When a Man Comes to Himself, Woodrow Wilson [read aloud txt] 📗

for oneself is like exercise in a

gymnasium. No healthy man can remain satisfied with it, or regard

it as anything but a preparation for tasks in the open, amid the

affairs of the world—not sport, but business—where there is no

orderly apparatus, and every man must devise the means by which he

is to make the most of himself. To make the most of himself means

the multiplication of his activities, and he must turn away from

himself for that. He looks about him, studies the fact of business

or of affairs, catches some intimation of their larger objects, is

guided by the intimation, and presently finds himself part of the

motive force of communities or of nations. It makes no difference

how small part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his powers

begin to play outward, and he loves the task at hand, not because it

gains him a livelihood, but because it makes him a life, he has come

to himself.

 

Necessity is no mother to enthusiasm. Necessity carries a whip.

Its method is compulsion, not love. It has no thought to make

itself attractive; it is content to drive. Enthusiasm comes

with the revelation of true and satisfying objects of devotion;

and it is enthusiasm that sets the powers free. It is a sort

of enlightenment. It shines straight upon ideals, and for those

who see it the race and struggle are henceforth toward these.

An instance will point the meaning. One of the most distinguished

and most justly honored of our great philanthropists spent the

major part of his life absolutely absorbed in the making of

money—so it seemed to those who did not know him. In fact, he had

very early passed the stage at which he looked upon his business as

a means of support or of material comfort. Business had become

for him an intellectual pursuit, a study in enterprise and

increment. The field of commerce lay before him like a chess-board;

the moves interested him like the manoeuvers of a game. More money

was more power, a great advantage in the game, the means of shaping

men and events and markets to his own ends and uses. It was his

will that set fleets afloat and determined the havens they were

bound for; it was his foresight that brought goods to market at the

right time; it was his suggestion that made the industry of

unthinking men efficacious; his sagacity saw itself justified at

home not only, but at the ends of the earth. And as the money

poured in, his government and mastery increased, and his mind was

the more satisfied. It is so that men make little kingdoms for

themselves, and an international power undarkened by diplomacy,

undirected by parliaments.

 

IV

 

It is a mistake to suppose that the great captains of industry, the

great organizers and directors of manufacture and commerce and

monetary exchange, are engrossed in a vulgar pursuit of wealth. Too

often they suffer the vulgarity of wealth to display itself in the

idleness and ostentation of their wives and children, who “devote

themselves,” it may be, “to expense regardless of pleasure”; but we

ought not to misunderstand even that, or condemn it unjustly. The

masters of industry are often too busy with their own sober and

momentous calling to have time or spare thought enough to govern

their own households. A king may be too faithful a statesman to be

a watchful father. These men are not fascinated by the glitter of

gold: the appetite for power has got hold upon them. They are in

love with the exercise of their faculties upon a great scale; they

are organizing and overseeing a great part of the life of the world.

No wonder they are captivated. Business is more interesting that

pleasure, as Mr. Bagehot said, and when once the mind has caught

its zest, there’s no disengaging it. The world has reason to be

grateful for the fact.

 

It was this fascination that had got hold upon the faculties of the

man whom the world was afterward to know, not as a prince among

merchants—for the world forgets merchant princes—but as a prince

among benefactors; for beneficence breeds gratitude, gratitude

admiration, admiration fame, and the world remembers its

benefactors. Business, and business alone, interested him, or

seemed to him worth while. The first time he was asked to subscribe

money for a benevolent object he declined. Why should he subscribe?

What affair would be set forward, what increase of efficiency would

the money buy, what return would it bring in? Was good money to be

simply given away, like water poured on a barren soil, to be sucked

up and yield nothing? It was not until men who understood

benevolence on its sensible, systematic, practical, and really

helpful side explained it to him as an investment that his mind took

hold of it and turned to it for satisfaction. He began to see that

education was a thing of infinite usury; that money devoted to it

would yield a singular increase to which there was no calculable

end, an increase in perpetuity—increase of knowledge, and therefore

of intelligence and efficiency, touching generation after generation

with new impulses, adding to the sum total of the world’s fitness

for affairs—an invisible but intensely real spiritual usury beyond

reckoning, because compounded in an unknown ratio from age to age.

Henceforward beneficence was as interesting to him as business—was,

indeed, a sort of sublimated business in which money moved new

forces in a commerce which no man could bind or limit.

