THREE CELEBRATED STRAWS.

Evening Star, Issue 19274, 12 June 1926, Page 2

THREE CELEBRATED STRAWS.

We are apt to mistake the relative proportion of things; wo honor mediocrity and let genius dio in starvation. Wo celebrate-the exploits of a jockey or a boxer, but the patient, plodding workman, who builds our hbuses, our bridges, and our boats, goes unrecorded to his forgotten grave. "Wo have eyes for the groat and the mighty, but wo are blind to the small and tho obscure, without which the others could never have won their fame. So we propose to put in a word for the latter. We propose to celebrate three straws. There is, indeed, a sense in which they have already attained renown, but in another they have not. Tho first of these straws is one that stands as a symbol of littleness, of nothingness. Thus Chaucer says: “I set not a straw by all your dreamings.” There is a saying common enough in Ireland. When a man is irritated he would sometimes threaten: “For two straws I would bash your head.” Thus this straw is tho symbol of a thing of no weight, no importance, no value. But, after all, is there any such tiling? The straw itself, as wo shall see after a bit, has immense weight. And it has value also. “Romo,” writes Richard Jeffries, “ thought more in her latter days of grapes and oysters and mullets, that change color as they die, and singing girls and flute playing and cynic versos of Horace—anything rather than corn. Romo is no more, and tho lords of the world are they that have tho mastership of wheat.” The great curso of our time is that we set little store by what seems worthless. There is more value in what wo allow to go to waste than in what we conserve. Mr Balfour, summing up tho industrial progress of the nineteenth century, said we were “ little better than splendid spendthrifts.” And wo are still in the business and going strong. There is abundance for everybody and to spare if we would obey tho Master’s injunction and follow tho example of Nature to “gather up the fragments.” If this were done nobody need be in want.* In our cities we are pouring our wealth away in their sewage and burning up in their coal. It has been calculated that iu Great Britain alone “the amount of nitrogen annually lost would he equivalent in tho form of bread to five thousand millions of quartern loaves.” As for coal, coming generations will consider us semi-sav-ages, so wasteful has been our destruction of this material. Of the destruction of onr forests by fires and our acres of soils reduced to permanent slag heaps in tho pursuit of gold little need be said. It is too deplorable for words. America throws away iu its dust pans over £50,000 worth of rubbish annually. Modern research is revealing to us that what wo call useless and waste and even disgusting things are yet of immense value. For instance, we have been accustomed to think that rotten eggs are only useful about election times, though there is an uneasy suspicion that they reappear in certain forms of cookery and cake. But a new demand has sprung up for them since it has been discovered they make excellent polish for shoes, and the whites of them are good for tho alburaenising of photographic paper. So we might go on to show in endless detail that our straw symbol of tho useless and insignificant is really a celebrated pointer to tho rich and invaluable. But wo must find space for our other two celebrated straws. ***** “It is tho last straw breaks the camel’s back.” Why? It is not any heavier than all tho other straws that preceded it. No; but it is they who enable it to accomplish the feat. Without them it would not bo possible. It is tho few last feet on the top of Flagstaff that give it its name. But those rest on all beneath it, and without them tho others would have no foundation. Climbing the Alps the guide sometimes tells tho climbers at certain places not to speak—to keep absolute silence. Why ? Because the utterance of a word may start an avalanche. It may bo so delicately poised that a breath of air may topple it over. Lord Kelvin, speaking once of the far-reaching effects of strains and vibrations, said: “I lay this little piece of chalk upon a granite mountain, and it strains tho whole earth.” The principle underlying this last straw proverb reaches far and deop. lor instance, v/o sometimes speak of sudden conversions and sudden collapses. We doubt tho former; wo are amazed at tho latter. Neither the doubt nor the amazement is justified. There aro no dich things as a sudden conversion or a sudden collapse. It is only our ignorance that makes us think so. The sudden conversion is tho result of a long, long series of causes, working out of our sight, and even out of the very consciousness of tho individual, St. Paul, of course, is tho typical example. But there are hundreds and thousands of others. Masefield, in his ‘ Everlasting Mercy,’ gives a powerful sketch of an abandoned profligate suddenly arrested in his wicked career—struck down in a moment like his namesake, Saul of Tarsus:

