The Art of the Ass: by Grove Herbert

              The Art of the Ass By GROVE HERBERT


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THE ART OF THE ASS
 By Grove Herbert



This is a fable that was born in the brain of that old Greek philosopher, Aesop.  This old fellow discovered that, after all, there is little real difference between human animals and the other sorts.  And the more I see of humans the more I am impressed with the similarity that exists between us and the so-called lower animals.




Now this particular Ass was a quadruped.  It is necessary to say this so you may not make a mistake in thinking he was human.  Either there is a lot of humanity in asses or there is a lot of assininity in humans.  And we shall note the resemblance as we go along.




According to the fable the Ass was the only one of his sort in a field in which there were numbers of oxen.  And the Ass pined for the company of his kind with whom he could converse in their more cultured language.  He despised the slow-witted oxen and looked down upon them because they were not university graduates.  He judged them by his own standards, and of course his standards, since they were made by himself, were very high.




The oxen paid very little attention to him.  Although he thought of himself in CAPITAL LETTERS, and would have felt chagrined to see his name in small letters, he was unable to impress the oxen with any sense of his superiority.  They seemed not to bow to him or to show any sense of honor in being in the same field with him.  And to the Ass life became monotonous, prosaic and dull.




One day he had a great idea.  There were lions in that country, and he knew where there was the skin of a dead lion.  Now, he would show those dullard oxen.  He would get that lion skin, wriggle into it and bound out toward the slow-witted oxen.  He would frighten the livers, lights and kidneys out of them.  He would have a great time pretending that he was a lion.





That bloomin' Ass got into the skin of the dead lion and bounded toward the oxen.  They saw him coming, and thought it was the real thing.  If they had stopped to think they must have known that the lumbering gait was not that of a lion, but they didn't think.  They decided they had business away off at the other end of the field.  Up went their tails, down went their heads, and away they skeedaddled.  The Ass went after them, and was having the time of his life getting even with them for the many slights they had put upon him.




But in his enthusiasm he forgot that he was an Ass, and began to believe he was a lion.  And all at once HE BRAYED!




Now, those oxen had heard the roar of a lion, and they knew the sound of it.  Most certainly they knew the bray of the Ass, for they had heard that many times, as the Ass, in his lonliness, had poured out his poetic soul, with no other orchestration than the echoes of his own protest against his immurement.  And as soon as the oxen heard that familiar minor strain, they stopped and conferred.




It is the skin of a lion all right,
 they said.  
But it is the bray of an ass.  More than that, it is the bray of that particular Ass that is with us in the field.  He should be gored.  Let's go!




And they gored that fool Ass to death, and thus he was joined to his fathers who before him did not have sense enough to keep their mouths shut.




I have not given the fable as I read it in college in the original Greek, Bill.  Old Aesop was not so verbose as we in this day of 
loud professions and little deeds.
  But I have enlarged it as seemed to be in keeping with my mood.




Now, that Ass might have lived to a good old age, and in time might have had a spiritual influence upon those oxen, if he had been content to be the Ass that the Lord had made him.  And if he had thought, he might have had a lot more


 fun in keeping up the hoax, but he must have known, if he had had any sense, that he must be discovered for what he was, sooner or later.




Even if he had run the oxen to death he must have been discovered.  But when he forgot himself and BRAYED, that ended the chapter and also the career that might have been his.  The horns of the oxen cut off his life in its prime.  And the vultures had several square meals off his carcass.




The Art of the Ass was spurious.  It wasn't real.  It was false all the way through.  It takes a real artist to pull off a stunt like that, and the Ass was a fake.  He had had no training in art.  And, besides, it would take a lot of training, anyway, for an ass to put over an impersonation of a lion.  Many of our Chautauqua readers and impersonators couldn't do it!




Now, Bill, isn't that just a lot like us humans?  Some business men, in a time of inflation, will plan to gouge and profiteer and skin the dear people, and then retire to live in luxury on their ill-gotten gains.  They become so wrapped up in their schemings that they forget that the people sometimes go on a buyers' strike.  They load themselves with goods from cellar to garret, shove up the prices again, and the bottom drops out, the people go on a strike, and the profiteer goes blooey.




