Men who have the right kind of material in them will assert their personality and rise in spite of a thousand adverse circumstances. You can not keep them down. Every obstacle seems only to add to their ability to get on.

The greatest men will ever be those who have risen from the ranks. It is said that there are ten thousand chances to one that genius, talent, and virtue shall issue from a farmhouse rather than from a palace.

Adversity exasperates fools, dejects cowards, but draws out the faculties of the wise and industrious, puts the modest to the necessity of trying their skill, awes the opulent, and makes the idle industrious. The storms of adversity, like those of the ocean, rouse the faculties, and excite the invention, prudence, skill, and fortitude of the voyager. A man upon whom continuous sunshine falls is like the earth in August: he becomes parched and dry and hard and close-grained. Men have drawn from adversity the elements of greatness.

Beethoven was almost totally deaf and burdened with sorrow when he produced his greatest works. Schiller wrote his best books in great bodily suffering. He was not free from pain for fifteen years. Milton wrote his leading productions when blind, poor, and sick. "Who best can suffer," said he, "best can do." Bunyan said that, if it were lawful, he could even pray for greater trouble, for the greater comfort's sake.

Not until the breath of the plague had blasted a hundred thousand lives, and the great fire had licked up cheap, shabby, wicked London, did she arise, phoenix-like, from her ashes and ruin, a grand and mighty city.

True salamanders live best in the furnace of persecution.

Many of our best poets

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong, And learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott, Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to genius. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum," as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and abuse.

This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere. We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries, newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are all worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often tutored through college with very little study. "Short roads" and "abridged methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college course. Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion. Self-help and self-reliance are getting old-fashioned. Nature, as if conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and emancipate him from Eden's curse.

But do not misinterpret her edict. She emancipates from the lower only to call to the higher. She does not bid the world go and play while she does the work. She emancipates the muscles only to employ the brain and heart.

The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying climate and on a stubborn soil. It is not chance that returns to the Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and New England with its granite and ice rich. It is rugged necessity, it is the struggle to obtain; it is poverty, the priceless spur, that develops the stamina of manhood, and calls the race out of barbarism. Intelligent labor found the world a wilderness and has made it a garden.

As the sculptor thinks only of the angel imprisoned in the marble block, so Nature cares only for the man or woman shut up in the human being. The sculptor cares nothing for the block as such; Nature has little regard for the mere lump of breathing clay. The sculptor will chip off all unnecessary material to set free the angel. Nature will chip and pound us remorselessly to bring out our possibilities. She will strip us of wealth, humble our pride, humiliate our ambition, let us down from the ladder of fame, will discipline us in a thousand ways, if she can develop a little character. Everything must give way to that.

"The hero is not fed on sweets, Daily his own heart he eats; Chambers of the great are jails, And head-winds right for royal sails."

Then welcome each rebuff, That turns earth's smoothness rough, Each sting, that bids not sit nor stand but go. BROWNING.



CHAPTER XXVIII

DECISION

Resolve, and thou art free.—LONGFELLOW.

The heaviest charged words in our language are those briefest ones, "yes" and "no." One stands for the surrender of the will, the other for denial; one stands for gratification, the other for character. A stout "no" means a stout character, the ready "yes" a weak one, gild it as we may.—T. T. MUNGER.

The world is a market where everything is marked at a set price, and whatever we buy with our time, labor, or ingenuity, whether riches, ease, fame, integrity, or knowledge, we must stand by our decision, and not like children, when we have purchased one thing, repine that we do not possess another we did not buy.—MATHEWS.

A man must master his undertaking and not let it master him. He must have the power to decide instantly on which side he is going to make his mistakes.—P. D. ARMOUR.

When Rome was besieged by the Gauls in the time of the Republic, the Romans were so hard pressed that they consented to purchase immunity with gold. They were in the act of weighing it, a legend tells us, when Camillus appeared on the scene, threw his sword into the scales in place of the ransom, and declared that the Romans should not purchase peace, but would win it with the sword. This act of daring and prompt decision so roused the Romans that they triumphantly swept from the sacred soil the enemy of their peace.

In an emergency, the arrival of a prompt, decided, positive man, who will do something, although it may be wrong, changes the face of everything. Such a man comes upon the scene like a refreshing breeze blown down from the mountain top. He is a tonic to the hesitating, bewildered crowd.

When Antiochus Epiphanes invaded Egypt, which was then under the protection of Rome, the Romans sent an ambassador who met Antiochus near Alexandria and commanded him to withdraw. The invader gave an evasive reply. The brave Roman swept a circle around the king with his sword, and forbade his crossing the line until he had given his answer. By the prompt decision of the intrepid ambassador the invader was led to withdraw, and war was prevented. The prompt decision of the Romans won them many a battle, and made them masters of the world. All the great achievements in the history of the world are the results of quick and steadfast decision.

Men who have left their mark upon their century have been men of great and prompt decision. An undecided man, a man who is ever balancing between two opinions, forever debating which of two courses he will pursue, proclaims by his indecision that he can not control himself, that he was meant to be possessed by others; he is not a man, only a satellite. The decided man, the prompt man, does not wait for favorable circumstances; he does not submit to events; events must submit to him.

The vacillating man is ever at the mercy of the opinion of the man who talked with him last. He may see the right, but he drifts toward the wrong. If he decides upon a course he only follows it until somebody opposes it.

When Julius Caesar came to the Rubicon, which formed the boundary of Italia,—"the sacred and inviolable,"—even his great decision wavered at the thought of invading a territory which no general was allowed to enter without the permission of the Senate. But his alternative was "destroy myself, or destroy my country," and his intrepid mind did not waver long. "The die is cast," he said, as he dashed into the stream at the head of his legions. The whole history of the world was changed by that moment's decision. The man who said, "I came, I saw, I conquered," could not hesitate long. He, like Napoleon, had the power to choose one course, and sacrifice every conflicting plan on the instant. When he landed with his troops in Britain, the inhabitants resolved never to surrender. Caesar's quick mind saw that he must commit his soldiers to victory or death. In order to cut off all hope of retreat, he burned all the ships which had borne them to the shores of Britain. There was no hope of return, it was victory or death. This action was the key to the character and triumphs of this great warrior.

Satan's sublime decision in "Paradise Lost," after his hopeless banishment from heaven, excites a feeling akin to admiration. After a few moments of terrible suspense he resumes his invincible spirit and expresses that sublime line: "What matter where, if I be still the same?"

That power to decide instantly the best course to pursue, and to sacrifice every opposing motive; and, when once sacrificed, to silence them forever and not allow them continually to plead their claims and distract us from our single decided course, is one of the most potent forces in winning success. To hesitate is sometimes to be lost. In fact, the man who is forever twisting and turning, backing and filling, hesitating and dawdling, shuffling and parleying, weighing and balancing, splitting hairs over non-essentials, listening to every new motive which presents itself, will never accomplish anything. There is not positiveness enough in him; negativeness never accomplishes anything. The negative man creates no confidence, he only invites distrust. But the positive man, the decided man, is a power in the world, and stands for something. You can measure him, gauge him. You can estimate the work that his energy will accomplish. It is related of Alexander the Great that, when asked how it was that he had conquered the world, he replied, "By not wavering."

When the packet ship Stephen Whitney struck, at midnight, on an Irish cliff, and clung for a few moments to the cliff, all the passengers who leaped instantly upon the rock were saved. The positive step landed them in safety. Those who lingered were swept off by the returning wave, and engulfed forever.

The vacillating man is never a prompt man, and without promptness no success is possible. Great opportunities not only come seldom into the most fortunate life, but also are often quickly gone.

"A man without decision," says John Foster, "can never be said to belong to himself; since if he dared to assert that he did, the puny force of some cause, about as powerful as a spider, may make a seizure of the unhappy boaster the very next minute, and contemptuously exhibit the futility of the determination by which he was to have proved the independence of his understanding and will. He belongs to whatever can make capture of him; and one thing after another vindicates its right to him by arresting him while he is trying to go on; as twigs and chips floating near the edge of a river are intercepted by every weed and whirled into every little eddy."

The decided man not only has the advantage of the time saved from dillydallying and procrastination, but he also saves the energy and vital force which is wasted by the perplexed man who takes up every argument on one side and then on the other, and weighs them until the two sides hang in equipoise, with no prepondering motive to enable him to decide. He is in stable equilibrium, and so does not move at all of his own volition, but moves very easily at the slightest volition of another.

Yet there is not a man living who might not be a prompt and decided man if he would only learn always to act quickly. The punctual man, the decided man, can do twice as much as the undecided and dawdling man who never quite knows what he wants. Prompt decision saved Napoleon and Grant and their armies many a time when delay would have been fatal. Napoleon used to say that although a battle might last an entire day, yet it generally turned upon a few critical minutes, in which the fate of the engagement was decided. His will, which subdued nearly the whole of Europe, was as prompt and decisive in the minutest detail of command as in the greatest battle.

