Architects of Fate Part 19

Said Captain Bingham: "You can have no idea of the wonderful machine that the German army is and how well it is prepared for war. A chart is made out which shows just what must be done in the case of wars with the different nations. And every officer's place in the scheme is laid out beforehand. There is a schedule of trains which will supersede all other schedules the moment war is declared, and this is so arranged that the commander of the army here could telegraph to any officer to take such a train and go to such a place at a moment's notice. When the Franco-Prussian war was declared, Von Moltke was awakened at midnight and told of the fact. He said coolly to the official who aroused him, 'Go to pigeonhole No. ---- in my safe and take a paper from it and telegraph as there directed to the different troops of the empire.' He then turned over and went to sleep and awoke at his usual hour in the morning. Every one else in Berlin was excited about the war, but Von Moltke took his morning walk as usual, and a friend who met him said, 'General, you seem to be taking it very easy. Aren't you afraid of the situation? I should think you would be busy.' 'Ah,'

replied Von Moltke, 'all of my work for this time has been done long beforehand and everything that can be done now has been done.'"

That is done soon enough which is done well. Soon ripe, soon rotten.

He that would enjoy the fruit must not gather the flower. He who is impatient to become his own master is more likely to become his own slave. Better believe yourself a dunce and work away than a genius and be idle. One year of trained thinking is worth more than a whole college course of mental absorption of a vast series of undigested facts. The facility with which the world swallows up the ordinary college graduate who thought he was going to dazzle mankind should bid you pause and reflect. But just as certainly as man was created not to crawl on all fours in the depths of primeval forests, but to develop his mental and moral faculties, just so certainly he needs education, and only by means of it will he become what he ought to become,--man, in the highest sense of the word. Ignorance is not simply the negation of knowledge, it is the misdirection of the mind. "One step in knowledge," says Bulwer, "is one step from sin; one step from sin is one step nearer to Heaven."

A learned clergyman was thus accosted by an illiterate preacher who despised education: "Sir, you have been to college, I presume?" "Yes, sir," was the reply. "I am thankful," said the former, "that the Lord opened my mouth without any learning." "A similar event," retorted the clergyman, "happened in Balaam's time."

"If a cloth were drawn around the eyes of Praxiteles' statue of Love,"

says Bulwer, "the face looked grave and sad; but as the bandage was removed, a beautiful smile would overspread the countenance. Even so does the removal of the veil of ignorance from the eyes of the mind bring radiant happiness to the heart of man."

A young man just graduated told the President of Trinity College that he had completed his education, and had come to say good-by. "Indeed,"

said the President, "I have just begun my education."

Many an extraordinary man has been made out of a very ordinary boy; but in order to accomplish this we must begin with him while he is young.

It is simply astonis.h.i.+ng what training will do for a rough, uncouth, and even dull lad, if he has good material in him, and comes under the tutelage of a skilled educator before his habits have become confirmed.

Even a few weeks' or months' drill of the rawest and roughest recruits in the late Civil War so straightened and dignified stooping and uncouth soldiers, and made them so manly, erect, and courteous in their bearing, that their own friends scarcely knew them. If this change is so marked in the youth who has grown to maturity, what a miracle is possible in the lad who is taken early and put under a course of drill and systematic training, both physical, mental, and moral. How many a man who is now in the penitentiary, in the poorhouse, or among the tramps, or living out a miserable existence in the slums of our cities, bent over, uncouth, rough, slovenly, has possibilities slumbering within the rags, which would have developed him into a magnificent man, an ornament to the human race instead of a foul blot and scar, had he only been fortunate enough early in life to have come under efficient and systematic training.

Laziness begins in cobwebs and ends in iron chains. The more business a man has, the more he can do, for be learns to economize his time.

The industry that acquired riches, according to a wise teacher, the patience that is required in obtaining them, the reserved self-control, the measuring of values, the sympathy felt for fellow-toilers, the knowledge of what a dollar costs to the average man, the memory of it--all these things are preservative. But woe to the young farmer who hates farming; does not like sowing and reaping; is impatient with the dilatory and slow path to a small though secure fortune in the neighborhood where he was born, and comes to the city, hoping to become suddenly rich, thinking that he can break into the palace of wealth and rob it of its golden treasures!

Edison described his repeated efforts to make the phonograph reproduce an aspirated sound, and added: "From eighteen to twenty hours a day for the last seven months I have worked on this single word 'specia.' I said into the phonograph 'specia, specia, specia,' but the instrument responded 'pecia, pecia, pecia.' It was enough to drive one mad. But I held firm, and I have succeeded."

The road to distinction must be paved with years of self-denial and hard work.

