attributes of disposition? Responsive Friendly Patient Ambitious Cheerful Enthusiastic Courteous Truthful Courageous Stable or Unresponsive or Unfriendly or Impatient or Self-satisfied or Gloomy or Indifferent or Discourteous or Untruthful or Cowardly or Unstable 9. WiU you agree to arise ten minutes earlier for one week as a will exercise and report the result?, 10. Write a treatise of 250 words on "The things I intend to do with my will." 26 PERSONALITY References Self Measurement — W. D. Hyde — B. W. Huebsch Education of Self— Paul DuBois— Funk & Wagnalla Company Power of Will — Frank C. Haddock — Pelton Publishing Company Kingship of Self Control — W. G. Jordan — Fleming H. Revell Company THINKING I CAN / To thine ownself be true, And it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be fake to any man. — Shakespeare This assurance from Shakespeare underwrites all social and business integrity and suggests that aU values are reflected from, and protected by, the individual appraissd. The wealth, honor, and moral- ity of mtankind must always begin with the pronoun I. A man without a self-sustaining confidence in Jamself must needs be without adequate faith in his Creator whose representative he is. No man can be in tune with the worth while life who sings no song of himself. He need not sing it from the housetop; but if he reahzes that he has been fitted out by the Creator to do well a given piece of the world's work, he will be about his business in due season and he will make his song of life worthy of the instnmaent he has been given to play. Modem day students of Shakespeare ascribe to biTTi the attributes of a master salesman. The twentieth century formulators of business ethics have builded squarely upon the basis that respect for the good and the true begins with the pronoun of the first person. No man can really be true to 27 28 PERSONALITY himself who has not an abiding faith in himself. Here hes the chief comer stone of scientific sales- manship. The first important selling transaction with which one can be identified is a three-cornered transaction. He is the salesman, purchaser, and the thing sold. For no salesman — and that term includes every man and woman who earns a hviag by hand or head — can be a success in this life until he has succeeded in selling himself, to himself. When he has once made that confident analysis it should be easy for him to apply the same principles to other commodities which he may offer for sale. But there may always be this difference in offering one's wares and oneself for sale: in the former sale the price is regulated by the law of supply and demand; but in the latter instance the price is arbitrary. Indeed I may be an autocrat and stamp whatever value I will upon myself. I may imprint my services with the mental trade-mark of superior- ity and carefully store them away against the hour of made-to-measure customers, or I may throw myself upon the bargain counter to be fingered over by the basement crowd. Every man is first great or small according to his own calculation. Spiritual bankruptcy is always several days ahead of the sheriff. Our mental collapse is the result of a poor system of bookkeeping. We strike off our trial balance, having underscored self-Hquidating ha- bilities, and overlooked important assets. People are wiUing to beheve a self-helping man a going THINKING I CAN 29 concern until he stops discounting his bills and begins to walk stoop-shouldered. Emerson said that the best lightning rod for self-protection is one's spine. Indeed one's carriage is more than an incident in his credit. Men have telltale gaits like thoroughbreds and truck horses. A careful banker would sooner look into your face than into your strong box, for if you have been serving the god of doubt, of personal distrust, these things are pictured in your countenance, and are more eloquent to the man who lends than coupon papers. A man may lack the confidence of every banker in his community and yet be strongly underwritten if he has the security of his own soul. To be a charter member of the " Self-Sustaimng Order of I Cans" promises more eventually than a first- class rating in Dun or Bradstreet. There is only one person whose respect and credit is mdispensable to your success and that person is yourself. What any other man may think of you or do for you will never make or break you. That job is highly personal. Doubters are always in the majority and he along the race coiu"se of life to whet the ambitions of the stout hearted. Edison and Marconi were good hurdlers before they became skilled inventors. In the lesser fields of achievement, men and women carry on by hearkening to the stiQ small voice from within rather than to chatter from without. I know a stenographic expert who twelve 30 PERSONALITY years ago enrolled in a business school, and after a week's endeavor was told by his teacher that he could never learn shorthetad; whereupon his tuition was refunded and he left the institution. However, before leaving he asked his teacher whether she thought he might not be able to learn a little. The reply was that he might master shorthand if he worked a hundred times harder than the average boy. A few weeks later the school was astonished to receive from the rejected pupil the first three lessons of the shorthand textbook written out in copperplate style a hundred times. In due com-se other lessons were received imtil the entire text had been copied a hundred times. Then this would-be stenographer wrote and inquired whether he might not reenroU in the school. Upon being enthusi- astically rematixculated- he entered, by his own request, the beginning class in shorthand. To-day that rejected student whom competent teachers had pronounced incapable of learning a shorthand system, is a court reporter in the City of New York at a salary of $6,000 a year. Robert Fulton years ago Said he'd make the steamboat go And stuck to it. Robert's friends began to jolly, Called the steamboat Fulton's folly, But the darn thing went, by golly He stuck to it. THINKING I CAN 31 And Robert Fulton deserves our admiration and plaudits for his contribution to the field of science, but the world imconsciously honors him more because he had the courage to hold on, to insist that the steamboat was withia him while the world was imwilling to help hinn search for it. Herbert Spencer, ia his "First Principles," says that nothing standing alone can be absolutely known. Science is a matter of relativity and in aU things our faith must transcend our knowledge. To believe yourself able is the nearest approach to being able; to fix your eyes resolutely upon a given goal shortens the distance to its attainment. Much of Sandow's power lies in the consciousness of his strength. "He can whothinks he can" is the Uon in him. Whoever beheves a given task impossible achieves a result corresponding to his suspicions. Philip the Second built the resplendent Spanish Armada and sent her forth to crush the lesser English fleet. But the admiral of the SpcUiish Armada was given to seasickness, and openly confessed to Philip his lack of confidence in the expedition. The Spanish Armada, overequipped with guns and sailors but without an enthusiastic confident command, sailed straight into the defeat which corresponded to the mental pattern of its admired. Contrast that adventm-e with the one financed by Ferdinand and Isabella in 1492. The Pinta, Nina, and Santa Maria were sickly craft when compared to the units of the Spanish Armada, 32 PERSONALITY and yet these tiny barks were ballasted and impelled by a mightier force than Philip the Second had put into his monsters of the deep. The Spanish Armada had no Colmnbus. History reveals no more in- spiring example of personal courage and fortitude than this. The issue that he raised was the rotund- ity of the earth and a shorter route to India; the decision he rendered was to fare forth and discover. From the first hour of his decision he never lost sight of his purpose nor ceased to throw his life against it. Doubt, ridicule, and disappointment were his daily portion and he finally walked calmly into the way of desertion and near-death, but his command never changed; it was always — "Sail on!" Ever came the still small voice "The earth is round; there must be land." Through the windows of his soul he saw San Salvador. "And they who were with him were mightier than they who were against him." All of the outposts of discovery and progress have been set by Columbuses. Faith has been the universal conqueror. Faith is the very mainspring of energy and action. Of all of the virtues, we can make it the most practical. Faith has been the foundation stone of all conquests of all ages. The Panama Canal is a colossal faith statue. The electric Hght, the steam engine, the telephone, the telegraph, the typewriter, the submarine, and the automobile are "I can" souvenirs left by men with a fondness for doing the impossible. To succeed in THINKING I CAN 33 life is the natxiral way to live. To fail is oftentimes to follow lines of greater resistance. It requires constructive and optimistic thinking to succeed, and it requires destructive and pessimistic thinking to fail. Choose as you may between success or failure, you can achieve neither without careful preparation. A man without an electrifying belief in his abihty to achieve is never adequately prepared. Practically all of the accompUshments of the race are the reward of an equipment hke yours. The Wright Brothers sharpened their first tools in the woodshed but the completed model had a factory finish. As com- pared with past heroes and world-servers the odds are in your favor, but you must choose carefully your belief pattern, For my work shall not be enduring And I shall not be free Until I myself am true to myself And value the power in me. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Contrast confidence with egotism, and illustrate both with example. 2. In what way does your self-confidence strengthen your faith in the general scheme of things? 3. Contrast the idea of selling one's seK with the idea of selling one's wares. 4. Why is it more necessary for a great merchant to have the support of his own soul than the backing of banks? 34 PERSONALITY 5. Name four men who have been self-impelled and who have traveled the road of international doubt and of ridicule, finally achieving "the impossible." 6. Who in your estimation presents the most out- standing example of personal confidence and tenacity in American history? 7. What did the expedition of the Spanish Armada have in common with the voyage of Columbus? Con- trast these adventures. 8. From the standpoint of confidence in the justness of the cause, whose faith was the greater, Washington's or Lincoln's? Why? 9. Who has your greater admiration, Cyrus W. Field or Robert Fulton? Why? 10. Name the inventor and give something of the history of the following inventions which were given to the world as a result of an unalterable personal courage: The Atlantic Cable The Steamship The Telephone The Typewriter The Electric Light References As a Man Thinketh — James L. Allen — CroweU Pub- lishing Company That Something — Smith — Digby, Tacoma, Washington You Can — George Mathew Adams — Frederick A. Stokes He Can Who Thinks He Can — 0. S. Marden — CroweU Publishing Company EYES THAT SEE Did God give the eyes for nothing? And was it for nothing that He mingled in them a spirit of such might and cunning? . . . Was it for nothing that he made light, without which there were no benefit of any other thing? — Epictetus About every second man one meets is wearing eye-glasses, and the other half is on its way to the oculist. "If the trouble is in the iris or retina, a piece of ground glass wiU quickly restore your focus, but if the fault Ues in the brain base which is the seat of perception, no amount of ocular skUl will print an enduring picture on your memory." To behold is fatally easy, but to observe requires that the myriad of brain cells be fully mobilized and put in action, giving the power of comparing, combining, constructing, and retaining. The aver-^ age brain is flabby from disuse. Only the most persistent regime of training wiU make it sufficiently sensitive to recall the objects carried to it through ether waves. No characteristic so marks a man or woman for preferment as the gift of sight. Every normal creature had seen the Ughtning flash but Ben- jamin Franklin observed it. Louis Brandeis startled our nation by saying: "I can show the 35 36 PERSONALITY railroads how to save one million dollars a day," and efficiency, which always might have been, seems to have begun. Noah, om- first great expert in transportation and conserve! of national re- sources, left an example in applying the conserva- tion principle of production that has been lost for two thousand years. Every sunrise ushers in a new world of opportunities. The modus operemdi of business, in science, in art, in every earthly mani- festation, is in a constant state of reformation. Nothing is permanent but change. The final edition of "Who's Who" never goes to press, and it offers a standing invitation to the man who will learn to see beyond his nose, to reason from ejBFect back to cause, to distinguish live wires from dead ones without coming into actual contact with the wire. Every great invention breaks the heart of a hundred men who had dreamed about it years in advance of the inventor's patent. They had made a dreamer's model, but flagging imagination or relenting concentration had omitted the spring or screw that would have tightened the mental patent into a practical machine. A New York business man who has made a dili- gent survey of successful people, gives this con- vincing contrast between sightless and seeing eyes: "After I had spent a summer at Harvard Uni- versity, I retimied to New York on a steamer from Providence. On board the vessel that night I met the most wonderful man of all my acquaintances. EYES THAT SEE 37 I cannot tell you his name for indeed I never knew him, and yet I call him the most interesting man I have ever met. He was a steerage passenger and had come up from the bowels of the ship after mid- night to get a few breaths of fresh air. I found that he was a bill-poster for one of our great Ameri- can circuses. He was not an educated man from the viewpoint of books but he was a post graduate in the xmiversity of observation. He told me aU about the wonderful institution — the circus. I thought I knew aU about the circus. Years ago I used to get up at four o'clock in the morning and watch the circus until it left the next morning at four. I thought I knew aH about it. I knew aU the animals by their first names and was on iqjimate terms with the gentleman who issued the complimentary tickets for services rendered. But I foimd out on this night that I really knew nothing about the circus. When this biU-poster told me the clock-like precision with which this great in- stitution moves from one city to another; when he told me how many beeves and potatoes were required to feed aU the people; the difference in pay between the men who drove the tent stakes and those who did the acting; how I wished that every boy and girl in this country might learn what I learned £ibout a circus that night from this steerage passenger. He had been all over Europe putting up his circus biUs, and everywhere he had been he had appropriated the treasures of the old world. 38 PERSONALITY At two o'clock that morning, when I allowed this bill-poster to go back to the steerage, I declared that that night had been far more entertaining and profitable to me than any I had spent at Har- vard University. " In bold contrast I recall the experience of a man who recently came into my office in New York. He was applying for a stenographic position. In reply to my query as to his education and experi- ence, he said that he had graduated from one of our largest western universities, was a stenographer of three years' experience, was thirty years of age, and desired fifteen dollars a week. You can make your own calculations. I then asked him what he had been doing for the last year. He repHed, 'Well, I have not been doing anything that would bear upon my abiHty to earn money. I have just finished my third voyage around the world.' I said, 'Do you really mean to tell me that you have been three times around the world.'*' He repHed, 'Yes, I returned only last week on the Mauretania.' By this time he had arisen and started to leave, but I insisted that he be seated and tell me something of the many interesting things he had seen in these three voyages around the world. 'Well,' he said, 'there reaUy isn't anything of interest that I can tell you.' 