Confidential Chats with Boys

by William Lee Howard

These brain-tools I have been speaking of are your powers of thinking correctly, creating, doing, and the absolute integrity which must be retained between the impulses of the mind and the hands which respond to these impulses. The engineer, the auto driver, the mechanic, the draughtsman, the airman, the man who works in perilous heights while constructing tall buildings or bridges, must have perfect harmony throughout all his body—brain, muscles, eyes, ears. Let any one of these senses become unconsciously dull through neglect of right living, and the awful moment comes when an engineer sends a train to wreck with its innocent passengers, a tender pulls a lever a tenth of a second too soon and lets down the derrick’s load upon his fellow workers, or a chauffeur misses the turn by a few inches and sends the auto crashing over a precipice.

It is because these little matters of keeping the brain in its best condition by attending to details of living have not been thoroughly understood, that we have so many unaccountable accidents occurring every day. The knowledge of man’s forces and how they are controlled has not kept pace with his wonderful mechanical and electrical discoveries, so we have gone along with brain, instincts and training well enough for handling the plow and side-wheel steamboat, but not for the safe control of the delicate and powerful machines of to-day.

For example: a young man who runs an auto goes one night to a dance where he breathes foul air, smokes and drinks a little beer. He returns late to his bed and rises early in the morning to take out the auto for a speedy spin. He knew the day before that he was to go with a party of children and women for an early drive. But what he did not know was that the foul air, tobacco and beer would surely make for less correct connection between his brain impulses and the response from his muscles, hands and arms.

Now all this little night’s pleasure, while harmless enough perhaps in its way and certainly harmless for a man who was to drive a hack the next morning, was injurious for one who needed every tenth of action between brain and hand under absolute control. There is coming a time when all these matters will be taught as well as the combustion parts of an engine.

In these details I am not referring to dissipation as it is generally considered. We accept without argument the injury such habits do—the certain ruin which follows drink and all that goes with that state. We take this auto driver whom we are using for an example, as a temperate man. And justly considered he is one, but nevertheless he has by this apparently harmless pleasure of one night, gone to work the next day with the fine edge off his brain-tools. When the time comes for the most accurate judgment and an immediate response of hands to avoid the danger the brain sees, there is a part of a second in delay, and then the awful accident happens.

How did it happen? Those left alive cannot understand. The right thing was done at the right moment, so all think. The driver was a careful young man, of good habits, temperate, “never known to have been under the influence of drink, and always trustworthy.”

To-day is the day of the brain worker, and the man who lets the edge of his brain become dulled is a danger to himself and whatever he controls. And it is these little things which dull the brain; matters of such little importance in a man’s outward life that no one would suspect the direful results.

You can no longer do as your fathers used to do; we are living in a distinctly different age; we are daily dealing with powerful forces undreamed of in the past generation, and we must make ourselves ever ready to handle these forces.

There has been such a tremendous move in mechanical devices the last twenty years that this necessity of adapting our methods of living so as to safely accomplish the things our brains are called upon to do, has not been fully appreciated. Take the case of an engineer who has been on duty for twenty-four hours. The old idea was that he simply became tired, that if he could keep his eyes open, everything would go all right. Now I have told you that fatigue produces a poison in the body; so here we see that when an engineer meets with an accident it was not due to merely being tired, but because his brain was being saturated with poisons, and when the moment came to act there could not be the ready response of hands or arms to avoid the accident.

But one class of men and women have known the absolute necessity of keeping the brain clear of poison. This class belongs to the professional circus people—trapeze performers, animal trainers, riders. These individuals live an ideally moral life. Not that they are any better than the rest of us, but because they know they have so to live in order to do their work. It is a very old profession, perhaps the oldest in the world, and experience, tradition, training and marrying into their own class—a very important factor—has brought about their unconscious acceptance of the physically pure life.