The Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 20, No. 32, Ed. 1 Monday, June 3, 1935 Page: 4 of 4
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PAGE FOUR
IPIIIPPI
BICE THBESHBB
Southern
Fine Field of Amateurs Slated
To Compete at Rice
Field.
Friday and Saturday at Rice Held
the Southern A. A. U. championship in
irack and field will be held. One of
the finest lists of athletes ever to com-
pete in this meet have entered and
many past records are due to be brok-
en if conditions are favorable.
Six Rice track men will represent
the Owls. Of this six, five will enter
the National Collegiate meet at Los
Angeles, June 21-22. The six are
Smokcy Brothers, Harold Johnson,
David Welchert, Bill Wallace, and Joss
Petty, varsity trackmen, and Jack Pat-
terson, freshman hurdler.
Among the outstanding stars to com-
pete in this meet are two Louisiana
world record holders. "Slats" Hardip
and Jack Torrance, both L. S. U. per-
formers. Hardin is the outstanding low
hurdler in the country. He beat Bill
Wallace in their only meeting this year,
but the margin Was very slim and he
the Owl '.-tat1 are expected to wage
■a limit battle in that, event. Hardin
is also cine ijif the, bt'St quarter milors
i'L *.h< country. ■' '
Torrance hoick Ihc world record in
the .•ihot put, having IhroWn the six-
teen pound bail over 57 feet This
ree;c>r<j has nilit' even lieen approached
by any other person, itind that event
will;'.oply' bt', a (.nK'Stifej1 Hi - how far
Torrance will toss the shtit.
Tilt! Owl sfars have? lx>en woi'king;out
daily to keep iircondition for this meet,
and the* niuuolk'giates Burnson has
been' 'gilding much . lime preparing
Wallace for 'his; rifCe with Hard'1"1- .
We specialize in watch and jewelry
repairing, It will B O. K. if from B.
O. Kreiter; Kress Bldg.
Con grain I at ions
Seniors
■
CHAMBER OF
COMMERCE
Houston, Texas
AT ROLLE'S
811 Main St.
(Continued from page S)
are the victims of our own efficiency.
But this assuredly is only a seeming
condition. Events have moved so fast
at times they outstrip us and we are
unable, temporarily, to control them in
such a way as to secure the fullest
benefits from the agencies of produc-
tion. Also, it is probable that we have
not discovered or do not recognize the
fundamental laws which contrel our
social activities to the same extent that
we understand the laws of natural
science. There must be laws which
control the forces of our social and
economic life, which are as definite in
their application as, for example, is the
law of gravitation, The complete dis-
agreement among scholars and students
of political economy and the social
sciences as to the causes and remedies
of the worldwide distress of recent
years shows that we fail as yet to un-
derstand the cause. It is well to re-
member too that periods of business
recession always are accompanied by
prophets of despair, fomenters of dis-
cord and class hatred, and others who
would receive but scant attention in
normal times. Their appeal is to the
emotions rather than to, the ideas or
reasoning of the people, They do in-
jury to those whom they pretend to
help when they precipitate trouble be-
tween those who should be. most stead-
fast friends, namely, the worker and
employer.
Here at once is a challenge and an
opportunity for the youth of today who
are entering upon the most active
period of life. We are equipped, as
never before in history, >vit.h tools, ma-
chinery, technical methods. These have
lifted the active physical burdens from
the shouders of men and women and
have placed in their hands many times
more power than any previous genera-
lion, had ever possessed. The problem
of the youth is- to resolve all of this
.'into power for good, to continue find-
ing new avenues for human endeavor
| which will take the place of that re-
leased from drudgery, and as greater
hime is left for leisure the mind and
j hands toward proper recreational and
• cultural enjoyment.
I Progress should not be questioned
j because it has been uneven or because
I we have not always been able to con-
trol our improvements and direct them
; U> the .greatest good. What we need
) is '.more understanding, more self con-
trol/self reliance, and capacity to ad-
, jtiiit ourselves ^ to the 1 very : changes
winch result from Progress.
My own belief is thai ■ vire need to
i give,;hibre heed to the spiritual side of
nut lives and to "si?areh there for guid-
.ince in applying1 the known laws and
j rules which ailed; our business and
j personal aifairs! I do not. know any
! beter .counsel: than that oJ Paul, the
i'Apostle,, to his beloved Phillippians
"WlKitsoever things' are 11 u<. whatso-
ever things iire honest whatsoever
. things life just,, whatsoever things are
•i pure, whatsoever things are lovely,
Uvhatsover things are of good report:
if'there l>e any'virtue, and if there be
any pi.use. think of these things."
