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

solve
that many young people rush headlong into matrimony without striking
a match, except the match they strike at the marriage altar. A girl sees a
young man today; he's handsome, talks well, and she falls in love with
him, dreams about him tonight, sighs about him tomorrow and thinks

she'll surely die if he doesn't ask her to marry him. Yet she knows
nothing about his parentage or his character. No 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