When the bank closes in on him and the sheriff closes him out, there are no tears from the people who have been bilked!




And every manufacturer, every jobber, every wholesaler and every bank learns of it, and the profiteering ass can get no more credit and has to go to work!




He has to sell his car and walk, and his wife has to sell her diamonds, and his daughter has to teach school if she has the sense, and his pampered son has to soil his dainty hands and crack his manicured nails with toil!





And once more the Good Book proves its wisdom where it says:  
HE THAT MAKETH HASTE TO BE RICH HATH AN EVIL EYE!!!




That fool profiteer simply forgot that he was an ass.  His idea of business was utterly diseased.  He forgot that in the long run, safe and sane and permanent business is founded upon service rendered rather than profits exacted.  For the foundation of any permanent business is SERVICE RATHER THAN PROFIT!!!




Render proper service and profits will take care of themselves.




WHO WOULD BE FIRST AMONG YOU, LET HIM BE YOUR SERVANT.  AND WHO WOULD BE CHIEF AMONG YOU, LET HIM BE YOUR MINISTER!!




Who said that, Bill?  Isn't it a fine and sane philosophy?  Well, the GALILEEAN CARPENTER said that, and HE knew life from the first shovel of earth thrown for the foundation of life's building to the last sweep of the paint brush at the pinnacle.




And Abraham Lincoln said:  
You may fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all the time!




Thus has many a profiteer discovered, to his sorrow, and many more of the same sort will weep briny tears before the millennium ushers in the perfect day of human brotherhood!  And no one pities the skunk when he gets it where the buck got the butcher knife!




No one pities the profiteer when he is discovered under a lion's skin.  He is in the same class with Judas Iscariot and Benedict Arnold.  And, a more humiliating thing to him, he is discovered to be a mere ass parading in the skin of a lion.




To be sure he had his day when fawning sycophants smirked and smiled at him, but at the best such a day is a short one.  Real worth is built upon genuine character and moral development.  The


 confidence of one real man is a greater asset than the smiles and smirks of a million hangers-on.



The poorest man on earth is the one who has nothing but wealth—material wealth.  The richest man on earth is the one whose foundation is laid in the esteem and confidence of people worth while.




The man whose wealth is all material is despised, while the man whose wealth is in the confidence of his fellows is hailed as THE REAL THING!




Many a man with little wealth can borrow on his own note, while many another man with money to burn has to come up with security other than his own.




No one but the most egregious ass in human skin will tamper with his honor.  No one but the most assinine ass will neglect his obligations.  And he who neglects his obligations or tampers with his honor will, some time, be discovered as the ass he is.  And the time will come when even we slow-witted oxen will turn and gore him.  Moreover, the one who would dodge responsibility for his own acts, or for the rights of his fellow men, will be branded as a sneak, a poltroon, a moral coward, and worse than the Ass of the fable.




GET THAT, BILL!!!




And now the laboring classes are rubbing their wounds with salve.  Not content with real progress, which is not so fast as their furious philosophies would have it, many have gone off after false gods.  They refused to listen to the counsels of the sages, but became imbued with the passion for power and money.  Many who 
dressed in purple and fine linen and fared sumptuously every day,
 a short while ago, now would be happy to have liver and bacon.  Or just plain liver.




Men of vision in the ranks of labor would have held back to saner paces, but the rank and file would have none of that.  It must be limousines,


diamonds, silk shirts, silk socks, silk underwear, and a six hour day with the wish for four hours later on.  And this with pay enough to go the gait to the devil.




Poorly balanced and violent men preached the rights of the toiler.  Now, as you know, Bill, I have fought all my life for the better things for the workers.  I have espoused Union Labor and the right of collective bargaining and many other things that were, in their day and to my loss, unpopular.  But I have been compelled to open the whole question again.  And you will pardon me when I say that I have been forced to challenge the conscience of the worker, and demand of him where his uncurbed triumph would land me.




