If, however, you affirm, "I am health; I am prosperity; I am this or that," but do not believe it, you will not be helped by affirmation. You must believe what you affirm and try to realise it.

Assert your actual possession of the things you need; of the qualities you long to have. Force your mind toward your goal; hold it there steadily, persistently, for this is the mental state that creates. The negative mind, which doubts and wavers, creates nothing.

"I, myself, am good fortune," says Walt Whitman. If we could only realize that the very attitude of assuming that we are the real embodiment of the thing we long to be or to attain, that we possess the good things we long for, not that we possess all the qualities of good, but that we are these qualities—with the constant affirming, "I myself am good luck, good fortune; I am myself a part of the great creative, sustaining principle of the universe, because my real, divine self and my Father are one"—what a revolution would come to earth's toilers!



CHAPTER XLV

STAND FOR SOMETHING

The greatest thing that can be said of a man, no matter how much he has achieved, is that he has kept his record clean.

Why is it that, in spite of the ravages of time, the reputation of Lincoln grows larger and his character means more to the world every year? It is because he kept his record clean, and never prostituted his ability nor gambled with his reputation.

Where, in all history, is there an example of a man who was merely rich, no matter how great his wealth, who exerted such a power for good, who was such a living force in civilization, as was this poor backwoods boy? What a powerful illustration of the fact that character is the greatest force in the world!

A man assumes importance and becomes a power in the world just as soon as it is found that he stands for something; that he is not for sale; that he will not lease his manhood for salary, for any amount of money or for any influence or position; that he will not lend his name to anything which he can not indorse.

The trouble with so many men to-day is that they do not stand for anything outside their vocation. They may be well educated, well up in their specialties, may have a lot of expert knowledge, but they can not be depended upon. There is some flaw in them which takes the edge off their virtue. They may be fairly honest, but you cannot bank on them.

It is not difficult to find a lawyer or a physician who knows a good deal, who is eminent in his profession; but it is not so easy to find one who is a man before he is a lawyer or a physician; whose name is a synonym for all that is clean, reliable, solid, substantial. It is not difficult to find a good preacher; but it is not so easy to find a real man, sterling manhood, back of the sermon. It is easy to find successful merchants, but not so easy to find men who put character above merchandise. What the world wants is men who have principle underlying their expertness—principle under their law, their medicine, their business; men who stand for something outside of their offices and stores; who stand for something in their community; whose very presence carries weight.

Everywhere we see smart, clever, longheaded, shrewd men, but how comparatively rare it is to find one whose record is as clean as a hound's tooth; who will not swerve from the right; who would rather fail than be a party to a questionable transaction!

Everywhere we see business men putting the stumbling-blocks of deception and dishonest methods right across their own pathway, tripping themselves up while trying to deceive others.

We see men worth millions of dollars filled with terror; trembling lest investigations may uncover things which will damn them in the public estimation! We see them cowed before the law like whipped spaniels; catching at any straw that will save them from public disgrace!

What a terrible thing to live in the limelight of popular favor, to be envied as rich and powerful, to be esteemed as honorable and straightforward, and yet to be conscious all the time of not being what the world thinks we are; to live in constant terror of discovery, in fear that something may happen to unmask us and show us up in our true light! But nothing can happen to injure seriously the man who lives four-square to the world; who has nothing to cover up, nothing to hide from his fellows; who lives a transparent, clean life, with never a fear of disclosures. If all of his material possessions are swept away from him, he knows that he has a monument in the hearts of his countrymen, in the affection and admiration of the people, and that nothing can happen to harm his real self because he has kept his record clean.

Mr. Roosevelt early resolved that, let what would come, whether he succeeded in what he undertook or failed, whether he made friends or enemies, he would not take chances with his good name—he would part with everything else first; that he would never gamble with his reputation; that he would keep his record clean. His first ambition was to stand for something, to be a man. Before he was a politician or anything else the man must come first.



In his early career he had many opportunities to make a great deal of money by allying himself with crooked, sneaking, unscrupulous politicians. He had all sorts of opportunities for political graft. But crookedness never had any attraction for him. He refused to be a party to any political jobbery, any underhand business. He preferred to lose any position he was seeking, to let somebody else have it, if he must get smirched in the getting it. He would not touch a dollar, place, or preferment unless it came to him clean, with no trace of jobbery on it. Politicians who had an "ax to grind" knew it was no use to try to bribe him, or to influence him with promises of patronage, money, position, or power. Mr. Roosevelt knew perfectly well that he would make many mistakes and many enemies, but he resolved to carry himself in such a way that even his enemies should at least respect him for his honesty of purpose, and for his straightforward, "square-deal" methods. He resolved to keep his record clean, his name white, at all hazards. Everything else seemed unimportant in comparison.

In times like these the world especially needs such men as Mr. Roosevelt—men who hew close to the chalk-line of right and hold the line plumb to truth; men who do not pander to public favor; men who make duty and truth their goal and go straight to their mark, turning neither to the right nor to the left, though a paradise tempt them.

Who can ever estimate how much his influence has done toward purging politics and elevating the American ideal. He has changed the view-point of many statesmen and politicians. He has shown them a new and a better way. He has made many of them ashamed of the old methods of grafting and selfish greed. He has held up a new ideal, shown them that unselfish service to their country is infinitely nobler than an ambition for self-aggrandizement. American patriotism has a higher meaning to-day, because of the example of this great American. Many young politicians and statesmen have adopted cleaner methods and higher aims because of his influence. There is no doubt that tens of thousands of young men in this country are cleaner in their lives, and more honest and ambitious to be good citizens, because here is a man who always stands for the "square deal," for civic righteousness, for American manhood.

Every man ought to feel that there is something in him that bribery can not touch, that influence can not buy; something that is not for sale; something he would not sacrifice or tamper with for any price; something he would give his life for if necessary.

If a man stands for something worth while, compels recognition for himself alone, on account of his real worth, he is not dependent upon recommendations; upon fine clothes, a fine house, or a pull. He is his own best recommendation.

The young man who starts out with the resolution to make his character his capital, and to pledge his whole manhood for every obligation he enters into, will not be a failure, though he wins neither fame nor fortune. No man ever really does a great thing who loses his character in the process.

No substitute has ever yet been discovered for honesty. Multitudes of people have gone to the wall trying to find one. Our prisons are full of people who have attempted to substitute something else for it.

No man can really believe in himself when he is occupying a false position and wearing a mask; when the little monitor within him is constantly saying, "You know you are a fraud; you are not the man you pretend to be." The consciousness of not being genuine, not being what others think him to be, robs a man of power, honeycombs the character, and destroys self-respect and self-confidence.

When Lincoln was asked to take the wrong side of a case he said, "I could not do it. All the time while talking to that jury I should be thinking, 'Lincoln, you're a liar, you're a liar,' and I believe I should forget myself and say it out loud."

Character as capital is very much underestimated by a great number of young men. They seem to put more emphasis upon smartness, shrewdness, long-headedness, cunning, influence, a pull, than upon downright honesty and integrity of character. Yet why do scores of concerns pay enormous sums for the use of the name of a man who, perhaps, has been dead for half a century or more? It is because there is power in that name; because there is character in it; because it stands for something; because it represents reliability and square dealing. Think of what the name of Tiffany, of Park and Tilford, or any of the great names which stand in the commercial world as solid and immovable as the rock of Gibraltar, are worth!

Does it not seem strange that young men who know these facts should try to build up a business on a foundation of cunning, scheming, and trickery, instead of building on the solid rock of character, reliability, and manhood? Is it not remarkable that so many men should work so hard to establish a business on an unreliable, flimsy foundation, instead of building upon the solid masonry of honest goods, square dealing, reliability?

A name is worth everything until it is questioned; but when suspicion clings to it, it is worth nothing. There is nothing in this world that will take the place of character. There is no policy in the world, to say nothing of the right or wrong of it, that compares with honesty and square dealing.

In spite of, or because of, all the crookedness and dishonesty that is being uncovered, of all the scoundrels that are being unmasked, integrity is the biggest word in the business world to-day. There never was a time in all history when it was so big, and it is growing bigger. There never was a time when character meant so much in business; when it stood for so much everywhere as it does to-day.

