THE LAW OF COMPENSATION
The purpose of this editorial, as well as the purpose back
of this magazine itself, is to help men and women weave
the ‘‘shoddy’’ threads of their experiences, hardships, failures, and struggles into a rich garment of truth and understanding that will clothe their efforts, finally, with success and happiness, to help people learn to draw a winning hand out of the discard of life’s failures and
experiences.—Editor.
The law of compensation is no respecter of persons. It operates for or against the rich and the poor alike. It is as immutable as the law of gravitation. If it were not so, this planet which we call earth would not roll on and on throughout immeasurable time and space, keeping ever in its true course. It is the equalizing force which balances the
‘‘eternal scales’’ and keeps the planets in their places.
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The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius, for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character!
—EMERSON
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The law of compensation permits no voids or hollow places anywhere in the universe. What is taken away from one place is replaced by something else. Read Emerson’s essay on compensation. It will lay the foundation in your mind for the development of that much-sought quality called ‘‘balance’’ or ‘‘sense of proportions’’ which marks the man or the woman who attains to great heights in the field of business, industry, or the professions.
The law of compensation never seems pushed for time, often deferring both its penalties and rewards over long periods. That which it exacts from one, generally as a penalty, is given over to the next generation as a reward. That which it takes away from the individual, it gives back to the offspring, or to the race as a whole. The law of compensation is no cheater, nor will it tolerate cheating. It squares its accounts to the penny and to every act and thought, demanding its debts and paying its rewards with an unvarying exactness.
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Love, beauty, joy, and worship are forever building, unbuilding, and rebuilding in each man’s soul.
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Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. The world war was a tremendous shock to humanity and a tremendous loss to the world, but already we can begin to see the compensating advantages that grew out of it.
For example, we have learned the folly of trying to ‘‘impose’’ rulership from the top without the consent of those ruled, through so-called ‘‘divine’’ righters. We have been reminded of Lincoln’s famous words concerning a ‘‘government of the people, by the people, for the people,’’ and we know that his idea was sound. We have learned, also, the folly of religious and racial intolerance; that all the people, of whatever religious belief or race, can fight for one common cause. We learned this because we saw Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Gentiles, fighting side by side in the trenches, never stopping to question one another as to race or creed. Somehow, we cannot get away from believing that this same spirit of tolerance will prevail among these people in their everyday relationships, because they learned during the war not only that this was possible, but that it actually was the sensible thing for all.
As another example, we commended to learn, with the close of the world war, that a part of the purpose of life is to be decent to one another here on earth, thereby reaping a part of our reward for virtue now, instead of waiting for it to come to us in the hereafter, in a world that we know not of. Out of this feeling is bound to come tolerance such as the world has never known before. What finer thought could come to the human race? What sounder philosophy than the belief that a part of one’s reward for virtue may be reaped here and now, by recognizing the law of compensation and governing one’s self accordingly.
The law of compensation both rewards and punishes! The punishment, as well as the reward, takes on every possible guise. Sometimes it seems self-inflicted, while at other times it seems to
come from causes beyond the individual control, but come it will, in one guise or another. There is one means of approach which no human being can cut off, and that is through the conscience.
Punishment is often visited upon a man through his conscience (or imagination) when it exists nowhere else. As evidence of this— evidence that might be multiplied by a million similar cases—read the following account of a bank clerk who stole some money and fled, with the ‘‘law’’—the unrelenting law of compensation—on his trail for eighteen years, and watch the workings of this law as you read. At the end of eighteen years, he found himself again in the United
States. He was getting old. The vital force in him was flagging; the courage that had driven him through his trials and adventures assumed a new turn. It drove him back to the scene of his theft. He could go no further but in one direction. His bark turned homeward.
One morning, the wanderer walked in upon the sheriff of his home town and said simply, ‘‘I’m Bill Jones.’’ ‘‘Pleased to meet you, Mr. Jones,’’ said the officer, without taking his feet off his desk. The haunted man was struck dumb. ‘‘What can I do for you?’’ asked the sheriff, smiling wryly.
‘‘You don’t understand,’’ said Jones. ‘‘I’m the fellow you’ve been hunting so long.’’ ‘‘Not me, my friend,’’ said the officer, sensing a lunatic. ‘‘No, maybe not. It’s been so long ago,’’ pondered the returned man, rubbing his eyes. ‘‘I’m the man who stole the three thousand dollars from the Merchants Loan Bank.’’ ‘‘Well, what of it?’’ the sheriff wanted to know. ‘‘There hasn’t been any such bank for ten years.’’