'If not,' I replied, 'let me ask you a few questions. For instance, teU me something about the Maiu-e- tania. I have occasionally seen her steam up the EYES THAT SEE 39 bay but I never have been on board.' 'Well,' he replied, 'the Mauretania is a great vessel; it is some ship,' He had gone over on this floating palace of the sea, had enjoyed her luxuries and her conveniences, but had associated ia no way this floating hotel with the first rude craft that Robert Fulton had set adrift ia the Hudson River many years before. He had gone over to London, the first city of the world, and had walked down the streets blindly. He had looked upon Westminster Abbey as you would look upon your City Heill, He had crossed the Channel and gone down the Rhine, but he could not teU me on which side Kved the Belgians — this college man. After a short stay ia Paris he had passed through the Strait of Gibraltar, but he did not see that mighty rock whose strength has been immortalized ia adver- tising. He had gone to the city of the Caesars but he did not teU me whether her hills were one or seven. There ia the land of the Renaissance and the world's early civilization and Hterature this man had grown weary ia a few days and had gone down into the domsiin of Solon and Alexander, but those great warriors and statesmen had left no in- teresting footprints for him. Finally he had come back to his own country to offer her the same services and to exact from her the same reward." The chief pmpose of life is to see something. There is a greater difference in our spiritual visions than there is in our physical visions. We should 40 PERSONALITY become a part of all that we see and all that we have. Our lives and our services should be inlaid with every aspect of our opportunities. Accurate sight is the result of concentrated view- ing of objects. Therefore to cultivate the power of sight we must cultivate the force of will. We must get the knack of attending vigorously and exclusively to the matter in hand. Dr. Haddock, in his "Power of Will," quotes the experience of a man in the Greek Island of Hydra, who was accustomed to take his post every day for thirty years on the summit of the island and look out for approaching vessels; and although there were over three himdred sailboats belonging to the island, he could teU the name of each one as she approached, with unerring certainty, while she was still at such a distance as to present to the common eye only a confused white blur upon the clear horizon. In one of the popular New York restaiu-ants there is a cloakroom attendant who never checks the articles left in his care. He scrutinizes both people and their belongings so closdy that they are in- stantly associated even after hours of separation. Dr. Harold Wilson says that it is estimated that the human eye is capable of distinguishing one hundred thousand different colors or hues and twenty shades or tints of each hue, making a total of two miUion color sensations which may be dis- criminated; and he expresses the beUef that such an estimate is not excessive. Also great speciahsts EYES THAT SEE 41 contend that so-called color blindness is as Kkely to result from long-practiced absent-mindedness as from marked defect in vision. We hmry along at such a rapid pace that we see Ufe only in terms of black and white, while there is infinite variation in the coloring of the earth, its blossoms, rainbows, and sunsets. How great is the opportunity to multiply the quahty of our hving by a journey through the woods after the fashion of John Bur- roughs or David Grayson! Such men have learned to get one hundred per cent out of life by invest- ing a like amount in life. They see the world because they look intently at it. They put their wills into their sight efforts and acquire the habit of intensive rather than extensive seeing. Detail rather than scope is the purpose, although £is the habit is developed it is surprising how wide a range of objects can be seen with fair degree of accuracy of detail. Learning to see is to a great extent a process of elimination, a shutting out from thought as well as from view distracting subjects and objects. As we put blinders on a spirited animal to confine his view ahead so must we use the will to align our focus, making it direct and purposeful. But the perfect vision — eyesight plus insight — comes only through the windows of the soul. Whipple says, "Our eyes can truly observe only those objects which the mind, heart and imagina- tion have been gifted to see." One but needs to 42 PERSONALITY visit a great art gallery to learn the truth of this. We never need the eyes of Rembrandt or Millet to appreciate a painting which the artist has pro- duced out of our world of education and experience. To such a canvas we bring a certain awareness, something of the coloring of life that the artist has painted in it. Our sight then wiU always be meas- Turably modified by our experience and our ideals. In New Orleans the old Royal Hotel was once the French capitol of America and in its basement was located one of the greatest slave markets in the old South. This hotel had been visited by countless thousands, including the royalty of France, and all had looked upon the block without seeing it as it really was. In this, the greatest hotel in all the South, the aristocracy of two continents studied from vantage points the art of buying and selling human life. Then one day came the strangest of all spectators, clothed not in royal robes; he was just a simple-hearted cabin boy shipping down the Mississippi, yet he looked upon the slave block and saw in it humanity's impardonable sin. That cabin boy turned away from the slave markets of the South with a new life's pattern etched in his brain. — "A nation half slave and half free could not long endure." The Emancipation Proclama- tion was what Abraham Lincoln reedly saw in the slave market of New Orleans. The future would cause us less concern if we ex- tracted from the passiag hour only a fraction of EYES THAT SEE 43 our due of its blessings and beauties. Dr. Crane, in commenting upon the writings of David Grayson, says: "His value is that he has stopped to look at life. He is not going anywhere; he is just takiug a walk. It is the journey that is worth while to him and it little matters at what inn or farmhouse the day's end shall find him. He came upon the truth by just standing still a bit and looking. He opens the gates of his soul and the beauties of the world troop ia." There is no ingratitude like that ingratitude which allows one to be unsusceptible to his surroundings and observations, flesolve to see the things at which you look, not because the process bears such a close relation to your bank account, but because observation and appreViation go so far in changing one's life from a condition of mere existence to one of ideal and perfect hvin^. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Distinguish between physical and mental seeing. 2. Why will an artist whose physical sight may be imperfect see more in the masterpiece than the layman whose physical sight is keen? 3. How many stories is the highest building in your city and what is its approximate foot frontage? 4. Is there a clock on your City Hall or Library build- ing? If so, in what direction is it facing? 5. Without referring to your watch draw a rough outline of its face, locating the second hand. 44 PERSONALITY 6. Who is the tallest member of your class? Who is the shortest? How many blonds in the class and how many brmiettes? 7. How many red stripes are there in the American flag? How many stars? Are the stars blue on a white field or white t)n a blue field? 8. Select an attractive show window in one of the leading stores in your city. Pass this window at your accustomed gait. Observe attentively the various ob- jects on display. When you have passed the window, note down the objects seen. Repeat this test for five different days and when you have recorded the result of your final test, go back to the window and then accur- ately Ust every article displayed. Estimate the per- centage of your failiures. 9. Describe the material and general architectiu'al character of the fifth nearest residence to the one in which you reside. Having recorded your analysis of this house, go within a hundred feet of it. Observe it closely for a period of ten minutes. Note its general size. Observe its distance from other houses flanking it on either side. Record its color and note whether it harmonizes with the general environment in which it is set. If so, how? If not, why? Write the result of your observation. Repeat the exercise for five days and note the improvement. 10. Take a walk of a dozen blocks along a fairly busy thoroughfare studying* attentively the faces of the passers-by. Observe how many are wholly new and the varying degree of famiUarity in the others. (a) How many of these faces can you call by name? (6) How many can you locate by residence or place of business? (c) How many have you seen frequently and are not now able to recall when or where? EYES THAT SEE 45 (d) Can you carry one of these familiar, unidentified faces in mind until you later establish some identifying fact or circumstance connected with it? References Power of Will (Chap. 9) — Frank C. Haddock — Pelton PubUshing Company The Great Within — Christian Larson — Progress Pub- lishing Company Seven Secrets of Success — Madison C. Peters — Robert M. McBride and Company Succeeding with What You Have — Chas. M. Schwab — The Century Company "MY SHIPS" Think you to-morrow, when the fullness of life's treas- ure is mine, that it will hold aught that is new or strange to me? I teU you that I long have known each masterpiece that hangs upon the walls of my To Be, and each royal robe that I shall wear was spun from starshine in my dreams. _ — Mumel Strode Doctor Katherine M. H. Blackford, in a qpiestion- naire, asks the applicant: "If you could have any position you wish for, what would it be?" She says that a man's ideal is the most important thing about him ; that it does more to determine his success or failure than any other one element in his character. Every man is two men — the man he is and the man that he may be. On the one hand there is the sum total of his thoughts and actions in the past, and on the other a passive bundle of possibilities. The essence of education is the adaptation of our conduct to our principles; of oiu- actions to our ideals. The world's dreamers have also been the world's doers. The renowned in all walks of hfe have been the product of a constructive imagination. Without a clear-cut mental blueprint of the thing to be achieved, no man holds on in the face of the world's scorn and ridicule. When the young Disraeli arose 46 "MY SHIPS" 47 in the British Parliament to make his maiden speech, he felt keenly an atmosphere of laughter and scorn, but he was undaunted. At the height of their ridicule he cried out, "The time wiU come when you will hear me!" The English Parliament was imprepared for such well-laid plans of the young judge. But Disraeli held on to his dream until, as Prime Minister of England, he became one of the most highly respected statesmen and orators in the Empire. The sequence of harvest to seedtime holds in human experience as well as in the realm of physics and chemistry. Thistles may grow beside the wheat but not from it. The seed can reproduce only its kind; in other words the material harvest follows a mental sowing. Nature gives in accord- ance with our mental planting. Think construe--' tively and concretely of the things you want; visualize them vigorously. Thomas Carlyle thought in terms of the books he expected to write, and hved to reap a literary harvest. His fellows ridi- culed his dream of authorship. They could not understand the aspirations of a youth whose only apparent stock in trade was poverty; but Carlyle assured them that he had better books in him than had ever been written. Lifelong dyspepsia and a scornful wife could not hinder him during the thirteen years he was writing his "History of Fred- erick the Great." His housemaid is said to have kindled the fire with the original manuscript of 48 PERSONALITY his "French Revolution." Undismayed he wrote it again. It is important to distinguish clearly between the limp wishing for success and haviug a definite, clear-cut mental pattern of the object to be achieved. Wishing will bring things to pass only to the extent that it may inspire and energize you to go after them. In fact, success never comes anywhere of its own accord. It must be fetched; and usually you bring it in by the nape of the neck. But those who cannot conceive success cannot beheve in success; and those who expect failure will find such results as justify their expectations. Our capac- ity for achievement is exactly measured by our abihty to imagine. If your rain barrel was origi- nally constructed to hold forty gallons of water, the rain clouds may send one hundred gallons into it, but it spills out every drop beyond its capacity. It is true we may visualize without realizing we are taking a chance; but if we ex- pect to realize without visualizing, there is no chance to take. The greater men about us are greater in their mental methods. They have learned to expect in larger units. The man who earns a salary of ten thousand doUars, twenty-five thousand dollars, or fifty thousand dollars a year is excited no more over the size of his monthly check than the dettul clerk who thinks in the unit of fifteen dollars a week. The speed of an average typist is probably fifty "MY SHIPS" 49 words a minute; but the world's champion writes one hundred and forty-three. His typewriting ideal is pitched in a higher key. The operation be- comes somewhat automatic, but if the mental blue- print gets befogged coordination ceases and the fingers lose their cunning. Imagination is to realiza- tion as cause to effect. Every achiever has been an adept in photography. He has recognized and utilized that wonderful motion picture camera that nature has set upon his shoulders. The lenses of that camera are far more wondrous than those of ground crystal and are usually exposed. We cannot force the shutters as with an ordinary camera, but we may save film by tiu-ning away from the mental object we do not wish to photo- graph; or we may refuse to develop those instan- taneous snaps which fly in when we may think the shutters are down. Better still, we may focus the camera upon the subject of our heart's desire, first being sure that the subject is one which will take well; one that will not only develop for our immediate pleasure but also for our future profit. Some men may be said to be almost without ideals. They possess a certain sense of the dra- matic, a knack for sitting back in the last row and watching others pass across the theater of fife. They can see the romantic, the spectacular, the possible in other people's lives, but are without capacity for standing aside betimes to see them- selves go by. A great editor says: 50 j PERSONALITY Take a pencil and mark down four periods in your life, say five years apart, and you will find your position in life will correspond closely, each period, with what you were thinking about at the time. Do you think for one instant that your body will be sent by destiny into some fat position, while your mind wallows in the sinkhold of society, in the dark corners of crime, in debauch, in despair? Seeing is more than believing. It is oftentimes habit. To possess a thing we must sometimes become that thing. All of the inhabitants of Hawthorne's New England village had seen the Great Stone Face, but only Ernest contemplated it constructively, visualized it, observed it. Of aU the thousands who had heard the story of the real coming of the Titanic countenance, only this lad anticipated it as a real event. Ernest came to possess the Great Stone Face because he him- self in long years of worshipful imagiaation had acquired the attributes and image of his ideal. What we earnestly aspire to be, that we, in some measure, already are; what we deeply desire to possess, we have in some degree already acquired. If we are possessed of an ideal it must be because we have in us the possibility of it. God does not put into the wild geese the instinct to go south in winter without a South to go to. He did not inspire Columbus to sail without a San Salvador on which to land. " We may see our ideals as surely as a sculptor sees the finished face in the rough "MY SHIPS" 51 marble even before he has taken up the chisel; as truly as the artist's composite view grows in his mind before the paints are mixed." So with all progress and accompUshment; first the ideal, then the real. One of the strongest patterns outlined