PLEASED WITH A RATTLE

Pacific Press Publishing Company · Oakland, California · Aug 20, 1902

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 28, No. 34.

"PLEASED WITH A RATTLE."

Under the above heading, the New York Thrice-a-Week World has the following:—

Lord Salisbury is now a K. G. C. R. V. O.—Knight Grand Cross of the Royal Victorian Order. The insignia that go with this new distinction cost perhaps $25, and would not be good collateral for over $5 at our uncle’s sign of the three golden balls.

Yet Lord Salisbury regards this as a fitting climax to a strenuous career covering nearly half a century in British public life. How paltry then, shall we say, are the prizes for which British statesmen strive! Fifty years of “toil and trouble” for a bit of jewelry, a mere trinket, to be fastened to your coat with a blue or a pink ribbon, and the privilege of writing six capital letters after your name. Incomprehensible, is it not, that men of the largest mental caliber, the widest scholarship, and the very highest order of executive ability, should be thus “pleased with a rattle, tickled with a straw?”

Our Morgans, Rockefellers, Armours, and the long train of our “captains of industry” we can understand. We see what they work and worry for; we can count it, put it down in figures, add it up, calculate the net annual income of it, and what it will grow to in ten, twenty or fifty years. Kitchener’s $250,000 also is intelligible. But where is the sane American who cares a fig for a ribbon, clasp, cross, or other decoration, and the privilege of putting R. M. N. O. P. O. at the end of his signature?

Well, we don’t know; but there are over forty secret orders to which over 6,000,000 American men belong, and every one of them has its insignia, its decorations, and its long titles, which take anywhere from four to six capital letters to indicate; and there are mighty strivings going on all the time in every one of them to be the Right Worthy Chief It.

But what better is a man when he dies whether he counts the worldly honors of his life-work in six capital letters, or the accumulations of his life-work, honorable or dishonorable, in from six to nine figures.

“Thou for fame, The miser for pelf, The end is one.”

But of what do all avail in the great day of God? “What shall it profit a man if he gain the whole world [of honor and dollars], and lose his own soul?” How small in that day will appear all the “rattles,” and “toys,” and baubles for which men have striven!