diff options
| -rw-r--r-- | .gitattributes | 3 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-8.txt | 1377 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-8.zip | bin | 0 -> 30116 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-h.zip | bin | 0 -> 315503 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-h/36898-h.htm | 1601 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-h/images/cover.jpg | bin | 0 -> 69231 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-h/images/endpaper1.jpg | bin | 0 -> 103797 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898-h/images/endpaper2.jpg | bin | 0 -> 109302 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898.txt | 1377 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | 36898.zip | bin | 0 -> 30098 bytes | |||
| -rw-r--r-- | LICENSE.txt | 11 | ||||
| -rw-r--r-- | README.md | 2 |
12 files changed, 4371 insertions, 0 deletions
diff --git a/.gitattributes b/.gitattributes new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6833f05 --- /dev/null +++ b/.gitattributes @@ -0,0 +1,3 @@ +* text=auto +*.txt text +*.md text diff --git a/36898-8.txt b/36898-8.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9ba7021 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-8.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1377 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Increasing Personal Efficiency, by Russell H. Conwell + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Increasing Personal Efficiency + +Author: Russell H. Conwell + +Release Date: July 29, 2011 [EBook #36898] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + + + + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + + + + Increasing Personal Efficiency + + Women + Musical Culture + Oratory + Self Help + Some Advice to Young Men + + + _By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL + + VOLUME 5 + + + NATIONAL + EXTENSION UNIVERSITY + 597 Fifth Avenue, New York + + OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY + + Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers + Printed in the United States of America + + + + +_Increasing Personal Efficiency_ + + + + +I + +WOMEN + + +Some women may be superficial in education and accomplishments, +extravagant in tastes, conspicuous in apparel, something more than +self-assured in bearing, devoted to trivialities, inclined to frequent +public places. It is, nevertheless, not without cause that art has +always shown the virtues in woman's dress, and that true literature +teems with eloquent tributes and ideal pictures of true womanhood--from +Homer's Andromache to Scott's Ellen Douglas, and farther. While +Shakespeare had no heroes, all his women except Ophelia are heroines, +even if Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are hideously wicked. In the +moral world, women are what flowers and fruit are in the physical. "The +soul's armor is never well set to the heart until woman's hand has +braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of +manhood fails." + +Men will mainly be what women make them, and there can never be +_entirely free men_ until there are _entirely free women_ with no +special privileges, but with all her rights. The wife makes the home, +the mother makes the man, and she is the creator of joyous boyhood and +heroic manhood; when women fulfil their divine mission, all reform +societies will die, brutes will become men, and men shall be divine. +There are unkind things said of her in the cheaper writings of +to-day--perhaps because their authors have seen her only in +boarding-houses, restaurants, theaters, dance-halls, and at +card-parties; and the poor, degraded stage with its warped mirror shows +her up to the ridicule of the cheaper brood. The greatest writings and +the greatest dramas of all time have more than compensated for all this +indignity, and we have only to read deep into the great literature to be +disillusioned of any vulgar estimations of womanhood, and to understand +the beauty and power of soul of every woman who is true to the royalty +of womanhood. + +There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he +has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the +esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of +womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters, +wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their +esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and +philosophers and high-class playwrights are the women who have been bred +mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and +only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly, +matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them--such as are +portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society, +but it is the best society--for the "women whose beauty and sweetness +and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the +Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our +faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and +all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again." + +If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment +and of lack of opportunity--never from lack of intelligence and other +soul-powers. There is no sex in spiritual endowments, and woman seems +entitled to all the rights of man--plus the right of protection. Ruskin +says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of +one sex over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is +completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each +seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give." + +In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has +come, Tennyson says in "The Princess": + + Yet in the long years liker must they grow: + The man be more of woman, she of man; + He gain in sweetness and in moral height, + Nor lose the _wrestling_ thews that throw the world; + She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, + Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind. + +Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always +been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four +walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron +Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother. +While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any +known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman +poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons +when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, +see that thou returnest with thy shield or on it." Napoleon claimed +that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its +men. + +"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for +just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering, +arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule." +Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating +her home, woman's exigencies--and perhaps her ambitions--have forced her +more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of +speculation and energy--perhaps into some war and some conquest. The +ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded +or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has +creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education, +and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has +invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of +the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and +happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has +undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable +the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types. + +Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and +only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and +although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest +and noblest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's, +wherever she can live nobly and work nobly. How many myriads in this +country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to +relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is +dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young +woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to +interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she +had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their +private lives; that although the majority were working partly or +entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of +the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like +George Eliot, Charlotte Brontė and Helen Hunt will long continue to +bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings. + +It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work +and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern +schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women +who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to +have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer +powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and +the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have +bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood. +Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the +smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think +of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the +confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for +one week! + +As a class, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a +talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to +talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure +if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking +to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably +accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so +much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration. +As dignity is a man's quality, loveliness is a woman's; her heart is +love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever +influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but +men go farther in friendship than women. Women mourn for the lost love, +says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love +consoles; a man's friendship supports. What a real man most desires in a +woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man +despises a mannish woman. + +Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere +brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it +is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they +scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a godless +woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she +adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and +refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know +her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their +arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that +her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force +push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful masculine +influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best +comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions. + +Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young +women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps +this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide +than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in +a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its +garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he +would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a +soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it +is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does +not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt +married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton +married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true +wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of +gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain +perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, +like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a +deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that +conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest +merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her +husband as her appendage. + +Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother +is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational +systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home +has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is +known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room +in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave. +Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each +boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy +mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do +without her. + +While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home, +she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes +early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her +children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior. + +Women are far more observant of little things than men, and the +greatest among them have marvelous powers of observation. It is this +power that made Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Disraeli the sturdy helpmates +they were to their husbands in all their trying cares of government. It +is said of Gladstone that it was not unusual for him to adjourn a +Cabinet meeting through a desire "to consult with Catherine." Had there +not been large power of observation, we should never have had the works +of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontė, Jane Austin, Helen Hunt, and all the +other notable women creators of fiction. Charlotte Cushman was the +greatest actress America has ever produced because her observation was +so close that not the smallest detail of the character she played +escaped her or was neglected. The beautifying of Athens owes its +inception to Aspasia rather than to Pericles. + + + + +II + +MUSICAL CULTURE + + +Of all the arts, none is more difficult to define than music. No two +persons seem to agree as to what it is, and a harsh sound to one is +often sweet music to another. When music is controlled by those who use +carefully their powers of observation, it will be vastly more useful to +mankind. The need of music in the advancement of humanity it too +apparent to admit of discussion. From the Greek instrument with one +string down to the wonderful pipe-organ, music has been intensely +attractive and marvelously helpful, and for the good of the human +family. + +No art or science needs more to be developed to-day than that of music. +Its influence on soul and body has been noticed and advanced by some of +the greatest thinkers of ancient and modern times, therefore it is not +necessary to discuss the supreme need for real music to bring into +harmony motives and movements for good. When we duly consider the +subject of music, and ask where we shall find the great musicians who +are to-day so much in demand, we feel that many so-called schools of +music are often more misleading than instructive, and that they follow +fashions that are far more unreasonable than the fashions of dress. + +The art of music needs philosophic study, and it should be begun with a +far better understanding of the many causes which contribute to its +composition. The singing of birds is literally one of the most +discordant expressions of sound. Indeed, the tones of the nightingale +and the meadow-lark are only shrill whistles when they are considered +with reference only to the tones of their voice, yet they furnish the +ideal of some of the richest music to which the ear has ever listened, +being one part of the delicate orchestra of nature. The lowing of the +cow, the bellow of the bull, the bark of an angry dog echoing among the +hills at eventide, combined with so many other different sounds and +impressions, has become enticingly sweet to the pensive listener. The +insect-choir of night has as much of the calming and refining influences +as the bird-choir of the morning. + +Real music requires not only that the tones should be clear and +resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings. +"Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn +in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful +music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind, +but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My +Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral, +with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its +stained-glass windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with +a ballroom jig. + +Harmonious circumstances and appropriate environment are as essential +for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The +foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and +growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed +her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too +little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner +in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner, +and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge, +has surely been misled into darkest delusion as to music, and will soon +be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place +anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity +shudder. + +What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of +musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the +influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that +always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of +the auditor and permanently influences him to nobler thought, feeling, +and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are +capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or +instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in +acoustics is not music. + +It has been frequently shown that music is potent in its effects upon +the body as well as upon the soul. In 1901, a notable illustration of +the power of music over disease was given at the Samaritan Hospital, +connected with Temple University in Philadelphia, although the +experiments were made under disadvantageous circumstances and +environment. The patients were informed what the physicians were +endeavoring to do, and the efforts of the first few months were wasted +for the most part. Many of the patients who were placed under the +influence of the music grew confident that they were going to be cured. +While the recovery of some seemed miraculous, those who conducted the +experiments felt that the healing might be largely due to the influence +of the mind and not directly to the music. The matter was dropped for +several months, until the patients were nearly all new cases. The +doctors charged the nurses not to let the patients know for what cause +the music was placed in the hospital. They eliminated also the personal +influence of the nurses as well as the use of drugs at the time the +music was produced. The experiment convinced those who conducted it that +music has a powerful restorative effect even upon a person who is +suffering from a combination of diseases. So many of the patients who +recovered at that time from the influence of the music are alive and in +good health to-day that common honesty disposes us to conclude that +there is some undiscovered benefit in music which should be immediately +investigated. This will never be attained by musical faddists or by +selfish musicians who sing or perform for applause or money. Some plain, +every day-man or woman will ultimately be the apostle of music for the +people, and the experiments at Samaritan Hospital furnish only a +suggestion of the resources of music which must soon be known to the +world. + +There was one patient in the hospital who had lost his memory through +"softening of the brain." He lay most of the time unconscious, but +occasionally talked irrationally upon all sorts of subjects. A quartet +sang several pieces in his ward, but the nurses who sat upon each side +of him noticed no effect whatever upon him until the quartet sang "My +Old Kentucky Home." Then his eyes brightened and he began to hum the +tune. Before they had finished the third verse, he asked the nurse about +the singing, and requested the quartet to repeat the song. His +intelligence seemed completely normal for a little while after the music +ceased. He asked and answered questions clearly, but soon relapsed into +his incoherent talk and listlessness. + +When the man's lawyer heard of the effects upon the patient, he asked +that the song might be sung while he was present, that he might then ask +the patient about some very important papers of great value to the +patient's family. As soon as the song was again sung by the quartet his +intelligence returned. He informed the lawyer accurately as to the bank +vault in which his box was locked, and told where he had left the keys +in a private drawer of his desk. + +Although the effect of the music was not permanent as to his case, many +persons who know of it feel that some time music may be so applied as +permanently to cure even such cases, if kept up for a sufficient length +of time. Accidents to the skull, heart diseases, nervous exhaustion, and +spinal ailments seem especially amenable to music. Two of the hospital +cases of paralysis were permanently relieved by music. In one of these +cases instrumental music seemed to produce a strong electric effect. +While four violins were accompanied by an organ, the patient could use +his feet and hands, but it was several weeks before he could walk +without music. In the other case, vocal music put an insomnia patient to +sleep, but after sleeping through the program, the patient was better; +after a few trials he returned home. + +Some of the hundred cases experimented upon were complete failures. But +those conducting the experiments were convinced that the failure was +attributable to the fact that they were unable to find the right kind of +music. In the use of religious selections, "Pleyel's Hymn" made the +patients of every ward worse; but "The Dead March" from Saul was +soothing to typhoid patients. When this march was rendered softly, the +nurses discovered that two cases had been so susceptible to the +influences of the music that the physicians omitted the usual treatment +and the patients recovered sooner than some other patients who had the +disease in a less dangerous form. + +Children were helped by a different class of music from that used with +adults, and difference in sex also was noted. Mothers who sing to their +children may become the best investigators as to the power of vocal +music on the healthy development of childhood. + +In the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, several hymns were once forcefully +rendered by the great chorus of the church to a congregation of three +thousand people. At the close, slips of paper were passed to the +worshipers, and they were asked to write upon the paper what thoughts +the music had suggested to them. While there was nothing in the anthems +suggestive of youth, and the burden of the stanzas seemed to divert from +childhood, yet more than half of the two thousand slips returned +attested that the hearer had been reminded of his schooldays and of the +games of childhood; these slips were collected before the congregation +had time to confer. It shows that the music was not in accord with the +words, and that it had greater power upon the mind than the words had. +It proves that, to produce its highest effects, sacred music must +harmonize with the meaning of the words and with the environment. It +also shows that the purpose for which one sings is an important +factor--random vociferations or a display of vocal gymnastics even of +the most cultured kind is both inartistic and unmusical. + +These pages have been written to suggest that music is still with the +common people; that the future blessings which mankind shall derive from +musical art and science are probably dependent upon some observant +person who is free from the trammels of misguided and misdirected +culture, and who may come to it with an independent genius, and handle +the subject in the light of every-day common-sense. + + + + +III + +ORATORY + + +Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press +with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has +done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from +oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced +during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public +attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the +_living_ man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which +cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for +orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the +past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the +restoration of the science and the art of oratory. + +The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that +public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong. It was +such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the +greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective +debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the +pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the +hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their +addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their +talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw. + +There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and +application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as +some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have +imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly +born with men and women--as the power of the true poet and the true +teacher--yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of +elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists +between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals +primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the +later science is persuasive--it has to do mainly with influencing the +head and the heart. + +There is a law of oratory which does not seem to be understood or +recognized by elocution teachers. The plow-boy in a debating society of +the country school may feel that natural law, like Daniel Webster, +without being conscious that he is following it. But there is a danger +of losing this great natural power through injurious cultivation. The +powerful speaker is consciously or unconsciously observant at all times +of his audience, and he naturally adopts the tones, the gesture, and the +language which attract the most attention and leave the most potent +influence upon the audience. That is the law of all oratory, whether it +applies to the domestic animals, to conversation with our fellows, to +debates or addresses, lectures, speeches, sermons, or arguments. Where +the orator has not been misdirected or misled by some superficial +teacher of elocution, his aim will be first "to win the favorable +attention of his audience" and then to strongly impress them with his +opening sentence, his appearance, his manners, and his subject. His +reputation will have also very much to do with winning this favorable +impression at first. The words of the speaker either drive away or +attract, and the speaker endeavors at the outset to command the +attention of the hearers, whether they be dogs or congregation. + +The beginner in oratory who is true to his instincts strives to adopt +the methods which he feels will favorably impress those for whom he has +a message. In his oration at the funeral of Julius Cęsar, Mark Anthony +disarmed the enemies of Cęsar and of himself by opening his oration +with, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury +Cęsar, not to _praise_ him." Almost any man or woman can become an +orator of power by keeping himself or herself natural while talking. + +The second condition of a successful oration is the statements of the +important facts or truths. Cicero, the elder Pitt, and Edward Everett +held strictly to the statement of all the facts at the outset of their +speech. Facts and truths are the most important things in all kinds of +oratory; as they are the most difficult to handle, the audience is more +likely to listen to them at the opening of the talk, and they must be +placed before the hearers clearly and emphatically, before the speaker +enters upon the next division of his address. + +The third condition of a successful address is the argument, or +reasoning which is used to prove the conclusion he wishes his hearers to +reach. It is here that logic has its special place; it is at this vital +point that many political speakers fail to convince the men they +address. After he has thus reasoned, the natural orator makes his +appeal, which is the _chief purpose_ of all true oratory. It is here +where the orator becomes vehement, here where he shows all the ornament +of his talk in appropriate figures of speech. The most effective orators +are always those whose hearts are in strong sympathy with humanity, and +whose sympathies are always aroused to plead for men. This is the +condition that accounts for the eloquence--the power to arouse +hearers--which characterizes men like Logan, the American Indian, and +which characterizes many of the religious enthusiasts like Peter the +Hermit, who have surprised the world and often moved them to mighty +deeds. + +So long as our government depends upon the votes of the people, just so +long must there be a stirring need of men and women orators to teach the +principles of government and to keep open to the light of truth the +consciences of the thousands and millions whose votes will decide the +welfare or the misfortune of our nation. As the speaker must adapt +himself and his message to all kinds of people, it is difficult to +advise any one in certain terms how to accomplish this. It is another +instance of the necessity of cultivating the daily habit of observation, +and of being always loyal to our instincts. + +While schools and colleges have their uses, they are by no means a +necessity for those who will accomplish great things through their +oratory. Many a man laden with a wealth of college accomplishment has +been an utter failure on the platform. Where reading-matter is as +abundant and as cheap as it is in America, the poor boy at work upon the +farm or in the factory, with no time but his evenings for study, may get +the essentials of education, and by observing those who speak may give +himself forms of oratorical expression that will enable him to outshine +those with scholarship who have been led into fads. + +We must be impressed with a high sense of duty in becoming an orator of +any class; we must feel that it is our calling to adhere to the truth +always and in all things, to warn our hearers of dangers, and to +encourage the good and help those who are struggling to be so. We must +have a passion for oratory which shall impel us to vigorous thought and +eloquent expression. The greatest oratory is that which is most +persuasive. It is not so fully in what an orator says or the vehemence +with which he says it that counts, but the practical good that results +from it. Many an oration has been elegant enough from its choice diction +and labored phraseology, yet it has fallen flat upon the audience. + +When a man has been worked into natural passion over his theme, his +words will strike root and inspire his hearers into similar passion. It +is wonderful how true are our instincts in detecting what comes from the +heart and that which is mere words. The greatest orators have been those +who have not learned "by rote" what they have spoken. When Lincoln broke +away in his celebrated Cooper Institute address, and pictured the word +freedom written by the Lord across the skies in rainbow hues, the hearts +of his audience stopped beating for the instant. It is foolhardy for any +one to presume to speak with no preparation, for those who wish to give +themselves to oratory should carefully study the great debaters, learn +how they expressed themselves, and then accumulate important truths and +facts concerning their subject. But we must not forget that too much +study as to nicety of expression may lose something of the mountainous +effects of what we wish to state. + +When an orator _feels_ his subject, his soul overflows with a thrill +indescribable, which is known only to those who have felt it. Genius is +lifted free for the moment to fly at will to the mountain heights, and +finds supreme delight therein. Everything that is food for the mind is +helpful to the orator, whether it come from school or work. But it is an +attainment which can be reached by the every-day plain man employed in +any every-day occupation. Demosthenes, the greatest orator the world has +yet known, found his School of Oratory along the shore talking to the +waves. John B. Gough and Henry Clay and both the elder and the younger +Pitt gained all their powers by means as humble. The mere study of +grammar has never yet made a correct speaker; the mere study of rhetoric +has never yet made a correct and powerful writer; and the study of +elocution cannot make an orator. Grammar, rhetoric, and elocution may +teach him only the laws which govern speech, writing, oratory, and leave +him ignorant of the best methods of execution. + +During the last hundred years the leading orators of Congress have +mainly come from among the humble and the poor, and all the learning +they had of their art was got in the schoolhouse, the shop, the fields, +and the University of Hard Knocks. It is a calling that seems to be open +to every man and woman of fair talent. If you desire to become a +platform orator, read the lives of successful orators, and apply to +yourself the means which helped them to distinction. But be vigilant not +to lose your own individuality, and never strive to be any one but +yourself. In no place more than upon the platform does _sham_ mean +_shame_; nothing is more transparent. + + + + +IV + +SELF-HELP + + +Although Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help" is the first and perhaps the best +of the many inspirational books that have been written of late years, it +is by far the most serviceable of all to any one who wishes and intends +to stand squarely on his own feet and to fight his own battle of life +from start to finish. That book is attractive because it is anecdotal of +life and character, and because of the interest that all men feel in +those who have achieved great things through their own labors, their +trials, and their struggles. It abounds with references to men who were +forced to be self-helpful, who were born lowly enough, but died among +God's gentlemen, and often among the aristocracy of the land, through +sheer force of character, labor, and determination. They have left their +"footprints on the sands of time" mainly because they were +_self-reliant_ and _self-helpful_. + +The aids to the royal life are all within, and no life is worthless +unless its owner wills it; the fountain of all good is within, and it +will bubble up, if we dig. + +Doctor Holland used to say that there is a super-abundance of +inspiration in America, but a lamentable dearth of perspiration. +Aspiration plus perspiration carries men to dizzy heights of success; +aspiration minus perspiration often lands them in the gutter. + +Self-help is not selfishness. The duty of helping oneself in the highest +sense always involves the duty of helping others. The self-helpful are +not always the men who have achieved greatest success in what vulgarians +call success. That man's life is a success which has attained the end +for which he started out--the greatest failure may sometimes be the +hugest success through the discipline it has afforded. They tell us that +men never fail who die in a worthy cause; that it is nobler to have +failed in a noble cause than to have won in a low one; that it is not +failure, but low aim, that is wicked. God sows the seed and starts us +all out with about the same quantity and the same quality; whether the +crop shall be abundant depends upon the environment in which we grow and +the way we take care of the field. + +The supreme end of each man's life is to take individual care of his +own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no +immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life--and +every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full +capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy +work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a +seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped +sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the +improvement of it we give ourselves. + +The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the +outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. +The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is +always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The +self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, +but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Cęsar could, we +have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the +minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some +government or some institution to do for them what they should only do +for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human +powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win +his own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for +men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, +so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been +during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other +institutions, and too little in ourselves. + +Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any +source--they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who +believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve +success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are +worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly +consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws--especially the laws +which teach men to lean--but they rather consist in helping men to +improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid +comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself--we may stand +him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is +a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and +nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel +that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by +governments. There is no man who rides through life so well as the man +who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called +self-dependence. + +Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the +manliness of the soul. + +The solid foundations of all liberty rest upon individual character, and +individual character is the only sure guaranty for social security and +national progress. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no +matter by what other name you call it. The gods are always on the side +of the man who relies on himself and helps himself; men's arms are long +enough to reach stars, if they will only stretch them. It is so contrary +to the spirit of our nation to be anything but self-helpful. "The flag +of freedom cannot long float over a nation of deadheads; only those who +determine to pay their way from cradle to grave have a right to make the +journey." Schiller says that the kind of education that perfects the +human race is action, conduct, self-culture, self-control. It has been +said that the individual is perfected far more by work than by reading, +by action more than by study, by character more than by biography; these +are courses that are given by the University of Life more completely +than in all other institutions known to men. + +The great men of science, literature, art, action--those apostles of +great thoughts and lords of the great heart--belong to no special rank. +They come from colleges, workshops, farms, from poor men's huts and rich +men's mansions; but they all began with reliance upon themselves, and +with an instinctive feeling that they must help themselves solely in +climbing to the work or the station which they had assigned to +themselves. Many of God's greatest apostles of thought and feeling and +action have come from the humblest stations, but the most insuperable +difficulties have not long been obstacles to them. These greatest of +difficulties are true men's greatest helpers--they stimulate powers that +might have lain dormant all through life, but often have readily yielded +to the stout and reliant heart. There is no greater blessing in the +world than poverty which is allied to self-reliance and the spirit of +self-help. "Poverty is the northwind which lashes men into vikings." +Lord Bacon says that men believe too great things of riches, and too +little of indomitable perseverance. + +Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in +the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No +inheritance and environments can do for a man what he can do for +himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the +poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of +clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder +of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape +painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden +were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, +the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. +Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, +the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the +ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary--started life as weavers. +Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the +missionary--were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; +Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the +inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of +steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a +tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, +both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant +sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats +and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists. + +Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose +industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly +benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and +philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to +participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home +in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, +wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his +greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with +important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government +appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In +less than four years after he landed in England he became +Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the +Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment +which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been +knighted by the king. + +In Bavaria he became lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief of staff, +minister of war, member of the council of state, knight of Poland, +member of the academy of science in three cities, commander-in-chief of +the general staff, superintendent of police of Bavaria, and chief of the +regency during the sovereign's compulsory absence in 1798. During his +ten years' service he made great civil and military reforms and produced +such salutary changes in the condition of the people that they erected a +monument in his honor in the pleasure-grounds of Munich, which he had +made for them. When Munich was attacked by an Austrian army in 1796, he +conducted the defense so successfully that he was accorded the highest +praise throughout Europe. The Bavarian monarch showed his appreciation +by making him a count; he chose the title of Count Rumford as an honor +to the birthplace of his wife and child. He ended his days at Paris in +literary and scientific studies and in the society of the most learned +men of Europe. + +The Rumford professorship at Harvard was very liberally endowed by him, +and he gave five thousand dollars to the American Academy of Arts and +Sciences in 1796. + + + + +V + +SOME ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN + + +A life is divine when duty is a joy. The best work we ever do is the +work we get pleasure from doing, and the work we are likeliest to enjoy +most is the work we are best fitted to do with our talent. There is +nothing in the world except marriage that we should be slower in taking +upon ourselves than our life-work; therefore, think much, read much, +inquire much before you assume any life career. + +When you have once decided what is best fitted for you, pursue it +ceaselessly and courageously, no matter how far distant it may be, how +arduous the labor attending it, or how difficult the ascent. The greater +the difficulty surmounted, the more you will value your achievement and +the greater power you will have for keeping on with your work after you +have reached your goal. Do your utmost to find a friend who is older +than you, and consult him freely, and give every man your ear, for the +humblest in station and those with the most meager acquirements in other +matters may see some few things more clearly than other men, and may be +well stored with what you most require. Take each man's advice, but act +according to your own judgment. Teachers should be the best advisers of +those about to enter upon their life-work, and no service of the +schoolmaster or professor can ever be more helpful to the young +intrusted to him than that of helping them to choose a career. + +The best work real teachers do for their pupils is by no means the +teaching of a few minor branches--it is almost always the work he is not +paid for, and which nobody outside of those who realize what real +education is, seems ever to consider. It is sympathy for their students, +getting them to understand the great things that are involved in the +process of getting an education, making them realize that true education +means growth of all our spiritual faculties--head and heart and will, +and that what we get from textbooks is the very least part of an +education. It is helping them to understand that knowledge got from +books and from schoolmasters is always a menace to a man whose spiritual +faculties of head, heart, and will have not been thoroughly +disciplined. It is wise counsel in choosing a life career. Instead of +looking upon this side of the work as divine, instead of being wise +counselors and friendly guides during this great transitional stage from +youth to manhood, teachers can be far more interested in their +individual concerns or in what they call "research-work"--the +research-work may give some temporary glory to themselves, and give some +little advertisement to the institutions that employ them; but the +supreme duty they owe to their students, to God, and to humanity is to +do their utmost to make full men, and worthy and successful men, out of +the youths whose education they have taken upon themselves. No traitor +is such a traitor to his country and to the whole world as the man who +is unfaithful to this sacred trust. Once again, find some sincere and +prudent elder counselor, and turn to him in all your difficulties. + +Get advice as to the best books to read--a good book is the best of +counselors, for it is the best of some good man; and it is a patient +counselor whom we may continually consult upon the same subject as often +as we wish. But waste no time, especially at the opening of your career, +upon books which have no message for your manhood and no helpfulness in +the work you shall assume for life. When you have once taken up a book +as your counselor, don't put it aside until it has been thoroughly +digested and assimilated. One book read is worth a hundred books peeped +through; and of all the dilettantes, a literary dilettante is the most +contemptible. Bacon says, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be +swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested." But it is only the books +that are to be chewed and digested that we can afford to peruse at the +outset in our career; the literary pleasure--gardens--may come later in +life. + +Do your utmost to understand poetic expression, for the poets are the +greatest teachers in the world as well as the greatest of all +legislators. It is they who teach the great in conduct and the pure in +thought. Without education that shall enable us to take them as our +friends, life bears upon it the stamp of death. The great poets are now +the only truth-tellers left to God. They are free, and they make their +lovers free; the great poet is nature's masterpiece. At the touch of his +imagination words blossom into beauty. A true poet is the most precious +gift to a nation, for he feels keenest the glorious duty of serving +truth; he cannot strive for despotism of any kind, for it is still the +instinct of all great spirits to be free. More than other authors, the +poets make us self-forgetful, make life and the whole human race nobler +in our eyes; all things are friendly and sacred to them, all days holy, +all good men divine. + +There is very little worthy work nowadays that does not need some +schooling that it may be well done. If you have an opportunity to give +yourself this help, don't neglect it. Carefully select the courses that +will be most helpful to you in your career, and don't be side-tracked by +any of what we sentimentalists term "culture studies." There's nothing +better in the world than culture study, if we can afford it and have +time for it. But there is not a greater or more wicked waste of valuable +time than the time spent upon what some sentimentalists term culture +study. + +When you have once taken up the studies you have decided upon, keep +steadily to your course and shun diversions. Recreations are as +essential to the student who intends to do high-class work as food is to +the body; but diversions disqualify him for earnest work, and may breed +a habit of halfness that shall bring his failure. Don't be foolish and +hope to be great in many lines. Who sips of many arts drinks none. In +every vocation to-day competition is so keen that the man who will +succeed must be content to be supreme in one thing alone. + +_Halfness_ weakens all our spiritual powers, and thoroughness is the +_central_ passion of all worthy characters. + +It is nobler to be confined to one calling, and to excel in that, than +to dabble in forty. There is some odor about a dabbler that makes him +especially offensive to all clean high-class men and women. But when we +have formed the habit of doing carelessly other tasks than our +life-work, we shall soon get into the way of doing carelessly the work +of our chosen calling. There is nothing that gives us greater assurance +that our life-work will be thoroughly done than to habituate ourselves +to do the slightest task completely. Sing the last note fully, make the +last letter of your name complete. Eat the last morsel deliberately. In +a real man's life there are no trifles. Whatever is worth doing by him +is worth doing well. The many-sided Edward Everett attributed his being +able to do so many things well to his early habit of doing even the +least thing thoroughly. He used to say that he prided himself upon the +way he tied up the smallest paper parcel. + +Although schools may be very helpful, don't forget to emphasize again +that they are merely helpers. The man is somebody only when the fight +is won within himself. Without the schools men have often reached the +pinnacles of success, through their own individual earnestness and +energy. Schools make wise men wiser, but they may make fools greater +fools than ever. If colleges have fallen somewhat into disrepute, it is +largely due to the fact that we may have sent more fools than wise men +to college. Many a man has been the better for being too poor to attend +school, like Franklin, Lincoln, Peter Cooper, and ten thousand other +Americans. Their thirst for what books had to give them forced them to +work harder and to deny themselves all the enjoyments that so vulgarize +yet so charm the cheaper brood. + +All that is won by sacrifice and downright hard work is priceless, and +many noble men and women who have risen to high honor and station owe +their place and power solely to this. Be always mindful that power is +the only safe foundation for reputation. Thoughtful Americans are not +concerning themselves about who your ancestors were, and whether or not +they were graduated from some college. Like Doctor Holmes, they feel +that old families and old trees generally have their best parts +underground, and that the only progressive is the man who is bigger in +thought and feeling and accomplishment than his father was. They believe +that it is unimportant where you buy your educational tools, if you are +only doing good work with them. + +There is only one _true aristocracy in America_--those with more +spiritual power and individual accomplishment than the rest of men. + +Emerson says that "all the winds that move the vanes of universities +blow from antiquity," and this is responsible for many foolish words and +many fool acts of schoolmen which are so often misleading the +unsuspecting public. + +Nothing is more foolish than the idea that any schooling is worthless +which is obtained in schools after the regular school hours; and more +than one attempt has been made to enact laws which shall hinder from +practice physicians and lawyers who have been obliged to get their +knowledge through channels other than the conventional. The victory of +the general does not depend upon the place where he got his military +training or the time of the day when he studied. Oliver Cromwell, the +greatest general of his day, was a farmer until his fortieth year, when +he entered the army of the Parliament against Charles I. The only +question that concerns the nation that puts a general at the head of +its forces is, has he the powers that shall make us victorious? + +Men in distress don't ask for the pedigree of the life-saver, nor do +they stop to inquire when he graduated. Don't be frightened off by +sticklers for what is customary. Knowledge is the right of the poorest +boy and girl in America, and it can be had by the humblest in the land. +Be convinced of this and enter the race. The world steps aside and lets +the man pass who knows where he is going; all the world will shout to +clear the track when they see a determined giant is coming. In choosing +your career, don't be limited to the old professions. There are to-day +many more occupations calling for the highest skill and offering the +highest inducements than there were twenty years ago, and these +positions are steadily increasing. Many occupations which were recently +regarded almost as menial have risen almost to professions--cooking, +agriculture, decorative art, forestry, nursing, sanitation, designing +apparel, and countless others; and the men and women qualified for these +are surer of better positions than formerly, and far better rewards. + +But the youth who is imbued with the determination to _be_ right and to +_do_ right must never lose sight of this truth--that life is vastly +more than place and meat and raiment. Living for self is suicide; men +that are men get far greater enjoyment and far greater reward from +making life a blessing for those who come their way than they get from +all other things combined. No man lives so truly for himself as he who +lives for other people, and one of the chiefest purposes of education is +that it gives larger views of life and adds greater power to serve +humanity. The man who is really in earnest to make his life count is +studiously observant. Each day and each place multiplies his means of +happiness for himself and others. + + +THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Increasing Personal Efficiency, by +Russell H. Conwell + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + +***** This file should be named 36898-8.txt or 36898-8.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/6/8/9/36898/ + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/36898-8.zip b/36898-8.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..2b714d6 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-8.zip diff --git a/36898-h.zip b/36898-h.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..bd31493 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-h.zip diff --git a/36898-h/36898-h.htm b/36898-h/36898-h.htm new file mode 100644 index 0000000..372bb8f --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-h/36898-h.htm @@ -0,0 +1,1601 @@ +<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN" + "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd"> +<!-- $Id: header.txt 236 2009-12-07 18:57:00Z vlsimpson $ --> + +<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en"> + <head> + <meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html;charset=iso-8859-1" /> + <meta http-equiv="Content-Style-Type" content="text/css" /> + <title> + The Project Gutenberg eBook of Increasing Personal Efficiency, by Russell H. Conwell. + </title> + <style type="text/css"> + +body { + margin-left: 10%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + + h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6 { + text-align: center; /* all headings centered */ + clear: both; +} + +p { + margin-top: .75em; + text-align: justify; + margin-bottom: .75em; +} + +hr { + width: 33%; + margin-top: 2em; + margin-bottom: 2em; + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; + clear: both; +} + +table { + margin-left: auto; + margin-right: auto; +} + +.pagenum { /* uncomment the next line for invisible page numbers */ + /* visibility: hidden; */ + position: absolute; + left: 92%; + font-size: smaller; + text-align: right; +} /* page numbers */ + +.linenum { + position: absolute; + top: auto; + left: 4%; +} /* poetry number */ + +.blockquot { + margin-left: 5%; + margin-right: 10%; +} + +.sidenote { + width: 20%; + padding-bottom: .5em; + padding-top: .5em; + padding-left: .5em; + padding-right: .5em; + margin-left: 1em; + float: right; + clear: right; + margin-top: 1em; + font-size: smaller; + color: black; + background: #eeeeee; + border: dashed 1px; +} + +.bb {border-bottom: solid 2px;} + +.bl {border-left: solid 2px;} + +.bt {border-top: solid 2px;} + +.br {border-right: solid 2px;} + +.bbox {border: solid 2px;} + +.center {text-align: center;} + +.smcap {font-variant: small-caps;} + +.u {text-decoration: underline;} + +.caption {font-weight: bold;} + +/* Images */ +.figcenter { + margin: auto; + text-align: center; +} + +.figleft { + float: left; + clear: left; + margin-left: 0; + margin-bottom: 1em; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-right: 1em; + padding: 0; + text-align: center; +} + +.figright { + float: right; + clear: right; + margin-left: 1em; + margin-bottom: + 1em; + margin-top: 1em; + margin-right: 0; + padding: 0; + text-align: center; +} + +/* Footnotes */ +.footnotes {border: dashed 1px;} + +.footnote {margin-left: 10%; margin-right: 10%; font-size: 0.9em;} + +.footnote .label {position: absolute; right: 84%; text-align: right;} + +.fnanchor { + vertical-align: super; + font-size: .8em; + text-decoration: + none; +} + +/* Poetry */ +.poem { + margin-left:10%; + margin-right:10%; + text-align: left; +} + +.poem br {display: none;} + +.poem .stanza {margin: 1em 0em 1em 0em;} + +.poem span.i0 { + display: block; + margin-left: 0em; + padding-left: 3em; + text-indent: -3em; +} + +.poem span.i2 { + display: block; + margin-left: 2em; + padding-left: 3em; + text-indent: -3em; +} + +.poem span.i4 { + display: block; + margin-left: 4em; + padding-left: 3em; + text-indent: -3em; +} + + </style> + </head> +<body> + + +<pre> + +Project Gutenberg's Increasing Personal Efficiency, by Russell H. Conwell + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Increasing Personal Efficiency + +Author: Russell H. Conwell + +Release Date: July 29, 2011 [EBook #36898] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ISO-8859-1 + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + + + + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + +</pre> + + +<div class="figcenter"> +<img src="images/cover.jpg" alt=""/> +</div> + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + + +<h1>Increasing Personal Efficiency</h1> + +<h3> +<a href="#I">Women</a><br /> +<a href="#II">Musical Culture</a><br /> +<a href="#III">Oratory</a><br /> +<a href="#IV">Self Help</a><br /> +<a href="#V">Some Advice to Young Men</a> +</h3> + +<h3><i>By</i></h3> + +<h2>RUSSELL H. CONWELL</h2> + +<h3>VOLUME 5</h3> + +<p class="center"> +NATIONAL<br /> +EXTENSION UNIVERSITY<br /> +597 Fifth Avenue, New York</p> + +<p class="center"> +<span class="smcap">Observation—Every Man His Own University</span></p> + +<p class="center"> +Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers<br /> +Printed in the United States of America</p> + + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<h2><i>Increasing Personal Efficiency</i></h2> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_119" id="Page_119">[Pg 119]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="I" id="I"></a>I</h2> + +<h3>WOMEN</h3> + + +<p>Some women may be superficial in education and accomplishments, +extravagant in tastes, conspicuous in apparel, something more than +self-assured in bearing, devoted to trivialities, inclined to frequent +public places. It is, nevertheless, not without cause that art has +always shown the virtues in woman's dress, and that true literature +teems with eloquent tributes and ideal pictures of true womanhood—from +Homer's Andromache to Scott's Ellen Douglas, and farther. While +Shakespeare had no heroes, all his women except Ophelia are heroines, +even if Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are hideously wicked. In the +moral world, women are what flowers and fruit are in the physical. "The +soul's armor is never well set to the heart until woman's hand has +braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of +manhood fails."</p> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_120" id="Page_120">[Pg 120]</a></span></p><p>Men will mainly be what women make them, and there can never be +<i>entirely free men</i> until there are <i>entirely free women</i> with no +special privileges, but with all her rights. The wife makes the home, +the mother makes the man, and she is the creator of joyous boyhood and +heroic manhood; when women fulfil their divine mission, all reform +societies will die, brutes will become men, and men shall be divine. +There are unkind things said of her in the cheaper writings of +to-day—perhaps because their authors have seen her only in +boarding-houses, restaurants, theaters, dance-halls, and at +card-parties; and the poor, degraded stage with its warped mirror shows +her up to the ridicule of the cheaper brood. The greatest writings and +the greatest dramas of all time have more than compensated for all this +indignity, and we have only to read deep into the great literature to be +disillusioned of any vulgar estimations of womanhood, and to understand +the beauty and power of soul of every woman who is true to the royalty +of womanhood.</p> + +<p>There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he +has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the +esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_121" id="Page_121">[Pg 121]</a></span>womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters, +wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their +esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and +philosophers and high-class playwrights are the women who have been bred +mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and +only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly, +matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them—such as are +portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society, +but it is the best society—for the "women whose beauty and sweetness +and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the +Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our +faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and +all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again."</p> + +<p>If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment +and of lack of opportunity—never from lack of intelligence and other +soul-powers. There is no sex in spiritual endowments, and woman seems +entitled to all the rights of man—plus the right of protection. Ruskin +says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of +<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_122" id="Page_122">[Pg 122]</a></span>one sex over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is +completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each +seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give."</p> + +<p>In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has +come, Tennyson says in "The Princess":</p> + +<div class="poem"><div class="stanza"> +<span class="i0">Yet in the long years liker must they grow:<br /></span> +<span class="i0">The man be more of woman, she of man;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">He gain in sweetness and in moral height,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor lose the <i>wrestling</i> thews that throw the world;<br /></span> +<span class="i0">She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care,<br /></span> +<span class="i0">Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind.<br /></span> +</div></div> + +<p>Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always +been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four +walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron +Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother. +While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any +known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman +poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons +when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, +see that thou returnest with thy shield or on<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_123" id="Page_123">[Pg 123]</a></span> it." Napoleon claimed +that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its +men.</p> + +<p>"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for +just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering, +arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule." +Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating +her home, woman's exigencies—and perhaps her ambitions—have forced her +more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of +speculation and energy—perhaps into some war and some conquest. The +ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded +or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has +creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education, +and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has +invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of +the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and +happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has +undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable +the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_124" id="Page_124">[Pg 124]</a></span></p> + +<p>Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and +only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and +although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest +and noblest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's, +wherever she can live nobly and work nobly. How many myriads in this +country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to +relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is +dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young +woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to +interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she +had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their +private lives; that although the majority were working partly or +entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of +the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like +George Eliot, Charlotte Brontė and Helen Hunt will long continue to +bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings.</p> + +<p>It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work +and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_125" id="Page_125">[Pg 125]</a></span> +schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women +who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to +have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer +powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and +the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have +bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood. +Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the +smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think +of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the +confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for +one week!</p> + +<p>As a class, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a +talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to +talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure +if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking +to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably +accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so +much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration. +As dignity is a man's quality,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_126" id="Page_126">[Pg 126]</a></span> loveliness is a woman's; her heart is +love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever +influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but +men go farther in friendship than women. Women mourn for the lost love, +says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love +consoles; a man's friendship supports. What a real man most desires in a +woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man +despises a mannish woman.</p> + +<p>Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere +brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it +is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they +scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a godless +woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she +adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and +refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know +her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their +arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that +her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force +push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_127" id="Page_127">[Pg 127]</a></span> masculine +influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best +comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions.</p> + +<p>Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young +women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps +this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide +than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in +a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its +garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he +would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a +soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it +is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does +not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt +married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton +married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true +wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of +gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain +perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, +like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_128" id="Page_128">[Pg 128]</a></span> +deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that +conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest +merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her +husband as her appendage.</p> + +<p>Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother +is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational +systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home +has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is +known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room +in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave. +Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each +boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy +mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do +without her.</p> + +<p>While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home, +she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes +early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her +children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior.</p> + +<p>Women are far more observant of little things<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_129" id="Page_129">[Pg 129]</a></span> than men, and the +greatest among them have marvelous powers of observation. It is this +power that made Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Disraeli the sturdy helpmates +they were to their husbands in all their trying cares of government. It +is said of Gladstone that it was not unusual for him to adjourn a +Cabinet meeting through a desire "to consult with Catherine." Had there +not been large power of observation, we should never have had the works +of George Eliot, Charlotte Brontė, Jane Austin, Helen Hunt, and all the +other notable women creators of fiction. Charlotte Cushman was the +greatest actress America has ever produced because her observation was +so close that not the smallest detail of the character she played +escaped her or was neglected. The beautifying of Athens owes its +inception to Aspasia rather than to Pericles.