in my own mind was a long while materializing. It was etched upon my mind as a lad of twelve growing up in Kentucky. Our nearest trunk-line was distant by a day's journey. The county in which I Uved was my world and a village of one thousand souls was its capital and its metropoUs. My North and South Poles were on the same street — one ran off the schoolhouse and the other the courthouse. On our main street was the county's only bank, and in the president's office was the county's only roU-top desk. From the hoiu- I first laid my eyes upon it, the enchantment was enslaving. Once, when selling a newspaper to this money king, I had dared to raise and lower its folding mechanism and my imagination continued the operation far into the night. I began to visualize the future in the terms of a roll-top desk; not that I considered it as a necessary means to the proper filling out of my life's pattern, but rather as the end of it — the complement of all success. From my mother's millinery shop I secured an old-fashioned spool case, which, thanks to rare flights of imagination, I improvised into my first roll-top desk. This mechanical success was achieved only to find a 52 PERSONALITY roll-top desk of little consequence in the absence of mail to be answered from it or filed away in its pigeonholes. This handicap was short-lived, for a traveling man who shared my confidence was quick to suggest that I would find in the mail-order houses of New York and Chicago prolific corre- spondents. I recfdl the day my postal cards were sent to Sears, Roebuck & Co., Montgomery Ward, and J. Lynn, asking them to put me on their mail- ing lists for catalogues, circular letters, etc. Soon I began to receive all the mail I could answer. We had in our town what we called a tri-daily mail service, — that is, the train ran around the foot- hills to the trunk-line every morning and tried to get back that night. That train never came in late enough to find me in bed. I was always at the Post Office with the village merchants, waiting for my mail; moreover, I took it home, spread it out on my roll-top desk, and answered it with aU the promptness of a man who had money with which to buy. My friends said that I was spending all my time and postage for nothing, because I could not buy anything. Years later, upon reaching New York and taking possession of my first roU-top desk, I found how true it was to the mental pattern, and I looked back upon that investment of time and money as the best one I had ever made. While I was improvising my roU-top desk they were mak- ing the real thing in Herkimer or Grand Rapids. While I was dictating imaginary letters to imagin- "MY SHIPS" 53 aiy stenographers, girls were going to school in New York, getting ready to take dictation. Thus my roll-top desk became the reminder of one of life's most valued lessons — that I am always seeing what I look for. My roll-top desk had been "seed com" which sent in an abundant harvest on the first incoming ship. Since that day I have taught myself to expect nothing for which I c£umot construct the concrete mental pattern. My roll-top desk taught me that there really should be few disappointments and no surprises for him who orders his mental life; that every great career has had an air-castle stage; that the world's greatest empire builders first ran toy tredns over toy raihoad tracks. One of life's best hours was when the drayman moved that roU-top desk into my home study. The pigeonholes are all carefully labeled, the largest one being assigned to Bills Receivable, which are "My Ships." And just there where my eyes take occasion to turn oftenest I have pasted these lines : If the mariner's wise he looks in the skies To see what he is about; And he never expects any ships to come in If he hasn't sent any ships out. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Distinguish constructive imagination from limp wishing or day dreaming. 54 PERSONALITY 2. If you could have any position you wished what would it be? J3. Have you carefully studied the talents, education, and general equipment of a man who occupies the posi- tion of yom heart's desire? Does your room contain his photograph and your library the story of his Ufe and work? 4. How does the power of imagination relate to your capacity for achievement? 5. What is the largest salary you have really planned to earn? 6. Are you spending as much as thirty minutes a week in contemplating your ideal as Ernest contemplated the Great Stone Face? 7. If to-morrow by some turn of good fortime the position you have long desired were thrust upon you would you have the presence of plan to command it? 8. Have you ever looked into the starry sky and thought that "the face of nature would not be so serene and beautiful if man's destiny were not equally so?" 9. Do your friends ever gUmpse your plans and ideals? 10. Do you beUeve that thoughts are things? References Imagination in Business — Lorin F. Deland — Harper & Bros. "My Ships" (poem)— EUa Wheeler Wilcox The Great Stone Face — Nathaniel Hawthorne Brain Power for Business Men — N. A. Harvey — War- wick and York THE STANDARD BEARER K the populace marched in file, 'twere my signal to break from the ranks; if a thousand generations did things thus and so, 'twere my cue to do otherwise. Sunrise had come on the second morning at Gettysbm'g. A fragment of what had been the South's fairest manhood arose from a night of sufferiag and death in answer to an ultimate trumpet call, eager to pay its last fuU measure of devotion. The left wing of the Confederacy was advancing on Little Round Top following after Slocum, that courageous Dixie son, who was bearing forward the emblem of a losing cause. The commander seeing, as he thought, that the colors were getting too far in advance of the soldiers, hailed Slocum £ind ordered him to bring the flag back to the regiment. But Slocum shouted over his shoulder, "No, Com- mander, you bring the regiment forward to the flag!" In every important movement since history began, whether for the emancipation of a race, the estabhshment of a new rehgion or a new education — whatever has been the issue, we have had the story of Slocum and his regiment: the figure of the stampeding army eager to follow lines of least resistance, spurred on by the inspired custodian of the colors. 55 56 PERSONALITY When the French retreat had reached the Mame, General Joffre instructed his subordinate oflBcers in immediate command of two million soldiers along a two himdred mile battle front that the time for retreat had passed, and that an oflfensive should begin. These two milUon men, in whose hearts and upon whose guns rested the destiny of France and the democracy of the world, were commanded to advance as long as possible, then hold and, when they could hold no longer — die. At the close of the second day of this, the world's most decisive battle, General Foch, ia command of JofTre's center, sent him the greatest mihtary dispatch in history: "My center gives way, my right recedes; the situa- tion is excellent. I shall attack." General Foch's attack forced the retreat of the Crown Prince and drove the Huns from the very gates of Paris. But all heroes are not warriors. Every field and profession has its standard bearers and crusaders. In the world's market places perpetual contests aie waging and only those are decorated who carry messages to Garcia. Mr. McKinley is dead and the Spanish-American War is over, but your opportuiiity is not lost. You do not need to be a soldier in the army; you do not need to be a student in a military school; to-morrow, next week, and next year, in every city in the United States, young men and young women, bookkeepers and stenographers, are going to be asked if they wiU not carry a message to Garcia. Perhaps the distance will involve only a trip THE STANDARD BEARER 57 to a dictionary or the encyclopedia. It may be the hazardous task of taking off a trial balance in the absence of the head bookkeeper. It may mean to dictate an important business letter in the absence of your employer. In whatever guise this chance may present itself you had better entertain it care- fully. It may carry with it world-wide significance for you; it may be your opportunity to take a message to Garcia. Will you take it or wiU you say, "Excuse me; I am just the ordinary book- keeper; I am just the ordinary stenographer; I cannot do any more than I am paid for, and I do not expect to be paid for any more than I do " .»> In a recent issue of a business man's magazine, this test of initiative was cited: You are sitting now in your office — six clerks are within call. Summon any one and make this request: "Please look in the encyclopedia and make a brief memorandum for me concerning the life of Correggio." Will the clerk quietly say, "Yes, sir," and go do the task? On your life he will not. He will look at you out of a fishy eye and ask one or more of the following questions: Who was he? Which encyclopedia? Where is the encyclopedia? Was I hired for that? Don't you mean Bismarck? What's the matter with Charlie doing it? Is he dead? Is there any hurry? Shan't I bring you the book and let you look it up yourself? 58 PERSONALITY What do you want to know for? And I wUl lay you ten to one that after you have answered the questions, and explained how to find the information, and why you want it, the clerk will go off and get the wrong book. The world's workers have always been divided into two classes — those who lead and those who follow — men who keep in the beaten track and those who leave it to blaze their own trail. It is a mistaken idea to think that one needs to invent a revolutionary mechanical device in order to do something original. The world's greatest masters of to-day are those men who are learning mightier ways of doing simpler things. If you did not in- vent the flying machine, possibly you can improve it. Perhaps you can write an old story from a new poiat of view, or do an old task in a strangely in- teresting way. A few years ago a cowboy on the western plaias learned the common task of lassoing. He pUed his trade with ordinary dexterity and was paid the customary wage of thirty dollars a month and his keep. It occurred to him to excel in his calling and to become a master of the lasso. As soon as he had learned to do the old task in an extraordinary way the world's spotlight fell upon him, and to-day he throws the lasso from the vaude- ville stage at one thousand dollars a week. Genius is oftener a matter of sheer hard work than of inspiration. Thomas Edison follows a working schedule that disqualifies him for member- THE STANDARD BEARER 59 ship in every labor union on earth. After years of close apphcation and industry, Luther Burbank married the strawberry to the blackberry and made their children resemble neither father nor mother. From the same toiler came the spineless cactus regenerated and robbed of individuaUty. Each of us has been fashioned for an individual work. As the sands of the seas and the leaves on the trees are imlilte, so are men when we come to analyze their abiUties and their possibiUties. Haddock says: "Every human being is intended to have a characterxjf his own; to be what no other is; to do what no otner can." Why be content with the life of the sateUit^.3 You were intended to be your own sun. In every man there is a nontransferable idea, a knack which can never pass current imless indorsed with the trade-mark of his own handiwork. Standardization is based on group tests, but fresh wisdom is the result of specialization. We waste precious moments lamenting that there are so many things we cannot do, instead of rejoicing in and concentrating upon the thing we are doing. If you are in earnest, seize this very nunute. What you can do, or think you can, begin it. In Utah there is a man who has recently added a thrilling chapter to the ever expanding volume, "Doing the Impossible." When Daniel C. JackJing was eighteen years old he was a farm hand earning fifteen dollars a month. At forty he was a million- 60 PERSONALITY aire, and had made every copper engineer and producer ia both hemispheres ask, "Who is Jack- ling?" He made the largest mine in the world out of a mountain that was thought to be only worthless porphyry, thereby adding a half million pounds of cheap copper to the world's annual supply. By a process of his own, which had been rejected by the metallurgical experts of America as too silly to try, Jackhng gets a pound of copper from ore "so lean that its ribs stick out," and he produces this copper two cents cheaper than it can be produced in Butte, the copper capital of the world. When this young man of thirty had dreamed out and worked out something new, he naturally turned to the recognized wizards in the field of mining engineering. He early secured their interest in his scheme for reducing refractory ore which resists the cyanide process. The great Mercur mine in Utah had been abandoned because of the impossible character of its refractory ore. Jackling, after wrestling with the problem single-handed, asked a metallurgist why, by a certain process, he coiild not bake the ore before putting it into the cyanide tanks; whereupon this wizard is said to have repUed: "Why not boil an egg to hatch it.^* Why not freeze ice cream with hve coals.** Why not be elected on a Republican ticket in Louisiana.** " But the inspired Jackling went on his way as becomes a true standard bearer. He hurdled the accustomed number of doubting Thomases that obstructed his path of thought. THE STANDARD BEARER 61 The period of his trials was long drawn out, but through it all he carried high the courage of his great ambition, and planted at last the flag of a new truth on the rock of firm achievement. Before rejecting our inspirations or stifling our eimbitions it is well to contemplate that fresh truths and new principles are discovered first single-handed — the multitude comes later. Majorities come always from minorities. The Golden Rule was a long time in arriving because its original practitioner got such a late start. He waited for the self- reformation of others instead of moving out himself. A hundred standard bearers of any righteous cause, scattered over the world in one generation, may become a miUion in the next; and then quickly follows a world-wide transformation. Pnh ly npim'n n crucifies.£ESty then tolerates, then sanctifies. To be a leader in any movement one must cultivate the habit of backing his own judgment; he must not vacillate between two opinions. He must storm the situation and stand by his guns; for if after hav- ing once set out for a certain port, he should change his covu-se, he will later have misgivings as to the wisdom of his change, thereby losing confidence in himself and sacrificing his goal. The emphasis of the heart cannot be wrong; whoever is right stands in the majority; whoever is right in principle and ambition may be a standard bearer. He who has not studied the evolution of a Belasco play has missed one of the most valuable lessons to 62 PERSONALITY be learned from perseverEince that brought indi- viduality and leadership to modern art. The exceeding popularity of one of Belasco's recent comedies, "The Boomerang," caused a great deal of comment. Theatergoers who were impressed by the spontaneity and ease with which it seemed to have been written, were surprised to learn that when this play was submitted to Mr. Belasco ia what its authors thought was complete form, they were required to spend two years ia revising it, and had to rewrite it completely three times. America's greatest play producer says that the greater part of his success he attributes to his feeling for and painstaking study of colors translated into effects of light. He says that their effects have sometimes been imitated by other producers with considerable success but that he does not fear such encroachment. "It may be possible for others to copy my colors but no one can get my feeling for them." The hght effect on his stage has been secured only after years of experiment, and at an expense which many other producers would con- sider ridiculous. Once he spent five thousand dollars attempting to reproduce the dehcate hues of a sunset and then threw the scene away. When he produced "The Girl of the Golden West," he experimented three months to secure exactly the soft, changiog colors of the Cahfomia sunset over the Sierra Nevadas, and then turned to another method. Mr. Beleisco said it was a good sunset, THE STANDARD BEARER 63 but not a California sunset. These experiments have always been an interesting part of his work, although they have been perplexing and sometimes most baffling. " It is no easy matter, " says Belasco, "to iodicate the difiference between the moon and the stars of a Japanese night and the fanciful moon and stars of fairyland, but there is a difference which an audience must be made to feel without detecting the mechanism, just as one is conscious of the heat, yet does not see it on enteriag a warm room." It was Mr. Belasco's talent for taking infinite pains that made him a genius and master in his Une. Other directors had been satisfied with good sunsets; Mr. Belasco demanded and produced the "California Sunset." There are, then, two hnes along which leadership or individuality may manifest itseK — by originating an idea, or by improving one already brought forth. Either achievement requires that you deviate from beaten thoroughfares and travel trails of your own blaziag. AU standard bearers are iconoclasts, but eventually the regiment comes forweu^d to the flag. QDESTIONWAIRE 1. What, for you, is the most helpful thought of this chapter? 