"During the following summer I earned $40. Throughout the senior year I retained the same room, under the same conditions as the previous year. I waited on table all the year, and received full board; earned by clerical work, tutoring, etc., $40; borrowed $40; secured a scholarship of $70; took a prize of $25; received a gift of $35. The expenses of the senior year, $496.64 were necessarily heavier than these of previous years. But having secured a good position as teacher for the coming year, I was permitted to give my note for the amount I could not raise, and so was enabled to graduate without financial embarrassment.

"The total expense for the course was about $1,708; of which (counting scholarships as earnings) I earned $1,157."

Twenty-five of the young men graduated at Yale not long ago paid their way entirely throughout their courses. It seemed as if they left untried no avenue for earning money. Tutoring, copying, newspaper work, and positions as clerks were well-occupied fields; and painters, drummers, founders, machinists, bicycle agents, and mail carriers were numbered among the twenty-five.

In a certain district in Boston there are ten thousand students. Many of them come from the country and from factory towns. A large number come from the farms of the West. Many of these students are paying for their education by money earned by their own hands. It is said that unearned money does not enrich. The money that a student earns for his own education does enrich his life. It is true gold.

Every young man or woman should weigh the matter well before concluding that a college education is out of the question.

If Henry Wilson, working early and late on a farm with scarcely any opportunities to go to school, bound out until he was twenty-one for only a yoke of oxen and six sheep, could manage to read a thousand good books before his time had expired; if the slave Frederick Douglass, on a plantation where it was almost a crime to teach a slave to read, could manage from scraps of paper, posters on barns, and old almanacs, to learn the alphabet and lift himself to eminence; if the poor deaf boy Kitto, who made shoes in an alms-house, could become the greatest Biblical scholar of his age, where is the boy or girl to-day, under the American flag, who cannot get a fair education and escape the many disadvantages of ignorance?

"If a man empties his purse into his head," says Franklin, "no man can take it away from him. An investment in knowledge always pays the best interest."



CHAPTER VIII

YOUR OPPORTUNITY CONFRONTS YOU—WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?

Never before was the opportunity of the educated man so great as to-day. Never before was there such a demand for the trained man, the man who can do a thing superbly well. At the door of every vocation is a sign out, "Wanted—a man." No matter how many millions are out of employment, the whole world is hunting for a man who can do things; a trained thinker who can do whatever he undertakes a little better than it has ever before been done. Everywhere it is the educated, the trained man, the man whose natural ability has been enlarged, enhanced one hundredfold by superior training, that is wanted.

On all sides we see men with small minds, but who are well educated, pushing ahead of those who have greater capabilities, but who are only half educated. A one-talent man, superbly trained, often gets the place when a man with many untrained or half-trained talents loses it. Never was ignorance placed at such a disadvantage as to-day.

While the opportunities awaiting the educated man, the college graduate, on his entrance into practical life were never before so great and so numerous as to-day, so also the dangers and temptations which beset him were never before so great, so numerous, so insidious.

All education which does not elevate, refine, and ennoble its recipient is a curse instead of a blessing. A liberal education only renders a rascal more dishonest, more dangerous. Educated rascality is infinitely more of a menace to society than ignorant rascality.

Every year, thousands of young men and young women graduate full of ambition and hope, full of expectancy, go out from the schools, the colleges, and the universities, with their diplomas, to face for the first time the practical world.

There is nothing else, perhaps, which the graduate needs to be cautioned against more than the money madness which has seized the American people, for nothing else is more fatal to the development of the higher, finer instincts and nobler desires.

Wealth with us multiplies a man's power so tremendously that everything gravitates toward it. A man's genius, art, what he stands for, is measured largely by how many dollars it will bring. "How much can I get for my picture?" "How much royalty for my book?" "How much can I get out of my specialty, my profession, my business?" "How can I make the most money?" or "How can I get rich?" is the great interrogation of the century. How will the graduate, the trained young man or woman answer it?

The dollar stands out so strongly in all the undertakings of life that the ideal is often lowered or lost, the artistic suffers, the soul's wings are weighted down with gold. The commercial spirit tends to drag everything down to its dead, sordid level. It is the subtle menace which threatens to poison the graduate's ambition. Whichever way you turn, the dollar-mark will swing info your vision. The money-god, which nearly everybody worships in some form or other, will tempt you on every hand.

Never before was such pressure brought to bear on the trained youth to sell his brains, to coin his ability into dollars, to prostitute his education, as to-day. The commercial prizes held up to him are so dazzling, so astounding, that it takes a strong, vigorous character to resist their temptation, even when the call in one to do something which bears little relation to money-making speaks very loudly.

The song of the money-siren to-day is so persistent, so entrancing, so overwhelming that it often drowns the still small voice which bids one follow the call that runs in his blood, that is indicated in the very structure in his brain.

Tens of thousands of young people just out of school and college stand tiptoe on the threshold of active life, with high ideals and glorious visions, full of hope and big with promise, but many of them will very quickly catch the money contagion; the fatal germ will spread through their whole natures, inoculating their ambition with its vicious virus, and, after a few years, their fair college vision will fade, their yearnings for something higher will gradually die and be replaced by material, sordid, selfish ideals.

The most unfortunate day in a youth's career is that one on which his ideals begin to grow dim and his high standards begin to drop; that day on which is born in him the selfish, money-making germ, which so often warps and wrenches the whole nature out of its legitimate orbit.

You will need to be constantly on your guard to resist the attack of this germ. After you graduate and go out into the world, powerful influences will be operative in your life, tending to deteriorate your standards, lower your ideals, and encoarsen you generally.

When you plunge into the swim of things, you will be constantly thrown into contact with those of lower ideals, who are actuated only by sordid, selfish aims. Then dies the man, the woman in you, unless you are made of superior stuff.

What a contrast that high and noble thing which the college diploma stands for presents to that which many owners of the diploma stand for a quarter of a century later! It is often difficult to recognize any relationship between the two.

American-Indian graduates, who are so transformed by the inspiring, uplifting influences of the schools and colleges which are educating them that they are scarcely recognizable by their own tribes when they return home, very quickly begin to change under the deteriorating influences operating upon them when they leave college. They soon begin to shed their polish, their fine manners, their improved language, and general culture; the Indian blanket replaces their modern dress, and they gradually drift back into their former barbarism. They become Indians again.

The influences that will surround you when you leave college or your special training school will be as potent to drag you down as those that cause the young Indian to revert to barbarism. The shock you will receive in dropping from the atmosphere of high ideals and beautiful promise in which you have lived for four years to that of a very practical, cold, sordid materiality will be a severe test to your character, your manhood.

But the graduate whose training, whose education counts for anything ought to be able to resist the shock, to withstand all temptations.

The educated man ought to be able to do something better, something higher than merely to put money in his purse. Money-making can not compare with man-making. There is something infinitely better than to be a millionaire of money, and that is to be a millionaire of brains, of culture, of helpfulness to one's fellows, a millionaire of character—a gentleman.

Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much, will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.

"A keen and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard University, "is the finest result of college life." The graduate who has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education can impart.

Your future, fortunate graduate, like a great block of pure white marble, stands untouched before you. You hold the chisel and mallet—your ability, your education—in your hands. There is something in the block for you, and it lives in your ideal. Shall it be angel or devil? What are your ideals, as you stand tiptoe on the threshold of active life? Will you smite the block and shatter it into an unshapely or hideous piece; or will you call out a statue of usefulness, of grace and beauty, a statue which will tell the unborn generations the story of a noble life?

Great advantages bring great responsibilities. You can not divorce them. A liberal education greatly increases a man's obligations. There is coupled with it a responsibility which you can not shirk without paying the penalty in a shriveled soul, a stunted mentality, a warped conscience, and a narrow field of usefulness. It is more of a disgrace for a college graduate to grovel, to stoop to mean, low practises, than for a man who has not had a liberal education. The educated man has gotten a glimpse of power, of grander things, and he is expected to look up, not down, to aspire, not to grovel.

We cannot help feeling that it is worse for a man to go wrong who has had all the benefits of a liberal education, than it is for one who has not had glimpses of higher things, who has not had similar advantages, because where much is given, much is expected. The world has a right to expect that wherever there is an educated, trained man people should be able to say of him as Lincoln said of Walt Whitman, "There goes a man."

The world has a right to expect that the graduate, having once faced the light and felt its power, will not turn his back on it; that he will not disgrace his alma mater which has given him his superior chance in life and opened wide for him the door of opportunity. It has a right to expect that a man who has learned how to use skilfully the tools of life, will be an artist and not an artisan; that he will not stop growing. Society has a right to look to the collegian to be a refining, uplifting force in his community, an inspiration to those who have not had his priceless chance; it is justified in expecting that he will raise the standard of intelligence in his community; that he will illustrate in his personality, his finer culture, the possible glory of life. It has a right to expect that he will not be a victim of the narrowing, cramping influence of avarice; that he will not be a slave of the dollar or stoop to a greedy, grasping career: that he will be free from the sordidness which often characterizes the rich ignoramus.

