o the
multitudes who have the same battles.

The popular song is the song that best voices what is in the popular
heart. And while we have a continual inundation of popular songs that
are trashy and voice the tawdriest human impulses, yet it is a tribute
to the good elements in humanity that the wholesome, uplifting
sentiments in Carrie Jacobs-Bond's songs continue to hold their
popularity.

Theory and Practice

My friends, I am not arguing that you and I must drink the dregs of
defeat, or that our lives must fill up with poverty or sorrow, or
become wrecks. But I am insisting upon what I see written all around me
in the affairs of everyday life, that none of us will ever know real
success in any line of human endeavor until that success flows from the
fullness of our experience just as the songs came from the life of
Carrie Jacobs-Bond.

The world is full of theorists, dreamers, uplifters, reformers, who
have worthy visions but are not able to translate them into practical
realities. They go around with their heads in the clouds, looking
upward, and half the time their feet are in the flower-beds or
trampling upon their fellow men they dream of helping. Their ideas must
be forged into usefulness available for this day upon the anvil of
experience.

Many of the most brilliant theorists have been the greatest failures in
practice.

There are a thousand who can tell you what is the matter with things to
one person who can give you a practical way to fix them.

I used to have respect amounting to reverence for great readers and
book men. I used to know a man who could tell in what book almost
anything you could think of was discussed, and perhaps the page. He was
a walking library index. I thought him a most wonderful man. Indeed, in
my childhood I thought he was the greatest man in the world.

He was a remarkable man--a great reader and with a memory that retained
it all. That man could recite chapters and volumes. He could give you
almost any date. He could finish almost any quotation. His conversation
was largely made up of classical quotations.

But he was one of the most helpless men I have ever seen in practical
life. He seemed to be unable to think and reason for himself. He could
quote a page of John Locke, but somehow the page didn't supply the one
sentence needed for the occasion. The man was a misfit on earth. He was
liable to put the gravy in his coffee and the gasoline in the fire. He
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