The Farmer And Mechanic

The Swelled Head
Inevitable on a Pinhead
By DOROTHY DIX.

There are no other people in the world who are so monumentally conceited as those who have made failures of their own affairs.

People who have achieved things nearly always go softly and sing small, but those who have fallen down on everything they ever attempted to do go about with clashing cymbals and blowing horns, and curiously enough, the burden of their song is not lamentations over their own mistakes, but advice to others about how to manage their business.

It is one of the most cynically humorous and exasperating things in the world, that the man or woman who has been left at the post in the race of life immediately turns out and begins to hand out sure tips and the way to win.

Nor do they use their own experience to point the moral and adorn the tale. They do not exploit themselves as an awful warning. Far from it!

It does not appear to occur to the failure that his sole value consists in being a sign-post of danger, and so with a blissful lack of appreciation of how ridiculous it is for him to pose as Sir Oracle he calmly hands out helpful hints to everybody that he meets. It takes adamantine nerve to do this, but the failure is one gigantic, throbbing palpitating nerve.

When you ask a successful man for some reliable recipe for success he is very slow to make answer, and when he does, he always says that nobody can tell another person how to achieve things.

"So much depends on your environment," he says, "and your personality, and the peculiar conditions with which you have to contend, that only you, who are on the inside, can really tell what ought to be done, or can be done, at any particular moment."

His First Name is Buttinsky.

The failure doesn't wait for you to ask him for advice. He butts right in.

"Say, old man," he says, "I'll tell you just exactly what you ought to do to make a howling success. You just do so and so. Now take this from me, and you can't fail."

And then he borrows a half-dollar from you for lunch, on the strength of having told you exactly how to make a million, and he goes blithely on his way to scatter rays of sunshine in the shape of advice on other benighted people who are merely getting along pretty well, thank you, in their own particular lines.

It is the man who does not know enough about newspaper work to hold down a good job as a reporter who takes up the time and bores editors to extinction by dropping in on them and telling them just exactly how they should run their papers.

He knows, bless you! although he can never keep a place, just what ought to be done to run a paper up to a billion circulation, and he has not the slightest hesitation in saying so.

It is the man whose wife takes in boarders to support him who drops in at your prosperous grocery and while he absent-mindedly nibbles away at your crackers and cheese, lays down the law to you about how you can make a fortune in less than no time if you will only take his advice.

A Cheap Recipe for Millions.

He tells you that you are making a mistake piking along in a small way, that you ought to branch out and rent another store, and buy some fine delivery wagons, and put in plate-glass front windows, etc., etc.

He never earned a dollar in his life, and you have started with nothing and have accumulated a comfortable fortune, but he is convinced that he knows 10 times as much about the money proposition as you do.

"Who are the critics?" someone asked Disraeli, and he replied: "The men who have failed in literature and art." Even so! But if you really want to know how a book should be written, it takes the man who can't even get a Vox Populi letter into the correspondence column of a newspaper to tell you.

If you burn to know the real interpretation of Hamlet, the only individual who can tell just how Mr. Sothern ought to play the melancholy Dane, and where Forbes-Robertson fails in his interpretation of the role, is some ham actor who can't get a place to pack a spear in the back row in a mob scene.

Nor is there a cracked voice music teacher in the land who doesn't feel perfectly able to tell Tetrazzini how to take a high note, or Mary Garden how to handle her voice.

My, but it sure does grouch these also-rans that the pusillanimous people who are merely doing things won't listen to their advice!

The woman failure is just as free with her counsel as is the man failure.

The mother who has lost 10 children by death is always the lady with an infallible remedy for croup, and who knows exactly how a baby should be fed in its second summer.

"Just give your baby a cucumber to cut its teeth on," I once heard a woman say to a young mother. "That's the way I always did."

"How many children did you raise?" I inquired.

"I had seven," she replied, "and the Lord took them all before any one of them was 5 years old."

Women That Fail Full of Advice.

It is the woman whose children have turned out badly, whose girls have run off and married trifling fellows, and whose sons are barroom loafers, that has the most beautiful theory about how to bring up her family, and whose inspired words on child culture bring tears to the eyes of her listeners at the mothers' clubs.

It is always the woman who looks like the human ragbag who tells you what sort of a dress you ought to buy and the style of a hat that would suit your face.

It is the woman who lives a cat and dog life with her husband, who knows exactly what you should do in order to keep your own husband smoothed down the right way.

It is the woman who is always in debt herself who will give you inside information about how, by the exercise of economy and frugality you could buy an apartment house out of what you could save out of your allowance if you only did as she told you to.

Nine-tenths of the good advice in the world is no good because it is handed out by people who have not been able to make good.

Before anybody undertakes to tell another person just how to manage his own affairs, the least that the oracle can do is to produce a guarantee that he himself has been a success.

The failures should go away back and sit down and keep mum.