2. Contrast the qualities of leadership and of states- manship. Illustrate both. 3. Who, in your opinion, has commanded or is com- manding the largest and most permanent following of 64 PERSONALITY the American people? What seems to have been or to be the secret of his power? 4. What is the diiFerence between courage and bravery? Give an example of both. 5. When asked to perform a given task by yom- superior officers, do you search your own soul and mind before asking questions? 6. Do you consider that the only help that strengthens and endures is self-help? Why? 7. Does pubUc opinion always promote progress? Why? Illustrate. 8. Have you inventoried your mental tendencies and estabhshed clearly your Une of least resistance? Is yoiu" present vocation coinciding with, or running counter to, this Hne? 9. Have you learned to disregard the doubts and fears expressed by those who can really know very Uttle about your strong points? 10. Are you striving to join that large army of standard bearers whose originaUty consists in doing small things ia a large way? References Individuality — E. L. Thorndike — Houghton Mifflin Company Men Who Are Making America — B. C. Forbes — Forbes Publishing Company Message to Garcia — Elbert Hubbard — The Roycrofters Leadership (Pamphlet) — Chicago Herald TIDES OF LIFE There is a tide in the affairs of men, Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune. — Shakespeare It was natural that the immortal bard writing on the banks of the Avon and within the ocean's call should interpret Kfe in terms of the sea. In his day it was scarcely a figure of speech to describe hfe as a voyage. Only sixty years before the poet- playwright was bom Columbus had conquered the deep, and his journey across the Atlantic became the most alluring adventure of the world. The Occident was calling loudly to the Orient, and Aladdin's cornucopia awaited those with the courage to fare forth. The Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock four years after Shakespeare had embarked "on that sea whose waves bore the image of no returning sail." Yet to-day we have found no better, no more perfect way of visuahziag the hiunan struggle and conquest of mankind than through the eyes of the bard of Avon. The seven seas have been charted, and in times of peace science makes the deep less hazardous than the land. Shakespeare's figure holds true — there is stiU a tide in the affairs of men. In fact, there are tides, many of them, in the experience of every man who 65 66 PERSONALITY is privileged to voyage far on the sea of life. Shake- speare spoke of flood tide, the big chance, the one psychological moment for setting sail; and he even said that unless one got off on that particular swell of the sea his adventure was lost. Modem philoso- phers, noting the experience of "men who have made America," refute this philosophy and tell us not to worry if the tide has gone out, as it is quite sure to come in again. This £issurance rests securely upon aquatic science and figuratively it squares with twentieth century biographies. Shakespeare was not reading the future but was recording the truth of his own period. The difference is a matter of time-tables. The seventeenth century passenger who failed to take passage on the Mayflower was probably down and out before he could get another sailing. In those days "setting sail" was indeed the event of a hfetime, and the new world was four months away. Now, every sea is flecked with venturesome craft, and New York and Liverpool are only six days apart. In analyzing our greatest captains of industry and finance we find very few experiences where men have capitalized the "flood time" and made straight to port without drffting betimes between flow and ebb. The earnest travelers along the highway of success have not voyaged in an unbroken course, but have journeyed rather by systematic stages, marking and resetting their mileposts at epochal places. Barry Pain, the humorous philosopher, TIDES OF LIFE 67 has said: "There are so many pleeisant halting places this side of perfection I have a great tendency to get out at the next station." A lad, wading iu the creek that marked the cor- porate limits of the village in which he hved, often watched heavily loaded log wagons as they wended their way slowly and imcertainly up the long hill that led to the village. Near the brow of that hill there was a halting place, a plateau that nature had fashioned out, and on this plateau the driver would always halt that his wheel horses might stretch ia the harness and take an easy breath before essaying the last lap of the hill. For most of the successful travelers over life's highway there have been many such stopping places, points where they have set the emergency brake to take inventory of stock in" trade and to measm-e their strength against the increase in the climb. All about us we may see drivers that are halting on the lull; while some, well up toward the brow, have paused for breath, but are afredd to halt too long lest the dis- tance already gained fill them with dismay at what they must stiU achieve. Too many men forsake their designs when they are within hailing distance of the goal, but brave hearts achieve victory through the courage to risk one milepost for the next. The conditions of conquest are nearly always the same — we toil awhile, endure betimes, but believe always, and never turn back. No road seems too long or too rugged for the traveler 68 PERSONALITY who advances deliberately, one milepost at a time, one day's march following another in orderly suc- cession. That which grows slowly is oftentimes more endm-iag, systematic progress lending itself to solidarity. If we compare a single brick, a foundation stone, or even the first story to the complete design of a great skyscraper, we are over- whelmed by a sense of their disproportion, yet the composite of every petty material and operation was necessary in the slow materializing of the blueprint. Mighty achievements are wrought not so much by superior strength as by the power to endure, enlargiag our mental patterns the while, or repairing and readjusting them to their original proportions. It has been said that he who walks three miles a day wiU have covered in seven years a path equal to the diameter of the earth. Should the same traveler essay to shorten the task by doubhng the day's march, he may make a briUiant start, but will sacrifice his goal. It is, of course, wise to know opportimity when you meet her face to face, but it is a rarer wisdom that guides us to forego a temporary advantage for the ultimate larger good. Whoever has studied the national pastime is weU schooled in the art and value of sacrifice. The crowning achievement of the game is the "Home Run" and he who can produce it is the hero of the hour. Whichever batter hits for less carries a crunched ambition in his bosom. The very feel of his bat TIDES OF LIFE 69 tantalizes him and dares him to his utmost strength. Why not one supreme effort and have his try over with? But for the moment he is crucified by science, the science of good baseball. His manager earns a huge salary because he is a careful student of the relative values of the game. He too is a great admirer of the "Home Run" but he has studied it closely in its relation to the law of average. So he directs the giant batter with a 4 H. P. swing to hold his bat in front of the ball hoping it may rebound only a few paces before him thereby ad- vancing a man from first to second. That he may sacrifice, for the time being, his own right to Hve is of shght consequence and fully discounted in the order. The important thing is that the man who is one quarter started may course the bases in orderly progression and score. Winning the game is not a matter of giant muscle, of spectacular brute force; it is a matter of mental and physical con- sistency — the bases must be taken in the order of their importance, First, Second, Third, Home. The player who contributes most toward a peimant and his batting average, makes a nice, clean hit and runs. When he reaches the first milepost he takes a deep breath and sets himself for the second whither the shghtest advantage will release him to complete the circle. He absolutely refuses to "die on third." He knows the distance between third and "Home" as the distance between failure and success; in baseball it's eternity. 70 PERSONALITY Winning in the game of life is quite the same. Success consists not in getting away on the first great swell of the sea with never a cahn, never a halt, never a plateau where the mileposts are set in for oui inspection and marking. Napoleon said, "There shall be no Alps," but he scaled them on the installment plan. And thus it lias been the glory of the victorious in fields of war and peace to ad- vance and overcome, and when they have overcome a great obstacle to fashion it into an instrument for achieving new conquests. Every plateau along the highway of life should be distini tly marked, "Cable crossing; do not anchor!" You may pause for breath and inventory, but the rising srni should bring a fresh perspective. Do not halt enough to acquire the habit of inaction of either body or mind. A brief sojourn in these epochal places will hearten and strengthen us against the final try when we reach the head of the stretch where the tiun comes for the home-running. But you must not lose the North Star out of your perspective. Do not become sorry for yourself when the last steep ascent sil- houettes itself against the horizon. Pat O'Brien's escape from German captivity was one of the miracles of the war. After having played hide and seek with German pickets for weeks in the occupied portions of Belgium, he was more dead than aUve from exhaustion and starvation. When on the last lap of his journey to freedom, he dis- covered that he had traveled a whole day directly TIDES OF LIFE 71' away from the Holland border and back toward the German Imes. He sank to the earth completely spent. When he awoke night had covered him with a bright, spangled sky out of which the North Star was shining like a huge diamond. To this friendly beacon O'Brien whispered: "You want me to get to Holland, don't you? But this Pat O'Brien — this Pat O'Brien, who caUs himself a soldier — he's got a yeUow streak — North Star — and he says it can't be done! He wants me to quit — to he down here for the Hims to find me and take me back to Comtrai — after all you've done, North Star, to lead me to liberty. Won't you make this coward leave me. North Star? I don't want to follow him — I just want to follow you — because you — you are taking me away from the Huns and this Pat O'Brien — this fellow who keeps after me all the time and leans on my neck and wants me to he down — this yellow Pat O'Brien wants me to go back to the Huns!" No man gets far on his way without great weari- ness of soul, but "happy is he who rests where there are Uving springs of water and three score and ten palms." QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Name four natural epochs in the life of the average individual. 2. Why was it quite natural for Shakespeare to speak of life as a voyage and to suggest that there is a tide in the affairs of men? 72 PERSONALITY 3. Select from among your own acquaintances, if you can, a successful man or woman whose experience seems to have been in marked contrast to the thought of this chapter. Tell why. 4. Cite the best of your experiences in support of this chapter. 5. How do you reckon the age of a tree? In what way is this question related to this chapter? 6. Using salary increase as the basis of measurement, how many mileposts have you passed on the highway of success? 7. Do you realize that the word "recreate" means to re-create and that no man can afford to be idle imtil he has learned to make the hours of his rest morie fruitful than the hours of his toil? 8. Do you ever mistake motion for progress and energy for efficiency? 9. Have you shown due courage in risking one milepost for the next? 10. Are you profiting by the experience of Lot's wife? References "Opportunity "(Poem) — John J. Ingalls At the Turn of the Road — Wilham G. Jordan — Fleming H. ReveU Company Mental Fatigue — Tsurn Aral — Colmnbia University Press Economics of Efficiency — N. A. Brisco — The Macmillan Ccanpany UNLISTED ASSETS No man can tell whether he is rich or poor by turning to his ledger. It is the heeirt that makes a man rich. \ He is rich according to what he is, not according to what he has. — Henby Ward Beecher The earth's most dependent paupers live in bank books and strong boxes; the exchequer is the largest slaveholder in the world. The highest priced editorial writer in America has recently estimated that the people of the United States are distributed about as follows : 90 % trying to make money, thinking of little else and envying those who have money. 7 % despairing of making money and bitterly envying those who have money. 3 % thinking of earnest useful effort apart from money, like the noble Agassiz who said he hadn't time to make money. While there is no way of verifying these per- centages, the greatest chance for error lies in the liberahty of the three per cent. This unhealthy state is due to a false idea of wealth. In Lapland, a man's wealth is measured by the number of his reindeer; in America, by the number of his auto- mobiles. Therefore, the ninety per cent are striving to become milhonaires, notwithstanding the assm-- ance of the statistician that a person has sixteen 73 74 PERSONALITY chances of being killed by lightning to one of being worth a million dollars. There can be no more fcdse conception of success than to visuEilize it in terms of money. While success is a matter of relativity and point of view and while to be without money means to sacrifice many of the worth while things of life, nevertheless success is not money. Every man should render unto Caesar that which is Caesar's, and demand a like portion in return. There is no honor in being poor, and the day is fast approaching when read- justed economic conditions will make poverty as we have it to-day unnecessary and unknovm. An- other chapter of this book has been devoted to the necessity of putting aside a competence for old age, emd yet we should not dignify money by calling it success. Some of the worst examples of unhappi- ness and failure we have in this country to-day come from the so-called idle rich class; men who have devoted their years and energies to amassing great fortimes come to find in the evening of life that money, factories, and farms are many times symbols of encumbrance and unhappiness. We are often made to pity the poor Kttle rich man who sees what a powerless thing money is in the making of real happiness and who finds that, after all, those things that are most worth while in life cannot be purchased with coin of the realm. Poverty is youth's stock in trade — "the spur that has sent many a lame colt past fatter flanks and first under UNLISTED ASSETS 75 the wire." The experience of Americans who have arrived clearly demonstrates that in the struggle of life it is unnecessary that we should have any- thing to start with, but imperative that we should have something to start for. Many men labor not for money but for the joy of achievement, the pleasure of creating or developing something. Of the fifty most widely known and successful busi- ness men only nine were bom into rich families. The world has always been too busy to build a siagle monument to immortalize a man only for money-making, nor has history long preserved a place for such a man. Herbert Kaufman Avrites: "Money has no power in the hereafter. Fame is not a competitor of Dun or Bradstreet. She publishes a different kind of book. She prints no record of what men secrete — her pages are open only to those who create — her