CHAPTER XV

THE PRICE OF SUCCESS.

The gods sell anything and to everybody at a fair price. - EMERSON.

To color well requires your life. It cannot be done cheaper. - RUSKIN.

There is no fate! Between the thought and the success, God is the only agent. - BULWER.

"We have but what we make, and every good Is locked by nature in a granite hand, Sheer labor must unclench! "By hammer and hand all arts do stand"

To be thrown upon one's own resources is to be cast into the very lap of fortune. --FRANKLIN.

Heaven never helps the man who will not act. - SOPHOCLES.

The talent of success is nothing more than doing what you can do well, and doing well whatever you do, without a

thought of fame. - LONGFELLOW.

There is no road to success but through a clear, strong purpose. A purpose underlies character, culture, position,

attainment of whatever sort. - T. T. MUNGER.

Mankind worships success, but thinks too little of the means by which it is. attained, - what days and nights of watching

and weariness, how year after year has dragged on, and seen the end still far off; all that counts for little, if the long

struggle do not close in victory. -H. M. FIELD.

“WHAT a heavenly mournful expression!" exclaims Miss Sybil in Bulwer's “ Kenelm Chillingly," as she gazes at the baby; " it seems so grieved to have left the angels!"

"That is prettily said, cousin Sybil," replied the clergyman, “but the infant must pluck up courage and fight its way among mortals with a good heart, if it wants to get back to the angels again."

The same principle obtains in the performance of even trivial tasks. An ancient Greek thought-to save his bees a laborious

SAMUEL F. B. MORSE

(First telegraphic message.)

"What hath God wrought."” A constant struggle, a ceaseless battle

to bring success from ahospitable surroundings, is the price of all

great achievements."
flight to Hymettus. He cut their wings and gathered flowers for them to work upon at home, but they made no honey.

“Oh, if I could thus put a dream on canvas !" exclaimed an enthusiastic young artist, pointing to a most beautiful painting. "Dream on canvas!" growled the master, "it is the ten thousand touches with the brush you must learn to put on canvas that make your dream."

“Not so very long to do the work itself," said a great artist, when asked the time required to paint a cottage scene with an old woman trying to thread a needle near the open door, "but it took me twenty years to get that pose of the figure, and to correctly represent that sun light coming in at the door."

" You charge me fifty sequins," said a Venetian nobleman to a sculptor, "for a bust that cost you only ten days' labor." "You forget," said the artist, "that I have been thirty years learning to make that bust in ten days."

"If only Milton's imagination could have conceived his visions," says Waters, "his consummate industry alone could have carved the immortal lines which enshrine them. If only Newton's mind could reach out to the secrets of nature, even his genius could only do it by the homeliest toil. The works of Bacon are not midsummer's-night dreams, but, like coral islands, they have risen from the depths of truth, and formed their broad surfaces above the ocean by the minutest accretions of persevering labor. The conceptions of Michael Angelo would have perished like a night's phantasy, had not his industry given them permanence."

"There is but one method of attaining excellence," said Sydney Smith, “ and that is hard labor."

The mottoes of great men often give us glimpses of the secret of their characters and success. " Work! work ! work ! " was the motto of Sir Joshua Reynold
David Wilkie, and scores of other men who have left their mark upon the world. Voltaire's motto was "Toujours an travail" (always at work). Scott's maxim was "Never be doing nothing." Michael Angelo was a wonderful worker. He even slept in his clothes ready to spring to his work as soon as he awoke. He kept a block of marble in his bedroom that he might get up in the night and work when he could not sleep. His favorite device was an old man in a go-cart, with an hour-glass upon it, bearing this inscription: "Ancoraim. paro" (still I'm learning). Even after he was blind he would ask to be wheeled into the Belvidere, to examine the statues with his hands.

Cobden used to say, "I'm working like a horse without a moment to spare." It was said that Handel, the musician, did the work of a dozen men. Nothing ever daunted him. He feared neither ridicule nor defeat.

Lord Palmerston worked like a slave, even in his old age. Being asked when he considered a man in his prime, he replied, "Seventy-nine," that being his own age. Humboldt was one of the world's great workers. In summer be arose at four in the morning for thirty years. He used to say work was as much of a necessity as eating or sleeping.

