Inhumanity—See Animals, Absurd Fondness for; Slave Trade, Atrocities of.
INITIATIVE
Charlotte Perkins Stetson writes of an experience in the following lines:
It takes great strength to train
To modern service your ancestral brain;
To lift the weight of the unnumbered years
Of dead men's habits, methods, and ideas;
To hold that back with one hand, and support
With the other the weak steps of the new thought.
It takes great strength to bring your life up square
With your accepted thought and hold it there;
Resisting the inertia that drags back
From new attempts to the old habit's track.
It is so easy to drift back, to sink;
So hard to live abreast of what you think.
But the best courage man has ever shown
Is daring to cut loose and think alone.
Dark are the unlit chambers of clear space
Where light shines back from no reflecting face.
Our sun's wide glare, our heaven's shining blue,
We owe to fog and dust they fumble through;
And our rich wisdom that we treasure so
Shines from the thousand things that we don't know.
But to think new—it takes a courage grim
As led Columbus over the world's rim.
To think it cost some courage. And to go—
Try it. It takes every power you know.
(1619)
INITIATIVE, LACK OF
That which is recorded of the telephone girl below is true of great numbers of both sexes in every walk of life. Patients in hospitals soon learn that "trained" nurses will never willingly do anything outside the routine of their directions, which they take mostly from the bulletin-boards. It is said of some physicians that they would prefer that their patients should die regularly rather than get well under an unaccredited practitioner.
A Philadelphia telephone girl refused to
make connection with the Fire Department
because the man at the other end of the line
had not the necessary nickel to put in the
slot. At the Earlswood Idiot Asylum, England,
we saw several idiots who had been
trained to "self-support under direction,"
but they had no power of self-reliance; indeed,
the superintendent informed us that
up to that time there had been quite a number
who could automatically do things after
much training, but only three in the history
of the institution (which was then comparatively
young) had been trained to be self-reliant.
A reasonable amount of common
sense ought to be required of telephone girls
or men. This girl's stupid blunder nearly
cost a life.
(1620)
INJUDICIOUS KINDNESS
Men ought not only to be kind and friendly, but to be judicious in the way they manifest their regard.
At the camp-fire and dinner of the Eleventh
Army Corps in New York recently, Gen.
James Grant Wilson, as reported in Tobacco,
told how General Grant became the inveterate
smoker that he was. He said that
after the Fort Donelson fight the newspapers
all over the North were filled with the story
of how the silent captain had fought that
fight with an unlighted cigar in his mouth.
"Up to that time," said General Wilson,
"General Grant never smoked more than two
cigars a day in his life. When the people
of the North found that their commander
evidently liked cigars, loyal souls from every
great Northern city sent in cigars to Grant's
headquarters until he had piled up in his
tent 20,000 cigars. He felt that it would
not be polite to return them or to give them
away, so the only thing to do was to smoke
them. That was the beginning of it, and it
ended with the smoking of something like a
bunch of cigars every day."
(1621)
Injurious, The, Made Valuable—See Profit from Pests.
INJURY TO SELF
John Chrysostom, from a little town in
the Taurus Mountains named Cucusus, to
which he had been banished by Arcadius,
addrest a treatise to Olympias entitled, "None
Can Hurt a Man Who Will Not Hurt Himself."
Later, dying from cruel exposure,
the last moments of this holy man were
spent in praising God and admonishing his
