The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

Students often reject the ethical and economic arguments against gambling. These arguments are valid but it is very hard to get a clutch for them on many minds. You can point out how dishonourable and essentially immoral it is for a man to have money which he did not earn, for which he gave no equivalent, which came to him as no expression of friendship or by no legitimate inheritance. All this is clear to the healthy and manly moral sense. But the gambler does not have such a sense. I have often wondered that the case is not more frequently put from the other side, from the side of the wrong of spending money in gambling. When a man has won on a bet the moral question is lulled but when he has lost there is a chastened mood which can be invited to reflect. What moral warrant did he have for throwing his money away? What does he have to show for it? A million hungry hands were outstretched to him, a world of want and suffering called towards him over land and sea? And he threw his money away—got nothing for it, did nothing with it. In a world like ours, there are parched lips waiting for drink; there are hungry mouths in need of bread:—do we have any right to waste in indulgence in a world like this? Men should scrutinize every dollar that passes through their hands and ask, “What is the very best thing that I can do with this?”

And frugality, self-imposed for the sake of service, will come back to us in rich reward in character and power. Horace Bushnell drew a noble picture of the fruitage of true parsimony in his address at the Litchfield County Centennial in 1851, on “The Age of Homespun”:

“It was also a great point, in this homespun mode of life, that it imparted exactly what many speak of only with contempt, a closely girded habit of economy. Harnessed, all together, into the producing process, young and old, male and female, from the boy that rode the plow-horse, to the grandmother knitting under her spectacles, they had no conception of squandering lightly what they all had been at work, thread by thread, and grain by grain, to produce. They knew too exactly what everything cost, even small things, not to husband them carefully. Men of patrimony in the great world, therefore, noticing their small way in trade, or expenditure, are ready, as we often see, to charge them with meanness—simply because they knew things only in the small; or, what is not far different, because they were too simple and rustic to have any conception of the big operations by which other men are wont to get their money without earning it, and lavish the more freely because it was not earned. Still, this knowing life only in the small, it will be found, is really anything but meanness.

“Probably enough the man who is heard threshing in his barn of a winter evening, by the light of a lantern, (I knew such an example) will be seen driving his team next day, the coldest day of the year, through the deep snow to a distant wood-lot to draw a load for a present to his minister. So the housewife that higgles for a half hour with the merchant over some small trade is yet one that will keep watch, not unlikely, when the schoolmaster, boarding round the district, comes to some hard quarter, and commence asking him to dinner, then to tea, then to stay over night, and literally boarding him, till the hard quarter is passed. Who now, in the great world of money, will do, not to say the same, as much, proportionally as much, in any of the pure hospitalities of life?

“Besides, what sufficiently disproves any real meanness, it will be found that children brought up, in this way, to know things in the small—what they cost and what is their value—have, in just that fact, one of the best securities of character and most certain elements of power and success in life; because they expect to get on by small advances followed up and saved by others, not by sudden leaps of fortune that despise the slow but surer methods of industry and merit. When the hard, wiry-looking patriarch of homespun, for example, sets off for Hartford, or Bridgeport, to exchange the little surplus of his year’s production, carrying his provision with him and the fodder for his team, and taking his boy along to show him the great world, you may laugh at the simplicity, or pity, if you will, the sordid look of the picture; but, five or ten years hence, this boy will probably enough be found in college, digging out the cent’s worths of his father’s money in hard study; and some twenty years later he will be returning, in his honours, as the celebrated Judge, or Governor, or Senator and public orator, from some one of the great states of the republic, to bless the sight once more of that venerated pair who shaped his beginnings, and planted the small seeds of his future success. Small seeds, you may have thought, of meanness; but now they have grown up and blossomed into a large-minded life, a generous public devotion, and a free benevolence to mankind.

“And just here, I am persuaded, is the secret, in no small degree, of the very peculiar success that has distinguished the sons of Connecticut, and, not least, those of Litchfield County, in their migration to other states. It is because they have gone out in the wise economy of a simple, homespun training, expecting to get on in the world by merit and patience, and by a careful husbanding of small advances; secured in their virtue by just that which makes their perseverance successful. For the men who see the great in the small, and go on to build the great by small increments, and so form a character of integrity before God and men, as solid and massive as the outward successes they conquer. The great men who think to be great in general, having yet nothing great in particular, are a much more windy affair.”

Every one ought to roughen life by friendships that will bring into it those influences which are not naturally in our daily associations and will carry us into contact with men and women who struggle harder than we do. A few such friendships will help to keep life from petrification and to make us aware that the world is under a cross, and that our hearts must be as open to all its needs as the heart of the Father of human life is open always.

And we can help to roughen our lives in the very sense in which Christ meant them to be roughened if we will resist the steadily increasing tendency of our day to multiply ways in which we are released from doing things for ourselves. There are none of us who do not have a hundred things done for us that our fathers and mothers had to do for themselves. Little by little, we are ridding ourselves of the responsibility of doing any service for ourselves whatsoever. There is immense gain in this. It gives freedom for larger living but it can go too far, and it would be a great thing if we resolved at periods that we would not let anybody else do for us what we could do for ourselves. There was a day, perhaps, when men needed the other rule, when it was a great deal better to get other people to do things for us than to do them ourselves, but the time has come when the world needs to reverse that principle. What the world wants is not organizers, but deorganizers, men and women who will increase the number of personal services and activities, and who will bring something frugal, simple and elementary back into life to deliver us from the false heaven of ease and self-indulgence, which is as bad as any other kind of hell. Christ came to save us from that.

There is one other way in which we can answer this call, and can deliver ourselves from the curse of smooth living. Around about us on every side there are causes waiting for what men and women can do for them. I do not mean crosses in any great, general, organized sense, in which we send our five, our twenty-five or our hundred dollars to some society and think we have, in that way, carried all the cross that Christ means to have us carry. We cannot fulfill Christ’s command by paying an organization to carry a cross for us. All the work they do must be done, and it must be supported. Millions of dollars that are not being given now ought to be given. But what Christ is waiting for also and what we have got to do if we are to have the satisfaction of the enduring life is to find each of us for himself some true cross of personal service. There are men and women around us who are waiting for some touch of sympathy, some kindness, some unflinching word of ours to them that shall mean the awakening of their own discouraged or sleeping souls, that they may come out to live. “If any man will come after me, let him deny himself, and take up his cross and follow me.”

One of the saddest things in the world to-day is the principle under which those are living who are unwilling to bear these crosses and to bring home into their lives the wholesome spiritual stimulus that this roughening of life alone can give to them. We have reacted too far from the old monastic idea. Men speak with scorn now of those men and women who went away into monasteries and convents, despising the joys of the world for the sake of their souls. But these men and women were infinitely better than the great multitudes who go out into the world to-day, despising their souls for the sake of the joys of the world. If a man or woman wants to do any despising it is better to despise the world than the soul. It were well for us to go back a little to the spirit of the mediæval time. When that spirit was pure and good the world’s richest service flowed out from it.