H. R. BRUCE.
It is time that the flamboyant and flowery, the unreal, was cut out of our oratory and literature. Kill it. Talk straight, think straight, live straight. The flamboyant, the flowery is the product of slavery, of idleness, of high living and no thinking. It is a relic of the past, of feudalism, a mixture of chivalry and unclear thinking. The great poet, the great writer, the great orator is he who talks the greatest good sense. Anything else is the badge of mediocrity. The tendency of everything these strenuous days, from literature to life insurance, is expressed in the phrase: “Get there.” How amusing the efforts of a Tennessee statesman in a recent great occasion, majestically sweeping the heavens with his hands and solemnly proclaiming that “Tennessee had set more stars in the galaxy of glory than all the other States.” Bosh! Tennessee has as many fools to the acre as any other State, and what she should do just now is to set more hens and fewer stars!
People who live with nature soon learn a great deal. The best way to study nature is to get in harmony with the laws of nature. The best advice ever given on longevity was from the cheerful old gentleman who said: “To live long, live naturally, eat what you want and walk on the sunny side of the street.” Children think that some great man made up the horrid rules of grammar, and then all the world learned them and went to talking. They do not know that the world talked first and the rules of grammar were deduced from the talking. From the facts of life we draw our rules.
And Nature is the Great Fact.
I was thinking of one of her facts the other day—she has so many thousands—but I noticed it is a fact that the man who works the soil is a natural-born optimist. Let the farmer fail year after year and he still plants, hoping. Let the merchant fail one year and he is badly shaken—one more—another, maybe—and he is done. That is the Fact. Now for the rule: God intended man to love, to cultivate, to cling to the soil. In other words, is not farming man’s natural vocation, since neither drought nor flood nor failure can shut out from his heart that instinct of hoping which has come down to him through centuries of farming fathers?
We—and that means England and America—have used the Jap to fight our battles for us. The issue has been the stopping of the tide of Moscovites across Asia, the killing of their influence in the East, the grasping from covetous hands the yellow empire, richer than mints of yellow gold to the nation that shall supply their wants. That means the open door until Japan decides to close it for the world and that the Muscovite must forever be bound between the Baltic and the North Sea and the ice zone of the Pacific, all of which was necessary. Arrogant and ignorant Russia needed this chastisement. But is it not time to stop? We are chuckling now, but the greatest problem lies before us. Sixteenth century Russia has met twentieth century Japan, and walked from the woods of barbarity into the daylight of a Mauser-swept, mine-entangled, smokeless-plowed field of death. The harvest has been as certain as when the Gauls came out of the woods to meet the steel-sheathed legions of Caesar.
History does not stop at one page. One was made at Port Arthur and the Straits of Japan, now—