ratings are not based upon what they have but what they have done." The real test of a man's financial power is to find where he keeps his money. If he deposits it in the bank he may be said to possess riches; if in his heart, riches may be said to possess him. "For every man remiats his money as it passes through his hands. The manner in which he hoards it or spends it gives to it a fresh couaage." The ultra-rich are often spoken of as selfish men, yet I should not so regard them. The only real human motive is inteUigent self-interest, and on 76 PERSONALITY this basis altruism is impossible. The first impulse that distinguished man from the lower order of life was a selfish impulse. It was the idea of defending himself, of enltirging himself and extending himself. Every advancement of the race, collective and individual, has been the result of true selBshness. But many of the ultra-rich cannot see that there is a noble sort of selfishness, a fine kind of egoism. A rich man gives fifty thousand dollars to the American Red Cross fund and asks the committee not to associate his name with the donation. Often- times the world calls such a man unselfish; to me that man is practicing the very highest and truest form of selfishness, for, while his right hand may not know what his left is doing, he is enriching his conscience beyond measure. In the last analysis all values rest on a spiritual basis. That is why the heroes and martyrs of aU ages have gone out gladly to meet their opportunities. The road to Calvary has become a beaten path. Coningsby Dawson, one of the great heroes and writers of the great war, said: "There is no doubt that the call for sacrifice and perhaps the supreme sacrifice can transform men into nobility of which they themselves are unconscious. That is the most splendid thing of it all — that they are unaware of their fineness. We can only die once and the chief concern is not when but how. We 'Go West' in the supreme moment." Such a glorious prophecy could reveal itself only to those who have laid their UNLISTED ASSETS 77 self-interest upon an immortal foundation, who have accepted life as a span of years and the grave as a milestone that must inevitably be passed in an unending adventure of readjustments and improve- ments. If to give up is to take up, such a hero has sown for Etn eternal harvest, and "happy is he whose death day finds him giving a measure of devotion that reflects the glories of the hmnan race." It seems strange, then, that so many men will allow their self-interest to rest upon a financial basis, taking all inventory of life in terms of money, and giving to a dollar a mind and heart veJue out of all proportion to the worth while things it will ptirchase. Henry Ward Beecher refers to such a man as a "world-made man." In the very great epoch of materiahsm which has just closed in America, world-made men were tolerated. It re- quired five thousand dollars to build such a man to his kne^, ten thousand dollars to his loins, fifty thousand dollars above his heart, and one hundred thousand doUars to put him in the financial "Who's Who." But often such men possess no great wealth of talent, no great wealth of honor, no great wealth of service. They have only a rare fiscal skill, a knack for making money without earning it and without being able to rive it its relative place in the scheme of values. Many such men fail to recognize that they are accumulating impedimenta against the day when life's ship will need to be lighter for the voyaging of strange seas, and they 78 PERSONALITY hold a dollar so close to the physical eye that it obscures the perspective of true earthly values. A few such men, money laden, but with a faint urge of conscience stiU caUing, have heard the war cry of our nation and have placed their talents for organization and command on the altar at Washing- ton without pay. Such service is as manna to the spiritually starved, and with their voluntary labor comes the sweet consciousness that humanity and historians remember better those who give than those who get. Life is a perpetual reflex. Like a rebound of the echo our kind deeds fly back in our faces. Our remuneration is often a hundredfold. The heights can never be commanded by those whose hearts are forever engaged in the business of gold-gathering. Let money-making b e an incident al affair of the head'^dTOf'alismpatfonof the nearlT The best reason ever advanced for accumulating money is that it enables one to forever cease from thinking about money. But this reason fails to justify itseK in practice. Money-making, once it becomes an affair of the heart, ceases to be a pro- fession. It takes on the nature both of a vocation and avocation. As a pastime habit it smothers out ideals and hmnanities, and hke a snowbaU it enlarges by sticking to everything in its path. Soon life, which is meant to be an orderly progression, de- generates into a mad race for money in which we are more likely to find ourselves wearing the bit than the reins. Far richer is he who travels peace- UNLISTED ASSETS 79 fully along the highway of hfe, not too busy to live and love as he journeys, regarding the appreciations of the heart rather than studying the depreciations of ledgers and bank books. Charles Lounsbury by self-appraisal was a miUion- aire, although he died some years ago in an alms- house ia Cook County, Illinois. In early life he had been a lawyer and after his burial in the potter's field there was found in the pocket of his well-worn coat a remarkable will which, because of its beauty of thought and language, was probated by the Chicago Bar Association and spread on the records of Cook County. The preface of this remarkable document was couched in conventional legal verbiage and followed by this unique statement: "That part of my interests, which is known in law and recog- nized in sheep-bound volumes as my property, being inconsiderable and of no account, I make no disposal of in this, my will. My right to live, being but a life estate, is not at my disposal, but these things excepted, all else in the world I now proceed to devise and bequeath." Following this paradoxical introduction the tes- tator parceled out his unlisted assets to the most logical beneficiaries. To good fathers and mothers in trust for their children he bequeathed "aU good httle words of praise and encoin-agement, euid all quaiut pet names and endearments, and I charge said parents to use them justly, but generously, as the needs of their children shall require." 80 PERSONALITY To the children inclusively, but only for the term of their childhood, he left "aU and every flower of the field, the blossoms of the woods, the banks of the brooks, and the golden sands beneath the waters thereof, and the odors of the willows that dip therein, and the white clouds that float over the giant trees." To the boys jointly he devised "all the idle fields and conamons where baU may be played, all pleasant waters where one may swim, all snow-clad hiUs where one may coast, and aU streams and ponds where one may fish, or where when grim winter comes one may skate; the meadows, with clover blossoms and but- terflies thereof, the woods with their appurtenances, the squirrels and birds and echoes and strange noises and aU distant places which may be visited together with the adventures there to be found." To lovers he devised "their imaginary world, the stars of the sky, the red roses by the wall, the bloom of the hawthorn, the sweet strains of music and all else they may desire to figure to each other the lastingness and beauty of their love." To those who are no longer children or youths or lovers he left memory, and he left to them "the poems of Bums and Shakespeare and of all other poets, if there be others, to the end that they may live the old days over agaiu." And finaUy, to the loved ones with snowy crowns he bequeathed "the happiness of old age, the love and honor of their children until they fall asleep." UNLISTED ASSETS 81 As a lawyer Charles Lounsbury had arrived at the present worth of men by computing bank, balances as required by sheep-bound volumes; as a pauper he had foimd himself rich in the great out-of-doors of life where the odor of his neighbor's fields, the songs of his feathered friends, and the stars of the skies were the common heritage of mankind. These enriched him beyond the deposits of any bank and without let or hindrEuice from any levy man. All those possessing eyes and heart hke Charles Lounsbury are rich indeed and no such need die intestate, for The world is mine! No law of man Has granted yet, nor ever can Grant ownership in every deed; For ownership, I hold this creed, Securely is within the mind; Outside of it we cannot find Exclusive rights to things we see; Appreciation makes them free! QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Do you believe that Carlyle spoke truly when he said that for every man who can stand success there are one hundred men who can better stand adversity? 2. Name three reasons why a man should not despise money. 3. Do you think that any man by honest fruits of his labor can earn a million dollars? 4. In which percentage group listed in the operdng paragraph of this chapter do you belong? Do you think that these classifications are extreme? Why? 82 PERSONALITY 5. Give your definition of selfishness. Do you con- sider John D. Rockefeller a selfish manP Why? 6. Contrast the wealth attitude of Charles Lounsbury with that of Andrew Carnegie. 7. What percentage of yoiu* yearly income did you contribute to war or other charities during the last twelve months? 8. Name a resident of your home city whose conduct with regard to money seems most compatible with your standard as outlined in the answer to question No. 6. Tell why. 9. What do you consider the most valuable possession in the world — that is, what contributes most toward the enjoyment and imfoldment of self? 10. In an essay of not more than 250 words outline what you consider a sane attitude toward money. Do not stress the idealistic or altruistic phase more than is justified by true self-values. References The Greatest Thing in the World — Henry Drummond — Henry Altemus & Company Adventures in Contentment — David Grayson — Double- day, Page & Company How to Live — Fisher & Fisk — Funk & Wagnalls Company Getting the Most out of Business — E. St. Elmo Lewis Ronald Press The Abolition of Inheritance — H. E. Read — The Mac- miUan Company PERSONALITY POWER When you meet a man for the first time, and carry away with you a vivid Impression of a remark, the tone of his voice, and expression of his countenance, 'and perhaps a memory of a look into his soul, his Personality has played its part and won. — L. Roy Cuhtiss "If that far-off event toward which Creation moves" be the perfecting of human society; if man is the ultimate divine effort at evolution; then Personahty is the answer to Henry Driunmond's question, "What is the greatest thing in the world?" After a century of intense study of the material- istic sciences man turns again to psychology as the mother science, the master science, because it treats of the greatest creation of aU the ages — man himself. Darwin wrote the world's greatest romance in tracing the history of man. In the evolutionary process the himian irnit stands out unmistakably the greatest in a mysterious setting of worlds and solar systems. The greatest of all scientists began with the earUest life on our planet, tracing it step by step out of the vegetable and up through the animal kingdom. With the coming of the ape the budding man began to throw off his brutal quali- ties and follow human instincts and ideeds — always 83 84 PERSONALITY upward. From that far-away day when our anthro- poid ancestor first "raised an issue and rendered a decision," the ape-man has been in the process of becoming a person, and the last transition in his evolutionary triumph has been from person to personality. The pivot of every movement in history has been a great personaUty — as Christ and Chris- tianity, Plato and philosophy, Dante and the Renais- sance, Luther and the Reformation, Alexander and world dominion, CromweU and democracy, Colum- bus and America, Lincoln and emancipation. The life and history of every nation are written in the biography of its personaUties. What is personality. I* Within the purpose of this chapter we treat the word in its universal application, rather than relate it to such outstanding heroes as have just been mentioned. For, after all, those men who write episodes into the history of nations are individuaUties as well as personaUties. They are unique, beiag earmarked with the indi- viduahzing trait or talent that defies classification. PersonaHty is a more democratic word. Indi- viduality suggests the unsocial personahty, the social. There is a high type of genius that creates in silence and seclusion, like the inventor and the poet, but personahty never develops behind closed doors. It is bom out of the very contact of man with man. It feeds on the multitude. The ability to attract people is the chmax of personal power. PERSONALITY POWER 85 Personality is the very ego of man. It is more than character. It is his character forcefully ex- pressed. You may have character without person- ality, but you cannot have personahty without character; for personahty is the complement of eill we are. We cannot radiate quahties that we do not possess. What made Charles M. Schwab one of the best beloved of men ia the world .i^ Personahty, founded upon genuine sympathy for humanity. What made "Papa" Joffre the universal idol when he visited America.** Personahty, ripened iu a liberty- loving country. A short time ago the great Chase National Bank of New York went up into New England and brought back Eugene V. R. Thayer, then only thirty-six years of age, and made him president of one of America's biggest financial institutions. When Chairman Wiggins was asked why he had selected the young man, "personality" was the first word that fell from the great financier's hps. Thus, as you foUow the history of successful men of aU ages, you find that they have conquered obstacles and capped the climax of their ambitions by the expres- sion of their personahties. And this quahty of personahty is not always a gift of the gods, but may be an acquired asset. Alexander H. Revell, one of Chicago's greatest merchants, says: "I beheve that personality is largely a matter of cultivation. A man may have 86 PERSONALITY certain abilities and characteristics which are useless because he has not trained them to work for him." Within the experience of the average person a winning personahty may be achieved by a careful .study of two things — dres&_aiuL_address. These I assets are listed in their cKronologicalOTHer, rather than in order of their importance, for the first I impression taken ninety-nine times out of a hundred, is an eye impression. After coming personally in contact with many thousands of young men and young women seeking employment in New York, I am convinced that the most successful among them have made a careful study of the mirror. Advertising experts have discovered that properly dressed advertisements, those that are pleasing to the eye, sell about twice as many goods as the same words in an unattractive attire. Every man must be a well-dressed ad- vertisement of his wares, which are his services or his ideas, offered for sale in a highly competitive market. Himdreds of men and women are .failing because they have not learned to look as good as they actually are. Our large mail order houses spend hundreds of thousands of dollars a year that the packages they place in the mails may be attractively tied, insuring a favorable first impression upon the recipients. How, then, can a young man or woman afford to tolerate that attire which grossly misrepresents the PERSONALITY POWER 87 superior brand of meinhood and womanhood which he or she is offeriag for sale? Employees may be adept in self-advertising; they must cultivate those personal artistries that will cause them to blend with the environment of a weU-groomed business office, as motion pictm-es blend one with the other. Many fifty-fifty personahties fall short of the one hundred per cent mark in seeking to sell their services because they forward their mercheOidise in unattractive wrappers. "The wise employer is as anxious about your external appearance as he is about your internal capabiUties." In analyzing the concrete side of personahty we find it not only neglected and underdone, but often abused and overdone. While many take personal appearance for granted, others affect the actor and actress type. When a French orator once said, "There are no ugly women, only those who do not know how to be