If you have the ability and have been given superior opportunities, it simply means that you have a great commission to do something out of the ordinary for your fellows; a special message for humanity.

If the torch of learning has been put in your hand, its significance is that you should light up the way for the less fortunate.

If you have received a message which carries freedom for people enslaved by ignorance and bigotry, you have no right to suppress it. Your education means an increased obligation to live your life up to the level of your gift, your superior opportunity. Your duty is to deliver your message to the world with all the manliness, vigor, and force you possess.

What shall we think of a man who has been endowed with godlike gifts, who has had the inestimable advantage of a liberal education, who has ability to ameliorate the hard conditions of his fellows, to help to emancipate them from ignorance and drudgery; what shall we think of this man, so divinely endowed, so superbly equipped, who, instead of using his education to lift his fellow men, uses it to demoralize, to drag them down; who employs his talents in the book he writes, in the picture he paints, in his business, whatever it may be, to mislead, to demoralize, to debauch; who uses his light as a decoy to lure his fellows on the rocks and reefs, instead of as a beacon to guide them into port?

We imprison the burglar for breaking into our houses and stealing, but what shall we do with the educated rascal who uses his trained mind and all his gifts to ruin the very people who look up to him as a guide?

"The greatest thing you can do is to be what you ought to be."

A great man has said that no man will be content to live a half life when he has once discovered it is a half life, because the other half, the higher half, will haunt him. Your superior training has given you a glimpse of the higher life. Never lose sight of your college vision. Do not permit yourself to be influenced by the maxims of a low, sordid prudence, which will be dinned into your ears wherever you go. Regard the very suggestion that you shall coin your education, your high ideals into dollars; that you lower your standards, prostitute your education by the practise of low-down, sordid methods, as an insult.

Say to yourself, "If the highest thing in me will not bring success, surely the lowest, the worst, cannot."

The mission of the trained man is to show the world a higher, finer type of manhood.

The world has a right to expect better results from the work of the educated man; something finer, of a higher grade, and better quality, than from the man who lacks early training, the man who has discovered only a small part of himself. "Pretty good," "Fairly good," applied either to character or to work are bad mottoes for an educated man. You should be able to demonstrate that the man with a diploma has learned to use the tools of life skilfully; has learned how to focus his faculties so that he can bring the whole man to his task, and not a part of himself. Low ideals, slipshod work, aimless, systemless, half-hearted endeavors, should have no place in your program.

It is a disgrace for a man with a liberal education to botch his work, demoralize his ideals, discredit his teachers, dishonor the institution which has given him his chance to be a superior man.

"Keep your eye on the model, don't watch your hands," is the injunction of a great master as he walks up and down among his pupils, criticizing their work. The trouble with most of us is that we do not keep our eyes on the model; we lose our earlier vision. A liberal education ought to broaden a man's mind so that he will be able to keep his eye always on the model, the perfect ideal of his work, uninfluenced by the thousand and one petty annoyances, bickerings, misunderstandings, and discords which destroy much of the efficiency of narrower, less cultivated minds.

The graduate ought to be able to rise above these things so that he can use all his brain power and energy and fling the weight of his entire being into work that is worth while.

After the withdrawal of a play that has been only a short time on the stage, we often read this comment, "An artistic success, but a financial failure." While an education should develop all that is highest and best in a man, it should also make him a practical man, not a financial failure. Be sure that you possess your knowledge, that your knowledge does not possess you.

The mere possession of a diploma will only hold you up to ridicule, will only make you more conspicuous as a failure, if you cannot bring your education to a focus and utilize it in a practical way.

Knowledge is power only when it can be made available, practical.

Only what you can use of your education will benefit you or the world.

The great question which confronts you in the practical world is "What can you do with what you know?" Can you transmute your knowledge into power? Your ability to read your Latin diploma is not a test of true education; a stuffed memory does not make an educated man. The knowledge that can be utilized, that can be translated into power, constitutes the only education worthy of the name. There are thousands of college-bred men in this country, who are loaded down with knowledge that they have never been able to utilize, to make available for working purposes. There is a great difference between absorbing knowledge, making a sponge of one's brain, and transmuting every bit of knowledge into power, into working capital.

As the silkworm transmutes the mulberry leaf into satin, so you should transmute your knowledge into practical wisdom.

There is no situation in life in which the beneficent influence of a well-assimilated education will not make itself felt.

The college man ought to be a superb figure anywhere. The consciousness of being well educated should put one at ease in any society. The knowledge that one's mentality has been broadened out by college training, that one has discovered his possibilities, not only adds wonderfully to one's happiness, but also increases one's self-confidence immeasurably, and self-confidence is the lever that moves the world. On every hand we see men of good ability who feel crippled all their lives and are often mortified, by having to confess, by the poverty of their language, their sordid ideals, their narrow outlook on life, that they are not educated. The superbly trained man can go through the world with his head up and feel conscious that he is not likely to play the ignoramus in any company, or be mortified or pained by ignorance of matters which every well-informed person is supposed to know. This assurance of knowledge multiplies self-confidence and gives infinite satisfaction.

In other words, a liberal education makes a man think a little more of himself, feel a little surer of himself, have more faith in himself, because he has discovered himself. There is also great satisfaction in the knowledge that one has not neglected the unfoldment and expansion of his mind, that he has not let the impressionable years of youth go by unimproved.

But the best thing you carry from your alma mater is not what you there prized most, not your knowledge of the sciences, languages, literature, art; it is something infinitely more sacred, of greater value than all these, and that is your aroused ambition, your discovery of yourself, of your powers, of your possibilities; your resolution to be a little more of a man, to play a manly part in life, to do the greatest, grandest thing possible to you. This will mean infinitely more to you than all you have learned from books or lectures.

The most precious thing of all, however, if you have made the most of your chance, is the uplift, encouragement, inspiration, which you have absorbed from your teachers, from your associations; this is the embodiment of the college spirit, the spirit of your alma mater; it is that which should make you reach up as well as on, which should make you aspire instead of grovel—look up, instead of down.

The graduate should regard his education as a sacred trust. He should look upon it as a power to be used, not alone for his advancement, or for his own selfish ends, but for the betterment of all mankind. As a matter of fact, things are so arranged in this world that no one can use his divine gift for himself alone and get the best out of it. To try to keep it would be as foolish as for the farmer to hoard his seed corn in a bin instead of giving it to the earth, for fear he would never get it back.

The man who withholds the giving of himself to the world, does it at his peril, at the cost of mental and moral penury.

The way to get the most out of ourselves, or out of life, is not to try to sell ourselves for the highest possible price but to give ourselves, not stingily, meanly, but royally, magnanimously, to our fellows. If the rosebud should try to retain all of its sweetness and beauty locked within its petals and refuse to give it out, it would be lost. It is only by flinging them out to the world that their fullest development is possible. The man who tries to keep his education, his superior advantages for himself, who is always looking out for the main chance, only shrivels, and strangles the very faculties he would develop.

The trouble with most of us is that, in our efforts to sell ourselves for selfish ends or for the most dollars, we impoverish our own lives, stifle our better natures.

The graduate should show the world that he has something in him too sacred to be tampered with, something marked "not for sale," a sacred something that bribery cannot touch, that influence cannot buy. You should so conduct yourself that every one will see that there is something in you that would repel as an insult the very suggestion that you could be bought or bribed, or influenced to stoop to anything low or questionable.

The college man who is cursed with commonness, who gropes along in mediocrity, who lives a shiftless, selfish life, and does not lift up his head and show that he has made the most of his great privileges disgraces the institution that gave him his chance.

You have not learned the best lesson from your school or college if you have not discovered the secret of making life a glory instead of a sordid grind. When you leave your alma mater, my young friend, whatever your vocation, do not allow all that is finest within you, your high ideals and noble purposes to be suffocated, strangled, in the everlasting scramble for the dollar. Put beauty into your life, do not let your esthetic faculties, your aspiring instincts, be atrophied in your efforts to make a living. Do not, as thousands of graduates do, sacrifice your social instincts, your friendships, your good name, for power or position.

Whether you make money or lose it, never sell your divine heritage, your good name, for a mess of pottage. Whatever you do, be larger than your vocation; never let it be said of you that you succeeded in your vocation, but failed as a man.

When William Story, the sculptor, was asked to make a speech at the unveiling of his great statue of George Peabody, in London, he simply pointed to the statue and said, "That is my speech."

