Indiana University - Arbutus Yearbook (Bloomington, IN)

Page 19 text:

The Drudge Bv William Lowe Bryan. IT is unhappily true, that many good and useful men are forced by cir- cumstances to work at one thing, while their hearts are tugging to be at something else. They have not chosen their tasks. They have been driven by necessity. There must be bread. There are the wife and the children. There is no escape. It is up with the sun. It is bearing the burden and heat of the day. It is intolerable weariness. It is worse than that. It is tramping round and round in the same hated steps until you cannot do anything else. You cannot think of anything else. They sound in your dreams those treadmill steps arousing echoes of bitterness and rebellion. You cannot escape from yourself. You cannot take a vaca- tion. You may grow rich and travel far and spend desperately, but the baleful music will follow you to the end, the music of the work you did in hate. This is the tragedy of drudgery, not that you spend your time and strength at it, but that you lose yourself in it. But at the worst this man is no such poverty stricken soul as the crank, the tramp at the jack-of-all-trades. If his occupations were worth while, those hated habits are far from deserving hate. If the}- are habits by which a man may live, by which one may give a service that other men need and pay for, their value is certified from the sternest laboratory. The drudge has a right to respect himself. He has the right to the respect of other men and I give mine without reserve. I say that he, who holds him- self grimly for life to a useful common-place work which he hates, is heroic. It is easy to be heroic on horseback. To be heroic on foot in the duty, lost in the crowd, with no applause, that is the heroism which ha - borne up and carried forward all the work of civilization.