ot be free.
You have ceased to make work gladsome, and you toil and make others
toil with you, and you all well nigh faint from weariness and disgust.
You are slave and slave-owner, for to own slaves is to be one.
But the artist is free and he works in joy, and to him all things are
good and all days are holy. The great inventors, thinkers, poets,
musicians and artists have all been men of deep religious natures; but
their religion has never been a formalized, restricted, ossified
religion. They did not worship at set times and places. Their religion
has been a natural and spontaneous blossoming of the intellect and
emotions--they have worked in love, not only one day in the week, but
all days, and to them the groves have always and ever been God's
first temples.
Let us work to make men free! Am I bad because I want to give you
freedom, and have you work in gladness instead of fear?
Do not hesitate to work on Sunday, just as you would think good thoughts
if the spirit prompts you. For work is, at the last, only the expression
of your thought, and there can be no better religion than good work.
Initiative
The world bestows its big prizes, both in money and honors, for but one
thing. And that is Initiative. What is Initiative? I'll tell you: It is
doing the right thing without being told. But next to doing the right
thing without being told is to do it when you are told once. That is to
say, carry the Message to Garcia! There are those who never do a thing
until they are told twice: such get no honors and small pay. Next, there
are those who do the right thing only when necessity kicks them from
behind, and these get indifference instead of honors, and a pittance for
pay. This kind spends most of its time polishing a bench with a
hard-luck story. Then, still lower down in the scale than this, we find
the fellow who will not do the right thing even when some one goes along
to show him how, and stays to see that he does it; he is always out of a
job, and receives the contempt he deserves, unless he has a rich Pa, in
which case Destiny awaits near by with a stuffed club. To which class do
you belong?
The Disagreeable Girl
England's most famous dramatist, George Bernard Shaw, has placed in the
pillory of letters what he is pleased to call "The Disagreeable Girl."
And he has done it by a dry-plate, quick-shutter process in a manner
that surely lays him liable for criminal libel in the assize of
high
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