So conduct yourself that your life shall need no eulogy in words. Let it be its own eulogy, let your success tell to the world the story of a noble career. However much money you may accumulate, carry your greatest wealth with you, in a clean record, an unsullied reputation. Then you will not need houses or lands or stocks or bonds to testify to a rich life.

Never before did an opportunity to render such great service to mankind confront the educated youth as confronts you to-day. WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?



CHAPTER IX

ROUND BOYS IN SQUARE HOLES

The high prize of life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit, which finds him in employment and happiness.—EMERSON.

There is hardly a poet, artist, philosopher, or man of science mentioned in the history of the human intellect, whose genius was not opposed by parents, guardians, or teachers. In these cases Nature seems to have triumphed by direct interposition; to have insisted on her darlings having their rights, and encouraged disobedience, secrecy, falsehood, even flight from home and occasional vagabondism, rather than the world should lose what it cost her so much pains to produce.—E. P. WHIPPLE.

I hear a voice you cannot hear, Which says, I must not stay; I see a hand you cannot see, Which beckons me away. TICKELL.

"James Watt, I never saw such an idle young fellow as you are," said his grandmother; "do take a book and employ yourself usefully. For the last half-hour you have not spoken a single word. Do you know what you have been doing all this time? Why, you have taken off and replaced, and taken off again, the teapot lid, and you have held alternately in the steam, first a saucer and then a spoon, and you have busied yourself in examining and, collecting together the little drops formed by the condensation of the steam on the surface of the china and the silver. Now, are you not ashamed to waste your time in this disgraceful manner?"

The world has certainly gained much through the old lady's failure to tell James how he could employ his time to better advantage!

"But I'm good for something," pleaded a young man whom a merchant was about to discharge for his bluntness. "You are good for nothing as a salesman," said his employer. "I am sure I can be useful," said the youth. "How? Tell me how." "I don't know, sir, I don't know." "Nor do I," said the merchant, laughing at the earnestness of his clerk. "Only don't put me away, sir, don't put me away. Try me at something besides selling. I cannot sell; I know I cannot sell." "I know that, too," said the principal; "that is what is wrong." "But I can make myself useful somehow," persisted the young man; "I know I can." He was placed in the counting-house, where his aptitude for figures soon showed itself, and in a few years he became not only chief cashier in the large store, but an eminent accountant.

You cannot look into a cradle and read the secret message traced by a divine hand and wrapped up in that bit of clay, any more than you can see the North Star in the magnetic needle. God has loaded the needle of that young life so it will point to the star of its own destiny; and though you may pull it around by artificial advice and unnatural education, and compel it to point to the star which presides over poetry, art, law, medicine, or whatever your own pet calling is until you have wasted years of a precious life, yet, when once free, the needle flies back to its own star.

"Rue it as he may, repent it as he often does," says Robert Waters, "the man of genius is drawn by an irresistible impulse to the occupation for which he was created. No matter by what difficulties surrounded, no matter how unpromising the prospect, this occupation is the only one which he will pursue with interest and pleasure. When his efforts fail to procure means of subsistence, and he finds himself poor and neglected, he may, like Burns, often look back with a sigh and think how much better off he would be had he pursued some other occupation, but he will stick to his favorite pursuit nevertheless."

Civilization will mark its highest tide when every man has chosen his proper work. No man can be ideally successful until he has found his place. Like a locomotive, he is strong on the track, but weak anywhere else. "Like a boat on a river," says Emerson, "every boy runs against obstructions on every side but one. On that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea."

Only a Dickens can write the history of "Boy Slavery," of boys whose aspirations and longings have been silenced forever by ignorant parents; of boys persecuted as lazy, stupid, or fickle, simply because they were out of their places; of square boys forced into round holes, and oppressed because they did not fit; of boys compelled to pore over dry theological books when the voice within continually cried "Law," "Medicine," "Art," "Science," or "Business"; of boys tortured because they were not enthusiastic in employments which they loathed, and against which every fiber of their being was uttering perpetual protest.

It is often a narrow selfishness in a father which leads him to wish his son a reproduction of himself. "You are trying to make that boy another you. One is enough," said Emerson. John Jacob Astor's father wished his son to be his successor as a butcher, but the instinct of commercial enterprise was too strong in the future merchant.

Nature never duplicates men. She breaks the pattern at every birth. The magic combination is never used but once. Frederick the Great was terribly abused because he had a passion for art and music and did not care for military drill. His father hated the fine arts and imprisoned him. He even contemplated killing his son, but his own death placed Frederick on the throne at the age of twenty-eight. This boy, who, because he loved art and music, was thought good for nothing, made Prussia one of the greatest nations of Europe.

How stupid and clumsy is the blinking eagle at perch, but how keen his glance, how steady and true his curves, when turning his powerful wing against the clear blue sky!

Ignorant parents compelled the boy Arkwright to become a barber's apprentice, but Nature had locked up in his brain a cunning device destined to bless humanity and to do the drudgery of millions of England's poor; so he must needs say "hands off" even to his parents, as Christ said to his mother, "Wist ye not that I must be about my Father's business?"

Galileo was set apart for a physician, but when compelled to study anatomy and physiology, he would hide his Euclid and Archimedes and stealthily work out the abstruse problems. He was only eighteen when he discovered the principle of the pendulum in a lamp left swinging in the cathedral at Pisa. He invented both the microscope and telescope, enlarging knowledge of the vast and minute alike.

The parents of Michael Angelo had declared that no son of theirs should ever follow the discreditable profession of an artist, and even punished him for covering the walls and furniture with sketches; but the fire burning in his breast was kindled by the Divine Artist, and would not let him rest until he had immortalized himself in the architecture of St. Peter's, in the marble of his Moses, and on the walls of the Sistine Chapel.

Pascal's father determined that his son should teach the dead languages, but the voice of mathematics drowned every other call, haunting the boy until he laid aside his grammar for Euclid.

The father of Joshua Reynolds rebuked his son for drawing pictures, and wrote on one: "Done by Joshua out of pure idleness." Yet this "idle boy" became one of the founders of the Royal Academy.

Turner was intended for a barber in Maiden Lane, but became the greatest landscape-painter of modern times.

Claude Lorraine, the painter, was apprenticed to a pastry-cook; Moliere, the author, to an upholsterer; and Guido, the famous painter of Aurora, was sent to a music school.

Schiller was sent to study surgery in the military school at Stuttgart, but in secret he produced his first play, "The Robbers," the first performance of which he had to witness in disguise. The irksomeness of his prison-like school so galled him, and his longing for authorship so allured him, that he ventured, penniless, into the inhospitable world of letters. A kind lady aided him, and soon he produced the two splendid dramas which made him immortal.

The physician Handel wished his son to become a lawyer, and so tried to discourage his fondness for music. But the boy got an old spinet and practiced on it secretly in a hayloft. When the doctor visited a brother in the service of the Duke of Weisenfelds, he took his son with him. The boy wandered unobserved to the organ in a chapel, and soon had a private concert under full blast. The duke happened to hear the performance, and wondered who could possibly combine so much melody with so much evident unfamiliarity with the instrument. The boy was brought before him, and the duke, instead of blaming him for disturbing the organ, praised his performance, and persuaded Dr. Handel to let his son follow his bent.

Daniel Defoe had been a trader, a soldier, a merchant, a secretary, a factory manager, a commissioner's accountant, an envoy, and an author of several indifferent books, before he wrote his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe."

Wilson, the ornithologist, failed in five different professions before he found his place.

Erskine spent four years in the navy, and then, in the hope of more rapid promotion, joined the army. After serving more than two years, he one day, out of curiosity, attended a court, in the town where his regiment was quartered. The presiding judge, an acquaintance, invited Erskine to sit near him, and said that the pleaders at the bar were among the most eminent lawyers of Great Britain. Erskine took their measure as they spoke, and believed he could excel them. He at once began the study of law, in which he eventually soon stood alone as the greatest forensic orator of his country.

A. T. Stewart studied for the ministry, and became a teacher, before he drifted into his proper calling as a merchant, through the accident of having lent money to a friend. The latter, with failure imminent, insisted that his creditor should take the shop as the only means of securing the money.

"Jonathan," said Mr. Chase, when his son told of having nearly fitted himself for college, "thou shalt go down to the machine-shop on Monday morning." It was many years before Jonathan escaped from the shop, to work his way up to the position of a man of great influence as a United States Senator from Rhode Island.

