By the Christmas Fire

by Samuel McChord Crothers

In these days it is so easy for one to get a supply of ready-made knowledge that it is hard to keep from applying it indiscriminately. We make incursions into our neighbor's affairs and straighten them out with a ruthless righteousness which is very disconcerting to him, especially when he has never had the pleasure of our acquaintance till we came to set him right. There is a certain modesty of conscience which would perhaps be more becoming. It comes only with the realization of practical difficulties. I like the remark of Sir Fulke Greville in his account of his friend, Sir Philip Sydney. Speaking of his literary labors he says: "Since my declining age it is true I had for some years more leisure to discover their imperfections than care and industry to mend them, finding in myself what all men complain of: that it is more easy to find fault, excuse, or tolerate, than to examine or reform."

The idea that we know what a person ought to do, and especially what he ought not to do, before we know the person or how he is situated, is one dear to the mind of the Doctrinaire. If his mind did not naturally work that way he would not be a Doctrinaire. He is always inclined to put duty before the pleasure of finding out what it is all about. In this way he becomes overstocked with a lot of unrelated duties, for which there is no home consumption, and which he endeavors to dump on the foreign market. This makes him unpopular.

I am not one of those who insist that everybody should mind his own business; that is too harsh a doctrine. One of the rights and privileges of a good neighbor is to give neighborly advice. But there is a corresponding right on the part of the advisee, and that is to take no more of the advice than he thinks is good for him. There is one thing that a man knows about his own business better than any outsider, and that is how hard it is for him to do it. The adviser is always telling him how to do it in the finest possible way, while he, poor fellow, knows that the paramount issue is whether he can do it at all. It requires some grace on the part of a person who is doing the best he can under extremely difficult circumstances to accept cheerfully the remarks of the intelligent critic.

Persons who write about the wild animals they have known are likely to be contradicted by persons who have been acquainted with other wild animals, or with the same wild animals under other circumstances. How much more difficult is it to give an exhaustive and correct account of that wonderfully complex creature, man.

One whose business requires him to meet large numbers of persons who are all in the same predicament, is in danger of generalizing from a too narrow experience. The teacher, the charity-worker, the preacher, the physician, the man of business, each has his method of professional classification. Each is tempted to forget that he is not in a position from which he can survey human nature in its entirety. He only sees one phase endlessly repeated. The dentist, for example, has special advantages for character study, but he should remember that the least heroic of his patients has moments when he is more blithe and debonair than he has ever seen him.

It takes an unusually philosophical mind to make the necessary allowances for its own limitations. If you were to earn your daily bread at the Brooklyn Bridge, and your sole duty was to exhort your fellow men to "step lively," you would doubtless soon come to divide mankind into three classes, namely: those who step lively, those who do not step lively, and those who step too lively. If Aristotle himself were to cross the bridge, you would see nothing in the Peripatetic Philosopher but a reprehensible lack of agility.

At the railway terminus there is an office which bears the inscription, "Lost Articles." In the midst of the busy traffic it stands as a perpetual denial of the utilitarian theory that all men are governed by enlightened self-interest. A very considerable proportion of the traveling public can be trusted regularly to forget its portable property.

The gentleman who presides over the lost articles has had long experience as an alienist. He is skeptical as to the reality of what is called mind. So far as his clients are concerned, it is notable for its absence. To be confronted day after day by the absent-minded, and to listen to their monotonous tale of woe, is disenchanting. It is difficult to observe all the amenities of life when one is dealing with the defective and delinquent classes.