American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and WomenStephens, Kate
History
American Thumb-prints: Mettle of Our Men and Women
Stephens, Kate
National characteristics, American; University of Kansas; Women -- Social conditions
She is born of fine material. When her nature is awry it is because of
lack of right incentive. Old measures and life estimates are absurd
to her quick senses, and none of the best of our modern values are
put in their place. Her creed is wholly at variance with the facts
of life to-day. If substantial instruction had entered the formative
period of her life, there would have been no substance to project the
darker parts of her shadow. Her nature is now ill-formed because of
the misdirection of its elemental forces. She knows the tenor of her
empire, and in truth and secretly she wonders how long her reign will
endure.
“And therefore,” says Aristotle, in his Politics, “women and children
must be trained by education with an eye to the state, if the virtues
of either of them are supposed to make any difference in the virtue of
the state. And they must make a difference, for children grow up to be
citizens, and half the persons in a state are women.”
* * * * *
Abiding beside this overdressed woman is an underdressed man. His first
striking quality is a certain sweet-natured patience--a result of his
optimistic dwelling in the future. Not content with the present, and
having forgotten the values of present-day simple life, he lives in a
future of fictitious money values. “All human power,” he thinks, with
Balzac, “is a compound of time and patience. Powerful beings will and
wait.” He knows his power and he waits.
“It’s going to be worth a good deal.”
“In a few years, that’ll be a good thing.”
“Fifteen years from now it’ll sell for ten times its present value.”
People have called him deficient in imagination. Not since the old
Greeks have there been such ideal seekers upon this golden nugget of
our solar system which we call the earth; nor since the old Hellenes
has there been such an idealistic people as that of which he is a
part. In Elizabeth’s time, indeed, there was imaginative vigor similar
to his. Then as now they were holding the earth in their hands and
standing on the stars to view it as it whirled.
Instead of turning his fertile thought toward art or literature, he
bends it first of all to material things. Schemes for developing
land, for dredging rivers, for turning forests into lumber or railway
ties, for putting up sky-scrapers facing four avenues; schemes for
building and controlling transcontinental railways and interoceanic
fleets; schemes for raising wheat by the million bushels and fattening
cattle by hundreds of thousands; schemes for compressing air, gas,
cotton, beef; for domestic and foreign mining; for irrigation; for
oil borings--he brings his dynamic energy and resourcefulness to the
evolution of all things but the human who is to be yoked to work out
his plan.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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