Not Above Your Business

B

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

Y a law of nature, the faults indulged in our childhood become the vices of our mature years. The little purloinings and peccadillos of the lad become the embezzlements and rascalities of the man. The carelessness, vanity, and pertness of the maid develop into the extravagance, frivolity, and shrewishness of the woman. All the life of the oak lies hidden in the tiny acorn; and the sins and crimes of after years lie hidden in the faults of the child. All human experience has shown that it is far easier to prevent an evil than to remedy it. A child can destroy many acorns in a brief time, but the strength of many men is required for many days to uproot the forest of oaks, when those acorns are fully grown. All the men of violence and bloody crimes were once innocent children, and their deeds of atrocity that shock the world are the natural growth of evils nourished in childhood and youth. The boy who, as a child and lad, took huge delight in pulling the wings from flies and beetles, and impaling them on sharp splints, naturally grew into that Nero, who, as emperor, ordered the Christians of Rome to be wrapped in flax and pitch, and tied to stakes in his royal gardens, and then burned them as candles wherewith to illuminate the feasts at which he and his lecherous crew were wont to recline and shout and revel, the while his human, shrieking torches were slowly burning to their miserable sockets. If those childish evils had but been repressed, what a foul blot on civilized humanity would have been prevented.

Experience has amply proved that parents are responsible

almost wholly for the faults of the child, either transmitting them to him by heredity, or else cultivating them in him by indulgence, or by unwise teaching. In the first case, we become but the reproduction of our ancestors, and have, at times, to confess sorrowfully to ourselves, at least, that we inherit their vices, even if we are not heirs to their virtues. In the second instance, we are our parents repeated, plus the faults they developed in us. Our children of to-day are to be the parents of to-morrow, and whatever of faults we allow or plant in them, whatever of wrong ideas we give them, will inevitably bear fruit after its kind to trammel them later in their efforts for success in life, and it may be to work their ruin. Or should they win success in defiance of such faults, as some have nobly done, nevertheless those faults in some form and degree will be handed down to the coming generation, for no man ever yet has escaped from this law of heredity.

The seeds of evil, like the seeds of plants, always produce after their kind. It is with the hope of aiding you to avoid an evil already too extensive that this reference is again made to the great primal law of nature, heredity. Plant faults, and you will reap vices. Plant evils, and you will reap crimes. The future is in your keeping. You are to be the future men and women of honor, or of shame. You are to be distinguished for noble deeds, perchance for heroic daring, or you are to be the slaves of sensuality, and the purveyors, if not the creators, of vice. And which of these you become will be almost wholly determined before you are twenty years old. If, in those forming years, you are vain, inconstant, untruthful, and vicious, you will be likely to continue so to old age. On the other hand, should you have formed correct habits of life ere then, success is sure to come to you. This evil but just referred to is the growing disposition among the young to despise manual labor, and seek for a genteel living. In some homes, indeed, the young are taught by precept and by example the folly that only professional, or mercantile, or office work is respectable; that if one were to hold a plow, or drive a plane, or run a lathe

or loom, or work in a kitchen, or preside at a washtub for a living, it would immensely lower, if not altogether ruin, one's dignity. In consequence, what are called the professions are crowded with those not fitted either by their natural gifts or by their acquirements, to succeed in them, and who by the very poverty of their surroundings are constantly subject to temptations to vice. If they were not so heavily burdened by dignity, they might soon be above the want or genteel beggary of their present positions, and pass their days in prosperity and usefulness by simply doing some honest, honorable, manual work. But too often their "dignity" forbids, and so some suffer in silence from want, and some resort to questionable, dishonest, and vicious methods to gain a livelihood.

