The Young Man and the World

by Albert J. Beveridge

So that, according to this Oriental, we are under the direct influence of woman from the cradle to the grave; and he points out that gradually (imperceptibly, perhaps, to our own eyes) an effeminizing process occurs in mind and character. As a result of this, he maintains, our men increasingly fear hardships and seek to avoid them; and life and even personal appearance are given a value which is absurd, considering the inevitableness of death in any event, the perfectly unthinkable number of myriads of human beings who exist, have existed, and will exist hereafter.

This philosopher of the East, therefore, claims that we will in the end be no match at all for the Orientals, and that the yellow race, which has been merely resting while we Caucasians have been having our brief innings, is now to the bat again. And there was a lot more to the same effect.

This is of course the Asiatic way of looking at things. There may be something in what he says about the continuity of female influence softening our Western civilization. Certainly the present war shows that the Japanese women, who were only yesterday altogether Oriental in habits and ideals, have produced a race of strong men, so far as physical daring and hardihood is concerned. The influence of women on these men ceased with childhood—even then it was a Spartan influence.

More than this, the Japanese generals and statesmen, nearly all of whom are above sixty, were the product of Japanese civilization before modern ideas had even been sown in the Island Empire. Oyama and Kuroki, Ito and Katsura, and all the rest, are the offspring of purely Asiatic conditions, uninfluenced in the slightest degree by Western thought or custom; and yet the state of society which brought forth these men is unfamiliar to American and European peoples.

But even if what this Oriental assailant of our customs terms the overcharge of femininity in Occidental society does mellow us, it does not follow that it weakens us. Anyhow it does not affect what I say about the influence of the mother upon the purposes and "principles" of young men. And, in any event, our Western civilization constitutes those human conditions in which you, young man, must spend your life, and you must be in harmony with it if you are going to accomplish anything.

Don't try to be an Oriental in the midst of Occidental surroundings. The yellow theory and the white theory of life must fight for the mastery, and the one which is nearest the truth will prevail. Meanwhile, stick to your own race and the ideals of it. I do not mean that you should ignore any true thing you may learn from the East. Welcome knowledge from every source. Light is light, no matter whence it comes.

And this brings back to us the little mother and the old home. If she wishes it, be her companion. In any event, make her your confidant. For a young man there is no source of safety and wisdom so abundant, pure, and unfailing as the making his mother his confessor. Tell her everything. I mean just that, tell her literally everything.

Do not fear her reproof. Chemistry has no miracle a fraction as wonderful as the patience and forgiveness of a mother for the exasperations of her son. There is not a thing which you ought to do, the telling of which to your mother will prevent your doing. And her counsel to you will be golden upon those purely personal matters which you could tell no one else, and which no one else could understand or sympathize with.

Remember that she has the wisdom of instinct—a wisdom peculiarly worldly and practical in its applicability to real things and real situations. The advice of a wife in business affairs has this same peculiarly valuable quality, quite beyond the strength of her or his intellect or the reach of her abstract understanding.

It is the instinct to preserve the home nest which makes the business advice of the wife to the husband so priceless; and it is this same instinct exercising itself in another form—seeking to preserve the offspring—which gives such shrewdness and depth to the counsel of mother to son.