It has been well said that if God should commission two angels, one to sweep a street crossing, and the other to rule an empire, they could not be induced to exchange callings. Not less true is it that he who feels that God has given him a particular work to do can be happy only when earnestly engaged in its performance. Happy the youth who finds the place which his dreams have pictured! If he does not fill that place, he will not fill any to the satisfaction of himself or others. Nature never lets a man rest until he has found his place. She haunts him and drives him until all his faculties give their consent and he falls into his proper niche. A parent might just as well decide that the magnetic needle will point to Venus or Jupiter without trying it, as to decide what profession his son shall adopt.

What a ridiculous exhibition a great truck-horse would make on the race-track; yet this is no more incongruous than the popular idea that law, medicine, and theology are the only desirable professions. How ridiculous, too, for fifty-two per cent. of our American college graduates to study law! How many young men become poor clergymen by trying to imitate their fathers who were good ones; of poor doctors and lawyers for the same reason! The country is full of men who are out of place, "disappointed, soured, ruined, out of office, out of money, out of credit, out of courage, out at elbows, out in the cold." The fact is, nearly every college graduate who succeeds in the true sense of the word, prepares himself in school, but makes himself after he is graduated. The best thing his teachers have taught him is how to study. The moment he is beyond the college walls he ceases to use books and helps which do not feed him, and seizes upon those that do.



We must not jump to the conclusion that because a man has not succeeded in what he has really tried to do with all his might, he cannot succeed at anything. Look at a fish floundering on the sand as though he would tear himself to pieces. But look again: a huge wave breaks higher up the beach and covers the unfortunate creature. The moment his fins feel the water, he is himself again, and darts like a flash through the waves. His fins mean something now, while before they beat the air and earth in vain, a hindrance instead of a help.

If you fail after doing your level best, examine the work attempted, and see if it really be in the line of your bent or power of achievement. Cowper failed as a lawyer. He was so timid that he could not plead a case, but he wrote some of our finest poems. Moliere found that he was not adapted to the work of a lawyer, but he left a great name in literature. Voltaire and Petrarch abandoned the law, the former choosing philosophy, the latter, poetry. Cromwell was a farmer until forty years old.

Very few of us, before we reach our teens, show great genius or even remarkable talent for any line of work or study. The great majority of boys and girls, even when given all the latitude and longitude heart could desire, find it very difficult before their fifteenth or even before their twentieth year to decide what to do for a living. Each knocks at the portals of the mind, demanding a wonderful aptitude for some definite line of work, but it is not there. That is no reason why the duty at hand should be put off, or why the labor that naturally falls to one's lot should not be done well. Samuel Smiles was trained to a profession which was not to his taste, yet he practiced it so faithfully that it helped him to authorship, for which he was well fitted.

Fidelity to the work or everyday duties at hand, and a genuine feeling of responsibility to our parents or employers, ourselves, and our God, will eventually bring most of us into the right niches at the proper time.

Garfield would not have become President if he had not previously been a zealous teacher, a responsible soldier, a conscientious statesman. Neither Lincoln nor Grant started as a baby with a precocity for the White House, or an irresistible genius for ruling men. So no one should be disappointed because he was not endowed with tremendous gifts in the cradle. His business is to do the best he can wherever his lot may be cast, and advance at every honorable opportunity in the direction towards which the inward monitor points. Let duty be the guiding-star, and success will surely be the crown, to the full measure of one's ability and industry.

What career? What shall my life's work be?

If instinct and heart ask for carpentry, be a carpenter; if for medicine, be a physician. With a firm choice and earnest work, a young man or woman cannot help but succeed. But if there be no instinct, or if it be weak or faint, one should choose cautiously along the line of his best adaptability and opportunity. No one need doubt that the world has use for him. True success lies in acting well your part, and this every one can do. Better be a first-rate hod-carrier than a second-rate anything.

The world has been very kind to many who were once known as dunces or blockheads, after they have become very successful; but it was very cross to them while they were struggling through discouragement and misinterpretation. Give every boy and girl a fair chance and reasonable encouragement, and do not condemn them because of even a large degree of downright stupidity; for many so-called good-for-nothing boys, blockheads, numskulls, dullards, or dunces, were only boys out of their places, round boys forced into square holes.

Wellington was considered a dunce by his mother. At Eton he was called dull, idle, slow, and was about the last boy in school of whom anything was expected. He showed no talent, and had no desire to enter the army. His industry and perseverance were his only redeeming characteristics in the eyes of his parents and teachers. But at forty-six he had defeated the greatest general living, except himself.

Goldsmith was the laughing-stock of his schoolmasters. He was graduated "Wooden Spoon," a college name for a dunce. He tried to enter a class in surgery, but was rejected. He was driven to literature. Goldsmith found himself totally unfit for the duties of a physician; but who else could have written the "Vicar of Wakefield" or the "Deserted Village"? Dr. Johnson found him very poor and about to be arrested for debt. He made Goldsmith give him the manuscript of the "Vicar of Wakefield," sold it to the publishers, and paid the debt. This manuscript made its author famous.

Robert Clive bore the name of "dunce" and "reprobate" at school, but at thirty-two, with three thousand men, he defeated fifty thousand at Plassey and laid the foundation of the British Empire in India. Sir Walter Scott was called a blockhead by his teacher. When Byron happened to get ahead of his class, the master would say: "Now, Jordie, let me see how soon you will be at the foot again."

Young Linnaeus was called by his teachers almost a blockhead. Not finding him fit for the church, his parents sent him to college to study medicine. But the silent teacher within, greater and wiser than all others, led him to the fields; and neither sickness, misfortune, nor poverty could drive him from the study of botany, the choice of his heart, and he became the greatest botanist of his age.

Richard B. Sheridan's mother tried in vain to teach him the most elementary studies. The mother's death aroused slumbering talents, as has happened in hundreds of cases, and he became one of the most brilliant men of his age.

Samuel Drew was one of the dullest and most listless boys in his neighborhood, yet after an accident by which he nearly lost his life, and after the death of his brother, he became so studious and industrious that he could not bear to lose a moment. He read at every meal, using all the time he could get for self-improvement. He said that Paine's "Age of Reason" made him an author, for it was by his attempt to refute its arguments that he was first known as a strong, vigorous writer.

It has been well said that no man ever made an ill figure who understood his own talents, nor a good one who mistook them.



CHAPTER X

WHAT CAREER?

Brutes find out where their talents lie; A bear will not attempt to fly, A foundered horse will oft debate Before he tries a five-barred gate. A dog by instinct turns aside Who sees the ditch too deep and wide. But man we find the only creature Who, led by folly, combats nature; Who, when she loudly cries—Forbear! With obstinacy fixes there; And where his genius least inclines, Absurdly bends his whole designs. SWIFT.

The crowning fortune of a man is to be born to some pursuit which finds him in employment and happiness, whether it be to make baskets, or broadswords, or canals, or statues, or songs.—EMERSON.

Whatever you are by nature, keep to it; never desert your line of talent. Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.—SYDNEY SMITH.

"Every man has got a Fort," said Artemus Ward. "It's some men's fort to do one thing, and some other men's fort to do another, while there is numeris shiftless critters goin' round loose whose fort is not to do nothin'.

"Twice I've endevered to do things which they wasn't my Fort. The first time was when I undertook to lick a owdashus cuss who cut a hole in my tent and krawld threw. Sez I, 'My jentle sir, go out, or I shall fall onto you putty hevy.' Sez he, 'Wade in, Old Wax Figgers,' whereupon I went for him, but he cawt me powerful on the hed and knockt me threw the tent into a cow pastur. He pursood the attack and flung me into a mud puddle. As I aroze and rung out my drencht garmints, I concluded fitin was n't my fort.

"I'le now rize the curtain upon seen 2nd. It is rarely seldum that I seek consolation in the Flowin Bole. But in a certain town in Injianny in the Faul of 18—, my orgin grinder got sick with the fever and died. I never felt so ashamed in my life, and I thought I'd hist in a few swallers of suthin strengthnin. Konsequents was, I histed so much I didn't zackly know whereabouts I was. I turned my livin' wild beasts of Pray loose into the streets, and split all my wax-works.

"I then Bet I cood play hoss. So I hitched myself to a kanawl bote, there bein' two other hosses behind and anuther ahead of me. But the hosses bein' onused to such a arrangemunt, begun to kick and squeal and rair up. Konsequents was, I was kicked vilently in the stummuck and back, and presently, I found myself in the kanawl with the other hosses, kikin and yellin like a tribe of Cusscaroorus savajis. I was rescood, and as I was bein carried to the tavern on a hemlock bored I sed in a feeble voice, 'Boys, playin' hoss isn't my Fort.'

"Moral: Never don't do nothin' which isn't your Fort, for ef you do you'll find yourself splashin' round in the kanawl, figuratively speakin."

