Democratic Sentinel, Volume 5, Number 24, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 22 July 1881 — Wendell Phillips’ Advice to Boys. [ARTICLE]

Wendell Phillips’ Advice to Boys.

History is, for the most part, an idle amusement, the day dream of pedants and triflers. The details of event, the actors’ motives and their relation to each other are buried w ith them. How impossible to learn the exact truth of what took place yesterday under your next neighbor’s roof. Yet we complacently argue and speculate about matters a thousand miles oft and a thousand years ago as if we knew them. When I was a scholar, my favorite study was history. The world and affairs have shown me that one-half of history is loose conjecture, and much of the rest is the writer’s opinion. But most men see facts, not with their eyes, but with their prej udices. Any one familiar with courts will testify how rare it is for an honest man to give a perfectly correct account of a transaction. We are tempted to see facts as we think they ought to be, or wish they were. And yet, journals, are the favorite original sources of history. Tremble, my good friend, if your sixpenny neighbor keeps a journal. It adds a new terror to death. You shall go down to your children not in your fair lineaments and proportions, but with the smirks, elbows and angles he sees you wi.th. Journals are excellent to record the depth of the last snow and the date when the Mayflower opens. But when you come to men’s motives and characters, journals are the magnets that get near the chronometer of history, and make all its records worthless. You can count on the fingers of your two hands all the robust minds that ever kept journals. Only milksops and fribblers indulge in that amusement, except, now and then, a respectable mediocrity. One such journal nightmares New England annals, emptied into history by respectable middle-aged gentlemen, who fancy that narrowness and spleen, like poor wine, mellow into truth when they get to be a century old.

The vicious practice of Americans in Europe, in squandering large sums of money and displaying their roll on all occasions, is bearing its legitimate fruit, and an idea seems to have taken possession of Europeans generally that Americans have more money than they can get rid of with a scoop shovel. They seem to think that almost every American owns a mine that turns out trade dollars in clusters, like grapes, and that the vines produce two crops each season. The vulgarity displayed by Americans in the lavish manner in which they squander immense sums have been frequently commented on, and the Europeans of course only see this phase of the American character. Those of us who remain at home, and are free from this vulgarity, are not taken into account. Life is so short that it is the woxst of stupidities to waste an hour of it.