If you must vilify, condemn, and eternally disparage, why, resign your position, and when you are outside, damn to your heart's content. But, I pray you, so long as you are a part of an institution, do not condemn it. Not that you will injure the institution--not that--but 10 when you disparage the concern of which you are a part, you disparage yourself.
More than that, you are loosening the tendrils that hold you to the institution, and the first high wind that comes along, you will be uprooted and blown away in the 15 blizzard's track--and probably you will never know why. The letter only says "Times are dull and we regret there is not enough work," et cetera.
Everywhere you find those out-of-a-job fellows. Talk with them and you will find that they are full of railing, 20 bitterness, and condemnation. That was the trouble--through a spirit of faultfinding they got themselves swung around so they blocked the channel and had to be dynamited. They are out of harmony with the concern, and no longer being a help they had to be removed. Every 25 employer is constantly looking for people who can help him; naturally he is on the lookout among his employees for those who do not help, and everything and everybody that is a hindrance has to go. This is the law of trade--do not find fault with it; it is founded on nature. The reward 30 is only for the man that helps, and in order to help, you must have sympathy.
You cannot help the Old Man so long as you are explaining in undertone and whisper, by gesture and suggestion, by thought and mental attitude, that he is a curmudgeon and his system dead wrong. You are not necessarily menacing him by stirring up discontent and warming envy into strife, 5 but you are doing this: You are getting yourself upon a well-greased chute that will give you a quick ride down and out.
When you say to other employees that the Old Man is a curmudgeon, you reveal the fact that you are one; and when you tell that the policy of the institution is "rotten," 10 you surely show that yours is.
Hooker got his promotion even in spite of his failings; but the chances are that your employer does not have the love that Lincoln had--the love that suffereth long and is kind. But even Lincoln could not protect Hooker forever. 15 Hooker failed to do the work, and Lincoln had to try some one else. So there came a time when Hooker was superseded by a Silent Man, who criticized no one, railed at nobody--not even the enemy. And this Silent Man, who ruled his own spirit, took the cities. He minded his own business and 20 did the work that no man ever can do unless he gives absolute loyalty, perfect confidence, and untiring devotion.