The Cap and Gown

by Charles Reynolds Brown

Once for all dismiss the idea that success in life is the result of luck or pull or any such artificial thing. There was a man in San Francisco who once picked up a five dollar gold piece in the street-car. He was a poor man and it was a great find for him. He thenceforth spent a large part of his time studying the floor of the street-car, peering in and out among the feet of the passengers, to find another gold piece. He never found another one, but the time wasted, if it had been given to thought and effort touching his own trade, would have earned for him many an extra gold piece. Now and then something may occur which men call “luck,” but it offers nothing reliable by which one may safely shape his course.

Young men and maidens look for four-leaf clovers on the lawn. They are commonly intent upon something else besides the clover as they creep about on their hands and knees—something sweeter and more satisfying than clover, and they find this too. Occasionally they do find a four-leaf clover, but the clover which makes the lawn green, feeds the cows, supplies the bees with honey and fills the haymow, is three-leaf clover—the ordinary, every-day sort of clover. The farmer, the dairyman, and the bee all know that the reliable and satisfying returns in life come not by some happy chance, but in those common and usual events which are according to law.

When the blood is warm, the heart beating high and fast, the nerves eager to yield their thrills, young people see visions and dream dreams. It ought to be so. The girl who does not have her day-dreams is no girl at all. The boy who does not see ahead of him shapes and forms of activity, achievement, advance, higher and more commanding than the Sierra, if not quite so solid, does not deserve to be young. The loftier, the richer, the rosier these day-dreams, the better!

But those visions will have to be worked out and realized, in so far as they come to have a definite, ascertainable value, in a world of plain, hard fact. The girl will marry a man with feet and hands like the rest of us; and the home she has, the place she makes for herself in society, the record of useful service she writes opposite her name, will be determined according to law. And the place in the world’s life which the boy carves out for himself as he climbs toward maturity, the size of it, the location of it, the comfort of it, will be the inevitable reaction from wise and useful effort. The law of returns is as sure as the statement about two and two making four.

We find this made plain in several directions—first of all in the gaining and maintenance of sound health. Genuine achievement in many lines becomes in the last analysis largely a question of nerves, digestion, physical stamina. In the busy, hurried city life the question is, “Can this man stand up to it as long and as effectively as any other man—and then just that much longer which gives him preeminence?” The lawyer must be able to go into court day after day clear-headed, so that he will have all the law he knows at his command, patient and smooth with blundering witnesses, wise and self-controlled in the face of the nagging of the opposing counsel; he must be able to do this all day long for weeks together, looking up his authorities at night oftentimes, and not break down. The physician must do something more than ride around in an automobile and look wise; he must be able to carry upon his mind and heart the anxieties of a hundred households at once, work all day, frequently half the night, eating and sleeping as he can, and do all this without resorting to stimulants or drugs to keep himself up to the mark. The teacher bent not on imparting information or on merely keeping the wheels of a pedagogical machine turning, but upon the high task of forming, developing, enriching personality in fifty or sixty restless lives there in plain view, needs a sound physique. The minister of religion if he is to stand up before the same congregation for a score of years or more and put faith, hope, courage, heart, and resolution into them and not become fagged out and stale, must be a man who can sleep nights, digest his meals, maintain his poise, rise early, and go all day without losing his head or his health—and for all this he needs a prime body. The same is true in the life of the merchant or the mechanic, in the work of the manufacturer or the farmer.

Henry Ward Beecher used to say that there were three kinds of people in the world—the sick people who must be taken care of with sympathetic tenderness; the people who are not sick, able to be up and to take their nourishment; and the people who are positively, radiantly, and joyously well. If the young man has not been handicapped by some accident or by an unfortunate heredity, it lies easily within his power to be enrolled in this third class. He ought to hold himself resolutely unwilling to accept anything less.

It is much more than a matter of personal prudence or of self-interest. Up to the limit of his powers each man owes it to his family, to his friends, and to the world about him to furnish it one more healthy, vigorous life. The world is defrauded if by his foolishness, dissipation, or laziness it is put off with a whining, grumbling, irritable caricature of what the man might have been. He owes it to the members of his family not to burden them with unnecessary doctor’s bills, nursing, and anxiety. He owes it to them not to break down and die before his time, leaving them to struggle on alone. Good, sound health, clear up to the limit of what intelligence, conscience, and that resolution which will not take “no” for an answer may achieve, becomes a moral obligation! The man who shirks this physical duty becomes to that extent a scamp.

Such physical efficiency comes not as a piece of good luck; nor is disease to be regarded always as a misfortune or “a mysterious dispensation of providence.” The man careless about the drainage or thoughtlessly allowing decaying vegetables to lie in the cellar of his home need not prate about “providence” if fever attacks some member of his household. The man who eats hot biscuits three times a day and drinks coffee by the quart until he is as yellow as a Chinaman has no right to shake his head over “the mysterious ways of God,” when he becomes ill. The young fellow who inhales whole fog-banks of cigarette smoke until his lungs are weak and his heart action defective, who tampers with his nerves by the use of stimulants or narcotics, need not be surprised that in the hard contests of life sounder men walk on ahead, leaving him in the rear. In each case the man forgot that two and two make four, that we must settle by the books, that according to the law of returns we take out what we put in.

Physical efficiency cannot be hastily bought in the drug store at a dollar a bottle any more than women can buy good complexions there for fifty cents a box. Beauty is more than skin deep; it roots all the way down into those vital processes which give the fair woman the appearance and the reality of joyous, engaging health. And the physical efficiency which stands the strain of modern life cannot be rapidly gained by the use of drugs; it comes according to the law of definite returns. It comes only as men eat good food, enough and not too much, drink that which slakes rather than creates thirst, sleep a sufficient number of hours, some of them before midnight, breathe their full share of the outdoor air where there is plenty for everybody, and exercise themselves sanely in some wholesome industry. It all comes according to method and not by magic.

The newspapers on the morning after the presidential election of nineteen hundred brought us an interesting picture. One of the candidates for vice-president that year had been traveling for weeks together, speaking ten or fifteen times a day to great audiences eager to drain him of his last drop of vitality. He had been meeting influential citizens by the hundreds, shaking hands with them until his right arm might have felt like the handle of some outworn town pump. He had been doing all this under the constant strain of tremendous excitement and personal interest. A man who had wasted his strength in vicious indulgences would have lasted about as long in such a situation as an old lady would last in a football game. This man went through it without breaking down, without losing his head or making foolish, damaging statements. And when the reporters went to call on him the night of the election they found him in evening dress, rejoicing in the companionship of his family, from whom he had been separated for those weeks, calmly awaiting the returns. Theodore Roosevelt—whether we agree with all his policies or not, we admire a vigorous, intelligent, public-spirited American citizen wherever found! He entered college a delicate lad. He gained and maintained that splendid efficiency by remembering that two and two make four. He was willing to pay the full price for virility by his steady attention to the law of returns.