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_131" id="Page_131">[Pg 131]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="II" id="II"></a>II</h2> + +<h3>MUSICAL CULTURE</h3> + + +<p>Of all the arts, none is more difficult to define than music. No two +persons seem to agree as to what it is, and a harsh sound to one is +often sweet music to another. When music is controlled by those who use +carefully their powers of observation, it will be vastly more useful to +mankind. The need of music in the advancement of humanity it too +apparent to admit of discussion. From the Greek instrument with one +string down to the wonderful pipe-organ, music has been intensely +attractive and marvelously helpful, and for the good of the human +family.</p> + +<p>No art or science needs more to be developed to-day than that of music. +Its influence on soul and body has been noticed and advanced by some of +the greatest thinkers of ancient and modern times, therefore it is not +necessary to discuss the supreme need for real music to bring into +harmony motives and movements for good. When we<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_132" id="Page_132">[Pg 132]</a></span> duly consider the +subject of music, and ask where we shall find the great musicians who +are to-day so much in demand, we feel that many so-called schools of +music are often more misleading than instructive, and that they follow +fashions that are far more unreasonable than the fashions of dress.</p> + +<p>The art of music needs philosophic study, and it should be begun with a +far better understanding of the many causes which contribute to its +composition. The singing of birds is literally one of the most +discordant expressions of sound. Indeed, the tones of the nightingale +and the meadow-lark are only shrill whistles when they are considered +with reference only to the tones of their voice, yet they furnish the +ideal of some of the richest music to which the ear has ever listened, +being one part of the delicate orchestra of nature. The lowing of the +cow, the bellow of the bull, the bark of an angry dog echoing among the +hills at eventide, combined with so many other different sounds and +impressions, has become enticingly sweet to the pensive listener. The +insect-choir of night has as much of the calming and refining influences +as the bird-choir of the morning.</p> + +<p>Real music requires not only that the tones<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_133" id="Page_133">[Pg 133]</a></span> should be clear and +resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings. +"Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn +in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful +music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind, +but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My +Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral, +with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its +stained-glass windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with +a ballroom jig.</p> + +<p>Harmonious circumstances and appropriate environment are as essential +for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The +foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and +growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed +her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too +little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner +in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner, +and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge, +has surely been misled into darkest delusion<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_134" id="Page_134">[Pg 134]</a></span> as to music, and will soon +be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place +anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity +shudder.</p> + +<p>What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of +musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the +influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that +always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of +the auditor and permanently influences him to nobler thought, feeling, +and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are +capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or +instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in +acoustics is not music.</p> + +<p>It has been frequently shown that music is potent in its effects upon +the body as well as upon the soul. In 1901, a notable illustration of +the power of music over disease was given at the Samaritan Hospital, +connected with Temple University in Philadelphia, although the +experiments were made under disadvantageous circumstances and +environment. The patients were informed what the physicians were +endeavoring to do, and the efforts of the first few months were wasted<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_135" id="Page_135">[Pg 135]</a></span> +for the most part. Many of the patients who were placed under the +influence of the music grew confident that they were going to be cured. +While the recovery of some seemed miraculous, those who conducted the +experiments felt that the healing might be largely due to the influence +of the mind and not directly to the music. The matter was dropped for +several months, until the patients were nearly all new cases. The +doctors charged the nurses not to let the patients know for what cause +the music was placed in the hospital. They eliminated also the personal +influence of the nurses as well as the use of drugs at the time the +music was produced. The experiment convinced those who conducted it that +music has a powerful restorative effect even upon a person who is +suffering from a combination of diseases. So many of the patients who +recovered at that time from the influence of the music are alive and in +good health to-day that common honesty disposes us to conclude that +there is some undiscovered benefit in music which should be immediately +investigated. This will never be attained by musical faddists or by +selfish musicians who sing or perform for applause or money. Some plain, +every day-man or woman will ultimately be the apostle of music for the +people, and<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_136" id="Page_136">[Pg 136]</a></span> the experiments at Samaritan Hospital furnish only a +suggestion of the resources of music which must soon be known to the +world.</p> + +<p>There was one patient in the hospital who had lost his memory through +"softening of the brain." He lay most of the time unconscious, but +occasionally talked irrationally upon all sorts of subjects. A quartet +sang several pieces in his ward, but the nurses who sat upon each side +of him noticed no effect whatever upon him until the quartet sang "My +Old Kentucky Home." Then his eyes brightened and he began to hum the +tune. Before they had finished the third verse, he asked the nurse about +the singing, and requested the quartet to repeat the song. His +intelligence seemed completely normal for a little while after the music +ceased. He asked and answered questions clearly, but soon relapsed into +his incoherent talk and listlessness.</p> + +<p>When the man's lawyer heard of the effects upon the patient, he asked +that the song might be sung while he was present, that he might then ask +the patient about some very important papers of great value to the +patient's family. As soon as the song was again sung by the quartet his +intelligence returned. He informed the lawyer accurately as to the bank +vault in which his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_137" id="Page_137">[Pg 137]</a></span> box was locked, and told where he had left the keys +in a private drawer of his desk.</p> + +<p>Although the effect of the music was not permanent as to his case, many +persons who know of it feel that some time music may be so applied as +permanently to cure even such cases, if kept up for a sufficient length +of time. Accidents to the skull, heart diseases, nervous exhaustion, and +spinal ailments seem especially amenable to music. Two of the hospital +cases of paralysis were permanently relieved by music. In one of these +cases instrumental music seemed to produce a strong electric effect. +While four violins were accompanied by an organ, the patient could use +his feet and hands, but it was several weeks before he could walk +without music. In the other case, vocal music put an insomnia patient to +sleep, but after sleeping through the program, the patient was better; +after a few trials he returned home.</p> + +<p>Some of the hundred cases experimented upon were complete failures. But +those conducting the experiments were convinced that the failure was +attributable to the fact that they were unable to find the right kind of +music. In the use of religious selections, "Pleyel's Hymn" made the +patients of every ward worse; but "The Dead<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_138" id="Page_138">[Pg 138]</a></span> March" from Saul was +soothing to typhoid patients. When this march was rendered softly, the +nurses discovered that two cases had been so susceptible to the +influences of the music that the physicians omitted the usual treatment +and the patients recovered sooner than some other patients who had the +disease in a less dangerous form.</p> + +<p>Children were helped by a different class of music from that used with +adults, and difference in sex also was noted. Mothers who sing to their +children may become the best investigators as to the power of vocal +music on the healthy development of childhood.</p> + +<p>In the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, several hymns were once forcefully +rendered by the great chorus of the church to a congregation of three +thousand people. At the close, slips of paper were passed to the +worshipers, and they were asked to write upon the paper what thoughts +the music had suggested to them. While there was nothing in the anthems +suggestive of youth, and the burden of the stanzas seemed to divert from +childhood, yet more than half of the two thousand slips returned +attested that the hearer had been reminded of his schooldays and of the +games of childhood; these slips were collected<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_139" id="Page_139">[Pg 139]</a></span> before the congregation +had time to confer. It shows that the music was not in accord with the +words, and that it had greater power upon the mind than the words had. +It proves that, to produce its highest effects, sacred music must +harmonize with the meaning of the words and with the environment. It +also shows that the purpose for which one sings is an important +factor—random vociferations or a display of vocal gymnastics even of +the most cultured kind is both inartistic and unmusical.</p> + +<p>These pages have been written to suggest that music is still with the +common people; that the future blessings which mankind shall derive from +musical art and science are probably dependent upon some observant +person who is free from the trammels of misguided and misdirected +culture, and who may come to it with an independent genius, and handle +the subject in the light of every-day common-sense.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_140" id="Page_140">[Pg 140]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="III" id="III"></a>III</h2> + +<h3>ORATORY</h3> + + +<p>Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press +with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has +done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from +oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced +during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public +attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the +<i>living</i> man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which +cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for +orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the +past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the +restoration of the science and the art of oratory.</p> + +<p>The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that +public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_141" id="Page_141">[Pg 141]</a></span> It was +such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the +greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective +debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the +pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the +hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their +addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their +talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw.</p> + +<p>There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and +application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as +some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have +imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly +born with men and women—as the power of the true poet and the true +teacher—yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of +elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists +between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals +primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the +later science is persuasive—it has to do mainly with influencing the +head and the heart.</p> + +<p>There is a law of oratory which does not seem<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_142" id="Page_142">[Pg 142]</a></span> to be understood or +recognized by elocution teachers. The plow-boy in a debating society of +the country school may feel that natural law, like Daniel Webster, +without being conscious that he is following it. But there is a danger +of losing this great natural power through injurious cultivation. The +powerful speaker is consciously or unconsciously observant at all times +of his audience, and he naturally adopts the tones, the gesture, and the +language which attract the most attention and leave the most potent +influence upon the audience. That is the law of all oratory, whether it +applies to the domestic animals, to conversation with our fellows, to +debates or addresses, lectures, speeches, sermons, or arguments. Where +the orator has not been misdirected or misled by some superficial +teacher of elocution, his aim will be first "to win the favorable +attention of his audience" and then to strongly impress them with his +opening sentence, his appearance, his manners, and his subject. His +reputation will have also very much to do with winning this favorable +impression at first. The words of the speaker either drive away or +attract, and the speaker endeavors at the outset to command the +attention of the hearers, whether they be dogs or congregation.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_143" id="Page_143">[Pg 143]</a></span></p> + +<p>The beginner in oratory who is true to his instincts strives to adopt +the methods which he feels will favorably impress those for whom he has +a message. In his oration at the funeral of Julius Cęsar, Mark Anthony +disarmed the enemies of Cęsar and of himself by opening his oration +with, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury +Cęsar, not to <i>praise</i> him." Almost any man or woman can become an +orator of power by keeping himself or herself natural while talking.</p> + +<p>The second condition of a successful oration is the statements of the +important facts or truths. Cicero, the elder Pitt, and Edward Everett +held strictly to the statement of all the facts at the outset of their +speech. Facts and truths are the most important things in all kinds of +oratory; as they are the most difficult to handle, the audience is more +likely to listen to them at the opening of the talk, and they must be +placed before the hearers clearly and emphatically, before the speaker +enters upon the next division of his address.</p> + +<p>The third condition of a successful address is the argument, or +reasoning which is used to prove the conclusion he wishes his hearers to +reach. It is here that logic has its special place; it is at<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_144" id="Page_144">[Pg 144]</a></span> this vital +point that many political speakers fail to convince the men they +address. After he has thus reasoned, the natural orator makes his +appeal, which is the <i>chief purpose</i> of all true oratory. It is here +where the orator becomes vehement, here where he shows all the ornament +of his talk in appropriate figures of speech. The most effective orators +are always those whose hearts are in strong sympathy with humanity, and +whose sympathies are always aroused to plead for men. This is the +condition that accounts for the eloquence—the power to arouse +hearers—which characterizes men like Logan, the American Indian, and +which characterizes many of the religious enthusiasts like Peter the +Hermit, who have surprised the world and often moved them to mighty +deeds.</p> + +<p>So long as our government depends upon the votes of the people, just so +long must there be a stirring need of men and women orators to teach the +principles of government and to keep open to the light of truth the +consciences of the thousands and millions whose votes will decide the +welfare or the misfortune of our nation. As the speaker must adapt +himself and his message to all kinds of people, it is difficult to +advise any one in certain terms how to accomplish this. It is another<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_145" id="Page_145">[Pg 145]</a></span> +instance of the necessity of cultivating the daily habit of observation, +and of being always loyal to our instincts.</p> + +<p>While schools and colleges have their uses, they are by no means a +necessity for those who will accomplish great things through their +oratory. Many a man laden with a wealth of college accomplishment has +been an utter failure on the platform. Where reading-matter is as +abundant and as cheap as it is in America, the poor boy at work upon the +farm or in the factory, with no time but his evenings for study, may get +the essentials of education, and by observing those who speak may give +himself forms of oratorical expression that will enable him to outshine +those with scholarship who have been led into fads.</p> + +<p>We must be impressed with a high sense of duty in becoming an orator of +any class; we must feel that it is our calling to adhere to the truth +always and in all things, to warn our hearers of dangers, and to +encourage the good and help those who are struggling to be so. We must +have a passion for oratory which shall impel us to vigorous thought and +eloquent expression. The greatest oratory is that which is most +persuasive. It is not so fully in what an orator says or the vehemence +with which he says it that counts, but<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_146" id="Page_146">[Pg 146]</a></span> the practical good that results +from it. Many an oration has been elegant enough from its choice diction +and labored phraseology, yet it has fallen flat upon the audience.</p> + +<p>When a man has been worked into natural passion over his theme, his +words will strike root and inspire his hearers into similar passion. It +is wonderful how true are our instincts in detecting what comes from the +heart and that which is mere words. The greatest orators have been those +who have not learned "by rote" what they have spoken. When Lincoln broke +away in his celebrated Cooper Institute address, and pictured the word +freedom written by the Lord across the skies in rainbow hues, the hearts +of his audience stopped beating for the instant. It is foolhardy for any +one to presume to speak with no preparation, for those who wish to give +themselves to oratory should carefully study the great debaters, learn +how they expressed themselves, and then accumulate important truths and +facts concerning their subject. But we must not forget that too much +study as to nicety of expression may lose something of the mountainous +effects of what we wish to state.</p> + +<p>When an orator <i>feels</i> his subject, his soul overflows with a thrill +indescribable, which is<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_147" id="Page_147">[Pg 147]</a></span> known only to those who have felt it. Genius is +lifted free for the moment to fly at will to the mountain heights, and +finds supreme delight therein. Everything that is food for the mind is +helpful to the orator, whether it come from school or work. But it is an +attainment which can be reached by the every-day plain man employed in +any every-day occupation. Demosthenes, the greatest orator the world has +yet known, found his School of Oratory along the shore talking to the +waves. John B. Gough and Henry Clay and both the elder and the younger +Pitt gained all their powers by means as humble. The mere study of +grammar has never yet made a correct speaker; the mere study of rhetoric +has never yet made a correct and powerful writer; and the study of +elocution cannot make an orator. Grammar, rhetoric, and elocution may +teach him only the laws which govern speech, writing, oratory, and leave +him ignorant of the best methods of execution.</p> + +<p>During the last hundred years the leading orators of Congress have +mainly come from among the humble and the poor, and all the learning +they had of their art was got in the schoolhouse, the shop, the fields, +and the University of Hard Knocks. It is a calling that seems to be open +to<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_148" id="Page_148">[Pg 148]</a></span> every man and woman of fair talent. If you desire to become a +platform orator, read the lives of successful orators, and apply to +yourself the means which helped them to distinction. But be vigilant not +to lose your own individuality, and never strive to be any one but +yourself. In no place more than upon the platform does <i>sham</i> mean +<i>shame</i>; nothing is more transparent.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> + +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_149" id="Page_149">[Pg 149]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="IV" id="IV"></a>IV</h2> + +<h3>SELF-HELP</h3> + + +<p>Although Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help" is the first and perhaps the best +of the many inspirational books that have been written of late years, it +is by far the most serviceable of all to any one who wishes and intends +to stand squarely on his own feet and to fight his own battle of life +from start to finish. That book is attractive because it is anecdotal of +life and character, and because of the interest that all men feel in +those who have achieved great things through their own labors, their +trials, and their struggles. It abounds with references to men who were +forced to be self-helpful, who were born lowly enough, but died among +God's gentlemen, and often among the aristocracy of the land, through +sheer force of character, labor, and determination. They have left their +"footprints on the sands of time" mainly because they were +<i>self-reliant</i> and <i>self-helpful</i>.</p> + +<p>The aids to the royal life are all within, and no<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_150" id="Page_150">[Pg 150]</a></span> life is worthless +unless its owner wills it; the fountain of all good is within, and it +will bubble up, if we dig.</p> + +<p>Doctor Holland used to say that there is a super-abundance of +inspiration in America, but a lamentable dearth of perspiration. +Aspiration plus perspiration carries men to dizzy heights of success; +aspiration minus perspiration often lands them in the gutter.</p> + +<p>Self-help is not selfishness. The duty of helping oneself in the highest +sense always involves the duty of helping others. The self-helpful are +not always the men who have achieved greatest success in what vulgarians +call success. That man's life is a success which has attained the end +for which he started out—the greatest failure may sometimes be the +hugest success through the discipline it has afforded. They tell us that +men never fail who die in a worthy cause; that it is nobler to have +failed in a noble cause than to have won in a low one; that it is not +failure, but low aim, that is wicked. God sows the seed and starts us +all out with about the same quantity and the same quality; whether the +crop shall be abundant depends upon the environment in which we grow and +the way we take care of the field.</p> + +<p>The supreme end of each man's life is to take<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_151" id="Page_151">[Pg 151]</a></span> individual care of his +own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no +immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life—and +every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full +capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy +work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a +seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped +sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the +improvement of it we give ourselves.