beautiful," he did not have in mind the art of assembfing one's complexion. This type of person usually shows a belabored effort at style. It is quite fitting that she should be styUsh. The trouble comes from misinterpreting the term. I hke the definition given recently in a tailor's advertise- ment which said that true style is hke a window through which you look without being conscious that it is there; that style doesn't shout, it whispers; that it pats itself neither on the chest nor on the back and it never cries, "Gaze on me," but is modestly content to be just the thing that it is. 88 PERSONALITY Dr. Frank. Crane says that you ought to dress exactly as your common sense tells you people expect you to dress, to wear apparel that pleases others rather than yourself; that overdress is vulgar. In other words, extremes in dress are faithful indices of personeJity. Only the tailor may profitably consider fabrics as stock in trade and drape them strikingly over wax figures in his show window. The wise man with services to sell wiU avoid making an issue of his clothing. In matters of style he will swim with the current. To dress so that no man gives lingering thought to your clothing, is to find the solution for one of life's most difficult problems. I have already suggested that appearance is not the whole of personahty. Personality has certain intangible, invisible characteristics that no camera can reproduce, for these things are abstract. They are not part of a man's dress — they comprise his address. That is why a great corporation never employs a man for an important position until he has been interviewed. A photograph would reveal his dress but not his address. Several other chapters of this book deal with the abstract virtues which reinforce personality, but perhaps no one word in the English language more surely underwrites a man's personality than "en- thusiasm," without which Emerson said nothing great is ever accompUshed. Every great triumph, every great evolution, every PERSONALITY POWER 89 great advancement, whether of individual, state, or nation, has been largely the result of enthusiasm. The world has seldom encountered a more irresistible force than that represented by a man facing enthusi- astically ia the direction of his faith. The man who Uves in this country to-day without enthusiasm is sick and needs a physician; the man without hope, without confidence, without an animated faith in things in general and in himself in particular, that man has already begun to die a death more horrifying than that which wiU separate his soul from his body. No age and no country have pro- vided so many causes for the electricity of hope in the hearts of men as has the twentieth century and America. Can one fail to be enthusiastic when he con- templates that out of the forty great inventions which have blessed mankind since the beginning, twenty-five have come within his parents' lifetime and many of the greatest within his own day? Can you fail to be enthusiastic when you observe that if you live seventy-five years and improve your opportimities you wiU live longer and see more than if you had hved a thousand years in any other period of the world's history? You have no right to live in the land of perpetual day- fight and strike elbows with Thomas Edison, if you are going to go along with the thoughts and doubts that are native to the age of kerosene. You have no right to step upon an electric car or ride in 90 PERSONALITY an automobile unless your mental processes are as fleet as these. Enthusiasm is ia the spiritual realm what elec- tricity is in the field of the material. Motion and emotion are twin elements and complement each other in the scheme of life. The enthusiastic man is the hopeful man; the hopeful man, the happy man. Again poise and not pose is one of character's most forceful manifestations. Silence is the trump card that the master personality vitalizes with a rare eloquence. The rich personality, like the deep river, courses along rhythmically. It is unobtrusive, unspectacular. It does not flash, it glows. It never behaves unseemly and is not puffed up. "A large personality exercises a broad judgment and issues orders firmly, but with consideration for the rights and opinions of others. It translates com- mands into interrogative suggestions and reheves strained situations with a phrase of humor." The obtrusive personality knows not the gospel of the still small voice, but is prone to perch on the housetop, whence it cries out ia commanding tones. In life's parade it selects the role of a drum major and must have right of way over aU mental thoroughfares. Consideration of others' rights and thoughts would be heresy to the obtrusive person- ality. The pronouns "I" and "my" are among its chief words, made as iadispensable as verbs ia all business and social conversation. PERSONALITY POWER 91 Life offers no finer opportunity than that given for transmuting the narrow, petulant person into a full, broad personality, and the inspiration for this transmuting may be drawn from the biographies of those personalities that have been given to us as gold from the crucible. QUESTIOIWAIRE 1. What is the difference between personality and individuality? 2. What is the relation of character to personality? To what extent do you think personality can be cultivated? 3. Distinguish between the concrete and abstract phase of personality. 4. Which do you regard as the more important in the personality equation, dress or address? Give your reasons. 5. What is your definition of style? Which do you consider the greater handicap — to be gaudily attired or noticeably unkempt? 6. CUp from current magazines or style books two models that you think illustrate the overdone type of personaMty. Write a treatise of not less than 150 words giving your impressions of these illustrations. 7. Write a treatise of not less than 150 words on the underdone personaUty type and submit if possible a type illustration. 8. Select from magazines and style books four models illustrating the medium or ideal type of personal attire: (a) for a young man stenographer (b) for a young lady private secretary (c) for a sales manager, age fifty ((f) for a saleslady of forty. Give reasons in support of your selections. 92 PERSONALITY 9. What percentage of income should a smgle man or woman earning one hundred dollars a month spend for clothing? 10. Give four reasons why every man should be enthusiastic. References The Culture of Personality — J. H. Randall — Dodge PubUshing Company The Job, the Man, and the Boss — Blackford & Newcomb — Doubleday, Page & Company Personal Efficiency — I. R. AJlen — LaSalle Extension University Life's Enthusiasms — David Starr Jordan — American Unitarian Association IDEALIZING THE REAL If all our misfortunes were laid in one heap whence everyone must take an equal portion, most people would be content to take their own and depart. — Socrates We are lesser men and lesser women because we are constantly comparing ourselves with other individuals who, we think, are more fortimate than we are; who possess a more highly talented equip- ment; and who have less of handicap and dis- couragement. We seem to think that since we are not perfect specimens of memhood we cannot hope to achieve anything worth while in life. This means that we are poor students of biographical history. The world's work in all ages and in aU countries has been performed very largely by handicapped and imperfect men and women. We have never had but one specimen of perfect manhood. If you might analyze to-day any man or any woman of your acquaintance — that individual who seems to be ideal — that man or woman who accomphshes the thing that you would like to accomphsh in the world; if you could know the secrets of his heart; if you could know the discouragement that he is encountering; if you could know the handicaps that have been his, you would understand and 93 94 PERSONALITY you would have a much more enthusiastic outlook on yoxu- own prospects. Many great men siace the beginning have been handicapped and imperfect. There has been about them some embarrassing incompleteness which may not have been visible to the naked eye, and which may never have been known in the outer circle of their acquaintance, but that incompleteness was there. They did not succeed because of it, but in spite of it. Character sketches of great men prove abim- dantly that in America no person need fail because of a percentage of handicap in birth, body, or en- vironment. "Now and then nature seems careless, and lays on the heavy hand of affliction, but almost always With a compensating supernormal touch to the other senses. On the whole she can be counted upon to strike a uniform average and maintain a consistent standard in the hiunan product." In fact, nature has overequipped us. Our senses are keener and more deUcate than the demands we ordinarily make upon them, and immediately upon the impairment of one sense the others rush in as first aid to the injured. Thomas Edison, who is quite deaf, has recently said that no existing piece of machinery is more than ten per cent perfect. The human machiae, so far as coordination and perfection of its parts go, is alarmingly below par — the average man is said to use less than fifty per cent of his physiceil power and only ten per cent of his IDEALIZING THE REAL 95 intellectual power. This low average leaves op- portunity for an individual to be deprived of some of the normal assets of nature, and stiU to carry forward in intense speciedization the faculty or sense which remains and which nature has surely reinforced. Herbert Kaufman, in commenting upon the ravages of war, says: "How much of his body does a man need to earn a living in this year of wheels and wires. For instance: Legs are not requisite at the cigar bench; expert typists never look at the keys; the watchful eye of a supervisor is not hampered by the absence of arms. Why, with telephones, elevators, motor cars, and Uke couriers £uid carriers, a respectable remnant of the human frame can overcome most of the handicaps of mutilation. If the head stays intact a missing feature or so isn't necessarily a sentence to de- pendence." Not the least modified conception of social and educational service to come out of the war will be an enhghtened pubUc opinion regarding the war cripples and disabled men in general. Following past wars nations have imdertaken to support in idleness thousands of cripples whose possible pro- ductivity had been only partially destroyed. The only callings for which these men were considered fit were those of guarding switches and drawbridges or vending peanuts and shoe laces on the street comers. Largely as a result of the experiments in 96 PERSONALITY Belgium and France the United States is to salvage what in other wars has become human wastage. As these lines are beiag written three giant steamers are docking at the port of New. York. They bring a cargo of 9,000 of our battle-scarred heroes from France. There are lame and halt and bhnd among them, but the Federal Board for Vocational Education, intrusted with the respon- sibiUty for rehabilitating these men, is teaching us to measure them, not by their infirmities but by their capacities; not by what they have lost but by what they have left. Happily these heroes are to learn that to be disabled does not mean to be unable; that disease and handicap are states of mind which can be modified and mastered by any man who has not lost the wiU to win. A recent canvas made by the United States Em- ployment Service of the Ford motor plant in Detroit, developed some wonderfully inspiring statistics in favor of handicapped men. About eighteen per cent of all employees engaged by Mr. Ford at the present time are said to be physically sub-standard, there being in that estabhshment nearly 700 jobs which can be filled by legless men, over 2500 that can be filled by one-armed men, and 10 that are open to the totally bhnd. By intelligent survey and stand- ardization the glorious cripples of the great war are to carry on. Not only will they have been our heroes of democracy, but they are to be the artisans of to-morrow's national prosperity. IDEALIZING THE REAL 97 As the war was intensely personal, so should become aU of its by-product lessons. Mrs. Browning did not have a war to emphasize the truth of her words: "The common problems, yours, mine, everyone's, is not to fancy what were fair ia living, provided it could be — but finding first what may be, then find how to make it (air up to our means." Some years ago 40,000 fans were attending the final game of the World's Series between the Giants and the Athletics. While we were watching the preliminary practice a big gate opened in the center of the field and a large hmousiae drove across the field and parked opposite my seat in the grand stand. Manifestly this car was occupied by a man of prominence and special privileges in the baseball world. Presently the word passed through the grand stand that this was the limousine of John Brush, the owner, organizer, and director of the Giants, an organization that had attracted the admiration of the baseball world. In our minds we had pictured him as a great, robust, stalwart man epitomizing the strength of the wonderful players on his team. Presently the door of the limousine opened and we got a glimpse of John Brush. Our disappointment was keen. This giant we had visualized proved to be a weakling, for we beheld a man of small stature leaning heavily upon his crutches. Throughout this exciting game for the world's baseball championship our minds were toying with the fact of how John Brush, the 98 PERSONALITY invalid, had developed the Giants, the pennant wiimers. We later learned that for many years he had been a hopeless paralytic and had directed the organization and movements of the great base- ball team by wire from his bedchamber. That was the last game of ball that John Brush ever saw. He died shortly afterward, but not xmtil the Giants had won the pennant and the plaudits of the base- ball world. And thus the handicapped have often performed. "If it were not so, how would we ex- plain the life of Helen Keller, who is deaf and blind since infancy. How do we accoimt for Robert Louis Stevenson, who never drew a well breath from his body.!* What would be our answer for Juhus Caesar, Deuiiel Webster, and Saint Paul.