Decision of purpose and promptness of action enabled him to astonish the world with his marvelous successes. He seemed to be everywhere at once. What he could accomplish in a day surprised all who knew him. He seemed to electrify everybody about him. His invincible energy thrilled the whole army. He could rouse to immediate and enthusiastic action the dullest troops, and inspire with courage the most stupid men. The "ifs and buts," he said, "are at present out of season; and above all it must be done with speed." He would sit up all night if necessary, after riding thirty or forty leagues, to attend to correspondence, dispatches and, details. What a lesson to dawdling, shiftless, half-hearted men!

"The doubt of Charles V.," says Motley, "changed the destinies of the civilized world."

So powerful were President Washington's views in determining the actions of the people, that when Congress adjourned, Jefferson wrote to Monroe at Paris: "You will see by their proceedings the truth of what I always told you,—namely, that one man outweighs them all in influence, who supports his judgment against their own and that of their representatives. Republicanism resigns the vessel to the pilot."

There is no vocation or occupation which does not present many difficulties, at times almost overwhelming, and the young man who allows himself to waver every time he comes to a hard place in life will not succeed. Without decision there can be no concentration; and, to succeed, a man must concentrate.

The undecided man can not bring himself to a focus. He dissipates his energy, scatters his forces, and executes nothing. He can not hold to one thing long enough to bring success out of it. One vocation or occupation presents its rosy side to him, he feels sure it is the thing he wants to do, and, full of enthusiasm, adopts it as his life's work. But in a few days the thorns begin to appear, his enthusiasm evaporates, and he wonders why he is so foolish as to think himself fitted for that vocation. The one which his friend adopted is much better suited to him; he drops his own and adopts the other. So he vacillates through life, captured by any new occupation which happens to appeal to him as the most desirable at the time, never using his judgment or common sense, but governed by his impressions and his feelings at the moment. Such people are never led by principle. You never know where to find them; they are here to-day and there to-morrow, doing this thing and that thing, throwing away all the skill they had acquired in mastering the drudgery of the last occupation. In fact, they never go far enough in anything to get beyond the drudgery stage to the remunerative and agreeable stage, the skilful stage. They spend their lives at the beginning of occupations, which are always most agreeable. These people rarely reach the stage of competency, comfort, and contentment.

There is a legend of a powerful genius who promised a lovely maiden a gift of rare value if she would go through a field of corn, and, without pausing, going backward, or wandering hither and thither, select the largest and ripest ear. The value of the gift was to be in proportion to the size and perfection of the ear. She passed by many magnificent ones, but was so eager to get the largest and most perfect that she kept on without plucking any until the ears she passed were successively smaller and smaller and more stunted. Finally they became so small that she was ashamed to select one of them; and, not being allowed to go backward, she came out on the other side without any.

Alexander, his heart throbbing with a great purpose, conquers the world; Hannibal, impelled by his hatred to the Romans, even crosses the Alps to compass his design. While other men are bemoaning difficulties and shrinking from dangers and obstacles, and preparing expedients, the great soul, without fuss or noise, takes the step, and lo, the mountain has been leveled and the way lies open. Learn, then, to will strongly and decisively; thus fix your floating life and leave it no longer to be carried hither and thither, like a withered leaf, by every wind that blows. An undecided man is like the turnstile at a fair, which is in everybody's way but stops no one.

"The secret of the whole matter was," replied Amos Lawrence, "we had formed the habit of prompt acting, thus taking the top of the tide; while the habit of some others was to delay till about half tide, thus getting on the flats."

Most of the young men and women who are lost in our cities are ruined because of their inability to say "No" to the thousand allurements and temptations which appeal to their weak passions. If they would only show a little decision at first, one emphatic "No" might silence their solicitors forever. But they are weak, they are afraid of offending, they don't like to say "No," and thus they throw down the gauntlet and are soon on the broad road to ruin. A little resolution early in life will soon conquer the right to mind one's own business.

An old legend says that a fool and a wise man were journeying together, and came to a point where two ways opened before them,—one broad and beautiful, the other narrow and rough. The fool desired to take the pleasant way; the wise man knew that the difficult one was the shortest and safest, and so declared. But at last the urgency of the fool prevailed; they took the more inviting path, and were soon met by robbers, who seized their goods and made them captives. A little later both they and their captors were arrested by officers of the law and taken before the judge. Then the wise man pleaded that the fool was to blame because he desired to take the wrong way. The fool pleaded that he was only a fool, and no sensible man should have heeded his counsel. The judge punished them both equally. "If sinners entice thee, consent thou not."

There is no habit that so grows on the soul as irresolution. Before a man knows what he has done, he has gambled his life away, and all because he has never made up his mind what he would do with it. On many of the tombstones of those who have failed in life could be read between the lines: "He Dawdled," "Behind Time," "Procrastination," "Listlessness," "Shiftlessness," "Nervelessness," "Always Behind." Oh, the wrecks strewn along the shores of life "just behind success," "just this side of happiness," above which the words of warning are flying!

Webster said of such an undecided man that "he is like the irresolution of the sea at the turn of tide. This man neither advances nor recedes; he simply hovers." Such a man is at the mercy of any chance occurrence that may overtake him. His "days are lost lamenting o'er lost days." He has no power to seize the facts which confront him and compel them to serve him.

To indolent, shiftless, listless people life becomes a mere shuffle of expedients. They do not realize that the habit of putting everything off puts off their manhood, their capacity, their success; their contagion infects their whole neighborhood. Scott used to caution youth against the habit of dawdling, which creeps in at every crevice of unoccupied time and often ruins a bright life. "Your motto must be," he said, "Hoc age,"—do instantly. This is the only way to check the propensity to dawdling. How many hours have been wasted dawdling in bed, turning over and dreading to get up! Many a career has been crippled by it. Burton could not overcome this habit, and, convinced that it would ruin his success, made his servant promise before he went to bed to get him up at just such a time; the servant called, and called, and coaxed; but Burton would beg him to be left a little longer. The servant, knowing that he would lose his shilling if he did not get him up, then dashed cold water into the bed between the sheets, and Burton came out with a bound. When one asked a lazy young fellow what made him lie in bed so long, "I am employed," said he, "in hearing counsel every morning. Industry advises me to get up; Sloth to lie still; and they give me twenty reasons for and against. It is my part, as an impartial judge, to hear all that can be said on both sides, and by the time the cause is over dinner is ready."

There is no doubt that, as a rule, great decision of character is usually accompanied by great constitutional firmness. Men who have been noted for great firmness of character have usually been strong and robust. There is no quality of the mind which does not sympathize with bodily weakness, and especially is this true with the power of decision, which is usually impaired or weakened from physical suffering or any great physical debility. As a rule, it is the strong physical man who carries weight and conviction. Any bodily weakness, or lassitude, or lack of tone and vigor, is, perhaps, first felt in the weakened or debilitated power of decisions.

Nothing will give greater confidence, and bring assistance more quickly from the bank or from a friend, than the reputation of promptness. The world knows that the prompt man's bills and notes will be paid on the day, and will trust him. "Let it be your first study to teach the world that you are not wood and straw; that there is some iron in you." "Let men know that what you say you will do; that your decision, once made, is final,—no wavering; that, once resolved, you are not to be allured or intimidated."

Some minds are so constructed that they are bewildered and dazed whenever a responsibility is thrust upon them; they have a mortal dread of deciding anything. The very effort to come to immediate and unflinching decision starts up all sorts of doubts, difficulties, and fears, and they can not seem to get light enough to decide nor courage enough to attempt to remove the obstacle. They know that hesitation is fatal to enterprise, fatal to progress, fatal to success. Yet somehow they seem fated with a morbid introspection which ever holds them in suspense. They have just energy enough to weigh motives, but nothing left for the momentum of action. They analyze and analyze, deliberate, weigh, consider, ponder, but never act. How many a man can trace his downfall in life to the failure to seize his opportunity at the favorable moment, when it was within easy grasp, the nick of time, which often does not present itself but once!

It was said that Napoleon had an officer under him who understood the tactics of war better than his commander, but he lacked that power of rapid decision and powerful concentration which characterized the greatest military leaders perhaps of the world. There were several generals under Grant who were as well skilled in war tactics, knew the country as well, were better educated, but they lacked that power of decision which made unconditional surrender absolutely imperative wherever he met the foe. Grant's decision was like inexorable fate. There was no going behind it, no opening it up for reconsideration. It was his decision which voiced itself in those memorable words in the Wilderness, "I propose to fight it out on these lines if it takes all summer," and which sent back the words "unconditional surrender" to General Buckner, who asked him for conditions of capitulation, that gave the first confidence to the North that the rebellion was doomed. At last Lincoln had a general who had the power of decision, and the North breathed easy for the first time.

The man who would forge to the front in this competitive age must be a man of prompt and determined decision; like Caesar, he must burn his ships behind him, and make retreat forever impossible. When he draws his sword he must throw the scabbard away, lest in a moment of discouragement and irresolution he be tempted to sheathe it. He must nail his colors to the mast as Nelson did in battle, determined to sink with his ship if he can not conquer. Prompt decision and sublime audacity have carried many a successful man over perilous crises where deliberation would have been ruin.