The following advertisement, which appeared day after day in a Western paper, did not bring a single reply:—

"Wanted.—Situation by a Practical Printer, who is competent to take charge of any department in a printing and publishing house. Would accept a professorship in any of the academies. Has no objection to teach ornamental painting and penmanship, geometry, trigonometry, and many other sciences. Has had some experience as a lay preacher. Would have no objection to form a small class of young ladies and gentlemen to instruct them in the higher branches. To a dentist or chiropodist he would be invaluable; or he would cheerfully accept a position as bass or tenor singer in a choir."

At length there appeared this addition to the notice:—

"P. S. Will accept an offer to saw and split wood at less than the usual rates." This secured a situation at once, and the advertisement was seen no more.

Your talent is your call. Your legitimate destiny speaks in your character. If you have found your place, your occupation has the consent of every faculty of your being.

If possible, choose that occupation which focuses the largest amount of your experience and tastes. You will then not only have a congenial vocation, but also will utilize largely your skill and business knowledge, which is your true capital.

Follow your bent. You cannot long fight successfully against your aspirations. Parents, friends, or misfortune may stifle and suppress the longings of the heart, by compelling you to perform unwelcome tasks; but, like a volcano, the inner fire will burst the crusts which confine it and will pour forth its pent-up genius in eloquence, in song, in art, or in some favorite industry. Beware of "a talent which you cannot hope to practice in perfection." Nature hates all botched and half-finished work, and will pronounce her curse upon it.

Better be the Napoleon of bootblacks, or the Alexander of chimney-sweeps, let us say with Matthew Arnold, than a shallow-brained attorney who, like necessity, knows no law.

Half the world seems to have found uncongenial occupation, as though the human race had been shaken up together and exchanged places in the operation. A servant girl is trying to teach, and a natural teacher is tending store. Good farmers are murdering the law, while Choates and Websters are running down farms, each tortured by the consciousness of unfulfilled destiny. Boys are pining in factories who should be wrestling with Greek and Latin, and hundreds are chafing beneath unnatural loads in college who should be on the farm or before the mast. Artists are spreading "daubs" on canvas who should be whitewashing board fences. Behind counters stand clerks who hate the yard-stick and neglect their work to dream of other occupations. A good shoemaker writes a few verses for the village paper, his friends call him a poet, and the last, with which he is familiar, is abandoned for the pen, which he uses awkwardly. Other shoemakers are cobbling in Congress, while statesmen are pounding shoe-lasts. Laymen are murdering sermons while Beechers and Whitefields are failing as merchants, and people are wondering what can be the cause of empty pews. A boy who is always making something with tools is railroaded through the university and started on the road to inferiority in one of the "three honorable professions." Real surgeons are handling the meat-saw and cleaver, while butchers are amputating human limbs. How fortunate that—

"There's a divinity that shapes our ends, Rough-hew them how we will."

"He that hath a trade," says Franklin, "hath an estate; and he that hath a calling hath a place of profit and honor. A plowman on his legs is higher than a gentleman on his knees."

A man's business does more to make him than anything else. It hardens his muscles, strengthens his body, quickens his blood, sharpens his mind, corrects his judgment, wakes up his inventive genius, puts his wits to work, starts him on the race of life, arouses his ambition, makes him feel that he is a man and must fill a man's shoes, do a man's work, bear a man's part in life, and show himself a man in that part. No man feels himself a man who is not doing a man's business. A man without employment is not a man. He does not prove by his works that he is a man. A hundred and fifty pounds of bone and muscle do not make a man. A good cranium full of brains is not a man. The bone and muscle and brain must know how to do a man's work, think a man's thoughts, mark out a man's path, and bear a man's weight of character and duty before they constitute a man.

Go-at-it-iveness is the first requisite for success. Stick-to-it-iveness is the second. Under ordinary circumstances, and with practical common sense to guide him, one who has these requisites will not fail.

Don't wait for a higher position or a larger salary. Enlarge the position you already occupy; put originality of method into it. Fill it as it never was filled before. Be more prompt, more energetic, more thorough, more polite than your predecessor or fellow workmen. Study your business, devise new modes of operation, be able to give your employer points. The art lies not in giving satisfaction merely, not in simply filling your place, but in doing better than was expected, in surprising your employer; and the reward will be a better place and a larger salary.

When out of work, take the first respectable job that offers, heeding not the disproportion between your faculties and your task. If you put your manhood into your labor, you will soon be given something better to do.

This question of a right aim in life has become exceedingly perplexing in our complicated age. It is not a difficult problem to solve when one is the son of a Zulu or the daughter of a Bedouin. The condition of the savage hardly admits of but one choice; but as one rises higher in the scale of civilization and creeps nearer to the great centers of activity, the difficulty of a correct decision increases with its importance. In proportion as one is hard pressed in competition is it of the sternest necessity for him to choose the right aim, so as to be able to throw the whole of his energy and enthusiasm into the struggle for success. The dissipation of strength or hope is fatal to prosperity even in the most attractive field.

Gladstone says there is a limit to the work that can be got out of a human body, or a human brain, and he is a wise man who wastes no energy on pursuits for which he is not fitted.

"Blessed is he who has found his work," says Carlyle. "Let him ask no other blessedness. He has a work—a life purpose; he has found it, and will follow it."

In choosing an occupation, do not ask yourself how you can make the most money or gain the most notoriety, but choose that work which will call out all your powers and develop your manhood into the greatest strength and symmetry. Not money, not notoriety, not fame even, but power is what you want. Manhood is greater than wealth, grander than fame. Character is greater than any career. Each faculty must be educated, and any deficiency in its training will appear in whatever you do. The hand must be educated to be graceful, steady, and strong. The eye must be educated to be alert, discriminating, and microscopic. The heart must be educated to be tender, sympathetic, and true. The memory must be drilled for years in accuracy, retention, and comprehensiveness. The world does not demand that you be a lawyer, minister, doctor, farmer, scientist, or merchant; it does not dictate what you shall do, but it does require that you be a master in whatever you undertake. If you are a master in your line, the world will applaud you and all doors will fly open to you. But it condemns all botches, abortions, and failures.

"Whoever is well educated to discharge the duty of a man," says Rousseau, "cannot be badly prepared to fill any of those offices that have relation to him. It matters little to me whether my pupils be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar. Nature has destined us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination concerning society. To live is the profession I would teach him. When I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a lawyer, nor a divine. Let him first be a man. Fortune may remove him from one rank to another as she pleases; he will be always found in his place."

In the great race of life common sense has the right of way. Wealth, a diploma, a pedigree, talent, genius, without tact and common sense, cut but a small figure. The incapables and the impracticables, though loaded with diplomas and degrees, are left behind. Not what do you know, or who are you, but what are you, what can you do, is the interrogation of the century.

George Herbert has well said: "What we are is much more to us than what we do." An aim that carries in it the least element of doubt as to its justice or honor or right should be abandoned at once. The art of dishing up the wrong so as to make it look and taste like the right has never been more extensively cultivated than in our day. It is a curious fact that reason will, on pressure, overcome a man's instinct of right. An eminent scientist has said that a man could soon reason himself out of the instinct of decency if he would only take pains and work hard enough. So when a doubtful but attractive future is placed before one, there is a great temptation to juggle with the wrong until it seems the right. Yet any aim that is immoral carries in itself the germ of certain failure, in the real sense of the word—failure that is physical and spiritual.

There is no doubt that every person has a special adaptation for his own peculiar part in life. A very few—geniuses, we call them—have this marked in an unusual degree, and very early in life.

Madame de Stael was engrossed in political philosophy at an age when other girls are dressing dolls. Mozart, when but four years old, played the clavichord and composed minuets and other pieces still extant. The little Chalmers, with solemn air and earnest gestures, would preach often from a stool in the nursery. Goethe wrote tragedies at twelve, and Grotius published an able philosophical work before he was fifteen. Pope "lisped in numbers." Chatterton wrote good poems at eleven, and Cowley published a volume of poetry in his sixteenth year. Thomas Lawrence and Benjamin West drew likenesses almost as soon as they could walk. Liszt played in public at twelve. Canova made models in clay while a mere child. Bacon exposed the defects of Aristotle's philosophy when but sixteen. Napoleon was at the head of armies when throwing snowballs at Brienne.

All these showed their bent while young, and followed it in active life. But precocity is not common, and, except in rare cases, we must discover the bias in our natures, and not wait for the proclivity to make itself manifest. When found, it is worth more to us than a vein of gold.

"I do not forbid you to preach," said a Bishop to a young clergyman, "but nature does."

Lowell said: "It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes, and lives left in the rough."

You have not found your place until all your faculties are roused, and your whole nature consents and approves of the work you are doing; not until you are so enthusiastic in it that you take it to bed with you. You may be forced to drudge at uncongenial toil for a time, but emancipate yourself as soon as possible. Carey, the "Consecrated Cobbler," before he went as a missionary said: "My business is to preach the gospel. I cobble shoes to pay expenses."