</p> + +<p>The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the +outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. +The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is +always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The +self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, +but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Cęsar could, we +have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the +minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some +government or some institution to do for them what they should only do +for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human +powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win +his<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_152" id="Page_152">[Pg 152]</a></span> own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for +men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, +so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been +during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other +institutions, and too little in ourselves.</p> + +<p>Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any +source—they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who +believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve +success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are +worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly +consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws—especially the laws +which teach men to lean—but they rather consist in helping men to +improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid +comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself—we may stand +him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is +a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and +nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel +that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by +governments. There is no man who rides<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_153" id="Page_153">[Pg 153]</a></span> through life so well as the man +who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called +self-dependence.</p> + +<p>Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the +manliness of the soul.</p> + +<p>The solid foundations of all liberty rest upon individual character, and +individual character is the only sure guaranty for social security and +national progress. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no +matter by what other name you call it. The gods are always on the side +of the man who relies on himself and helps himself; men's arms are long +enough to reach stars, if they will only stretch them. It is so contrary +to the spirit of our nation to be anything but self-helpful. "The flag +of freedom cannot long float over a nation of deadheads; only those who +determine to pay their way from cradle to grave have a right to make the +journey." Schiller says that the kind of education that perfects the +human race is action, conduct, self-culture, self-control. It has been +said that the individual is perfected far more by work than by reading, +by action more than by study, by character more than by biography; these +are courses that are given by the University of Life more completely +than in all other institutions known to men.<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_154" id="Page_154">[Pg 154]</a></span></p> + +<p>The great men of science, literature, art, action—those apostles of +great thoughts and lords of the great heart—belong to no special rank. +They come from colleges, workshops, farms, from poor men's huts and rich +men's mansions; but they all began with reliance upon themselves, and +with an instinctive feeling that they must help themselves solely in +climbing to the work or the station which they had assigned to +themselves. Many of God's greatest apostles of thought and feeling and +action have come from the humblest stations, but the most insuperable +difficulties have not long been obstacles to them. These greatest of +difficulties are true men's greatest helpers—they stimulate powers that +might have lain dormant all through life, but often have readily yielded +to the stout and reliant heart. There is no greater blessing in the +world than poverty which is allied to self-reliance and the spirit of +self-help. "Poverty is the northwind which lashes men into vikings." +Lord Bacon says that men believe too great things of riches, and too +little of indomitable perseverance.</p> + +<p>Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in +the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No +inheritance and environments can do for a man<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_155" id="Page_155">[Pg 155]</a></span> what he can do for +himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the +poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of +clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder +of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape +painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden +were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, +the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. +Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, +the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the +ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary—started life as weavers. +Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the +missionary—were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; +Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the +inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of +steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a +tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, +both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant +sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_156" id="Page_156">[Pg 156]</a></span> +and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists.</p> + +<p>Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose +industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly +benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and +philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to +participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home +in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, +wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his +greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with +important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government +appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In +less than four years after he landed in England he became +Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the +Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment +which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been +knighted by the king.</p> + +<p>In Bavaria he became lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief of staff, +minister of war, member of the council of state, knight of Poland, +member of the academy of science in three cities,<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_157" id="Page_157">[Pg 157]</a></span> commander-in-chief of +the general staff, superintendent of police of Bavaria, and chief of the +regency during the sovereign's compulsory absence in 1798. During his +ten years' service he made great civil and military reforms and produced +such salutary changes in the condition of the people that they erected a +monument in his honor in the pleasure-grounds of Munich, which he had +made for them. When Munich was attacked by an Austrian army in 1796, he +conducted the defense so successfully that he was accorded the highest +praise throughout Europe. The Bavarian monarch showed his appreciation +by making him a count; he chose the title of Count Rumford as an honor +to the birthplace of his wife and child. He ended his days at Paris in +literary and scientific studies and in the society of the most learned +men of Europe.</p> + +<p>The Rumford professorship at Harvard was very liberally endowed by him, +and he gave five thousand dollars to the American Academy of Arts and +Sciences in 1796.</p> + + + +<hr style="width: 65%;" /> +<p><span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_158" id="Page_158">[Pg 158]</a></span></p> +<h2><a name="V" id="V"></a>V</h2> + +<h3>SOME ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN</h3> + + +<p>A life is divine when duty is a joy. The best work we ever do is the +work we get pleasure from doing, and the work we are likeliest to enjoy +most is the work we are best fitted to do with our talent. There is +nothing in the world except marriage that we should be slower in taking +upon ourselves than our life-work; therefore, think much, read much, +inquire much before you assume any life career.</p> + +<p>When you have once decided what is best fitted for you, pursue it +ceaselessly and courageously, no matter how far distant it may be, how +arduous the labor attending it, or how difficult the ascent. The greater +the difficulty surmounted, the more you will value your achievement and +the greater power you will have for keeping on with your work after you +have reached your goal. Do your utmost to find a friend who is older +than you, and consult him freely, and give every man your ear, for the<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_159" id="Page_159">[Pg 159]</a></span> +humblest in station and those with the most meager acquirements in other +matters may see some few things more clearly than other men, and may be +well stored with what you most require. Take each man's advice, but act +according to your own judgment. Teachers should be the best advisers of +those about to enter upon their life-work, and no service of the +schoolmaster or professor can ever be more helpful to the young +intrusted to him than that of helping them to choose a career.</p> + +<p>The best work real teachers do for their pupils is by no means the +teaching of a few minor branches—it is almost always the work he is not +paid for, and which nobody outside of those who realize what real +education is, seems ever to consider. It is sympathy for their students, +getting them to understand the great things that are involved in the +process of getting an education, making them realize that true education +means growth of all our spiritual faculties—head and heart and will, +and that what we get from textbooks is the very least part of an +education. It is helping them to understand that knowledge got from +books and from schoolmasters is always a menace to a man whose spiritual +faculties of head, heart, and will have not been thoroughly<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_160" id="Page_160">[Pg 160]</a></span> +disciplined. It is wise counsel in choosing a life career. Instead of +looking upon this side of the work as divine, instead of being wise +counselors and friendly guides during this great transitional stage from +youth to manhood, teachers can be far more interested in their +individual concerns or in what they call "research-work"—the +research-work may give some temporary glory to themselves, and give some +little advertisement to the institutions that employ them; but the +supreme duty they owe to their students, to God, and to humanity is to +do their utmost to make full men, and worthy and successful men, out of +the youths whose education they have taken upon themselves. No traitor +is such a traitor to his country and to the whole world as the man who +is unfaithful to this sacred trust. Once again, find some sincere and +prudent elder counselor, and turn to him in all your difficulties.</p> + +<p>Get advice as to the best books to read—a good book is the best of +counselors, for it is the best of some good man; and it is a patient +counselor whom we may continually consult upon the same subject as often +as we wish. But waste no time, especially at the opening of your career, +upon books which have no message for your manhood and no helpfulness in +the work you shall assume<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_161" id="Page_161">[Pg 161]</a></span> for life. When you have once taken up a book +as your counselor, don't put it aside until it has been thoroughly +digested and assimilated. One book read is worth a hundred books peeped +through; and of all the dilettantes, a literary dilettante is the most +contemptible. Bacon says, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be +swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested." But it is only the books +that are to be chewed and digested that we can afford to peruse at the +outset in our career; the literary pleasure—gardens—may come later in +life.</p> + +<p>Do your utmost to understand poetic expression, for the poets are the +greatest teachers in the world as well as the greatest of all +legislators. It is they who teach the great in conduct and the pure in +thought. Without education that shall enable us to take them as our +friends, life bears upon it the stamp of death. The great poets are now +the only truth-tellers left to God. They are free, and they make their +lovers free; the great poet is nature's masterpiece. At the touch of his +imagination words blossom into beauty. A true poet is the most precious +gift to a nation, for he feels keenest the glorious duty of serving +truth; he cannot strive for despotism of any kind, for it is still the +instinct of all great<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_162" id="Page_162">[Pg 162]</a></span> spirits to be free. More than other authors, the +poets make us self-forgetful, make life and the whole human race nobler +in our eyes; all things are friendly and sacred to them, all days holy, +all good men divine.</p> + +<p>There is very little worthy work nowadays that does not need some +schooling that it may be well done. If you have an opportunity to give +yourself this help, don't neglect it. Carefully select the courses that +will be most helpful to you in your career, and don't be side-tracked by +any of what we sentimentalists term "culture studies." There's nothing +better in the world than culture study, if we can afford it and have +time for it. But there is not a greater or more wicked waste of valuable +time than the time spent upon what some sentimentalists term culture +study.</p> + +<p>When you have once taken up the studies you have decided upon, keep +steadily to your course and shun diversions. Recreations are as +essential to the student who intends to do high-class work as food is to +the body; but diversions disqualify him for earnest work, and may breed +a habit of halfness that shall bring his failure. Don't be foolish and +hope to be great in many lines. Who sips of many arts drinks none. In +every vocation to-day competition is so keen that the man who<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_163" id="Page_163">[Pg 163]</a></span> will +succeed must be content to be supreme in one thing alone.</p> + +<p><i>Halfness</i> weakens all our spiritual powers, and thoroughness is the +<i>central</i> passion of all worthy characters.</p> + +<p>It is nobler to be confined to one calling, and to excel in that, than +to dabble in forty. There is some odor about a dabbler that makes him +especially offensive to all clean high-class men and women. But when we +have formed the habit of doing carelessly other tasks than our +life-work, we shall soon get into the way of doing carelessly the work +of our chosen calling. There is nothing that gives us greater assurance +that our life-work will be thoroughly done than to habituate ourselves +to do the slightest task completely. Sing the last note fully, make the +last letter of your name complete. Eat the last morsel deliberately. In +a real man's life there are no trifles. Whatever is worth doing by him +is worth doing well. The many-sided Edward Everett attributed his being +able to do so many things well to his early habit of doing even the +least thing thoroughly. He used to say that he prided himself upon the +way he tied up the smallest paper parcel.</p> + +<p>Although schools may be very helpful, don't forget to emphasize again +that they are merely<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_164" id="Page_164">[Pg 164]</a></span> helpers. The man is somebody only when the fight +is won within himself. Without the schools men have often reached the +pinnacles of success, through their own individual earnestness and +energy. Schools make wise men wiser, but they may make fools greater +fools than ever. If colleges have fallen somewhat into disrepute, it is +largely due to the fact that we may have sent more fools than wise men +to college. Many a man has been the better for being too poor to attend +school, like Franklin, Lincoln, Peter Cooper, and ten thousand other +Americans. Their thirst for what books had to give them forced them to +work harder and to deny themselves all the enjoyments that so vulgarize +yet so charm the cheaper brood.</p> + +<p>All that is won by sacrifice and downright hard work is priceless, and +many noble men and women who have risen to high honor and station owe +their place and power solely to this. Be always mindful that power is +the only safe foundation for reputation. Thoughtful Americans are not +concerning themselves about who your ancestors were, and whether or not +they were graduated from some college. Like Doctor Holmes, they feel +that old families and old trees generally have their best parts +underground, and that the only<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_165" id="Page_165">[Pg 165]</a></span> progressive is the man who is bigger in +thought and feeling and accomplishment than his father was. They believe +that it is unimportant where you buy your educational tools, if you are +only doing good work with them.</p> + +<p>There is only one <i>true aristocracy in America</i>—those with more +spiritual power and individual accomplishment than the rest of men.</p> + +<p>Emerson says that "all the winds that move the vanes of universities +blow from antiquity," and this is responsible for many foolish words and +many fool acts of schoolmen which are so often misleading the +unsuspecting public.</p> + +<p>Nothing is more foolish than the idea that any schooling is worthless +which is obtained in schools after the regular school hours; and more +than one attempt has been made to enact laws which shall hinder from +practice physicians and lawyers who have been obliged to get their +knowledge through channels other than the conventional. The victory of +the general does not depend upon the place where he got his military +training or the time of the day when he studied. Oliver Cromwell, the +greatest general of his day, was a farmer until his fortieth year, when +he entered the army of the Parliament against Charles I. The only +question that concerns the nation that puts a general<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_166" id="Page_166">[Pg 166]</a></span> at the head of +its forces is, has he the powers that shall make us victorious?</p> + +<p>Men in distress don't ask for the pedigree of the life-saver, nor do +they stop to inquire when he graduated. Don't be frightened off by +sticklers for what is customary. Knowledge is the right of the poorest +boy and girl in America, and it can be had by the humblest in the land. +Be convinced of this and enter the race. The world steps aside and lets +the man pass who knows where he is going; all the world will shout to +clear the track when they see a determined giant is coming. In choosing +your career, don't be limited to the old professions. There are to-day +many more occupations calling for the highest skill and offering the +highest inducements than there were twenty years ago, and these +positions are steadily increasing. Many occupations which were recently +regarded almost as menial have risen almost to professions—cooking, +agriculture, decorative art, forestry, nursing, sanitation, designing +apparel, and countless others; and the men and women qualified for these +are surer of better positions than formerly, and far better rewards.</p> + +<p>But the youth who is imbued with the determination to <i>be</i> right and to +<i>do</i> right must never lose<span class="pagenum"><a name="Page_167" id="Page_167">[Pg 167]</a></span> sight of this truth—that life is vastly +more than place and meat and raiment. Living for self is suicide; men +that are men get far greater enjoyment and far greater reward from +making life a blessing for those who come their way than they get from +all other things combined. No man lives so truly for himself as he who +lives for other people, and one of the chiefest purposes of education is +that it gives larger views of life and adds greater power to serve +humanity. The man who is really in earnest to make his life count is +studiously observant. Each day and each place multiplies his means of +happiness for himself and others.</p> + + +<h3>THE END</h3> + + +<div class="figleft"> +<img src="images/endpaper1.jpg" alt=""/> +</div> + +<div class="figright"> +<img src="images/endpaper2.jpg" alt=""/> +</div> + + + + + + + + + +<pre> + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Increasing Personal Efficiency, by +Russell H. Conwell + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + +***** This file should be named 36898-h.htm or 36898-h.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/6/8/9/36898/ + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. + + +</pre> + +</body> +</html> diff --git a/36898-h/images/cover.jpg b/36898-h/images/cover.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..9e8ca53 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-h/images/cover.jpg diff --git a/36898-h/images/endpaper1.jpg b/36898-h/images/endpaper1.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..1119a70 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-h/images/endpaper1.jpg diff --git a/36898-h/images/endpaper2.jpg b/36898-h/images/endpaper2.jpg Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..3fbb0f4 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898-h/images/endpaper2.jpg diff --git a/36898.txt b/36898.