"Hoc age."



CHAPTER XXIX

OBSERVATION AS A SUCCESS FACTOR

Henry Ward Beecher was not so foolish as to think that he could get on without systematic study, and a thorough-going knowledge of the world of books. "When I first went to Brooklyn," he said, "men doubted whether I could sustain myself. I replied, 'Give me uninterrupted time till nine o'clock every morning, and I do not care what comes after.'"

He was a hard student during four hours every morning; those who saw him after that imagined that he picked up the material for his sermons on the street.

Yet having said so much, it is true that much that was most vital in his preaching he did pick up on the street.

"Where does Mr. Beecher get his sermons?" every ambitious young clergyman in the country was asking, and upon one occasion he answered: "I keep my eyes open and ask questions."

This is the secret of many a man's success,—keeping his eyes open and asking questions. Although Beecher was an omnivorous reader he did not care much for the writings of the theologians; the Christ was his great model, and he knew that He did not search the writings of the Sanhedrin for His sermons, but picked them up as He walked along the banks of the Jordan and over the hills and through the meadows and villages of Galilee. He saw that the strength of this great Master's sermons was in their utter simplicity, their naturalness.

Beecher's sermons were very simple, healthy, and strong. They pulsated with life; they had the vigor of bright red blood in them, because, like Christ's, they grew out of doors. He got them everywhere from life and nature. He picked them up in the marketplace, on Wall Street, in the stores. He got them from the brakeman, the mechanic, the blacksmith, the day laborer, the newsboy, the train conductor, the clerk, the lawyer, the physician, and the business man.

He did not watch the progress of the great human battle from his study, as many did. He went into the thick of the fight himself. He was in the smoke and din. Where the battle of life raged fiercest, there he was studying its great problems. Now it was the problem of slavery; again the problem of government, or commerce, or education,—whatever touched the lives of men. He kept his hand upon the pulse of events. He was in the swim of things. The great, busy, ambitious world was everywhere throbbing for him.



When he once got a taste of the power and helpfulness which comes from the study of real life, when he saw how much more forceful and interesting actual life stories were as they were being lived than anything he could get out of any book except the Bible, he was never again satisfied without illustrations fresh from the lives of the people he met every day.

Beecher believed a sermon a failure when it does not make a great mass of hearers go away with a new determination to make a little more of themselves, to do their work a little better, to be a little more conscientious, a little more helpful, a little more determined to do their share in the world.

This great observer was not only a student of human nature, but of all nature as well. I watched him, many a time, completely absorbed in drinking in the beauties of the marvelous landscape, gathering grandeur and sublimity from the great White Mountains, which he loved so well, and where he spent many summers.

He always preached on Sunday at the hotel where he stayed, and great crowds came from every direction to hear him. There was something in his sermons that appealed to the best in everyone who heard him. They were full of pictures of beautiful landscapes, seascapes, and entrancing sunsets. The clouds, the rain, the sunshine, and the storm were reflected in them. The flowers, the fields, the brooks, the record of creation imprinted in the rocks and the mountains were intermingled with the ferryboats, the steam-cars, orphans, calamities, accidents, all sorts of experiences and bits of life. Happiness and sunshine, birds and trees alternated with the direst poverty in the slums, people on sick beds and death beds, in hospitals and in funeral processions; life pictures of successes and failures, of the discouraged, the despondent, the cheerful, the optimist and the pessimist, passed in quick succession and stamped themselves on the brains of his eager hearers.

Wherever he went, Beecher continued his study of life through observation. Nothing else was half so interesting. To him man was the greatest study in the world. To place the right values upon men, to emphasize the right thing in them, to be able to discriminate between the genuine and the false, to be able to pierce their masks and read the real man or woman behind them, he regarded as one of a clergyman's greatest accomplishments.

Like Professor Agassiz, who could see wonders in the scale of a fish or a grain of sand, Beecher had an eye like the glass of a microscope, which reveals marvels of beauty in common things. He could see beauty and harmony where others saw only ugliness and discord, because he read the hidden meaning in things. Like Ruskin, he could see the marvelous philosophy, the Divine plan, in the lowliest object. He could feel the Divine presence in all created things.

"An exhaustive observation," says Herbert Spencer, "is an element of all great success." There is no position in life where a trained eye can not be made a great success asset.

"Let's leave it to Osler," said the physicians at a consultation where a precious life hung by a thread. Then the great Johns Hopkins professor examined the patient. He did not ask questions. His experienced eye drew a conclusion from the slightest evidence. He watched the patient closely; his manner of breathing, the appearance of the eye,—everything was a telltale of the patient's condition, which he read as an open book. He saw symptoms which others could not see. He recommended a certain operation, which was performed, and the patient recovered. The majority of those present disagreed with him, but such was their confidence in his power to diagnose a case through symptoms and indications which escape most physicians, that they were willing to leave the whole decision to him. Professor Osler was called a living X-ray machine, with additional eyes in finger tips so familiar with the anatomy that they could detect a growth or displacement so small that it would escape ordinary notice.

The power which inheres in a trained faculty of observation is priceless. The education which Beecher got through observation, by keeping his eyes, his ears, and his mind open, meant a great deal more to him and to the world than his college education. He was not a great scholar; he did not stand nearly as high in college as some of his classmates whom he far outstripped in life, but his mind penetrated to the heart of things.

Lincoln was another remarkable example of the possibilities of an education through reflection upon what he observed. His mind stopped and questioned, and extracted the meaning of everything that came within its range. Wherever he went, there was a great interrogation point before him. Everything he saw must give up its secret before he would let it go. He had a passion for knowledge; he yearned to know the meaning of things, the philosophy underlying the common, everyday occurrences.

Ruskin says: "Hundreds of people can talk for one who can think; but thousands can think for one who can see."

I once traveled abroad with two young men, one of whom was all eyes,—nothing seemed to escape him,—and the other never saw anything. The day after leaving a city, the latter could scarcely recall anything of interest, while the former had a genius for absorbing knowledge of every kind through the eye. Things so trivial that his companion did not notice them at all, meant a great deal to him. He was a poor student, but he brought home rich treasures from over the sea. The other young man was comparatively rich, and brought home almost nothing of value.

While visiting Luther Burbank, the wizard horticulturist, in his famous garden, recently, I was much impressed by his marvelous power of seeing things. He has observed the habits of fruits and flowers to such purpose that he has performed miracles in the fields of floriculture and horticulture. Stunted and ugly flowers and fruits, under the eye of this miracle worker, become marvels of beauty.

George W. Cortelyou was a stenographer not long ago. Many people thought he would remain a stenographer, but he always kept his eyes open. He was after an opportunity. Promotion was always staring him in the face. He was always looking for the next step above him. He was a shrewd observer. But for this power of seeing things quickly, of absorbing knowledge, he would never have advanced.

The youth who would get on must keep his eyes open, his ears open, his mind open. He must be quick, alert, ready.

I know a young Turk, who has been in this country only a year, yet he speaks our language fluently. He has studied the map of our country. He knows its geography, and a great deal of our history, and much about our resources and opportunities. He said that when he landed in New York it seemed to him that he saw more opportunities in walking every block of our streets than he had ever seen in the whole of Turkey. And he could not understand the lethargy, the lack of ambition, the indifference of our young men to our marvelous possibilities.

The efficient man is always growing. He is always accumulating knowledge of every kind. He does not merely look with his eyes. He sees with them. He keeps his ears open. He keeps his mind open to all that is new and fresh and helpful.

The majority of people do not see things; they just look at them. The power of keen observation is indicative of a superior mentality; for it is the mind, not the optic nerve, that really sees.

Most people are too lazy, mentally, to see things carefully. Close observation is a powerful mental process. The mind is all the time working over the material which the eye brings it, considering, forming opinions, estimating, weighing, balancing, calculating.

Careless, indifferent observation does not go back of the eye. If the mind is not focused, the image is not clean-cut, and is not carried with force and distinctness enough to the brain to enable it to get at the truth and draw accurate conclusions.

The observing faculty is particularly susceptible to culture, and is capable of becoming a mighty power. Few people realize what a tremendous success and happiness is possible through the medium of the eye.

The telegraph, the sewing machine, the telephone, the telescope, the miracles of electricity, in fact, every great invention of the past or present, every triumph of modern labor-saving machinery, every discovery in science and art, is due to the trained power of seeing things.

The whole secret of a richly stored mind is alertness, sharp, keen attention, and thoughtfulness. Indifference, apathy, mental lassitude and laziness are fatal to all effective observation.

It does not take long to develop a habit of attention that seizes the salient points of things.

It is a splendid drill for children to send them out on the street, or out of doors anywhere, just for the purpose of finding out how many things they can see in a certain given time, and how closely they can observe them. Just the effort to try to see how much they can remember and bring back is a splendid drill. Children often become passionately fond of this exercise, and it becomes of inestimable value in their lives.

