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The Elements of Worth in the IndividualToC
Our scientific experts are investigating the wastes of society. Their reports indicate that man is a great spendthrift. He seems not so much a husbandman, making the most of the treasures of his life-garden, as a robber looting a storehouse for booty.
Travelers affirm that one part of the northern pineries has been wasted by man's careless fires and much of the rest by his reckless axe. Coal experts insist that a large percentage of heat passes out of the chimney. The new chemistry claims that not a little of the precious ore is cast upon the slag heap.
In the fields the farmers overlook some ears of corn and pass by some handfuls of wheat. In the work-room the scissors leave selvage and remnant. In the mill the saw and plane refuse slabs and edges. In the kitchen a part of what the husband carries in, the wife's wasteful cooking casts out. But the secondary wastes involve still heavier losses. Man's carelessness in the factory breaks delicate machinery, his ignorance spoils raw materials, his idleness burns out boilers, his recklessness blows up engines; and no skill of manager in juggling figures in January can retrieve the wastes of June.
Passing through the country the traveler finds the plow rusting in the furrow, mowers and reapers exposed to rain and snow; passing through the city he sees the docks lined with boats, the alleys full of broken vehicles, while the streets exhibit some broken-down men. A journey through life is like a journey along the trackway of a retreating army; here a valuable ammunition wagon is abandoned because a careless smith left a flaw in the tire; there a brass cannon is deserted because a tug was improperly stitched; yonder a brave soldier lies dying in the thicket where he fell because excited men forgot the use of an ambulance. What with the wastes of intemperance and ignorance, of idleness and class wars, the losses of society are enormous. But man's prodigality with his material treasures does but interpret his wastefulness of the greater riches of mind and heart. Life's chief destructions are in the city of man's soul. Many persons seem to be trying to solve this problem: "Given a soul stored with great treasure, and three score and ten years for happiness and usefulness, how shall one kill the time and waste the treasure?" Man's pride over his casket stored with gems must be modified by the reflection that daily his pearls are cast before swine, that should have been woven into coronets.
Man's evident failure to make the most out of his material life suggests a study of the elements in each citizen that make him of value to his age and community. What are the measurements of mankind, and why is it that daily some add new treasures to the storehouse of civilization, while others take from and waste the store already accumulated? These are questions of vital import. Many and varied estimates of man's value have been made. Statisticians reckon the average man's value at $600 a year. Each worker in wood, iron or brass stands for an engine or industrial plant worth $10,000, producing at 6 per cent. an income of $600. The death of the average workman, therefore, is equivalent to the destruction of a $10,000 mill or engine. The economic loss through the non-productivity of 20,000 drunkards is equal to one Chicago fire involving two hundred millions. Of course, some men produce less and others more than $600 a year; and some there are who have no industrial value—non-producers, according to Adam Smith; paupers, according to John Stuart Mill; thieves, according to Paul, who says, "Let him that stole steal no more, but rather work." In this group let us include the tramps, who hold that the world owes them a living; these are they who fail to realize that society has given them support through infancy and childhood; has given them language, literature, liberty. Wise men know that the noblest and strongest have received from society a thousandfold more than they can ever repay, though they vex all the days and nights with ceaseless toil. In this number of non-sufficing persons are to be included the paupers—paupers plebeian, supported in the poorhouse by many citizens; paupers patrician, supported in palace by one citizen, generally father or ancestor; the two classes differing in that one is the foam at the top of the glass and the other the dregs at the bottom. To these two groups let us add the social parasites, represented by thieves, drunkards, and persons of the baser sort whose business it is to trade in human passion. We revolt from the red aphides upon the plant, the caterpillar upon the tree, the vermin upon bird or beast. How much more do we revolt from those human vermin whose business it is to propagate parasites upon the body politic! The condemnation of life is that a man consumes more than he produces, taking out of society's granary that which other hands have put in. The praise of life is that one is self-sufficing, taking less out than he put into the storehouse of civilization.
A man's original capital comes through his ancestry. Nature invests the grandsire's ability, and compounds it for the grandson. Plato says: "The child is a charioteer driving two steeds up the long life-hill; one steed is white, representing our best impulses; one steed is dark, standing for our worst passions." Who gave these steeds their color? Our fathers, Plato replies, and the child may not change one hair, white or black. Oliver Wendell Holmes would have us think that a man's value is determined a hundred years before his birth. The ancestral ground slopes upward toward the mountain-minded man. The great never appear suddenly. Seven generations of clergymen make ready for Emerson, each a signboard pointing to the coming philosopher. The Mississippi has power to bear up fleets for war or peace because the storms of a thousand summers and the snows of a thousand winters have lent depth and power. The measure of greatness in a man is determined by the intellectual streams and moral tides flowing down from the ancestral hills and emptying into the human soul. The Bach family included one hundred and twenty musicians. Paganini was born with muscles in his wrists like whipcords. What was unique in Socrates was first unique in Sophroniscus. John ran before Jesus, but Zacharias foretold John. No electricity along rope wires, and no vital living truths along rope nerves to spongy brain. There are millions in our world who have been rendered physical and moral paupers by the sins of their ancestors. Their forefathers doomed them to be hewers of wood and drawers of water. A century must pass before one of their children can crowd his way up and show strength enough to shape a tool, outline a code, create an industry, reform a wrong. Despotic governments have stunted men—made them thin-blooded and low-browed, all backhead and no forehead. Each child has been likened to a cask whose staves represent trees growing on hills distant and widely separated; some staves are sound and solid, standing for right-living ancestors; some are worm eaten, standing for ancestors whose integrity was consumed by vices. At birth all the staves are brought together in the infant cask—empty, but to be filled by parents and teachers and friends. As the waste-barrel in the alley is filled with refuse and filth, so the orphan waifs in our streets are made receptacles of all vicious thoughts and deeds. These children are not so much born as damned into life. But how different is the childhood of some others. On the Easter day, in foreign cathedrals, a beauteous vase is placed beside the altar, and as the multitudes crowd forward and the solemn procession moves up the aisles, men and women cast into the vase their gifts of gold and silver and pearls and lace and rich textures. The well-born child seems to be such a vase, unspeakably beautiful, filled with knowledges and integrities more precious than gold and pearls. "Let him who would be great select the right parents," was the keen dictum of President Dwight.
By the influence of the racial element, the laborer in northern Europe, viewed as a producing machine, doubles the industrial output of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race. For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, the warm Venetian blood has given few