The Stuff of Manhood: Some Needed Notes in American Character

by Robert E. Speer

And it is a good thing that the nation in conserving her resources realizes that there is something more important than a careful husbanding of her mere material wealth. The vital resources of any people are of more significance to her than clods of coal, or timber on her hillsides. Of what use would it be to conserve the material resources of any nation if we conserve them only for a deteriorating racial stock? The nation has come to realize that the men and women who compose it are its largest wealth, and that this treasure must be guarded more sacredly than our mines, our forests, or our water power. We have seen, accordingly, a whole new body of legislation growing up, that would have made our fathers stand aghast, fixing the conditions of employment, the age of employees, the sanitary condition of homes and mills, the hours of work and the care of women. The expenditure of immense sums for the protection of the life and health of factory labourers is now readily recognized even by “soul-less corporations,” which formerly fought against all such outlay, as money well invested. In all the nation to-day we realize that there is a more precious wealth than our material wealth. I saw an interesting illustration of this new frame of mind a little while ago in a statement issued by some leading men in Tennessee dealing with the excessive death rate among the negroes of the South. They pointed out that among nine millions of white people the death rate is 160,000, and that among the nine millions of the negroes the death rate is 266,000. In other words, among the negroes, 106,000 more people die every year than among a corresponding number of the whites of our country. In the negro, these men argued, the South had an invaluable asset, a better type of labour on the whole, with all its drawbacks, than any other section of the nation possessed, more docile, more faithful, less troublesome, and the South could not afford to lose this labour which it needed for developing its wealth. These men estimated the economic value of each one of these lives at $350 a year, and the period of that economic value at ten years, so that each one of these wasted lives was a loss of $3,500 to the South, or $371,000,000 each year, one million dollars a day, and they argued that the South could not afford such a waste. The South, they held, must see that the death rate among the negro is reduced to the same proportions as the death rate among the white people, in order that such an enormous economic loss might be averted. We are realizing all over the nation now that a man is a very costly product. You can breed an animal in a few months for the market, but it takes twenty years to grow a man, and no nation can afford to throw away such costly products as men and women. These are its most priceless wealth. If it expects to conserve its treasures and to be prepared for the services of the days to come, it is bound to guard this wealth more sacredly than any other. And American capital and industry have come to see this clearly. Here is one typical utterance by a leading engineer at a meeting of the Immigration Committee of the Chamber of Commerce of the United States:

“Industrial Americanization is a part of the prevalent present-day movement towards the humanizing of industry. It aims to make what is commonly called ‘welfare work’ not an exercise of the individual employer’s ‘paternalism,’ but a legitimate kind of business organization everywhere. There are now innumerable kinds of ‘welfare work.’ One employer does it from the point of view of ‘good business’; another on the ‘big brothers’ theory. One man confines himself to playgrounds, another to safety appliances. In one firm it is under the employment manager; in another under a Y. M. C. A. director; and in a number of other firms it is classified in as many different ways.

“There is no agreement among American employers as to where the organization of the human side of industry really belongs. And there are absolutely no standards for it. What we need to do is to extend scientific methods to the human phases of industrial organization, and thus give ‘welfare work’ a definite place and definite standards. The engineer as the ‘consulting mind’ of industry must be the leader in this work. It is he who determines the site of the plant and its construction. Inside the plant again, the engineer has much to do with efficiency methods. No efficiency methods that are unrelated to the men in the plant can prosper permanently.”