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..68ec232 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898.txt @@ -0,0 +1,1377 @@ +Project Gutenberg's Increasing Personal Efficiency, by Russell H. Conwell + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + + +Title: Increasing Personal Efficiency + +Author: Russell H. Conwell + +Release Date: July 29, 2011 [EBook #36898] + +Language: English + +Character set encoding: ASCII + +*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + + + + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + + + + + + + + + + + Increasing Personal Efficiency + + Women + Musical Culture + Oratory + Self Help + Some Advice to Young Men + + + _By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL + + VOLUME 5 + + + NATIONAL + EXTENSION UNIVERSITY + 597 Fifth Avenue, New York + + OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY + + Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers + Printed in the United States of America + + + + +_Increasing Personal Efficiency_ + + + + +I + +WOMEN + + +Some women may be superficial in education and accomplishments, +extravagant in tastes, conspicuous in apparel, something more than +self-assured in bearing, devoted to trivialities, inclined to frequent +public places. It is, nevertheless, not without cause that art has +always shown the virtues in woman's dress, and that true literature +teems with eloquent tributes and ideal pictures of true womanhood--from +Homer's Andromache to Scott's Ellen Douglas, and farther. While +Shakespeare had no heroes, all his women except Ophelia are heroines, +even if Lady Macbeth, Regan, and Goneril are hideously wicked. In the +moral world, women are what flowers and fruit are in the physical. "The +soul's armor is never well set to the heart until woman's hand has +braced it; and it is only when she braces it loosely that the honor of +manhood fails." + +Men will mainly be what women make them, and there can never be +_entirely free men_ until there are _entirely free women_ with no +special privileges, but with all her rights. The wife makes the home, +the mother makes the man, and she is the creator of joyous boyhood and +heroic manhood; when women fulfil their divine mission, all reform +societies will die, brutes will become men, and men shall be divine. +There are unkind things said of her in the cheaper writings of +to-day--perhaps because their authors have seen her only in +boarding-houses, restaurants, theaters, dance-halls, and at +card-parties; and the poor, degraded stage with its warped mirror shows +her up to the ridicule of the cheaper brood. The greatest writings and +the greatest dramas of all time have more than compensated for all this +indignity, and we have only to read deep into the great literature to be +disillusioned of any vulgar estimations of womanhood, and to understand +the beauty and power of soul of every woman who is true to the royalty +of womanhood. + +There are few surer tests of a manly character than the estimation he +has of women, and it is noteworthy that the men who stand highest in the +esteem of both men and women are always men with worthy ideas of +womanhood, and with praiseworthy ideals for their mothers, sisters, +wives, and daughters. As men sink in self-respect and moral worth, their +esteem of womanhood lowers. The women who become the theme for poets and +philosophers and high-class playwrights are the women who have been bred +mainly in the home. They seem without exception to abhor throngs, and +only stern necessity can induce them to appear in them; the motherly, +matronly, and filial graces appeal strongly to them--such as are +portrayed in Cornelia, Portia, and Cordelia. They may yearn for society, +but it is the best society--for the "women whose beauty and sweetness +and dignity and high accomplishments and grace make us understand the +Greek mythology, and for the men who mold the time, who refresh our +faith in heroism and virtue, who make Plato and Zeno and Shakespeare and +all Shakespeare's gentlemen possible again." + +If there is any inferiority in women, it is the result of environment +and of lack of opportunity--never from lack of intelligence and other +soul-powers. There is no sex in spiritual endowments, and woman seems +entitled to all the rights of man--plus the right of protection. Ruskin +says, "We are foolish without excuse in talking of the superiority of +one sex over the other; each has attributes the other has not, each is +completed by the other, and the happiness of both depends upon each +seeking and receiving from the other what the other can alone give." + +In speaking of the time when perfect manhood and perfect womanhood has +come, Tennyson says in "The Princess": + + Yet in the long years liker must they grow: + The man be more of woman, she of man; + He gain in sweetness and in moral height, + Nor lose the _wrestling_ thews that throw the world; + She mental breadth, nor fail in childward care, + Nor lose the childlike in the larger mind. + +Home is the true sphere for woman; her best work for humanity has always +been done there, or has had its first impulse from within those four +walls. It was home with all its duties that made the Roman matron +Cornelia the type of the lofty woman of the world and the worthy mother. +While it endowed her with the power to raise two sons as worthy as any +known to history, who sacrificed their lives in defense of the Roman +poor, it also endowed her with courage to say to the second of her sons +when he was leaving her for the battle which brought his death, "My son, +see that thou returnest with thy shield or on it." Napoleon claimed +that it was the women of France who caused the loss at Waterloo, not its +men. + +"Man's intellect is for speculation and invention, and his energy is for +just war and just conquest; woman's intellect is for sweet ordering, +arrangement, and decision; her energy is not for battle, but for rule." +Apparently relying upon man's magnanimity not to resent her abdicating +her home, woman's exigencies--and perhaps her ambitions--have forced her +more and more during the past fifty years into man's domains of +speculation and energy--perhaps into some war and some conquest. The +ever-increasing demand for her in these man-realms which she has invaded +or into which she has intruded herself is abundant evidence that she has +creditably acquitted herself in the betterment of business, education, +and literature, as well as in the numberless things which she has +invented to add beauty and comfort to the home, and to remove much of +the bitter drudgery from house and office, and to promote the health and +happiness of millions. All these helps she has given, even if she has +undoubtedly lost some of the graces which have always made so lovable +the woman of whom Andromache, Portia, and Cordelia are but types. + +Although matrimony and motherhood were the first conditions of women and +only conditions that poets sing about and philosophers write about, and +although these are still the conditions where she is doing her largest +and noblest work in humanizing, yet her proper sphere is as man's, +wherever she can live nobly and work nobly. How many myriads in this +country alone are drudging or almost drudging in shops and offices to +relieve the too stern pressure of pain or poverty from some one who is +dear to them, yet are doing it unselfishly and uncomplainingly! A young +woman lately told me that she had for several years been employed to +interview women applicants for positions; that during these years she +had interviewed scores of women daily, and had learned much of their +private lives; that although the majority were working partly or +entirely to maintain others, yet had she never heard one complaint of +the sacrifices this service involved. Hundreds of other women, like +George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte and Helen Hunt will long continue to +bring pleasure and profit to millions through their writings. + +It is women, too, whose inventions have not only lightened domestic work +and brightened the home, but also have so far removed the modern +schoolroom from the little red schoolhouse of long ago; and it is women +who have improved the books and the studies for children. They seem to +have entered almost every activity outside of the home, and their finer +powers of observation, aided by their innate love of the beautiful and +the practicality they have learned while in service, seem mainly to have +bettered conditions for wage-earners as well as for home and childhood. +Think of the thousands upon thousands in this land whose work with the +smaller children of the school could never be so well done by men! Think +of the service daily rendered by women outside the home, and picture the +confusion that would now arise if all these remained at home, even for +one week! + +As a class, women do not speak so well as men, but they excel him as a +talker. In truth it is less difficult for them to talk little, than to +talk well. Somebody has said that there is nothing a woman cannot endure +if she can only talk. It is the woman who is ordained to teach talking +to infancy. Those who see short distances see clearly, which probably +accounts for woman's being able to see into and through character so +much better than men. A man admires a woman who is worthy of admiration. +As dignity is a man's quality, loveliness is a woman's; her heart is +love's favorite seat; women who are loyal to their womanhood can ever +influence the gnarliest hearts. They go farther in love than men, but +men go farther in friendship than women. Women mourn for the lost love, +says Dr. Brinton, men mourn for the lost loved-one. A woman's love +consoles; a man's friendship supports. What a real man most desires in a +woman is womanhood. As every woman despises a womanish man, so every man +despises a mannish woman. + +Men are more sincere with the women of most culture, although mere +brain-women never please them so much as heart-women. Men feel that it +is the exceptional woman who should have exceptional rights; but they +scorn women whose soul has shrunk into mere intellect, and a godless +woman is a supreme horror to them. When to her womanly attributes she +adds the lady's attributes of veracity, delicate honor, deference, and +refinement, she becomes a high school of politeness for all who know +her. "True women," says Charles Reade, "are not too high to use their +arms, nor too low to cultivate their minds," but Hamerton believes that +her greatest negative quality is, that she does not of her own force +push forward intellectually; that she needs watchful masculine +influence for this. It is claimed that single women are mainly best +comforters, best sympathizers, best nurses, best companions. + +Dean Swift says: "So many marriages prove unhappy because so many young +women spend their time in making nets, not in making cages." Perhaps +this is why they say that, in choosing a wife, the ear is a safer guide +than the eye. The gifts a gentlewoman seeks are packed and locked up in +a manly heart. Without a woman's love, a man's soul is without its +garden. He is happiest in marriage who selects as his wife the woman he +would have chosen as his bosom-companion, a happy marriage demands a +soul-mate as for as a house-mate or a yoke-mate. Spalding says that it +is doubtful whether a woman should ever marry who cannot sing and does +not love poetry. The conceptions of a wife differ. When the Celt +married, he put necklace and bracelets upon his wife; when the Teuton +married, he gave his wife a horse, an ox, a spear, and a shield. A true +wife delights both sense and soul; with her, a man unfolds a mine of +gold. Like a good wine, the happiest marriages take years to attain +perfection, and Hamerton says that marriage is a long, slow intergrowth, +like that of two trees closely planted in a forest. The marriage of a +deaf man and a blind woman is always happy; but this does not imply that +conjugal happiness is attained only under these conditions. The greatest +merit of many a man is his wife, but no real woman ever wears her +husband as her appendage. + +Maternity is the loveliest word in the language, and every worthy mother +is an aristocrat. Mothers are the chief requisites of all educational +systems, and the hand that rocks the cradle rules the world. The home +has always been the best school in the world, and nothing else that is +known to education can ever supersede it. The cradle is the first room +in the school of life, and what is learned there lasts to the grave. +Dearth of real mothers is responsible for dearth of real education. Each +boy and each man is what his mother has made him, and every worthy +mother rears her children to stand upon their own two feet, and to do +without her. + +While a thoughtful wife and mother is busied with the affairs of home, +she is never done with her intellectual education, for she realizes +early in her career that a mother loses half her influence with her +children when she ceases to be their intellectual superior. + +Women are far more observant of little things than men, and the +greatest among them have marvelous powers of observation. It is this +power that made Mrs. Gladstone and Mrs. Disraeli the sturdy helpmates +they were to their husbands in all their trying cares of government. It +is said of Gladstone that it was not unusual for him to adjourn a +Cabinet meeting through a desire "to consult with Catherine." Had there +not been large power of observation, we should never have had the works +of George Eliot, Charlotte Bronte, Jane Austin, Helen Hunt, and all the +other notable women creators of fiction. Charlotte Cushman was the +greatest actress America has ever produced because her observation was +so close that not the smallest detail of the character she played +escaped her or was neglected. The beautifying of Athens owes its +inception to Aspasia rather than to Pericles. + + + + +II + +MUSICAL CULTURE + + +Of all the arts, none is more difficult to define than music. No two +persons seem to agree as to what it is, and a harsh sound to one is +often sweet music to another. When music is controlled by those who use +carefully their powers of observation, it will be vastly more useful to +mankind. The need of music in the advancement of humanity it too +apparent to admit of discussion. From the Greek instrument with one +string down to the wonderful pipe-organ, music has been intensely +attractive and marvelously helpful, and for the good of the human +family. + +No art or science needs more to be developed to-day than that of music. +Its influence on soul and body has been noticed and advanced by some of +the greatest thinkers of ancient and modern times, therefore it is not +necessary to discuss the supreme need for real music to bring into +harmony motives and movements for good. When we duly consider the +subject of music, and ask where we shall find the great musicians who +are to-day so much in demand, we feel that many so-called schools of +music are often more misleading than instructive, and that they follow +fashions that are far more unreasonable than the fashions of dress. + +The art of music needs philosophic study, and it should be begun with a +far better understanding of the many causes which contribute to its +composition. The singing of birds is literally one of the most +discordant expressions of sound. Indeed, the tones of the nightingale +and the meadow-lark are only shrill whistles when they are considered +with reference only to the tones of their voice, yet they furnish the +ideal of some of the richest music to which the ear has ever listened, +being one part of the delicate orchestra of nature. The lowing of the +cow, the bellow of the bull, the bark of an angry dog echoing among the +hills at eventide, combined with so many other different sounds and +impressions, has become enticingly sweet to the pensive listener. The +insect-choir of night has as much of the calming and refining influences +as the bird-choir of the morning. + +Real music requires not only that the tones should be clear and +resonant, but that they should be uttered amid harmonious surroundings. +"Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle," sung with a banjo accompaniment on a lawn +in the evening, surrounded by gay companions, may be the most delightful +music, which will start the blood coursing or rest the disturbed mind, +but it would not be called music if sung at a funeral. "I Know That My +Redeemer Liveth" is glorious music when it is sung in a great cathedral, +with echoes from its shadowy arches and the dim light of its +stained-glass windows. But the same solo would be in awful discord with +a ballroom jig. + +Harmonious circumstances and appropriate environment are as essential +for perfect effects in music as is the concord of sweet sounds. The +foolish idea that music consists in screaming up to the highest C and +growling down to the lowest B has misled many an amateur, and destroyed +her helpfulness to a world that has far too much misery and far too +little of the joy that comes from a sweet-voiced songster. The beginner +in voice culture who attempts to wiggle her voice like a hired mourner, +and with her tremulous effects sets the teeth of her audience on edge, +has surely been misled into darkest delusion as to music, and will soon +be lost amid the throng of vocal failures. Extremists are out of place +anywhere, but the myriads of them in the musical world make humanity +shudder. + +What is needed in music to-day more than anything else is a standard of +musical culture which shall demand careful discipline in all the +influences that contribute to good music. True music is the music that +always produces benign effects, the music that holds the attention of +the auditor and permanently influences him to nobler thought, feeling, +and action. Those large-hearted, artistic-souled men and women who are +capable of interpreting into feeling what they have heard from voice or +instrument must be the final court of appeal. A trapeze performance in +acoustics is not music. + +It has been frequently shown that music is potent in its effects upon +the body as well as upon the soul. In 1901, a notable illustration of +the power of music over disease was given at the Samaritan Hospital, +connected with Temple University in Philadelphia, although the +experiments were made under disadvantageous circumstances and +environment. The patients were informed what the physicians were +endeavoring to do, and the efforts of the first few months were wasted +for the most part. Many of the patients who were placed under the +influence of the music grew confident that they were going to be cured. +While the recovery of some seemed miraculous, those who conducted the +experiments felt that the healing might be largely due to the influence +of the mind and not directly to the music. The matter was dropped for +several months, until the patients were nearly all new cases. The +doctors charged the nurses not to let the patients know for what cause +the music was placed in the hospital. They eliminated also the personal +influence of the nurses as well as the use of drugs at the time the +music was produced. The experiment convinced those who conducted it that +music has a powerful restorative effect even upon a person who is +suffering from a combination of diseases. So many of the patients who +recovered at that time from the influence of the music are alive and in +good health to-day that common honesty disposes us to conclude that +there is some undiscovered benefit in music which should be immediately +investigated. This will never be attained by musical faddists or by +selfish musicians who sing or perform for applause or money. Some plain, +every day-man or woman will ultimately be the apostle of music for the +people, and the experiments at Samaritan Hospital furnish only a +suggestion of the resources of music which must soon be known to the +world. + +There was one patient in the hospital who had lost his memory through +"softening of the brain." He lay most of the time unconscious, but +occasionally talked irrationally upon all sorts of subjects. A quartet +sang several pieces in his ward, but the nurses who sat upon each side +of him noticed no effect whatever upon him until the quartet sang "My +Old Kentucky Home." Then his eyes brightened and he began to hum the +tune. Before they had finished the third verse, he asked the nurse about +the singing, and requested the quartet to repeat the song. His +intelligence seemed completely normal for a little while after the music +ceased. He asked and answered questions clearly, but soon relapsed into +his incoherent talk and listlessness. + +When the man's lawyer heard of the effects upon the patient, he asked +that the song might be sung while he was present, that he might then ask +the patient about some very important papers of great value to the +patient's family. As soon as the song was again sung by the quartet his +intelligence returned. He informed the lawyer accurately as to the bank +vault in which his box was locked, and told where he had left the keys +in a private drawer of his desk. + +Although the effect of the music was not permanent as to his case, many +persons who know of it feel that some time music may be so applied as +permanently to cure even such cases, if kept up for a sufficient length +of time. Accidents to the skull, heart diseases, nervous exhaustion, and +spinal ailments seem especially amenable to music. Two of the hospital +cases of paralysis were permanently relieved by music. In one of these +cases instrumental music seemed to produce a strong electric effect. +While four violins were accompanied by an organ, the patient could use +his feet and hands, but it was several weeks before he could walk +without music. In the other case, vocal music put an insomnia patient to +sleep, but after sleeping through the program, the patient was better; +after a few trials he returned home. + +Some of the hundred cases experimented upon were complete failures. But +those conducting the experiments were convinced that the failure was +attributable to the fact that they were unable to find the right kind of +music. In the use of religious selections, "Pleyel's Hymn" made the +patients of every ward worse; but "The Dead March" from Saul was +soothing to typhoid patients. When this march was rendered softly, the +nurses discovered that two cases had been so susceptible to the +influences of the music that the physicians omitted the usual treatment +and the patients recovered sooner than some other patients who had the +disease in a less dangerous form. + +Children were helped by a different class of music from that used with +adults, and difference in sex also was noted. Mothers who sing to their +children may become the best investigators as to the power of vocal +music on the healthy development of childhood. + +In the Baptist Temple, Philadelphia, several hymns were once forcefully +rendered by the great chorus of the church to a congregation of three +thousand people. At the close, slips of paper were passed to the +worshipers, and they were asked to write upon the paper what thoughts +the music had suggested to them. While there was nothing in the anthems +suggestive of youth, and the burden of the stanzas seemed to divert from +childhood, yet more than half of the two thousand slips returned +attested that the hearer had been reminded of his schooldays and of the +games of childhood; these slips were collected before the congregation +had time to confer. It shows that the music was not in accord with the +words, and that it had greater power upon the mind than the words had. +It proves that, to produce its highest effects, sacred music must +harmonize with the meaning of the words and with the environment. It +also shows that the purpose for which one sings is an important +factor--random vociferations or a display of vocal gymnastics even of +the most cultured kind is both inartistic and unmusical. + +These pages have been written to suggest that music is still with the +common people; that the future blessings which mankind shall derive from +musical art and science are probably dependent upon some observant +person who is free from the trammels of misguided and misdirected +culture, and who may come to it with an independent genius, and handle +the subject in the light of every-day common-sense. + + + + +III + +ORATORY + + +Oratory has always been a potent influence for good. The printing-press +with its newspapers and magazines and tens of thousands of books has +done much during the past fifty years to draw attention away from +oratory. The printing-press is a huge blessing, and has greatly advanced +during these years that oratory has declined in public esteem or public +attention. But we are learning that there is yet something in the +_living_ man, in his voice and his manner and his mesmeric force, which +cannot be expressed through the cold lead of type. Hence the need for +orators, both men and women, has been steadily increasing during the +past few years, until there seems to be a pressing demand for the +restoration of the science and the art of oratory. + +The country lad or the hard-working laborer or mechanic who thinks that +public speaking is beyond his reach has done himself a wrong. It was +such as they who oftener than can be told have become some of the +greatest orators of history. Men who afterward became great as effective +debaters made their first addresses to the cows in the pasture, to the +pigs in pens, to the birds in trees, and to the dog and the cat upon the +hearth. They often drew lessons concerning the effects of their +addresses from the actions of the animal auditors which heard their +talk, and were attracted or repulsed by what they heard and saw. + +There is a mystery about public speaking. After years of study and +application, some men cannot accomplish as much by their addresses as +some uncultured laborer can do with his very first attempt. Some have +imperfectly called this power "personal magnetism." While this is mainly +born with men and women--as the power of the true poet and the true +teacher--yet it can be cultivated to a surprising degree. The schools of +elocution so often seem to fail to recognize the wide gulf that exists +between elocution and oratory. The former is an art which deals +primarily with enunciation, pronunciation, and gesture; the work of the +later science is persuasive--it has to do mainly with influencing the +head and the heart. + +There is a law of oratory which does not seem to be understood or +recognized by elocution teachers. The plow-boy in a debating society of +the country school may feel that natural law, like Daniel Webster, +without being conscious that he is following it. But there is a danger +of losing this great natural power through injurious cultivation. The +powerful speaker is consciously or unconsciously observant at all times +of his audience, and he naturally adopts the tones, the gesture, and the +language which attract the most attention and leave the most potent +influence upon the audience. That is the law of all oratory, whether it +applies to the domestic animals, to conversation with our fellows, to +debates or