The University of Hard Knocks Part 13

"Going to have a lecture."

"Lecture?" said with a s.h.i.+ver as tho it was "small pox." "I ain't goin.' I don't like lectures."

The speaker is perfectly honest. He has no place to put a lecture. I am not saying that he should attend my lecture, but I am grieving at what underlies his remark. He does not want to think. He wants to follow his nose around. Other people generally lead his nose. The man who will not make the effort to think is the great menace to the nation. The crowd that drifts and lives for amus.e.m.e.nt is the crowd that finds itself back near the caboose, and as the train of progress leaves them, they wail, they "never had no chanct." They want to start a new party to reform the government.

The Lure of the City

Do you ever get lonely in a city? How few men and women there. A jam of people, most of them imitations--most of them trying to look like they get more salary. Poor, hungry, doped b.u.t.terflies of the bright lights,--hopers, suckers and straphangers! Down the great white way they go chasing amus.e.m.e.nt to find happiness. They must be amused every moment, even when they eat, or they will have to be alone with their empty lives.

The Prodigal Son came to himself afterwhile and thought upon his ways.

Then he arose and went to his father's house. Whenever one will stop chasing amus.e.m.e.nts long enough to think upon his ways, he will arise and go to his father's house of wisdom. But there is no hope for the person who will not stop and think. And the devil works day and night s.h.i.+fts keeping the crowd moving on.

That is why the crowd is not furnis.h.i.+ng the strong men and women.

We must have amus.e.m.e.nt and relaxation. Study your muscles. First they contract, then they relax. But the muscle that goes on continually relaxing is degenerating. And the individual, the community, the nation that goes on relaxing without contracting--without struggling and overcoming--is degenerating.

The more you study your muscles, the more you learn that while one muscle is relaxing another is contracting. So you must learn that your real relaxation, vacation and amus.e.m.e.nt, are merely changing over to contracting another set of muscles.

Go to the bank president's office, go to the railroad magnate's office, go to the great pulpit, to the college chair--go to any place of great responsibility in a city and ask the one who fills the place, "Were you born in this city?"

The reply is almost a monotony. "I born in this city? No, I was born in Poseyville, Indiana, and I came to this city forty years ago and went to work at the bottom."

He glows as he tells you of some log-cabin home, hillside or farmside where he struggled as a boy. Personally, I think this log-cabin ancestry has been over-confessed for campaign purposes. Give us steam heat and push-b.u.t.tons. There is no virtue in a log-cabin, save that there the necessity for struggle that brings strength is most in evidence. There the young person gets the struggle and service that makes for strength and greatness. And as that young person comes to the city and shakes in the barrel among the weaklings of the artificial life, he rises above them like the eagle soars above a lot of chattering sparrows.

The cities do not make their own steam. The little minority from the farms controls the majority. The red blood of redemption flows from the country year by year into the national arteries, else these cities would drop off the map.

If it were not for Poseyville, Indiana, Chicago would disappear. If it were not for Poseyville, New York would disintegrate for lack of leaders.

"Hep" and "Pep" for the Home Town

But so many of the home towns of America are sick. Many are dying. Many are dead.

It is the lure of the city--and the lure-lessness of the country. The town the young people leave is the town the young people ought to leave. Somebody says, "The reason so many young people go to h.e.l.l is because they have no other place to go."

What is the matter with the small town? Do not blame it all upon the city mail order house. With rural delivery, daily papers, telephones, centralized schools, automobiles and good roads, there are no more delightful places in the world to live than in the country or in the small town. They have the city advantages plus suns.h.i.+ne, air and freedom that the crowded cities cannot have.

I asked the keeper who was showing me thru the insane asylum at Weston, West Virginia, "You say you have nearly two thousand insane people in this inst.i.tution and only a score of guards to keep them in. Aren't you in danger? What is to hinder these insane people from getting together, organizing, overpowering the few guards and breaking out?"

The keeper was not in the least alarmed at the question. He smiled.

"Many people say that. But they don't understand. If these people could get together they wouldn't be in this asylum. They are insane. No two of them can agree upon how to get together and how to break out. So a few of us can hold them."

It would be almost unkind to carry this further, but I have been thinking ever since that about three-fourths of the small towns of America have one thing in common with the asylum folks--they can't get together. They cannot organize for the public good. They break up into little antagonistic social, business and even religious factions and neutralize each other's efforts.

A lot of struggling churches compete with each other instead of ma.s.sing for the common good. And when the churches fight, the devil stays neutral and furnishes the munitions for both sides.

So the home towns stagnate and the young people with visions go away to the cities where opportunity seems to beckon. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them will jostle with the straphangers all their lives, mere wheels turning round in a huge machine. Ninety-nine out of a hundred of them might have had a larger opportunity right back in the home town, had the town been awake and united and inviting.

We must make the home town the brightest, most attractive, most promising place for the young people. No home town can afford to spend its years raising crops of young people for the cities. That is the worst kind of soil impoverishment--all going out and nothing coming back. That is the drain that devitalizes the home towns more than all the city mail order houses.

America is to be great, not in the greatness of a few crowded cities, but in the greatness of innumerable home towns.

The slogan today should be, For G.o.d and Home and the Home Town!

A School of Struggle

Dr. Henry Solomon Lehr, founder of the Ohio Northern University at Ada, Ohio, one of Ohio's greatest educators, used to say with pride, "Our students come to school; they are not sent."

He encouraged his students to be self-supporting, and most of them were working their way thru school. He made the school calendar and courses elastic to accommodate them. He saw the need of combining the school of books with the school of struggle. He organized his school into competing groups, so that the student who had no struggle in his life would at least have to struggle with the others during his schooling.

He pitted cla.s.s against cla.s.s. He organized great literary and debating societies to compete with each other. He arranged contests for the military department. His school was one surging ma.s.s of contestants.

Yet each student felt no compulsion. Rather he felt that he was initiating an individual or cla.s.s effort to win. The literary societies vied with each other in their programs and in getting new members, going every term to unbelievable efforts to win over the others. They would go miles out on the trains to intercept new students, even to their homes in other states. Each old student pledged new students in his home country. The military companies turned the school into a military camp for weeks each year, scarcely sleeping while drilling for a contest flag.

Those students went out into the world trained to struggle. I do not believe there is a school in America with a greater alumni roll of men and women of uniformly greater achievement.

I believe the most useful schools today are schools of struggle schools offering encouragement and facilities for young people to work their way thru and to act upon their own initiative.

Men Needed More Than Millions

We are trying a new educational experiment today.

The old "deestrick" school is pa.s.sing, and with it the small academies and colleges, each with its handful of students around a teacher, as in the old days of the lyceum in Athens, when the pupils sat around the philosopher in the groves.

From these schools came the makers and the preservers of the nation.

Today we are building wonderful public schools with equally wonderful equipment. Today we are replacing the many small colleges with a few great centralized state normal schools and state universities. We are spending millions upon them in laboratories, equipment and maintenance.

Today we scour the earth for specialists to sit in the chairs and speak the last word in every department of human research.

O, how the students of the "dark ages" would have rejoiced to see this day! Many of them never saw a germ!

But each student has the same definite effort to make in a.s.similation today as then. Knowing and growing demand the same personal struggle in the cus.h.i.+ons of the "frat" house as back on the old oak-slab bench with its splintered side up.