To the young the future has a more roseate hue. The roseate hue comes
high, but we have to use it in this place. To the young there spreads
out across the horizon a glorious range of possibilities. After the
youth has endorsed for an intimate friend a few times and purchased the
paper at the bank himself later on, the horizon won't seem to horizon so
tumultuously as it did aforetime. I remember at one time of purchasing
such a piece of accommodation paper at a bank, and I still have it. I
didn't need it any more than a cat needs eleven tails at one and the
same time. Still the bank made it an object for me, and I secured it.
Such things as these harshly knock the flush and bloom off the cheek of
youth, and prompt us to turn the strawberry-box bottom side up before we
purchase it.
Youth is gay and hopeful, age is covered with experience and scars where
the skin has been knocked off and had to grow on again. To the young a
dollar looks large and strong, but to the middle-aged and the old it is
weak and inefficient.
When we are in the heyday and fizz of existence, we believe everything;
but after awhile we murmur: "What's that you are givin' us," or words
of like character. Age brings caution and a lot of shop-worn experience,
purchased at the highest market price. Time brings vain regrets and
wisdom teeth that can be left in a glass of water over night.
Still we should not repine. If people would repine less and try harder
to get up an appetite by persweating in some one's vineyard at so much
per diem, it would be better. The American people of late years seem to
have a deeper and deadlier repugnance for mannish industry, and there
seems to be a growing opinion that our crops are more abundant when
saturated with foreign perspiration. European sweat, if I may be allowed
to use such a low term, is very good in its place, but the native-born'
Duke of Dakota, or the Earl of York State should remember that the
matter of perspiration and posterity should not be left solely to the
foreigner.
There are too many Americans who toil not, neither do they spin. They
would be willing to have an office foisted upon them, but they would
rather blow their so-called brains out than to steer a pair of large
steel-gray mules from day to day. They are too proud to hoe corn, for
fear some great man will ride by and see the termination of their shirts
extending out through the seats of their pantaloons, but they are not
too proud to assign their shattered finances to a friend and their
shattered remains to the morgue.
Pride is all right if it is the right kind, but the pride that prompts
a man to kill his mother, because she at last refuses to black his boots
any more, is an erroneous pride. The pride that induces a man to muss up
the carpet with his brains because there is nothing left for him to do
but labor, is the kind that Lucifer had when he bolted the action of the
convention and went over to the red-hot minority.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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