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"We All Knolv Setter Than We Tfo”
OME great man made the above state
ment, and if there is any doubt as to
its truthfulness in the minds of those
who may read these lines, we ask the
reader to review for a few days the
work that he has accomplished each day
and then pass judgment upon the above
quotation. If the average man who has
a desire to save in a financial way would
f !
keep an account of what he spends daily, he would
soon find how his expense account could be reduced.
If the young man who has ambition to accomplish
something in life would keep for a few days an ac
curate account of the way in which he spent the
time each day, he would readily see that his at
tainments were not in keeping with his possibili
ties.
Since that good day on which Eve disobeyed the
God that had given her an abundance of all that
she should have desired, there has been evil as
well as good in the w T orld, and the very fact that a
continued combat has been fought so long and so
stubbornly by these opposing forces without a vic
tory for either, "would tend to convince us that
neither the power for good nor for evil is weak or
ineffective.
That “one increasing purpose runs” “through
the ages,” we believe because we believe that God
lives and rules, but so far as the observation of
man goes, or so far as he is able to determine with
the history of generations at his command, it seems
no more difficult to point out a greater evil in the
present age than to point out a greater good than
was manifest in former periods of history. Far
back in the palmy days of ancient Greece, or even
at the time when Rome was the proud mistress of
land and sea, we find an intellectual achievement
that is not equalled today by any nation of the
globe. Since these nations, together with others
remarkable for their intellectual activities, grew to
greatness, crumbled and decayed, we are led to be
lieve that the nations of the world are not suffer
ing primarily from an epidemic of ignorance. It
seems that those peoples who have not reached the
greatest heights in mental achievement have had a
broad conception of right and wrong, and have put
into action their ideas of right about as effectually
as have men of greater educational resources. In
ternal strife has done more to weaken and destroy
great civilizations than have forces from without.
The average Negro that has passed middle life,
with no knowledge of books, having had no training
in the class room, is just as good a citizen as the
Negro of a later generation, with his ability to
read and write. And yet we do not use this as
argument against the education of the Negro or
of any other race of people.
The mummied civilization of the Ptolomies is
voiceless not as a- result of intellectual greatness.
Athens no longer rejoices in the age of Pericles,
but it is not because the Periclean age surpassed
all others in art and in science. Rome’s greatness
was buried "with her Cipios and her Caesars, but
not because the minds of her men were too greatly
cultured.
Since civilization after civilization has reached a
certain position and has fallen, it would be a re
markable discovery to determine the causes of
growth and decay in order that the good of past
ages might be applied today and the evil shunned
to as great extent as possible.
We may not be able to learn a great amount of
truth, but one thing can be said with safety: the
moral development of these civilizations did not
keep pace with the intellectual.
In this age of educational awakening in our own
country, when every state, every county, and every
town is insisting upon better schools, and is almost
compelling the children to be educated, the ques
tion comes to us with tremendous force, Why these
schools and this training, if they must finally lead
to decay?
These schools and this training must be, but along
with the development of mind, boys and girls must
By IV. “Rufus Lanier.
be taught to do as well as they know. In the class
room, through the press, from the pulpit, and
through many other sources the country should be
properly educated.
These are the forces that should have for their
aim the building of a permanent, constantly devel
oping civilization, and that should remove the causes
wherever discovered that tend to destroy our insti
tutions instead of throwing about them influences
that preserve and strengthen.
To bring about some changes that will probably
result in good, we believe that the daily and more
especially the weekly press will be compelled to
mold more largely public sentiment, instead of al
lowing public sentiment to mold the sentiment or
opinion of the press.
To illustrate. A few years ago the weekly papers
especially, though not alone, limited their criti
cism of Tom Watson only as the English language
limited their po"wer of expression. Today a major
ity of the same editors would lie awake at night,
afraid to doze, should a criticism of this man hap
pen to slip into an editorial column.
Watson’s ideas, whether right or wrong, have
undergone very little change. His former politi
cal line-up was simply not as strong or influential
as it is now. Thus we see public opinion directing
the editorial column, and those who would gladly
be directed aright are compelled to exclaim “in
consistency, ” “ inconsistency. ’ ’
It is sometimes more convenient to follow the
majority regardless c'f convictions than to join the
minority for reasons of convictions that dare not be
violated.
It seems also true that the tendency of the age
is directed too much toward the so-called popular
sports, beginning too frequently in the preparatory
school, and going through the college, the univer
sity, and on into professional life.
Proper physical development is desirable and the
right kind of physical exercise necessary, but the
popular sports that tear the bodily tissues, strain
the muscles, break the bones and thus impair the
body, cannot be encouraged as a necessity for prop
er bodily growth.
