The University of Hard Knocks Part 14

I am anxiously awaiting the results. I am hoping that the boys and girls who come out in case-lots from these huge school plants will not be rows of lithographed cans on the shelves of life. I am hoping they will not be shorn of their individuality, but will have it stimulated and unfettered. I am anxious that they be not veneered but inspired, not denatured but discovered.

All this school machinery is only machinery. Back of it must be men--great men. I am anxious that the modern school have the modern equipment demanded to serve the present age. But I am more anxious that each student come in vital touch with great men. We get life from life, not from laboratories, and we have life more abundantly as our lives touch greater lives.

A school is vastly more than machinery, methods, microscopes and millions.

Many a small school struggling to live thinks that all it needs is endowment, when the fact is that its struggle for existence and the spirit of its teachers are its greatest endowment. And sometimes when the money endowment comes the spiritual endowment goes in fatty degeneration. Some schools seem to have been visited by calamities in the financial prosperity that has engulfed them.

Can we keep men before millions, and keep our ideals untainted by foundations? That is the question the age is asking.

You and I are very much interested in the answer.

Chapter VII

The Salvation of a "Sucker"

The Fiddle and the Tuning

HOW long it takes to learn things! I think I was thirty-four years learning one sentence, "You can't get something for nothing." I have not yet learned it. Every few days I stumble over it somewhere.

For that sentence utters one of the fundamentals of life that underlies every field of activity.

What is knowing?

One day a manufacturer took me thru his factory where he makes fiddles.

Not violins--fiddles.

A violin is only a fiddle with a college education.

I have had the feeling ever since that you and I come into this world like the fiddle comes from the factory. We have a body and a neck. That is about all there is either to us or to the fiddle. We are empty. We have no strings. We have no bow--yet!

When the human fiddles are about six years old they go into the primary schools and up thru the grammar grades, and get the first string--the little E string. The trouble is so many of these human fiddles think they are an orchestra right away. They want to quit school and go fiddling thru life on this one string!

We must show these little fiddles they must go back into school and go up thru all the departments and inst.i.tutions necessary to give them the full complement of strings for their life symphonies.

After all this there comes the commencement, and the violin comes forth with the E, A, D and G strings all in place. Educated now? Why is a violin? To wear strings? Gussie got that far and gave a lot of discord.

The violin is to give music.

So there is much yet to do after getting the strings. All the book and college can do is to give the strings--the tools. After that the violin must go into the great tuning school of life. Here the pegs are turned and the strings are put in tune. The music is the knowing. Learning is tuning.

You do not know what you have memorized, you know what you have vitalized, what you have written in the book of experience.

Gussie says, "I have read it in a book." Bill Whackem says, "I know!"

Reading and Knowing

All of us are Christopher Columbuses, discovering the same new-old continents of Truth. That is the true happiness of life--discovering Truth. We read things in a book and have a hazy idea of them. We hear the preacher utter truths and we say with little feeling, "Yes, that is so." We hear the great truths of life over and over and we are not excited. Truth never excites--it is falsehood that excites--until we discover it in our lives. Until we see it with our own eyes. Then there is a thrill. Then the old truth becomes a new blessing. Then the oldest, driest plat.i.tude crystallizes into a flas.h.i.+ng jewel to delight and enrich our consciousness. This joy of discovery is the joy of living.

There is such a difference between reading a thing and knowing a thing.

We could read a thousand descriptions of the sun and not know the sun as in one glimpse of it with our own eyes.

I used to stand in the row of blessed little rascals in the "deestrick"

school and read from McGuffey's celebrated literature, "If--I-p-p-play--with--the--f-f-f-i-i-i-i-r-r-e--I--will--g-e-e-et --my-y-y-y-y--f-f-f-f--ingers--bur-r-r-rned--period!"

I did not learn it. I wish I had learned by reading it that if I play with the fire I will get my fingers burned. I had to slap my hands upon hot stoves and coffee-pots, and had to get many kinds of blisters in order to learn it.

Then I had to go around showing the blisters, boring my friends and taking up a collection of sympathy. "Look at my bad luck!" Fool!

This is not a lecture. It is a confession! It seems to me if you in the audience knew how little I know, you wouldn't stay.

"You Can't Get Something for Nothing"

Yes, I was thirty-four years learning that one sentence. "You can't get something for nothing." That is, getting it in partial tune. It took me so long because I was naturally bright. It takes that kind longer than a human being. They are so smart you cannot teach them with a few b.u.mps. They have to be pulverized.

That sentence takes me back to the days when I was a "hired man" on the farm. You might not think I had ever been a "hired man" on the farm at ten dollars a month and "washed, mended and found." You see me here on this platform in my graceful and cultured manner, and you might not believe that I had ever trained an orphan calf to drink from a copper kettle. But I have fed him the fingers of this hand many a time. You might not think that I had ever driven a yoke of oxen and had said the words. But I have!

I remember the first county fair I ever attended. Fellow sufferers, you may remember that at the county fair all the people sort out to their own departments. Some people go to the canned fruit department. Some go to the fancywork department. Some go to the swine department. Everybody goes to his own department. Even the "suckers"! Did you ever notice where they go? That is where I went--to the "tr.i.m.m.i.n.g department."

I was in the "tr.i.m.m.i.n.g department" in five minutes. n.o.body told me where it was. I didn't need to be told. I gravitated there. The barrel always shakes all of one size to one place. You notice that--in a city all of one size get together.

Right at the entrance to the "local Midway" I met a gentleman. I know he was a gentleman because he said he was a gentleman. He had a little light table he could move quickly. Whenever the climate became too sultry he would move to greener pastures. On that table were three little sh.e.l.ls in a row, and there was a little pea under the middle sh.e.l.l. I saw it there, being naturally bright. I was the only naturally bright person around the table, hence the only one who knew under which sh.e.l.l the little round pea was hidden.

Even the gentleman running the game was fooled. He thought it was under the end sh.e.l.l and bet me money it was under the end sh.e.l.l. You see, this was not gambling, this was a sure thing. (It was!) I had saved up my money for weeks to attend the fair. I bet it all on that middle sh.e.l.l. I felt bad. It seemed like robbing father. And he seemed like a real nice old gentleman, and maybe he had a family to keep. But I would teach him a lesson not to "monkey" with people like me, naturally bright.

But I needn't have felt bad. I did not rob father. Father cleaned me out of all I had in about five seconds.

I went over to the other side of the fairgrounds and sat down. That was all I had to do now--just go, sit down. I couldn't see the mermaid now or get into the grandstand.

Sadly I thought it all over, but I did not get the right answer. I said the thing every fool does say when he gets b.u.mped and fails to learn the lesson from the b.u.mp. I said, "Next time I shall be more careful."

When anybody says that he is due for a return date.

I Bought the Soap

Learn? No! Within a month I was on the street a Sat.u.r.day night when another gentleman drove into town. He stopped on the public square and stood up in his buggy. "Let the prominent citizens gather around me, for I am going to give away dollars."