The rover wavered and asked if he might sit down. He pondered a long time while the officer watched him uneasily. He looked like a man who was struggling with some desperate problem, trying to plumb some deep and terrible mystery. Self-Inflicted Punishment
‘‘Do you keep a file of men that are wanted?’’ he asked the sheriff. ‘‘Yep.’’ ‘‘I wonder if you would do me a favor?’’ ‘‘Sure.’’ ‘‘Would you look up the files of July, eighteen years ago, and see if a man named Bill Jones was wanted for stealing from the Merchants Loan?’’
The sheriff went through his books. There was no record of such a case. A little inquiry developed that the bank had never let out a whisper of the defalcation. The officers had preferred pocketing the
loss to risking a run. And so Bill Jones had fled round the world, hunted for eighteen years by a phantom, when he might have lived securely in the next county and never been sought or taken.
‘‘I punished myself all those years,’’ the aging man murmured bitterly. ‘‘I suffered every torture a man can know—for nothing.’’ ‘‘I punished myself all those years!’’
Ah, there is the thought to which you can profitably direct sober reflection! ‘‘I punished myself.’’In each human heart lies the power to visit upon the person, from within, joy or sorrow, according to the extent to which one’s efforts are made to conform to the law of compensation or permitted to run
counter against it.
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Only truth can permanently prevail. All else must pass on.
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There never was any man-made law placed on the statute books, and there never will be any such law placed there, which cannot be broken and the consequences avoided now and then, by shrewd and
cunning men, but no man has yet been smart enough to thwart the workings of the law of compensation. That law is man-proof. The more man tinkers with it, the less chance he stands of escaping its consequences, unless he earnestly studies it with the object of conforming to its principles!
By turning back the pages of history, we learn that most of the great men of the past—those whose names have lived beyond the grave—were men who suffered much, who sacrificed, who met with
failure and defeat, yet went smiling on to the end of this physical existence without bitterness in their hearts. The pages of history are full of such men, from Socrates and the man from Galilee on down to the present, but a case that particularly claims our attention just now, on account of the fact that the principal still lives, is that of Knut Hamsun, whose story is briefly told in the following press dispatch:
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A Tramp Wins the Nobel Prize for Literature
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The Nobel Prize in literature has been awarded, nearly fifty thousanddollars, to Knut Hamsun, whom probably not one American in one hundred ever heard of. But Hamsun was for years a streetcar conductor in Chicago and a longshoreman in New York City. He has been a dishwasher in a restaurant, a coal passer on a tramp steamer, a house painter, a writer of scientific essays, a porter in a hotel, a deck hand, and many others things.
Like O. Henry, he was for years a forlorn, friendless, and homeless person, wandering over the face of the earth, often without money or food, a sleeper on park benches. Now he receives the most glittering single prize offered anywhere in the world to literary genius, awarded by a committee of experts. Hamsun was discharged as a trolley car conductor because ‘‘he never could remember the names of streets.’’ The Chicago superintendent said he seemed too stupid even for skipper for a Halsted streetcar. So he went to New York, worked on the docks several months, and then shipped as a seaman on a fishing smack for Newfoundland. Wherever he went, he was always scribbling on
paper.
Finally, he published his Pan, a lyrical novel of epic power. The volume has been translated into seventeen languages, of which English was one of the last. His two most notable novels are Shallow Soil and Hunger. The last has neither plot, beginning, nor end. Nor is the name or age of the
hero given. It describes what happens to a man who cannot get work in a great city, either as a writer or a laborer, and is forced to go hungry after pawning most of his clothes. The novel leaves the man exactly where it found him—friendless, homeless, nameless. No one who reads it will ever forget it.
This was Knut Hamsun’s own experience. Now, at sixty, he has worldwide fame, a fifty-thousand-dollar prize, and a handsome country estate in Norway, and his gates will henceforth be besieged by publishers. As Mark Twain says, the only difference between truth and fiction is that fiction has to stick to what seems possible. Truth
doesn’t.
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Men and women are beginning to learn that they need not wait for a world that they know not of, beyond the grim shadow called death, to find happiness.
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Verily, we repeat, out of hardship and failure comes strength! This seems like unsound philosophy while we are experiencing the ‘‘hardship and failure,’’ but all who survive these cleansing experiences know differently.
My own will eventually come to me, and I will recognize it when it arrives if I keep always in mind the fact that the law of compensation is eternally at work, because if I do this, I will know that ‘‘my own’’ will harmonize with and correspond to my conduct in life toward my fellowmen.
Ten years of observation have taught me much concerning the workings of this law of compensation. I have seen it place men on the highest pinnacle of what the world calls ‘‘success,’’ and I have seen it topple them over and roll them right back to the bottom from which they started.
Twelve years ago, I enjoyed the acquaintance of a banker in Washington, D.C. This man began as a dentist, and fortune seemed to smile upon him. He began the business of loaning money, in small amounts, at exorbitant rates, as a side issue. He became so successful at this that he finally organized a bank and was elected as its president.
