Shrapnel (Pointed Humor)

1916

A doctor's pills may cure some ill — but not ill humor.

Courtship is a game in which a girl plays her heart against a man's diamond.

If women looked like the pictures in fashion magazines men would take to the woods.

It isn't necessary for a man to be a hypnotist in order to get his mind concentrated on the toothpick.

If time were money, the average man would have his watch geared to run forty-eight hours a day.

A young widow knows that the easiest way to catch a successor to the late lamented is to run away from him.

If the phoenix of common sense rises from the ashes of a fool's money the conflagration has not been in vain.

Possibly an honest man might be otherwise if an opportunity worth while were to knock at his front door.

Will Women Abandon Love?

1910

Gertrude Atherton, the novelist, has been writing for Harper's Bazar on "The Woman in Love." In her first two papers Mrs. Atherton discusses those women in history whose love episodes have been the most striking thing about them. In her third paper, however, not yet published, she makes some predictions concerning the place that love will take in the future.

Mrs. Atherton does not go so far as Mrs. Belmont, who predicts that there will be a war between the sexes, due to the fact that men will not give women the suffrage. Mrs. Atherton believes and states, however, that from now on the love element will be a far less vital thing in women's lives than it has been heretofore. She thinks that the broadening out of feminine interests, the entrance of women into new fields, the intellectual development of women, are all factors which will fill women's lives to the comparative exclusion of that other factor which heretofore has been supposed to be "her whole existence."


The Busy Ant

Ants have six ears, which are located at about the queerest places imaginable — the legs. The ants are deaf to all sounds made by the vibration of the air, but detect the slightest possible vibrations of solid matter. This is supposed to be to their advantage. So sensitive are their feet that they can detect the drop of a small birdshot dropped on a table from a height of six inches and about 14 feet distant from an artificial nest placed at the other end of the table. The ant also has an elaborate array of noses.

Office Boy Always Potential Boss

1910

By Jonas Howard

"Every office boy is a potential office manager. Every clerk is a potential head of the firm. The talk that the day of opportunity is past is all rot. The chance to 'work up' is as good as ever. It always is up to the boy."

These little extracts from the philosophy of James B. McMahon, whose recent election as first vice-president of the American Cotton Oil Company of New York supplemented his old position as vice-president of the N. K. Fairbank Company of Chicago, are worth the reading and remembering. The difference between them and the casual optimisms of the ordinary giver of "advice to the young" is that they emanate from a man who has the right to talk, especially along this line. Mr. McMahon does not say what he does simply because he believes it. He knows. Mr. McMahon began his career as an office boy with the firm of which he now comes near being the head.

The story of McMahon is a good, inspiring idea with which to begin the new year. It reeks with hope and optimism and has results to back it up. McMahon now is only 43 years old and from a start humble enough to suit anybody he has mounted pretty near to the heights of business success.

He was 14 when he began in the New York office of the Fairbank company. That was 28 years ago. There was nothing spectacular or meteoric about the boy. There are probably thousands of office kids around the country at this moment who show as much promise as did he. He was just a common office boy who had to work for a living and he did nothing but work, work hard, for his subsequent promotions.

He moved naturally from ordinary office boy to ordinary clerk and it wasn't until he was placed in charge of the export shipping business that the future began to promise much. There he displayed the ability that won him the confidence of his superiors and in 1896 he was appointed general sales manager and came to Chicago.

Chicago has been the scene of his most important activities, but he had won his spurs before he came here. It is easy enough to continue as a success; where the thousands fail is in making the big step upward.

No Monopoly of Brains

1905

Hopeful Sign That Proves This the Age of Opportunity

One of the most hopeful signs of the times is the apparent decay of the breed of so-called great men — those mighty personalities that in former times stood out like a solitary tree in a vast prairie.

The reason for it, of course, is the distinction of all those old-time monopolies of brains which stunted all human beings except a few who, by chance rather than by superiority of fibre, grew and developed. There are thousands, literally thousands, of men now living who, if they had lived a century or so ago and had done a work similar to which they are doing without any very sonorous fanfare upon the trumpets of fame, would have been the talk of the world and the main topic of history.

And how many of the so-called great achievements of so-called great statesmen, soldiers and thinkers of former times would be impossible to-day, because those achievements depended chiefly upon the ignorance and incapacity of the overwhelming mass of the men of their day!

Truly, this is the age of opportunity. — Saturday Evening Post.