There was a time when the man who was the shrewdest and sharpest and cunningest in taking advantage of others got the biggest salary; but to-day the man at the other end of the bargain is looming up as never before.

Nathan Straus, when asked the secret of the great success of his firm, said it was their treatment of the man at the other end of the bargain. He said they could not afford to make enemies; they could not afford to displease or to take advantage of customers, or to give them reason to think that they had been unfairly dealt with,—that, in the long run, the man who gave the squarest deal to the man at the other end of the bargain would get ahead fastest.

There are merchants who have made great fortunes, but who do not carry weight among their fellow men because they have dealt all their lives with inferiority. They have lived with shoddy and shams so long that the suggestion has been held in their minds until their whole standards of life have been lowered; their ideals have shrunken; their characters have partaken of the quality of their business.

Contrast these men with the men who stood for half a century or more at the head of solid houses, substantial institutions; men who have always stood for quality in everything; who have surrounded themselves not only with ability but with men and women of character.

We instinctively believe in character. We admire people who stand for something; who are centered in truth and honesty. It is not necessary that they agree with us. We admire them for their strength, the honesty of their opinions, the inflexibility of their principles.

The late Carl Schurz was a strong man and antagonized many people. He changed his political views very often; but even his worst enemies knew there was one thing he would never go back on, friends or no friends, party or no party—and that was his devotion to principle as he saw it. There was no parleying with his convictions. He could stand alone, if necessary, with all the world against him. His inconsistencies, his many changes in parties and politics, could not destroy the universal admiration for the man who stood for his convictions. Although he escaped from a German prison and fled his country, where he had been arrested on account of his revolutionary principles when but a mere youth, Emperor William the First had such a profound respect for his honesty of purpose and his strength of character that he invited him to return to Germany and visit him, gave him a public dinner, and paid him great tribute.

Who can estimate the influence of President Eliot in enriching and uplifting our national ideas and standards through the thousands of students who go out from Harvard University? The tremendous force and nobility of character of Phillips Brooks raised everyone who came within his influence to higher levels. His great earnestness in trying to lead people up to his lofty ideals swept everything before it. One could not help feeling while listening to him and watching him that there was a mighty triumph of character, a grand expression of superb manhood. Such men as these increase our faith in the race; in the possibilities of the grandeur of the coming man. We are prouder of our country because of such standards.

It is the ideal that determines the direction of the life. And what a grand sight, what an inspiration, are those men who sacrifice the dollar to the ideal!

The principles by which the problem of success is solved are right and justice, honesty and integrity; and just in proportion as a man deviates from these principles he falls short of solving his problem.

It is true that he may reach something. He may get money, but is that success? The thief gets money, but does he succeed? Is it any honester to steal by means of a long head than by means of a long arm? It is very much more dishonest, because the victim is deceived and then robbed—a double crime.

We often receive letters which read like this:

"I am getting a good salary; but I do not feel right about it, somehow. I can not still the voice within me that says, 'Wrong, wrong,' to what I am doing."

"Leave it, leave it," we always say to the writers of these letters. "Do not stay in a questionable occupation, no matter what inducement it offers. Its false light will land you on the rocks if you follow it. It is demoralizing to the mental faculties, paralyzing to the character, to do a thing which one's conscience forbids."

Tell the employer who expects you to do questionable things that you can not work for him unless you can put the trade-mark of your manhood, the stamp of your integrity, upon everything you do. Tell him that if the highest thing in you can not bring success, surely the lowest can not. You can not afford to sell the best thing in you, your honor, your manhood, to a dishonest man or a lying institution. You should regard even the suggestion that you might sell out for a consideration as an insult.

Resolve that you will not be paid for being something less than a man; that you will not lease your ability, your education, your inventiveness, your self-respect, for salary, to do a man's lying for him; either in writing advertisements, selling goods, or in any other capacity.

Resolve that, whatever your vocation, you are going to stand for something; that you are not going to be merely a lawyer, a physician, a merchant, a clerk, a farmer, a congressman, or a man who carries a big money-bag; but that you are going to be a man first, last, and all the time.



CHAPTER XLVI

NATURE'S LITTLE BILL

Though the mills of God grind slowly, yet they grind exceeding small; Though with patience He stands waiting, with exactness grinds He all. FREDERICK VON LOGAU.

Because sentence against an evil work is not executed speedily, therefore the heart of the sons of men is fully set in them to do evil.—ECCLESIASTES.

Man is a watch, wound up at first but never Wound up again: once down he's down forever. HERRICK.

Old age seizes upon an ill-spent youth like fire upon a rotten house.—SOUTH.

Last Sunday a young man died here of extreme old age at twenty-five.—JOHN NEWTON.

If you will not hear Reason, she'll surely rap your knuckles.—POOR RICHARD'S SAYINGS.

"Oh! oh! ah!" exclaimed Franklin; "what have I done to merit these cruel sufferings?" "Many things," replied the Gout; "you have eaten and drunk too freely, and too much indulged those legs of yours in your indolence."

Nature seldom presents her bill on the day you violate her laws. But if you overdraw your account at her bank, and give her a mortgage on your body, be sure she will foreclose. She may loan you all you want; but, like Shylock, she will demand the last ounce of flesh. She rarely brings in her cancer bill before the victim is forty years old. She does not often annoy a man with her drink bill until he is past his prime, and then presents it in the form of Bright's disease, fatty degeneration of the heart, drunkard's liver, or some similar disease. What you pay the saloon keeper is but a small part of your score.

We often hear it said that the age of miracles is past. We marvel that a thief dying on the cross should appear that very day in Paradise; but behold how that bit of meat or vegetable on a Hawarden breakfast table is snatched from Death, transformed into thought, and on the following night shakes Parliament in the magnetism and oratory of a Gladstone. The age of miracles past, when three times a day right before our eyes Nature performs miracles greater even than raising the dead? Watch that crust of bread thrown into a cell in Bedford Jail and devoured by a poor, hungry tinker; cut, crushed, ground, driven by muscles, dissolved by acids and alkalies; absorbed and hurled into the mysterious red river of life. Scores of little factories along this strange stream, waiting for this crust, transmute it as it passes, as if by magic, here into a bone cell, there into gastric juice, here into bile, there into a nerve cell, yonder into a brain cell. We can not trace the processes by which this crust arrives at the muscle and acts, arrives at the brain and thinks. We can not see the manipulating hand which throws back and forth the shuttle which weaves Bunyan's destinies, nor can we trace the subtle alchemy which transforms this prison crust into the finest allegory in the world, the Pilgrim's Progress. But we do know that, unless we supply food when the stomach begs and clamors, brain and muscle can not continue to act; and we also know that unless the food is properly chosen, unless we eat it properly, unless we maintain good digestion by exercise of mind and body, it will not produce the speeches of a Gladstone or the allegories of a Bunyan.

Truly we are fearfully and wonderfully made. Imagine a cistern which would transform the foul sewage of a city into pure drinking water in a second's time, as the black venous blood, foul with the ashes of burned-up brain cells and debris of worn-out tissues, is transformed in the lungs, at every breath, into pure, bright, red blood. Each drop of blood from that magic stream of liquid life was compounded by a divine Chemist. In it float all our success and destiny. In it are the extensions and limits of our possibilities. In it are health and long life, or disease and premature death. In it are our hopes and our fears, our courage, our cowardice, our energy or lassitude, our strength or weakness, our success or failure. In it are susceptibilities of high or broad culture, or pinched or narrow faculties handed down from an uncultured ancestry. From it our bones and nerves, our muscles and brain, our comeliness or ugliness, all come. In it are locked up the elements of a vicious or a gentle life, the tendencies of a criminal or a saint. How important is it, then, that we should obey the laws of health, and thus maintain the purity and power of this our earthly River of Life!

"We hear a great deal about the 'vile body,'" said Spencer, "and many are encouraged by the phrase to transgress the laws of health. But Nature quietly suppresses those who treat thus disrespectfully one of her highest products, and leaves the world to be peopled by the descendants of those who are not so foolish."

Nature gives to him that hath. She shows him the contents of her vast storehouse, and bids him take all he wants and be welcome. But she will not let him keep for years what he does not use. Use or lose is her motto. Every atom we do not utilize this great economist snatches from us.

