With the institution of the Douma, the strong men are bound to make themselves felt, and the results will be that the Czar will not lack for competent advisers and administrators.
I am convinced that as soon as the Douma gets going thoroughly a new day will dawn for Russia and her people. There is bound to be wonderful commercial development, and with this will come an awakening of intelligence and exercise of limited constitutional government, which is bound to result in peace and tranquillity and the restoration of Russia to her high place among the powers of the world.
DR. OSLER IN HIS MORE CHEERFUL PHASE.
Some Pet Philosophies of the Famous
Physician Whose View on the Age-Limit
Is Not His Only Idea.
When Dr. William Osler admitted his belief that man is fit for creative intellectual work only up to his fortieth year he gained an undeserved reputation for grimness. The age-limit theory is but one of many that he has formed on various subjects. In his book, "Counsels and Ideals," are many genial expressions of a ripe observation. Here is his advice as to "work":
How can you take the greatest possible advantage with the least possible strain? By cultivating system. I say cultivating advisedly, since some of you will find the acquisition of systematic habits very hard. There are minds congenitally systematic; others have a life-long fight against an inherited tendency to diffusiveness and carelessness in work.
To counteract "the murmurings and whimperings of men and women over the non-essentials" he advises each of us to "consume his own smoke."
Things cannot always go your way. Learn to accept in silence the minor aggravations, cultivate the gift of taciturnity, and consume your own smoke with an extra draft of hard work, so that those about you may not be annoyed with the dust and soot of your complaints. More than any other the practitioner of medicine may illustrate the great lesson that we are here not to get all we can out of life for ourselves, but to try to make the lives of others happy.... Courage and cheerfulness will not only carry you over the rough places of life, but will enable you to bring comfort and help to the weak-hearted, and will console you in the sad hours when, like Uncle Toby, you have "to whistle that you may not weep."
Of the end of life, speaking both as a physician and as a philosopher, he says:
With what strife and pains we come into the world we know not, but it is commonly no easy matter to get out of it, Sir Thomas Browne says; and, having regard to the uncertainties of the last stage of all, the average man will be of Cæsar's opinion, who, when questioned at his last dinner-party as to the most preferable mode of death, replied, "That which is the most sudden."