An old sentimental poem in honor of Mother’s Day.

Somebody’s Mother
By Mary D. Brine

The woman was old and ragged and gray,
And bent with the chill of a winter’s day;
The streets were white with a recent snow,
And the woman’s feet with age were slow.

At the crowded crossing she waited long,
Jostled aside by the careless throng
Of human beings who passed her by.
Unheeding the glance of her anxious eye.

Down the street with laughter and shout.
Glad in the freedom of  “school let out,”
Come happy boys, like a flock of sheep,
Hailing the snow piled white and deep;
Past the woman, so old and gray.
Hastened the children on their way.

None offered a helping hand to her,
So weak and timid, afraid to stir,
Lest the carriage wheels or the horses’ feet
Should trample her down in the slippery street.

At last came out of the merry troop
The gayest boy of all the group;
He paused beside her and whispered low,
“I’ll help you across, if you wish to go.”

Her aged hand on his strong young arm
She placed, and so without hurt or harm
He guided the trembling feet along,
Proud that his own were young and strong;
Then back again to his friends he went,
His young heart happy and well content

“She’s somebody’s mother, boys, you know,
For all she’s aged, and poor and slow;
And some one, some time, may lend a hand
To help my mother—you understand?—
If ever she’s old and poor and gray,
And her own dear boy so far away.”

“Somebody’s mother” bowed low her head
In her home that night, and the prayer she said
Was: “God be kind to that noble boy,
Who is somebody’s son and pride and joy.”

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From The Cardinal Virtues, 1902
By William De Witt Hyde

TEMPERANCE

Temperance is closely akin to courage; for as courage takes on the pains which wisdom and justice find incidental to their ends, so temperance cuts off remorselessly whatever pleasures are inconsistent with these ends. The temperate man does not hate pleasure, any more than the brave man loves pain, for its own sake. It is not that he loves pleasure less, but that he loves wisdom and justice more. He puts the satisfaction of his permanent and social self over against the fleeting satisfaction of some isolated appetite, and cuts off the little pleasure to gain the lasting personal and social good. There is a remark of Hegel which gives the key to all true temperance; “In the eye of fate all action is guilt.” Since we are finite, to do one thing is to neglect all the competing alternative courses. We cannot have our cake and eat it too. As James puts it: “Not that I would not, if I could, be both handsome and fat and well-dressed and a great athlete, and make a million a year; be a wit, a bon-vivant, and a lady-killer, as well as a philosopher; a philanthropist, statesman, warrior, and African explorer, as well as a ‘tone-poet’ and saint. But the thing is simply impossible. The millionaire’s work would run counter to the saint’s; the bon-vivant and the philanthropist would trip each other up; and the philosopher and the lady-killer could not well keep house in the same tenement of clay. So the seeker of his truest, strongest, deepest self must review the list carefully, and pick out the one on which to stake his salvation.”

Some selection there must be between competing and mutually exclusive goods. The intemperate man selects what appeals most forcibly to his sensibilities at the moment. The temperate man selects that which best fits his permanent ends. There is sacrifice in either case. The intemperate man sacrifices his permanent and social self to his transient physical sensations. The temperate man sacrifices his transient sensations in the interest of his permanent and social self.

The temptation to intemperance comes chiefly from a false abstraction of pleasure. Finding that some function is attended with pleasure, we perform the function for the sake of the pleasure; forgetting to consider the end at which the function aims, or even disregarding the end altogether. A man seizes on one or another of the more sensitive parts of his nervous system, and then contrives ways to produce constant or frequently recurrent excitation. Thus the glutton crams his stomach, not for the nourishment and vigor food will give him, but for the sensations of agreeable taste and comfortable distention. Muscle must toil, brain must plan, and every other organ do extra work, simply to give the palate its transient titillation and provide the stomach its periodic gorge…

The glutton’s gorging of his stomach, in so far as it produces a pleasurable feeling of distention, is good. If a man were nothing but a stomach, and that were made of cast iron, then gluttony would be not only good, but the highest good. If a man were nothing but a bundle of nerves, and these were of wire and never subject to reaction, then the man who could keep them thrilling most intensely by whiskey and champagne would be the wisest one of us all…If one were a heating-plant chimney, then smoking would be the best he could do. If a man need do nothing but dream, then to neglect the joys of opium or cocaine would be superlative folly.