Sir Walter Scott was a phenomenal worker. He wrote the "Waverley Novels" at the rate of twelve volumes a year. He averaged a volume every two months during his whole working life. What an example is this to the young men of today, of the possibilities of an earnest life ! Edmund Burke was one of the most prodigious workers that ever lived.

Daniel Webster said, "I have worked for more than twelve hours a day for fifty years." Charles James Fox became a great orator, yet few people outside of his personal friends had any idea of how he struggled to perfect himself in "the art of all arts." He never let an opportunity for speaking or self-culture pass unimproved. Henry Clay could have been found almost daily for years in some old Virginia barn, declaiming to the cattle for an audience. He said, "Never let a day go by without exercising your power of speech." Caesar controlled men by exciting their fear; Cicero by captivating their affections and swaying their passions. The influence of one perished with its author; that of the other continues to this day. Beecher used to practice speaking for years in the woods and pastures.

"Work or starve," is nature's motto, - and it is written on the stars and the sod alike, - starve mentally, starve morally, starve physically. It is an inexorable law of nature that whatever is not used, dies. “ No thing for nothing," is her maxim. If we are idle and shiftless by choice, we shall be nerveless and powerless by necessity. We are the sum of our endeavors. "Our reward is in the race we run, not in the prize."

“I acquired all the talent I have," said John Sebastian Bach, “ by working hard; and all who like to work as hard will succeed just as I have done."

“What is the secret of success in business ? " asked a friend of Cornelius Vanderbilt. "Secret! there is no secret about it," replied the commodore ; "all you have to do is to attend, to your business and go ahead." If you would adopt Vanderbilt's method, know your business, attend to it, and keep down expenses until your fortune is safe from business perils.

A Southern student at Andover bought some wood, and went to Professor Stuart to learn whom he could get to saw it. " I am out of a job of that kind," said Mr. Stuart; " I will saw it myself."

Do not choose your life-work solely for the money that you can make by it. It is a contemptible estimate of an occupation to regard it as a mere means of making a living. The Creator might have given us our bread, ready-made. He might have kept us in luxurious Eden forever; but He had a grander and nobler end in view when He created man, than the mere satisfaction of his animal appetites and passions. There was a divinity within man, which the luxuries of Eden could never develop. There was an inestimable blessing in that curse which drove him from the garden, and compelled him forever to earn his bread by the sweat of his brow. It was not without significance that the Creator concealed our highest happiness and greatest good beneath the sternest difficulties, and made their attainment conditional upon a struggle for existence. "Our motive power is always found in what we lack." Never feel above your business.

All legitimate occupations are respectable. "The ploughman may be a Cincinnatus, or a Washington, or he may be brother to the clod he turns." During the Revolutionary War the soldiers were trying to raise a heavy timber which they could scarcely lift from the ground. A young corporal stood by, urging the men to lift hard, and shouting, "Now, boys, right up," when a superior officer rode up, dismounted, and lifted with the men. When the timber was in place the officer asked the corporal why he did not help. " I am a corporal," he replied. "I am George Washington," responded the officer. "You will meet me at your commander's headquarters."

Depend upon it, there is always something wrong about the young man or woman who looks upon manual labor as degrading. Manual labor was never considered degrading until slavery came into existence.

"Laboremus " (we must work) was the last word of the dying Emperor Severus, as his soldiers gathered around him. " Labor," " achievement," was the great Roman motto, and the secret of her conquest of the world. The greatest generals returned from their triumphs to the plough.

Agriculture was held in great esteem, and it was considered the highest compliment to call a Roman a great agriculturist. Many of their family names were derived from agricultural terms, as Cicero from " cicer," a chick-pea, and Fabius from "faba," a bean, etc. The rural tribes held the foremost rank in the early days of the Empire. City people were regarded as an indolent, nerveless race.

Rome was a mighty nation while industry led her people, but when her great conquest of wealth and slaves placed her citizens above the necessity of labor, that moment her glory began to fade; vice and corruption, induced by idleness, doomed the proud city to an ignominious history. Cicero, Rome's great orator and statesman, said: "All artisans are engaged in a disgraceful occupation;" and Aristotle, a stranger to Christian philosophy, said: "The best regulated cities will not permit a mechanic to be a citizen, for it is impossible for one who leads the life of a mechanic, or hired servant, to practice a life of virtue. Some were born to be slaves." But fortunately, there came One mightier than Rome, Cicero, or Aristotle, whose magnificent life and example forever lifted the ban from labor, and redeemed it from disgrace. He gives significance to labor and dignity to the most menial service. Christ did not say, " Come unto me, all ye pleasure-hunters, ye indolent, and ye lazy; " but, " Come all ye that labor and are heavy laden." A noble manhood or womanhood. will lift any legitimate calling into respectability.