REBUILDING—
i (Continued from page 1)
■ ported to have said, when he laid down
j the Presidency of Harvard, that nine-
tenths of his: work in that office had
j been sheer unrelieved drudgery. And
! thirty years ago I heard one of the
greatest, scholars in Oxford say, at a
! lecture in the Chapter House of Christ
j Central Cathedral, that three-quarters
! of all the httnest: intellectual work of
I the world has to be nothing but men-
j tal,,drudgery.
There is not now, and apparently
there never will be, any Utopia where
men can escape from this elemental
human discipline. We cannot live
merely by taking in each other's light
washing on Mondays. We cannot re-
sign froin a laboring world and live
upon a dole. One of the disquieting
facts in these difficult times is that
long and <p|orced idleness seems in
the end to "(lestroy the will to work.
It is against that fatal paralysis that
we have always to steel ourselves.
Surely having learned what that Ger-
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We specialize in all lines of
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"We've alwayn Been the Shop
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man poet meant when he Mid: "K only
it w*w not Ap hard to think", wo snuit
go on to learn that other lesson from
this older story: "The people had a
mind to work."
n.
The work that has to be done in the
world today is very much like the
work on which those men of long ago
were employed. "Come, let us build
work on which those men of long ago
up again the wall." It is primarily a
task of reconstruction.
To get our hinds geared to such a,
task most of us Americans are having
to be born again. For it is not in this
way or in these terms that we have
thought of our labor. America has
been, until most recently, the country
where men could do things for the
first time. It has been this fact above
all others which has made our coun-
try a land of romance and of oppor-
tunity. There are still among us old
men who have done striking things
for the first time; crossed mountains,
gone down unknown rivers, cut virgin
stands of timber, struck a plough into
unturned prairie, tapped oil wells that
have lain hidden for millennia. These
men seem to us the authentic incarna-
tions of the American spirit. We lis-
ten to their stories and read their bi-
ographies. Speaking of them Kipling
says that
A voice, as bad as Conscience, rang
interminable changes
, On one everlasting Whisper day
and night repeated—so:
"Something hidden. Go and find
it. Go and look behind the
Ranges—
Something lost behind the Ranges.
Ijost and waiting for you. Go!''
But tiiat voice no longer has anything
to say. The ranges have been crossed
and what was lost has been found,
With every day the chance to do things
for the first time in America recedes
farther into the romantic past.
It is true that in the fields of scien-
tific discovery and idtimately applied
science there is no end to the chance
for novelty. But this is a task for spe-
cialists. For the rank and file of us
the American problem is far more that
of remaking a country we already know
than of discovering a country that we
do not know. After the age of discov-
ery came the age of reckless exploita-
tion. We are the heirs of that age as
of the one that preceded it. Much of
our immediate task is to make good
wanton ravages which never should
have been committed. There is no
stand of primeval timber to be butch-
ered for a first time. There are in-
stead scarred hillsides to be reforested.
There is no virgin soil to be turned up
fresh. Tltere are the dust-swept plains
to be arrested and recovered. There
are soil and oil tc> ba conserved here-
after but no more exploited.
As for the human half of the pic-
ture, Tliere will be no more millions
of immigrants meaning cheap labor.
There will be the present population
in work with. And above all else there
are ' ourselves New names cannot
make us over. As we were not remade
by codes so we cannot be unmade by
! them. There is no conceivable revolu-
tion which can change us into persons
; other than what we are. We under-
stand with ..utter clarity what St. Au-
gustine meant when he said: "Whither
shall my heart flee from my heart?
Whither shall I go from myself?
] Whither shall I not follow myself? 'We'
bow to the wisdom of an old-time
j world of Schiller's: "Thy America is
here or nowhere."
All this, of course, is a direct con-
sequence of those stern four years
from 1914-1918. I have never been
able to forget a sentence which oc-
curred in an editorial of the London
Nation at the end of the first week
of August, 1914: "The society of hope
and ideas lies in ruins. In the years or
generations to come our enfeebled
hands will have to collect its scattered
stones and put them in place again."
The metaphor is that of our text. "Let
us build up again the wall of Jerusa-
lem, that we bo no more a reproach."
And I can think of no more accurate
description of the necessitated life work
of men today than that prophetic sen-
tence of over twenty years ago. We
are trying to collect the scattered stones
of the society of hope and ideas and
put them in place again.
This is tor us Americans a new kind
of task. It seems to us beside the ex-
citing business of pioneering with its
chance to do things for the first time,
a dull and thankless task. Byt this is
what every grown up society has had
to do and apparently must do. The
pioneering stage of a nation's history
belongs to its youth and to its youth
alone. The mature life of nations, like
the lives of grown-up men, is spent
working within the limits of accepted
facts. When, therefore, Andre Sieg-
fried writes a book about us which he
calls "America Comes of Age," he con-
cedes for us that our life becomes
more and more a life of thoughtful re-
construction rather than reckless ex-
ploitation.