Very much of the forgery and embezzlement of the day is due to the desire to maintain this false dignity of position without hard work. Men are being stimulated by the fabulous fortunes of a few men of note to despise the slow, plodding ways of the fathers of the republic, and they plunge into unwise speculations, hoping thus to amass a fortune quickly, or they tax the energies of mind and body to their utmost in the mad race for position, or wealth, and are wrecked in nerve and brain while yet in the flush of their manhood. The wise content ⚫with a frugal living and a modest competence has too largely departed, and in its place has come a feverish anxiety for much gold, and for luxury of dress and appointments, that is destined to undermine, slowly, perhaps, but none the less surely, the health and morals of the American people. It is time to call a halt, and to remember that there are other and nobler things to seek for than money. I would not have you despise money. It is a most useful gift of God to men. Yet who was ever satisfied with his pots of gold? If, however, that is what you are determined on seeking, bear in mind that it does not require a very high grade of brains or of morals to get it. Some of the most successful money-getters that the world has ever known never had an atom of greatness either in brain or soul, and, when the Almighty took away the money from them, he found

only the skeleton of a man. The intellect was shriveled into a parchment for recording stocks and bonds, while the spirit had become simply a mummy's bag to take in gold. No, it does not take a first-class man to get money. A gambler can often get much of it; so can a thief; so can a rumseller. Indeed, such persons often get more of it, and in far less time, than an honest merchant, or a hard-working farmer or mechanic can. And the reason is very plain. They are never above their business. They could not succeed in it if they were. The business brings money, and all their energies are bent to the one thing of They may despise the business, and being in it, but the "easy money" it The instant they get above their busiThey must always be And it is just so in all

"getting on" by it. despise themselves for yields holds them to it. ness, that instant the business stops. down to its level in order to carry it on. honorable lines of industry. No man ever makes much of a success in any one of them who gets above the business in which he is engaged. The moment he does, that instant his failure in it is certain.

The men of honor who amass honest fortunes by honorable means are never above their business. No part of it is so lowly as to be despised or neglected by them. They recognize the all-important fact in life that no necessary work can ever be dishonorable or degrading to any man. If you would get on in the world, never despise any honest, hard work, or worker. Pride, like modesty, is a most excellent thing in its place, but it is often assumed, and is sometimes counterfeited, and then it becomes grotesque, or contemptible. Many a young man is "too proud" to carry a bundle through the street for his employer, or even for himself, and orders it sent by the porter, but the same young man is not "too proud" to shirk work, and indulge in hours of leisure at his employer's expense, or to indulge in indelicate speech, or to fellowship vicious companions, any one of which things will lower his dignity more in an hour than it would to drive a dray for a twelvemonth. Peter the Great, though Czar of all the Russias, was never so great

as when, in order to elevate his half-savage countrymen by inducing them to become shipbuilders, he laid aside his royal robes, and, disguising himself as an humble workman, entered the East India Company's dockyard at Amsterdam to learn the art of shipbuilding for their sakes, and lived in the lowly lodgings of his fellow laborers, and ate their kind of food, and was as one of them. Royalty's dignity was not tarnished by the deed, but how honorable shipbuilding became to all noble minded Russians when it was known that the Czar had learned it in order to benefit them.

John Marshall, for thirty-five years the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, who had been general in the army, member of Congress, senator, and envoy to France, and his country's greatest constitutional lawyer, did not think it belittled him to carry from the market his family supplies. On one occasion, a pompous young fellow was loudly bewailing his inability to find an errand man to carry a turkey for him, when the chief justice, saying he was going past the young man's house, offered to take it home for him. The young man, who did not know Mr. Marshall, gladly accepted the offer, and contentedly trotted along by his side, and, when the house was reached, offered to pay him for the errand. When this was refused, the young sprout made inquiry as to "who that obliging old man was," and, when he was told, it began to dawn on him that there was a vast difference between dignity and dudism.

Boston's millionaire merchant and philanthropist, Amos Lawrence, once had a clerk in his employ who was requested to take home to a lady a small purchase, but he declined to do it on the ground that it would "compromise his dignity," whereupon Mr. Lawrence, hoping to teach him a lesson, carried it himself, much to the consternation of the fop, who had mistaken vanity for dignity. Unfortunately a few like him survive to this day, but they never get above a clerkship.