PERSONAL INFLUENCES
Of home influences it is hardly necessary to speak. The blessing of a wise and good mother; the disaster of an ignorant, vicious, or neglectful mother call for no reminder. The influence of husbands and wives upon each other; the transformation wrought by a fortunate or unfortunate love passion in the life of a woman or a man are equally obvious and well understood. So with friendship: most men have known at least one friend whose counsel, conversation, or example has affected the entire current of their thoughts—perhaps has changed the direction of their life. These instances being noted, it remains for us only to remember that the influence of a wife, a lover, a mother, or a friend may be as powerful for evil as for good.
But there are other personal influences as potent, but not so generally nor so wisely recognised. Such are the influences of good or bad books, and of great leaders and teachers—good and bad.
What tremendous powers over the lives and thoughts of millions were wielded by such teachers as Confucius, Buddha, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, and Jesus Christ.
How vast a difference was wrought amongst the masses of humanity by Caesar, Mahomet, Alexander, Oliver Cromwell.
Who can estimate the importance to the world of Copernicus, Galileo; Luther, Calvin, Bacon, Darwin; of Rousseau, Wycliffe, Tyndall, Marx, Homer, Harvey, Watt, Caxton, and Stephenson?
Which of us can assess his debt to such men as Shakespeare, Dante, Shelley, Dickens, and Carlyle?
Then consider our account with the scientists, priests, and lawgivers of Babylon and Egypt. Recall the benefits conferred upon us by the men who invented written language; the wheel, the file, the plough. Think of all the laborious and gradual building up of the arts, the ethics, the sciences of the world. The making of architecture, mathematics, sculpture, painting, agriculture, working in wood or metals; the evolution of literature and music, the invention and improvement of the many decencies, courtesies, and utilities of life; from the first wearing of loin cloths, the fashioning of flint axes, to the steel pen, the use of chloroform, and the custom of raising one's hat to a lady.
All the arts and crafts; the ethics, sciences, and laws; the tools, arms, grammars; the literatures, dramas, and newspapers; the conveniences and luxuries, the morals and the learning—all that goes to the making of modern civilization we owe to the genius, the industry, and the humanity of countless men and women whom we have never seen.
Into all the wealth of knowledge and freedom, of wisdom and virtue they created and bequeathed, we are born, as we are born to the light and the air. But for the labours and the sacrifices of the workers, fighters, and thinkers of the past we were shorn of all our pride and power, and reduced below the social, intellectual, and moral level of the Australian Bushmen.
And yet, to see the airs and graces of many educated and superior persons, one might suppose that they invented and discovered and developed all the knowledge and wisdom, all the virtues and the graces by which they benefit, of their own act and thought. One would suppose, to behold the scorn of these superior persons for their more rude and ignorant and unfortunate brothers and sisters, that they had designed and tailored all the moral and intellectual finery in which they are arrayed. Whereas all their plumes are borrowed plumes; all they know they have been taught by other men; all they have has been made by other men; and they have become that which they are through the generosity and the tenderness of other men and women.
The rich young scholar fresh from Harvard or Cambridge is blessedly endowed with health, and strength and grammar, and mathematics, a sprinkle of dead languages, and more or less graceful manners. He despises the lout at the plough or the coster at the barrow because of their lack of the benefits given to him as a dole. He forgets that the University was there centuries before he was born, that Euclid, Lindley Murray, Dr. Johnson, Cicero, Plato, and a million other abler men than himself, forged every link of the chain of culture with which his proud young neck is adorned. He forgets that it is to others, and not to himself, that he owes all that makes him the man of whom he is so vain. He forgets that the coster at the barrow and the hind at the plough differ from him chiefly by the accident of birth, and that had they been nursed and taught and trained like himself they would have been as handsome, as active, as clever, as cultured, and very probably as conceited and unjust as he.
For all the mighty dead, and the noble works they have bequeathed us, and all the faithful living, and all the tender services they render us and the shielding love they bear us, are parts of our environment.
And for the blessings these good men and gentle women, with their golden heritage, have wrought in us, we are no more responsible and no more praiseworthy than we are for the flowers of the field, or the constellations in the sky, or the warmth of the beneficent sun that shines alike upon the sinner and the saint.
And since we are but debtors to the dead, but starvelings decked out by charity in the braveries made by other hands, and since we are deserving of no praise for our grandeur and our virtues, how shall we lift up our vainglorious and foolish faces to despise and contemn our less fortunate brothers and sisters, who have been made evil, even as we have been made good, who have been left uncouth and ignorant, even as we have been polished and instructed?
"But for the grace of God," said the tinker of Elstow—but for the graces of environment, say we—there, in the hangman's cart, in the felon's jacket, in the dunce's cap, in the beggar's rags, in the degradation of the drunkard or the misery of the degenerate weed of the slums—go We.