• Author: Unknown
• Editor:
• Newspaper: The Umpire volume V
• Page Number:
• Date: 5 29 1918
• Tags:
• advice
• temptation

GOOD INTENTIONS

Once more General Foch provides us with a text, we rather like the General, he’s as good a talker as he is fighter —and he says, "I have no use for people who are said to be animated by good intentiens. Good intentions are not enough: I want people who are determined to get there.”

Good intentions are probably the most plentiful commodity in the world—and if not translated inte action, probably the most useless. There are undoubtedly enough good intentions interned within the walls of the E. S. P. to stop the war, and bring the millenium topass at once, but the cruel fact of the matter is, that 99% of them are doomed to die in earliest infancy, without so mueh as approaching the manhood of performance. Perhaps in a corner, perhaps with a flourish of trumpets—most the latter—you announce that you are not going to steal again, or lie again, or drink again; that you are going cut and get a job, or an education, or a divorce, and it sounds so sweetly mellifluous that you at once say it over again, while your audience applauds softly, your chest swells visibly, and you go about the Yard wearing that pale, earnest, early-christian-martyr look which goes so well with a clean shave; and the time comes for your leaving, and a relieved Overseer shakes your hand, and wishes you ‘‘God-speed,” and you feel those good intentions to be right on the job, but when the gate swings shut behind you, Oh! What a change is there, my countrymen!

The farther you get from that Gate, the weaker grow those good intentions, and about the third pair of swinging doors you see,—if you’re still on speaking terms with your conscience—‘‘Well, I'll just take one little drink, to show that I can take it or leave it alone,” and half-an-hour later you’re telling a total stranger in a white apron about how your wife left you for a handsomer man, and you go out and commit bigamy, or go into politics, and in about three months, or less, Rube, or Bob Meyers are starring with you in a revised version of Back to the Old Homestead. Sure, your intentions were all right, you really intended to climb on the water-wagon for a long stay, and advertise for the owner of the Ferry ticket you found on the street-car, but the determination was lacking.

It takes a triple-plated, nickle steel will,to resist the temptations the streets, and one’s old companions, offer. But the reward is worth the effort. Never were there so many chances for a man who is determined to be something as now. Any man with at least one leg, and a reasonable quantity of arms— brains don’t matter, common-sence is vastly better—who has staying qualities—and by staying qualities we don’t mean the ability to stay ont late at night, but the ability to stay with a job—can figure in the Income Tax List within a decade, unless he has a persistent run of bad luck, and becomes Governor, or Congressman, or if he should measure success in life by some other standard than that of dollars, he can make such foot-prints in the sands of time, as will cause people to come from East Samark and, Asia, to wonder at, and admire. Good intentions are all right in a way, no one can succeed with bad, but they need tobe backed up by a determined will which neither time, nor place, nor circumstance can change.