A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character — John Shaqi
A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and CharacterHillis, Newell Dwight
Philosophy
A Man's Value to Society: Studies in Self Culture and Character
Hillis, Newell Dwight
Character; Self-culture
him who would be great select the right parents," was the keen dictum
of President Dwight.
By the influence of the racial element, the laborer in northern
Europe, viewed as a producing machine, doubles the industrial output
of his southern brother. The child of the tropics is out of the race.
For centuries he has dozed under the banana tree, awakening only to
shake the tree and bring down ripe fruit for his hunger, eating to
sleep again. His muscles are flabby, his blood is thin, his brain
unequal to the strain of two ideas in one day. When Sir John Lubbock
had fed the chief in the South Sea Islands he began to ask him
questions, but within ten minutes the savage was sound asleep. When
awakened the old chief said: "Ideas make me so sleepy." Similarly, the
warm Venetian blood has given few great men to civilization; but the
hills of Scotland and New England produce scholars, statesmen, poets,
financiers, with the alacrity with which Texas produces cotton or
Missouri corn. History traces certain influential nations back to a
single progenitor of unique strength of body and character. Thus
Abraham, Theseus, and Cadmus seem like springs feeding great and
increasing rivers. One wise and original thinker founds a tribe,
shapes the destiny of a nation, and multiplies himself in the lives of
future millions. In accordance with this law, tenacity reappears in
every Scotchman; wit sparkles in every Irishman; vivacity is in every
Frenchman's blood; the Saxon is a colonizer and originates
institutions. During the construction of the Suez Canal it was
discovered that workmen with veins filled with Teutonic blood had a
commercial value two and a half times greater than the Egyptians.
Similarly, during the Indian war, the Highland troops endured double
the strain of the native forces. Napoleon shortened the stature of
the French people two inches by choosing all the taller of his
30,000,000 subjects and killing them in war. Waxing indignant, Horace
Mann thinks "the forehead of the Irish peasantry was lowered an inch
when the government made it an offense punishable with fine,
imprisonment, and a traitor's death to be the teacher of children." A
wicked government can make agony, epidemic, brutalize a race, and
reaching forward, fetter generations yet unborn. "Blood tells," says
science. But blood is the radical element put out at compound interest
and handed forward to generations yet unborn.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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