If you put your arm in a sling and do not use it, Nature will remove the muscle almost to the bone, and the arm will become useless, but in exact proportion to your efforts to use it again she will gradually restore what she took away. Put your mind in the sling of idleness, or inactivity, and in like manner she will remove your brain, even to imbecility. The blacksmith wants one powerful arm, and she gives it to him, but reduces the other. You can, if you will, send all the energy of your life into some one faculty, but all your other faculties will starve.

A young lady may wear tight corsets if she chooses, but Nature will remove the rose from her cheek and put pallor there. She will replace a clear complexion with muddy hues and sallow spots. She will take away the elastic step, the luster from the eye.

Don't expect to have health for nothing. Nothing in this world worth anything can be had for nothing. Health is the prize of a constant struggle.

Nature passes no act without affixing a penalty for its violation. Whenever she is outraged she will have her penalty, although it take a life.

A great surgeon stood before his class to perform a certain operation which the elaborate mechanism and minute knowledge of modern science had only recently made possible. With strong and gentle hand he did his work successfully so far as his part of the terrible business went; and then he turned to his pupils and said, "Two years ago a safe and simple operation might have cured this disease. Six years ago a wise way of life might have prevented it. We have done our best as the case now stands, but Nature will have her word to say. She does not always consent to the repeal of her capital sentences." Next day the patient died.

Apart from accidents, we hold our life largely at will. What business have seventy-five thousand physicians in the United States? It is our own fault that even one-tenth of them get a respectable living. What a commentary upon our modern American civilization that three hundred and fifty thousand people in this country die annually from absolutely preventable diseases! Seneca said, "The gods have given us a long life, but we have made it short." Few people know enough to become old. It is a rare thing for a person to die of old age. Only three or four out of a hundred die of anything like old age. But Nature evidently intended, by the wonderful mechanism of the human body, that we should live well up to a century.

Thomas Parr, of England, lived to the age of one hundred and fifty-two years. He was married when he was a hundred and twenty, and did not leave off work until he was a hundred and thirty. The great Dr. Harvey examined Parr's body, but found no cause of death except a change of living. Henry Jenkins, of Yorkshire, England, lived to be a hundred and sixty-nine, and would probably have lived longer had not the king brought him to London, where luxuries hastened his death. The court records of England show that he was a witness in a trial a hundred and forty years before his death. He swam across a rapid river when he was a hundred.

There is nothing we are more ignorant of than the physiology and chemistry of the human body. Not one person in a thousand can correctly locate important internal organs or describe their use in the animal economy.

What an insult to the Creator who fashioned them so wonderfully and fearfully in His own image, that the graduates from our high schools and even universities, and young women who "finish their education," become proficient in the languages, in music, in art, and have the culture of travel, but can not describe or locate the various organs or functions upon which their lives depend! "The time will come," says Frances Willard, "when it will be told as a relic of our primitive barbarism that children were taught the list of prepositions and the names of the rivers of Thibet, but were not taught the wonderful laws on which their own bodily happiness is based, and the humanities by which they could live in peace and goodwill with those about them." Nothing else is so important to man as the study and knowledge of himself, and yet he knows less of himself than he does of the beasts about him.

The human body is the great poem of the Great Author. Not to learn how to read it, to spell out its meaning, to appreciate its beauties, or to attempt to fathom its mysteries, is a disgrace to our civilization.

What a price mortals pay for their ignorance, let a dwarfed, half-developed, one-sided, short-lived nation answer.

"A brilliant intellect in a sickly body is like gold in a spent swimmer's pocket."

Often, from lack of exercise, one side of the brain gradually becomes paralyzed and deteriorates into imbecility. How intimately the functions of the nervous organs are united! The whole man mourns for a felon. The least swelling presses a nerve against a bone and causes one intense agony, and even a Napoleon becomes a child. A corn on the toe, an affection of the kidneys or of the liver, a boil anywhere on the body, or a carbuncle, may seriously affect the eyes and even the brain. The whole system is a network of nerves, of organs, of functions, which are so intimately joined, and related in such close sympathy, that an injury to one part is immediately felt in every other.

Nature takes note of all our transactions, physical, mental, or moral, and places every item promptly to our debit or credit.

Let us take a look at a page in Nature's ledger:—

To damage to the heart in The "irritable heart," the youth by immoderate athletics, "tobacco heart," a life of tobacco chewing, cigarette promise impaired or blighted. smoking, drinking strong tea or coffee, rowing, running to trains, overstudy, excitement, etc.

* * * * * * * *

To one digestive apparatus Dyspepsia, melancholia, years ruined, by eating hurriedly, by of misery to self, anxiety to eating unsuitable or poorly one's family, pity and disgust cooked food, by drinking ice of friends. water when one is heated, by swallowing scalding drinks, especially tea, which forms tannic acid on the delicate lining of the stomach; or by eating when tired or worried, or after receiving bad news, when the gastric juice can not be secreted, etc.

* * * * * * * *

To one nervous system Years of weakness, disappointed shattered by dissipation, abuses, ambition, hopeless inefficiency, over-excitement, a fast life, a burnt-out life. feverish haste to get riches or fame, hastening puberty by stimulating food, exciting life, etc.

* * * * * * * *

To damage by undue mental Impaired powers of mind, exertion by burning the softening of the brain, "midnight oil," exhausting the blighted hopes. brain cells faster than they can be renewed.

* * * * * * * *

To overstraining the brain A disappointed ambition, a trying to lead his class in life of invalidism. college, trying to take a prize, or to get ahead of somebody else.

* * * * * * * *

To hardening the delicate A hardened brain, a hardened and sensitive gray matter of conscience, a ruined the brain and nerves, and home, Bright's disease, fatty ruining the lining membranes of degeneration, nervous the stomach and nervous degeneration, a short, system by alcohol, opium, etc. useless, wasted life.

* * * * * * * *

By forced balances, here and Accounts closed. Physiological there. and moral bankruptcy.

Sometimes two or three such items are charged to a single account. To offset them, there is placed on the credit side a little feverish excitement, too fleeting for calm enjoyment, followed by regret, remorse, and shame. Be sure your sins will find you out. They are all recorded.

"The gods are just, and of our pleasant vices Make instruments to scourge us."

It is a wonder that we live at all. We violate every law of our being, yet we expect to live to a ripe old age. What would you think of a man who, having an elegant watch delicately adjusted to heat and cold, should leave it on the sidewalk with cases open on a dusty or a rainy day, and yet expect it to keep good time? What would you think of a householder who should leave the doors and windows of his mansion open to thieves and tramps, to winds and dust and rain?

What are our bodies but timepieces made by an Infinite Hand, wound up to run a century, and so delicately adjusted to heat and cold that the temperature will not vary half a degree between the heat of summer and the cold of winter whether we live in the regions of eternal frost or under the burning sun of the tropics? A particle of dust or the slightest friction will throw this wonderful timepiece out of order, yet we often leave it exposed to all the corroding elements. We do not always keep open the twenty-five miles of ventilating pores in the skin by frequent bathing. We seldom lubricate the delicate wheels of the body with the oil of gladness. We expose it to dust and cinders, cold and draughts, and poisonous gases.

How careful we are to filter our water, air our beds, ventilate our sleeping-rooms, and analyze our milk! We shrink from contact with filth and disease. But we put paper colored with arsenic on our walls, and daily breathe its poisonous exhalations. We frequent theaters crowded with human beings, many of whom are uncleanly and diseased. We sit for hours and breathe in upon fourteen hundred square feet of lung tissue the heated, foul, and heavy air; carbonic acid gas from hundreds of gas burners, each consuming as much oxygen as six people; air filled with shreds of tissue expelled from diseased lungs; poisonous effluvia exhaled from the bodies of people who rarely bathe, from clothing seldom washed, fetid breaths, and skin disease in different stages of development. For hours we sit in this bath of poison, and wonder at our headache and lassitude next morning.

We pour a glass of ice water into a stomach busy in the delicate operation of digestion, ignorant or careless of the fact that it takes half an hour to recover from the shock and get the temperature back to ninety-eight degrees, so that the stomach can go on secreting gastric juice. Then down goes another glass of water with similar results.

