People's Pilot, Volume 5, Number 36, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 12 March 1896 — Is II Worth the Price? [ARTICLE]

Is II Worth the Price?

The world is full of young men who are panting to throw off the restraints of youth and enter into the battle of life. In every class, in every college, there is at least one boy who nurses the profound belief that he is “the coming man, and that he will open a new chapter in the book of human achievement. In the court house he will win cases Bob Toombs or Ben Butler would have lost. In medicine he will cure where Pasteur, or Koch, or Battey would have killed. In science, he will make Humboldt, and Spencer and Huxley and Darwin appear pigmies. As an orator he will spell bind where Phillips or Prentiss would have put to sleep. As a statesman. he will begin where Gladstone left off. As a warrior the first ‘Tbund” in his ladder of glory will be an Austerlitz or a Jena. Yes, indeed, I know what we are saying. When I was at college this “coming man” was in every class. In fact there were two or three of him in every class. And, of course. I was one of him myself. That was long ago—so long ago that when I met one of “the coming men” of these college days a few weeks since, I found him as gray and as subdued as a still, drizzly day in October. He was travelling about selling a new edition of an oxcellent cook book. This feverish, desperate contest for fame and wealth and position—is the reward worth the labor?

Is there any “reward” at all, in the success achieved, which brightens the home, gladdens the heart, and fills the soul's desire with satisfaction? In that hub bub of talk about you, which the world calls fame, how manv of the talkers are men whose good opinion is of actual value? And how many of these worthiest of the people are citizens whose good opinion is so indispensible to you that you would work you legs off and your heart out to get it? What is that good opinion going to do for you that you should turn your days into days of drudgery and your nights into sleepless vigils of anxious thought? What are you going to get out of it that repays you for the health- and the peace and the happiness paid for it? Napoleon believed that fame was the only immortality. He had no belief in the soul. \et after toiling so hard over his books that he stunned his growth; after reaching supreme power by such a career of blood, hypocrisy, selfishness, genius, labor, lies and good luck as the world never saw before; after carrying his triumphant eagles from Cairo to Moscow he had the mortification to learn that.there were people livingeven in France who had never heard of him. And, you see. he had been ram - paging around, with infinite noise, for twenty-odd years, just to make people hear of him! Where there is one man m the world today who has any clear idea as to who Napoleon was, there are forty thousand who never heard of him. Once upon a time a very prominent burgher of the town where I iive—a man of eminent respectability and in-telligence-closed a harangue I had been making to him on the subject of Napoleon’s greatness, by asking me with the utmost seriousness if Napoleon was dead.

What , was there in the splendid fame he won that made it easy for Henry Grady to give his young life into the frozen arms of death? What is there in Bill Nye should work himself to death—killing himself to supply the public with fun? Where is the recompense which repay to the slave of ambition the loss of the sunny days in the fields, the myriad voice of the autumn woods, and the leisure hours at the fireside of a happy home?

Shall there be no rest for weary feet in this mad race for fame and wealth and position? Shall there be no furlough frbtn this all-devouring army? Shall there never come a time when the rainy day is mine and the long, sweet hours in the quiet library? Shall the fever of pursuit so entirely enslave us that there shall be no hour that belongs to friendship, none that belongs to solitude and reflection, npue to memory and to the sacred teachings of regret? Tom Reed once said to me “we are not judged by character, we are judged by reputation.” Just so; and perhaps that’s the

very reason why it is worth while to stress the fact that the reputation is not worth the price we pay for it—for surely the real value .of the man is his character and not his reputation. Get all the fame that flows from a good life. Such fame is as healthy as the light that pours from a star —as unfeverish as the breath of a rose or the song.of a bird. Such a fame is but thS halo that follows sterling worth. Get all the money you can honestly get. You owe it to yourself and those who depend on you to bring the vessals into port, if you can—safe from the storm* The man who says he loves being poor is a liar, and he takes you for a fool—else he wouldn’t tell you so. Win position in life, if you feel that duty calls for you there. No man should under rate the importance of fame, of wealth, or of position:—but the man who pays his health and his happiness and his life for them pays too much. —T. <E. W., in People’s Party Paper.