More Elbert Hubbard

1. The great Big Black Things that have loomed against the horizon of my life, threatening to devour me, simply loomed and nothing more. The things that have really made me miss my train have always been sweet, soft, pretty, pleasant things of which I was not in the least afraid. (p. 61)

Personality first reveals itself in the hat. Woman lures with her hat--a bonnet beckons. The hat is a purely secondary sex manifestation. What the comb and wattles are to the cock o' the walk, the hat is to man. With the hat we signal, apologize, or defy. Strong men do not allow Mrs. Grundy to dictate when they shall have their hair cut, nor to select their hats. (183)

The introduction of London Music-Hall features in hotel dining rooms is only about fifteen years old [in 1917].

The innovation came in with the bizarre, the loud, the blatant. It matched the Plaster-of-Paris, gold-leaf figures on the wall.

All of the modern hotels about that time had a balcony built for the musicians. We gulped our soup to waltz time, did the entree to a two-step and disposed of pie to Chopin's Funeral March. You bawled to your vis-a-vis across a three-foot void, and if the music stopped suddenly, you found yourself addressing the audience.

It was a wonderful thing. We got the concert free, and we had to have a dinner anyway! The concert was given as a sort of premium, and at that time the air was full of the idea of getting something for nothing.

The hotels and restaurants advertising music at meals caught the great unwashed, who hypnotized themselves into the belief that they had broken into good society with a social jimmy. (200)

First, for her own happiness and satisfaction

Second, so she may be a better mother, and add her influence to racial education.

Third, so that she may be a better companion for man, for all strong men are educated by women. (74)

For instance, I can think back to a time when my mother used to sing at her work. She eliminated the servant problem and thereby cut out one topic of conversation.

She used to cook, sew, scrub, wash, make garden, and when she washed dishes I can remember that she would prop a book up against the castor--now an obsolete thing--and let a table-fork hold the pages open. And as she worked she read.

She would knit us stockings and mittens--warm woolen mittens for Winter--and this knitting she would do after supper while some one read aloud

When she was doing her ironing she would sing, loud and clear, some good old Baptist hymn.

I admired her voice, even if at times I provoked a discord. She could lift a high C that you could hear a quarter of a mile. And certainly she did make that iron sizz! I can hear it hit the table now, and closing my eyes, I can see her test the heat of the iron with a moistened finger.

And so she ironed and sang, and I, perhaps three or four years of age, would occasionally creep softly into the room, navigate under the table and suddenly clutch the soloist by the feet.

This would stop the song and cause a good spitball Baptist expletive to spin through the air, and I was apt to get a good kick at the same time. And certainly it was coming to me. (77)

The personality of a man who could not only convert to Christianity three thousand Indians, but who could set them to work, must surely be sublimely great. NOt only did they labor, but they produced art of a high order. These missions which lined the Coast from San Francisco to San Diego, every forty miles, were Manual Training Schools, founded on a religious concept.

Junipero taught that, unless you backed up your prayer with work, God would never answer your petitions. And the wonderful transformations which this man worked in characters turned on the fact that he made them acceptable and beautiful. Here is a lesson for us! He ranks with Saint Benedict, who rescued classical art from the dust of time and gave it to the world. Junipero is one with Albrecht Durer, Lorenzo the Magnificent, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Friedrich Froebel, John Ruskin and William Morris. These men all taught the Gospel of Work, and the sacredness of Beauty and Use.

Junipero was without question the greatest teacher of Manual Training which this continent has so far seen. Without tools, apparatus or books, save as he created them, he evolved an architecture and an art, utilizing the services of savages, and transforming these savages in the process, for the time at least, into men of taste, industry and economy.

This miracle of human energy and love could not endure, and after Fra Junipero had passed out, there being none to take his place, the Indians relapsed into their racial ways. (76)

Grimy, ragged, tousled boys in the street often attract me strangely. A boy is a man in the cocoon--you do not know what it is going to become--his life is big with many possibilities.

He may make or unmake kings, change boundary-lines between States, write books that will mold characters, or invent machines that will revolutionize the commerce of the world. Every man was once boy: I trust I shall not be contradicted: it is really so.

Wouldn't you like to turn Time backward, and see Abraham Lincoln at twelve, when he had never worn a pair of boots? The lank, lean, yellow, hungry boy--hungry for love, hungry for learning, tramping off through the woods for twenty miles to borrow a book, and spelling it out, crouched before the glare of the burning logs!

Then there was that Corsican boy, one of a goodly brood, who weighed only fifty pounds when ten years old; who was thin and pale and perverse, and had tantrums, and had to be sent supperless to bed, or locked in a dark closet because he wouldn't "mind!" Who would have thought that he would have mastered every phase of warfare at twenty-six; and when told that the exchequer of France was in dire confusion would say, "The finances? I will arrange them!"

Very distinctly and vividly I remember a slim, freckled boy, who was born in the "Patch," and used to pick up coal along the railroad tracks in Buffalo. A few months ago I had a motion to make before the Supreme Court, and that boy from the "Patch" was the Judge who wrote the opinion granting my petition. Yesterday I rode horseback past a field where a boy was plowing. The lad's hair stuck out through the top of his hat; his form was bony and awkward; one suspender held his trousers in place; his bare legs and arms were brown and sunburned and briar-scarred. He swung his horses around just as I passed by, and from under the flapping brim of his hat he cast a quick glance out of dark, half-bashful eyes and modestly returned my salute.

His back turned, I took off my hat and sent a God-bless-you down the furrow after him.

Who knows?--I may go to that boy to borrow money yet, or to hear him preach, or to beg him to defend me in a lawsuit; bare of arm, in white apron, ready to do his duty, while the cone is placed over my face, and Night and Death come creeping into my veins. Be patient with the boys--you are dealing with soul-stuff. Destiny awaits just around the corner. Be patient with the boys! (78)

I knew one commuter, ten years ago, who refused to read the daily papers, but instead carried with him in his side pocket a volume of Emerson. That man is now a marked personality, wielding a large and healthful influence in a rational way. Every city in the land has periodic perturbations about "Jack the Stabber," "Jack the Snipper" and "Jack the Peeper" fanned into flame by the molders of public opinion, these beneficent educators of the people. Even staid old Boston had a week of fits a short time ago, when every paper in the city combined to terrorize women and children by conjuring forth an awful "Jack," who finally was run to cover and found to be a mischievous cigarettist boy who should have been left, from the beginning, to the police and alienists. But not so! The newspapers saw their chance and they grabbed it in gladsome glee. The pernicious effects of such an epidemic of fear, to say nothing about a million people devoting an hour a day to reading and talking about it, can not be computed.

If the men who prepare the copy for the daily papers were allowed to write out of their hearts and state their beliefs, what they would say might be worth reading; although the printed words of a commonplace person exert an influence far beyond the speech of the same person, for we still worship the fetish and miracle of a printed book. But what shall we say of the writing of mediocre men who write on order! What the world needs is a great temperance revival where men will swear off and quit reading the newspapers. Quit and you'll be the gainer. (81)

"What's the matter with the dog?" I said. "He looks like a good one."

"Why!" said Ali, "He is what you call a gravedigger dog."

"Go on," I said; "I don't exactly understand."

"Well, it is this way," he says; "that dog is like some folks: he is always digging up things that have been buried; and I believe that when things have been buried properly they ought to be left buried. Let 'em rest in their graves. Don't you think so?" And I thought so. (82)

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