Page:Harper's New Monthly Magazine - v108.djvu/1024

960 of remorse—eyes which no mother had ever kissed—eyes which had opened—

And then the eyes of Philip Grayson could not see those other eyes which were before him, and he put up his hand to break the blinding mist—little caring what those men upon the platform would think of him, little thinking what effect the words which were crowding into his heart would have upon his candidacy. But one thing was vital to him now: to bring upon that ugly chasm the levelling forces of a throbbing humanity, and to make those boys who were of his clay feel that a being who had fallen and risen again, a being for whom life would always mean a falling and a rising again, was standing before them, and—not as the embodiment of a distant goodness, not as a pattern, but as one among them, verily as man to man—was telling them a few things which his own life had taught him were true.

It was his very consecration which made it hard to begin. He was fearful of estranging them in the beginning, of putting between them and him that very thing he was determined there should not be. And it was not easy to unlock the chamber of one's heart when that chamber held much of which the world did not know.

"I have a strange feeling," he said, with a winning little smile which had helped the candidate for Governor up many a round, "that if I were to open my heart to-day, just open it clear up the way I'd like to if I could, that you boys would look into it, and then jump back in a scared kind of way and cry, 'Why—that's me!' You would be a little surprised—wouldn't you?—if you could look back and see the kind of boy I was, and find I was much the kind of boy you are?

"Do you know what I think? I think hypocrisy is the worst thing in the world. I think it's worse than stealing, or lying, or any of the other bad things you can name. And do you know where I think lots of the hypocrisy comes from? I think it comes from the so-called self-made men—from the real good men, the men who say, 'I haven't got one bad thing charged up to my account.'

"Now the men out campaigning for me call me a self-made man. Your superintendent just now spoke of my integrity, of the confidence reposed in me, and all that. But do you know what is the honest truth? If I am any kind of a man worth mentioning, if I am deserving of any honor, any confidence, it is not because I was born with my heart filled with good and beautiful things, for I was not. It is because I was born with much in my heart that we call the bad, and because, after that bad had grown stronger and stronger through the years it was unchecked, and after it had brought me the great shock, the great sorrow of my life, I began then, when older than you boys are now, to see a little of that great truth, which you can put, briefly, into these words: 'There is good and there is bad in every human heart, and it is the struggle of life to conquer the bad with the good.' What I am trying to say is, that if I am worthy any one's confidence to-day, it is because, having seen that truth, I have been able, through never ceasing trying, through slow conquering, to crowd out some of the bad, and to make room for a little of the good.

"You see," he went on, three hundred pairs of eyes hard upon him now, "some of us are born to a harder struggle than others. There are people who study what is called ethics who might make a fuss about that statement, and there are lots of people who would object to my saying it to you, even if I believed it. They would say you would make the fact of being born with much against which to struggle an excuse for being bad. But look here a minute; if you were born with a body not as strong as other boys' bodies, if you couldn't run as far, or jump as high, you wouldn't be eternally saying, 'I can't be expected to do much; I wasn't born right.' Not a bit of it! You'd make it your business to get as strong as you could, and you wouldn't make any parade of the fact that you weren't as strong as you should be. We don't like people who whine, whether it's about weak bodies or weak souls.

"I've been sitting here this afternoon wondering what to say to you boys. I had intended telling some funny stories about things which happened to me when I was a boy. But for some reason a sort of serious mood has come over me, and I