This gave him greater prestige and additional financial power; so he began to reach out and buy up real estate, taking a heavy toll from every transaction. The people began to complain of his usurious rates of interest and his tightfisted business methods, but from all outside appearances, he continued to gather power and prosper.
I was a client of this man’s bank. When I needed money, he loaned it to me, but his rates of interest to me were always moderate and in keeping with the rates charged at other banks. I often wondered why he was so fair and liberal with me while he was so unfair and exacting
with others. I owned a prosperous school of mechanical engineering.
I learned, by and by, why this banker was so liberal with me. He wanted that school, and he finally got it. When he had loaned money to me so that he knew I was over my head in the case of an emergency, he closed me out.
That transaction was a blow to me; yet, in the light of subsequent years’ experience, I know that it was a blessing in disguise, probably one of the greatest that ever came my way, because it forced me out of a business which played no part in developing strong moral fiber, or laying the foundation for a worldwide service to my fellowmen such as I am rendering today.
I could not prove that this temporary failure was a deliberate part of a great plan to direct my efforts into more constructive channels, but if some power had been putting such a plan into operation, it could not have been more successfully conducted than it was. That which was
taken away from me ten years ago has been more than repaid within the last three or four years. The law of compensation has squared accounts with me, and still the reward seems to be coming my way.
But, there was another and different reason for telling of this banker. Two years ago, I went back to Washington for a short visit. It is natural for a person to want to go back to those old stomping grounds where, in bygone days, he experienced either great joy or great sorrow. When I got to Washington, I strolled down Fourteenth Street, thinking to look the banker over and supposing, of course, that
I would find a few stories added to his bank building and a prosperous, strong bank, such as I had known his to be ten years ago. When I got to the bank building, I found that the banking fixtures had been removed, the bank had gone out of business, and the splendid banking house had been turned into a lunch room! I went on down Fourteenth Street to the $75,000 mansion which this banker owned ten years ago, but it was occupied now by new tenants and no longer belonged to him. Inquiry proved that this erstwhile successful banker had been reduced almost overnight to the ranks from which he had ascended, for reasons which seemed not very clear to anyone!
He was down and out!
The silent, heavy hand had descended upon his head, and he had gone down in spite of every resource at his command. Back of that heavy hand was a force that was augmented by every disgruntled depositor whom this man had come in contact with in his bank, every widow who had felt his ‘‘own hand’’ under a mortgage foreclosure, every property owner who had been ‘‘squeezed’’ preparatory to the purchase, by this bank, of his land. Emerson has so well said:
‘‘Every excess causes a defect, every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour, every evil its
good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. For every grain of wit, there is a grain of folly. For everything you have missed, you have gained something else; and for everything you gain, you lose something. If riches increase, they are increased that use them. If the gatherer gathers too much, nature takes out of the man what she puts into his treasure chest, swells the estate, but kills the owner. Nature hates monopolies and exceptions. The waves of the sea do not more speedily seek a level from their loftiest
tossing, than the varieties of condition tend to equalize themselves. There is always bearing, the
strong, the rich, the fortunate, substantially on the same ground with all others!’’
What greater work is there than that of helping people weave the shoddy threads of failures, mistakes, and heartaches into a beautiful garment that will clothe their efforts in a final success.
When my former associate lost sight of the high ideals, the humanitarian aims and purposes which actuated me in editing Hill’s Golden Rule Magazine, and was no longer able to hold principle above the dollar, was no longer actuated by the spirit to serve instead of the desire to get, his change of attitude forced me to disconnect myself from him. In doing so, it practically meant that two years of labor was lost; it means that new contacts must be formed, that new subscribers must be secured, that my work must all be done over again. Yet, only three short months have elapsed since I decided to take the step which told all the world that I stood for principle above the dollar, for humanity above the individual, and I have been more than compensated for taking this stand by the sweeping storm of protest that swept down on my former publisher from those who sensed what had happened, and the corresponding pledge of support of this magazine which has come to me from those same people.
In the light of every experience which I have cataloged, and in the light of every observation which I have made with relation to others, I am bound to say frankly and boldly that where principle stands in the way of pecuniary gain, there is only one thing to do and that is to
support principle; where the cause of the individual is in conflict with the cause of humanity as a whole, support the cause of humanity! All who would thus boldly assert themselves must sacrifice, temporarily, but just as sure as the sun rises in the east and sets in the west, their
just reward will come to them further along the line, when the law of compensation begins to get down to business.
One of the very best ways to teach a child that a hot coffee pot will burn is to explain, in minute detail, that hot surfaces always burn, then turn your back and let the child do a little experimenting with its fingers. One lesson will be about right. Some of us ‘‘children grown
tall’’ learn in the same way.
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