is a form of exercise, and growth comes only through
exercise--that is to say, expression.

We learn things only to throw them away: no man ever wrote well until he
had forgotten every rule of rhetoric, and no orator ever spake straight
to the hearts of men until he had tumbled his elocution into the Irish
Sea.

To hold on to things is to lose them. To clutch is to act the part of
the late Mullah Bah, the Turkish wrestler, who came to America and
secured through his prowess a pot of gold. Going back to his native
country, the steamer upon which he had taken passage collided in
mid-ocean with a sunken derelict. Mullah Bah, hearing the alarm, jumped
from his berth and strapped to his person a belt containing five
thousand dollars in gold. He rushed to the side of the sinking ship,
leaped over the rail, and went to Davy Jones' Locker like a plummet,
while all about frail women and weak men in life-preservers bobbed on
the surface and were soon picked up by the boats. The fate of Mullah Bah
is only another proof that athletes die young, and that it is harder to
withstand prosperity than its opposite.

But knowledge did not turn the head of Marat. His restless spirit was
reaching out for expression, and we find him drifting to London for a
wider field.

England was then, as now, the refuge of the exile. There is today just
as much liberty, and a little more free speech, in England than in
America. We have hanged witches and burned men at the stake since
England has, and she emancipated her slaves long before we did ours.
Over against the home-thrust that respectable women drink at public bars
from John O'Groat's to Land's End, can be placed the damning count that
in the United States more men are lynched every year than Great Britain
legally executes in double the time.

A too-ready expression of the Rousseau philosophy had made things a bit
unpleasant for Marat in Edinburgh, but in London he found ready
listeners, and the coffeehouses echoed back his radical sentiments.

These underground debating-clubs of London started more than one man off
on the oratorical transverse. Swift, Johnson, Reynolds, Goldsmith,
Garrick, Burke--all sharpened their wits at the coffeehouses. I see the
same idea is now being revived in New York and Chicago: little clubs of
a dozen or so will rent a room in some restaurant, and fitting it up for
themselves, will dine daily and discuss great themes, or small,
according to the mental caliber