Modern civilization has encouraged the growth of the luxury liner and the pleasure cruise. Studying the activity of the myriads of men who have brought the work on the vessel to completion, we are first impressed with the endeavors of the designers, engineers, decorators, and artists whose brain and energy have provided the luxury boat.
The captain and the men down to the most menial servant have gone through a long course of instruction and toil in order that those in the possession of wealth may exhibit their vanity and egotism. Many of these men, earning salaries barely covering the necessities of their mode of life, do not appear to hear or notice the things going on around them.
There are always passengers on these boats who, afraid of being alone, are followed by the “Hound of Heaven.” The makers of the family fortune seek rest and a change of scene, but the ambition of the younger members is to gain recognition from a higher strata of society than they were born to.
The women folk of the “idle rich” are very similar to the bowerbird of Australia, which Darwin wrote about. The females of this species of bird build a promenade with an arch, and line it with the colorful things they can collect from nature, and then they parade back and forth in order to attract the male species. As this type of woman grows old, she still seeks to carry on the illusion, and often resorts to cosmetics in an effort to conceal the ravages of Time, that hound of fear ever yapping at her heels.
When a person finds that he cannot spend an evening alone with some good and stimulating book which will make him think, he should begin a survey of himself and try to penetrate into the future for which he is heading. Men and women are glorious creations and it is a glorious thing to have strong passions and desires. When we learn to aspire for the finer things of life and control the passions they can lift us into a higher stratum of consciousness where we discover intelligence and bliss.
Man must seek the Presence of the Lord God of Truth within, and try to find and heed his own soul, and not lose it. Youth demands the finest creations for the gratification of vanity. Art has an ennobling quality and brings to youth a type of refinement which expresses itself. Then they compare the things surrounding them with the things others possess, and frequently the possession of something of real artistic merit, such as a picture or painting, will transform the bedrock character of man, and bring out the hidden and finer expression from within.
Contrast an English railway station in London, with an American depot in any of our large cities. The one represents old conditions and the past, and the other the fertility of a newer mind and a more useful expression. When the Boston Library was opened, its marble stairways and mural decoration by Puvis de Chavannes so impressed the hoboes, who always seek warmth in our public institutions, with their beauty and symmetry, that for over a month they did not desecrate the building by spitting on the floor. This hobo type peruses Burke’s Peerage more often than any other book, and I imagine must be seeking for some trace of eminence in their family name. People of this class often say to me, “When the spring comes, I must get away and lie under the trees.”
This type of soul (often lower than the beast of the field) continually speaks of the attraction of open air life, and of their hatred towards humanity. They are a parasitic class of unfortunates who often glory in wrongdoing, and prey upon the labors of honest men. They are pathological cases, and difficult to heal. Like the beast of the field they are often good and humane to their own kind, though destructive to those outside their world. Strange to say they have not the ordinary man’s sensitivity to pain, and in minor surgical operations they often take no anaesthetic, but merely ask for a “fag” or a drink.
As above, so below. The hobo class of humanity is only the reflection of another class higher up in society. Both are parasites, and inimical to the welfare of the community. By the cinema, the youths of this type are stimulated to become heroes, as well as to emulate the gangster and the hobo of the screen. Much petty pilfering is done by youths ranging from fourteen to seventeen years of age. A Scotland Yard officer once caught three youths fourteen, fifteen, and seventeen years of age. For sometime they had been raiding “shut up” shops in a certain residential neighborhood. The fathers and mothers of these boys held honorable positions in society, but the boys had provided themselves with complete kits, comprising masks, burglar tools, etc. When they determined to raid a shop they made a plan of the place, beforehand, then they broke in, ransacked the shop, and did a tremendous amount of damage. They were caught lifting a radio set out of the window. When the parents were summoned to the police station, each protested the innocence of his boy, until shown the individual equipment and loot which had been taken from him.
Moving pictures do not usually show the end which overtakes their gangster heroes. In some Continental cities, the criminal is given a drug in coffee, known as the “talking drug.” When questioned under this influence, he will talk freely, thus doing away with the brutality of “third degree” methods practiced in America. This drug is now used with great success in Russia, and under its influence the soul in man only allows him to speak the truth. Its use was suggested in America, but the legal fraternity said that they gained money by protecting the criminal, and that they would be “out of a job” if this drug were allowed to be used on him. The drug has been introduced into England by a foreign syndicate, and has been used by women gangsters in order to get money from the victims whom they induce to drink with them. Under the effect of the drug, a man will honestly tell these women how much money he has in the bank, and will unhesitatingly write a check for any sum which they may demand. Of course he is kept a prisoner in the apartment till the check is cashed.
The ordinary man does not take much interest in things which do not affect him personally.
Often the foreign element in a country work harder and are more thrifty than the original inhabitants, but their canons of honor differ, and these conditions bring about hatred and sometimes persecution of the minority. The Chinese live and thrive on fare that would starve any other national. This is the chief thing Japan is afraid of. But as a rule we usually find the disturbing criminal element comes from the foreign infiltration.
The student of reincarnation today will find that many Americans have lived in Oriental bodies. There is a strong similarity to the Koran in Mr. Wilson’s Fourteen Points which were the basis for the Peace Treaty at Versailles, and his pronouncements were certainly those of a Mohammedan soul. Abdul Baha, the leader of the Bahai movement, when asked why he was going to America, answered, “I go to collect and bring together in a unity the Bahai souls living in American bodies.” This is why Oriental teachers of different sects find such response to their teaching on American soil.
Once when I was talking to a great red Indian initiate, he said, “Our Indian souls are incarnating into American bodies today and if you will study the faces of the white people in the Middle West, you will find the characteristic features of the Red Man, the feminine mother eye, and the male jaw and cheek bones. I recognize a Red Man in a white body as easily as the scientist does the geological formation of a country. In the future these Indian “white men” will respond to the Indian call for Truth.”