If your vocation be only a humble one, elevate it with more manhood than others put into it. Put into it brains and heart and energy and economy. Broaden it by originality of methods. Extend it by enterprise and industry. Study it as you would a profession. Learn everything that is to be known about it. Concentrate your faculties upon it, for the greatest achievements are reserved for the man of single aim, in whom no rival powers divide the empire of the soul. Better adorn your own than seek another's place.

Go to the bottom of your business if you would climb to the top. Nothing is small which concerns your business. Master every detail. This was the secret of A. T. Stewart's and of John Jacob Astor's great success. They knew everything about their business.

As love is the only excuse for marriage, and the only thing which will carry one safely through the troubles and vexations of married life, so love for an occupation is the only thing which will carry one safely and surely through the troubles which overwhelm ninety-five out of every one hundred who choose the life of a merchant, and very many in every other career.

A famous Englishman said to his nephew, "Don't choose medicine, for we have never had a murderer in our family, and the chances are that in your ignorance you may kill a patient; as to the law, no prudent man is willing to risk his life or his fortune to a young lawyer, who has not only no experience, but is generally too conceited to know the risks he incurs for his client, who alone is the loser; therefore, as the mistakes of a clergyman in doctrine or advice to his parishioners cannot be clearly determined in this world, I advise you by all means to enter the church."

"I felt that I was in the world to do something, and thought I must," said Whittier, thus giving the secret of his great power. It is the man who must enter law, literature, medicine, the ministry, or any other of the overstocked professions, who will succeed. His certain call, that is his love for it, and his fidelity to it, are the imperious factors of his career. If a man enters a profession simply because his grandfather made a great name in it, or his mother wants him to, with no love or adaptability for it, it were far better for him to be a motor-man on an electric car at a dollar and seventy-five cents a day. In the humbler work his intelligence may make him a leader; in the other career he might do as much harm as a bowlder rolled from its place upon a railroad track, a menace to the next express.

Only a few years ago marriage was the only "sphere" open to girls, and the single woman had to face the disapproval of her friends. Lessing said: "The woman who thinks is like a man who puts on rouge, ridiculous." Not many years have elapsed since the ambitious woman who ventured to study or write would keep a bit of embroidery at hand to throw over her book or manuscript when callers entered. Dr. Gregory said to his daughters: "If you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts and a cultivated understanding." Women who wrote books in those days would deny the charge as though a public disgrace.

All this has changed, and what a change it is! As Frances Willard said, the greatest discovery of the century is the discovery of woman. We have emancipated her, and are opening countless opportunities for our girls outside of marriage. Formerly only a boy could choose a career; now his sister can do the same. This freedom is one of the greatest glories of the twentieth century. But with freedom comes responsibility, and under these changed conditions every girl should have a definite aim.

Dr. Hall says that the world has urgent need of "girls who are mother's right hand; girls who can cuddle the little ones next best to mamma, and smooth out the tangles in the domestic skein when thing's get twisted; girls whom father takes comfort in for something better than beauty, and the big brothers are proud of for something that outranks the ability to dance or shine in society. Next, we want girls of sense,—girls who have a standard of their own, regardless of conventionalities, and are independent enough to live up to it; girls who simply won't wear a trailing dress on the street to gather up microbes and all sorts of defilement; girls who don't wear a high hat to the theater, or lacerate their feet and endanger their health with high heels and corsets; girls who will wear what is pretty and becoming and snap their fingers at the dictates of fashion when fashion is horrid and silly. And we want good girls,—girls who are sweet, right straight out from the heart to the lips; innocent and pure and simple girls, with less knowledge of sin and duplicity and evil-doing at twenty than the pert little schoolgirl of ten has all too often. And we want careful girls and prudent girls, who think enough of the generous father who toils to maintain them in comfort, and of the gentle mother who denies herself much that they may have so many pretty things, to count the cost and draw the line between the essentials and non-essentials; girls who strive to save and not to spend; girls who are unselfish and eager to be a joy and a comfort in the home rather than an expense and a useless burden. We want girls with hearts,—girls who are full of tenderness and sympathy, with tears that flow for other people's ills, and smiles that light outward their own beautiful thoughts. We have lots of clever girls, and brilliant girls, and witty girls. Give us a consignment of jolly girls, warm-hearted and impulsive girls; kind and entertaining to their own folks, and with little desire to shine in the garish world. With a few such girls scattered around, life would freshen up for all of us, as the weather does under the spell of summer showers."

"They talk about a woman's sphere, As though it had a limit; There's not a place in earth or heaven, There's not a task to mankind given, There's not a blessing or a woe, There's not a whisper, Yes or No, There's not a life, or death, or birth, That has a feather's weight of worth, Without a woman in it."

"Do that which is assigned you," says Emerson, "and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses or Dante, but different from all these."

"The best way for a young man to begin, who is without friends or influence," said Russell Sage, "is, first, by getting a position; second, keeping his mouth shut; third, observing; fourth, being faithful; fifth, making his employer think he would be lost in a fog without him; and sixth, being polite."

"Close application, integrity, attention to details, discreet advertising," are given as the four steps to success by John Wanamaker, whose motto is, "Do the next thing."

Whatever you do in life, be greater than your calling. Most people look upon an occupation or calling as a mere expedient for earning a living. What a mean, narrow view to take of what was intended for the great school of life, the great man developer, the character-builder; that which should broaden, deepen, heighten, and round out into symmetry, harmony, and beauty all the God-given faculties within us! How we shrink from the task and evade the lessons which were intended for the unfolding of life's great possibilities into usefulness and power, as the sun unfolds into beauty and fragrance the petals of the flower!

I am glad to think I am not bound to make the world go round; But only to discover and to do, With cheerful heart, the work that God appoints. JEAN INGELOW.

"'What shall I do to be forever known?' Thy duty ever! 'This did full many who yet sleep all unknown,'— Oh, never, never! Think'st thou, perchance, that they remain unknown Whom thou know'st not? By angel trumps in heaven their praise is blown, Divine their lot."



CHAPTER XI

CHOOSING A VOCATION

Be what nature intended you for, and you will succeed; be anything else, and you will be ten thousand times worse than nothing.—SYDNEY SMITH.

"Many a man pays for his success with a slice of his constitution."

No man struggles perpetually and victoriously against his own character; and one of the first principles of success in life is so to regulate our career as rather to turn our physical constitution and natural inclinations to good account than to endeavor to counteract the one or oppose the other.—BULWER.

He that hath a trade hath an estate.—FRANKLIN.

Nature fits all her children with something to do.—LOWELL.

As occupations and professions have a powerful influence upon the length of human life, the youth should first ascertain whether the vocation he thinks of choosing is a healthy one. Statesmen, judges, and clergymen are noted for their longevity. They are not swept into the great business vortex, where the friction and raspings of sharp competition whittle life away at a fearful rate. Astronomers, who contemplate vast systems, moving through enormous distances, are exceptionally long lived,—as Herschel and Humboldt. Philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians, as Galileo, Bacon, Newton, Euler, Dalton, in fact, those who have dwelt upon the exact sciences, seem to have escaped many of the ills from which humanity suffers. Great students of natural history have also, as a rule, lived long and happy lives. Of fourteen members of a noted historical society in England, who died in 1870, two were over ninety, five over eighty, and two over seventy.

The occupation of the mind has a great influence upon the health of the body.

There is no employment so dangerous and destructive to life but plenty of human beings can be found to engage in it. Of all the instances that can be given of recklessness of life, there is none which exceeds that of the workmen employed in what is called dry-pointing—the grinding of needles and of table forks. The fine steel dust which they breathe brings on a painful disease, of which they are almost sure to die before they are forty. Yet not only are men tempted by high wages to engage in this employment, but they resist to the utmost all contrivances devised for diminishing the danger, through fear that such things would cause more workmen to offer themselves and thus lower wages. Many physicians have investigated the effects of work in the numerous match factories in France upon the health of the employees, and all agree that rapid destruction of the teeth, decay or necrosis of the jawbone, bronchitis, and other diseases result.

We will probably find more old men on farms than elsewhere. There are many reasons why farmers should live longer than persons residing in cities or than those engaged in other occupations. Aside from the purer air, the outdoor exercise, both conducive to a good appetite and sound sleep, which comparatively few in cities enjoy, they are free from the friction, harassing cares, anxieties, and the keen competition incident to city life. On the other hand, there are some great drawbacks and some enemies to longevity, even on the farm. Man does not live by bread alone. The mind is by far the greatest factor in maintaining the body in a healthy condition. The social life of the city, the great opportunities afforded the mind for feeding upon libraries and lectures, great sermons, and constant association with other minds, the great variety of amusements compensate largely for the loss of many of the advantages of farm life. In spite of the great temperance and immunity from things which corrode, whittle, and rasp away life in the cities, farmers in many places do not live so long as scientists and some other professional men.