It is manhood nature is after, not money or fame. Oh, what price will she not pay for a man! Ages and aeons were nothing for her to spend in preparing for his coming, or in making his existence possible. She has rifled the centuries for his development, and placed the universe at his disposal. The world is but his kindergarten, and every created thing but an object-lesson from the unseen universe. Nature resorts to a thousand expedients to develop a perfect type of her grandest creation. To do this she must induce him to fight his way up to his own loaf. She never allows him once to lose sight of the fact that it is the struggle to attain that develops the man. The moment we put our hand upon that which looks attractive at a distance, and which we struggle so hard to reach, nature robs it of its charm by holding up before us another prize still more attractive. The toy which the child could not be induced to give up, he forsakes willingly when he sees the orange. So we relinquish one prize to pursue another, but with the added strength, developed in the struggle to attain the last.

Nature has left man in this unstable equilibrium, lest the satisfaction from the possession of that which he struggled so hard to get rob him. of his ambition for new conquests. The struggle to obtain is the great gymnasium of the race. Nature puts pleasure in the acquisition of that which the heart covets, but the moment we place our hand upon the prize, the charm vanishes ; its usefulness is gone ; it can develop no more character, no more stamina, no more manhood. What if -

“That which shone afar so grand Turns to ashes in the hand ? On again ; the virtue lies In the struggle, not in the prize."

Labor is the great schoolmaster of the race. It is the grand drill in life's army, without which we are only confused and powerless when called into action. What a teacher industry is! It calls us away from conventional instructors, books, and theories, and brings us into the world's great school-into actual contact with men and things.

The perpetual attrition of mind upon mind rasps off the rough edges of unpractical life and gives polish to character. It teaches patience, perseverance, forbearance, and application. It teaches method and system, by compelling us to crowd the most possible into every day and hour. Industry is a perpetual call upon the judgment, the power of quick decision; it makes ready men, practical men.

“ To have any chance of success, I must be more steady than other men," Lord Campbell wrote to his father as an excuse for not visiting home; “ I must be in chambers when they are at the theatre; I must study when they are asleep; I must, above all, remain in town when they are in the country."

Why does a bit of canvas with the "Angelus" on it bring one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, while that of another artist brings but a dollar ? Because Millet put one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars' worth of brains and labor into his canvas, while the other man put only a dollar's worth into his. Work is worthless unless mixed with brains.

A blacksmith makes five dollars' worth of iron into horseshoes, and gets ten dollars for them. The cutler makes the same iron into knives, and gets two hundred dollars. The machinist makes the same iron into needles, and gets sixty-eight hundred dollars. The watchmaker takes it and makes it into mainsprings, and gets two hundred thousand dollars; or into hair-springs, and gets two million dollars, sixty times the value of the same weight of gold.

So it is with our life material which is given us at birth. Do something with it we must. We cannot throw it away, for even idleness leaves its curse upon it. One young man works his up into objects of beauty and utility. He mixes brains with it. Another botches and spoils his without purpose or aim until, perhaps late in life, he comes to his senses and tries to patch up the broken and wasted pieces; but it is a sorry apology to leave, in payment for a life of magnificent possibilities.

"Why, my lord," said a flippant English clergyman to the Bishop of Litchfield, "it is the easiest thing in the world to preach. Why, very often, I choose my text after I go into the pulpit, and then go on and preach a sermon, and think nothing of it." “Ah, yes,"
said the bishop, "that agrees exactly with what I hear your people say, for they hear the sermon, and they, too, think nothing of it."

The world is full of just-agoing-to-be’s, - subjunctive heroes who might, could, would, or should be this. or that but for certain obstacles or discouragements, - prospectuses which never become published works They all long for success, but they want it at a discount. The "one price" for all is too high. They covet the golden round in the ladder, but they do not like to climb the difficult steps by which alone it can be reached. They long for victory, but shrink from the fight. They are forever looking for soft places and smooth surfaces where there will be the least resistance, forgetting that the very friction which retards the train upon the track, and counteracts a fourth of all the engine's power, is essential to its locomotion. Grease the track, and; though the engine puffs and the wheels revolve, the train will not move an inch.