 

He had come to himself—to the full realization of his powers, the

true and clear perception of what it was his mind demanded for its

satisfaction. His faculties were consciously stretched to their

right measure, were at last exercised at their best. He felt the

keen zest, not of success merely, but also of honor, and was raised

to a sort of majesty among his fellow-men, who attended him in death

like a dead sovereign. He had died dwarfed had he not broken the

bonds of mere money-getting; would never have known himself had he

not learned how to spend it; and ambition itself could not have

shown him a straighter road to fame.

 

This is the positive side of a man’s discovery of the way in which

his faculties are to be made to fit into the world’s affairs, and

released for effort in a way that will bring real satisfaction.

There is a negative side also. Men come to themselves by

discovering their limitations no less than by discovering their

deeper endowments and the mastery that will make them happy. It is

the discovery of what they can not do, and ought not to attempt,

that transforms reformers into statesmen; and great should be the

joy of the world over every reformer who comes to himself. The

spectacle is not rare; the method is not hidden. The practicability

of every reform is determined absolutely and always by “the

circumstances of the case,” and only those who put themselves into

the midst of affairs, either by action or by observation, can known

what those circumstances are or perceive what they signify. No

statesman dreams of doing whatever he pleases; he knows that it does

not follow that because a point of morals or of policy is obvious to

him it will be obvious to the nation, or even to his own friends;

and it is the strength of a democratic polity that there are so many

minds to be consulted and brought to agreement, and that nothing can

be wisely done for which the thought, and a good deal more than the

thought, of the country, its sentiment and its purpose, have not

been prepared. Social reform is a matter of cooperation, and if it

be of a novel kind, requires an infinite deal of converting to bring

the efficient majority to believe in it and support it. Without

their agreement and support it is impossible.

 

V

 

It is this that the more imaginative and impatient reformers find out

when they come to themselves, if that calming change ever comes to them.

Oftentimes the most immediate and drastic means of bringing them to

themselves is to elect them to legislative or executive office. That

will reduce over-sanguine persons to their simplest terms. Not because

they find their fellow-legislators or officials incapable of high

purpose or indifferent to the betterment of the communities which they

represent. Only cynics hold that to be the chief reason why we approach

the millennium so slowly, and cynics are usually very ill-informed

persons. Nor is it because under our modern democratic arrangements we

so subdivide power and balance parts in government that no one man can

tell for much or turn affairs to his will. One of the most instructive

studies a politician could undertake would be a study of the infinite

limitations laid upon the power of the Russian Czar, notwithstanding the

despotic theory of the Russian constitution—limitations of social

habit, of official prejudice, of race jealousies, of religious

predilections, of administrative machinery even, and the inconvenience

of being himself only one man, caught amidst a rush of duties and

responsibilities which never halt or pause. He can do only what can be

done with the Russian people. He cannot change them at will. He is

himself of their own stuff, and immersed in the life which forms them,

as it forms him. He is simply the leader of the Russians.

 

An English or American statesman is better off. He leads a thinking

nation, not a race of peasants topped by a class of revolutionists

and a caste of nobles and officials. He can explain new things to

men able to understand, persuade men willing and accustomed to make

independent and intelligent choices of their own. An English

statesman has an even better opportunity to lead than an American

statesman, because in England executive power and legislative

initiative are both intrusted to the same grand committee, the

ministry of the day. The ministers both propose what shall be law

and determine how it shall be enforced when enacted. And yet

English reformers, like American, have found office a veritable

cold-water bath for their ardor for change. Many a man who has made

his place in affairs as the spokesman of those who see abuses and

demand their reformation has passed from denunciation to calm and

moderate advice when he got into Parliament, and has turned

veritable conservative when made a minister of the crown. Mr.

Bright was a notable example. Slow and careful men had looked upon

him as little better than a revolutionist so long as his voice rang

free and imperious from the platforms of public meetings. They

greatly feared the influence he should exercise in Parliament, and

would have deemed the constitution itself unsafe could they have

seen foreseen that he would some day be invited to take office and a

hand of direction in affairs. But it turned out that there was

nothing to fear. Mr. Bright lived to see almost every reform he had

urged accepted and embodied in legislation; but he assisted at the

process of their realization with greater and greater temperateness

and wise deliberation as his part in affairs became more and more

prominent and responsible, and was at the last as little like an

agitator as any man that served the queen.

 

It is not that such men lose courage when they find themselves

charged with the actual direction of the affairs concerning which

they have held and uttered such strong, unhesitating, drastic

opinions. They have only learned discretion. For the first time

they see in its entirety what it was that they were attempting.

They are at last at close quarters with the world. Men of every

interest and variety crowd about them; new impressions throng them;

in the midst