The city of Jerusalem still lives in
men's imagination as one of the sym-
bols of Utopia. Yet from the days of
David the King until the days of Al-
lenby the .General its history has been
one long story of rebuilding. The
stones In its walls and streets, its
homes and churches and mosques, have
not been fresh cut, They have been
the old stones, cast down in the wars,
which men have tried to put back in
ever more certain shape. Thus, also,
Rice's Class of 1920 will hold its fif-
teenth reunion after the garden party
today at the Cohen House, according
to J. Frank Jungman, acting class sec-
retary. The graduating class of 1920
numbered seventy-seven including six
candidates for advanced degrees.
At the Physics Amphitheatre the As-
sociation of Rice Alumni will hold its
annual reunion meeting under the
gavel of Alumni President Tommy
Moore, '28, this afternoon, at which
time the candidates for Alumni officers
will be made public by the nominating
committee. The bi-annual election of
Alumni Association officials will be
held in the fall on Homecoming Day.
zSaturday the Class of 1925 held its
tenth reunion, a dinner in the Com-
mons with I. M. Wilford, permanent
class president, as toastmaster, Guests
included the officers of the administra-
tion,
On the same day at the Cohen House
the class of 1920 held its, fifth reunion
dinner. Officers of the class are: John
Shuhmacher, permanent president, Mrs.
Homoiselle Haden Fay, vice-president,
and John Ridley, secretary-treasurer.
it is said that there is not 'a stone in
St. Peter's in Rome which had not
been previously used in some earlier
pagan or Christian building in the
Eternal City. Yet out of the cast down
stones of a previous time Bramante
built one of the ejjduring shrines of
Christendom. It may well be that the
task of reconstruction will issue in
creations more permanent and beauti-
ful than those of sheer invention. The
fact that you are called upon now to
share in an age of reconstruction does
not deny you work that is interesting
or work that may not be more sig-
nificant than that which was done by
your predecessors in the days of pio-
neering. You are living at the time
of America's "coming of age."
in.
And, finally, these men of long ago
worked, as the story runs, with a
trowel In one hand and a sword in the
other hand. The conditions for their
work were confessedly unideal. No
modern efficiency engineer could hold
out any hope that work done under
such conditions could meet the re-
quirements of the task. And yet, with
divided attention and divided strength
they persevered until the wall was
built. It says much for their resource-
fulness that working with these handi-
caps they finished the job which they
began.
I There are many of us today who
! have the mind lo work, yet who are
j at loggerheads with the conditions for
our work. We are doubtful whether
I in the face of the difficulties against
which we have to contend, good work
can be done. There is the difficulty
of getting work in the first instance,
There is the feeling of insecurity about
the job we succeed in getting. If we
are an established business^ or a set-
tled prolusion there is the instability
of the world around us. We do not
know from day to day how environ-
ment will change. There is more kill-
ing competition in some .lines than ever
before. Altogether we understand only
too well what it is to have to work
with a sword in one nand, and never
to have two free hands for the task
itself. We have to fight for the chance
to work and then to defend the job
itself once it has been taken on, ^
Men have always dreamed of Uto-
pian conditions for work. We today
dream this dream with an added vivid-
ness. HBut I wonder is it not today as
it always has been merely a dream.
For if you start a serious search for
the men who did good work for the
sole reason that they had ideal condi-
tions for their work, you seem never
to find them. Indeed, you come fin-
ally to doubt; whether any such men
exist. What you find instead is men
who, in the face of what would seem
Names engraved free if you buy a
Pen or Pencil from the Fountain Pen
Hospital, 601 Kress Bldg. F. 7918.
to be insuperable obstacles, have done
much if not most of the enduring work
of the' world. 11^
Goethe said that for the last seven-
ty-five years of his life he never had
a month of genuine comfort and that
the mere business of living was a per-
petual rolling of a stone which he had
always to raise anew. Meanwhile his
creative work was disturbed, limiteu,
and hindered by external conditions.
Neither Kant nor Carlyle ever knew
in maturity a single healthy, carefree
day. Robert Louis Stevenson's gallant
optimism was affirmed against a back-
drop of dark difficulties. The wizard
mind of Steinmetz inhabited a body
which must have made every motion a
burden, and this great genius did his
work under conditions which suggest
an almost mediaeval asceticism. Fran-
cis Thompson, who wrote the greatest
lyrics in our language, since the Eliza-
bethans, sold matches for a penny a
box on the streets of London and slept
beneath the arches of the Thames
bridges.
We should beware of leaping to the
sentimental conclusion that poverty
and hardship are guarantees of genius.
But, on the other hand, we cannot
evade the plain inference from the
facts which tells us that much of the
best work of tile world has been done
under the most unlikely conditions.
