John Jacob Astor(约翰·约伯·奥斯塔)

VIP免费

2024-12-26 1 0 68.48KB 19 页 5.9玖币

侵权投诉

John Jacob Astor

BY ELBERT HUBBARD

John Jacob Astor

LITTLE JOURNEYS

Victor Hugo says, ``When you open a school, you close a prison.''

This seems to require a little explanation. Victor Hugo did not have

in mind a theological school, nor yet a young ladies' seminary, nor an

English boarding-school, nor a military academy, and least of all a

parochial institute. What he was thinking of was a school where people--

young and old-- were taught to be self-respecting, self-reliant and

efficient--to care for themselves, to help bear the burdens of the world, to

assist themselves by adding to the happiness of others.

Victor Hugo fully realized that the only education that serves is the

one that increases human efficiency, not the one that retards it. An

education for honors, ease, medals, degrees, titles, position--immunity--

may tend to exalt the individual ego, but it weakens the race and its gain

on the whole is nil.

Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service, gets

great returns. Action and reaction are equal, and the radiatory power of

the planets balances their attraction. The love you keep is the love you

give away.

A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and

a cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware

store and remarked, ``Lemme see your razors.''

The clerk smiled pleasantly and asked, ``Do you want a razor to shave

with?''

``Naw,'' said the colored person, ``--for social purposes.''

An education for social purposes is n't of any more use than a razor

purchased for a like use. An education which merely fits a person to prey

on society, and occasionally slash it up, is a predatory preparation for a life

of uselessness, and closes no prison. Rather it opens a prison and takes

captive at least one man. The only education that makes free is the one

that tends to human efficiency. Teach children to work, play, laugh,

fletcherize, study, think, and yet again--work, and we will raze every

prison.

John Jacob Astor

There is only one prison, and its name is Inefficiency. Amid the

bastions of this bastile of the brain the guards are Pride, Pretense, Greed,

Gluttony, Selfishness.

Increase human efficiency and you set the captives free.

``The Teutonic tribes have captured the world because of their

efficiency,'' says Lecky the historian.

He then adds that he himself is a Celt.

The two statements taken together reveal Lecky to be a man without

prejudice. When the Irish tell the truth about the Dutch the millennium

approaches.

Should the quibbler arise and say that the Dutch are not Germans, I

will reply, true, but the Germans are Dutch-- at least they are of Dutch

descent.

The Germans are great simply because they have the homely and

indispensable virtues of prudence, patience and industry.

There is no copyright on these qualities. God can do many things,

but so far, He has never been able to make a strong race of people and

leave these ingredients out of the formula.

As a nation, Holland first developed them so that they became the

characteristic of the whole people.

It was the slow, steady stream of Hollanders pushing southward that

civilized Germany.

Music as a science was born in Holland. The grandfather of

Beethoven was a Dutchman.

Gutenberg's forebears were from Holland.

And when the Hollanders had gone clear through Germany, and then

traversed Italy, and came back home by way of Venice, they struck the

rock of spiritual resources and the waters gushed forth.

Since Rembrandt carried portraiture to the point of perfection, two

hundred and fifty years ago, Holland has been a land of artists--and it is so

even unto this day.

John Jacob Astor was born of a Dutch family that had migrated down

to Heidelberg from Antwerp. Through some strange freak of atavism the

father of the boy bred back, and was more or less of a stone-age cave-

John Jacob Astor

dweller. He was a butcher by trade, in the little town of Waldorf, a few

miles from Heidelberg. A butcher's business then was to travel around

and kill the pet pig, or sheep, or cow that the tender- hearted owners dare

not harm. The butcher was a pariah, a sort of unofficial, industrial

hangman.

At the same time he was more or less of a genius, for he climbed

steeples, dug wells, and did all kinds of disagreeable jobs that needed to be

done, and from which sober and cautious men shrank like unwashed wool.

One such man--a German, too--lives in East Aurora. I joined him,

accidentally, in walking along a country road the other day. He carried a

big basket on his arm, and was peacefully smoking a big Dutch pipe. We

talked of music and he was regretting the decline of a taste for Bach, when

he shifted the basket to the other arm.

``What have you in the basket?'' I asked.

And here is the answer, ``Noddings--but dynamite. I vas going up on

der hill, already, to blow me oud some stumps oud.'' And I suddenly

bethought me of an engagement I had at the village.

John Jacob Astor was the youngest of four sons, and as many

daughters. The brothers ran away early in life, and went to sea or joined

the army. One of these boys came to America, and followed his father's

trade of butcher.

Jacob Astor, the happy father of John Jacob, used to take the boy with

him on his pig-killing expeditions. This for two reasons--one, so the lad

would learn a trade, and the other to make sure that the boy did not run

away.

Parents who hold their children by force have a very slender claim

upon them. The pastor of the local Lutheran Church took pity on this

boy, who had such disgust for his father's trade and hired him to work in

his garden and run errands.

The intelligence and alertness of the lad made him look like good

timber for a minister.

He learned to read and was duly confirmed as a member of the church.

Under the kindly care of the village parson John Jacob grew in mind

文档加载中……请稍候！
如果长时间未打开，您也可以点击刷新试试。

下载文档到电脑，查找使用更方便

5.9 玖币 0人已下载

立即下载 VIP免费下载

摘要：

JohnJacobAstor1JohnJacobAstorBYELBERTHUBBARDJohnJacobAstor2LITTLEJOURNEYSVictorHugosays,``Whenyouopenaschool,youcloseaprison.''Thisseemstorequirealittleexplanation.VictorHugodidnothaveinmindatheologicalschool,noryetayoungladies'seminary,noranEnglishboarding-school,noramilitaryacademy,andleastofallap...

展开>> 收起<<

John Jacob Astor(约翰·约伯·奥斯塔).pdf

共19页,预览4页

还剩页未读，继续阅读

声明：本站为文档C2C交易模式，即用户上传的文档直接被用户下载，本站只是中间服务平台，本站所有文档下载所得的收益归上传人(含作者)所有。玖贝云文库仅提供信息存储空间，仅对用户上传内容的表现方式做保护处理，对上载内容本身不做任何修改或编辑。若文档所含内容侵犯了您的版权或隐私，请立即通知玖贝云文库，我们立即给予删除！

John Jacob Astor(约翰·约伯·奥斯塔)

相关推荐

开通VIP享超值会员特权

作者详情

相关内容

热门标签

举报选择: