文档介绍：John Jacob Astor

John Jacob Astor
BY ELBERT HUBBARD
1
John Jacob Astor
LITTLE JOURNEYS
Victor Hugo says, ``When you open a school, you close a prison.''
This seems to require a little explanation. Victor Hugo did not have
in mind a theological school, nor yet a young ladies' seminary, nor an
English boarding-school, nor a military academy, and least of all a
parochial institute. What he was thinking of was a school where people--
young and old-- were taught to be self-respecting, self-reliant and
efficient--to care for themselves, to help bear the burdens of the world, to
assist themselves by adding to the happiness of others.
Victor Hugo fully realized that the only education that serves is the
one that increases human efficiency, not the one that retards it. An
education for honors, ease, medals, degrees, titles, position--immunity--
may tend to exalt the individual ego, but it weakens the race and its gain
on the whole is nil.
Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service, gets
great returns. Action and reaction are equal, and the radiatory power of
the s balances their attraction. The love you keep is the love you
give away.
A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and
a cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware
store and remarked, ``Lemme see your razors.''
The clerk smiled pleasantly and asked, ``Do you want a razor to shave
with?''
``Naw,'' said the colored person, ``--for social purposes.''
An education for social purposes is n't of any more use than a razor
purchased for a like use. An education which merely fits a person to prey
on society, and occasionally slash it up, is a predatory preparation for a life
of uselessness, and closes no prison. Rather it opens a prison and takes
captive at least one man. The only education that makes free is the one
that tends to human efficiency. Teach children to work, play, laugh,
fletcherize, study, think, an