To improve the world begin by improving yourself.

THE STEEPLE, MOVING LIKE THE HAND OF A CLOCK

If you live in the suburbs you devote perhaps two hours each day to travel. Two hours per day means practically one-fifth of your active life.

How many readers make any use of those two hours, and feel each day that they have been well spent? ----

Instead of being wasted, those hours should be among your best.

Never mind if you are clinging to a strap because companies are licensed to exploit you. Never mind if you are tired and weary when the day is ended. The tired brain often thinks better than the fresh one. And man, so recently descended from the monkey who had to think while hanging head down, ought to have no trouble thinking as he hangs from his strap--head up. ----

Some in the cars play cards as they travel homeward. Others talk gossip, and tens of thousands waste too much time on this and other newspapers.

Try this experiment: Make up your mind to devote your hours of travel to thinking. The brain, like the muscles, needs definite and well-planned exercise. It must be methodical and regular.

There is no limit to its possible results. You would be glad to spend your two travelling hours in a gymnasium on wheels. Make of your homeward car a mental gymnasium. Each night or morning, take up some one line of thought and follow it to its end--or as far as your mind can take you. Learn to observe, to study, to reflect. Don't look at your fellow pa.s.sengers as calves look at each other on the way to the slaughter house.

Look, as a human being, at other human beings. There they sit or stand or hang. Some chatter, others scowl, fret, fume, complain, brag, grin or otherwise express the strange emotions that move us here.

They are all ghosts, as Carlyle tells you, imprisoned for a time in coverings of flesh, and a car packed full of real ghosts pa.s.sing over the earth on their quick journey to the grave ought to stir you. ----

The giggling shopgirls whose life of misery is still a joke to them--blessed youth!--should interest you deeply. And the negro, too, with a tired black face, resting for the next day's slavery--slavery on a wage basis, but slavery all the same.

Possibly you despise his thick lips. But those lips are carved on every sphinx in Egypt's sand, and if you could go back far enough you would find the ancestors of that negro, before the days of the Pharaohs, laying the foundations of your religion and locating the stars in heaven. At that time your forbears were gibbering cave savages, sharpening bones and gnawing raw flesh.

When you see the negro on the opposite seat, the ill-starred one who has gone down in the human race while we have gone up, think about him, study him, speculate as to his ultimate end--and your own. Don't merely say to yourself, "That's a plain negro," and go on chewing gum. ----

The pictures that flash by your car windows should help you to think.

The train rumbles over the switches, and in the dusk a swinging lantern tells you that a man is at work, guiding you safely when your work is done. Can't you take an interest in that human atom, representing the Power that swings our tiny sun in s.p.a.ce, lighting us on our journey toward the constellation Hercules?

A black steeple is outlined against the dark-blue sky of the evening. That is a finger of stone, built by man to point everlastingly toward Infinite Power. It now points "upward." In twelve hours--as the earth slowly turns--it will be pointing "downward." But there is no upward or downward in the carpentry of the universe. In the twenty-four hours, as it turns round with the earth, that steeple points toward all the corners of s.p.a.ce, and constantly it points toward Eternal Wisdom and Justice in every corner. ----

This is tiresome? All right, then we'll stop. But whether we tire or interest you, remember:

As a man thinks, so he grows. Think, study, use all the hours that separate your croupy cradle from your gloomy grave. Those hours are few.

CULTIVATE THOUGHT--TEACH YOUR BRAIN TO WORK EARLY

Two centuries back a young man of twenty-three sat in the quiet of the evening--THINKING.

His body was quiet; his vitality, his life, all his powers, were centred in his brain.

Above, the moon shone, and around him rustled the branches of the trees in his father's orchard.

From one of the trees an apple fell.

No need to tell you that the young man was Newton; that the fall of the apple started in his READY brain the thought that led to his great discovery, giving him fame to last until this earth shall crumble.

How splendid the achievement born that moment! How fortunate for the world and for the youth Newton, that at twenty-three his brain had cultivated the HABIT OF THOUGHT! ----

Our muscles we share with everything that lives--with the oyster clinging to his rock, the whale ploughing through cold seas, and our monkey kinsman swinging from his tropical branch.

These muscles, useful only to cart us around, help us to do slave work or pound our fellows, we cultivate with care.

We run, fence, ride, walk hard, weary our poor lungs and gather pains in our backs building the muscles that we do not need.

Alone among animals, we possess a potentiality of mind development unlimited.

And for that, with few exceptions, we care nothing. ----

Most of us, sitting in Newton's place and seeing the apple fall, would merely have debated the advisability of getting the apple to eat it--just the process that any monkey mind would pa.s.s through.

A Newton, a BRAIN TRAINED TO THINK, sees the apple drop, asks himself why the moon does not drop also. And he discovers the law of gravitation which governs the existence of every material atom in the universe. ----

Young men who read this, start in NOW to use your brains.

Take nothing for granted, not even the fact that the moon stays in her appointed place or that the poor starve and freeze amid plenty.

Think of the things which are wrong and of the possibilities of righting them. Study your own weaknesses and imperfections.

There is power in your brain to correct them, if you will develop that power.

As surely as you can train your arm to hold fifty pounds out straight, just so surely can you train your brain to deal with problems that now would find you a gaping incompetent.

You may not be a Newton. But if you can condescend to aim at being an inferior Sandow, can't you afford to try even harder to be an inferior Newton?

Don't be a muscular monkey. Be a low-grade philosopher, if you can't be high-grade, and find how much true pleasure there is even in inferior brain gymnastics. ----

Take up some problem and study it:

There goes a woman, poor and old. She carries a heavy burden because she is too sad and weak to fight against fate, too honest to leave a world that treats her harshly.

There struts a youngster, rich and idle.

How many centuries of h.e.l.l on earth will it take to put that woman's load on that other broad, fat, idle back?

Answer that one question, better still, TRANSFER THE LOAD, and your life will not have been wasted. ----

It is THOUGHT that moves the world. In Napoleon's BRAIN are born the schemes that murder millions and yet push civilization on. The mere soldier, with gold lace and sharp sword, is nothing--a mere tool.

It is the concentrated thought of the English people under Puritan influence that makes Great Britain a sham monarchy and a real republic now.

It is the thought of the men of independent MIND in this country that throws English tea and English rule overboard forever.

Don't wait until you are old. Don't wait until you are ONE DAY older. Begin NOW.

Or, later, with a dull, fuzzy, useless mind, you will realize that an unthinking man might as well have been a monkey, with fur instead of trousers, and consequent freedom from mental responsibility or self-respect.