One incident, among two or three which he has recorded, but one of a great many known only to those with whom the occasion was shared, is sufficient to illustrate how practical expression was given to this belief. It occurred within a short time after he had left the university, and before he had entered upon his journalistic career.
“I was returning home one night after a social evening, when I saw a young man in the hands of a policeman. He was what some people would have called a ‘bad boy,’ kept rather doubtful company, and was under arrest for having raised a disturbance during a drunken row. Well, I managed to get the boy, who was about eighteen years of age, out of the cells on bail, and, in company with a fellow who had been ‘painting the town’ with him, I undertook to take him home. I contrived, after some time, to get rid of his ‘pal,’ and, as soon as the boy was sober enough, I undertook to find out whether he had a conscience.
“After walking about the streets with him for a couple of hours in the beautiful moonlight, by the aid of a power which was certainly not my own, I discovered that he had; and the boy opened up his heart to me. I showed him the uselessness and folly of the life into which he was rapidly drifting, and, in a voice convulsed with sobs, he told me that what I said was true. My own eyes moistened as he confessed what a fool he was. He concluded by promising me in a voice and with a pressure of the hand which meant truth, that he would never touch a drop of liquor again. From the frank manner in which he meets my eyes when I now see him occasionally, I believe that he has thoroughly reformed. That night, as I went home, I knew that one prayer had not been in vain.”
For society as a whole, as for its individual members, his aim was a constant betterment.
“There are so few men who couple the capacity for appreciating the troubles of struggling humanity with an earnest desire to remove them, that I can see in such a life a tremendous power for good, and, after all, is not that the highest ideal a man can hold before him?”
In this sentence, penned in reference to another, he wrote of himself more truly than he knew. His journals are full of passages which disclose his “capacity to appreciate,” and his “earnest desire to remove,” the obstacles which thwart the upward and onward progress of men engaged in the competitive rivalries of the world, and in the struggle for daily bread. Whether it was pursuing an uncongenial task in the wilds of Muskoka, or immersed in the cares and unrest of journalism, or busied in research for material from which to construct an article for the Labour Gazette, a human interest in the life and the lot of the mass of men was ever before him, and a purpose to understand and improve that lot his aim.
“During the course of my stay here,” he writes of Muskoka, in the winter of 1895, “I have had some chance to notice the type of inhabitants of this inhospitable district. First and foremost come the lumbermen, not the miners who live in the town, but the stout fellows in smock and jersey, with their pants shoved into stockings, which are in turn encased in stout rubbers. Overcoats are scarce, they don’t seem to be needed. Altogether, though these fellows lead a hard life, and are often coarse and dissipated, they have opinions of their own, and must be reckoned with by the rulers of the country.
“Next comes the Muskoka farmer living in his shanty, for that is pretty much the rule, although there is, of course, an occasional farmhouse of more pretentious appearance, and drawing a bare livelihood by his constant toil with antiquated implements; most of the hay (the chief product, since it requires little care,) being cut by the scythe on patches of land cleared by years of toil, and in most cases thickly strewn with rocks, the only satisfaction that they have in their poverty being that they are independent.
“It is difficult to conceive of culture and refinement under such circumstances. It may be well, however, to have one part of our population comparatively free from the two dangerous influences of our time, riches and luxury on the one hand, and, on the other, embittered and ignorant combinations actuated by selfish interests and swayed too largely by demagogues.