THE WAR WITH SELF
If all wars were once abolished, and universal peace established, don’t think for a moment that the age of conquests and triumphs would be absolutely past forever. Those who argue that war and conquest bring out man’s best energy and build up strong manhood, can turn their guns against themselves and find all they care to fight. A man at war with his appetite and passions and human frailties and weakness finds his match. The man will not always be on top. At some careless hour a man will forget his vigilance and watchfulness and will fall before the onslaught of his passion or appetite, and it will require many days for him to regain his former position and place human weakness under his feet.
I have seen strong men bowed down to the lowest notch of humiliation, with all their courage and hope gone, yet no one did them a wrong. It was only their own appetite and passion that dealt them the crushing blow. No use to sit down and grieve over the fall. Grieving only adds to the first defeat. A man’s own appetite and passion and lust and hate and fear and weakness are his worst enemies, if once they get the upper hand. And in our youth we are apt to receive our first defeat; before we know the subtle strength of our weakness, we often become its victim.
Ninety per cent. of all the suicides come through man’s battle with self, and his defeat. After a man has become a slave to appetite and passion there isn’t much in life worth living for, and he falls a victim to the worst of all weaknesses—the fear to go on with life to its natural end. And how often the criminal, against whom every hand is raised in condemnation, is only the victim of his own weakness.
Theodore Radden became the victim of self before he was sixteen years old. His appetite began to rule him before he was twenty, and passion began to ruin him at the same time. He found congenial company in the lowest dives of his native town, where the fallen men and women collected, like buzzards, to feast on each other’s fallen condition. Several times he fought successfully with himself and broke away from his evil associates, only to fall back again when temptation laid her snares to catch his uncertain feet.
Once he held out for two years, and during that time he met and loved and married a beautiful girl. In her eyes he found a new world, and for over a year he lived in the only earthly paradise known to man—the world of love.
How proud his wife was when she contemplated his physical strength and manly beauty, never dreaming that the moral man within had been many times conquered by temptation, and was absolutely unqualified to conquer himself. She was but a weak and frail body, but morally she was a giant of strength, while he was but a pigmy in the grasp of former defeats. She was a country girl, and in marrying her he, too, lived out in God’s beautiful country and far away from the influence of old associates.
But one unfortunate day he was obliged to go to the city. By chance he met an old associate and was invited to take a social glass. And while in the saloon he met a bad woman who had much influence over him in past days. She knew that he had married and left the gang, and she set about to bring him back. It was her weakness to lead men astray. She was not all bad, nor had she always been bad. Once she had been a good girl, full of hope and happy dreams; but her own weakness gained a victory over her, and she fell. Even then she was not all bad. Many the poor woman and half starved hobo had eaten at her expense, and on many occasions she stooped and kissed a weeping child on the street and tried to soothe its sorrowing heart.
Did she love Theodore Radden? No one will ever know, but many thought she did, and that her love knew no moral code of honor, nor cared anything for public opinion. She already knew what opinion the world entertained for her—what need she care for public opinion?
And Theodore Radden fell a victim to his own weakness. He blamed the woman for it all, just the same as Adam did; but nobody took Adam seriously, nor will they take Theodore Radden’s word for it. A week later the woman crawled to the street from a tenement house, bleeding from several ugly wounds in her breast. Before she died she told them that Theodore Radden had shot her in a drunken brawl, accusing her of parting him from his wife; to which accusation she confessed her guilt, and said she deserved to die at his hands.
Inside the house the police found Theodore Radden—dead. He had shot himself through the head, after shooting the woman who tempted him from the paradise where now only a brokenhearted woman was leaving to go out into the shadows of sorrow and live her lonely life to the end. She had never fallen, and she knew not how to forgive the woman who had led her husband to his death.