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About The Sunday Oregonian. (Portland, Ore.) 1881-current | View Entire Issue (May 14, 1916)
TIIE SUNDAY OKEGOXIAX. rORTXAD, 3fAY 14, 10iC. : i . ..i h a There's always room for a skyscraping career. Most men are planning shanty lives. 7"afee tie Zif your imofination, take the hobbles off your pluck and fa fee a chance. Shakespeare LITTLE squirt courtiers dared to patronize his genius . Doubtless he often cringed and shame lessly fawned before potent nobles. City mer chants and goldsmiths vaguely held him in the con tempt men universally bestowed upon all player folk. The Law co-ordinated him with thieves, vagabonds and prostitutes. He muchly lived in the half-world mainly as it lived. Altogether, his estate was rather humble. England was uncouth. Elizabeth herself, vulgar and nasty. Assuredly he knew nothing of nice refine ments. Therefore it is exceedingly strange how sweet and clean he kept his quill. A tower, a bridge, and a crazy old ramshackle or two are all that remain to mark his London. The last Tudor is gone. Of Drake and Raleigh and the proud companies whose exploits made splendid the virgin's reign, perhaps a score of dilute-veined collaterals still endure. We do not even know the names of the great dandies and haughty chatelaines who condescended to approve his mummeries. Vanished dust, these. And all that was a mighty medieval city has long since been fed to wood-worms and broken into junk and carted away in rubbish. But his words are still golden on our lips. The mintage of his mind is universal coin his phrases spent from Cape to Cape. Yellow and white man daily mine the treasuries of his imagination. His sentences are glib on clucking, hissing, purring tongues are vernacular throughout the world. He put a girdle around the earth, and then around eternity. "Thrones totter and empires fall, the tidal wave sweeps from the sea and tears the fortress from the rocks, the rotting nations drop from off Time's bough and only things the dreamers make live on." Equalization WHEN the King's son was born, the fairy god mothers thereabouts dropped in and did the conventional thing. One left a little spell which made him suzerain of all the lands from the ice of the North to the- ice of the South. And one made him Lord of all the seas from the Islands of the Dawn to the Islands of the Dark. And one heaped his days with the glory of brave emprise. And one crowded his youth with the witchery of amazing women. And one brought him a feather from the wing of fame. Until with this and that his future was filled to overflowing and there was no place left for the wishing ring, which the oldest and wisest godmother brought. So she stopped at the cotter's hut and gave it to his baby. And yet, there were those who envied the prince and pitied the pauper. Muzzle the Pessimists NOTHING is hopeless before imagination no ob struction is invincible. We have the tools and we have the rules and the rest is a matter of trying. Knowledge is a relay race Today takes up Yester day's incomplete experiment and passes the record of its investigation to Tomorrow. Span by span the bridge is built link by link the chain lengthens step by step the search proceeds. Cures for cancer, consumption, Bright's disease are at hand; deferred, perhaps, by a year, maybe a de cade who can tell from what laboratory tube the fate ful answer is about to speak? Microscope and retort are fighting death for you. Hope. Keep up your courage while they, keep up the battle. Every disapointment eliminates one more ad verse chance and narrows down the field of potentiali ties. "Incurable" is a temporary word in every disease. Old impossibilities are new whetstones. If a wire, pole and a pot of acid can spit speech between islands if a woman born blind can be made to see after 25 years in the dark if astronomy can weigh worlds a million miles away if a lamp can learn to sing if an atom can be divided into demonstrable fractions if trains can be driven over the Rockies by the power of waterfalls along the way if the breath of a rose can be resurrected from the hunk of coal in which it was petrified an aeon ago if a 10-cent store can be managed well enough to pay for a 55-story building if life can be restored to a man dead from suffocation if a skull operation can reform a criminal if a sheep's shank can be mortised into a human shin bone if .a ship can be built to travel 4000 miles under water it s about time to muzzle pessimism. I I 111 ill II Jill i ii ill! iiiiiiin ! iiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiititiitiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiitilitiiiiillliiiiiiltiiiiliiiiiiliiltiliiIIIIIIIIIIMIi,llllllltlllllllilllllmlill !!!! Give Ambition a New Bone to Gnaw BY HERBERT KAUFMAN. Arkwright, an illiterate little Cockney barber, found time between shaves and haircuts to discover the needs of the weaving trade and produced the spinning jenny, which completely revolutionized the manufacture of fabrics. Morse was a portrait painter of sorts, but training for one vocation 'didn't absorb all his ideas, among which was the notion of communication by wire, otherwise we might have never had the tele graph. Berliner, a young German from Hanover, began life keeping books in a two-by-four Washington dry goods store and employed his evenings puzzling out the transmitter upon which the development of the telephone is largely based. Daniel Drew started out as