But this is not the worst objection. The worst
objection lies in the fact that these sports, empha
sized as they are, become a hindrance in the devel
opment of mind and morals.
The strong young man of intelligence, who is
willing to become a professional sport, and thus
play his life away without even teaching a moral,
may gratify the desire of idle men and women
for six or seven days in the week, but he does noth
ing toward making a nation of people stronger char
acters.
The thousands who can look from day to day upon
this ill-spent life, will be willing to look later upon
a more brutal form of contest. Rome did not al
ways require the shedding of blood in the arena
to gratify her appetite, that desire was of gradual
growth, but it developed.
When any form of gratification gains such a hold
upon an individual or upon a number of individuals
as to cause them to neglect the higher duties of
life for which man was intended, then the tendency
of this form of gratification is in the wrong direc
tion. When the college begins to emphasize above
other things the common games of sport, and pro
fessionals are invited to become members of our
institutions for the purpose of leading them to vic
tory on the fields of athletics, then the tendency has
gained good headway in the wrong direction.
When the men who hold the higher professional
chairs in these institutions., men whose influence
for good or evil will always be felt by students un
der their charge, see these students violate regula
tions that they are under moral obligation to keep
inviolate, wink at the violation, and pat the violator,
then the tendency is moving at a tremendous speed
in the wrong direction, and some effort should be
made to check its mad haste. The work of an in
dividual or of all individuals in this our native
country may not, for the length of a life or of
The Golden Age for February 27, 1908.
a generation, influence very largely the tendency of
the civilization that is to reach, gradually, to a high
er plane, or sink to a lower level, but whether our
names live for a short while in the memory of men,
or for a longer while on the pages of history, or
are buried with our frail bodies that must so soon
decay, our love for the living and for generations
unborn should make us determine to do, so nearly
as possible, as well as we know, and if there is
to be in the centuries to come a summing up of
good and evil, there can be no greater aim or desire
than that the result should be found upon the side
of good though it represent only an infinitesimal of
the whole.
Christ did not pray, Thy will be known, but
“Thy will be done.” Broader conceptions of good
come to us after we have used properly the concep
tions that we already have. “We all know better
than we do.”
n *
The Prohibition Tight.
The other day it was reported that Macon had
received six hundred packages of liquor in one
day. Those packages contained, say, an average
of one gallon each, which is six hundred gallons in
one day. Six hundred divided by forty makes fif
teen, that is, there "were fifteen barrels of liquor
received in Macon that day. I wonder what the
average daily receipts in Macon were last year. I
have no doubt Macon has received many a shipment
of a hundred barrels at a time.
The same sort of thing is going on in Atlanta.
The Atlanta saloons had to sell more than one
barrel a day each to pay expenses. They probably
sold from four to five hundred barrels every day,
and yet two or three hundred packages coming
in in a day now looks like a big business.
In the recent primary for governor in Louisiana,
the prohibition question was involved, but it was
not settled. The Baptist Chronicle in an editorial
review of the situation states that the leader of
the Anti-Saloon League attacked Mr. Sanders, who
was the winning candidate for governor, on grounds
other than prohibition. The Chronicle thinks that
that course was a mistake, but it comforts the peo
ple by reminding them that the prohibition voters
did not follow the lead of the Anti-Saloon man
ager, and gives some most excellent reasons for be
lieving that Governor Sanders will not be unfriendly
to the prohibition movement.
< 1
While the liquor men are pretending to give
gloomy facts about prohibition in Maine, the other
side has something to say. Look at these para
graphs, which we clip from The Baptist Advance:
“The total number of commitments to the state
prison for Maine last year was fifty-four; Monroe
county alone sent thirty-eight men last year to Au
burn (state prison), thirty-one sentenced by the
county court for crimes committed to the peniten
tiary, and twenty-six to the Elmira Reformatory. A
larger record for crime than the entire state of
Maine! Pauperism has constantly decreased there
under prohibition, while it has been growing out of
all proportion in the license states. —Exchange.
“One of two things must be true, either prohibi
tion to a very considerable extent prohibits, and in
the absence of the saloon the people of Maine are
more sober and more prosperous tnan their neigh
bors, or prohibition results in increasing the con
sumption of drink, and because Maine drinks more
whiskey and is more drunken, she has more homes,
more schools, more money in the bank, and fewer
men in the poorhouse and jail. So that in either
case prohibition is a blessing to the people—drunk
or sober.
11 In the number of homes owned by the people who
live in them, prohibition Maine leads the world.
Seventeen out of every one hundred families are
home-owners in New York, with her 27,000 saloons,
eighteen in Massachusetts, nineteen in Connecticut,
and forty-nine clear home-owners out of every one
hundred families in Maine. You cannot match it
anywhere on earth where they have the licensed
saloon.”