And, groping blindly above it for light,
Climbs to a soul in grass and flowers.”
With the impetuosity and the lack of discipline of our day, this aspiration often overreaches itself. The highly stimulated desire for advancement is thwarted by unwillingness to take the plodding and the stony road. The treasures of the humble are forgotten. The quick fire burns up the substance and leaves but ashes. Meanwhile, it is something if, with Landor, we have
“warmed both hands against the fire of life.”
But, with all this impatience to “get culture,” and this rush to take beauty and intellectual resources to those who have them not, as food to the famine-stricken, we are in danger of forgetting the chief value of the best in literature and the arts: that it awakens the imagination and gives poise to life. Now, imagination and poise are two traits that differentiate man from the brute, and the superior man from the inferior. The best thinking is done by men of imagination; the best action is accomplished by men of poise; for, by poise is meant the faculty of holding one’s course courageously to the compass among contrary winds and waves. The value of high literary, artistic, and musical standards is not that they make poise and imagination universal, but that they affect the world secondarily, through the leaders in whom these qualities are developed. Who shall compute the worth to humanity of one great thinker, one great novelist, one great poet, one great painter, one great sculptor, one great composer? In debating societies, great material advances through invention and discovery are weighed in the balance with great achievements in arts and letters; but account is seldom taken of the intellectual forces that created the inventors and the discoverers.
It is because America is in need of great men that she stands most in need of these forces. The twentieth century appears to be a century of challenge to all the centuries that have gone before, with the accelerated momentum of them all. Now, more than ever, must we have men of imagination and men of poise, and every agency that gives promise of developing these traits deserves encouragement and support. The uplifting of the people to a high average of happiness is thus closely though indirectly related to the advance of literature and the arts.
COMMENTS ON “SCHEDULE K”
IN the paper on the tariff as applied to woolen goods, by Mr. N. I. Stone in the May CENTURY, it was stated: “The great factor in the woolen industry to-day is the American Woolen Company, popularly known as the Woolen Trust, which was said to control sixty per cent. of the country’s output at the time of its formation in 1899.”
Mr. Winthrop L. Marvin, secretary of the “National Association of Wool Manufacturers,” in a letter to THE CENTURY says: “The American Woolen Company makes annual reports. Its capital stock in 1899 was $49,501,100 and in 1909 it was $60,000,000. The total capital of the woolen and worsted industry of this country, as stated by the Federal Census, was, in 1899, $257,000,000 and in 1909 it was $415,000,000. The output of the American Woolen Company in any given year has been at a maximum $51,000,000. The total output of the industry in 1899 was $239,000,000 and in 1909 it was $419,000,000. These figures controvert the assertion of ‘sixty per cent.’”
Mr. Marvin also states that while the Tariff Board mentioned duties on certain English cloths as being “from 132 to 260 per cent.,” it also made plain that those very high rates were not actually effective, since American competition operated to reduce the tariff cost to an average of 67 per cent., “embodying the higher cost of American materials and labor.”