We pour down alcohol which thickens the velvety lining of the stomach, and hardens the soft tissues, the thin sheaths of nerves, and the gray matter of the brain. We crowd meats, vegetables, pastry, confectionery, nuts, raisins, wines, fruits, etc., into one of the most delicately constructed organs of the body, and expect it to take care of its miscellaneous and incongruous load without a murmur.

After all these abuses we do not give the blood a chance to go to the stomach and help it out of its misery, but summon it to the brain and muscles, notwithstanding the fact that it is so important to have an extra supply to aid digestion that Nature has made the blood vessels of the alimentary canal large enough to contain several times the amount in the entire body.

Who ever saw a horse leave his oats and hay, when hungry, to wash them down with water? The dumb beasts can teach us some valuable lessons in eating and drinking. Nature mixes our gastric juice or pepsin and acids in just the right proportion to digest our food, and keep it at exactly the right temperature. If we dilute it, or lower its temperature by ice water, we diminish its solvent or digestive power, and dyspepsia is the natural result.

English factory children have received the commiseration of the world because they were scourged to work fourteen hours out of the twenty-four. But there is many a theoretical republican who is a harsher taskmaster to his stomach than this; who allows it no more resting time than he does his watch; who gives it no Sunday, no holiday, no vacation in any sense, and who seeks to make his heart beat faster for the sake of the exhilaration he can thus produce.

Although the heart weighs a little over half a pound, yet it pumps eighteen pounds of blood from itself, forcing it into every nook and corner of the entire body, back to itself in less than two minutes. This little organ, the most perfect engine in the world, does a daily work equal to lifting one hundred and twenty-four tons one foot high, and exerts one-third as much muscle power as does a stout man at hard labor. If the heart should expend its entire force lifting its own weight, it would raise itself nearly twenty thousand feet an hour, ten times as high as a pedestrian can lift himself in ascending a mountain. What folly, then, to goad this willing, hard-working slave to greater exertions by stimulants!

We must pay the penalty of our vocations. Beware of work that kills the workman. Those who prize long life should avoid all occupations which compel them to breathe impure air or deleterious gases, and especially those in which they are obliged to inhale dust and filings from steel and brass and iron, the dust in coal mines, and dust from threshing machines. Stone-cutters, miners, and steel grinders are short lived, the sharp particles of dust irritating and inflaming the tender lining of the lung cells. The knife and fork grinders in Manchester, England, rarely live beyond thirty-two years. Those who work in grain elevators and those who are compelled to breathe chemical poisons are short lived.

Deep breathing in dusty places sends the particles of dust into the upper and less used lobes of the lungs, and these become a constant irritant, until they finally excite an inflammation, which may end in consumption. All occupations in which arsenic is used shorten life.

Dr. William Ogle, who is authority upon this subject, says, "Of all the various influences that tend to produce differences of mortality in any community, none is more potent than the character of the prevailing occupations." Finding that clergymen and priests have the lowest death-rate, he represented it as one hundred, and by comparison found that the rate for inn and hotel servants was three hundred and ninety-seven; miners, three hundred and thirty-one; earthenware makers, three hundred and seventeen; file makers, three hundred; innkeepers, two hundred and seventy-four; gardeners, farmers, and agricultural laborers closely approximating the clerical standard. He gave as the causes of high mortality, first, working in a cramped or constrained attitude; second, exposure to the action of poisonous or irritating substances; third, excessive work, mental or physical; fourth, working in confined or foul air; fifth, the use of strong drink; sixth, differences in liability to fatal accidents; seventh, exposure to the inhalation of dust. The deaths of those engaged in alcoholic industries were as one thousand five hundred and twenty-one to one thousand of the average of all trades.

It is very important that occupations should be congenial. Whenever our work galls us, whenever we feel it to be a drudgery and uncongenial, the friction grinds life away at a terrible rate.

Health can be accumulated, invested, and made to yield its compound interest, and thus be doubled and redoubled. The capital of health may, indeed, be forfeited by one misdemeanor, as a rich man may sink all his property in one bad speculation; but it is as capable of being increased as any other kind of capital.

One is inclined to think with a recent writer that it looks as if the rich men kept out of the kingdom of heaven were also excluded from the kingdom of brains. In New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago are thousands of millionaires, some of them running through three or four generations of fortune; and yet, in all their ranks, there is seldom a man possessed of the higher intellectual qualities that flower in literature, eloquence, or statesmanship. Scarcely one of them has produced a book worth printing, a poem worth reading, or a speech worth listening to. They are struck with intellectual sterility. They go to college; they travel abroad; they hire the dearest masters; they keep libraries among their furniture; and some of them buy works of art. But, for all that, their brains wither under luxury, often by their own vices or tomfooleries, and mental barrenness is the result. He who violates Nature's law must suffer the penalty, though he have millions. The fruits of intellect do not grow among the indolent rich. They are usually out of the republic of brains. Work or starve is Nature's motto; starve mentally, starve morally, even if you are rich enough to prevent physical starvation.

How heavy a bill Nature collects of him in whom the sexual instinct has been permitted to taint the whole life with illicit thoughts and deeds, stultifying the intellect, deadening the sensibilities, dwarfing the soul!

"I waive the quantum of the sin, The hazard of concealing; But och, it hardens all within, And petrifies the feeling."

The sense of fatigue is one of Nature's many signals of danger. All we accomplish by stimulating or crowding the body or mind when tired is worse than lost. Insomnia, and sometimes even insanity, is Nature's penalty for prolonged loss of sleep.

One of the worst tortures of the Inquisition was that of keeping victims from sleeping, often driving them to insanity or death. Melancholy follows insomnia; insanity, both. To keep us in a healthy condition, Nature takes us back to herself, puts us under the ether of sleep, and keeps us there nearly one-third of our lives, while she overhauls and repairs in secret our wonderful mechanism. She takes us back each night wasted and dusty from the day's work, broken, scarred, and injured in the great struggle of life. Each cell of the brain is reburnished and refreshened; all the ashes or waste from the combustion of the tissues is washed out into the blood stream, pumped to the lungs, and thrown out in the breath; and the body is returned in the morning as fresh and good as new. The American honey does not always pay for the sting.

Labor is the eternal condition on which the rich man gains an appetite for his dinner, and the poor man a dinner for his appetite; but the habit of constant, perpetual industry often becomes a disease.

In the Norse legend, Allfader was not allowed to drink from Mirmir's Spring, the fount of wisdom, until he had left his eye as a pledge. Scholars often leave their health, their happiness, their usefulness behind, in their great eagerness to drink deep draughts at wisdom's fountain. Professional men often sacrifice everything that is valuable in life for the sake of reputation, influence, and money. Business men sacrifice home, family, health, happiness, in the great struggle for money and power. The American prize, like the pearl in the oyster, is very attractive, but is too often the result of disease.

Charles Linnaeus, the great naturalist, so exhausted his brain by over-exertion that he could not recognize his own work, and even forgot his own name. Kirk White won the prize at Cambridge, but it cost him his life. He studied at night and forced his brain by stimulants and narcotics in his endeavor to pull through, but he died at twenty-four. Paley died at sixty-two of overwork. He was called "one of the sublimest spirits in the world."

President Timothy Dwight of Yale College nearly killed himself by overwork when a young man. When at Yale he studied nine hours, taught six hours a day, and took no exercise whatever. He could not be induced to stop until he became so nervous and irritable that he was unable to look at a book ten minutes a day. His mind gave way, and it was a long time before he fully recovered.

Imagine the surprise of the angels at the death of men and women in the early prime and vigor of life. Could we but read the notes of their autopsies we might say less of mysterious Providence at funerals. They would run somewhat as follows:—

NOTES FROM THE ANGELS' AUTOPSIES.

What, is it returned so soon?—a body framed for a century's use returned at thirty?—a temple which was twenty-eight years in building destroyed almost before it was completed? What have gray hairs, wrinkles, a bent form, and death to do with youth?

Has all this beauty perished like a bud just bursting into bloom, plucked by the grim destroyer? Has she fallen a victim to tight-lacing, over-excitement, and the gaiety and frivolity of fashionable life?

Here is an educated, refined woman who died of lung starvation. What a tax human beings pay for breathing impure air! Nature provides them with a tonic atmosphere, compounded by the divine Chemist, but they refuse to breathe it in its purity, and so must pay the penalty in shortened lives. They can live a long time without water, a longer time without food, clothing, or the so-called comforts of life; they can live without education or culture, but their lungs must have good, healthful air-food twenty-four thousand times a day if they would maintain health. Oh, that they would see, as we do, the intimate connection between bad air, bad morals, and a tendency to crime!