Other things equal, it is the keen observer who gets ahead. Go into a place of business with the eye of an eagle. Let nothing escape you. Ask yourself why it is that the proprietor at fifty or sixty years of age is conducting a business which a boy of eighteen or twenty ought to be able to handle better. Study his employees; analyze the situation. You will find perhaps that he never knew the value of good manners in clerks. He thought a boy, if honest, would make a good salesman; but, perhaps, by gruff, uncouth manners, he is driving out of the door customers the proprietor is trying to bring in by advertisements. You will see by his show windows, perhaps, before you go into his store, that there is no business insight, no detection of the wants of possible buyers. If you keep your eyes open, you can, in a little while, find out why this man is not a greater success. You can see that a little more knowledge of human nature would have revolutionized his whole business, multiplied the receipts tenfold in a few years. You will see that this man has not studied men. He does not know them.

No matter where you go, study the situation. Think why the man does not do better if he is not doing well, why he remains in mediocrity all his life. If he is making a remarkable success, try to find out why. Keep your eyes open, your ears open. Make deductions from what you see and hear. Trace difficulties; look up evidences of success or failure everywhere. It will be one of the greatest factors in your own success.



CHAPTER XXX

SELF-HELP

I learned that no man in God's wide earth is either willing or able to help any other man.—PESTALOZZI.

What I am I have made myself.—HUMPHRY DAVY.

Be sure, my son, and remember that the best men always make themselves.—PATRICK HENRY.

Hereditary bondsmen, know ye not Who would be free themselves must strike the blow? BYRON.

Who waits to have his task marked out, Shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled. LOWELL.

"Colonel Crockett makes room for himself!" exclaimed a backwoods congressman in answer to the exclamation of the White House usher to "Make room for Colonel Crockett!" This remarkable man was not afraid to oppose the head of a great nation. He preferred being right to being president. Though rough, uncultured, and uncouth, Crockett was a man of great courage and determination.

"Poverty is uncomfortable, as I can testify," said James A. Garfield; "but nine times out of ten the best thing that can happen to a young man is to be tossed overboard and compelled to sink or swim for himself. In all my acquaintance I have never known a man to be drowned who was worth the saving."

Garfield was the youngest member of the House of Representatives when he entered, but he had not been in his seat sixty days before his ability was recognized and his place conceded. He stepped to the front with the confidence of one who belonged there. He succeeded because all the world in concert could not have kept him in the background, and because when once in the front he played his part with an intrepidity and a commanding ease that were but the outward evidences of the immense reserves of energy on which it was in his power to draw.

"Take the place and attitude which belong to you," says Emerson, "and all men acquiesce. The world must be just. It leaves every man with profound unconcern to set his own rate."

"A person under the firm persuasion that he can command resources virtually has them," says Livy.

Richard Arkwright, the thirteenth child, in a hovel, with no education, no chance, gave his spinning model to the world, and put a scepter in England's right hand such as the queen never wielded.

Solario, a wandering gypsy tinker, fell deeply in love with the daughter of the painter Coll' Antonio del Fiore, but was told that no one but a painter as good as the father should wed the maiden. "Will you give me ten years to learn to paint, and so entitle myself to the hand of your daughter?" Consent was given, Coll' Antonio thinking that he would never be troubled further by the gypsy.

About the time that the ten years were to end the king's sister showed Coll' Antonio a Madonna and Child, which the painter extolled in terms of the highest praise. Judge of his surprise on learning that Solario was the artist. His great determination gained him his bride.

Louis Philippe said he was the only sovereign in Europe fit to govern, for he could black his own boots.

When asked to name his family coat-of-arms, a self-made President of the United States replied, "A pair of shirtsleeves."

It is not the men who have inherited most, except it be in nobility of soul and purpose, who have risen highest; but rather the men with no "start" who have won fortunes, and have made adverse circumstances a spur to goad them up the steep mount, where

"Fame's proud temple shines afar."

To such men, every possible goal is accessible, and honest ambition has no height that genius or talent may tread, which has not felt the impress of their feet.

You may leave your millions to your son, but have you really given him anything? You can not transfer the discipline, the experience, the power, which the acquisition has given you; you can not transfer the delight of achieving, the joy felt only in growth, the pride of acquisition, the character which trained habits of accuracy, method, promptness, patience, dispatch, honesty of dealing, politeness of manner have developed. You cannot transfer the skill, sagacity, prudence, foresight, which lie concealed in your wealth. It meant a great deal for you, but means nothing to your heir. In climbing to your fortune, you developed the muscle, stamina, and strength which enabled you to maintain your lofty position, to keep your millions intact. You had the power which comes only from experience, and which alone enables you to stand firm on your dizzy height. Your fortune was experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him. It was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; to you it was education and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction, lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance. You have taken the priceless spur—necessity—away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly all the great achievements in the history of the world.

You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son might begin where you left off. You thought to spare him the drudgery, the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meager education, which you had on the old farm. But you have put a crutch into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self-discipline and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no great character is ever possible. His enthusiasm will evaporate, his energy will be dissipated, his ambition, not being stimulated by the struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away. If you do everything for your son and fight his battles for him, you will have a weakling on your hands at twenty-one.

"My life is a wreck," said the dying Cyrus W. Field, "my fortune gone, my home dishonored. Oh, I was so unkind to Edward when I thought I was being kind. If I had only had firmness enough to compel my boys to earn their living, then they would have known the meaning of money." His table was covered with medals and certificates of honor from many nations, in recognition of his great work for civilization in mooring two continents side by side in thought, of the fame he had won and could never lose. But grief shook the sands of life as he thought only of the son who had brought disgrace upon a name before unsullied; the wounds were sharper than those of a serpent's tooth.

During the great financial crisis of 1857 Maria Mitchell, who was visiting England, asked an English lady what became of daughters when no property was left them. "They live on their brothers," was the reply. "But what becomes of the American daughters," asked the English lady, "when there is no money left?" "They earn it," was Miss Mitchell's reply.

Men who have been bolstered up all their lives are seldom good for anything in a crisis. When misfortune comes, they look around for somebody to lean upon. It the prop is not there, down they go. Once down, they are as helpless as capsized turtles, or unhorsed men in armor. Many a frontier boy has succeeded beyond all his expectations simply because all props were early knocked out from under him and he was obliged to stand upon his own feet.

"A man's best friends are his ten fingers," said Robert Collyer, who brought his wife to America in the steerage.

There is no manhood mill which takes in boys and turns out men. What you call "no chance" may be your only chance. Don't wait for your place to be made for you; make it yourself. Don't wait for somebody to give you a lift; lift yourself. Henry Ward Beecher did not wait for a call to a big church with a large salary. He accepted the first pastorate offered him, in a little town near Cincinnati. He became literally the light of the church, for he trimmed the lamps, kindled the fires, swept the rooms, and rang the bell. His salary was only about $200 a year,—but he knew that a fine church and great salary can not make a great man. It was work and opportunity that he wanted. He felt that if there were anything in him work would bring it out.

When Beethoven was examining the work of Moscheles, he found written at the end, "Finis, with God's help." He wrote under it, "Man, help yourself."

A young man stood listlessly watching some anglers on a bridge. He was poor and dejected. At length, approaching a basket filled with fish, he sighed, "If now I had these I would be happy. I could sell them and buy food and lodgings." "I will give you just as many and just as good," said the owner, who chanced to overhear his words, "if you will do me a trifling favor." "And what is that?" asked the other. "Only to tend this line till I come back; I wish to go on a short errand." The proposal was gladly accepted. The old man was gone so long that the young man began to get impatient. Meanwhile the fish snapped greedily at the hook, and he lost all his depression in the excitement of pulling them in. When the owner returned he had caught a large number. Counting out from them as many as were in the basket, and presenting them to the youth, the old fisherman said, "I fulfil my promise from the fish you have caught, to teach you whenever you see others earning what you need to waste no time in foolish wishing, but cast a line for yourself."

A white squall caught a party of tourists on a lake in Scotland, and threatened to capsize the boat. When it seemed that the crisis had really come, the largest and strongest man in the party, in a state of intense fear, said, "Let us pray." "No, no, my man," shouted the bluff old boatman; "let the little man pray. You take an oar."

The grandest fortunes ever accumulated or possessed on earth were and are the fruit of endeavor that had no capital to begin with save energy, intellect, and the will. From Croesus down to Rockefeller the story is the same, not only in the getting of wealth, but also in the acquirement of eminence; those men have won most who relied most upon themselves.

"The male inhabitants in the Township of Loaferdom, in the County of Hatework," says a printer's squib, "found themselves laboring under great inconvenience for want of an easily traveled road between Poverty and Independence. They therefore petitioned the Powers that be to levy a tax upon the property of the entire county for the purpose of laying out a macadamized highway, broad and smooth, and all the way down hill to the latter place."

"Every one is the artificer of his own fortune," says Sallust.

Man is not merely the architect of his own fate, but he must lay the bricks himself. Bayard Taylor, at twenty-three, wrote: "I will become the sculptor of my own mind's statue." His biography shows how often the chisel and hammer were in his hands to shape himself into his ideal.