Horace Mann, the great author of the common school system of Ma.s.sachusetts, was a remarkable example of that pluck and patience which can work and wait. His only inheritance was poverty and hard work. But he had an unquenchable thirst for knowledge and a determination to get on in the world. He braided straw to get money to buy books which his soul thirsted for.

To Jonas Chickering there were no trifles in the manufacture of a piano. Others might work for salaries, but he was working for fame and fortune. Neither time nor pains were of any account to him compared with accuracy and knowledge. He could afford to work and wait, for quality, not quant.i.ty, was his aim. Fifty years ago the piano was a miserable, instrument compared with the perfect mechanism of to-day.

Chickering was determined to make a piano which would yield the fullest, richest volume of melody with the least exertion to the player, and one which would withstand atmospheric changes and preserve its purity and truthfulness of tone. And he strove patiently and persistently till he succeeded.

"Thy life, wert thou the pitifullest of all the sons of earth, is no idle dream, but a solemn reality," said Carlyle. "It is thy own. It is all thou hast to comfort eternity with. Work then like a star, unhasting, yet unresting."

Gladstone was bound to win; although he had spent many years of preparation for his life work, in spite of the consciousness of marvelous natural endowments which would have been deemed sufficient by many young men, and notwithstanding he had gained the coveted prize of a seat in Parliament, yet he decided to make himself master of the situation; and amid all his public and private duties, he not only spent eleven terms more in the study of the law, but he studied Greek constantly and read every well written book or paper he could obtain, so determined was he that his life should be rounded out to its fullest measure, and that his mind should have broad and liberal culture.

Emperor William I. was not a genius, but the secret of his power lay in tireless perseverance. A friend says of him, "When I pa.s.sed the palace at Berlin night after night, however late, I always saw that grand imperial figure standing beside the green lamp, and I used to say to myself, 'That is how the imperial crown of Germany was won.'"

Ole Bull said, "If I practice one day, I can see the result. If I practice two days my friends can see it; if I practice three days the great public can see it."

The habit of seizing every bit of knowledge, no matter how insignificant it may seem at the time, every opportunity, every occasion, and grinding them all up into experience, cannot be overestimated. You will find use for all of it. Webster once repeated an anecdote with effect which he heard fourteen years before, and which he had not thought of in the mean time. It exactly fitted the occasion. "It is an ill mason that rejects any stone."

Webster was once urged to speak on a subject of great importance, but refused, saying he was very busy and had no time to master the subject.

"But," replied his friend, "a very few words from you would do much to awaken public attention to it." Webster replied, "If there be so much weight in my words, it is because I do not allow myself to speak on any subject until my mind is imbued with it." On one occasion Webster made a remarkable speech before the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard, when a book was presented to him, but after he had gone, his "impromptu"

speech, carefully written out, was found in the book which he had forgotten to take away.

Demosthenes was once urged to speak on a great and sudden emergency, but replied, "I am not prepared." In fact, it was thought by many that Demosthenes did not possess any genius whatever, because he never allowed himself to speak on any subject without thorough preparation.

In any meeting or a.s.sembly, when called upon, he would never rise, even to make remarks, it was said, without previously preparing himself.

Alexander Hamilton said, "Men give me credit for genius. All the genius I have lies just in this: when I have a subject in hand I study it profoundly. Day and night it is before me. I explore it in all its bearings. My mind becomes pervaded with it. Then the effort which I make the people are pleased to call the fruit of genius; it is the fruit of labor and thought." The law of labor is equally binding on genius and mediocrity.

Are the results so distant that you delay the preparation in the hope that fortuitous good luck may make it unnecessary? As well might the husbandman delay sowing his seed until the spring and summer are past and the ground hardened by the frosts of a rigorous winter. As well might one who is desirous of enjoying firm health inoculate his system with the seeds of disease, and expect at such time as he may see fit to recover from its effects, and banish the malady. Nelaton, the great surgeon, said that if he had four minutes in which to perform an operation, on which a life depended, he would take one minute to consider how best to do it.

"Many men," says Longfellow, "do not allow their principles to take root, but pull them up every now and then, as children do flowers they have planted, to see if they are growing." We must not only work, but wait.

"The spruce young spark," says Sizer, "who thinks chiefly of his mustache and boots and s.h.i.+ny hat, of getting along nicely and easily during the day, and talking about the theatre, the opera, or a fast horse, ridiculing the faithful young fellow who came to learn the business and make a man of himself, because he will not join in wasting his time in dissipation, will see the day, if his useless life is not earlier blasted by vicious indulgences, when he will be glad to accept a situation from his fellow-clerk whom he now ridicules and affects to despise, when the latter shall stand in the firm, dispensing benefits and acquiring fortune."

