Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 93, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 20 April 1915 — MEASURED BY INCHES [ARTICLE]

MEASURED BY INCHES

LITTLE THINGS GOVERN LIFE’S BUCCESB OR FAILURE. A Little Contemplation Will Show the Troth of the Statement —Man Who Considers It la the One Who Succeeds. Everybody knows what a little thing an inch is, but few realize what a big thing it is. Few stop to contemplate what the difference of an inch really means, says a writer in the New York American. A tailor knows when an inch too much or too little has cost him anywhere from $lB to SBO. A dressmaker knows when an inch too little of the goods on hand may cause her, after an arduous day of planning, to abandon a chosen pattern for another. An engineer knows when his train, with its carload of human freight, has gone one inch off the track over a precipice. Some men have minds one inch off the judgment track, and that causes all their schemes, gigantic and brilliant as they may be, to run amuck. Every calamity and every success in life is controlled by inches. Men rarely go to their doom in an hour; it is inch by inch. All successes are won inch by inch. As inch by inch the waters of life creep in to ingulf us, so inch by inch the obstacles that impede our progress move aside. The man who attempts to leap over the inches to reach his goal gets there with a broken leg. The word inch has a forbidding sound. It is because it holds us in its clutches. We cannot ignore an inch, or it immediately thwarts our intentions. Every simple thing is performed by man, as the saying goes, “within an inch of his life.” All diseases move inch by inch. Before the scarlet fever breaks out in a child it has been developing inch by. inch for nine days. A man built a magnificent structure the other day at an enormous expense, and when it was proved that he had encroached a few inches on the land of another man the law accorded the other man the right to pull it down. The overstepping of an inch in the proprieties of life brands us. If a girl in a theater laughs an inch too loud the audience looks around and puts upon her the stamp of "not a lady.” Art is controlled by inches. A picture an inch too high or too low, and the entire artistic effect of the wall upon which it hangs is lost. Deportment is measured by inches, and woe unto the man who fails to observe its dictates. Even in the deepest grief, if one goes too far in his wailings the grief is questioned, if not ridiculed, and sympathy turned aside. An inch too far in the poet’s flight to Imagination’s realms and the world laughs at his best efforts.. A single inch in any direction may throw away a man’s chances for the world’s approval, and yet some men do not even consider the yards. It is the man who considers life within an inch of every detail presented who succeeds.