Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
Philosophy
Some War-time Lessons: The Soldier's Standards of Conduct; The War As a Practical Test of American Scholarship; What Have We Learned?
Keppel, Frederick P. (Frederick Paul)
World War, 1914-1918
Be honest with yourself. Do your own thinking and do it straight. This,
strangely enough, is perhaps the thing which you will find hardest to do
after the undergraduate atmosphere. A student body is, or at any rate
was before the war, the most convention ridden group of which I have any
knowledge. I am all for conventions, because they save a great deal of
time and worry, but only so far as we recognize them as conventions and
do not exalt them into principles or philosophical truths. Remember that
the public opinion of America is an infinitely more important thing to
the world than ever before, and that you are each to be a part of it.
Keep your intellectual interests and your interest in your _alma mater_,
not in her athletics and her fraternities alone. Remember that as alumni
of this University you are citizens of no mean city. Recruit men and
women whom she ought to have and who ought to have her, remembering that
the danger to this country from the inside, and it is no inconsiderable
danger, is mainly due to the misdirected zeal of sincere people who lack
knowledge and background. Take for example the employer who can't see
beyond the point of telling his men to "take it or leave it," and the
workman whose sense of real or fancied injustice has brought him to what
with our children we know as the kicking and biting stage. It is too
late to do much with the present adult generation except by main
strength and awkwardness, but a recruit for higher education from either
of these groups is a good national investment.
Keep your human contacts. Don't be a "glad-hander" but do at least your
share. It takes two to make and keep alive a friendship, just as it does
a quarrel. There is something worth while in everyone. Give yourself a
chance to find what it is. Practice following and, as the chance comes
to you, practice leading, but above all, practice team play. Keep
yourself ready to take the next step, whatever it may be. There is a
story of Marshal Joffre, of which I can at least say that it is good
enough to be true. After the first battle of the Marne some enthusiast
was proclaiming him as a second Napoleon and laying it on pretty thick.
The old gentleman stood it as long as he could and then said: "No,
Napoleon would have known what to do next, and I don't."
Keep your enthusiasms and your ideals. In other words, keep your youth.
In choosing your life work, get into something in which the policy and
practice are such that you can throw your whole soul into the job. Don't
take yourself seriously, but take your opportunities for usefulness
seriously. Find out the callings in which America is short. There are
plenty of them, as the war has shown. Think over whether it isn't
possible for you to be one of the men or one of the women who, from your
training and momentum and vision, will be selected ten or fifteen or
twenty years hence, to take on some important job, with the nation as
your client, as the one person best qualified to fill it.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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