There is no doubt that aspiration and success tend to prolong life. Prosperity tends to longevity, if we do not wear life away or burn it out in the feverish pursuit of wealth. Thomas W. Higginson made a list of thirty of the most noted preachers of the last century, and found that their average length of life was sixty-nine years.

Among miners in some sections over six hundred out of a thousand die from consumption. In the prisons of Europe, where the fatal effects of bad air and filth are shown, over sixty-one per cent. of the deaths are from tuberculosis. In Bavarian monasteries, fifty per cent. of those who enter in good health die of consumption, and in the Prussian prisons it is almost the same. The effect of bad air, filth, and bad food is shown by the fact that the death-rate among these classes, between the ages of twenty and forty, is five times that of the general population of the same age. In New York City, over one-fifth of all the deaths of persons over twenty are from this cause. In large cities in Europe the percentage is often still greater. Of one thousand deaths from all causes, on the average, one hundred and three farmers die of pulmonary tuberculosis, one hundred and eight fishermen, one hundred and twenty-one gardeners, one hundred and twenty-two farm laborers, one hundred and sixty-seven grocers, two hundred and nine tailors, three hundred and one dry-goods dealers, and four hundred and sixty-one compositors,—nearly one-half.

According to a long series of investigations by Drs. Benoysten and Lombard into occupations or trades where workers must inhale dust, it appears that mineral dust is the most detrimental to health, animal dust ranking next, and vegetable dust third.

In choosing an occupation, cleanliness, pure air, sunlight, and freedom from corroding dust and poisonous gases are of the greatest importance. A man who would sell a year of his life for any amount of money would be considered insane, and yet we deliberately choose occupations and vocations which statistics and physicians tell us will be practically sure to cut off from five to twenty-five, thirty, or even forty years of our lives, and are seemingly perfectly indifferent to our fate.

There is danger in a calling which requires great expenditure of vitality at long, irregular intervals. He who is not regularly, or systematically employed incurs perpetual risk. "Of the thirty-two all-round athletes in a New York club not long ago," said a physician, "three are dead of consumption, five have to wear trusses, four or five are lop-shouldered, and three have catarrh and partial deafness." Dr. Patten, chief surgeon at the National Soldiers' Home at Dayton, Ohio, says that "of the five thousand soldiers in that institution fully eighty per cent. are suffering from heart disease in one form or another, due to the forced physical exertions of the campaigns."

Man's faculties and functions are so interrelated that whatever affects one affects all. Athletes who over-develop the muscular system do so at the expense of the physical, mental, and moral well-being. It is a law of nature that the overdevelopment of any function or faculty, forcing or straining it, tends not only to ruin it, but also to cause injurious reactions on every other faculty and function.

Vigorous thought must come from a fresh brain. We cannot expect nerve, snap, robustness and vigor, sprightliness and elasticity, in the speech, in the book, or in the essay, from an exhausted, jaded brain. The brain is one of the last organs of the body to reach maturity (at about the age of twenty-eight), and should never be overworked, especially in youth. The whole future of a man is often ruined by over-straining the brain in school.

Brain-workers cannot do good, effective work in one line many hours a day. When the brain is weary, when it begins to lose its elasticity and freshness, there will be the same lack of tonicity and strength in the brain product. Some men often do a vast amount of literary work in entirely different lines during their spare hours.

Cessation of brain activity does not necessarily constitute brain rest, as most great thinkers know. The men who accomplish the most brain-work, sooner or later—usually later, unfortunately—learn to give rest to one set of faculties and use another, as interest begins to flag and a sense of weariness comes. In this way they have been enabled to astonish the world by their mental achievements, which is very largely a matter of skill in exercising alternate sets of faculties, allowing rest to some while giving healthy exercise to others. The continual use of one set of faculties by an ambitious worker will soon bring him to grief. No set of brain cells can possibly set free more brain force in the combustion of thought than is stored up in them. The tired brain must have rest, or nervous exhaustion, brain fever, or even softening of the brain is liable to follow.

As a rule, physical vigor is the condition of a great career. What would Gladstone have accomplished with a weak, puny physique? He addresses an audience at Corfu in Greek, and another at Florence in Italian. A little later he converses at ease with Bismarck in German, or talks fluent French in Paris, or piles up argument on argument in English for hours in Parliament. There are families that have "clutched success and kept it through generations from the simple fact of a splendid physical organization handed down from one generation to another."



All occupations that enervate, paralyze, or destroy body or soul should be avoided. Our manufacturing interests too often give little thought to the employed; the article to be made is generally the only object considered. They do not care if a man spends the whole of his life upon the head of a pin, or in making a screw in a watch factory. They take no notice of the occupations that ruin, or the phosphorus, the dust, the arsenic that destroys the health, that shortens the lives of many workers; of the cramped condition of the body which creates deformity.

The moment we compel those we employ to do work that demoralizes them or does not tend to elevate or lift them, we are forcing them into service worse than useless. "If we induce painters to work in fading colors, or architects with rotten stone, or contractors to construct buildings with imperfect materials, we are forcing our Michael Angelos to carve in snow."

Ruskin says that the tendency of the age is to expend its genius in perishable art, as if it were a triumph to burn its thoughts away in bonfires. Is the work you compel others to do useful to yourself and to society? If you employ a seamstress to make four or five or six beautiful flounces for your ball dress, flounces which will only clothe yourself, and which you will wear at only one ball, you are employing your money selfishly. Do not confuse covetousness with benevolence, nor cheat yourself into thinking that all the finery you can wear is so much put into the hungry mouths of those beneath you. It is what those who stand shivering on the street, forming a line to see you step out of your carriage, know it to be. These fine dresses do not mean that so much has been put into their mouths, but that so much has been taken out of their mouths.

Select a clean, useful, honorable occupation. If there is any doubt on this point, abandon it at once, for familiarity with a bad business will make it seem good. Choose a business that has expansiveness in it. Some kinds of business not even a J. Pierpont Morgan could make respectable. Choose an occupation which will develop you; which will elevate you; which will give you a chance for self-improvement and promotion. You may not make quite so much money, but you will be more of a man, and manhood is above all riches, overtops all titles, and character is greater than any career. If possible avoid occupations which compel you to work in a cramped position, or where you must work at night and on Sundays. Don't try to justify yourself on the ground that somebody must do this kind of work. Let "somebody," not yourself, take the responsibility. Aside from the right and wrong of the thing, it is injurious to the health to work seven days in the week, to work at night when Nature intended you to sleep, or to sleep in the daytime when she intended you to work.

Many a man has dwarfed his manhood, cramped his intellect, crushed his aspiration, blunted his finer sensibilities, in some mean, narrow occupation just because there was money in it.

"Study yourself," says Longfellow, "and most of all, note well wherein kind nature meant you to excel."

Dr. Matthews says that "to no other cause, perhaps, is failure in life so frequently to be traced as to a mistaken calling." We can often find out by hard knocks and repeated failures what we can not do before what we can do. This negative process of eliminating the doubtful chances is often the only way of attaining to the positive conclusion.

How many men have been made ridiculous for life by choosing law or medicine or theology, simply because they are "honorable professions"! These men might have been respectable farmers or merchants, but are "nobodies" in such vocations. The very glory of the profession which they thought would make them shining lights simply renders more conspicuous their incapacity.

Thousands of youths receive an education that fits them for a profession which they have not the means or inclination to follow, and that unfits them for the conditions of life to which they were born. Unsuccessful students with a smattering of everything are raised as much above their original condition as if they were successful. A large portion of Paris cabmen are unsuccessful students in theology and other professions and also unfrocked priests. They are very bad cabmen.

"Tompkins forsakes his last and awl For literary squabbles; Styles himself poet; but his trade Remains the same,—he cobbles."

Don't choose a profession or occupation because your father, or uncle, or brother is in it. Don't choose a business because you inherit it, or because parents or friends want you to follow it. Don't choose it because others have made fortunes in it. Don't choose it because it is considered the "proper thing" and a "genteel" business. The mania for a "genteel" occupation, for a "soft job" which eliminates drudgery, thorns, hardships, and all disagreeable things, and one which can be learned with very little effort, ruins many a youth.

When we try to do that for which we are unfitted we are not working along the line of our strength, but of our weakness; our will power and enthusiasm become demoralized; we do half work, botched work, lose confidence in ourselves, and conclude that we are dunces because we cannot accomplish what others do; the whole tone of life is demoralized and lowered because we are out of place.

