Between You and Me

by Sir Harry Lauder

There are things for us all to think about, dear knows. We've come, of late years, we were doing it too much before the war, to give too great weight to things that were not of the spirit. Men have grown used to more luxury than it is good for man to have. Look at our clubs. Palaces, no less, some of them. What need has a man of a temple or a palace for a club. What should a club be? A comfortable place, is it no, whaur a man can go to meet his friends, and smoke a pipe, maybe—find a bit and a sup if the wife is not at hame, and he maun be eating dinner by his lane. Is there need of marble columns and rare woods?

And a man's own hoose. We've been thinking lately, it seems to me, too much of luxury, and too little of use and solid comfort. We wasted much strength and siller before the war. Aweel, we've to pay, and to go on paying, noo, for a lang time. We've paid the price in blood, and for a lang time the price in siller will be kept in our minds. We'll ha' nae choice aboot luxury, maist of us. And that'll be a rare gude thing.

Things! Things! It's sae easy for them to rule us. We live up to them. We act as if they owned us, and a' the time it's we who own them, and that we maun not forget. And we grow to think that a'thing we've become used to is something we can no do wi'oot. Oh, I'm as great a sinner that way as any. I was forgetting, before the war came to remind me, the days when I'd been puir and had had tae think longer over the spending of a saxpence than I had need to in 1914, in you days before the Kaiser turned his Huns loose, over using a hundred poonds.

I'm not blaming a puir body for being bitter when things gae wrong. All I'm saying is he'll be happier, and his troubles will be sooner mended if he'll only be thinking that maybe he's got a part in them himsel'. It's hard to get things richt when you're thinking they're a' the fault o' some one else, some one you can't control. Ca' the guilty one what you will—a prime minister, a capitalist, a king. Is it no hard to mak' a wrong thing richt when it's a' his fault?

But suppose you stop and think, and you come tae see that some of your troubles lie at your ain door? What's easier then than to mak' them come straight? There are things that are wrong wi' the world that we maun all pitch in together to mak' richt—I'm kenning that as well as anyone. But there's muckle that's only for our own selves to correct, and until that's done let's leave the others lie.

It's as if a man waur sair distressed because his toon was a dirty toon. He'd be thinking of hoo it must look when strangers came riding through it in their motor cars. And he'd aye be talking of what a bad toon it was he dwelt in; how shiftless, how untidy. And a' the time, mind you, his ain front yard would be full o' weeds, and the grass no cut, and papers and litter o' a' sorts aboot.

Weel, is it no better for that man to clean his ain front yard first? Then there'll be aye ane gude spot for strangers to see. And there'll be the example for his neighbors, too. They'll be wanting their places to look as well as his, once they've seen his sae neat and tidy. And then, when they've begun tae go to work in sic a fashion, soon the whole toon will begin to want to look weel, and the streets will look as fine as the front yards.

When I hear an agitator, a man who's preaching against all things as they are, I'm always afu' curious aboot that man. Has he a wife? Has he bairns o' his ain? And, if he has, hoo does he treat them?

There's men, you know, who'll gang up and doon the land talkin' o' humanity. But they'll no be kind to the wife, and their weans will run and hide awa' when they come home. There's many a man has keen een for the mote in his neighbor's eye who canna see the beam in his own— that's as true to-day as when it was said first twa thousand years agane.

I ken fine there's folk do no like me. I've stood up and talked to them, from the stage, and I've heard say that Harry Lauder should stick to being a comic, and not try to preach. Aye, I'm no preacher, and fine I ken it. And it's no preaching I try to do; I wish you'd a' understand that. I'm only saying, whiles I'm talking so, what I've seen and what I think. I'm but one plain man who talks to others like him.