In the recent past parlor bolshevists, parlor socialists, parlor anarchists have simpered and slobbered over the condition of the toiler.  These are, too often, blind leaders of the blind.  Their hands are not calloused, although their tongues must be oiled to keep from creaking.  Their jaws must be stuffed with oiled waste to prevent friction.




These are, usually, people of wealth who neither soil their hands with toil nor endanger their patrimonies with gifts to the cause.




They haven't the GUTTZ to take pot luck with the producer!




Mighty few Tolstoys in such bunches of boobs as these!




It is an insult to every honest-to-God toiler to be associated with such 
Peddlers of Piffle!
  Simpering women who should be bearing and rearing children—or should say, out of regard for their kiddies — take up the redemption of the toiler as less irksome than the prosaic things of bearing babies and wiping their noses and kissing their bruises and paddling their posteriors.




Sissy men spout slop and slush in simpering and sickening philosophies, and they wouldn't know a pick from a churn paddle.  I am not saying that there are no women and men of real


character and ability and conscience, even with wealth engaged in striving intelligently to bring about a better social order, for many of my friends of real worth are thus engaged.



But wild men from Borneo and Russia and Germany and Italy, as well as the same breed who disgrace the name AMERICAN, engage in the same mad scramble, and their attempts to create anarchy and confusion do violence to the cause of the honest-to-God workingman.




Listen, Bill.  Thousands of men and women may think and pray and toil for thousands of years, and produce better civilizations, and when in sight of 
the Delectable Mountains,
 some mad fool may incite other mad fools to destroy in a day the constructive achievements of those master builders.  It takes toil and faith and honesty and integrity to rear a building or a civilization.  It takes nothing but the starkest sort of madness, if it have power for but a minute, to destroy all these fruits of faith.




It is history, Bill, that when the so-called 
downtrodden
 get in power, they show more brutality, more cruelty, than their former oppressors.  I do not hold a brief for those who abuse their power, be they patricians or proletarians.  But even today, Lenine and Trotsky are repeating the history of the times when, once in power, the radicalisms of such as they are destroying rather than constructing.




All sorts of oppression must stop, eventually, but it will not stop so long as we are swayed by hate and passion and lust for power.  And we common folks who pay the piper when labor and capital cross swords, will some time knock their heads together to bump a little sense into them.




However, we have compelled capital to terms more consistent with the benefits of the people.  In the days when new territories were opened up a lot of conscienceless Shylocks invaded them with their money.  They loaned it, and the limit was the sky in interest charges.  For the sake of


 justice all those blankety blank money sharks should eat grass or starve.




The state took hold of them and compelled them to take less interest.  No longer can the blood sucker fatten at the misery of helpless women and children in those states.  We tell the railroads what they may charge for freight and passenger and other service.  We do the same thing, increasingly, in all public service corporations.  And we shall go farther yet in such matters.




Thus will capital become the obedient child of the state.  Is it too much to demand, in the name of the people—laws regulating the percentage of profit in business and the rate of wages in industry?




Unless labor and business shall be sane and constructive in their aims and operations, the state will be compelled to do just this.  And I should not like to see state paternalism go so far as that.  But merchants and working people will bring that about unless they heed the signs of the times.




What little I have is invested in long term securities.  The greater part was invested before the war.  The returns were static all through the period of inflation.  Then I bought all the Government Bonds I could during the war, and I paid a hundred cents on every dollar.  Yet, during the inflation, I could not purchase, with my income, one half of what I could before the toot.




At the same time, when I needed work done I had to pay three times what I had paid before.  I was one of the millions caught in the pinch, and I had to pay.




I'm not knocking, Bill.  I am just stating a fact.  I never speculated.  My little money has come through the strictest sort of economy.  And I cannot live on the income of my small savings.  Once in awhile I have a little waiting for a conservative investment, and then I lend it if I can.





Murphy has been doing odd jobs for me for years.  He needed the money, and frequently I have had him work for me because I knew he was out of a job and needed money to support his family.  During the toot Murphy shoved up his price to three times what I had been paying.  At the same time he owed me some money that I had loaned to him at six per cent.  Now, if I had asked Murphy—if the law even had permitted it—eighteen per cent, Murphy would have brained me with a shovel.  Yet he charged me three times what I had formerly paid him.




