When a Man Comes to Himself - Woodrow Wilson (spanish books to read txt) 📗
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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
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