CHAPTER VI-SERVICE AND CHARACTER

I. (a) The child no more selects his early home than he does his parents. Consider what is the manner of life and still more what is likely to be the kind of person, resulting from (1) birth in the slums of a great city, (2) in the family of a millionaire in the same city, (3) on a typical farm, (4) in the mountains of Kentucky, (5) in a well-to-do family in a city of from ten thousand to fifty thousand inhabitants.

(b) We may pass to the education of the child and youth in school and college. Obviously no child creates these institutions for himself. The public school system of the United States is the product of the work of a large number of devoted men and women, chief among whom we must count Horace Mann. The difference that exists between the educated and the uneducated is, for the great majority of those who could not or would not have attended an expensive private school, due to an institution created and supported for them by others.

(c) Another institution (of which the preceding is a part) into which we grow and which we did not create and which each one of us can do little to modify, is the state. That we live in a democracy, rather than an autocracy, like Russia, is, in the first place, due to the patriotism and courage of many generations of Englishmen who created in their own land a constitutional monarchy and parliamentary institutions; then to the courage, patriotism, and incorruptibility of the leaders of the American Revolution. As to this last statement, the British government made repeated attempts, lasting through several years, to bribe the leaders of the movement, in the early part of the Revolution. Had they consented to sell themselves the present condition of this country and of every one now living here would have been a very different one. The fact that we have one united country from the Canadian boundary line to the Gulf of Mexico, and that this country is a democratic one instead of a half-feudal aristocracy based upon negro slavery, these tremendous facts are again due to the ability, strength, and patriotism of many famous and many more unknown men, who not merely from 1861 to 1865, but for two generations before, fought disunion, or slavery, or both. The slave system made almost all forms of work dishonorable except that involved in managing the work of negroes. For the difference between the position of the ambitious young man born without wealth under such a system as that and his position in our own system one must consult the special works on the subject, as Frederick Law Olmsted's The Cotton Kingdom (N. Y. 1861), or Lincoln's speeches on slav

ery.

(d) The financial success of the individual, even of the individual with exceptional force and ability, is determined far more by others than himself. In the United States the fundamental fact is that we are an independent nation. Had we lost in the Revolutionary war, the industrial conditions from which the prosperous man draws his prosperity would have been very different from what they are now. The second fact as stated immediately aboveis that slavery has been destroyed. In the third place, we have a stable government, under which, within certain limits, the property of the business man is fairly well protected. In Mexico there is farm land situated within two or three miles of a railroad, within thirty miles of a great seaport, which can be had for five dollars an acre. Land of the same quality near San Diego, California, is worth one thousand dollars an acre. The principal cause of this difference in value is that one is under the Mexican government, and the other, under that of the United States.

(e) Wrong-doing in the community is a terrible financial tax upon each one of us. Take, for example, a single item. Collier's Weekly for February and March, 1913, contains a series of articles showing that in the United States and Canada in 1911 fire losses to the extent of $250,000,000 were caused by arson. Some of this was due to malice, most of it to dishonesty. This enormous tax is paid, not, of course, by the fire insurance companies, but by every one who lives and who does business in a building upon which fire insurance is paid.

(f) All contagious and infectious diseases are eloquent witnesses of the dependence of the individual upon his fellows. Perhaps this is most noticable in typhoid fever and tuberculosis. The former is a scourge for community sins. In Germany where there is an intelligent public opinion in such matters, and a high grade of local government, it is said this disease is now practically nonexistent. As is well known, it was eliminated also in the Japanese army during the recent Russian-Japanese war.

(g) How great is the dependence of one community on another we do not, commonly, half realize. It is of far more importance to the inhabitants of Wisconsin what is the make-up of the New York delegation to the House of Representatives, in Washington, than what their own is. For the former possesses thirty-seven votes and the latter only eleven. But one would never suppose so from reading the columns of a Wisconsin newspaper. Graft, or a victory over graft, in Philadelphia, or Denver is not supposed to affect us in Wisconsin, yet graft is as contagious as tuberculosis.

Other conditions, besides the governmental, influencing for better or worse the financial status of the individual on a tremendous scale, are: Financial panics; the discovery of minerals and the discovery and use of other natural resources, as water power, -two years after the discovery of gold in California the salaries of clerks in New York City had begun to rise; the growth in population of the United States both in the prosperous farming portions of the country, and especially in the cities, a movement which exercises a profound financial influence upon thousands.

Another set of facts are important factors in determining individual success or failure, namely, the purchasing power of the community. Whether this is high or low will evidently make a great difference in the manner of conducting and in the returns obtained from one's business. Is the community lazy, or unintelligent, its purchasing power will, of course, be low. Again the conduct of business depends much upon the industry, native intelligence, education, and honesty of one's employees. In Spain there are few partnerships in business and almost no corporations, although the country imperatively needs the latter for the development of certain of its resources. It is said that the reason is that one business man will not trust another. It matters not for our purpose whether this distrust is justified by the actual dishonesty of its business men or not. The fact remains that the most effective methods of conducting business are made possible for any given person only by confidence in the honesty and reliability of others. With these facts in view it is clear that the term "self made man" is preposterous.

The facts thus far enumerated are simply a few of the more obvious, and in some cases, superficial aspects of a great subject. If the student wishes to penetrate to a deeper level, let him consult Cornish: Animals at Work and Play, p. 315 ff., for an account of a boy who, as осcasionally happens in countries with a warm climate, wandered off to the forest as a very young child, and remained there, a companion of wild beasts, till, as a young man, he was captured. The difference between this creature and you or me measures the extent to which the development of our potentialities requires the soil of human society.

2. The preceding survey shows us that man was created for society. It is not by accident but as a result of the fundamental structure of the human mind that each of us is to a large extent dependent upon his fellows, in respect to what he does and gets and is. Beyond all question the