But there is another sort of resource and national treasure greater by far than these, which most of the nations are passing by. I mean the latent and undeveloped capacities for ministry and achievement which lie dormant inside human life. Every life is a reservoir of unawakened possibilities. There is no one of us that is more than a fraction of the man he should be. There is not one who is not falling short by a wide margin of the ideals that he ought to attain, not one who is making the contribution to the nation or building the share in the Kingdom of God that God and mankind alike have a right to expect of him. Not long before his death, an article contributed by Prof. William James, of Harvard, appeared in the American Magazine, entitled “The Powers of Man,” in which Professor James argued that mankind is living on a very small fraction of its vitality, and that there are buried underground strata of possibilities and of power which are never tapped except in times of great emergency. For a little time then a man draws on these reserves, and then seals the strata over again and falls back on the surface levels once more. For illustration he spoke of the familiar phenomenon of the second wind. Every boy can remember such experiences. There came a time in the game when he was “all in.” He had done his best and drawn on his last available power. Suddenly it was as though something broke. A partition wall fell in. Unsuspected reserves were released. The second wind came and reservoirs of power that had been withheld came unexpectedly into play and he did better than he had done before, what he had never been able to do before. That is an absolute truth of experience all through life. In our great crises, any one of many forces may unlock these energies and let them loose. And the present needed appeal of the world is to men and women that they should not be content to draw upon these reservoirs in crises alone. The tragic crises come because these powers are not drawn forth and used. The great wealth of the nations and of the world that needs now to be unsealed is just this wealth of moral capacity lying latent and dormant within.

What I have been saying is certainly true in the realm of our physical energies. I remember a story of John Lawrence, who went out to India a raw, uninfluential Irish boy in the service of the East India Company, resolved to do his work well and make himself a name. Very early in his career he was assigned to the collectorship of the Jullundur Doab, on what was then the frontier of India. He made himself perfectly at home among his people, entering into their life, mastering their vernaculars, learning their secrets, until at last men came to think of “Jans Larens” as a demi-god with powers beyond the knowledge of common men. One day as he was sitting in his house a messenger came in from one of his districts and reported that a village was burning down and begged him to come. He hurried out to the village. When he arrived he asked the headmen if they had all the people out of the houses and was told that all had been brought out except one old woman who refused to come. He went to the house where the woman lived and looked in. There she sat on a bag of grain. Lawrence entreated her to come out but she refused, explaining that this bag of grain was all her earthly wealth. If she came out she would starve; she would rather stay and be burned. When Lawrence found his commands and entreaties unavailing, he rushed in, with the embers from the burning roof falling on his shoulders, stooped over and picked up the bag of grain, and left the burning building, the old woman following obediently behind. The next day as he was sitting in his house it flashed on his mind that the bag of grain had been exceedingly heavy and he rode out curiously to the village again to see how much he had lifted. He had no difficulty in finding the old woman and her bag of grain. He stooped over to lift it but could not budge it from the ground. But the day before he had budged it. He had picked it up and carried it. The power to do it was lying latent in him all the while. All he needed was just the piercing call or inspiration adequate to release the buried energy.

And the world is full of evidences that what is true physically is true morally. In every man lies the power with the grace and help of God to meet his great crisis and in every woman the power to bear the agony and pain of her great hour. Only a few years ago, when the Titanic went down and some men who had walked as dogs at the heel of their passions suddenly became masters of themselves and laughing stood at attention to death as they waited on the deck, we all wondered what it was that gave these men who had been slaves their sudden moral mastery. That mastery was within all the time. It did not come out of the frame of the Titanic. It did not come out of the iceberg. It was lying buried all the while only waiting the hour and the Voice that was to summon it to come forth.

Among the nations to-day this is the needed truth as it is the needed truth here in our own lives. There are boys here to-day who have been yielding to temptation, to whom God would give energies to withstand their enemy. In the nation there are even now capacities to conquer all the evils with which the nation abounds. Some day our children will look back and ask why we have allowed immorality to dominate the moral life of the land and why in the world we have endured the saloon so long. These things will be cleaned away some day and men will wonder then what their mothers and fathers were about that they surrendered where that happier generation will not surrender but will achieve. The needed capacities are buried of God in life, but we are not willing to believe that they are there or to have faith in Him to energize them.

Let me put the truth in yet a different way.

Last spring, just after Holy Week, I received a very interesting letter from a friend who is one of the best known and best loved judges in our country. It was written on the Saturday between Good Friday and Easter Day, and he said in it that he was pursuing the practice which he had pursued for many years, of trying in the interval between Good Friday and Easter morning to eliminate Jesus Christ entirely from his thought of life and of the world in order that he might thus bring home to his own mind and conscience more deeply the significance of Jesus, and he said he could hardly wait for Easter morning to come to escape from the oppressive gloom and depression in which his spirit was as a result of his enforced practice. And he begged me, as one of his friends, to try this between the next Good Friday and Easter Day and to see what the experience would mean.