Labor is the only legal tender in the world to true success. The gods sell everything for that, nothing without it. You will never find success "marked down." The door to the temple of success is never left open. Every one who enters makes his own door, which closes behind him to all others.

Circumstances have rarely favored great men. They have fought their way to triumph over the road of difficulty and through all sorts of opposition. A lowly beginning and a humble origin are no bar to a great career. The farmer's boys fill many of the greatest places in legislatures, in business, at the bar, in pulpits, in Congress, to-day. Boys of lowly origin have made many of the greatest discoveries, are presidents of our banks, of our colleges, of our universities. Our poor boys and girls have written many of our greatest books, and have filled the highest places as teachers and journalists. Ask almost any great man in our large cities where he was born, and he will tell you it was on a farm or in a small country village. Nearly all of the great capitalists of the city came from the country.

Isaac Rich, the founder of Boston University, left Cape Cod for Boston to make his way with a capital of only four dollars. Like Horace Greeley, he could find no opening for a boy; but what of that? He made an opening. He found a board, and made it into an oyster stand on the street corner. He borrowed a wheelbarrow, and went three miles to an oyster smack, bought three bushels of oysters, and wheeled them to his stand. Soon his little savings amounted to $130, and then he bought a horse and cart.

Self-help has accomplished about all the great things of the world. How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose because they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good luck to give them a lift! But success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It cannot be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours. Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the world than Elihu Burritt, apprenticed to a blacksmith, in whose shop he had to work at the forge all the daylight, and often by candle-light? Yet, he managed, by studying with a book before him at his meals, carrying it in his pocket that he might utilize every spare moment, and studying at night and holidays, to pick up an excellent education in the odds and ends of time which most boys throw away. While the rich boy and the idler were yawning and stretching and getting their eyes open, young Burritt had seized the opportunity and improved it. At thirty years of age he was master of every important language in Europe and was studying those of Asia. What chance had such a boy for distinction?

Probably not a single youth will read this book who has not a better opportunity for success. Yet he had a thirst for knowledge and a desire for self-improvement, which overcame every obstacle in his pathway.

If the youth of America who are struggling against cruel circumstances to do something and be somebody in the world could only understand that ninety per cent. of what is called genius is merely the result of persistent, determined industry, in most cases of down-right hard work, that it is the slavery to a single idea which has given to many a mediocre talent the reputation of being a genius, they would be inspired with new hope. It is interesting to note that the men who talk most about genius are the men who like to work the least. The lazier the man, the more he will have to say about great things being done by genius.

The greatest geniuses have been the greatest workers. Sheridan was considered a genius, but it was found that the "brilliants" and "off-hand sayings" with which he used to dazzle the House of Commons were elaborated, polished and repolished, and put down in his memorandum book ready for any emergency.

Genius has been well defined as the infinite capacity for taking pains. If men who have done great things could only reveal to the struggling youth of to-day how much of their reputations was due to downright hard digging and plodding, what an uplift of inspiration and encouragement they would give! How often I have wished that the discouraged, struggling youth could know of the heartaches, the headaches, the nerve-aches, the disheartening trials, the discouraged hours, the fears and despair involved in works which have gained the admiration of the world, but which have taxed the utmost powers of their authors. You can read in a few minutes or a few hours a poem or a book with only pleasure and delight, but the days and months of weary plodding over details and dreary drudgery often required to produce it would stagger belief.

The greatest works in literature have been elaborated and elaborated, line by line, paragraph by paragraph, often rewritten a dozen times. The drudgery which literary men have put into the productions which have stood the test of time is almost incredible. Lucretius worked nearly a lifetime on one poem. It completely absorbed his life. It is said that Bryant rewrote "Thanatopsis" a hundred times, and even then was not satisfied with it. John Foster would sometimes linger a week over a single sentence. He would hack, split, prune, pull up by the roots, or practise any other severity on whatever he wrote, till it gained his consent to exist. Chalmers was once asked what Foster was about in London. "Hard at it," he replied, "at the rate of a line a week."

Even Lord Bacon, one of the greatest geniuses that ever lived, at his death left large numbers of manuscripts filled with "sudden thoughts set down for use." Hume toiled thirteen hours a day on his "History of England." Lord Eldon astonished the world with his great legal learning, but when he was a student too poor to buy books, he had actually borrowed and copied many hundreds of pages of large law books. Matthew Hale for years studied law sixteen hours a day. Speaking of Fox, some one declared that he wrote "drop by drop." Rousseau says of the labor involved in his smooth and lively style: "My manuscripts, blotted, scratched, interlined, and scarcely legible, attest the trouble they cost me. There is not one of them which I have not been obliged to transcribe four or five times before it went to press. . . . Some of my periods I have turned or returned in my head for five or six nights before they were fit to be put to paper."

Beethoven probably surpassed all other musicians in his painstaking fidelity and persistent application. There is scarcely a bar in his music that was not written and rewritten at least a dozen times. His favorite maxim was, "The barriers are not yet erected which can say to aspiring talent and industry 'thus far and no further.'" Gibbon wrote his autobiography nine times, and was in his study every morning, summer and winter, at six o'clock; and yet youth who waste their evenings wonder at the genius which can produce "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire," upon which Gibbon worked twenty years. Even Plato, one of the greatest writers that ever lived, wrote the first sentence in his "Republic" nine different ways before he was satisfied with it. Burke wrote the conclusion of his speech at the trial of Hastings sixteen times, and Butler his famous "Analogy" twenty times. It took Vergil seven years to write his Georgics, and twelve years to write the Aeneid. He was so displeased with the latter that he attempted to rise from his deathbed to commit it to the flames.

Haydn was very poor; his father was a coachman and he, friendless and lonely, married a servant girl. He was sent away from home to act as errand boy for a music teacher. He absorbed a great deal of information, but he had a hard life of persecution until he became a barber in Vienna. Here he blacked boots for an influential man, who became a friend to him. In 1798 this poor boy's oratorio, "The Creation," came upon the musical world like the rising of a new sun which never set. He was courted by princes and dined with kings and queens; his reputation was made; there was no more barbering, no more poverty. But of his eight hundred compositions, "The Creation" eclipsed them all. He died while Napoleon's guns were bombarding Vienna, some of the shot falling in his garden.

When a man like Lord Cavanagh, without arms or legs, manages to put himself into Parliament, when a man like Francis Joseph Campbell, a blind man, becomes a distinguished mathematician, a musician, and a great philanthropist, we get a hint as to what it means to make the most possible out of ourselves and our opportunities. Perhaps ninety-nine of a hundred under such unfortunate circumstances would be content to remain helpless objects of charity for life. If it is your call to acquire money power instead of brain power, to acquire business power instead of professional power, double your talent just the same, no matter what it may be.

A glover's apprentice of Glasgow, Scotland, who was too poor to afford even a candle or a fire, and who studied by the light of the shop windows in the streets, and when the shops were closed climbed the lamp-post, holding his book in one hand, and clinging to the lamp-post with the other,—this poor boy, with less chance than almost any boy in America, became the most eminent scholar of Scotland.

Francis Parkman, half blind, became one of America's greatest historians in spite of everything, because he made himself such. Personal value is a coin of one's own minting; one is taken at the worth he has put into himself. Franklin was but a poor printer's boy, whose highest luxury at one time was only a penny roll, eaten in the streets of Philadelphia.

Michael Faraday was a poor boy, son of a blacksmith, who apprenticed him at the age of thirteen to a bookbinder in London. Michael laid the foundations of his future greatness by making himself familiar with the contents of the books he bound. He remained at night, after others had gone, to read and study the precious volumes. Lord Tenterden was proud to point out to his son the shop where he had shaved for a penny. A French doctor once taunted Flechier, Bishop of Nismes, who had been a tallow-chandler in his youth, with the meanness of his origin, to which he replied, "If you had been born in the same condition that I was, you would still have been but a maker of candles."

Edwin Chadwick, in his report to the British Parliament, stated that children, working on half time (that is, studying three hours a day and working the rest of their time out of doors), really made the greatest intellectual progress during the year. Business men have often accomplished wonders during the busiest lives by simply devoting one, two, three, or four hours daily to study or other literary work.

James Watt received only the rudiments of an education at school, for his attendance was irregular on account of delicate health. He more than made up for all deficiencies, however, by the diligence with which he pursued his studies at home. Alexander V was a beggar; he was "born mud, and died marble." William Herschel, placed at the age of fourteen as a musician in the band of the Hanoverian Guards, devoted all his leisure to philosophical studies. He acquired a large fund of general knowledge, and in astronomy, a science in which he was wholly self-instructed, his discoveries entitle him to rank with the greatest astronomers of all time.

George Washington was the son of a widow, born under the roof of a Westmoreland farmer; almost from infancy his lot had been that of an orphan. No academy had welcomed him to its shade, no college crowned him with its honors; to read, to write, to cipher—these had been his degrees in knowledge. Shakespeare learned little more than reading and writing at school, but by self-culture he made himself the great master among literary men. Burns, too, enjoyed few advantages of education, and his youth was passed in almost abject poverty.