** These weakhngs outlived their doctors to see the world made over after their own ideas." The happiest and one of the most active boys in our old seminary class had a wooden leg. He was a good ball player, an expert jumper, an all-round athlete, and he is to-day a successful lawyer. His career is one of the most notable of our whole class. When he lost his leg he became an optimist because it gave him a basis of comparison, a true appre- ciation of his remaining possessions. George H. Sut- ton, the handless biUiardist, is one of America's greatest experts in that gfame and his mastery of the masse excels that of any other biUiardist in the world. When he was asked how he came to do such an utterly anomalous thing as to take to IDEALIZING THE REAL 99 billiard playing when he had no hands, he said: "The subject chanced to be mentioned and some- body said it would be utterly impossible for a man without hands to manipiilate a cue; that anyway, he could not by any chance leam to nurse the balls with deUcacy, since that required 'wrist motion.' So, as the thing was declared impossible, I deter- mined to do it." As the photographer develops his prints in a dark room, so does nature often put us through a similar developing process which we do not always understand. Our "thorn in the flesh" comes to stop us oftentimes in our conquest against nature and sets us at work along hnes of least resistance. Down in Dallas, Texas, Quentin Corley is county judge, but he probably never would have been if Providence had not t£iken away both his arms. But he refused to remain armless; he turned in- ventor and reequipped his own body. To-day he writes a beautiful hand, dresses and imdresses himself, cranks his own automobile; in fact, is quite as artistic as a great many of his fellow men who have never suffered any bodily handicap at all. His inventions have been carefully studied and utilized in rehabiUtating the cripples of the world war. The good are better made by iU "1 ^ As odours crushed are sweeter still. ) It often happens that those very things we clas- sify as natm-e's Uabihties are in truth eissets. Things 100 PERSONALITY we deprecate as fatal limitations are our direst need. What we may call handicaps and obstacles may yet prove our final opportunity. Only if we fight on shall we win, making friends with our trials as becomes those persons and things which must always be together. Certainly we must not cry out agcunst them. The Indian boy of fifteen suffered sharp thorns to be fastened under the muscles of his shoulder blades and was then swung into the air and hurled round and round. If he showed courage, kept his face calm and imchanged, and did not cry out in pain, he was accepted as a good warrior. There is nothing so eloquent in character as the attitude one takes toward his limitations. A recent writer says that John D. Rockefeller cannot eat a square meal and Andrew Carnegie cannot spell, (but they do not allow what they cannot do to prevent them from doing what they can do. ' In this large and ever-changing world we must leave much important work for others to do. We must rise superior to the need of things that were not intended for us. There is an art of omission, and the Great Artist practiced it against you when he equipped you for an important hfe's work. It is then for you to be happy and con- tent in your neglect of the work you were not intended to do. "Use that power and possession which is yours like a free man rather than essay in a slavish way that which is beyond your strength." Ultimately it wiU not matter. We shall see that IDEALIZING THE REAL 101 what we blindly desired would have been fatal to \is, while the very thing we sought so very hard to avoid was indispensable to our higher develop- ment. History is replete with biographies of great men who would have been greater had they met early with life's great instructors, obstacle, handicap, and humiliation. There was no guidepost at the forks of the road. Napoleon, as a prisoner at St. Helena, lamented that adversity had been wanting in his career. His Waterloo came too late and the defeat was final. Had he known the crucible of sorrow, trial, and disappointment when he was fighting in Austria in his early mihtary career he might have escaped both Waterloo and St. Helena, Somewhere between the kick-off and life's goal Hes the "Happy Valley of Adversity" which we may not bridge over or tunnel xmder. To seek to avoid it and yet arrive would be hke "running from fife or dodging the atmosphere." But we may and should demand that we shall not pass through the Valley of Disappointment, of Handicap, without a blessing. "Somehow, somewhere, somewhen, the great sorrow is transformed into a finer strength, broader sympathy, deeper friendship, gentler toler- ance, greater charity, and a truer vision of the realities of life." It is then that we shall hark back over the pilgrimage and measiu-e the real equity between nature's assets and liabihties. 102 PERSONALITY QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Do you accept the text of this chapter as true? 2. Distinguish handicap from difficulty; from hard- ship. 3. Cite three illustrious characters who made great contributions to the world in spite of personal handicap. 4. Name three Americans of renown who endured and surmounted great personal hardships. 5. Tell something of the life and work of a man or woman of your personal acquaintance who seems to have accompUshed much in the face of great difficulty. 6. What was Paul's "thorn in the flesh"? 7. How has the World War modified our considera- tion of, and attitude toward, the cripple? 8. Are you holding or choosing your position with due regard for physical weaknesses and temperamental idiosyncrasies? 9. Value your legs at ten, your arms at ten, your eyes at twenty-five, your ears at fifteen, your heart at fifteen, your lungs at twenty, your voice at five and estimate the percentage of yom- abnormality. Contrast your average with that of Helen Keller. 10. What is the most inspiring thing that you have foimd in the life of Miss KeUer? Books Recommended for Reading When We Forget the Equity — William G. Jordan — Fleming H. Revell Company Story of My Life — Helen Keller — Doubleday, Page & Company Life of Robert L. Steveason — Graham Balfour — Charles Scribner's Sons Lame and Lovely — Frank Crane — B. C. Forbes & Company THE OLD HOME TOWN Enchantment is ever for things far away That youth fiUs with its windows of gold; While the things we possess and seldom survey Are the happiest things to behold. — Edwin Liebfried One of the most popular misconceptions is to reckon success as a matter of location. There is something ahnost uncanny about the respect men pay to'rivers, mountains, and cities when they come to visualize success. This localizing of effort and inspiration would be a better tonic oftentimes if appUed in the direction of one's native city or state; but alas, it too often fixes itself upon the most distant locahty logically unrelated to one's possible accomplishments. Too high a percentage of American youth is in a constant state of locomo- tion. "A rolling stone gathers no moss" is the cross upon which many a young man has been crucified. Ambitions are stifled, energies paralyzed, efforts postponed, awaiting doubtful winds that may or may not bear successward. Just at sxmset a Knoxville-Atlanta traia ran into the cotton fields of Georgia. From the observation car we got a close view of an old darky bent with age. As our car whizzed past the old man lifted 103 104 PERSONALITY his tattered hat from his head and waved it fran- tically, exhibiting the while a face beaming with happiness. How could he be happy in such an isolated community? Why, perhaps he had never seen New York or Chicago or perhaps even Atlanta. Then we beheld the clean-picked field behind him and we understood. He had come to the end of a perfect day because he was doing what he could with what he had where he was. One only needs to travel through the West to learn the cxffse of the wanderlust. Recently a leading business men's organization in one of the principal Pacific Coast cities asked each of its members to arise at roU call and give the state in which he was bom. More than seventy per cent of those answering had been transplanted from states east of the Mississippi, while only ten per cent could claim birth in the state in question. Every western city is a community of prodigal sons. Their fore- fathers turned their backs upon a garden of old- fashioned flowers that the wilderness might become the fertile plain; that civihzation's frontier might be advanced from the rising to the setting sun. They followed the lead of the wagon train Back to the setting sun; And the dust clouds lift in the homeward drift And the East and the West were one. One of the most interesting placards posted at the Panama-Pacific Exposition said, "Young man, THE OLD HOME TOWN 105 go east!" and some of the native western sons have gone and are still going east to reclaim farms and orchards deserted by their forefathers when they answered the "Westward Hoi" Society is in an mihealthy state of chasing the rainbow. He searched the whole world over To find a four leafed clover, Which all the while had grown beside his door. Full many a man has traveled to the fom- comers searching for the pot of gold when it lay just under the surface soil of his nativity. The Aleiskan gold miner who perished in the Yukon while his wife developed an oil well in his back yard in Ohio is scarcely an extreme instance. A New York lawyer of indififerent success was recounting to a friend the cause that had influenced him to come to the metropohs. "Twenty-five years ago," he said, "I was a successful lavryer in a small southern town where I knew friends and happiness. These I sacrificed that I might bring my children to the city where they would enjoy superior educational advantages. I was especially desirous that my boys might be brought up in the atmosphere of big business. To-day as I grow old not a boy of the three I have reared in New York is earning twenty-five dollars a week." Counter- attractions neutralize urban advantages and no boy so deserves our commendation as the successful fellow to the manner bom in a great city. 106 PERSONALITY When Athens was the intellectual and military capital of the world her young men were required to swear: "Thus in all that is wise will we transmit this city, not only not less but greater and more beautiful than it was transmitted to us." The Athenians recognized that environment need not necessarily shape the destiny of man, but that man, on the other hemd, should shape his environment. The great philosophers of Greece had discovered that a man's mind was the court of his universe and that only those who had no inner life were slaves to their surroundings. A realization of this teaches us that it is not always, in fact that it is seldom, neces- sary to take one's self out of a particular environment in order to do a worth while work. The time and place are usually adequate to our needs when we are adequate to our time and place. John Bunyan, exiled iu an English prison and thought to be ostracized from the world, drew in through the bars of Bedford jail a larger universe than his captors ever saw and there, with the world for a stage, an eternity for a background, John Bunyan wrote " Pilgrim's Progress." The court of his mind was the court of his universe. Uncongenial environment has been as putty in the hands of American stalwarts who have carved out of whatever destiny thrust upon them a life pattern as original and full as their smroimdings were iminviting. Dr. Newell Dwight Hillis has well said: "Thrust an Emerson into any Concord and his THE OLD HOME TOWN 107 pungent presence will penetrate the entire region. Soon all who come within the radius of his life respond to his presence £is flowers and trees respond to sunshine." Of course, Concord did not make Emerson; Emerson made Concord. With his law of compensation and brotherly love he took that little New England village in hand and fashioned it after his own idea. As Emerson wrought ia the realm of letters, so have wrought the artist, the artisan, the farmer in the material field of achievement. The order of the day is to enslave yom* sur- roundings, and this is being done as certainly as Franklin attracted the electric spark with the key and the kite string, and harnessed it to do the world's work. A better mouse trap is assembled "Some- where in the Wilderness" and the beaten path gives way to the automobile and railroads. The map man never sleeps, for almost over night the village becomes a town, the town a city, the city a metrop- olis. The last is only the lengthened shadow of the first and usually the shadow was cast by one man — the man with an idea. Detroit, one of the most beautiful American cities, was discovered in 1900 by Henry Ford, having been founded two himdred years earlier by Cadillac. If Henry Ford had been cursed with wanderlust, Detroit might to-day be in Jersey City or Brooklyn. At least half a million of its inhabitants, made up of the by-product popula- tion of the automobile world, have followed Henry Ford and his gasoline buggy to the ends of the 108 PERSONALITY earth. But the httle giant with the mechanical idea determined to democratize the transportation of the world and chose to take root where he was. It was a great day for Michigan when Henry Ford shifted his gaze from seaboard to the Great Lakes. He took the overgrown village of Cadillac and shook life into it, and began building an American city that will never lose the color and character of his work. The eyes of the fool are on the ends of the earth, X' But the rainbow is in the beginning. Rochester, Minnesota, is the capital of the sm-gical world, for the Mayo Brothers are the most successful surgeons in America. Dr. Will and Dr. Charles Mayo, sons of a small town physician, were near- sighted when it came to visualizing their world's work. Usually when a country doctor reaches the air-castle stage he begins to turn his mind in the direction of New York and Baltimore, with the idea of turning his feet later. Great surgeons are in- digenous to great cities; to transplant one in the open country is extremely difficult. But the Mayos were the exception to the rule. They grew up in the country and therefore needed no transplanting. When Drs. WiU and Charles came home from college, Rochester was a city of perhaps 6,000 people. To-day the floating population Adsiting Dr. Will and Dr. Charles is larger in proportion than the floating population of New York City. In 1917, 45,000 THE OLD HOME TOWN 109 or three times the population of Rochester registered as Mayo patients, and every night a specicJ Pulhnan of Mayo pilgrims leaves Chicago over the beaten path to Rochester. The Mayos will tell you that your post-office address is the least important thing about you; that a man's real environment is not skyscrapers, smokestacks, and switch engines. A man must Uve for most part with himself. "Not in the clamor of the crowded street, not in the shouts and plaudits of the throng, but in ourselves hes victory or defeat." Whenever we deserve to be heard the world wireless will pick up our messages whatever may be our location. If you are tired of receiving your mail R. F. D. you can connect up with the P. D, Q. reulway as soon as your industry warrants a survey. Meantime it wiU be wise for you to cultivate your present surroundings as if you intend to spend your life where you are, and to accept your everyday duties as an indispensable part of the world's program. Maybe your locaUty needs a Ford or a Mayo since there are very few places that do not. Wherever you are, your re- sources, once you get going under your own steam, are limitless. As you read this paragraph there is a banker in your town waiting to be interviewed. His hobby is developing home enterprises and his brass gate swings in to every caUer who has a bright home-town idea. Time is the magnifying glass through which we behold lost yesterdays in the homeland. It has been no PERSONALITY my fortune to listen to the melodies of Sousa, but yonder by an old cave stream in the South, high up in the thorn tree where we robbed our first mocking bird's nest — there where we set the impoverished mother bird ascream — we got the shrillest note of agony, yet of harmony, we ever heard; it has been my fortime to travel over the tributaries of the Mis- sissippi and inspect hydraulic projects like Keokuk, yet there by the cave in the youthland I may kneel me down for a drink of crystal water more undefiled than that which filters through the reservoirs of any city. I have visited the rose gardens of California and basked in the artificial floweries of Luther Burbank, but back in my heart's coimtry, 'twixt the cave and the thorn tree, one may pluck a tulip or an old- fashioned "Jack in the Pulpit" scattering incense and pollen of the fairest flower of all the springtime. A New Yorker writing in the Louisville Courier- Journal says: "When I first came away from Kentucky, the sorrow of severing home ties was partly compensated by the thought that out in the new world things would be different. There would be no assassinated governors; no iflicit stills; no feuds; no night riders. The world I had visualized was a Utopian country without strife and bloodshed; where I would en- counter good without evil and where success would be achieved along radically different lines from those which had restricted the empire of my youth. A few months wrought a remarkable change iu my THE OLD HOME TOWN 111 viewpoint. When my perspective clarified I saw the old home town in a transcendent briUietacy. To-day my recollection's picture records my native state not as a land of feuds, of illicit stills, of night riders. The Kentucky I kaow to-day is a leuid riotous with blue grass and rich ia the ripples of sweet song birds; my Kentucky is the birthplace of Jefferson Davis and Abraham Lincoln, the resting place of Henry Clay; the home of George D. Prentice and the inspiration of Henry Watterson and James Lane Allen. When I might discuss the assassination of Goebel I recount the matchless sacrifice of my native state on the altar of the Civil War; I fol- low the cruel Mason and Dixon's line as it clipped along uncertainly over the border line of Kentucky — imaginary both in fact and effect. I see the mother as she came to the doorway of the humble cottage, waving the father to the northward and the son to Dixie, praying that God might rest his soul in peace under whichever flag he fell." What the average man needs to do is to take root; to realize that the city of happiness is a state of mind; that success is not yonder but here; not then but now, and the sun that shines on New York eind Chicago is a riot of iQiunuiation in the old home town. Fot it isn't by money you measure a town Or the miles that its border extends, For the best things you gather whatever the town Are contentment, enjoyment, and friends. 