I did not think. I did not strive; The deep peace burnt my mo alive. The bolted door had broken in; I know that I had done with sin. The records of the Salvation Army and the history of religion abound with examples such as these. Some slight thing—a word, a song, the scent of a flower, an old music tune, or such like—and the bolted doors fly open and the soul looks out into a new world. But the crisis has been prepared for by all

the long preceding years. The train was slowly being laid, and these seemingly trivial things were but the match that fired it. So it is also with the opposite of sudden conversion to good: the sudden collapse into evil. We are often astonished at this. A man whom the community has held in great respect—a seemingly honorable and trustworthy person occupying high positions in the city and the church—suddenly is revealed as a scoundrel. The cloak drops off, and he passes in a day, an.hour, from the seat of, honor to the felon’s dock. Hero, again, the suddenness of the collapse is only seeming. We should cease to wonder at it if we knew all the secret forces that were tunnel,ling away underneath the outward show. “ Just as a bubble in the casting may cause a flaw in the steel and occasion a dire catastrophe, so some secret frailty of faith, reservation of surrender, sympathy with evil, or undefined sickness of soul may bring about in the hour of temptation surprising and humiliating failure.” We see the same thing on a larger scale in national catastrophes. An •unknown, student in an obscure town—to multitudes, anyway—fired a pistol at a State official, and the shot was hoard round the world. It created a universal war. But here, again, the principle of the last straw is clearly seen, it was the final result of a long process of preparation. Wo know that now of Germany, But the other nations had also been accumulating those elements of thought and character that when Germany struck the match inevitably exploded, too. The great war broke out suddenly, but the materials that made it possible were the alow accumulation of years, it was the last result of a long series of events stretching away back into the unhistoric past. Evolution has its apocalypses. The hidden story of tho quiet days is verified in catastrophe. That is why the catastrophe form's a judgment, a disclosure, for it forces to tho front that which has been hidden.” And our power to meet and master it depends not on what it is, but on how we have been dealing with tho opportunities offered to us in normal and quiet times. * * * * “ A straw shows what way the wind blows,” This tho third of our celebrated straws. It shows the way the wind blows because it yields. It allies itself with tho higher and greater power. So it becomes the symbol of how little things reveal the significance of groat things. Science has made us familiar with a whole series of these. The magnetic needle guides the ship through the perils of the pathless ocean. “The seismograph is an alarm proclaiming tho stealthy steps of earthquake and volcano.” Barometers and weather gauges and charts announce to those who understand cyclonic disturbances. And it is the same in life. A little thing indicates character—its greatness or its wickedness. Solomon, speaking of a worthless man, a man of iniquity, says; “He walketh with a Howard month; bo winkethwith his eyes; ho spoaketh with his feet; ho maketh signs with his fingers.” How winks, nods, shoulder shrugs say what words do not I “The human face is a magazine of signals ready at a moment’s notice for purposes of good or evil.” The very foot can be made to speak. Spurgeon, we are told, liked to preach from a platform because, as he said, there was abundant eloquence in a man’s logs of which he liked to got the benefit. And hero wo bethink ourselves of the legend connected with tho Module of St. Sophia, in Constantinople. It was built by the Emperor Justinian, and is said to have cost twenty million pounds. On a marble stone above the entrance door the Emperor caused the architect to carve the words “Justinian gives this house to (led.” On tho opening day tho Emperor looked up proudly to see tho inscription which recorded his gift, a-nd glory. To his astonishment and wrath, ho read instead the words “ Tho Widow Euphrasia gives this to God.” Indignantly bo inquired how this had come about. Search wan made for the widow. She was found—a poor, aged widow woman living at the foot of the hill on which the church was built. Brought trembling into the presence of the august Emperor, be demanded bow she dared to change the inscription. She said: “Sire, I only threw a little straw, which I plucked from the mattress on which I lay, before the oxen that dragged up the stones to the building.” The Emperor replied: “Thy gift was little, but the great King Who lived and died humble has accepted thy gift, for it was the gilt of love; but Ho has rejected mine, for it was tho gift of pride.” It will be well for us all to make' sure that the straws which show the way ami bent of our character may win ns a like commendation.