James Ferguson, the son of a half-starved peasant, learned to read by listening to the recitations of one of his elder brothers. While a mere boy he discovered several mechanical principles, made models of mills and spinning-wheels, and by means of beads on strings worked out an excellent map of the heavens. Ferguson made remarkable things with a common penknife. How many great men have mounted the hill of knowledge by out-of-the-way paths! Gifford worked his intricate problems with a shoemaker's awl on a bit of leather. Rittenhouse first calculated eclipses on his plow-handle.

Columbus, while leading the life of a sailor, managed to become the most accomplished geographer and astronomer of his time.

When Peter the Great, a boy of seventeen, became the absolute ruler of Russia his subjects were little better than savages, and in himself even the passions and propensities of barbarism were so strong that they were frequently exhibited during his whole career. But he determined to transform himself and the Russians into civilized people. He instituted reforms with great energy, and at the age of twenty-six started on a visit to the other countries of Europe for the purpose of learning about their arts and institutions. At Saardam, Holland, he was so impressed with the sights of the great East India dockyard that he apprenticed himself to a shipbuilder, and helped to build the St. Peter, which he promptly purchased. Continuing his travels, after he had learned his trade, he worked in England in paper-mills, saw-mills, rope-yards, watchmakers' shops, and other manufactories, doing the work and receiving the treatment of a common laborer.

While traveling, his constant habit was to obtain as much information as he could beforehand with regard to every place he was to visit, and he would demand, "Let me see all." When setting out on his investigations, on such occasions, he carried his tablets in his hand and whatever he deemed worthy of remembrance was carefully noted down. He would often leave his carriage if he saw the country people at work by the wayside as he passed along, and not only enter into conversation with them on agricultural affairs, but also accompany them to their homes, examine their furniture, and take drawings of their implements of husbandry. Thus he obtained much minute and correct knowledge, which he would scarcely have acquired by other means, and which he afterward turned to admirable account in the improvement of his own country.

The ancients said, "Know thyself"; the twentieth century says, "Help thyself." Self-culture gives a second birth to the soul. A liberal education is a true regeneration. When a man is once liberally educated, he will generally remain a man, not shrink to a manikin, nor dwindle to a brute. But if he is not properly educated, if he has merely been crammed and stuffed through college, if he has merely a broken-down memory from trying to hold crammed facts enough to pass the examination, he will continue to shrink, shrivel, and dwindle, often below his original proportions, for he will lose both his confidence and self-respect, as his crammed facts, which never became a part of himself, evaporate from his distended memory.

Every bit of education or culture is of great advantage in the struggle for existence. The microscope does not create anything new, but it reveals marvels. To educate the eye adds to its magnifying power until it sees beauty where before it saw only ugliness. It reveals a world we never suspected, and finds the greatest beauty even in the commonest things. The eye of an Agassiz could see worlds of which the uneducated eye never dreamed. The cultured hand can do a thousand things the uneducated hand can not do. It becomes graceful, steady of nerve, strong, skilful, indeed it almost seems to think, so animated is it with intelligence. The cultured will can seize, grasp, and hold the possessor, with irresistible power and nerve, to almost superhuman effort. The educated touch can almost perform miracles. The educated taste can achieve wonders almost past belief. What a contrast between the cultured, logical, profound, masterly reason of a Gladstone and that of the hod-carrier who has never developed or educated his reason beyond what is necessary to enable him to mix mortar and carry brick!

Be careful to avoid that over-intellectual culture which is purchased at the expense of moral vigor. An observant professor of one of our colleges has remarked that "the mind may be so rounded and polished by education, and so well balanced, as not to be energetic in any one faculty. In other men not thus trained, the sense of deficiency and of the sharp, jagged corners of their knowledge leads to efforts to fill up the chasms, rendering them at last far better educated men than the polished, easy-going graduate who has just knowledge enough to prevent consciousness of his ignorance. While all the faculties of the mind should be cultivated, it is yet desirable that it should have two or three rough-hewn features of massive strength. Young men are too apt to forget the great end of life, which is to be and do, not to read and brood over what other men have been and done."

"I repeat that my object is not to give him knowledge, but to teach him how to acquire it at need," said Rousseau.

All learning is self-teaching. It is upon the working of the pupil's own mind that his progress in knowledge depends. The great business of the master is to teach the pupil to teach himself.

"Thinking, not growth, makes manhood," says Isaac Taylor. "Accustom yourself, therefore, to thinking. Set yourself to understand whatever you see or read. To join thinking with reading is one of the first maxims, and one of the easiest operations."

"How few think justly of the thinking few: How many never think who think they do."



CHAPTER XXXI

THE SELF-IMPROVEMENT HABIT

If you want knowledge you must toil for it.—RUSKIN.

We excuse our sloth under the pretext of difficulty.—QUINTILLIAN.

What sculpture is to a block of marble, education is to the human soul.—ADDISON.

A boy is better unborn than untaught.—GASCOIGNE.

It is ignorance that wastes; it is knowledge that saves, an untaught faculty is at once quiescent and dead.—N. D. HILLIS.

The plea that this or that man has no time for culture will vanish as soon as we desire culture so much that we begin to examine seriously into our present use of time.—MATTHEW ARNOLD.

Education, as commonly understood, is the process of developing the mind by means of books and teachers. When education has been neglected, either by reason of lack of opportunity, or because advantage was not taken of the opportunities afforded, the one remaining hope is self-improvement. Opportunities for self-improvement surround us, the helps to self-improvement are abundant, and in this day of cheap books and free libraries, there can be no good excuse for neglect to use the faculties for mental growth and development which are so abundantly supplied.

When we look at the difficulties which hindered the acquisition of knowledge fifty years to a century ago; the scarcity and the costliness of books, the value of the dimmest candle-light, the unremitting toil which left so little time for study, the physical weariness which had to be overcome to enable mental exertion in study, we may well marvel at the giants of scholarship those days of hardship produced. And when we add to educational limitations, physical disabilities, blindness, deformity, ill-health, hunger and cold, we may feel shame as we contemplate the fulness of modern opportunity and the helps and incentives to study and self-development which are so lavishly provided for our use and inspiration, and of which we make so little use.

Self-improvement implies one essential feeling: the desire for improvement. If the desire exists, then improvement is usually accomplished only by the conquest of self—the material self, which seeks pleasure and amusement. The novel, the game of cards, the billiard cue, idle whittling and story-telling will have to be eschewed, and every available moment of leisure turned to account. For all who seek self-improvement "there is a lion in the way," the lion of self-indulgence, and it is only by the conquest of this enemy that progress is assured.

Show me how a youth spends his evenings, his odd bits of time, and I will forecast his future. Does he look upon this leisure as precious, rich in possibilities, as containing golden material for his future life structure? Or does he look upon it as an opportunity for self-indulgence, for a light, flippant good time?

The way he spends his leisure will give the keynote of his life, will tell whether he is dead in earnest, or whether he looks upon it as a huge joke.

He may not be conscious of the terrible effects, the gradual deterioration of character which comes from a frivolous wasting of his evenings and half-holidays, but the character is being undermined just the same.

Young men are often surprised to find themselves dropping behind their competitors, but if they will examine themselves, they will find that they have stopped growing, because they have ceased their effort to keep abreast of the times, to be widely read, to enrich life with self-culture.

It is the right use of spare moments in reading and study which qualify men for leadership. And in many historic cases the "spare" moments utilized for study were not spare in the sense of being the spare time of leisure. They were rather spared moments, moments spared from sleep, from meal times, from recreation.

Where is the boy to-day who has less chance to rise in the world than Elihu Burritt, apprenticed at sixteen to a blacksmith, in whose shop he had to work at the forge all the daylight, and often by candle-light? Yet he managed, by studying with a book before him at his meals, carrying it in his pocket that he might utilize every spare moment, and studying nights and holidays, to pick up an excellent education in the odds and ends of time which most boys throw away. While the rich boy and the idler were yawning and stretching and getting their eyes open, young Burritt had seized the opportunity and improved it.

He had a thirst for knowledge and a desire for self-improvement, which overcame every obstacle in his pathway. A wealthy gentleman offered to pay his expenses at Harvard. But no, Elihu said he could get his education himself, even though he had to work twelve or fourteen hours a day at the forge. Here was a determined boy. He snatched every spare moment at the anvil and forge as if it were gold. He believed, with Gladstone, that thrift of time would repay him in after years with usury, and that waste of it would make him dwindle. Think of a boy working nearly all the daylight in a blacksmith shop, and yet finding time to study seven languages in a single year.

It is not lack of ability that holds men down but lack of industry. In many cases the employee has a better brain, a better mental capacity than his employer. But he does not improve his faculties. He dulls his mind by cigarette smoking. He spends his money at the pool table, theater, or dance, and as he grows old, and the harness of perpetual service galls him, he grumbles at his lack of luck, his limited opportunity.