112 PERSONALITY If you live and you work and develop your town In spite of the fact it is small, You may find that your town — your own little town — Is the very best town after all. QUESTIONNAIRE 1. Are you a conversational advertiser for "the old, home town"? What is its population? Approximately how many people are employed in its principal iudustry? 2. What is the very best thing you can say about your old home town? What is its most prominent handicap? 3. Did you ever contemplate for as much as an hour, ways and means for securing an offset against that handicap? 4. Are the agricultural resources of the surrounding country at maximimi production? Has the Agricultural Department at Washington or your State University made recent analysis and suggestions regarding the fertilizing and improvement of the soil? 5. Have you ever taken a bright idea to a banker in your town and asked him to assist you in its development? 6. Which is the city of your dreams? Why have you visualized it as the city of success? In just what respect does it offer broader opportunities than your home town? Have you compared the cost of living with your probable income in that city? Do you know its death rate? Could you visit almost any metropolitan city twice a year and bring back to the home town many of the seeming advantages that fill you with wanderlust? 7. Have you ever made a survey of foreign capitalists who have come into your commimity and organized paying enterprises out of ideas that home talent had overlooked? THE OLD HOME TOWN 115 8. Are you certain there is not a silver mine or a lake of oQ in your back yard? Have the waterfalls been harnessed just north of the old swimming hole? 9. Have you ever Usted the top-notch professional men who are growing old in your neighborhood? Have you studied these men with the thought that you might understudy them? 10. Are you in love with your home-town people? Have you given them a JSrst-class excuse for being in love with you? References Business and Kingdom Come — Frank Crane — Forbea Publishing Company Acres of Diamonds — Russell H. Conwell — Barton The Law of Mental Domination — T. E. Dockrill — Commercial Publishing Company The Lords of Destiny — Samuel McC. Crothers — Hough- ton Mifflin Company WINNING WITH WORDS So shall my word be that goeth forth out of my mouth: it shall not return unto me void, but it shall accomplish that which I please and it shall prosper in the thing whereto I sent it. — The Bible Coleridge said you might as weU push a brick out of a wall as to remove a word out of the finished passages of Shakespeare. The word-smith selects his material and constructs his language as a chemist compounds a powerful medicine. Every ingredient must be in the required proportion, and the blending of them must be made with a nice regard for the law of cause and effect. Language is the bridge that separates the animate from the inanimate. Words are so indispensably associated with fife as to be an attribute of hfe. A nation and its language die together. To make the most of language one must personify it, humanize it. He must objectify himself in words. They must be as much a part of his per- sonality as his eyes or his hair. Indeed, "words are spirit." Mirabeau called them living things. Emerson said that Montaigne's sentences were so vital that if you cut them they would bleed. Joubert declared that Rousseau's words imparted bowels of feehng, while Stedman called Swinburne a tamer of words. Language is the birthmark of the in- 114 WINNING WITH WORDS 115 dividual and the pedigree of the nation. "Speak that I may know thee!" and not only that I may know thee, but thy antecedents, associates, and environment. There is no more revealing symbol of character than one's style of speech. It will be recognized by discerning men more quickly than a Roman nose or a cauliflower ear. Nearly every other personality attribute may be treated "while you wait." By a sort of camouflage we may have our physical shortcomiags veneered until it is difficult to detect the spurious from the genuine. "An artful tailor or a clever dressmaker can drape an awkward figure until it becomes the glass of fashion or the mold of form." But one's language cannot be put on and off like a garment. It is a thing of depth and no superficial treatment can touch it. When men of good breeding and educa- tion fall into ways of crime they quickly adopt the dress and environment of murderers and crooks, but twenty years later they wiU come iato a court room using their mother tongue. Words are not only the means of expression but the very cause of it- Intelligent, forceful thinkiag is done in words. Therefore, my thought wealth and my word wealth are coUateral possessions. Manifestly I cannot think in words which I do not have. Indeed, thought and expression are twin elements, the relation being so close that it is im- possible to cultivate the one without improving the other. Poverty of words means inexactness of 116 PERSONALITY expression. For instaBce, a man impotent in speech may describe all oscillating movement as "rocking like a cradle"; he is always "tolerably well"; his feet from October to April are "as cold as ice." Dorothy Dix has written: "There are those, for instance, who consider that the word 'swell' covers every possible variety of commendation; they say that a beautiful woman is 'swell'; that a fifty-story skyscraper is 'swell'; that a beefsteak dinner is 'swell'; that Caruso is a 'swell singer,' and Kipling a 'swell writer.' Anything they disapprove is 'punk.' StiU others lean their whole conversa- tional weight on the word 'sure' and would be speechless if it were eliminated from our vocabulary. They 'sm-e' do everything, and are 'sure' certain about how things will turn out. StUl others depend upon 'cute' to express the range of their emotions. I once heard a girl who was standing on the rim of the raging hell of the volcano of Kilauea exclaim as she looked down into its terrific depths, 'Oh, isn't it cute .3' and nothing but the strongest effort at self-control prevented my pushing her in." The saddest commentary upon education in this country, public and private, is the fact that, from the kindergarten to the university, every year we are sending out thousands of boys and girls who are language paupers. When they speak, they use a meager few hundred words, which they reenforce with gesticulations and facial exjH-e^ions which belong to the Stone age. You think that every WINNING WITH WORDS 117 syllable that they use has been a pearl of great price; you imagine that every word has been mined out of the mountain; certainly you would never suspect that, for all of these hundreds of years, the minds of the English-speaking race have been storing away the choicest treasures of thought and expression, which may be had for the looking or the listening. There is no inefficiency like that inefficiency which comes from a poverty of language. Study the artistry of our language. If we woiild possess a vocabulary with a market value, let us read in the advertising sections of our leading magazines; let us read the poetry of the automobile, of clothes craft, of hosiery; let us spend much time in the company of those verbal musicians who play upon the English language as Paderewski plays upon the piano. And for all oiu- efforts to acquire a vocabulary that has a market value, may we never cease to know and love our language for its own sake; may we always know Enghsh as the creation of Chaucer, as the medium of Shakespeare, as the vehicle of Macaulay, of Longfellow, of Emerson, of Whittier, and of Riley, to the end that these dis- tinguished minds may be our chosen companions when the sunset's season shall have overtaken us. Pace and Pace in "Good English as a Business Asset" tell the story of a cashier m a small western bank who had studied banking and also English at night. He wrote an article on "Bank Accept- ances" which w£is widely distributed. A copy of it 118 PERSONALITY came to the notice of the president of a large eastern bank. This prominent banker, himself a master of clear, succinct English, wrote a letter to the obscure cashier complimenting him not only upon his subject matter, but also upon his "simple, logical, and happy manner of expression." To-day that cashier is one of the vice-presidents of the eastern bank. In whatever field one may work, if he has acquired an imcommon verbal skiU he goes through life a marked man. The difference between the A-1 and the B-2 stenographer is not infrequently a difference of vocabulary. Merely to record and reproduce sound rapidly is the work of the phonograph, but whoever digests with ease and fluency the words of the dictator is no machine. Ajnanuenses who depend whoUy upon facile fingers and vest pocket diction- aries come imder the classification of B-2, and their undoing is simply a matter of circumstance. A great many stenographers who possess fairly good general vocabularies accept technical positions where the cultivation of a certain phraseology would promote their efficiency Eind prospects. A yoimg lady stenographer to a department manager in a large mail order establishment spent her spare moments in studying the firm's advertising and foUow-up hterature. She not only adapted her shorthand forms to frequently occurring words and phrases, which greatly increased her speed, but she carefully analyzed the new words by studying their WINNING WITH WORDS 119 etymology and by arranging groups of synonyms. Her promotion to a secretaryship in the advertising department followed as a matter of com-se. I once met a Japanese whose fluency of expression amazed me. After I had made inquiry he referred me smilingly to an imabridged dictionary which was weU thumbed. Nearby were a dozen small note- books completely filled with words, data, and phrases which had been jotted down from reading and conversation. From these, translations had been made into other and larger books of reference. As soon as this information became a part of the Japanese' personality he found a ready market in which to sell it. A large hfe insurance company gave him a position where he was in constant communication with highly educated Enghsh-speak- ing people. Such instances as this are justly humihating to those native-bom stenographers who year after year neglect to appropriate sufficient language to give ease to conversation and effective- ness to correspondence. Just the right word in just the right place is the accompHshment which leads full many a poorly paid stenographer and clerk out of the workroom into the sales or correspondence force. A poverty of words is the most embarrassing weakness the amanuensis can have, while the remedy is pleasing and sure. A new word to-day and another to-morrow are credit entries in oiu- bank books that wiU be found as handy as savings on a rainy day. 120 PERSONALITY Dr. Lewis M. Tennan, Professor of Education in Leland Stanford Junior University, has estimated that the average child of eight should have a vocabu- lary of 3600 words; at ten, 5400 words; at twelve, 7200; at fourteen, 9000. The average adult can define 11,700, while the superior adult has a vocabu- lary of 13,500. The recognized mediums of acquir- ing speech, such as conversation, reading, emd consulting the dictionary, £is ordinary operations in the usual course of business, will not suffice. Un- happily our vocabulary is not comprised of the words we recognize but those we actually command. From the Journal of Education we learn that a few years ago there was a prize offered for a hst of the twenty-five most beautiful words in the English language. This prize was won by a New York lawyer. The words were judged according to their l)eauty of sound as well as their beauty of meeming. Here is the list: Melody Faith Love Splendor Joy Divine Adoration Honor Hope Eloquence Radiance Harmony Virtue Nobility Happiness Innocence Sympathy Purity Modesty Heaven T liberty But in this practical age we must not always select our language with regard to its beauty unless it shall also have selling power. We need to-day, as Professor Hotchkiss of New York University has WINNING WITH WORDS 121 pointed out, a language of impression rather than a language of expression. The King's English will not do imless it is also the English of the general pubhc which has money to spend. Words — vital and humanizing words — are the stock in trade of salesmen, the material out of which they must build images. A great advertising expert has said that we do not give sufficient attention to verbs and adjec- tives siQce they constitute our working words. The verb (from verbum, meaning the word) is the only part of speech which must be expressed or under- stood in order to have a complete thought. The verb is the action word and hence the part of speech which lends itself most readily to personification. To make our word images impelling, we must make them as nearly human as possible. Through adjectives we may impart to the object described the attributes of persons. "If you are endeavoring to transmit an image, use adjectives — well-chosen, gripping adjectives, whose familiar faces will smUe, laugh, frown, leap, and bmn into the reader's mind from the written page." In describing an auto- mobile, say it "glides," "responds," "sings along," "whispers." In every case you have imparted life to the inanimate. You have given to that without life the qualities of a person. Many of our modem- day writers are masters of this personifying style. IngaUs' famous poem, " Opportunity," grips because the subject is personified by the use of the first personal pronoun, and by humanizing verbs. 122 PERSONALITY Joaquin Miller resorts effectively to this style ia his poem " Columbus." Note the strong description of the sea: This mad sea shows his teeth to-night; He curls his lips, he lies in wait. With lifted teeth, as if to bite! The New York Sun recently addressed this advice to Tirriters: "To arouse interest a good ad writer can spend many profitable hours in studying just how successful generals as Johnson, Burke, Addison, Swift, Pope, Macaulay, Webster, Roose- velt, marshal their verbal battahons- Each has a strategy of his own; each wins you by something individually his own. Johnson's words rumble along heavily and soimd like the boom of a 42- centimeter gun. Burke's word soldiers are excellent swordsmen. Their blades are so sharp that they can cut down every enemy. Addison's army is poUte and peaceful, excellent for dress parade, but not meant for battle. Swift's words are bombs, poisoned gas, Uquid fire, and are hurled with accurate aim. Pope's words are daggers, they cut deep and sting hard. Macaulay is a cavalry leader. His word army rushes along on horseback and sweeps everything before it. Webster's words are volcanic, they consume the opposing forces. Roosevelt's words are dynamic, they hit every time and when the bombardment is over the enemy is no more." And remember that language may be either WINNING WITH WORDS 123 vrritten or spoken, the latter being far the more effective. Every person in public life should acquire some art in public speaking, not in the sense of oratory or declamation, but he must be effective in pubUc speaking because all speaking is pubUc. The salesman addressing a single customer is a pubUc speaker. The secretary interpreting the orders of her superior to a half dozen department heads is gettiog valuable training in oral expression. One's &st lesson in pubhc speaking should be like the proverbial first lesson in swimming. The most indispensable requisite of effective pubhc speaking hes in the anxiety of the speeiker to speak. He must have something to say that he very much desires to say, otherwise the address is sure to lack force and appear as a belabored effort against time. A good speech is never made altogether by the speaker. The audience catches the first force of the speaker and in reacting unconsciously inspires and reinforces the speaker. Perhaps a large share of the difficulty would be overcome if one realized that, however inexperienced he may be, seventy-five per cent of his audience would not do as well as he. Of aU the wise words that have been written on this subject I have read none that seem to be more to the point or more genuinely helpful than the fol- lowing pages taken from "Personal Efficiency" pubhshed by the La SaUe Extension University, Chicago, Illinois: 124 PERSONALITY To Become a^ a G-ood Spea^ker ytndY>MrVo ic> //nJ^\ -B^'^** Y our Vocabulary ArticulaJt* / ,'/ThorougK\\ woraaKeep carefully/ /ySpeechTT^nX \ - ^ . .- coriti'ol you I* voice>^ incitebeeK \StMdylhe Xdiefion* .a»ry. ^/ yowf \ o J? /Mudi«rvce\ ^|. «r/ /DevetopN \ ^ . ])«v«1op Your Ple.^ _S ehpui-poae puyp Study People W%dh*r« tevouii z PRACTICE. VT%.cUcm writing— breA-thing d*«ply- sp«».l