He cannot see the hopeless construction of their foreheads, nor can he read in their eyes the sad absence of "speculation."
Let us be thankful for that. The future depends on the good care awarded to almost worthless specimens now. ----
FOR THE UNIVERSAL INSTINCT OF THANKFULNESS, LET BE DEEPLY THANKFUL.
The thick-lipped negro on the Congo finds a dead hippopotamus, half eaten by wild beasts, and in his woolly brain a dim, misty feeling of THANKFULNESS is born.
The Tartar bandit surprises mild Chinese conducting a tea caravan across the stony desert. He murders the mild Celestials and feels THANKFUL as he contemplates the booty.
A great Trust manager finds ways to add some millions to those which he already has and does not need. In THANKFUL mood he gives two millions or three to education.
As inborn, as instinctive as the beating of the heart in the human being is THANKFULNESS.
Thankfulness is the unconscious acknowledgment of a Higher Power.
It is the indestructible evidence of man"s permanent belief in just government of the universe.
It is the most hopeful, the most promising feature of man"s character.
For THANKFULNESS itself we should be thankful. ----
If you want to succeed, cultivate a feeling of hopeful thankfulness.
Hopefulness, thankfulness and success are as near akin as light, heat and motion--the same force underlies, makes up the first trio, as it does the second.
If you find it hard to be thankful, read a little of history, and thankfulness will come. Thousands of millions of men have lived and suffered to make your existence here at least bearable. You may not be satisfied, but you have comforts that were not dreamed of by the luckiest a few centuries back. You think the prosperous have too many privileges.
Perhaps they have. But when your great-grandfather was a young man a n.o.bleman could order his lackeys to seize Voltaire the greatest mind in Europe--and beat him almost to death. Voltaire was locked up in the Bastile for complaining.
Thanks to the eternal row that Voltaire kicked up, you can never be treated as he was. So be thankful to Voltaire.
Be thankful to the long line of plucky men and fighters--not forgetting Christopher Columbus--who have gone before you.
Be thankful that you are alive in an interesting age with interesting events happening.
Be thankful also that with thankfulness you combine the feeling of dissatisfaction, of unrest that will push you ahead and give you cause for fresh thankfulness next year. ----
We are thankful to have you for a reader.
We are thankful for the criticisms and friendly comments that you occasionally send.
We hope that you will enjoy your dinner to-day and not regret it to-morrow.
WHAT WILL 999 YEARS MEAN TO THE HUMAN RACE
The street railroad company in the Borough of Brooklyn has just executed some leases to endure 999 years. Leases of property have also been made for the same period, though, of course, a lease of 999 years will be about as binding 999 years from now as would a lease of the great pyramid executed the day after it was finished, if such a lease should be presented at present to the Egyptian Government.
These preposterous leases are interesting because they bring vividly before the human mind the certainty of wonderful and splendid changes in human affairs.
The street railroad leases are especially fascinating to the imaginative mind.
They deal with present conditions and will seem inconceivably primitive hundreds of years before the leases will have ended.
These leases deal with miserable little electric cars crawling slowly over the face of the earth, at either end an underpaid, overworked man, and in the middle a crowd of poor, dissatisfied, ill-housed human beings.
Nine hundred and ninety-nine years from now the human race will not by any means have accomplished its destiny. It will still be struggling on toward the goal of real civilization.
But it will have grown far beyond the savage condition of life that marks the execution of these long leases.
Before these street railroad leases expire Brooklyn and all other cities as they now exist will have disappeared from the earth.
Perfect transportation, underground, overground and through the air, will enable human beings, if they choose, to live as far from their work as does the seagull or the eagle.
It will no longer be necessary to crowd together in miserable tenements, and homes will be scattered. Human beings undoubtedly will dwell in huge, splendidly managed structures, each in the centre of its own park, far from the noise and the brutality of modern city life.
Before the leases expire the combined cities of New York and Brooklyn and Yonkers and Coney Island and Montauk Point will have grown into an enormous, hideous human aggregation of fifty million or more human beings.
Even the city of a hundred millions may be seen.
But as that huge, monstrous city will have grown, so it will have died, as the monsters of former geological epochs grew and died in their turn.
The site of the vanished great city will be covered with gardens, and children in schools will be taught that human beings who once lived in the cliffs in the Far West afterward gathered together in horrible munic.i.p.al ant-hills in the East, called cities, before they learned how to live comfortably. ----
Before those street railroad leases expire the present temporary mania for money will have run its course.
Once every important man felt that a certain number of slaves must be murdered at his funeral. Sometimes his favorite horse was shot. In scores of millions of cases his wife was burned alive with his corpse. We have outgrown that. Nowadays the great man who dies must leave behind him an acc.u.mulation of millions, which means that thousands of men have worked to give him what he did not need. Before these leases shall have expired that form of financial barbarism will have ceased to exist.
It is reasonable to hope that the coming thousand years will have seen the end of industrial feudalism, which has had its birth in our day, and which will run its course as did the military feudalism of the Middle Ages.
What a marvellous picture the world will present one thousand years from now!
The earth will be adequately populated.
Science will have conquered disease almost entirely. Each woman will be the mother of two children. She will not bring five or six into the world in order that two or three may live.
Compet.i.tion will be replaced by emulation. The intelligent servant of government will work as loyally and enthusiastically for his government and for the people as the boy at college now works for his college football team.
The human mind will have wandered on many leagues in its search for a satisfying religion, getting always nearer to a clear conception of the grandeur of the universe, and further away from the superst.i.tion necessary to the moral control of a brutal semi-civilization.
Human beings will have learned that the n.o.blest thing one man can do is to work for others.
Each will gladly contribute all his talent and strength to the welfare of all.
All will gladly recognize, applaud and richly reward the special ability of the individual.
There will be no poverty. Willingness to work will insure a comfortable livelihood. Education will have developed the average human intellect far beyond our conception. Nine-tenths of the human race have been able to read only within the past few years. What will a thousand years of universal education do?