The number of perpetual clerks is constantly being recruited by those who did not think it worth while as boys to learn to write a good hand or to master the fundamental branches of knowledge requisite in a business career. The ignorance common among young men and young women, in factories, stores, and offices, everywhere, in fact, in this land of opportunity, where youth should be well educated, is a pitiable thing in American life. On every hand we see men and women of ability occupying inferior positions because they did not think it worth while in youth to develop their powers and to concentrate their attention on the acquisition of sufficient knowledge.

Thousands of men and women find themselves held back, handicapped for life because of the seeming trifles which they did not think it worth while to pay attention to in their early days.

Many a girl of good natural ability spends her most productive years as a cheap clerk, or in a mediocre position because she never thought it worth while to develop her mental faculties or to take advantage of opportunities within reach to fit herself for a superior position. Thousands of girls unexpectedly thrown on their own resources have been held down all their lives because of neglected tasks in youth, which at the time were dismissed with a careless "I don't think it worth while." They did not think it would pay to go to the bottom of any study at school, to learn to keep accounts accurately, or fit themselves to do anything in such a way as to be able to make a living by it. They expected to marry, and never prepared for being dependent on themselves,—a contingency against which marriage, in many instances, is no safeguard.

The trouble with most youths is that they are not willing to fling the whole weight of their being into their location. They want short hours, little work and a lot of play. They think more of leisure and pleasure than of discipline and training in their great life specialty.

Many a clerk envies his employer and wishes that he could go into business for himself, be an employer too but it is too much work to make the effort to rise above a clerkship. He likes to take life easy; and he wonders idly whether, after all, it is worth while to strain and strive and struggle and study to prepare oneself for the sake of getting up a little higher and making a little more money.

The trouble with a great many people is that they are not willing to make present sacrifices for future gain. They prefer to have a good time as they go along, rather than spend time in self-improvement. They have a sort of vague wish to do something great, but few have that intensity of longing which impels them to make the sacrifice of the present for the future. Few are willing to work underground for years laying a foundation for the life monument. They yearn for greatness, but their yearning is not the kind which is willing to pay any price in endeavor or make any sacrifice for its object.

So the majority slide along in mediocrity all their lives. They have ability for something higher up, but they have not the energy and determination to prepare for it. They do not care to make necessary effort. They prefer to take life easier and lower down rather than to struggle for something higher. They do not play the game for all they are worth.

If a man or woman has but the disposition for self-improvement and advancement he will find opportunity to rise or "what he can not find create." Here is an example from the everyday life going on around us and in which we are all taking part.

A young Irishman who had reached the age of nineteen or twenty without learning to read or write, and who left home because of the intemperance that prevailed there, learned to read a little by studying billboards, and eventually got a position as steward aboard a man-of-war. He chose that occupation and got leave to serve at the captain's table because of a great desire to learn. He kept a little tablet in his coat-pocket, and whenever he heard a new word wrote it down. One day an officer saw him writing and immediately suspected him of being a spy. When he and the other officers learned what the tablet was used for, the young man was given more opportunities to learn, and these led in time to promotion, until, finally, the sometime steward won a prominent position in the navy. Success as a naval officer prepared the way for success in other fields.

Self-help has accomplished about all the great things of the world. How many young men falter, faint, and dally with their purpose, because they have no capital to start with, and wait and wait for some good luck to give them a lift! But success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. It can not be coaxed or bribed; pay the price and it is yours.

One of the sad things about the neglected opportunities for self-improvement is that it puts people of great natural ability at a disadvantage among those who are their mental inferiors.

I know a member of one of our city legislatures, a splendid fellow, immensely popular, who has a great, generous heart and broad sympathies, but who can not open his mouth without so murdering the English language that it is really painful to listen to him.

There are a great many similar examples in Washington of men who have been elected to important positions because of their great natural ability and fine characters, but who are constantly mortified and embarrassed by their ignorance and lack of early training.

One of the most humiliating experiences that can ever come to a human being is to be conscious of possessing more than ordinary ability, and yet be tied to an inferior position because of lack of early and intelligent training commensurate with his ability. To be conscious that one has ability to realize eighty or ninety per cent of his possibilities, if he had only had the proper education and training, but because of this lack to be unable to bring out more than twenty-five per cent of it on account of ignorance, is humiliating and embarrassing. In other words, to go through life conscious that you are making a botch of your capabilities just because of lack of training, is a most depressing thing.

Nothing else outside of sin causes more sorrow than that which comes from not having prepared for the highest career possible to one. There are no bitterer regrets than those which come from being obliged to let opportunities pass by for which one never prepared himself.

I know a pitiable case of a born naturalist whose ambition was so suppressed, and whose education so neglected in youth, that later when he came to know more about natural history than almost any man of his day, he could not write a grammatical sentence, and could never make his ideas live in words, perpetuate them in books, because of his ignorance of even the rudiments of an education. His early vocabulary was so narrow and pinched, and his knowledge of his language so limited that he always seemed to be painfully struggling for words to express his thought.

Think of the suffering of this splendid man, who was conscious of possessing colossal scientific knowledge, and yet was absolutely unable to express himself grammatically!

How often stenographers are mortified by the use of some unfamiliar word or term, or quotation, because of the shallowness of their preparation!

It is not enough to be able to take dictation when ordinary letters are given, not enough to do the ordinary routine of office work. The ambitious stenographer must be prepared for the unusual demand, must have good reserves of knowledge to draw from in case of emergency.

But, if she is constantly slipping up upon her grammar, or is all at sea the moment she steps out of her ordinary routine, her employer knows that her preparation is shallow, that her education is very limited, and her prospects will be limited also.

A young lady writes me that she is so handicapped by the lack of an early education that she fairly dreads to write a letter to anyone of education or culture for fear of making ignorant mistakes in grammar and spelling. Her letter indicates that she has a great deal of natural ability. Yet she is much limited and always placed at a disadvantage because of this lack of an early education. It is difficult to conceive of a greater misfortune than always to be embarrassed and handicapped just because of the neglect of those early years.

I am often pained by letters from people, especially young people, which indicate that the writers have a great deal of natural ability, that they have splendid minds, but a large part of their ability is covered up, rendered ineffectual by their ignorance.

Many of these letters show that the writers are like diamonds in the rough, with only here and there a little facet ground off, just enough to let in the light and reveal the great hidden wealth within.

I always feel sorry for these people who have passed the school age and who will probably go through life with splendid minds handicapped by their ignorance which, even late in life, they might largely or entirely overcome.

It is such a pity that, a young man, for instance, who has the natural ability which would make him a leader among men, must, for the lack of a little training, a little preparation, work for somebody else, perhaps with but half of his ability but with a better preparation, more education.

Everywhere we see clerks, mechanics, employees in all walks of life, who cannot rise to anything like positions which correspond with their natural ability, because they have not had the education. They are ignorant. They can not write a decent letter. They murder the English language, and hence their superb ability cannot be demonstrated, and remains in mediocrity.

The parable of the talents illustrates and enforces one of nature's sternest laws: "To him that hath shall be given; from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath." Scientists call this law the survival of the fittest. The fittest are those who use what they have, who gain strength by struggle, and who survive by self-development by control of their hostile or helpful environment.

The soil, the sunshine, the atmosphere are very liberal with the material for the growth of the plant or the tree, but the plant must use all it gets, it must work it up into flowers, into fruit, into leaf or fiber or something or the supply will cease. In other words, the soil will not send any more building material up the sap than is used for growth, and the faster this material is used the more rapid the growth, the more abundantly the material will come.

The same law holds good everywhere. Nature is liberal with us if we utilize what she gives us, but if we stop using it, if we do not transform what she gives us into power, if we do not do some building somewhere, if we do not transform the material which she gives us into force and utilize that force, we not only find the supply cut off, but we find that we are growing weaker, less efficient.

Everything in nature is on the move, either one way or the other. It is either going up or down. It is either advancing or retrograding; we cannot hold without using.

Nature withdraws muscle or brain if we do not use them. She withdraws skill the moment we stop drilling efficiently, the moment we stop using our power. The force is withdrawn when we cease exercising it.

A college graduate is often surprised years after he leaves the college to find that about all he has to show for his education is his diploma. The power, the efficiency which he gained there has been lost because he has not been using them. He thought at the time that everything was still fresh in his mind after his examination that this knowledge would remain with him, but it has been slipping away from him every minute since he stopped using it, and only that has remained and increased which he has used; the rest has evaporated. A great many college graduates ten years afterwards find that they have but very little left to show for their four years' course, because they have not utilized their knowledge. They have become weaklings without knowing it. They constantly say to themselves, "I have a college education, I must have some ability, I must amount to something in the world." But the college diploma has no more power to hold the knowledge you have gained in college than a piece of tissue paper over a gas jet can hold the gas in the pipe.

Everything which you do not use is constantly slipping away from you. Use it or lose it. The secret of power is use. Ability will not remain with us, force will evaporate the moment we cease to do something with it.