The evil of these things is due to the greater good they displace. Man is more than stomach or nerves or nose or jaws or chimney or dreamer; and indulgence in these departments of his life, unless very carefully controlled and restricted, involves injury to more important sides of life, out of all proportion to the petty gains in these special departments in question…

[But] let us be careful not to confound a wise temperance with the absurdities and rigors of asceticism. Asceticism hates pleasure, and sets itself up as something superior to pleasure. Hence it is sour, narrow, repulsive. As Macaulay said of the Puritans, “They hated bear-baiting, not because it gave pain to the bear, but because it gave pleasure to the spectators;” so the ascetic seems to hate the pleasure there is in things, and to begrudge other people their joys and consolations.

True temperance is modest. It is nothing in itself, but, like courage, simply the handmaid of wisdom and justice to carry out their commands. Temperance does not hate pleasure. Temperance loves pleasure more wisely — that is all. The temperate man recognizes that the pleasure of an act is a pretty sure indication that the act has some elements of good. But temperance denies that pleasure is an indication of the relative worth of different acts. Reason, not pleasure alone, must decide that point. Temperance never cuts off an indulgence, unless it be to save some greater and more valuable interest of life. Temperance is always, if it is modest, and keeps its proper place as the handmaid of wisdom, engaged in cutting off a lesser to save a greater good. Its weapon and symbol is the pruning knife; and its aim and justification is that the vine of life may bear more and better fruit. To erect temperance into a positive principle, to be merely a temperance man or woman, to cut off the fair leaves of pleasure merely for the sake of cutting them off, is monstrous, unnatural, perverse. The great moral motive power of life must lie in the positive and pleasurable interests which wisdom and justice and faith and love lay hold upon. To cast out evil as an end in itself is as futile as to try to drive the air out of a room with a fan.

Temperance, indeed, often finds itself arrayed against the lower and intenser forms of pleasure. That is because, for purposes of her own, Nature has attached the keenest pleasures to those instincts which are most fundamental to the preservation of the individual and the perpetuation of the species. But temperance, if it be wise, — if, that is, it be truly moral — must ever justify itself by those personal and social goods at which wisdom and justice aim. Hence temperance, though an important virtue in its place, is yet a strictly subordinate one. No man can amount to much without constant practice of stern self-denial and rigid self-control. But a man who does nothing but that; the man who erects temperance into a positive principle, who believes that the pruning knife can bear fruit of itself, and despises the rich soil that feeds the roots and the sweet sap that nourishes the branches of the vine of life, is no man at all. The measure and value of our temperance is, not the indulgences which we lop off from the branches of life here and there, but the beauty and sweetness and worth of the fruit which is borne by our lives as a whole.

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From The Cardinal Virtues, 1902
By William De Witt Hyde

COURAGE

If man were merely a mind, wisdom to see particular desires in the light of their permanent consequences to self, and justice to weigh the interests of self to the impartial scales of a due regard for the interests of others, would together sum up all virtue. Knowledge, in these two forms, would be virtue, as Socrates taught.

We feel, however, as well as know. Nature, for purposes of her own, has placed the premium of pleasure on the exercise of function, and attached the penalty of pain to both privation of such exercise on the one hand, and over-exertion on the other. Nature, too, has adjusted the scale of intensity of pleasures and pains to her own ends; placing the keenest rewards and the severest penalties on those appetites which, like nutrition and reproduction, are most essential to the survival of the individual and the race; thus enforcing by her rough process of natural selection a crude wisdom and justice of her own. Moreover, these premiums and penalties were adjusted to the needs of the race at a stage of evolution when scanty and precarious food supply and a high death rate, due to the combined inroads of war, famine, and pestilence, rendered nutrition and reproduction of vastly more relative urgency, in comparison with other interests, than they are to-day.

Pleasure and pain, therefore, though reliable guides in the life of an animal struggling for existence, are not reliable guides for men in times of artificial plenty and elaborate civilization. To follow the strongest appetites, to seek the intensest pleasures and shun the sharpest pains, is simply to revert to a lower stage of evolution, and live the life of a beast. Hence that combat of the moral nature with the cosmic process to which Mr. Huxley recently recalled our attention; or rather, that combat of man with himself which Paul and Augustine, Plato and Hegel, have more profoundly expressed. This fact that Nature’s premiums and penalties are distributed on an entirely different principle from that which wisdom and justice mark out for the civilized man renders it necessary for wisdom and justice to summon to their aid two subordinate virtues — courage and temperance: courage to endure the pains which the pursuit of wisdom and justice involves; temperance to cut off the pleasures which are inconsistent with the ends which wisdom and justice set before us.

The wide, permanent ends at which justice and wisdom aim often involve what is in itself, and for the present, disagreeable and painful. The acquisition of a competence involves hard work, when Nature calls for rest; the solution of a problem requires us to be wide awake, when Nature urges sleep; the advocacy of a reform involves unpopularity, when Nature suggests the advantages of having the good opinion of our fellows; the life of the country calls for the death of the soldier, when Nature bids him cling to life by running away.