Here are the ruins of an idolized son and loving husband. Educated and refined, what infinite possibilities beckoned him onward at the beginning of his career! But the Devil's agent offered him imagination, sprightliness, wit, eloquence, bodily strength, and happiness in eau de vie, or "water of life," as he called it, at only fifteen cents a glass. The best of our company tried to dissuade him, but to no avail. The poor mortal closed his "bargain" with the dramseller, and what did he get? A hardened conscience, a ruined home, a diseased body, a muddled brain, a heartbroken wife, wretched children, disappointed friends, triumphant enemies, days of remorse, nights of anguish, an unwept deathbed, an unhonored grave. And only to think that he is only one of many thousands! "What fools these mortals be!"

Did he not see the destruction toward which he was rushing with all the feverish haste of slavish appetite? Ah, yes, but only when it was too late. In his clenched hand, as he lay dead, was found a crumpled paper containing the following, in lines barely legible so tremulous were the nerves of the writer: "Wife, children, and over forty thousand dollars all gone! I alone am responsible. All has gone down my throat. When I was twenty-one I had a fortune. I am not yet thirty-five years old. I have killed my beautiful wife, who died of a broken heart; have murdered our children with neglect. When this coin is gone I do not know how I can get my next meal. I shall die a drunken pauper. This is my last money, and my history. If this bill comes into the hands of any man who drinks, let him take warning from my life's ruin."

What a magnificent specimen of manhood this would have been if his life had been under the rule of reason, not passion! He dies of old age at forty, his hair is gray, his eyes are sunken, his complexion sodden, his body marked with the labels of his disease. A physique fit for a god, fashioned in the Creator's image, with infinite possibilities, a physiological hulk wrecked on passion's seas, and fit only for a danger signal to warn the race. What would parents think of a captain who would leave his son in charge of a ship without giving him any instructions or chart showing the rocks, reefs, and shoals? Do they not know that those who sleep in the ocean are but a handful compared with those who have foundered on passion's seas? Oh, the sins of silence which parents commit against those dearer to them than life itself! Youth can not understand the great solicitude of parents regarding their education, their associations, their welfare generally, and the mysterious silence in regard to their physical natures. An intelligent explanation, by all mothers to the daughters and by all fathers to the sons, of the mysteries of their physical lives, when at the right age, would revolutionize civilization.

This young clergyman killed himself trying to be popular. This student committed suicide by exhausting his brain in trying to lead his class. This young lawyer overdrew his account at Nature's bank, and she foreclosed by a stroke of paralysis.

This merchant died at thirty-five by his own hand. His life was slipping away without enjoyment. He had murdered his capacity for happiness, and dug his own spiritual grave while making preparations for enjoying life. This young society man died of nothing to do and dissipation, at thirty.

What a miserable farce the life of men and women seems to us! Time, which is so precious that even the Creator will not give a second moment until the first is gone, they throw away as though it were water. Opportunities which angels covet they fling away as of no consequence, and die failures, because they have "no chance in life." Life, which seems so precious to us, they spurn as if but a bauble. Scarcely a mortal returns to us who has not robbed himself of years of precious life. Scarcely a man returns to us dropping off in genuine old age, as autumn leaves drop in the forest.

Has life become so cheap that mortals thus throw it away?



CHAPTER XLVII

HABIT—THE SERVANT,—THE MASTER

Habit, if wisely and skilfully formed, becomes truly a second nature.—BACON.

Habit, with its iron sinews, Clasps and leads us day by day. LAMARTINE.

The chain of habit coils itself around the heart like a serpent, to gnaw and stifle it.—HAZLITT.

You can not, in any given case, by any sudden and single effort, will to be true, if the habit of your life has been insincerity.—F. W. ROBERTSON.

It is a beautiful provision in the mental and moral arrangement of our nature, that that which is performed as a duty may by frequent repetition, become a habit; and the habit of stern virtue, so repulsive to others, may hang around our neck like a wreath of flowers.—PAXTON HOOD.

"When shall I begin to train my child?" asked a young mother of a learned physician.

"How old is the child?" inquired the doctor.

"Two years, sir."

"Then you have lost just two years," replied he, gravely.

"You must begin with his grandmother," said Oliver Wendell Holmes, when asked a similar question.

"At the mouth of the Mississippi," says Beecher, "how impossible would it be to stay its waters, and to separate from each other the drops from the various streams that have poured in on either side,—of the Red River, the Arkansas, the Ohio, and the Missouri,—or to sift, grain by grain the particles of sand that have been washed from the Alleghany, or the Rocky Mountains; yet how much more impossible would it be when character is the river, and habits are the side-streams!"

"We sow an act, we reap a habit; we sow a habit, we reap a character."

While correct habits depend largely on self-discipline, and often on self-denial, bad habits, like weeds, spring up, unaided and untrained, to choke the plants of virtue and as with Canada thistles, allowed to go to seed in a fair meadow, we may have "one day's seeding, ten years' weeding."

We seldom see much change in people after they get to be twenty-five or thirty years of age, except in going further in the way they have started; but it is a great comfort to think that, when one is young, it is almost as easy to acquire a good habit as a bad one, and that it is possible to be hardened in goodness as well as in evil.

Take good care of the first twenty years of your life, and you may hope that the last twenty will take good care of you.

A writer on the history of Staffordshire tells of an idiot who, living near a town clock, and always amusing himself by counting the hour of the day whenever the clock struck, continued to strike and count the hour correctly without its aid, when at one time it happened to be injured by an accident.

Dr. Johnson had acquired the habit of touching every post he passed in the street; and, if he missed one, he was uneasy, irritable, and nervous till he went back and touched the neglected post.

"Even thought is but a habit."

Heredity is a man's habit transmitted to his offspring.

A special study of hereditary drunkenness has been made by Professor Pellman of Bonn University, Germany. He thus traced the careers of children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren in all parts of the present German Empire, until he was able to present tabulated biographies of the hundreds descended from some original drunkard. Notable among the persons described by Professor Pellman is Frau Ada Jurke, who was born in 1740, and was a drunkard, a thief, and a tramp for the last forty years of her life, which ended in 1800. Her descendants numbered 834, of whom 709 were traced in local records from youth to death. One hundred and six of the 709 were born out of wedlock. There were 144 beggars, and 62 more who lived from charity. Of the women, 181 led disreputable lives. There were in the family 76 convicts, 7 of whom were sentenced for murder. In a period of some seventy-five years, this one family rolled up a bill of costs in almshouses, prisons, and correctional institutions amounting to at least 5,000,000 marks, or about $1,250,000.

Isaac Watts had a habit of rhyming. His father grew weary of it, and set out to punish him, which made the boy cry out:—

"Pray, father, on me mercy take, And I will no more verses make."

A minister had a bad habit of exaggeration, which seriously impaired his usefulness. His brethren came to expostulate. With extreme humiliation over this fault as they set it forth, he said, "Brethren, I have long mourned over this fault, and I have shed barrels of tears because of it." They gave him up as incorrigible.

Men carelessly or playfully get into habits of speech or act which become so natural that they speak or act as they do not intend, to their discomfiture. Professor Phelps told of some Andover students, who, for sport, interchanged the initial consonants of adjacent words. "But," said he, "retribution overtook them. On a certain morning, when one of them was leading the devotions, he prayed the Lord to 'have mercy on us, feak and weeble sinners.'" The habit had come to possess him.

Many speakers have undesirable habits of utterance or gesture. Some are continually applying the hand to some part of the face, the chin, the whiskers; some give the nose a peck with thumb and forefinger; others have the habit characterized as,—

"Washing the hands with invisible soap In a bowl of invisible water."

"We are continually denying that we have habits which we have been practising all our lives," says Beecher. "Here is a man who has lived forty or fifty years; and a chance shot sentence or word lances him, and reveals to him a trait which he has always possessed, but which, until now, he had not the remotest idea that he possessed. For forty or fifty years he has been fooling himself about a matter as plain as the nose on his face."

Had the angels been consulted, whether to create man, with this principle introduced, that, if a man did a thing once, if would be easier the second time, and at length would be done without effort, they would have said, "Create!"

