Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 277, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 November 1910 — THANKSGIVING [ARTICLE]

THANKSGIVING

As this is Thanksgiving and. we all have stomachs whose appeals belong properly to this and to every other day in the year, let us give thanks for the things of the stomach, for turkey |f we have turkey, for goose if we have goose, for sausage if we have sausage. For the power to earn and to enjoy the things of the stomach, we may be thankful, since the power to earn what our own stomachs call for is the power to serve the needs of all other stomachs. And Instead of being shameful or regrettable from any standpoint, an unspoiled stomach is natural, is right, is commendable and moreover is Inevitable in its operations. But over and above everything between turkey and sausage we have “potentials.” A potential is a simple thing. A shoemaker or a machinist is as apt to have it as an Archduke or a Czar, or a supreme court judge or a senator or a president. It comes into the brain as a constructive idea. It works out of one brain into ten, a hundred, a thousand, a hundred million. Then it is a force nothing can resist. Put men with constructive ideas into the wilderness and the desert and their ideas will show themselves the -highest realities, controlling all difficulties. What were the worst difficulties (serve constructive ideas as the raw material tor great states and great cities, for fields yielding their products year by year tn the hundreds of millions of bushels or of dollars, for new creation in a thousand ways, depriving none and enriching all, with .new opportunities created at every

step forward end the Open Road into the future cleared and kept open, never to be closed and kept closed by any force or any fraud. If we doubt that constructible ideas have this force in them for the future we have only to look around us into the present and back into the past which they and they alone converted into this present. These things are for all men. For ourselves, man by man, if today we can look back and see how by the use of any idea of ours we have been able to escape struggle, to subject others and to dominate them while giving a single constructive idea its force in serving them, or if we can look into the future and see opportunities opening before us for this,

then we can see that which, for each one of us, man by man, means power, the highest possible power for us, as for each one of us and for all it is liberation. Were there only one man tn the million of us who had such cause for Thanksgiving as that would mean for himself and for all of us, all would surely go forward with him to greater power, to fuller prosperity, to the only possible independence, the independence which belongs to the highest possible freedom of service. The man who has such independence has the highest cause for Thanksgiving— That man la freed from se*Ue sands Of hopes to rise or fears to fail, Lord of himself. If not of lands. And, having nothing, yet hath all.