Evening public ledger. [volume] (Philadelphia [Pa.]) 1914-1942, 1916-02-11

an expressman struggling with wide barrel
in a narrow doorway. 1t was sugar barrel
! full of something or other. The man was in
| side the doorway trying to get the barrel out,
and it stuck. But he was persevering chap.
! He had forced it almost through, when along
J came a stranger who meant well. Perhaps
! he had promised some one to do a little deed
| of kindness each day. Anyway, he stepped
up promptly, kicked the barrel through-the
wrong way, and went calmly and righteously
down the street. Whereat the eXpressman
looked across at me and grinned. He had the
humorous sense. And how 1t helped just
then"
Ford, however, underestimates the impor-
tance of humor. This is his summing up:
Always a sense of humor helps. II is one of
life's little compensations-and that is about
all. For in this vale of sobs, humor like
virtue, must in most cases be it's own re-
ward. It is case of majority rule, you
know. The unsmiling, humorless three-ffths
deal out the high places and the rich rewards
to the solemn faced sobersdes among us.
Isn't that SO? What Chief Executive can
you name other than Lincoln, who had a
we'll developed sense of humor? What trust
magnate railroad head, bank president? No,
we want our great ones to be serious, and a
bit pompous. That grinning eXpressman will
never get to be a Director. He will continue
to drive the wagon"
Practical Results of HumOr
This is inadequate. Martin Glynn stated
the case better: Carlyle says Humor is the
finest perfection of pathetic genius, and
Thackeray calls 1t n combination OF love and
of wit. The magic sisters, Philosophy and
Science, analyze life into seven elemental
colors of the spectrum. Their humane
brother, Humor, mixes and mingles and
synthesizes these seven elemental tints into
the glorious effulgence of life's sunshine and
into the rolicking sunbeams of pleasure and
of joy from the unassorted relations of life
that muddle and befuddle the intellect
Humor distils the pure Joy of living and ex-
tracts the essence of the truth that the
things that are are better than the things
that are not; and that the things that
might be- could not be half good as the
things that are"
Glynn comes down to simpler language, as
follows: "The most effective way in the
world to knock man down is to knock him
down with a smile. With a smile Charles
Dickens knocked more of the evils of Eng
land into a cooked hat than all the preachers
of his day with their sermons. A humorist can
be the greatest reformer in the world for
men as we'll as institutions fear prick of the
PEN
"Humor is a collision of two ideas marching
In opposite directions. Washington Irving,
oliver Wendell Holmes. James Russell Lowell
and Mark Twain were full of such collisions
and so is Irwin Cobb.
Washington Franklin and Lincoln are the
shining lights of Americanism, OF these
three, two were humorists. Washington was
great, but he never laughed; Franklin
laughed at everybody and everything and
,1yag 10 sb,.d Of
he laughed at everything with everybody and
he was lovable. would like to be great, but
If had to be great without a sense of humor
l would rather be human and lovable."