Indeed Goethe himself insisted that if
a man wps to make his mark on the
world he needed two things, a good
head and a great inheritance. The lat-
ter of these, a great inheritance, he
did not construe as birth mto a secure
and tranquil time of the world's his-
tory. He preferred rather the inheri-
tance which comes to us from a trou-
bled time and mentions the break up
of the Middle Ages and the later dis-
location of Europe caused by the Na-
poleonic Wars. A man born into such
a time, he implies, inherits an op-
portunity which is denied men w«o
fall upon the stagnant periods of hu-
man history. His very occupation is
defined for him by the tasks of re-
construction which are at hand in his-
tory's unsettled years.
There is, in the preface to one of the
latest volumes of Professor Bury's
collected essays, a half apology for
the contents of the book. These es-
says, which are perhaps his most bril-
liant work, were written, Bury says,
under the most unlikely conditions. They
were prepared as special lectures and
addresses under pressure and in the
midst of constant distractions. He
never had proper time for any of
them; they were fitted into hurried
hours, interrupted by regular duties,
and never properly revised. Bury goes
on to say that he, too, had dreamed
the universal human dream of ideal
conditions for productive work. He
had hoped for what had never come,
uninterrupted leisure for research and
long, quiet periods for writing.
The essays in question, he goes on
to say, were actually all written
"against the grain." They were writ-
ten against the grain of his own in-
clination at the time and again the
grain of an unpromising environment.
Yet, he continues, as he looks back
and discovers that most of what he
takes to be his best work was done
under precisely those conditions, and
he finds himself wondering whether,
if he had had the ideal setting of
which he had dreamed, he would have
done as well. He is driven to the con-
clusion that probably most of our best
human work is "done against the
grain."
You and I today are having to do
our work against the grain. We can-
not always pick and choose what we
will do. We have to accept, either as
School and College
Supplies
Books • Stationery • Gifts
Lending Library
1014 Texas Ave. Houston, Texas
We trade Pens and Pencils. Match
your pen or pcncil, old style or new
style. Fountain Pen Hospital, 60t Kress
Bldg. F. 7818.
Best Wishes for...
Class of 1935
• e e
The
fmmMB&WL
Ben Wolfman
• necessity or &s i duty, the work
which offers. And once we are st work
we find ourselves dealing with a
world which is tough and gnarled. The
world lies on our work bench like a
great timber of live oak. And it lies
so that we cannot work with its grain,
'•ut must work against its grain. We
should be more than human if, at
times, we did not quarrel with our
tools, with the workshop, and with the
stuff to be handled. Other men, we
say, were able to work with the grain
of a softer world. Why the cursed
spite that we were born to set right so
difficult a day? ..: wlWtl
If the testimony of htindreds of lives
is to be trusted, if Professor Bury's
reflections on his own history were
accurate, it may be well that in the un-
ideal conditions for our modern toil we
have a great inheritance. By a para-
dox which we do not at first under-
stand it may be that the Conditions
for our labor are more ideal than
those of which we idly dream.
Eckermann records that in his con-
versations with Goethe he naturally
sought natures and environments which
coincided with his own inclinations.
Goethe told him that he was wrong,
that it was a great mistake to hope
that men and the world will harmonize'
with us. "It is in the conflict of na-
tures opposed to his own," said the
poet, "that a man must collect his
strength to fight his way through.
Thus all our different sides are brought
out and developed, so that we soon feel
ourselves a match for every foe. You
must at all events plunge into the
great world whether you like it or
not."
A century or more ago, in a world
radically unsettled by the Napoleonic
Wars, a mystical English poet retold
the old Hebrew story about rebuild-
ing Jerusalem in England's fair and
pleasant land. He stayed close to the
original story and said that those who
•v -
Always use good Ink in your Pen.
Fountain Pen Hospital, 601 Kress Bldg.
F. 7918.
thus labored must carrv a
we hnnd. How better can
come you, who are now
institution, into the difficult
the world than to say to you
must at all events plunge into
great world, whether you like
notj and then to charge you that;
sword shall not deep in your '
till you have built a better andl
eternal city in this fair and pleasant
land.
— ___—.
Fountain Pen Hospital repairs all
makes of Pens and Pencils. 601 Kress
Bldg. F. 7918.
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believable value. There never was a suit that offered so
muoji and cost so little.
1
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The Thresher (Houston, Tex.), Vol. 20, No. 32, Ed. 1 Monday, June 3, 1935, newspaper, June 3, 1935; Houston, Texas. (https://texashistory.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metapth230334/m1/4/: accessed July 17, 2024), University of North Texas Libraries, The Portal to Texas History, https://texashistory.unt.edu.; crediting Rice University Woodson Research Center.