Now, eighteen per cent interest would drive the whole financial world into chaos.  AND THE EXCESSIVE WAGES OF THE INFLATION PERIOD ALMOST DID THAT FOR US!!  Neither excessively high interest nor excessively high wages are safe.  High interest would make money worthless.  High wages have made industry groggy.  You can't defy Nature and get away with it for long.  She will take you across her knees and apply a spanking machine sooner or later.




Prices came down with a bump.  The real business men took their losses in time and worked their brains and faith to the limit to meet the crash.  Men who call themselves business men, but who should be weilding a pick, still stand out, and they are in for a smash—just what they deserve.  And sane business will profit by the accounting with Nature and her laws.




Nor would I, nor any man with sense, push wages below the point of safety.  They must not go below the average of human need.  And the future of the honest and sane worker must be secure.  We cannot afford serfdom in this country, nor can we afford to attempt it.  Neither labor nor capital can be permitted unchecked power.  We cannot afford to antagonize each other nor to try violence against each other.




Your parlor bolshevist prates about equality, but it will be a long time before we are equal, either in brains or bodies, ability or management or accumulations.  But the surest way to


 bring about chaos and anarchy is to foment class hatreds, class jealousies, class antagonisms.




Above all classes looms America!  Above America looms the World!!  And above the world looms the SIGN OF THE CROSS as the inspiration to service and gentleness and brotherhood!!!




The profiteer, whether in business or labor, is an enemy to humanity.  The one who would exalt his own selfishness above the common good is worse than Judas.  Go back and read what Lincoln said.  Go farther back and read the word of THE CARPENTER!




The time came when I couldn't afford to pay Murphy and so I discovered that I did not need him so badly, after all, and I told him that I did not need him.  Then he, who had boosted me as a good fellow for years, denounced me as a skinflint, as an enemy of labor and so on.  And now, very humbly, he wants work and offers to do it at the old price.  And I'm asking for the grace of forgiveness that I may give him work that I can as well do myself.




For Murphy blowed in all he made, and is worse off than he would have been had we had no period of inflation.




A good many asses are shedding their lions' skins these days.




For a few years we went a pace—the pace that tires if it don't kill.  When money began to flow like water we hunted up a lot of lions' skins and put 'em on and bounded and roared.  When again we get down to brass tacks, when we get back to liver and onions for a time, it will be a great thing for us all.  Not many of us are aristocrats, Bill, and when we see some of those who profiteered during the war and made and kept a lot of their steals, I say, when we see them trying to look aristocratic, and failing, we think of The Art of the Ass.  They can't impress real folks with anything but their pitiful assininity.




You and I were not asses, bill, but about all we lacked was the bray.  If the so-called 
wave of prosperity
 had not receded, we should have


learned to bray.  And at the same time we should have been looking for lions' skins.  Mixed metaphor?  Yep.




O, we are learning, and in a million years or so we shall know enough to estimate things by their real value.  And in the process America may go the way of the ancient nations.  It sure will unless we learn wisdom from the study of history.  No bigger ass in a littler lion's skin is there than the pitiful politician who declares that his party alone can save the country and the other party will damn it.




The Nation is too big to be saved or damned by any party, Bill.  No one class can save it.  If we have the sense to close our ears to the whine of the discontented—the devilishly discontented—and open them to the wisdom of the sages, we shall make of our nation a perpetual benediction to humanity.




It doesn't much matter who is president, or which party is in power.  I have been a 
mugwamp
 all my voting life.  While yet young I attended some political conventions and came away with a distinctly 
tired feeling.
  I wondered then, and I wonder yet, when we shall be emancipated from the utter absurdity of partisanship.  Just as I wonder when, in religion, we shall be emancipated from crass sectarianism.