Remember that habit is an arrangement, a principle of human nature, which we must use to increase the efficiency and ease of our work in life.

"Make sobriety a habit, and intemperance will be hateful; make prudence a habit, and reckless profligacy will be as contrary to the course of nature in the child, or in the adult, as the most atrocious crimes are to any of us."

Out of hundreds of replies from successful men as to the probable cause of failure, "bad habits" was in almost every one.

How easy it is to be nobody; it is the simplest thing in the world to drift down the stream, into bad company, into the saloon; just a little beer, just a little gambling, just a little bad company, just a little killing of time, and the work is done.

New Orleans is from five to fifteen feet below high water in the Mississippi River. The only protection to the city from the river is the levee. In May, 1883, a small break was observed in the levee, and the water was running through. A few bags of sand or loads of dirt would have stopped the water at first; but it was neglected for a few hours, and the current became so strong that all efforts to stop it were fruitless. A reward of five hundred thousand dollars was offered to any man who would stop it; but it was too late—it could not be done.

Beware of "small sins" and "white lies."

A man of experience says: "There are four good habits,—punctuality, accuracy, steadiness, and dispatch. Without the first, time is wasted; without the second, mistakes the most hurtful to our own credit and interest, and those of others, may be committed; without the third, nothing can be well done; and without the fourth, opportunities of great advantage are lost, which it is impossible to recall."

Abraham Lincoln gained his clear precision of statement of propositions by practise, and Wendell Phillips his wonderful English diction by always thinking and conversing in excellent style.

"Family customs exercise a vast influence over the world. Children go forth from the parent-nest, spreading the habits they have imbibed over every phase of society. These can easily be traced to their sources."

"To be sure, this is only a trifle in itself; but, then, the manner in which I do every trifling thing is of very great consequence, because it is just in these little things that I am forming my business habits. I must see to it that I do not fail here, even if this is only a small task."

"A physical habit is like a tree grown crooked. You can not go to the orchard, and take hold of a tree grown thus, and straighten it, and say, 'Now keep straight!' and have it obey you. What can you do? You can drive down a stake, and bind the tree to it, bending it back a little, and scarifying the bark on one side. And if, after that, you bend it back a little more every month, keeping it taut through the season, and from season to season, at length you will succeed in making it permanently straight. You can straighten it, but you can not do it immediately; you must take one or two years for it."

Sir George Staunton visited a man in India who had committed murder; and in order not only to save his life, but what was of much greater consequence to him, his caste, he had submitted to a terrible penalty,—to sleep for seven years on a bed, the entire top of which was studded with iron points, as sharp as they could be without penetrating the flesh. Sir George saw him during the fifth year of his sentence. His skin then was like the hide of a rhinoceros; and he could sleep comfortably on his bed of thorns, and he said that at the end of the seven years he thought he should use the same bed from choice. What a vivid parable of a sinful life! Sin, at first a bed of thorns, after a time becomes comfortable through the deadening of moral sensibility.

When the suspension bridge over Niagara River was to be erected, the question was, how to get the cable over. With a favoring wind a kite was elevated, which alighted on the opposite shores. To its insignificant string a cord was attached, which was drawn over, then a rope, then a larger one, then a cable; finally the great bridge was completed, connecting the United States with Canada.

First across the gulf we cast Kite-borne threads till lines are passed, And habit builds the bridge at last.

"Launch your bark on the Niagara River," said John B. Gough; "it is bright, smooth, and beautiful, Down the stream you glide on your pleasure excursion. Suddenly some one cries out from the bank, 'Young men, ahoy!' 'What is it?'

"'The rapids are below you.' 'Ha! ha! we have heard of the rapids, but we are not such fools as to get there. If we go too fast, then we shall up with the helm, and steer to the shore. Then on, boys, don't be alarmed—there is no danger.'

"'Young men, ahoy there!' 'What is it?' 'The rapids are below you!' 'Ha! ha! we will laugh and quaff. What care we for the future? No man ever saw it. Sufficient for the day is the evil thereof. We will enjoy life while we may, will catch pleasure as it flies. There's time enough to steer out of danger.'

"'Young men, ahoy!' 'What is it?' 'Beware! Beware! The rapids are below you!'

"Now you see the water foaming all around. See how fast you pass that point! Up with the helm! Now turn! Pull hard! Quick, quick! Pull for your lives! Pull till the blood starts from the nostrils, and the veins stand like whip-cords upon the brow! Set the mast in the socket! hoist the sail—ah! ah! it is too late! Shrieking, cursing, howling, blaspheming, over you go.

"Thousands go over the rapids every year, through the power of habit, crying all the while, 'When I find out that it is injuring me, I will give it up!'"

A community is often surprised and shocked at some crime. The man was seen on the street yesterday, or in his store, but he showed no indication that he would commit such crime to-day. Yet the crime committed to-day is but a regular and natural sequence of what the man did yesterday and the day before. It was but a result of the fearful momentum of all his past habits.

A painter once wanted a picture of innocence, and drew from life the likeness of a child at prayer. The little suppliant was kneeling by his mother. The palms of his hands were reverently pressed together, and his mild blue eyes were upturned with the expression of devotion and peace. The portrait was much prized by the painter, who hung it up on his wall, and called it "Innocence." Years passed away, and the artist became an old man. Still the picture hung there. He had often thought of painting a counterpart,—the picture of guilt,—but had not found the opportunity. At last he effected his purpose by paying a visit to a neighboring jail. On the damp floor of his cell lay a wretched culprit heavily ironed. Wasted was his body, and hollow his eyes; vice was visible in his face. The painter succeeded admirably; and the portraits were hung side by side for "Innocence" and "Guilt." The two originals of the pictures were discovered to be one and the same person,—first, in the innocence of childhood! second, in the degradation of guilt and sin and evil habits.

Will-power can be so educated that it will focus the thought upon the bright side of things, upon objects which lift and elevate. Habits of contentment and goodness may be formed the same as any others.

Walking upon the quarter-deck of a vessel, though at first intolerably confining, becomes by custom so agreeable to a sailor that on shore he often hems himself within the same bounds. Lord Kames tells of a man who, having relinquished the sea for a country life, reared an artificial mount, with a level summit, resembling a quarter-deck not only in shape, but in size, where he generally walked. When Franklin was superintending the erection of some forts on the frontier, as a defense against the Indians, he slept at night in a blanket on a hard floor; and, on his first return to civilized life, he could hardly sleep in a bed. Captain Ross and his crew, having been accustomed, during their polar wanderings, to lie on the frozen snow or a bare rock, afterwards found the accommodations of a whaler too luxurious for them, and the captain exchanged his hammock for a chair.

Two sailors, who had been drinking, took a boat off to their ship. They rowed but made no progress; and presently each began to accuse the other of not working hard enough. Lustily they plied the oars, but after another hour's work still found themselves no farther advanced. By this time they had become tolerably sober; and one of them, looking over the side, said to the other, "Why, Tom, we haven't pulled the anchor up yet." And thus it is with those who are anchored to something of which they are not conscious, perhaps, but which impedes their efforts, even though they do their very best.

"A youth thoughtless, when all the happiness of his home forever depends on the chances or the passions of an hour!" exclaims Ruskin. "A youth thoughtless, when his every act is a foundation-stone of future conduct, and every imagination a fountain 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 nobly thoughtless,—his deathbed. No thinking should ever be left to be done there."

Sir James Paget tells us that a practised musician can play on the piano at the rate of twenty-four notes a second. For each note a nerve current must be transmitted from the brain to the fingers, and from the fingers to the brain. Each note requires three movements of a finger, the bending down and raising up, and at least one lateral, making no less than seventy-two motions in a second, each requiring a distinct effort of the will, and directed unerringly with a certain speed, and a certain force, to a certain place.

Some can do this easily, and be at the same time busily employed in intelligent conversation. Thus, by obeying the law of habit until repetition has formed a second nature, we are able to pass the technique of life almost wholly over to the nerve centers, leaving our minds free to act or enjoy.

All through our lives the brain is constantly educating different parts of the body to form habits which will work automatically from reflex action, and thus is delegated to the nervous system a large part of life's duties. This is nature's wonderful economy to release the brain from the drudgery of individual acts, and leave it free to command all its forces for higher service.