addresses, lectures, speeches, sermons, or arguments. Where +the orator has not been misdirected or misled by some superficial +teacher of elocution, his aim will be first "to win the favorable +attention of his audience" and then to strongly impress them with his +opening sentence, his appearance, his manners, and his subject. His +reputation will have also very much to do with winning this favorable +impression at first. The words of the speaker either drive away or +attract, and the speaker endeavors at the outset to command the +attention of the hearers, whether they be dogs or congregation. + +The beginner in oratory who is true to his instincts strives to adopt +the methods which he feels will favorably impress those for whom he has +a message. In his oration at the funeral of Julius Caesar, Mark Anthony +disarmed the enemies of Caesar and of himself by opening his oration +with, "Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. I come to bury +Caesar, not to _praise_ him." Almost any man or woman can become an +orator of power by keeping himself or herself natural while talking. + +The second condition of a successful oration is the statements of the +important facts or truths. Cicero, the elder Pitt, and Edward Everett +held strictly to the statement of all the facts at the outset of their +speech. Facts and truths are the most important things in all kinds of +oratory; as they are the most difficult to handle, the audience is more +likely to listen to them at the opening of the talk, and they must be +placed before the hearers clearly and emphatically, before the speaker +enters upon the next division of his address. + +The third condition of a successful address is the argument, or +reasoning which is used to prove the conclusion he wishes his hearers to +reach. It is here that logic has its special place; it is at this vital +point that many political speakers fail to convince the men they +address. After he has thus reasoned, the natural orator makes his +appeal, which is the _chief purpose_ of all true oratory. It is here +where the orator becomes vehement, here where he shows all the ornament +of his talk in appropriate figures of speech. The most effective orators +are always those whose hearts are in strong sympathy with humanity, and +whose sympathies are always aroused to plead for men. This is the +condition that accounts for the eloquence--the power to arouse +hearers--which characterizes men like Logan, the American Indian, and +which characterizes many of the religious enthusiasts like Peter the +Hermit, who have surprised the world and often moved them to mighty +deeds. + +So long as our government depends upon the votes of the people, just so +long must there be a stirring need of men and women orators to teach the +principles of government and to keep open to the light of truth the +consciences of the thousands and millions whose votes will decide the +welfare or the misfortune of our nation. As the speaker must adapt +himself and his message to all kinds of people, it is difficult to +advise any one in certain terms how to accomplish this. It is another +instance of the necessity of cultivating the daily habit of observation, +and of being always loyal to our instincts. + +While schools and colleges have their uses, they are by no means a +necessity for those who will accomplish great things through their +oratory. Many a man laden with a wealth of college accomplishment has +been an utter failure on the platform. Where reading-matter is as +abundant and as cheap as it is in America, the poor boy at work upon the +farm or in the factory, with no time but his evenings for study, may get +the essentials of education, and by observing those who speak may give +himself forms of oratorical expression that will enable him to outshine +those with scholarship who have been led into fads. + +We must be impressed with a high sense of duty in becoming an orator of +any class; we must feel that it is our calling to adhere to the truth +always and in all things, to warn our hearers of dangers, and to +encourage the good and help those who are struggling to be so. We must +have a passion for oratory which shall impel us to vigorous thought and +eloquent expression. The greatest oratory is that which is most +persuasive. It is not so fully in what an orator says or the vehemence +with which he says it that counts, but the practical good that results +from it. Many an oration has been elegant enough from its choice diction +and labored phraseology, yet it has fallen flat upon the audience. + +When a man has been worked into natural passion over his theme, his +words will strike root and inspire his hearers into similar passion. It +is wonderful how true are our instincts in detecting what comes from the +heart and that which is mere words. The greatest orators have been those +who have not learned "by rote" what they have spoken. When Lincoln broke +away in his celebrated Cooper Institute address, and pictured the word +freedom written by the Lord across the skies in rainbow hues, the hearts +of his audience stopped beating for the instant. It is foolhardy for any +one to presume to speak with no preparation, for those who wish to give +themselves to oratory should carefully study the great debaters, learn +how they expressed themselves, and then accumulate important truths and +facts concerning their subject. But we must not forget that too much +study as to nicety of expression may lose something of the mountainous +effects of what we wish to state. + +When an orator _feels_ his subject, his soul overflows with a thrill +indescribable, which is known only to those who have felt it. Genius is +lifted free for the moment to fly at will to the mountain heights, and +finds supreme delight therein. Everything that is food for the mind is +helpful to the orator, whether it come from school or work. But it is an +attainment which can be reached by the every-day plain man employed in +any every-day occupation. Demosthenes, the greatest orator the world has +yet known, found his School of Oratory along the shore talking to the +waves. John B. Gough and Henry Clay and both the elder and the younger +Pitt gained all their powers by means as humble. The mere study of +grammar has never yet made a correct speaker; the mere study of rhetoric +has never yet made a correct and powerful writer; and the study of +elocution cannot make an orator. Grammar, rhetoric, and elocution may +teach him only the laws which govern speech, writing, oratory, and leave +him ignorant of the best methods of execution. + +During the last hundred years the leading orators of Congress have +mainly come from among the humble and the poor, and all the learning +they had of their art was got in the schoolhouse, the shop, the fields, +and the University of Hard Knocks. It is a calling that seems to be open +to every man and woman of fair talent. If you desire to become a +platform orator, read the lives of successful orators, and apply to +yourself the means which helped them to distinction. But be vigilant not +to lose your own individuality, and never strive to be any one but +yourself. In no place more than upon the platform does _sham_ mean +_shame_; nothing is more transparent. + + + + +IV + +SELF-HELP + + +Although Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help" is the first and perhaps the best +of the many inspirational books that have been written of late years, it +is by far the most serviceable of all to any one who wishes and intends +to stand squarely on his own feet and to fight his own battle of life +from start to finish. That book is attractive because it is anecdotal of +life and character, and because of the interest that all men feel in +those who have achieved great things through their own labors, their +trials, and their struggles. It abounds with references to men who were +forced to be self-helpful, who were born lowly enough, but died among +God's gentlemen, and often among the aristocracy of the land, through +sheer force of character, labor, and determination. They have left their +"footprints on the sands of time" mainly because they were +_self-reliant_ and _self-helpful_. + +The aids to the royal life are all within, and no life is worthless +unless its owner wills it; the fountain of all good is within, and it +will bubble up, if we dig. + +Doctor Holland used to say that there is a super-abundance of +inspiration in America, but a lamentable dearth of perspiration. +Aspiration plus perspiration carries men to dizzy heights of success; +aspiration minus perspiration often lands them in the gutter. + +Self-help is not selfishness. The duty of helping oneself in the highest +sense always involves the duty of helping others. The self-helpful are +not always the men who have achieved greatest success in what vulgarians +call success. That man's life is a success which has attained the end +for which he started out--the greatest failure may sometimes be the +hugest success through the discipline it has afforded. They tell us that +men never fail who die in a worthy cause; that it is nobler to have +failed in a noble cause than to have won in a low one; that it is not +failure, but low aim, that is wicked. God sows the seed and starts us +all out with about the same quantity and the same quality; whether the +crop shall be abundant depends upon the environment in which we grow and +the way we take care of the field. + +The supreme end of each man's life is to take individual care of his +own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no +immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life--and +every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full +capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy +work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a +seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped +sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the +improvement of it we give ourselves. + +The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the +outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. +The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is +always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The +self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, +but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Caesar could, we +have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the +minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some +government or some institution to do for them what they should only do +for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human +powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win +his own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for +men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, +so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been +during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other +institutions, and too little in ourselves. + +Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any +source--they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who +believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve +success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are +worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly +consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws--especially the laws +which teach men to lean--but they rather consist in helping men to +improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid +comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself--we may stand +him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is +a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and +nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel +that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by +governments. There is no man who rides through life so well as the man +who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called +self-dependence. + +Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the +manliness of the soul. + +The solid foundations of all liberty rest upon individual character, and +individual character is the only sure guaranty for social security and +national progress. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no +matter by what other name you call it. The gods are always on the side +of the man who relies on himself and helps himself; men's arms are long +enough to reach stars, if they will only stretch them. It is so contrary +to the spirit of our nation to be anything but self-helpful. "The flag +of freedom cannot long float over a nation of deadheads; only those who +determine to pay their way from cradle to grave have a right to make the +journey." Schiller says that the kind of education that perfects the +human race is action, conduct, self-culture, self-control. It has been +said that the individual is perfected far more by work than by reading, +by action more than by study, by character more than by biography; these +are courses that are given by the University of Life more completely +than in all other institutions known to men. + +The great men of science, literature, art, action--those apostles of +great thoughts and lords of the great heart--belong to no special rank. +They come from colleges, workshops, farms, from poor men's huts and rich +men's mansions; but they all began with reliance upon themselves, and +with an instinctive feeling that they must help themselves solely in +climbing to the work or the station which they had assigned to +themselves. Many of God's greatest apostles of thought and feeling and +action have come from the humblest stations, but the most insuperable +difficulties have not long been obstacles to them. These greatest of +difficulties are true men's greatest helpers--they stimulate powers that +might have lain dormant all through life, but often have readily yielded +to the stout and reliant heart. There is no greater blessing in the +world than poverty which is allied to self-reliance and the spirit of +self-help. "Poverty is the northwind which lashes men into vikings." +Lord Bacon says that men believe too great things of riches, and too +little of indomitable perseverance. + +Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in +the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No +inheritance and environments can do for a man what he can do for +himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the +poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of +clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder +of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape +painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden +were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, +the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. +Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, +the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the +ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary--started life as weavers. +Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the +missionary--were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; +Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the +inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of +steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a +tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, +both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant +sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats +and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists. + +Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose +industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly +benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and +philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to +participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home +in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, +wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his +greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with +important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government +appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In +less than four years after he landed in England he became +Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the +Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment +which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been +knighted by the king. + +In Bavaria he became lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief of staff, +minister of war, member of the council of state, knight of Poland, +member of the academy of science in three cities, commander-in-chief of +the general staff, superintendent of police of Bavaria, and chief of the +regency during the sovereign's compulsory absence in 1798. During his +ten years' service he made great civil and military reforms and produced +such salutary changes in the condition of the people that they erected a +monument in his honor in the pleasure-grounds of Munich, which he had +made for them. When Munich was attacked by an Austrian army in 1796, he +conducted the defense so successfully that he was accorded the highest +praise throughout Europe. The Bavarian monarch showed his appreciation +by making him a count; he chose the title of Count Rumford as an honor +to the birthplace of his wife and child. He ended his days at Paris in +literary and scientific studies and in the society of the most learned +men of Europe. + +The Rumford professorship at Harvard was very liberally endowed by him, +and he gave five thousand dollars to the American Academy of Arts and +Sciences in 1796. + + + + +V + +SOME ADVICE TO YOUNG MEN + + +A life is divine when duty is a joy. The best work we ever do is the +work we get pleasure from doing, and the work we are likeliest to enjoy +most is the work we are best fitted to do with our talent. There is +nothing in the world except marriage that we should be slower in taking +upon ourselves than our life-work; therefore, think much, read much, +inquire much before you assume any life career. + +When you have once decided what is best fitted for you, pursue it +ceaselessly and courageously, no matter how far distant it may be, how +arduous the labor attending it, or how difficult the ascent. The greater +the difficulty surmounted, the more you will value your achievement and +the greater power you will have for keeping on with your work after you +have reached your goal. Do your utmost to find a friend who is older +than you, and consult him freely, and give every man your ear, for the +humblest in station and those with the most meager acquirements in other +matters may see some few things more clearly than other men, and may be +well stored with what you most require. Take each man's advice, but act +according to your own judgment. Teachers should be the best advisers of +those about to enter upon their life-work, and no service of the +schoolmaster or professor can ever be more helpful to the young +intrusted to him than that of helping them to choose a career. + +The best work real teachers do for their pupils is by no means the +teaching of a few minor branches--it is almost always the work he is not +paid for, and which nobody outside of those who realize what real +education is, seems ever to consider. It is sympathy for their students, +getting them to understand the great things that are involved in the +process of getting an education, making them realize that true education +means growth of all our spiritual faculties--head and heart and will, +and that what we get from textbooks is the very least part of an +education. It is helping them to understand that knowledge got from +books and from schoolmasters is always a menace to a man whose spiritual +faculties of head, heart, and will have not been thoroughly +disciplined. It is wise counsel in choosing a life career. Instead of +looking upon this side of the work as divine, instead of being wise +counselors and friendly guides during this great transitional stage from +youth to manhood, teachers can be far more interested in their +individual concerns or in what they call "research-work"--the +research-work may give some temporary glory to themselves, and give some +little advertisement to the institutions that employ them; but the +supreme duty they owe to their students, to God, and to humanity is to +do their utmost to make full men, and worthy and successful men, out of +the youths whose education they have taken upon themselves. No traitor +is such a traitor to his country and to the whole world as the man who +is unfaithful to this sacred trust. Once again, find some sincere and +prudent elder counselor, and turn to him in all your difficulties. + +Get advice as to the best books to read--a good book is the best of +counselors, for it is the best of some good man; and it is a patient +counselor whom we may continually consult upon the same subject as often +as we wish. But waste no time, especially at the opening of your career, +upon books which have no message for your manhood and no helpfulness in +the work you shall assume for life. When you have once taken up a book +as your counselor, don't put it aside until it has been thoroughly +digested and assimilated. One book read is worth a hundred books peeped +through; and of all the dilettantes, a literary dilettante is the most +contemptible. Bacon says, "Some books are to be tasted, others to be +swallowed, some few to be chewed and digested." But it is only the books +that are to be chewed and digested that we can afford to peruse at the +outset in our career; the literary pleasure--gardens--may come later in +life. + +Do your utmost to understand poetic expression, for the poets are the +greatest teachers in the world as well as the greatest of all +legislators. It is they who teach the great in conduct and the pure in +thought. Without education that shall enable us to take them as our +friends, life bears upon it the stamp of death. The great poets are now +the only truth-tellers left to God. They are free, and they make their +lovers free; the great poet is nature's masterpiece. At the touch of his +imagination words blossom into beauty. A true poet is the most precious +gift to a nation, for he feels keenest the glorious duty of serving +truth; he cannot strive for despotism of any kind, for it is still the +instinct of all great spirits to be free. More than other authors, the +poets make us self-forgetful, make life and the whole human race nobler +in our eyes; all things are friendly and sacred to them, all days holy, +all good men divine. + +There is very little worthy work nowadays that does not need some +schooling that it may be well done. If you have an opportunity to give +yourself this help, don't neglect it. Carefully select the courses that +will be most helpful to you in your career, and don't be side-tracked by +any of what we sentimentalists term "culture studies." There's nothing +better in the world than culture study, if we can afford it and have +time for it. But there is not a greater or more wicked waste of valuable +time than the time spent upon what some sentimentalists term culture +study. + +When you have once taken up the studies you have decided upon, keep +steadily to your course and shun diversions. Recreations are as +essential to the student who intends to do high-class work as food is to +the body; but diversions disqualify him for earnest work, and may breed +a habit of halfness that shall bring his failure. Don't be foolish and +hope to be great in many lines. Who sips of many arts drinks none. In +every vocation to-day competition is so keen that the man who will +succeed must be content to be supreme in one thing alone. + +_Halfness_ weakens all our spiritual powers, and thoroughness is the +_central_ passion of all worthy characters. + +It is nobler to be confined to one calling, and to excel in that, than +to dabble in forty. There is some odor about a dabbler that makes him +especially offensive to all clean high-class men and women. But when we +have formed the habit of doing carelessly other tasks than our +life-work, we shall soon get into the way of doing carelessly the work +of our chosen calling. There is nothing that gives us greater assurance +that our life-work will be thoroughly done than to habituate ourselves +to do the slightest task completely. Sing the last note fully, make the +last letter of your name complete. Eat the last morsel deliberately. In +a real man's life there are no trifles. Whatever is worth doing by him +is worth doing well. The many-sided Edward Everett attributed his being +able to do so many things well to his early habit of doing even the +least thing thoroughly. He used to say that he prided himself upon the +way he tied up the smallest paper parcel. + +Although schools may be very helpful, don't forget to emphasize again +that they are merely helpers. The man is somebody only when the