The Joyful Heart | Page 8

the
dollar-business. For, in the former, if the interest comes in regularly
and unimpaired, you may know that the principal is safe, while in the
dollar-business they may be paying your interest out of your principal,
and you none the wiser until the crash. But here the difference ceases.
For if little or no vital interest comes in, your generous scale of living is
pinched. You may defer the catastrophe a little by borrowing short-time
loans at a ruinous rate from usurious stimulants, giving many pounds of
flesh as security. But soon Shylock forecloses and you are forced to
move with your sufferings to the slums and ten-cent lodging-houses of
Life. Moreover, you must face a brutal dispossession from even the
poor flat or dormitory cot you there occupy--out amid the snows and
blasts--
"Where he stands, the Arch Fear in a visible form"

there to pay slack life's "arrears of pain, darkness, and cold."
The reason why every day is a joy to the normal child is that he fell heir
at birth to a fortune of vitality and has not yet had time to squander all
his substance in riotous or thoughtless living, or to overdraw his
account in the Bank of Heaven on Earth. Every one of his days is a
joy--that is, except in so far as his elders have impressed their tired
standards of behavior too masterfully upon him. "Happy as a
child"--the commonness of the phrase is in itself a commentary. In
order to remain as happy as this for a century or so, all that a child has
to do is to invest his vitality on sound business principles, and never
overdraw or borrow. I shall not here go into the myriad details of just
how to invest and administer one's vitality. For there is no dearth of
wise books and physicians and "Masters of the Inn," competent to mark
out sound business programs of work, exercise, recreation, and regimen
for body, mind, and spirit; while all that you must contribute to the
enterprise is the requisite comprehension, time, money, and will-power.
You see, I am not a professor of vital commerce and investment; I am a
stump-speaker, trying to induce the voters to elect a sound business
administration.
I believe that the blessings of climate give us of North America less
excuse than most other people for failing to put such an administration
into office. It is noteworthy that many of the Europeans who have
recently written their impressions of the United States imagine that
Colonel Roosevelt's brimming cup of vitality is shared by nearly the
whole nation. If it only were! But the fact that these observers think so
would seem to confirm our belief that our own cup brims over more
plentifully than that of Europe. This is probably due to the exhilarating
climate which makes America--physically, at least, though not yet
economically and socially--the promised land.
Of course I realize the absurdity of urging the great majority of human
beings to keep within their vital incomes. To ask the overworked,
under-fed, under-rested, under-played, shoddily dressed, overcrowded
masses of humanity why they are not exuberant, is to ask again, with
Marie Antoinette, why the people who are starving for bread do not eat

cake. The fact is that to keep within one's income to-day, either
financially or vitally, is an aristocratic luxury that is absolutely denied
to the many. Most men--the rich as well as the poor--stumble through
life three parts dead. The ruling class, if it had the will and the skill,
might awaken itself to fullness of life. But only a comparatively few of
the others could, because the world is conducted on a principle which
makes it even less possible for them to store up a little hoard of vitality
in their bodies against a rainy day than to store up an overplus of
dollars in the savings bank.
I think that this state of things is very different from the one which the
fathers contemplated in founding our nation. When they undertook to
secure for us all "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness," they did
not mean a bare clinging to existence, liberty to starve, and the pursuit
of a nimble happiness by the lame, the halt, and the blind. They meant
fullness of life, liberty in the broadest sense, both outer and inner, and
that almost certain success in the attainment of happiness which these
two guarantee a man. In a word, the fathers meant to offer us all a good
long draft of the brimming cup with the full sum of benefits implied by
that privilege. For the vitalized man possesses real life and liberty, and
finds happiness usually at his disposal without putting himself to the
trouble of pursuit.
I can imagine the good