THE GREAT ESTATE OF A LITTLE WORD.

Otago Witness, Issue 2928, 27 April 1910, Page 72

THE GREAT ESTATE OF A LITTLE WORD.

A very little world—so small that there is only one smaller; so important that only that one smaller word takes precedence —"No' and "I," and on the relations between " No" and " I " all the weal or woe of life depends; Naturally enough, this little word has no dealings with Silence. Complaisance and consent have their .traffic with her; then sly dealings with eloquent eyes, with smiling" lips and clinging palms ; but for the vital strength of "no " there must be the freedom of speech : no room for misapprehension for misrepresentation; no weak-kneed excuse for cowardise, no room for doubt. It is "No" or nothing.

We say of a good painter that he " knows what to leave out," for the beauty of a picture depends as much on what is left out as on what is put in. And, again, in the more prosaic details of daily life it is what is left out that counts. We all love, because we all understand, those plaintive little verses that find a place in the scrap-book of most womanly women . —■ It isn't the thing you've done-, dear, But the thing you've left undone. That gives you a bit of a heartache At the setting of the sun. We are, most of us, neither heroes nor rascals, neither saints nor sinners. Our faults are, perhaps, more of omission than of commission. . We are more easily described by negatives than positives; by what we are not rather than by what we are. We all know dozens of people (just as they know us) of whom it is difficult to say anything positive, but concerning whom it is easy to be quite fluent iLwe adopt the negative form of description, thus : "No. I certainly should not call her pretty." " Oh! neither fair nor dark, I should say." "Well, not exactly tall, but not short. ' "Clever? I shouldn't call her clever, I think." "What is she like?" "Oh! just a nice girl, I think." There it all is—a blurred sketch in negatives. You know precisely the kind of person you are going to meet. You know that she will wear the same kind of suit, talk the same kind of talk, read the same kind of books as a score of other people you have already met in the same place or set. It is the same with " the common or garden variety " of man, the clerks in banking or mercantile houses, in insurance or Government offices, who are moved from place to place in the course of what the local press unfailingly terms " well-deserved promotion." They are not very witty, or noticeably wise; they are not actually handsome; then tailor is not proud of them, and they are lucky if their own sex ignore their commonplaceness by the saving grace of the verdict, "He's a white man." and women, with their more critical instinct, tolerantly pronounce him " not bad." That is the most that the majority of us should expect. Sometimes there is a positive touch which brings up the study in negatives to a more striking tone. It is found in some such phrase as, " a rattling good tennis player," or " He's a good all-round sport," " She's very musical," or " He's a bit of a bookworm." But failing these outward and visible signs —which, after all, are comprised in a sentence —we come to essentials —and negatives. When we have found out what our new acquaintance is not we begin to know what he is. Yet all these useful negatives, which play such a much larger part in our lives than we are willing to admit, do not touch the substance of life; are but the thin shadow of that vital word which, spoken at the critical moment, cuts like the sculptor's chisel the obscuring surplus, leaving the true character sharply, cleanly denned. The very humility of our daily prayer, "Lead us not into temptation," implies, of course, temptation too strong for us—temptation to which we have not the wall-

power to say " No !" and to which the word of salvation is throttled to the silence of damnation. It may be—it is—often as much as we can compass to shut the door on temptation by saying "No!" to the tempter. And the reason is that there is so often the, traitor within the gates, the "!'* whose longing and desires are all on the side of surrender, and who knows with diabolical intuition every "trick of the trade " from the out-and'-out truism that " silence gives consent" to the frequentlyforgotten warning that " delays ara dangerous." Since it is to ourselves that we must say " No !" more firmly and mora frequently. (than to anyone eles, it is necessary to practise the accomplishment early in life. We cannot be taught too early the comfort, the strength, and peace of being able to say "No!" to ourselves. We think no trouble too great to take in the matter of physical culture OV mental equipment. We see that our girls practice each d<av their full tally of scales and studies ; we remind them of their deep-breathing exercises and their glass of hot milk; but we never say anything to them about learning to say "No! Yet what can be more important? We do worse than this with these young li ves _these boys and girls who are in deed and truth " the very apple of the eye " to us. We not only leave them in ignorance of the absolute necessity of being able to say " No!" to themselves ; we encourage them in never saying it by shirking the saying of it ourselves. One would imagine "that there was something callous, almost brutal, in. the very idea of saying "No!" to .the modern child! "It is bad for a child to cry." " Crying excites poor little Joan. She' is such a sensitive child—all nerves, my dear, iust like me." "Nurse, give Master Jack whatever he is crying for. I never allow him to cry like that. Don't you. knowhow bad it is for little boys to cry V But if Joan and Jack had learnt from the very first that " No " was something final and inflexible, against which tempers,, and tears were alike unavailing, they would have acquiesced in " No" with a sense of conviction which would from very babyhood have invested the word with its true meaning, and lent to those mighty arbiters of fate—father and mother, the people who could say " Yes or "No quietly and inflexibly—an unconscious power and dignity. • Deep in our brains and hearts we respect, we value, and if we may we upon the people who can say "No!" Not shouting it or boasting of it, but just as naturally as the> can say " Yes !" Look for the people who can say " No " and try to make them your friends; they are worth it. Think of the days and the years to come when your boys and girls will tread the thousand paths that lead to a thousand temptations of wealth or of poverty, of joy or of sorrow, of success or adversity, and train them to say " No!" as carefully as you tram their bodies and educate their minds, for it *s a far more vital, thinsr to possess a disciplined will than a perfect body or % cultured mind.