fight +is won within himself. Without the schools men have often reached the +pinnacles of success, through their own individual earnestness and +energy. Schools make wise men wiser, but they may make fools greater +fools than ever. If colleges have fallen somewhat into disrepute, it is +largely due to the fact that we may have sent more fools than wise men +to college. Many a man has been the better for being too poor to attend +school, like Franklin, Lincoln, Peter Cooper, and ten thousand other +Americans. Their thirst for what books had to give them forced them to +work harder and to deny themselves all the enjoyments that so vulgarize +yet so charm the cheaper brood. + +All that is won by sacrifice and downright hard work is priceless, and +many noble men and women who have risen to high honor and station owe +their place and power solely to this. Be always mindful that power is +the only safe foundation for reputation. Thoughtful Americans are not +concerning themselves about who your ancestors were, and whether or not +they were graduated from some college. Like Doctor Holmes, they feel +that old families and old trees generally have their best parts +underground, and that the only progressive is the man who is bigger in +thought and feeling and accomplishment than his father was. They believe +that it is unimportant where you buy your educational tools, if you are +only doing good work with them. + +There is only one _true aristocracy in America_--those with more +spiritual power and individual accomplishment than the rest of men. + +Emerson says that "all the winds that move the vanes of universities +blow from antiquity," and this is responsible for many foolish words and +many fool acts of schoolmen which are so often misleading the +unsuspecting public. + +Nothing is more foolish than the idea that any schooling is worthless +which is obtained in schools after the regular school hours; and more +than one attempt has been made to enact laws which shall hinder from +practice physicians and lawyers who have been obliged to get their +knowledge through channels other than the conventional. The victory of +the general does not depend upon the place where he got his military +training or the time of the day when he studied. Oliver Cromwell, the +greatest general of his day, was a farmer until his fortieth year, when +he entered the army of the Parliament against Charles I. The only +question that concerns the nation that puts a general at the head of +its forces is, has he the powers that shall make us victorious? + +Men in distress don't ask for the pedigree of the life-saver, nor do +they stop to inquire when he graduated. Don't be frightened off by +sticklers for what is customary. Knowledge is the right of the poorest +boy and girl in America, and it can be had by the humblest in the land. +Be convinced of this and enter the race. The world steps aside and lets +the man pass who knows where he is going; all the world will shout to +clear the track when they see a determined giant is coming. In choosing +your career, don't be limited to the old professions. There are to-day +many more occupations calling for the highest skill and offering the +highest inducements than there were twenty years ago, and these +positions are steadily increasing. Many occupations which were recently +regarded almost as menial have risen almost to professions--cooking, +agriculture, decorative art, forestry, nursing, sanitation, designing +apparel, and countless others; and the men and women qualified for these +are surer of better positions than formerly, and far better rewards. + +But the youth who is imbued with the determination to _be_ right and to +_do_ right must never lose sight of this truth--that life is vastly +more than place and meat and raiment. Living for self is suicide; men +that are men get far greater enjoyment and far greater reward from +making life a blessing for those who come their way than they get from +all other things combined. No man lives so truly for himself as he who +lives for other people, and one of the chiefest purposes of education is +that it gives larger views of life and adds greater power to serve +humanity. The man who is really in earnest to make his life count is +studiously observant. Each day and each place multiplies his means of +happiness for himself and others. + + +THE END + + + + + +End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Increasing Personal Efficiency, by +Russell H. Conwell + +*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK INCREASING PERSONAL EFFICIENCY *** + +***** This file should be named 36898.txt or 36898.zip ***** +This and all associated files of various formats will be found in: + https://www.gutenberg.org/3/6/8/9/36898/ + +Produced by D Alexander, Juliet Sutherland, Mary Meehan +and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at +https://www.pgdp.net + + +Updated editions will replace the previous one--the old editions +will be renamed. + +Creating the works from public domain print editions means that no +one owns a United States copyright in these works, so the Foundation +(and you!) can copy and distribute it in the United States without +permission and without paying copyright royalties. Special rules, +set forth in the General Terms of Use part of this license, apply to +copying and distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works to +protect the PROJECT GUTENBERG-tm concept and trademark. Project +Gutenberg is a registered trademark, and may not be used if you +charge for the eBooks, unless you receive specific permission. If you +do not charge anything for copies of this eBook, complying with the +rules is very easy. You may use this eBook for nearly any purpose +such as creation of derivative works, reports, performances and +research. They may be modified and printed and given away--you may do +practically ANYTHING with public domain eBooks. Redistribution is +subject to the trademark license, especially commercial +redistribution. + + + +*** START: FULL LICENSE *** + +THE FULL PROJECT GUTENBERG LICENSE +PLEASE READ THIS BEFORE YOU DISTRIBUTE OR USE THIS WORK + +To protect the Project Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting the free +distribution of electronic works, by using or distributing this work +(or any other work associated in any way with the phrase "Project +Gutenberg"), you agree to comply with all the terms of the Full Project +Gutenberg-tm License (available with this file or online at +https://gutenberg.org/license). + + +Section 1. General Terms of Use and Redistributing Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic works + +1.A. By reading or using any part of this Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work, you indicate that you have read, understand, agree to +and accept all the terms of this license and intellectual property +(trademark/copyright) agreement. If you do not agree to abide by all +the terms of this agreement, you must cease using and return or destroy +all copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in your possession. +If you paid a fee for obtaining a copy of or access to a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work and you do not agree to be bound by the +terms of this agreement, you may obtain a refund from the person or +entity to whom you paid the fee as set forth in paragraph 1.E.8. + +1.B. "Project Gutenberg" is a registered trademark. It may only be +used on or associated in any way with an electronic work by people who +agree to be bound by the terms of this agreement. There are a few +things that you can do with most Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works +even without complying with the full terms of this agreement. See +paragraph 1.C below. There are a lot of things you can do with Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works if you follow the terms of this agreement +and help preserve free future access to Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. See paragraph 1.E below. + +1.C. The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation ("the Foundation" +or PGLAF), owns a compilation copyright in the collection of Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic works. Nearly all the individual works in the +collection are in the public domain in the United States. If an +individual work is in the public domain in the United States and you are +located in the United States, we do not claim a right to prevent you from +copying, distributing, performing, displaying or creating derivative +works based on the work as long as all references to Project Gutenberg +are removed. Of course, we hope that you will support the Project +Gutenberg-tm mission of promoting free access to electronic works by +freely sharing Project Gutenberg-tm works in compliance with the terms of +this agreement for keeping the Project Gutenberg-tm name associated with +the work. You can easily comply with the terms of this agreement by +keeping this work in the same format with its attached full Project +Gutenberg-tm License when you share it without charge with others. + +1.D. The copyright laws of the place where you are located also govern +what you can do with this work. Copyright laws in most countries are in +a constant state of change. If you are outside the United States, check +the laws of your country in addition to the terms of this agreement +before downloading, copying, displaying, performing, distributing or +creating derivative works based on this work or any other Project +Gutenberg-tm work. The Foundation makes no representations concerning +the copyright status of any work in any country outside the United +States. + +1.E. Unless you have removed all references to Project Gutenberg: + +1.E.1. The following sentence, with active links to, or other immediate +access to, the full Project Gutenberg-tm License must appear prominently +whenever any copy of a Project Gutenberg-tm work (any work on which the +phrase "Project Gutenberg" appears, or with which the phrase "Project +Gutenberg" is associated) is accessed, displayed, performed, viewed, +copied or distributed: + +This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with +almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or +re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included +with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org + +1.E.2. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is derived +from the public domain (does not contain a notice indicating that it is +posted with permission of the copyright holder), the work can be copied +and distributed to anyone in the United States without paying any fees +or charges. If you are redistributing or providing access to a work +with the phrase "Project Gutenberg" associated with or appearing on the +work, you must comply either with the requirements of paragraphs 1.E.1 +through 1.E.7 or obtain permission for the use of the work and the +Project Gutenberg-tm trademark as set forth in paragraphs 1.E.8 or +1.E.9. + +1.E.3. If an individual Project Gutenberg-tm electronic work is posted +with the permission of the copyright holder, your use and distribution +must comply with both paragraphs 1.E.1 through 1.E.7 and any additional +terms imposed by the copyright holder. Additional terms will be linked +to the Project Gutenberg-tm License for all works posted with the +permission of the copyright holder found at the beginning of this work. + +1.E.4. Do not unlink or detach or remove the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License terms from this work, or any files containing a part of this +work or any other work associated with Project Gutenberg-tm. + +1.E.5. Do not copy, display, perform, distribute or redistribute this +electronic work, or any part of this electronic work, without +prominently displaying the sentence set forth in paragraph 1.E.1 with +active links or immediate access to the full terms of the Project +Gutenberg-tm License. + +1.E.6. You may convert to and distribute this work in any binary, +compressed, marked up, nonproprietary or proprietary form, including any +word processing or hypertext form. However, if you provide access to or +distribute copies of a Project Gutenberg-tm work in a format other than +"Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other format used in the official version +posted on the official Project Gutenberg-tm web site (www.gutenberg.org), +you must, at no additional cost, fee or expense to the user, provide a +copy, a means of exporting a copy, or a means of obtaining a copy upon +request, of the work in its original "Plain Vanilla ASCII" or other +form. Any alternate format must include the full Project Gutenberg-tm +License as specified in paragraph 1.E.1. + +1.E.7. Do not charge a fee for access to, viewing, displaying, +performing, copying or distributing any Project Gutenberg-tm works +unless you comply with paragraph 1.E.8 or 1.E.9. + +1.E.8. You may charge a reasonable fee for copies of or providing +access to or distributing Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works provided +that + +- You pay a royalty fee of 20% of the gross profits you derive from + the use of Project Gutenberg-tm works calculated using the method + you already use to calculate your applicable taxes. The fee is + owed to the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark, but he + has agreed to donate royalties under this paragraph to the + Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation. Royalty payments + must be paid within 60 days following each date on which you + prepare (or are legally required to prepare) your periodic tax + returns. Royalty payments should be clearly marked as such and + sent to the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation at the + address specified in Section 4, "Information about donations to + the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation." + +- You provide a full refund of any money paid by a user who notifies + you in writing (or by e-mail) within 30 days of receipt that s/he + does not agree to the terms of the full Project Gutenberg-tm + License. You must require such a user to return or + destroy all copies of the works possessed in a physical medium + and discontinue all use of and all access to other copies of + Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +- You provide, in accordance with paragraph 1.F.3, a full refund of any + money paid for a work or a replacement copy, if a defect in the + electronic work is discovered and reported to you within 90 days + of receipt of the work. + +- You comply with all other terms of this agreement for free + distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm works. + +1.E.9. If you wish to charge a fee or distribute a Project Gutenberg-tm +electronic work or group of works on different terms than are set +forth in this agreement, you must obtain permission in writing from +both the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation and Michael +Hart, the owner of the Project Gutenberg-tm trademark. Contact the +Foundation as set forth in Section 3 below. + +1.F. + +1.F.1. Project Gutenberg volunteers and employees expend considerable +effort to identify, do copyright research on, transcribe and proofread +public domain works in creating the Project Gutenberg-tm +collection. Despite these efforts, Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works, and the medium on which they may be stored, may contain +"Defects," such as, but not limited to, incomplete, inaccurate or +corrupt data, transcription errors, a copyright or other intellectual +property infringement, a defective or damaged disk or other medium, a +computer virus, or computer codes that damage or cannot be read by +your equipment. + +1.F.2. LIMITED WARRANTY, DISCLAIMER OF DAMAGES - Except for the "Right +of Replacement or Refund" described in paragraph 1.F.3, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation, the owner of the Project +Gutenberg-tm trademark, and any other party distributing a Project +Gutenberg-tm electronic work under this agreement, disclaim all +liability to you for damages, costs and expenses, including legal +fees. YOU AGREE THAT YOU HAVE NO REMEDIES FOR NEGLIGENCE, STRICT +LIABILITY, BREACH OF WARRANTY OR BREACH OF CONTRACT EXCEPT THOSE +PROVIDED IN PARAGRAPH 1.F.3. YOU AGREE THAT THE FOUNDATION, THE +TRADEMARK OWNER, AND ANY DISTRIBUTOR UNDER THIS AGREEMENT WILL NOT BE +LIABLE TO YOU FOR ACTUAL, DIRECT, INDIRECT, CONSEQUENTIAL, PUNITIVE OR +INCIDENTAL DAMAGES EVEN IF YOU GIVE NOTICE OF THE POSSIBILITY OF SUCH +DAMAGE. + +1.F.3. LIMITED RIGHT OF REPLACEMENT OR REFUND - If you discover a +defect in this electronic work within 90 days of receiving it, you can +receive a refund of the money (if any) you paid for it by sending a +written explanation to the person you received the work from. If you +received the work on a physical medium, you must return the medium with +your written explanation. The person or entity that provided you with +the defective work may elect to provide a replacement copy in lieu of a +refund. If you received the work electronically, the person or entity +providing it to you may choose to give you a second opportunity to +receive the work electronically in lieu of a refund. If the second copy +is also defective, you may demand a refund in writing without further +opportunities to fix the problem. + +1.F.4. Except for the limited right of replacement or refund set forth +in paragraph 1.F.3, this work is provided to you 'AS-IS' WITH NO OTHER +WARRANTIES OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO +WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTIBILITY OR FITNESS FOR ANY PURPOSE. + +1.F.5. Some states do not allow disclaimers of certain implied +warranties or the exclusion or limitation of certain types of damages. +If any disclaimer or limitation set forth in this agreement violates the +law of the state applicable to this agreement, the agreement shall be +interpreted to make the maximum disclaimer or limitation permitted by +the applicable state law. The invalidity or unenforceability of any +provision of this agreement shall not void the remaining provisions. + +1.F.6. INDEMNITY - You agree to indemnify and hold the Foundation, the +trademark owner, any agent or employee of the Foundation, anyone +providing copies of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works in accordance +with this agreement, and any volunteers associated with the production, +promotion and distribution of Project Gutenberg-tm electronic works, +harmless from all liability, costs and expenses, including legal fees, +that arise directly or indirectly from any of the following which you do +or cause to occur: (a) distribution of this or any Project Gutenberg-tm +work, (b) alteration, modification, or additions or deletions to any +Project Gutenberg-tm work, and (c) any Defect you cause. + + +Section 2. Information about the Mission of Project Gutenberg-tm + +Project Gutenberg-tm is synonymous with the free distribution of +electronic works in formats readable by the widest variety of computers +including obsolete, old, middle-aged and new computers. It exists +because of the efforts of hundreds of volunteers and donations from +people in all walks of life. + +Volunteers and financial support to provide volunteers with the +assistance they need are critical to reaching Project Gutenberg-tm's +goals and ensuring that the Project Gutenberg-tm collection will +remain freely available for generations to come. In 2001, the Project +Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation was created to provide a secure +and permanent future for Project Gutenberg-tm and future generations. +To learn more about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation +and how your efforts and donations can help, see Sections 3 and 4 +and the Foundation web page at https://www.pglaf.org. + + +Section 3. Information about the Project Gutenberg Literary Archive +Foundation + +The Project Gutenberg Literary Archive Foundation is a non profit +501(c)(3) educational corporation organized under the laws of the +state of Mississippi and granted tax exempt status by the Internal +Revenue Service. The Foundation's EIN or federal tax identification +number is 64-6221541. Its 501(c)(3) letter is posted at +https://pglaf.org/fundraising. Contributions to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation are tax deductible to the full extent +permitted by U.S. federal laws and your state's laws. + +The Foundation's principal office is located at 4557 Melan Dr. S. +Fairbanks, AK, 99712., but its volunteers and employees are scattered +throughout numerous locations. Its business office is located at +809 North 1500 West, Salt Lake City, UT 84116, (801) 596-1887, email +business@pglaf.org. Email contact links and up to date contact +information can be found at the Foundation's web site and official +page at https://pglaf.org + +For additional contact information: + Dr. Gregory B. Newby + Chief Executive and Director + gbnewby@pglaf.org + + +Section 4. Information about Donations to the Project Gutenberg +Literary Archive Foundation + +Project Gutenberg-tm depends upon and cannot survive without wide +spread public support and donations to carry out its mission of +increasing the number of public domain and licensed works that can be +freely distributed in machine readable form accessible by the widest +array of equipment including outdated equipment. Many small donations +($1 to $5,000) are particularly important to maintaining tax exempt +status with the IRS. + +The Foundation is committed to complying with the laws regulating +charities and charitable donations in all 50 states of the United +States. Compliance requirements are not uniform and it takes a +considerable effort, much paperwork and many fees to meet and keep up +with these requirements. We do not solicit donations in locations +where we have not received written confirmation of compliance. To +SEND DONATIONS or determine the status of compliance for any +particular state visit https://pglaf.org + +While we cannot and do not solicit contributions from states where we +have not met the solicitation requirements, we know of no prohibition +against accepting unsolicited donations from donors in such states who +approach us with offers to donate. + +International donations are gratefully accepted, but we cannot make +any statements concerning tax treatment of donations received from +outside the United States. U.S. laws alone swamp our small staff. + +Please check the Project Gutenberg Web pages for current donation +methods and addresses. Donations are accepted in a number of other +ways including including checks, online payments and credit card +donations. To donate, please visit: https://pglaf.org/donate + + +Section 5. General Information About Project Gutenberg-tm electronic +works. + +Professor Michael S. Hart was the originator of the Project Gutenberg-tm +concept of a library of electronic works that could be freely shared +with anyone. For thirty years, he produced and distributed Project +Gutenberg-tm eBooks with only a loose network of volunteer support. + + +Project Gutenberg-tm eBooks are often created from several printed +editions, all of which are confirmed as Public Domain in the U.S. +unless a copyright notice is included. Thus, we do not necessarily +keep eBooks in compliance with any particular paper edition. + + +Most people start at our Web site which has the main PG search facility: + + https://www.gutenberg.org + +This Web site includes information about Project Gutenberg-tm, +including how to make donations to the Project Gutenberg Literary +Archive Foundation, how to help produce our new eBooks, and how to +subscribe to our email newsletter to hear about new eBooks. diff --git a/36898.zip b/36898.zip Binary files differnew file mode 100644 index 0000000..e481d94 --- /dev/null +++ b/36898.zip diff --git a/LICENSE.txt b/LICENSE.txt new file mode 100644 index 0000000..6312041 --- /dev/null +++ b/LICENSE.txt @@ -0,0 +1,11 @@ +This eBook, including all associated images, markup, improvements, +metadata, and any other content or labor, has been confirmed to be +in the PUBLIC DOMAIN IN THE UNITED STATES. + +Procedures for determining public domain status are described in +the "Copyright How-To" at https://www.gutenberg.org. + +No investigation has been made concerning possible copyrights in +jurisdictions other than the United States. Anyone seeking to utilize +this eBook outside of the United States should confirm copyright +status under the laws that apply to them. diff --git a/README.md b/README.md new file mode 100644 index 0000000..0bb88cd --- /dev/null +++ b/README.md @@ -0,0 +1,2 @@ +Project Gutenberg (https://www.gutenberg.org) public repository for +eBook #36898 (https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/36898) |