It doesn't much matter where a man 
gets right with God,
 just so he gets right.  And I have a fellow feeling for many who find that sectarianism is a handicap to real religion.  Political jamborees are losing their hold.  The old-time political campaigns are gone, thank the Lord!  No longer can the voters be fooled with campaign oratory into senseless acrilonies and strife.  And not much longer can we be fooled with pyrotechnic, psycological and perilatetic revivalism.




O, we are shedding those lion skins, Bill, and if, in shedding them, we shall find how big asses we were, and repent of it, we may be able to get


along in the same field, and amicably, with the folks who are there with us.



We have had one great fling.  Bill Nye said, 
The Fourth of July is all right, but I wish Congress would abolish the fifth.
  Well, we have had our Fourth of July, and now to sober up and get busy with the tasks in hand.




The other day I saw a young fellow who had thrown up a job at nine dollars a day because he was notified that his wages would be cut to seven and a half.  He had such an exaggerated opinion of himself that he thought there were a million jobs waiting for him at nine a day.  Now he is discouraged and will take less than the seven and a half if he can get a job.  He is an ass, or he was.  Maybe he will grow now, into something really fine.




It's tough to have the lion's skin torn off when it reveals the ass inside.  But it may be salutary.  If a man will persist in being an ass, and tries to camouflage it with the skin of a lion, it is well for society that he be exposed, ears, tail and all.




Shakedowns are inevitable, Bill.  Inflation must be followed by deflation.  Soberness must follow a toot.  What goes up must come down.  Blow a bladder too hard and it will 
bust.
  Too much gas will burst any balloon, and big pretensions are followed by collapse.




Fill your gasoline tank and control the explosion, and you may run your car for miles.  But explode ten gallons of gas all at once and everything goes up in the air and comes down scattered all over the landscape.




Blow yourself to silk shirts and all the accessories and before long you will get back to cotton, and be glad if you have that.




Ride to your work today in a limousine and tomorrow you will be glad to take a street car.  You'll


 be lucky, when the boom bursts, if you even have the price of a car ride.



You'll show more sense in the street car than you did in the limousine.  And you will be a better American for it all, if you don't weaken.




And for goodness' sake, Bill, don't try to ruin the government because the lion's skin has been taken from you.  We were responsible for the fools we made of ourselves.  The Lord don't make fools.  He provides the raw material, but usually we make fools of ourselves.




The chain of evils that follow the war are of human making, prompted by the devil.  But even the devil will not persist in a hopeless effort.  He is shrewd enough to know whom he can influence, and he never tries the man whom he knows has the sense to resist him.




The devil has more sense than many a theologian.




He must be taught that we are going to get busy, with faith, in reconstructing a groggy nation and world.




We are going to restore lost confidence and assure all the world, the flesh and the devil that Uncle Sam will not default, will not lag, will not loaf!




We are going to show the world that the American laboring man, the American business man, the American professional man, can be depended upon to show that he is all wool and a yard wide!




And we will restore faith in God, in religion and in mankind!




Glad you came over, Bill.  Come again!!




(Copyright Applied For)





THE ART OF THE ASS



This is one of a series of twelve articles written by Grove Herbert.  He is a student of affairs and competent to discuss business, industrial, educational and social problems intelligently.  He is also a speaker of wide experience, having lectured in Lyce umand Chautauquas for twenty years.




It will be well for Business, Civic and Religious bodies to secure Mr. Herbert for his series of lectures.  The themes of the pamphlets follow:


1.


When Gideon Got to Going.


2.


The Art of the Ass.


3.


The Gag of the Grasshopper.


4.


The Fullness of Faith.


5.


The Sons of Sarah.


6.


The Whoop of the Hooligan.


7.


Peddlers of Piffle.


8.


The Influence of Ideas.


9.


The Masterly Male.


10.


The Madness of Mars.


11.


The Charm of Charity.


12.


The Bugaboo of Brooding.





These pamphlets can be secured in quantities of 1,000, more or less, for distribution by employers of labor or business bodies.  They will prove tonics to business and faith.




Mr. Herbert offers his services as an artistic and peppy writer of ads.  What is your business?  Whom do you reach and hope to reach?




Address 
L. G. HERBERT
 801 Huntington Bldg. COLUMBUS, OHIO