"I have been watching the careers of young men by the thousand in this busy city of New York for over thirty years," said Dr. Cuyler, "and I find that the chief difference between the successful and the failures lies in the single element of staying power. Permanent success is oftener won by holding on than by sudden dash, however brilliant. The easily discouraged, who are pushed back by a straw, are all the time dropping to the rear--to perish or to be carried along on the stretcher of charity. They who understand and practice Abraham Lincoln's homely maxim of 'pegging away' have achieved the solidest success."

"When a man has done his work," says Ruskin, "and nothing can any way be materially altered in his fate, let him forget his toil, and jest with his fate if he will, but what excuse can you find for willfulness of thought at the very lime when every crisis of fortune hangs on your decisions? A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home forever depends on the chances or the pa.s.sions of the hour! A youth thoughtless, when the career of all his days depends on the opportunity of a moment! A youth thoughtless, when his every action is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a foundation of life or death! Be thoughtless in any after years, rather than now--though, indeed, there is only one place where a man may be n.o.bly thoughtless, his deathbed. Nothing should ever be left to be done there."

The Duke of Wellington became so discouraged because he did not advance in the army that he applied for a much inferior position in the customs department, but was refused. Napoleon had applied for every vacant position for seven years before he was recognized, but meanwhile he studied with all his might, supplementing what was considered a thorough military education by researches and reflections which in later years enabled him easily to teach the art of war to veterans who had never dreamed of his novel combinations.

Reserves which carry us through great emergencies are the result of long working and long waiting. Collyer declares that reserves mean to a man also achievement,--"the power to do the grandest thing possible to your nature when you feel you must, or some precious thing will be lost,--to do well always, but best in the crisis on which all things turn; to stand the strain of a long fight, and still find you have something left, and so to never know you are beaten, because you never are beaten." Every defeat is a Waterloo to him who has no reserves.

He only is independent in action who has been earnest and thorough in preparation and self-culture. "Not for school, but for life, we learn;" and our habits--of promptness, earnestness, and thoroughness, or of tardiness, fickleness, and superficiality--are the things acquired most readily and longest retained.

"One who reads the chronicles of discoveries is struck with the prominent part that accident has played in such annals. For some of the most useful processes and machinery the world is indebted to apparently chance occurrences. Inventors in search of one object have failed in their quest, but have stumbled on something more valuable than that for which they were looking. Saul is not the only man who has gone in search of a.s.ses and found a kingdom. Astrologers sought to read from the heavens the fate of men and the fortune of nations, and they led to a knowledge of astronomy. Alchemists were seeking for the philosopher's stone, and from their efforts sprung the science of chemistry. Men explored the heavens for something to explain irregularities in the movements of the planets, and discovered a star other than the one for which they were looking. A careless glance at such facts might encourage the delusion that aimless straying in bypaths is quite as likely to be rewarded as is the steady pressing forward, with fixed purpose, towards some definite goal.

"But it is to be remembered that the men who made the accidental discoveries were men who were looking for something. The unexpected achievement was but the return for the toil after what was attained.

Others might have encountered the same facts, but only the eye made eager by the strain of long watching would be quick to note the meaning. If vain search for hidden treasure has no other recompense, it at least gives ability to detect the first gleam of the true metal.

Men may wake at times surprised to find themselves famous, but it was the work they did before going to sleep, and not the slumber, that gave the eminence. When the ledge has been drilled and loaded and the proper connections have been made, a child's touch on the electric key may be enough to annihilate the obstacle, but without the long preparation the pressure of a giant's hand would be without effect.

"In the search for truth and the shaping of character the principle remains the same as in science and literature. Trivial causes are followed by wonderful results, but it is only the merchantman who is on the watch for goodly pearls who is represented as finding the pearl of great price."

To vary the language of another, the three great essentials to success in mental and physical labor are Practice, Patience, and Perseverance, but the greatest of these is Perseverance.

Let us, then, be up and doing, With a heart for any fate; Still achieving, still pursuing, Learn to labor and to wait.

LONGFELLOW.

CHAPTER X.

CLEAR GRIT.

I shall show the cinders of my spirits Through the ashes of my chance.

SHAKESPEARE.

What though ten thousand faint, Desert, or yield, or in weak terror flee!

Heed not the panic of the mult.i.tude; Thine be the captain's watchword,--Victory!

HORATIUS BONAR.

Better to stem with heart and hand The roaring tide of life, than lie, Unmindful, on its flowery strand, Of G.o.d's occasions drifting by!

Better with naked nerve to hear The needles of this goading air, Than in the lap of sensual ease forego The G.o.dlike power to do, the G.o.dlike aim to know.

WHITTIER.

Let fortune empty her whole quiver on me, I have a soul that, like an ample s.h.i.+eld, Can take in all, and verge enough for more.

DRYDEN.