The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

Under its benign reign, men can come to themselves. Through the operation of this law, there will be no curtailment of the volume or the extent of commerce; but the emphasis will be kept in the right place, and men will not be lost in the process of securing the elements of food and shelter. Commerce will be the means of mediating to men their higher nature. Surrounded by conditions engendered by the operation of a law like this, life will reach through relation higher and higher ranges of hope and insight. The elements of poems, symphonies, philosophies, temples, and pictures will flow in the blood.

The fierce competition we see in the commercial world to-day is the attempt to re-enact, in business life, the principle of natural selection, or “the survival of the fittest in the struggle for existence.” This is the law of the jungle, but not of the social realm. This is doubtless the law among trees, determining their number, variety, and structure; for one tree gains nothing from association with other trees. This law doubtless operates in the sea, among the fish, and in the sky among the birds, for fish and birds are what they are by birth and not by association. Mr. Spencer regards the operation of this law as beneficent. It kills off the unsuccessful members of society, it drives the weak ones to the wall. Those who survive in the struggle are the fittest. The Greeks, who put Socrates to death, were, according to this so-called beneficent principle, the fittest to survive. This law is regarded as beneficent as it operates among men to control their products, upon the supposition that man is an animal and a part and parcel of nature, as are the bears and the wolves. The things which elevate men and civilize them, however, do not come from nature, but are engendered through companionship and association. Hence, from the sense of obligation men are under to one another for the best and highest things of life, the law is to be deduced which is to regulate their commerce and to determine the character of their actions. This law is, “Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself.” Thus business looks to character. The discipline it insures is worth more than the money it brings. The highest product of trade is man himself. If in business such methods are practiced, if such aims are followed as destroy the man, however great the returns in money, it is a thousand fold worse than a failure. The man it was designed to make, it has destroyed.

IV.

The disposition to accumulate, which is right and praiseworthy, should always be modified by right knowledge of the uses of property, and the methods by which it is amassed. Nothing is more pitiable than for a person to have more property than he has manhood. This indicates that the stress has been on the wrong side of the wealth. Such a man is under the sad necessity of taking his significance from the money he has accumulated, rather than the noble elements of life he should have secured in the process of obtaining it. With such a man, the end of business has been lost. He has consumed the end in the means. Instead of turning the elements of trade into manhood, manhood has been lost amid the maze and chaos of things. The order of progress has been violated, and the man, instead of moving on through business cares to immortal character, turns back to the earth, and seeks to substitute the tendency to move from it, by the disposition to settle permanently upon it. The desire to get rich has grown so abnormal and perverted, that it seeks to satisfy itself by the abundance of mere things. There are a great number of mowers and reapers, engines and cotton-gins, hats and shoes, pins and buttons; but a man has been lost in the making of them. This is more than all the mowers and reapers, cotton-gins and steam engines, pins and buttons ever made are worth. It is not mete that men should be sacrificed to the beauty and perfection of machinery, or to things machinery turns out. It is not necessary either. What we gain is not worth what we give. The machinery should be so manipulated as to get the things, and at the same time secure the perfection of men through the process. It is not necessary for the painter to lose himself in his art, and sacrifice his manhood to make his vision glow on the canvas. A proper regard for the methods and uses of art will result in leaving in the living spirit a picture more perfect than any painted by the brush. John Bunyan did not lose his manhood in portraying the history of a human soul in its attempts to get from earth to heaven. While conducting his pilgrim safely through the sorrow and temptations of life, to a home in a better world, he opened the pearly gates to his own soul. His work transfigured his life, and was the means of sanctifying it. All business and all work should lift up, and not hold down; it should make free, and not enslave; it should ennoble and not degrade. It is as honorable to make shoes or anchors as to paint pictures or write books. The shoemaker should learn the secret through his work of finding the sandals of manhood for his own feet. The blacksmith should learn, through the making of anchors for the great ships, to find the anchor that is to hold his own soul to the truth, amid the storms of life.

V.

If through trade only the material result is sought, the ends it were intended to subserve are missed. Its bulk may be large, the machinery through which it is carried on manifold and complicated, but with the emphasis on the money side of it, no manhood will be reached through it. The man side of a button machine is infinitely more important than the button side. The buttons which fall on one side may conform precisely to an approved and an exquisite pattern, but if the person who stands on the other side does not, through the process of making buttons, get a man out of himself, the whole thing is a disastrous failure. Human spirits are too valuable to be used up in making buttons. More respect is to be had to the human side of the loom than to the cloth side. The most beautiful pattern of silk ever woven loses its power to please the eye when it is remembered that the soul of a woman has been drawn into its threads and colors. The sacrifice of individual life is impressive and noble, if the object for which it is made is worthy. This kind of sacrifice is not the means of losing life, but of gaining it. But no material result to be used up in the passing season of fashion is worth such costly sacrifice.

Through forces we name capillarity, cohesion, and gravitation, matter accomplishes the purposes of thought. They are but manifestations of the power of mind working through them, to build up the mineral, vegetable, and animal kingdoms. They look beyond themselves. They work for higher ends. Thus all the industries we see in nature look to lifting and refining matter, and force high enough to serve the uses of human life. So the industries established on the plane of human life are to elevate man another step in the scale of being. Through sowing and reaping, through grinding and sawing, through spinning and weaving, through buying and selling, through building and furnishing, he is to be carried on in the march of progress.

The history of the physical universe culminates in man, finds its interpreter and its interpretation in him. Never was the thought of him absent from her movements through Pliocene, Miocene, Eocene, Cretaceous, Jurassic, Triassic, Carboniferous, Devonian, Silurian, or Cambrian ages. In all her awful cosmic emotion to reach order and form, it was the anticipation of man that moved her, for he it is at last that comes of it. So, through all the course of her tumultuous history, nature was pregnant with man. The stars which sang together in the early morning of the world, caught the inspiration which gave melody to their song from the thought of him.

Commerce, if it is to be permanent and healthy and progressive, must fall into line with the purpose nature was put upon its perilous course to subserve. Her countless forms of industry established by the law of supply and demand; her cars, rushing hither and thither all round the world; her great steamships on every sea; her great furnaces, whose chimneys lift themselves against the sky, must get their meaning and the reason for their existence from the fact that they are putting in their contribution to the making of a man. Her wheels are to fly, her spindles are to whirl, her paddles are to splash, and her hammers are to ring, making music amid it all, in anticipation of his increasing worth, his growing thought, his enlarging hope. Her countless wheels of industry will be throwing out axes, wagons, plow-stocks, hand-saws, and reapers as they fly; but these will be only so many means used to discipline the precious life committed for a while to her training. What chemical affinity did in lifting the original elements to the mineral kingdom, and what the animal did to lift the plant to the animal kingdom, so the trades and industries of commerce are to do in lifting human life from its individual, unrelated state to its social and fraternal state. The elements of commerce are to be the means to help human character out of human nature. Two kinds of raw material are to be refined. The iron in the mountain is to be turned into razor blades and caligraphs; the reeds in the swamps and the woods in the forests are to be turned into the notes of organ and piano; and in the process of refining these, man is to be disciplined in the use of himself, in the possession of himself, and in the command of himself.