Wit, Humor, Reason, Rhetoric, Prose, Poetry and Story Woven into Eight Popular Lectures | Page 5

wonder we have so many unhappy marriages, so many homes like the one where a stranger knocked at the front door and receiving no response went around to the rear where he found a very small husband and a very large wife in a fight, with the wife getting the better of the battle.
The stranger said: "Hello! who runs this house?"
"That's what we are trying to settle now," shouted the little husband.
My young friends, I will admit love is a kind of spontaneous, impulsive, natural affinity, something after the order of molecular attraction or chemical affinity, but while by the natural law of love, a young woman may see in the object of her affection her ideal of perfection in humanity, she owes volitional conformity to a higher law than natural affinity. She owes to herself, to posterity and to her country a careful study of the character of the young man to whom she should link her life and love.
I believe two dark clouds hanging upon the horizon of this republic to be the recklessness with which life is linked with life at the marriage altar, and the recklessness with which we elect men to offices of public trust. While we have many public men, schooled in the science of government, whom the spoils of office cannot corrupt, we have an army of demagogues who rely upon saloon politics for promotion, and on all moral questions reason with their stomachs instead of their brains. This is especially true in the government of our large cities.
Sam Jones, lecturing in a city noted for its corrupt government said: "Take the political gang you have running this city, put them in a cage, then let the devil pass along and look in and he would say, 'That beats anything I have in my show.'"
We don't seem to realize that every public man is a teacher, every home is a school, and the education received outside the schoolroom is often more effective than the education inside. All the forces and elements of the organism of society are teachers and all life is learning. The birth of an infant into this world is its matriculation into a university, where it graduates in successive degrees. And do you know in this great school of human life, where I come with you to study the traits of our kind, that we never reach a grade that we are not influenced by what touches us? Here I am past fifty years of age (and then "some"), yet I am constantly being influenced by what touches me.
Start a new song with a popular air and it will spread throughout the whole country. Boys will whistle it and girls will sing it. A number of years ago, when at the station ready to leave home for New England, a lad near me began to whistle and then to sing a new song. It was a catchy tune and took hold of me. On the train I found myself trying to hum that tune, then I tried to whistle it, and failing in both attempts I finally gave it up. Two days after I left the train up in a New Hampshire town and took a street car for the hotel. A blizzard was on, but there stood the motorman, muffled to his ears, whistling the same tune I had heard down in Kentucky, "There'll be a hot time in the old town tonight."
When the telephone made its appearance a good Christian man had one installed in his store and during the morning hours of the first day he called up all his friends who had phones, and "Hello! Hello!" took hold of him. He went home to lunch and being a little late he hurried into his chair at the table. With the telephone still on his mind, he bowed his head to return thanks and said: "Hello." He was a good Christian man, but the telephone had taken hold of him.
The very tone of the voice has a tendency to influence and control character. I wonder so many parents train their voices as they do. They have a kind of snap to the tone which they evidently think makes the children and the servants "get a move" on them. Perhaps it does, but at the same time it falls upon a family like frost upon a field of flowers. You pay three dollars to have your piano tuned, yet you train your voice to sound harsh and hard.
How the tone of the voice controls was illustrated in my own home several years ago. I went home in the early spring and found some one had been among my bees and had left the lids of the hives lifted at the time the bees were making brood. Going to