The University of Hard Knocks | Page 9

here. This is no reflection upon the janitor. You became a
piano by the Needful Knocks.
I can see you back in your callow beginnings, when you were just a
tree--a tall, green tree. You were green! Only green things grow. Did
you get the meaning of that, children? I hope you are green.
There you stood in the forest, a perfectly good, green young tree. You
got your lessons, combed your hair, went to Sunday school and were
the best young tree you could be.
That is why you were bumped--because you were good! There came a
man into the woods with an ax, and he looked for the best trees there to
bump. He bumped you--hit you with the ax! How it hurt you! And how
unjust it was! He kept on hitting you. "The operation was just terrible."
Finally you fell, crushed, broken, bleeding.
It is a very sad story. They took you all bumped and bleeding to the
sawmill and they bumped and ripped you more. They cut you in pieces
and hammered you day by day.
They did not bump the little, crooked, dissipated, cigaret-stunted trees.
They were not worth bumping.
But shake, Mr. Piano. That is why you are on this stage. You were
bumped here. All the beauty, harmony and value were bumped into
you.

The Sufferings of the Red Mud
One day I was up the Missabe road about a hundred miles north of

Duluth, Minnesota, and came to a hole in the ground. It was a big
hole--about a half-mile of hole. There were steam-shovels at work
throwing out of that hole what I thought was red mud.
"Kind sir, why are they throwing that red mud out of that hole?" I asked
a native.
"That hain't red mud. That's iron ore, an' it's the best iron ore in the
world."
"What is it worth?"
"It hain't worth nothin' here; that's why they're movin' it away."
There's red mud around every community that "hain't worth nothin'"
until you move it--send it to college or somewhere.
Not very long after this, near Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I saw some of
this same red mud. It had been moved over the Great Lakes and the
rails to what they call a blast furnace, the technological name of which
being The College of Needful Knocks for Red Mud.
I watched this red mud matriculate into a great hopper with limestone,
charcoal and other textbooks. Then they corked it up and school began.
They roasted it. It is a great thing to be roasted.
When it was done roasting they stopped. Have you noticed that they
always stop when anything is done roasting? If we are yet getting
roasted, perhaps we are not done!
Then they pulled the plug out of the bottom of the college and held
promotion exercises. The red mud squirted out into the sand. It was not
red mud now, because it had been roasted. It was a freshman-- pig iron,
worth more than red mud, because it had been roasted.
Some of the pig iron went into another department, a big teakettle,
where it was again roasted, and now it came out a sophomore--steel,
worth more than pig iron.
Some of the sophomore steel went up into another grade where it was
roasted yet again and rolled thin into a junior. Some of that went on up
and up, at every step getting more pounding and roasting and affliction.
It seemed as tho I could hear the suffering red mud crying out, "O, why
did they take me away from my happy hole-in-the-ground? Why do
they pound me and break my heart? I have been good and faithful. O,
why do they roast me? O, I'll never get over this!"
But after they had given it a diploma--a pricemark telling how much it
had been roasted--they took it proudly all over the world, labeled

"Made in America." They hung it in show windows, they put it in glass
cases. Many people admired it and said, "Isn't that fine work!" They
paid much money for it now. They paid the most money for what had
been roasted the most.
If a ton of that red mud had become watch-springs or razor-blades, the
price had gone up into thousands of dollars.
My friends, you and I are the raw material, the green trees, the red mud.
The Needful Knocks are necessary to make us serviceable.
Every bump is raising our price. Every bump is disclosing a path to a
larger life. The diamond and the chunk of soft coal are exactly the same
material, say the chemists. But the diamond has gone to The College of
Needful Knocks more than has her crude sister of the coal-scuttle.
There is no human diamond that has not