The tools for self-improvement are at your hand, use them. If the ax is dull the more strength must be put forth. If your opportunities are limited you must use more energy, put forth more effort. Progress may seem slow at first, but perseverance assures success. "Line upon line, and precept upon precept" is the rule of mental upbuilding and "In due time ye shall reap if ye faint not."



CHAPTER XXXII

RAISING OF VALUES

"Destiny is not about thee, but within,— Thyself must make thyself."

"The world is no longer clay, but rather iron in the hands of its workers," says Emerson, "and men have got to hammer out a place for themselves by steady and rugged blows."

To make the most of your "stuff," be it cloth, iron, or character,—this is success. Raising common "stuff" to priceless value is great success.

The man who first takes the rough bar of wrought iron may be a blacksmith, who has only partly learned his trade, and has no ambition to rise above his anvil. He thinks that the best possible thing he can do with his bar is to make it into horseshoes, and congratulates himself upon his success. He reasons that the rough lump of iron is worth only two or three cents a pound, and that it is not worth while to spend much time or labor on it. His enormous muscles and small skill have raised the value of the iron from one dollar, perhaps, to ten dollars.

Along comes a cutler, with a little better education, a little more ambition, a little finer perception, and says to the blacksmith: "Is this all you can see in that iron? Give me a bar, and I will show you what brains and skill and hard work can make of it." He sees a little further into the rough bar. He has studied many processes of hardening and tempering; he has tools, grinding and polishing wheels, and annealing furnaces. The iron is fused, carbonized into steel, drawn out, forged, tempered, heated white-hot, plunged into cold water or oil to improve its temper, and ground and polished with great care and patience. When this work is done, he shows the astonished blacksmith two thousand dollars' worth of knife-blades where the latter only saw ten dollars' worth of crude horseshoes. The value has been greatly raised by the refining process.

"Knife-blades are all very well, if you can make nothing better," says another artisan, to whom the cutler has shown the triumph of his art, "but you haven't half brought out what is in that bar of iron. I see a higher and better use; I have made a study of iron, and know what there is in it and what can be made of it."

This artisan has a more delicate touch, a finer perception, a better training, a higher ideal, and superior determination, which enable him to look still further into the molecules of the rough bar,—past the horse-shoes, past the knife-blades,—and he turns the crude iron into the finest cambric needles, with eyes cut with microscopic exactness. The production of the invisible points requires a more delicate process, a finer grade of skill than the cutler possesses.

This feat the last workman considers marvelous, and he thinks he has exhausted the possibilities of the iron. He has multiplied many times the value of the cutler's product.

But, behold! another very skilful mechanic, with a more finely organized mind, a more delicate touch, more patience, more industry, a higher order of skill, and a better training, passes with ease by the horse-shoes, the knife-blades, and the needles, and returns the product of his bar in fine mainsprings for watches. Where the others saw horseshoes, knife-blades, or needles, worth only a few thousand dollars, his penetrating eye saw a product worth one hundred thousand dollars.

A higher artist-artisan appears, who tells us that the rough bar has not even yet found its highest expression; that he possesses the magic that can perform a still greater miracle in iron. To him, even main-springs seem coarse and clumsy. He knows that the crude iron can be manipulated and coaxed into an elasticity that can not even be imagined by one less trained in metallurgy. He knows that, if care enough be used in tempering the steel, it will not be stiff, trenchant, and merely a passive metal, but so full of its new qualities that it almost seems instinct with life.

With penetrating, almost clairvoyant vision, this artist-artisan sees how every process of mainspring making can be carried further; and how, at every stage of manufacture, more perfection can be reached; how the texture of the metal can be so much refined that even a fiber, a slender thread of it, can do marvelous work. He puts his bar through many processes of refinement and fine tempering, and, in triumph, turns his product into almost invisible coils of delicate hair-springs. After infinite toil and pain, he has made his dream true; he has raised the few dollars' worth of iron to a value of one million dollars, perhaps forty times the value of the same weight of gold.

Still another workman, whose processes are so almost infinitely delicate, whose product is so little known, by even the average educated man, that his trade is unmentioned by the makers of dictionaries and encylopedias, takes but a fragment of one of the bars of steel, and develops its higher possibilities with such marvelous accuracy, such ethereal fineness of touch, that even mainsprings and hairsprings are looked back upon as coarse, crude, and cheap. When his work is done, he shows you a few of the minutely barbed instruments used by dentists to draw out the finest branches of the dental nerves. While a pound of gold, roughly speaking, is worth about two hundred and fifty dollars, a pound of these slender, barbed filaments of steel, if a pound could be collected, might be worth hundreds of times as much.

Other experts may still further refine the product, but it will be many a day before the best will exhaust the possibilities of a metal that can be subdivided until its particles will float in the air.

It sounds magical, but the magic is only that wrought by the application of the homeliest virtues; by the training of the eye, the hand, the perception; by painstaking care, by hard work, and by determination and grit.

If a metal possessing only a few coarse material qualities is capable of such marvelous increase in value, by mixing brains with its molecules, who shall set bounds to the possibilities of the development of a human being, that wonderful compound of physical, mental, moral, and spiritual forces? Whereas, in the development of iron, a dozen processes are possible, a thousand influences may be brought to bear upon mind and character. While the iron is an inert mass acted upon by external influences only, the human being is a bundle of forces, acting and counteracting, yet all capable of control and direction by the higher self, the real, dominating personality.

The difference in human attainment is due only slightly to the original material. It is the ideal followed and unfolded, the effort made, the processes of education and experience undergone that fuse, hammer, and mold our life-bar into its ultimate development.

Life, everyday life, has counterparts of all the tortures the iron undergoes, and through them it comes to its highest expression. The blows of opposition, the struggles amid want and woe, the fiery trials of disaster and bereavement, the crushings of iron circumstances, the raspings of care and anxiety, the grinding of constant difficulties, the rebuffs that chill enthusiasm, the weariness of years of dry, dreary drudgery in education and discipline,—all these are necessary to the man who would reach the highest success.

The iron, by this manipulation, is strengthened, refined, made more elastic or more resistant, and adapted to the use each artisan dreams of. If every blow should fracture it, if every furnace should burn the life out of it, if every roller should pulverize it, of what use would it be? It has that virtue, those qualities that withstand all; that draw profit from every test, and come out triumphant in the end. In the iron the qualities are, in the main, inherent; but in ourselves they are largely matters of growth, culture, and development, and all are subject to the dominating will.

Just as each artisan sees in the crude iron some finished, refined product, so must we see in our lives glorious possibilities, if we would but realize them. If we see only horseshoes or knife-blades, all our efforts and struggles will never produce hairsprings. We must realize our own adaptability to great ends; we must resolve to struggle, to endure trials and tests, to pay the necessary price, confident that the result will pay us for our suffering, our trials, and our efforts.

Those who shrink from the forging, the rolling, and the drawing out, are the ones who fail, the "nobodies," the faulty characters, the criminals. Just as a bar of iron, if exposed to the elements, will oxidize, and become worthless, so will character deteriorate if there is no constant effort to improve its form, to increase its ductility, to temper it, or to better it in some way.

It is easy to remain a common bar of iron, or comparatively so, by becoming merely a horseshoe; but it is hard to raise your life-product to higher values.

Many of us consider our natural gift-bars poor, mean, and inadequate, compared with those of others; but, if we are willing, by patience, toil, study, and struggle, to hammer, draw out, and refine, to work on and up from clumsy horseshoes to delicate hairsprings, we can, by infinite patience and persistence, raise the value of the raw material to almost fabulous heights. It was thus that Columbus, the weaver, Franklin, the journeyman printer, Aesop, the slave, Homer, the beggar, Demosthenes, the cutler's son, Ben Jonson, the bricklayer, Cervantes, the common soldier, and Haydn, the poor wheelwright's son, developed their powers, until they towered head and shoulders above other men.

There is very little difference between the material given to a hundred average boys and girls at birth, yet one with no better means of improvement than the others, perhaps with infinitely poorer means, will raise his material in value a hundredfold, five-hundredfold, aye, a thousandfold, while the ninety-nine will wonder why their material remains so coarse and crude, and will attribute their failure to hard luck.

While one boy is regretting his want of opportunities, his lack of means to get a college education, and remains in ignorance, another with half his chances picks up a good education in the odds and ends of time which other boys throw away. From the same material, one man builds a palace and another a hovel. From the same rough piece of marble, one man calls out an angel of beauty which delights every beholder, another a hideous monster which demoralizes every one who sees it.

The extent to which you can raise the value of your life-bar depends very largely upon yourself. Whether you go upward to the mainspring or hairspring stage, depends very largely upon your ideal, your determination to be the higher thing, upon your having the grit to be hammered, to be drawn out, to be thrust from the fire into cold water or oil in order to get the proper temper.

Of course, it is hard and painful, and it takes lots of stamina to undergo the processes that produce the finest product, but would you prefer to remain a rough bar of iron or a horseshoe all your life?



CHAPTER XXXIII

SELF-IMPROVEMENT THROUGH PUBLIC SPEAKING