Man's life-work is a masterpiece or a botch, according as each little habit has been perfectly or carelessly formed.

It is said that if you invite one of the devil's children to your home the whole family will follow. So one bad habit seems to have a relationship with all the others. For instance, the one habit of negligence, slovenliness, makes it easier to form others equally bad, until the entire character is honeycombed by the invasion of a family of bad habits.

A man is often shocked when he suddenly discovers that he is considered a liar. He never dreamed of forming such a habit; but the little misrepresentations to gain some temporary end, had, before he was aware of it, made a beaten track in the nerve and brain tissue, until lying has become almost a physical necessity. He thinks he can easily overcome this habit, but he will not. He is bound to it with cords of steel; and only by painful, watchful, and careful repetition of the exact truth, with a special effort of the will-power at each act, can he form a counter trunk-line in the nerve and brain tissue. Society is often shocked by the criminal act of a man who has always been considered upright and true. But, if they could examine the habit-map in his nervous mechanism and brain, they would find the beginnings of a path leading directly to his deed, in the tiny repetitions of what he regarded as trivial acts. All expert and technical education is built upon the theory that these trunk-lines of habit become more and more sensitive to their accustomed stimuli, and respond more and more readily.

We are apt to overlook the physical basis of habit. Every repetition of an act makes us more likely to perform that act, and discovers in our wonderful mechanism a tendency to perpetual repetition, whose facility increases in exact proportion to the repetition. Finally the original act becomes voluntary from a natural reaction.

It is cruel to teach the vicious that they can, by mere force of will-power, turn "about face," and go in the other direction, without explaining to them the scientific process of character-building, through habit-formation. What we do to-day is practically what we did yesterday; and, in spite of resolutions, unless carried out in this scientific way, we shall repeat to-morrow what we have done to-day. How unfortunate that the science of habit-forming is not known by mothers, and taught in our schools, colleges, and universities! It is a science compared with which other departments of education sink into insignificance. The converted man is not always told that the great battle is yet before him; that he must persistently, painfully, prayerfully, and with all the will-power he possesses, break up the old habits, and lay counter lines which will lead to the temple of virtue. He is not told that, in spite of all his efforts, in some unguarded moment, some old switch may be left open, some old desire may flash along the line, and that, possibly before he is aware of it, he may find himself yielding to the old temptation which he had supposed to be conquered forever.

An old soldier was walking home with a beefsteak in one hand and a basket of eggs in the other, when some one yelled, "Halt! Attention!" Instantly the veteran came to a stand; and, as his arms took the position of "attention," eggs and meat went tumbling into the street, the accustomed nerves responding involuntarily to the old stimulus.

Paul evidently understood the force of habit. "I find, then," he declares, "the law, that to me who would do good, evil is present. For I delight in the law of God after the inward man; but I see a different law in my members, warring against the law in my mind, and bringing me into captivity, under the law of sin, which is in my members. O wretched man that I am! who shall deliver me from the body of this death!" He referred to the ancient custom of binding a murderer face to face with the dead body of his victim, until suffocated by its stench and dissolution.

"I would give a world, if I had it," said an unfortunate wretch, "to be a true man; yet in twenty-four hours I may be overcome and disgraced with a shilling's worth of sin."

"How shall I a habit break?" As you did that habit make. As you gathered, you must lose; As you yielded, now refuse. Thread by thread the strands we twist, Till they bind us, neck and wrist; Thread by thread the patient hand Must untwine, ere free we stand; As we builded, stone by stone, We must toil unhelped, alone, Till the wall is overthrown.



CHAPTER XLVIII

THE CIGARETTE

We are so accustomed to the sight and smell of tobacco that we entirely overlook the fact that the tobacco of commerce in all its forms is the product of a poisonous weed. It is first a narcotic and then an irritant poison. It has its place in all toxicological classifications together with its proper antidotes.

Tobacco has not achieved its almost universal popularity without strong opposition. In England King James launched his famous "Counterblaste" against its use. In Turkey, where men and women are alike slaves to its fascination, tobacco was originally forbidden under severe penalties; the loss of the ears, the slitting of the nostrils and even death itself being penalties imposed for the infraction of the law forbidding the use of tobacco in any form. Since then pipes, cigars, snuff and chewing tobacco have become popularized and tobacco in some form or another is used by almost every nation. The last development in the form of tobacco using was the cigarette rolled between the fingers, and the worst form of the cigarette is the manufactured article sold in cheap packages and freely used by boys who in many cases have not reached their teens.

The manufactured American cigarette seems to be especially deadly in its effect. It is said to contain five and one-half per cent. of nicotine, or more than twice as much as the Cuban-made cigarette contains, and more than six times as much as is contained in the Turkish cigarette.

I am not going to quarrel with the use of tobacco in general by mature men. He who has come to man's estate is free to decide for himself whether he shall force a poison on his revolting stomach; for the nausea that follows the first use of tobacco is the stomach's attempt to eject the poison which has been absorbed from pipe, cigar, or cigarette. The grown man, too, is able to determine whether he wants to pay the tax which the use of tobacco levies upon his time, his health, his income and his prosperity. The most that can be said of the use of tobacco is that if habitual users of the narcotic weed are successful in life they must be successful in spite of the use of tobacco and not because of it; for it is opposed to both reason and common sense that the habitual use of a poison in any form should promote the development and exercise of the faculties whose energetic use is essential to success.

What I desire to do is to warn the boy, the growing youth, of the baneful influence of the cigarette on minds yet unformed, on bodies yet in process of development.

The danger of the cigarette to the growing boy lies first in the fact that it poisons the body. That it does not kill at the outset is due to the fact that the dose is small and so slowly increased that the body gradually accommodates itself to this poison as it does to strychnine, arsenic, opium, and other poisons. But all the time there is a slow but steady process of physical degeneration. The digestion is affected, the heart is overtaxed, liver and bowels are deranged in their functions, and as the poison spreads throughout the system there is a gradual physical deterioration which is marked alike in the countenance and in the carriage of the body. Any person who cares to do so may prove for himself the poisonous nature of nicotine which is derived from tobacco and taken into the system by those who chew or smoke.

Dr. J. J. Kellogg says: "A few months ago I had all the nicotine removed from a cigarette, making a solution of it. I injected half the quantity into a frog, with the effect that the frog died almost instantly. The rest was administered to another frog with like effect. Both frogs were full grown, and of average size. The conclusion is evident that a single cigarette contains poison enough to kill two frogs. A boy who smokes twenty cigarettes a day has inhaled enough poison to kill forty frogs. Why does the poison not kill the boy? It does tend to kill him. If not immediately, he is likely to die sooner or later of weak heart, Bright's disease, or some other malady which scientific physicians everywhere now recognize as a natural result of chronic nicotine poisoning."

A chemist, not long since, took the tobacco used in an average cigarette and soaked it in several teaspoonfuls of water and then injected a portion of it under the skin of a cat. The cat almost immediately went into convulsions, and died in fifteen minutes. Dogs have been killed with a single drop of nicotine.

A single drop of nicotine taken from a seasoned pipe, and applied to the tongue of a venomous snake has caused almost instant death.

A Western farmer tried to rear a brood of motherless chickens in his greenhouse. But the chickens did not thrive. They refused to eat; their skins became dry and harsh; their feathers were ruffled; they were feverish and drank constantly. Soon they began to die. As the temperature and general condition of the greenhouse seemed to be especially favorable to the rearing of chickens, the florist was puzzled to determine the cause of their sickness and death. After a careful study of the symptoms he found that the source of the trouble arose from the fumes of the tobacco stems burned in the greenhouse to destroy green flies and destructive plant parasites. Though the chickens had always been removed from the greenhouse during the tobacco fumigation and were not returned while any trace of smoke was apparent to the human senses, it was evident that the soil, air, and leaves of the plants retained enough of the poison to keep the chickens in a condition of semi-intoxication. The conditions were promptly changed, and the chickens removed to other quarters recovered rapidly and in a short time were healthy and lively though they were stunted in growth because of this temporary exposure to the effects of nicotine. The symptoms in the chickens were almost identical with the symptoms of nicotine poisoning in young boys, and the effects were relatively the same.