How it shortens the road to success to make a wise choice of one's occupation early, to be started on the road of a proper career while young, full of hope, while the animal spirits are high, and enthusiasm is vigorous; to feel that every step we take, that every day's work we do, that every blow we strike helps to broaden, deepen, and enrich life!

Those who fail are, as a rule, those who are out of their places. A man out of his place is but half a man; his very nature is perverted. He is working against his nature, rowing against the current. When his strength is exhausted he will float down the stream. A man can not succeed when his whole nature is entering its perpetual protest against his occupation. To succeed, his vocation must have the consent of all his faculties; they must be in harmony with his purpose.

Has a young man a right to choose an occupation which will only call into play his lower and inferior qualities, as cunning, deceit, letting all his nobler qualities shrivel and die? Has he a right to select a vocation that will develop only the beast within him instead of the man? which will call out the bulldog qualities only, the qualities which overreach and grasp, the qualities which get and never give, which develop long-headedness only, while his higher self atrophies?

The best way to choose an occupation is to ask yourself the question, "What would my government do with me if it were to consider scientifically my qualifications and adaptations, and place me to the best possible advantage for all the people?" The Norwegian precept is a good one: "Give thyself wholly to thy fellow-men; they will give thee back soon enough." We can do the most possible for ourselves when we are in a position where we can do the most possible for others. We are doing the most for ourselves and for others when we are in a position which calls into play in the highest possible way the greatest number of our best faculties; in other words, we are succeeding best for ourselves when we are succeeding best for others.

The time will come when there will be institutions for determining the natural bent of the boy and girl; where men of large experience and close observation will study the natural inclination of the youth, help him to find where his greatest strength lies and how to use it to the best advantage. Even if we take for granted what is not true, that every youth will sooner or later discover the line of his greatest strength so that he may get his living by his strong points rather than by his weak ones, the discovery is often made so late in life that great success is practically impossible. Such institutions would help boys and girls to start in their proper careers early in life; and an early choice shortens the way. Can anything be more important to human beings than a start in life in the right direction, where even small effort will count for more in the race than the greatest effort—and a life of drudgery—in the wrong direction? A man is seldom unsuccessful, unhappy, or vicious when he is in his place.

After once choosing your occupation, however, never look backward; stick to it with all the tenacity you can muster. Let nothing tempt you or swerve you a hair's breadth from your aim, and you will win. Do not let the thorns which appear in every vocation, or temporary despondency or disappointment, shake your purpose. You will never succeed while smarting under the drudgery of your occupation, if you are constantly haunted with the idea that you could succeed better in something else. Great tenacity of purpose is the only thing that will carry you over the hard places which appear in every career to ultimate triumph. This determination, or fixity of purpose, has a great moral bearing upon our success, for it leads others to feel confidence in us, and this is everything. It gives credit and moral support in a thousand ways. People always believe in a man with a fixed purpose, and will help him twice as quickly as one who is loosely or indifferently attached to his vocation, and liable at any time to make a change, or to fail. Everybody knows that determined men are not likely to fail. They carry in their very pluck, grit, and determination the conviction and assurance of success.

The world does not dictate what you shall do, but it does demand that you do something, and that you shall be a king in your line. There is no grander sight than that of a young man or woman in the right place struggling with might and main to make the most of the stuff at command, determined that not a faculty or power shall run to waste. Not money, not position, but power is what we want; and character is greater than any occupation or profession.

"Do not, I beseech you," said Garfield, "be content to enter on any business that does not require and compel constant intellectual growth." Choose an occupation that is refining and elevating; an occupation that you will be proud of; an occupation that will give you time for self-culture and self-elevation; an occupation that will enlarge and expand your manhood and make you a better citizen, a better man.

Power and constant growth toward a higher life are the great end of human existence. Your calling should be the great school of life, the great man-developer, character-builder, that which should broaden, deepen, and round out into symmetry, harmony, and beauty, all the God-given faculties within you.

But whatever you do be greater than your calling; let your manhood overtop your position, your wealth, your occupation, your title. A man must work hard and study hard to counteract the narrowing, hardening tendency of his occupation. Said Goldsmith,—

Burke, born for the universe, narrowed his mind, And to party gave up what was meant for mankind.

"Constant engagement in traffic and barter has no elevating influence," says Lyndall. "The endeavor to obtain the upper hand of those with whom we have to deal, to make good bargains, the higgling and scheming, and the thousand petty artifices, which in these days of stern competition are unscrupulously resorted to, tend to narrow the sphere and to lessen the strength of the intellect, and, at the same time, the delicacy of the moral sense."

Choose upward, study the men in the vocation you think of adopting. Does it elevate those who follow it? Are they broad, liberal, intelligent men? Or have they become mere appendages of their profession, living in a rut with no standing in the community, and of no use to it? Don't think you will be the great exception, and can enter a questionable vocation without becoming a creature of it. In spite of all your determination and will power to the contrary, your occupation, from the very law of association and habit, will seize you as in a vise, will mold you, shape you, fashion you, and stamp its inevitable impress upon you. How frequently do we see bright, open-hearted, generous young men come out of college with high hopes and lofty aims, enter a doubtful vocation, and in a few years return to college commencement so changed that they are scarcely recognized. The once broad, noble features have become contracted and narrowed. The man has become grasping, avaricious, stingy, mean, hard. Is it possible, we ask, that a few years could so change a magnanimous and generous youth?

Go to the bottom if you would get to the top. Be master of your calling in all its details. Nothing is small which concerns your business.

Thousands of men who have been failures in life have done drudgery enough in half a dozen different occupations to have enabled them to reach great success, if their efforts had all been expended in one direction. That mechanic is a failure who starts out to build an engine, but does not quite accomplish it, and shifts into some other occupation where perhaps he will almost succeed, but stops just short of the point of proficiency in his acquisition and so fails again. The world is full of people who are "almost a success." They stop just this side of success. Their courage oozes out just before they become expert. How many of us have acquisitions which remain permanently unavailable because not carried quite to the point of skill? How many people "almost know a language or two," which they can neither write nor speak; a science or two whose elements they have not quite acquired; an art or two partially mastered, but which they can not practice with satisfaction or profit! The habit of desultoriness, which has been acquired by allowing yourself to abandon a half-finished work, more than balances any little skill gained in one vocation which might possibly be of use later.

Beware of that frequently fatal gift, versatility. Many a person misses being a great man by splitting into two middling ones. Universality is the ignis fatuus which has deluded to ruin many a promising mind. In attempting to gain a knowledge of half a hundred subjects it has mastered none. "The jack-of-all-trades," says one of the foremost manufacturers of this country, "had a chance in my generation. In this he has none."

"The measure of a man's learning will be the amount of his voluntary ignorance," said Thoreau. If we go into a factory where the mariner's compass is made we can see the needles before they are magnetized, they will point in any direction. But when they have been applied to the magnet and received its peculiar power, from that moment they point to the north, and are true to the pole ever after. So man never points steadily in any direction until he has been polarized by a great master purpose.

Give your life, your energy, your enthusiasm, all to the highest work of which you are capable. Canon Farrar said, "There is only one real failure in life possible, and that is, not to be true to the best one knows."

"'What must I do to be forever known?' Thy duty ever."

Who does the best his circumstance allows, Does well, acts nobly, angels could do no more. YOUNG.

"Whoever can make two ears of corn, two blades of grass to grow upon a spot of ground where only one grew before," says Swift, "would deserve better of mankind and do more essential service to his country than the whole race of politicians put together."



CHAPTER XII

CONCENTRATED ENERGY

This one thing I do.—ST. PAUL.

The one prudence in life is concentration; the one evil is dissipation; and it makes no difference whether our dissipations are coarse or fine. . . . Everything is good which takes away one plaything and delusion more, and sends us home to add one stroke of faithful work.—EMERSON.

The man who seeks one thing in life, and but one, May hope to achieve it before life be done; But he who seeks all things, wherever he goes, Only reaps from the hopes which around him he sows, A harvest of barren regrets. OWEN MEREDITH.

The longer I live, the more deeply am I convinced that that which makes the difference between one man and another—between the weak and powerful, the great and insignificant, is energy—invincible determination—a purpose once formed, and then death or victory.—FOWELL BUXTON.

"There was not enough room for us all in Frankfort," said Nathan Mayer Rothschild, in speaking of himself and his four brothers. "I dealt in English goods. One great trader came there, who had the market to himself: he was quite the great man, and did us a favor if he sold us goods. Somehow I offended him, and he refused to show me his patterns. This was on a Tuesday. I said to my father, 'I will go to England.' On Thursday I started. The nearer I got to England, the cheaper goods were. As soon as I got to Manchester, I laid out all my money, things were so cheap, and I made a good profit."