Man must work. That is certain as the sun. But he may work grudgingly, or he may work gratefully, or he may work as a machine. He cannot always choose his work, but he can do it in a generous temper and with an up-looking heart. There is no work so rude that he may not exalt it; there is no work so impassive that he may not breathe a soul into it; there is no work so dull that he may not enliven it.-Henry Giles. Not least, 'tis ever my delight -Philip Henry Savage. What causes the majority of women to be so little touched by friendship is that it is insipid when they have once tasted of love.-LaRochefoucault. Righteousness is not that ye turn your faces to the east or west; but righteousness is to him who believeth in God and the last day and angels and revealed books and prophets; who giveth cheerfully from his substance to kinsman, orphans, the needy, the wayfarer and to them that ask; who freeth the prisoner and the slave; who offereth prayers at their appointed times and giveth the ordained alms to them who fulfill the covenants to which they have bound themselves and who are patient in times of distress, and pain, and struggle: These are they who are sincere and who fear to do evil.-The Duties of Man, from The Koran. Riches are for spending, and spending for honor and good action. Therefore, extraordinary expense must be limited. by the worth of the occasion; for voluntary undoing may be as well for a man's country as for the kingdom of heaven; but ordinary expense ought to be limited. by a man's estate, and governed with such regard as it be within his compass; and not subject to deceit and abuse of servants, and ordered to the best show, that the bills may be less than the estimation abroad. Certainly, if a man will keep but of even hand his ordinary expenses.-Bacon. If THE OLD AND THE NEW you would find clean morals, powerful characters, and men and women of genuine worth, go among those who are working with body, mind and soul, for the building up of the new. It is among such people that you find real purity; and it is the work of such people that will save the nation, that will preserve the good of society, and that will destroy, remove and consume the useless, the effete and the unclean in the world today, that a greater civilization, and a finer race than ever known before may appear upon this planet. There may be exceptions; there always are exceptions; but wherever you find the old order, there you also find weakness, laxity and decay. And vice versa, wherever you find the building of the new order, there there you find purity, strength, nobleness, worth, sincerity, and a genuine appreciation of all that is true, lofty, superior and ideal in life. When you go where the old order obtains, you are inclined to believe in total depravity; but when you enter the pastures green of the new order, you exclaim with unbounded joy, "What a piece of work is man," destined indeed to become nothing less than a god. ALWAYS ROOM AT THE TOP Are there any ten-thousand-a-year men loafing around your town? If there are, jobs are waiting, crying, begging for them-somewhere. John Arbuckle of coffee fame advertised for one not long ago. Thomas A. Edison declares that the world is full of three-thousand-a-year men, but mighty shy on the higher-priced variety, and now George W. Perkins, partner until recently of J. P. Morgan, insists that the ten-thousand variety are quite as scarce as bicuspids in the head of a chicken. Why? Well, for a number of reasons. Among others: It takes years for a man to prepare himself for $10,000 jobs, and this lack of preparation is the cause of the dearth of these men. Inventions have so crowded the commercial arena that man has not been able to cope with them as fast as they appear. The man who reaches the $10,000 point is he who not only knows his work thoroughly, but that of the man ahead of him. The $10,000 man is only possible after a long apprenticeship in the school of experience the everyday contact of man to man. No longer is it a question of brawn as much as brain. The day has come when we need statesmanship in business and business in statesmanship. The art of the $10,000 man is to supervise, regulate and control the actions of men. "The big men today are those who have gone through every phase of experience of the business in which they are engaged. They are drawn from all conditions of men," Mr. Perkins told a New York Evening World reporter. "Gone is the day when people were told by the church and the state how and what to think; gone, never to return. The thoughts of one man in one city this morning are the thoughts of all men in all cities this afternoon. "And," he said later, "the ten-thousand-dollar man must be honest The day has come when to be honest means not technically, legally honest, but broadly, humanely honest-honest in thought, in purpose, in act. Man is still selfish, and this must be seriously reckoned with in calculating what he will do in his relationship with his fellows." MANNERS ARE A VARNISH Life expresses. A statue has no tongue, and needs none. Good tableaux do not need declamation. Nature tells every secret once. Yes, but in man she tells it all the time by form, attitude, gesture, mien, face and parts of the face, and by the whole action of the machine. The visible carriage, or action of the individual, as resulting from his organization and his will combined, we call manners. What are they but thought entering the hands and feet, controlling the movements of the body, the speech and the behavior? Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love-now repeated or hardened into usage. They form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew drops which give such a dress to the morning meadows. Manners are very communicable; men catch them from each other. Genius invents fine manners, which the baron and baroness copy very fast, and, by the advantage of a palace, better the instruction. They stereotype the lesson they have learned into a mode.