The University of Hard Knocks | Page 4

songs written
from experience--Theory and practice--Tuning the strings of life
VIII. LOOKING BACKWARD--Memories of the price we pay--My
first school teaching--Loaning the deacon my money--Calling the roll
of my schoolmates--At the grave of the boy I had envied--Why Ben
Hur won the chariot race--Pulling on the oar
IX. GO ON SOUTH!--The book in the running brook--The Mississippi
keeps on going south and growing greater--We generally start well, but
stop--Few go on south--The plague of incompetents--Today our best
day, tomorrow to be better--Birthdays are promotions--I am just
beginning--Bernhardt, Davis, Edison--Moses begins at eighty--Too
busy to bury--Sympathy for the "sob squad"--Child sees worst days, not
best--Waiting for the second table--Better days on south--Overcoming
obstacles develops power--Go on south from principle, not
praise--Doing duty for the joy of it--Becoming the "Father of
Waters"--Go on south forever!
X. GOING UP LIFE'S MOUNTAIN--The defeats that are victories--
Climbing Mount Lowe--Getting above the clouds into the sunshine--
Each day we rise to larger vision--Getting above the night into the
eternal day--Going south is going upward

Some Preliminary Remarks
LADIES and Gentlemen: I do not want to be seen in this lecture. I want
to be heard. I am only the delivery wagon. When the delivery wagon
comes to your house, you are not much interested in how it looks; you
are interested in the goods it brings you. You know some very good
goods are sometimes delivered to you in some very poor delivery
wagons.
So in this lecture, please do not pay any attention to the delivery
wagon--how much it squeaks and wheezes and rattles and wabbles. Do
not pay much attention to the wrappings and strings. Get inside to the
goods.
Really, I believe the goods are good. I believe I am to recite to you
some of the multiplication table of life--not mine, not yours alone, but
everybody's.
Can Only Pull the Plug!
Every audience has a different temperature, and that makes a lecture go
differently before every audience. The kind of an audience is just as
important as the kind of a lecture. A cold audience will make a good
lecture poor, while a warm audience will make a poor lecture good.
Let me illustrate:
When I was a boy we had a barrel of sorghum in the woodshed. When
mother wanted to make ginger-bread or cookies, she would send me to
the woodshed to get a bucket of sorghum from that barrel.
Some warm September day I would pull the plug from the barrel and
the sorghum would fairly squirt into my bucket. Later in the fall when
it was colder, I would pull the plug but the sorghum would not squirt. It
would come out slowly and reluctantly, so that I would have to wait a
long while to get a little sorghum. And on some real cold winter day I
would pull the plug, but the sorghum would not run at all. It would just
look out at me.
I discovered it was the temperature.
I have brought a barrel of sorghum to this audience. The name of the
sorghum is "The University of Hard Knocks." I can only pull the plug. I
cannot make it run. That will depend upon the temperature of this
audience. You can have all you want of it, but to get it to running freely,
you will have to warm up.

Did You Bring a Bucket?
No matter how the sorghum runs, you have to have a bucket to get it.
How much any one gets out of a lecture depends also upon the size of
the bucket he brings to get it in. A big bucket can get filled at a very
small stream. A little bucket gets little at the greatest stream. With no
bucket you can get nothing at Niagara.
That often explains why one person says a lecture is great, while the
next person says he got nothing out of it.

What It's All About
Here is a great mass of words and sentences and pictures to express two
or three simple little ideas of life, that our education is our growing up
from the Finite to the Infinite, and that it is done by our own personal
overcoming, and that we never finish it.
Have you noticed that no sentence, nor a million sentences, can bound
life? Have you noticed that every statement does not quite cover it? No
statement, no library, can tell all about life. No success rule can alone
solve the problem. You must average it all and struggle up to a higher
vision.
We are told that the stomach needs bulk as well as nutriment. It would
not prosper with the necessary elements in their condensed form. So
abstract truths in their lowest terms do not always promote mental
digestion like more bulk in the