The Sun SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 1928 THE CURSE OF SUCCESS

Sun (Auckland), Volume II, Issue 430, 11 August 1928, Page 8

The Sun SATURDAY, AUGUST 11, 1928 THE CURSE OF SUCCESS

IS the American man with all his zeal for dollar success a personal triumph to be envied? Those who are enamoured of American prosperity and ape American ideals and habits should pause in their wistful admiration for a moment or two and look at the vivid story told in the London “Spectator” by the novelist, Miss Mary Borden. It is a revealing demonstration of the curse of success.

There is no difficulty in visualising the picture of the American world. The place and its polyglot people are the most stupendous objects on the horizon of the twentieth century. A skyscraper is the national emblem, and down among the ceaseless roar of machinery and blatant progress the average American man may be detected, fighting for money and the power that money buys, fighting for extravagant pleasure, fighting and tussling relentlessly for his life. The American scramble for material success leaves no time for anything really peaceful other than a restless desire for peace and the lost ways of the Pilgrim Fathers. As Miss Borden asks and answers her own question: “What is the American man fighting for and what is he fighting against? He thinks that he is fighting for success, for money, to win out in the greatest game on earth.”

And it undoubtedly is an alluring game, so magnetic in its power of attraction that thousands of ambitious people even in comparative!y quiet countries like the British Dominions far beyond the roar of the United States sit up o’ nights studying the trick of American efficiency, seeking with a frenzy of enthusiasm to become successful go-getters. It is admitted that Americans enjoy the greatest game on earth for a time. They play with oil, wheat, motor-cars, railways, and new cures with some of the zest with which boys play with marbles and mechanical puzzles. Money comes quickly and each inflow of the financial tide creates more and newer excitement. The process goes on, tirelessly, progressively, almost faultlessly (though here and there wealth gets fouled with corruption or crookedness until popular conscience flings a millionaire or two to the dogs of poverty). Such gaps, however, are filled quickly in the vast movement toward a pile of treasures on earth. But reaction comes. A big price has to be paid for big success. The amazingly successful American man gets caught in the whirring machinery of rich business and “he turns to fat quickly and goes bald, and at forty his women find him a bore, for he is ignorant of everything except business, and they are not interested in his business.” And the man who has shot up from slums like a firebolt. out of a volcano, or the fine, eager lad who hiked across prairie and desert to get into the great dollar game appears at last “as a captain of industry, a nervous dyspeptic and an old man at fifty, but a millionaire.” If it be true that the future of the human race is being tried out in America, it becomes the duty of everybody outside to study the test with the utmost care and closeness of attention, and decide whether the acquisition of material success is really the greatest game on earth. The foundational idealism of Americans was simple enough, and may be pictured most easily as a log cabin, a farm, a clearing in the forest, political freedom, and poets singing about laughing water and the conquest of the Red Indian. But there is monotony even in ideal log cabins, homesteads, clearings in the forest, and the romantic disappearance of Sioux warriors and lovely Hiawathas. So one can understand the American passion for something livelier than the faith of the Pilgrim Fathers, though, to he sure, scalping was lively enough while it lasted. Still there is a vast difference between the austere simplicity of America’s pioneers and the gigantic achievement in the form of skyscrapers, gold, bootleggers, automobiles, cinemas, and “The Trial of Mary Dugan.” As for political freedom, surely there must be something better in a nation of 120 millions that is not yet a distinctive race than Big Bill Thompson of Chicago. So by way of contrast, the only way to arrive at dependable values, we must look at the British game of life. Is it being played right, and is its purpose high? The Rotary. Club probably would answer without hesitation that all is well with the game and the goal certain, but that response would merely be American idealism talking with an English accent. Perhaps it would be better to take Sir James Barrie’s view of British life and aims as presented recently to an assembly of Rhodes scholars, and set life’s goal in the centre of that Scot’s pawky wisdom. This is to find out what your particular speck in life is and to believe that “it would be wiser . . to stop short of greatness” for, “to be very able is safer.” So far, 1,300 students have secured the advantage of Cecil Rhodes’s beneficence, and all of them were given it in the hope—perhaps a dream—that three years at Oxford and a look-in on Europe might enrich the character of New World life and teach even the American man that moral victory is a better triumph than stupendous material success. The great game need hold no mystery for questing youth. It is only necessary to kindle youth’s torches at the hallowed altar-fire of loyalty and honest service.