-Emerson. "ATMOSPHERE" Everyone is helped or hindered by the atmosphere in which he lives. For this he is sometimes responsible. He creates it himself. It is due to his It is due to his life of compromise, or his hidden sin. Not infrequently it is forced upon him by the influence of others, and he struggles with it like one who is in a death conflict. Atmosphere is the explanation for the success of some and the failure of others. The bracing air of the mountains has no greater influence for physical health than the spiritual and moral atmosphere in which we live exerts for the strengthening of character. The depressing miasma of the marsh is no more killing than are the low moral conditions with which we are surrounded. When in business corporations there are low ideals with questionable or dishonest practices permitted, all in the place of business, from proprietor to porter, will suffer. . When in the household there is bickering, jealousy and unkindness, which is not followed by an acknowledgment of wrong, the home loses its sacredness, and from it boys and girls drift to ruin and the divorce court has a new applicant. THE GROWTH OF HABITS A Philadelphia embezzler says that he can remember the time in his life when the owing of $3 worried him. But owing money may, like many other things, become a habit and sear the conscience. He acquired the habit and in late years. felt no uneasiness in borrowing all the money he could get his hands on, even without waiting for the owner's consent. "How use doth breed a habit in a man!" Habit lies at the basis of all'our ordinary action. Everything that we do repeatedly becomes easy and habitual. David Hume declared that the habit of seeing the bright side of things is worth more than a thousand pounds a year. Diligence, economy and perseverance are habits that carry life as steadily to success as favoring winds carry a ship at sea. Depravity is not an inheritance, but a character formed by persistent habits. And rectitude is only the confirmed habit of doing what is right. The truth is not simply that we may form habits. We must form habits. We cannot do or say or think or feel anything without leaving a definite mark on the nervous organism which more or less affects all succeeding action or speech or thought or feeling. Could the young but realize how soon they will become mere walking bundles of habits they would take the care to have those habits helpful instead of When in the church there is a spirit of worldliness, censoriousness, exclusiveness, cold heartedness, the minister's sermon is killed, the audiences are thinned out and the pews are slowly yet harmful.-Pittsburgh Press. surely emptied. "The secret of possessing an atmosphere which is always uplifting, strengthening, ennobling, is to walk with Christ. He waits to lead you on. He will never fail you.-J. Wilbur Chapman. Friendship is one soul in two bodies. -Diogenes. But indeed conviction, were it never so excellent, is worthless till it converts itsef into conduct.-Carlyle. Life never turns its best side toward us until we have turned our best side toward it.-Marden. WOMEN TRAVEL IN COMFORT It is getting to be less and less of an ordeal for a woman to travel, and even travel alone, from the one ocean to the other, says a writer in Harper's Weekly. On the smartest of the excess fare limiteds women's maids are already part of the established equipment. The washrooms and the toilet rooms at the woman's end of the open berth sleeper each year come closer to the size of the men's comfortable rooms of that sort. And woman even threatens the supremacy of the, to her, unbearable open berth sleeper. She has been to Europe enough times already to bring back a demand for an increasing number of stateroom cars of one sort or another. And one of J. J. Hill's big railroads has been giving her parlor accommodations of her very own on its through limited trains-but on that precise thing the traffic man was not quite sure of himself. It is not always easy to make women herd by themselves in a car from which men are excluded. That experiment has been tried many times-and generally abandoned. When a road up in the Northwest first placed rocking chairs in all its passenger stations, large and small, it made an early concession to the importance of woman on its trains. The Pullman Com pany, in providing paper bags for women's hats, made another, the ladies' maids were a third-the modern railroad has awakened fully to the revenue possibilities of the eternal feminine. It will move more rapidly for her comfort in the future than ever it has in the past. That is one of the possibilities of a business which today neglects no profitable opportunities of any sort. A PRACTICAL PHILOSOPHY Truth is everywhere, is to break down the fences of organization and to give freedom in the interpretation of its great principles. Therefore, its spread and dissemination will know no limit, until all the earth shall believe it, and each man utter it in his own way and live it as he sees it; and all the rest shall bless him in the saying and in the doing. The way of thinking and feeling that is a practical philosophy may be briefly stated. Let two sentences cover the ground: All the presence there is, is Good. All the power there is, is Mind. Infinite are the ways in which these principles can be stated, and every new statement carries new realization and new power. With these statements simply as hypotheses, a man can enter into a new life, with transformations taking place everywhere. They illuminate the whole world. The best in philosophy, in poetry, in civilization is uncovered by the flash of their penetrating rays. Let them receive a place in your thinking and feeling. Watch how evils diminish and disappear from your life as you are true in your thoughts and feelings to the allness of the Good. Observe the powers that rise in you and exercise themselves as you know yourself to be Mind, not matter and your world to be mental and not material. It is very simple. Greatness is always simple. It is here to stay. You will accept the great Truth sooner or later. Wise are you if you accept it soon. The Master Mind. Man is arrogant in proportion to his ignorance.-Edward Bulwer Lytton. |