Now, since we are not ascetics, we must admit that per se pleasure is preferable to pain. If it were a question between rest and work when weary, between sleep and waking when tired out, between popularity and unpopularity, between life and death, every sensible man would choose the first alternatives as a matter of course. Wisdom and justice, however, see the present and partial pain as part of a wider personal and social good, and order that the pain be endured. True courage, therefore, is simply the executor of the orders of wisdom and justice. The wise and just man, who knows what he wants, and is bound to get it at all costs, is the only man who can be truly brave. For the strength of one’s courage is simply the strength of the wise and just aims which he holds. All bravery not thus rooted and grounded in the vision of some larger end to be gained is mere bravado and bluster.

Of the many applications of courage, two of the simplest will suffice for illustration: the courage of space, to take the pains to keep things in order; and the courage of time, to be punctual, or even ahead of the hour, when a hard task has to be done.

Even if our life is a small, sheltered one, even if we have only our house or rooms to look after, things tend to get out of order, to pile themselves up in heaps, to get out of our reach and into each other’s way. To leave things in this chaos is both unwise and unjust; for it will trouble us in the future, and trouble the people who have to live with us. Yet it costs pain and effort to attack this chaos and subject it to order. Endurance of pain, in the name of wisdom and justice, to secure order for our own future comfort and the comfort of our family and friends, is courage. On the other hand, to leave things lying in confusion around us; to let alien forces come into our domain and encamp there in insolent defiance of ourselves and our friends, is a shameful confession that things are stronger than we. To be thus conquered by dead material things is as ignominious a defeat as can come to a man. The man who can be conquered by things is a coward in the strict ethical sense of the term; that is, he lacks the strength of will to bear the incidental pains which his personal and social interests put upon him.

The courage of time is punctuality. When there is a hard piece of work to be done, it is pleasanter far to sit at ease for the present, and put off the work. “The thousand nothings of the hour” claim our attention. The coward yields to “their stupefying power,” and the great task remains forever undone. The brave man brushes these conflicting claims into the background, stops his ears until the sirens’ voices are silent, stamps on his feelings as though they were snakes in his path, and does the thing now which ever after he will rejoice to have done. In these crowded modern days, the only man who “finds time” for great things is the man who takes it by violence from the thousands of petty, local temporary claims, and makes it serve the ends of wisdom and justice.

There are three places where one may draw the line for getting a piece of work done. One man draws it habitually a few minutes or hours or days after it is due. He is always in distress, and a nuisance to everybody else. There is no dignity in a life that is as perpetually behind its appointments as a tail is in the rear of a dog.

It is very risky — ethically speaking, it is cowardly — to draw the line at the exact date when the work is due; for then one is at the mercy of any accident or interruption that may overtake him at the end of his allotted time. If he is sick or a friend dies, or unforeseen complications arise, he is as bad off as the man who deliberately planned to be late, and almost as much to blame. For a man who leaves the possibility of accident and interruption out of account, and stakes the welfare of himself and of others on such miscalculation, is neither wise nor just; he is reckless rather than brave. Even if accidents do not come, he is walking on the perilous edge all the time; his work is done in a fever of haste and anxiety, injurious alike to the quality of the work and the health of the worker.

The man who puts the courage of punctuality into his work will draw the line for finishing a piece of work a safe period inside the time when it is actually due. If one forms the habit and sticks to it, it is no harder to have work done ten days, or at least one day, ahead of time than to finish it at the last allowable minute. Then, if anything happens, it does no harm. This habit will save literary workers an incalculable amount of anxiety and worry. And it is the wear and tear of worry and hurry, not the amount of calm, quiet work, that kills such men before their time.

I am aware that orderliness and punctuality are not usually regarded as forms of courage. But the essential element of all courage is in them — the power to face a disagreeable present in the interest of desirable permanent ends. They are far more important in modern life than the courage to face bears or bullets. They underlie the more spectacular forms of courage. The man who cannot reduce to order the things that are lying passively about him, and endure the petty pains incidental to doing hard things before the sheer lapse of time forces him to action, is not the man who will be calm and composed when angry mobs are howling about him, or who will go steadily on his way when greed and corruption, hypocrisy and hate, are arrayed to resist him. For whether in the quiet of a study and the routine of an office, or in the turmoil of a riot or a strike, true courage is the ready and steadfast acceptance of whatever pains are incidental to securing the personal and public ends that are at stake.

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