The most moderate use of the cigarette is injurious to the body and mind of the youth; excessive indulgence leads inevitably to insanity and death.

A young man died in a Minnesota state institution not long ago, who, five years before, had been one of the most promising young physicians of the West. "Still under thirty years at the time of his commitment to the institution," says the newspaper account of his story, "he had already made three discoveries in nervous diseases that had made him looked up to in his profession. But he smoked cigarettes,—smoked incessantly. For a long time the effects of the habit were not apparent on him. In fact, it was not until a patient died on the operating table under his hands, and the young doctor went to pieces, that it became known that he was a victim of the paper pipes. But then he had gone too far. He was a wreck in mind as well as in body, and he ended his days in a maniac's cell."

Another unfortunate victim of the cigarette was, not long ago, taken to the Brooklyn Hospital. He was a fireman on the railroad and was only twenty-one years old. He said he began smoking cigarettes when a mere boy. Before being taken to the hospital he smoked all night for weeks without sleep. When in the hospital he recognized none, but called loudly to everyone he saw to kill him. He would batter his head against the wall in the attempt to commit suicide. At length he was taken to the King's County Hospital in a strait jacket, where death soon relieved him of his sufferings.

Similar results are following the excessive use of cigarettes, every day and in all sections of the country.

"Died of heart failure" is the daily verdict on scores of those who drop down at the desk or in the street. Can not this sudden taking off, of apparently hale and sturdy men be related, oftentimes to the heart weakness caused by the excessive use of tobacco and particularly of cigarettes?

Excessive cigarette smoking increases the heart's action very materially, in some instances twenty-five or thirty beats a minute. Think of the enormous amount of extra work forced upon this delicate organ every twenty-four hours! The pulsations are not only greatly increased but also very materially weakened, so that the blood is not forced to every part of the system, and hence the tissues are not nourished as they would be by means of fewer but stronger, more vigorous pulsations.

The indulgence in cigarettes stunts the growth and retards physical development. An investigation of all the students who entered Yale University during nine years shows that the cigarette smokers were the inferiors, both in weight and lung capacity, of the non-smokers, although they averaged fifteen months older.

It has been said that the universal habit of smoking has made Germany "a spectacled nation." Tobacco greatly irritates the eyes, and injuriously affects the optic nerves. The eyes of boys who use cigarettes to excess grow dull and weak, and every feature shows the mark of the insidious poison. The face is pallid and haggard, the cheeks hollow, the skin drawn, there is a loss of frankness of expression, the eyes are shifty, the movements nervous and uncertain, and all this is but preliminary to the ultimate degradation and loss of self-respect which follow the victim of the cigarette habit, through years of misery and failure.

Side by side with physical deterioration there goes on a process of moral degeneration which robs the cigarette smoking boy of refinement, of manners. The moral depravity which follows cigarette habit is appalling. Lying, cheating, swearing, impurity, loss of courage and manhood, a complete dropping of life's standards, result from such indulgence.

Magistrate Crane, of New York City, says: "Ninety-nine out of a hundred boys between the ages of ten and seventeen years who come before me charged with crime have their fingers disfigured by yellow cigarette stains—I am not a crank on this subject, I do not care to pose as a reformer, but it is my opinion that cigarettes will do more than liquor to ruin boys. When you have arraigned before you boys hopelessly deaf through the excessive use of cigarettes, boys who have stolen their sisters' earnings, boys who absolutely refuse to work, who do nothing but gamble and steal, you can not help seeing that there is some direct cause, and a great deal of this boyhood crime, is, in my mind, easy to trace to the deadly cigarette. There is something in the poison of the cigarette that seems to get into the system of the boy and to destroy all moral fiber."

He gives the following probable course of a boy who begins to smoke cigarettes: "First, cigarettes. Second, beer and liquors. Third, craps—petty gambling. Fourth, horse-racing—gambling on a bigger scale. Fifth, larceny. Sixth, state prison."

Another New York City magistrate says: "Yesterday I had before me thirty-five boy prisoners. Thirty-three of them were confirmed cigarette smokers. To-day, from a reliable source, I have made the grewsome discovery that two of the largest cigarette manufacturers soak their product in a weak solution of opium. The fact that out of thirty-five prisoners thirty-three smoked cigarettes might seem to indicate some direct connection between cigarettes and crime. And when it is announced on authority that most cigarettes are doped with opium, this connection is not hard to understand. Opium is like whisky,—it creates an increasing appetite that grows with what it feeds upon. A growing boy who lets tobacco and opium get a hold upon his senses is never long in coming under the domination of whisky, too. Tobacco is the boy's easiest and most direct road to whisky. When opium is added, the young man's chance of resisting the combined forces and escaping physical, mental, and moral harm is slim, indeed."

I think the above statement regarding the use of opium by manufacturers is exaggerated. Yet we know that young men of great natural ability, everywhere, some of them in high positions, are constantly losing their grip, deteriorating, dropping back, losing their ambition, their push, their stamina, and their energy, because of the cigarette's deadly hold upon them.

Did you ever watch the gradual deterioration of the cigarette smoker, the gradual withdrawal of manliness and character, the fading out of purpose, the decline of ambition; the substitution of the beastly for the manly, the decline of the divine and the ascendency of the brute?

A very interesting study this, to watch the gradual withdrawal from the face of all that was manly and clean, and all that makes for success. We can see where purity left him and was gradually replaced by vulgarity, and where he began to be cursed by commonness.

We can see the point at which he could begin to do a bad job or a poor day's work without feeling troubled about it.

We can tell when he began to lose his great pride in his personal appearance, when he began to leave his room in the morning and to go to his work without being perfectly groomed. Only a little while before he would have been greatly mortified to have been seen by his employers and associates with slovenly dress; but now baggy trousers, unblackened shoes, soiled linen, frayed neck-tie do not trouble him.

He is not quite as conscientious about his work as he used to be. He can leave a half-finished job, and cut his hours and rob his employer a little here and there without being troubled seriously. He can write a slipshod letter. He isn't particular about his spelling, punctuation, or handwriting, as formerly. He doesn't mind a little deceit.

Vulgarity no longer shocks him. He does not blush at the unclean test. Womanhood is not as sacred to him as in his innocent days. He does not reverence women as formerly; and he finds himself laughing at the coarse jest and the common remarks about them among his associates, when once he would have resented and turned away in disgust.

Dr. Lewis Bremer, late physician at St. Vincent's Institute for the Insane says, "Basing my opinion upon my experience gained in private sanitariums and hospitals, I will broadly state that the boy who smokes cigarettes at seven will drink whisky at fourteen, take morphine at twenty-five, and wind up at thirty with cocaine and the rest of the narcotics."

The saddest effects of cigarette smoking are mental. The physical signs of deterioration have their mental correspondencies. Sir William Hamilton said: "There is nothing great in matter but man; there is nothing great in man but mind." The cigarette smoker takes man's distinguishing faculty and uncrowns it. He "puts an enemy in his mouth to steal away his brains."

Anything which impairs one's success capital, which cuts down his achievement and makes him a possible failure when he might have been a grand success, is a crime against him. Anything which benumbs the senses, deadens the sensibilities, dulls the mental faculties, and takes the edge off one's ability, is a deadly enemy, and there is nothing else which effects all this so quickly as the cigarette. It is said that within the past fifty years not a student at Harvard University who used tobacco has been graduated at the head of his class, although, on the average, five out of six use tobacco.

The symptoms of a cigarette victim resembles those of an opium eater. A gradual deadening, benumbing influence creeps all through the mental and moral faculties; the standards all drop to a lower level; the whole average of life is cut down, the victim loses that power of mental grasp, the grip of mind which he once had. In place of his former energy and vim and push, he is more and more inclined to take things easy and to slide along the line of the least resistance. He becomes less and less progressive. He dreams more and acts less. Hard work becomes more and more irksome and repulsive, until work seems drudgery to him.

Professor William McKeever, of the Kansas Agricultural College, in the course of his findings after an exhaustive study of "The Cigarette Smoking Boy" presents facts which are as appalling as they are undeniable:

"For the past eight years I have been tracing out the cigarette boy's biography and I have found that in practically all cases the lad began his smoking habit clandestinely and with little thought of its seriousness while the fond parents perhaps believed that their boy was too good to engage in such practise.