a cattle-driver and wound up as a railroad kjug. Jay Gould was one of the most persuasive peddlers who ever sold clocks from door to door. John H. Patterson was a coal merchant until he began to think of cash registers. Henry Ford was still running an engine at day wages when middle age and the automobile occurred to him. What are you thinking about besides your regular line of work? The roomiest thing we know is a man's head. Columbus had space in his sufficient for a new world. Carnegie's skull was large enough to accommodate a square mile of steel mills. Other men have sailed ships and built transportation systems in their brain pans. George Pullman, after carpentering hours, grew a palacc'Car works under his hair roots. Who knows how many possi bilities are imprisoned in your brain cells let 'em out. Don't wonder how the other fellow managed to do it, but ponder instead what you may accomplish by tackling another subject. The outside view point is frequently an improving new point. Most men tumble haphazardly into the first job that presents itself, instead of sifting out the occu pations best adapted to their bents. If you haven't got anywhere you're on the wrong road. Try another train of thought and keep changing the route until you find yourself. Give ambition a shift of scene. Education helps, of course, but determination and constructive curiosity are first-rate substitutes for a college training. Half the stuff in text-books was thought out by men who tutored themselves to discovery. Study courses are mainly reviews of the work and works of plodders with gumption enough to look around without a guide. Illiteracy isn't necessarily ignorance. The graduates of the University of Action have endowed civilization with most of its essential re quirements. Foundries and shipping-rooms, freight caboosesnd car platforms, office desks and barn yards arc lecture halls in which progress is continually presenting objects for study. The men who produce the tools you use and the articles you handle in your daily affairs get short sighted after a while and believe that they've accomplished the utmost in their lines; but you get an altogether different standard of measurement as a handler of their product and are quite apt to hit upon a change in the shape or form of an implement or device simply by giving your fancy free play and fig uring out a difference from the attitude of a user. Housewives, clerks, farmers, lawyers, even laborers are daily filing valuable patents on contriv ances of their own conception. Stores secure some of their most helpful hints in management from the suggestions and grievances of their customers. When you next feel like registering a complaint against a public service corporation or the laundry, or the hotel, or your merchant, pause first and consider the chance of instituting a superior method. If you're not satisfied, a great many others may not be, and dissatisfaction with existing conditions is just one of the ways that fortune has of calling attention to opportunity. Remember the woman who pricked her finger until she saw the point of the safety pin. IlIIIIItlllllllllllllllllllTIIIIItlfltllfllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllltllllflllllllllllllllllllllllflllllllllllttllllllllllllllllllflllllllltllllllllltflllflllllllflltllllllllllttI ! iiiiiiiiiiuiiiiiiiiuiiiiiuiuHiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiM IIIIIITIIIll I I I iiiiiiiiiillLJJ It's a Warning From Headquarters THE last place we look for a mystery is the first place. The burglar rummages through bureau drawers, turns carpets and moves furniture, searching for the box of jewelry concealed in the gas range. The Lord only knows how many scientists scratched their mosquito bites as they delved for the cause of malaria. A man who sold his farm to go hunting petroleum used regularly to skim the "scum" of a cattle pond so that his cows would drink the water, never dreaming that he stood near one of the richest oil wells in existence. We generally know the least about the things right tinder our nose. Take teeth, for instance. Would you ever have guessed that any number of ailments which have been baffling the doctors for ages, originate in our molars? The new dentists are wonder-workers. They've discovered and uncov ered a whole brigade of diseases nesting in the gums. Oral surgery is accomplishing marvelous cures in corners of the body that seem utterly disconnected from the masticating functions. Lots of stomach troubles start at the front door. The pain in your toe may spring from a germ colony operating around the root of an indis posed eye tooth; so may certain types of headache and many varieties of eye pain," not to mention deafness and, mirabile dictu, liver complaints and kidney troubles. No wonder toothache hurts so it's a warning from headquarters. Verses f Herbert Kaufman fptf It never pays to posa a part, you're sure to be detected; The masquerade was never made That could be quite perfected. Pretenders all betray them selves, they're certain to grow careless; The best of wigs will slip a brt and prove its wearer hair less. While there are acts, there must be facts And nothing can erase them. The things we do Must come to view; In time we have to face them. If you would not be ridiculed and patronized and pitied Then always be yourself and play the role for which you're fitted. Copyright. isi, by Herbert Kafa Ore at BritaUi ana Ail IIUiu Ailxkta Aeacrvetf.