Work is difficult in proportion as the end to be attained is high and noble. God has put the highest price upon the greatest worth. If a man would reach the highest success he must pay the price himself. No titled pedigree, no money inherited from ancestors with long bank accounts, can be given in exchange for this commodity. He must be self-made or never made.

The Romans arranged the seats in their two temples to Virtue and Honor, so that no one could enter the second without passing through the first. Such is the order of advance, - Virtue, Toil, Honor.

All would like to succeed, but this is not enough. Who would be satisfied with the success which may be had for the wishing ? You can have what you desire, if you will pay the price. But how much do you want to succeed ? Will you pay the price ? How eager are you to strive for success ? How much can you endure ? How long can you wait?

Do you long for an education ? Would you, if necessary, wear threadbare clothes in college, and board yourself ? Would you, like Thurlow Weed, study nights by the light of a camp-fire in a sugar-orchard ? Would you walk through the snow two miles, with pieces of rag carpet tied about your feet for shoes, that you might, like him, borrow a coveted book ? Have you the stamina to go on with your studies when too poor to buy bread, and when you can appease the pangs of hunger only by tying tighter and tighter about your body a girdle, as did Samuel Drew or Kitto ?

Would you, like John Scott, rise at four and study until ten or eleven at night, tying a wet towel around your head to keep awake; would you, when too poor to buy books, borrow and copy three folio volumes of precedents, and the whole of Coke on Littleton, with the boy who became Lord Eldon ?

Would you be disheartened by Wilberforce's suggestion to a student of law:" You must make up your mind to live like a hermit and work like a horse" ? Can you eat sawdust without butter, as the great lawyer, Chitty, asked the young man who came to him for advice about studying law ? Have you the determination that would hammer an education from the stone-quarry, with Hugh Miller; the patience that would spend a lifetime tracing the handwriting of the Creator down through the ages in the strata of the rocks ?

Would you work on a farm for twelve long years for a yoke of oxen and six sheep, with Henry Wilson ? Do you love learning well enough to walk forty miles to obtain a book you could not afford to buy, with Abraham Lincoln ?

Not that we would recommend such extreme measures; but if you saw no way open except such as was traveled by these and many other great men, would you be equal to the stern ordeal, and learn from experience that " the royal road to learning" is a myth, and that the real road is one that tears the brow with its thorns, and exhausts the heart with its disappointments Would you be an orator and sway the minds of men? Would you train your voice for months on the seashore with only the wild waves for your audience, with Demosthenes ? Would you, like him, cure yourself of a peculiar shrug by practicing with naked shoulders under the sharp points of suspended swords ? Could you stand calm and unmoved in Faneuil Hall, amid hisses and showers of rotten eggs, with Wendell Phillips ? Have you the stamina that would keep you on your feet in Parliament with a Disraeli when every sentence is hailed with derisive laughter ? Could you stand your ground, as he did, until you had compelled the applause of "the first gentlemen in the world" ? Have you the determination that carried Curran again and again to speak in that august Parliament from which he had been so often hissed ? Would you persevere, like Savoriarola, Cobden, Sheridan, and scores of others who broke down

completely at their first attempts, in spite of repeated and ignominious failures ?

If, like Daniel Webster, you could not manage to declaim throughout your whole school course, could you still find courage to become a public speaker ? Would you black boots for the students at Oxford with George Whitefield ? Would you, like Beecher, begin preaching in a church of nineteen members in an obscure town in Indiana, and act as sexton, janitor, and minister ? Would you, like Anna Dickinson, face the jeers and hisses, and even the pistol-bullets of the Molly Maguires ? Would you preach Christ and Him crucified amid the scorn of skeptics, the pangs of martyrdom ? Do you yearn to be an artist, and transfer to canvas or set free from marble the beauty which haunts your soul ? Would you join Michael Angelo in carrying mortar for the frescoers up long ladders, to catch some suggestions from their words or work ?

Would you, at sixty-five, while the pope yet sleeps, don your overalls and dig your own ochre in the rear of the Vatican, and devote your whole day to your art? Could you work patiently for seven long years decorating the Sistine Chapel with the "Story of the Creation " and the immortal " Last Judgment " ? Would you refuse remuneration for this work, lest you be swerved from the ideal dominating your soul ? Would you rise at dead of night, seize hammer and chisel, and call from the rough marble the angel which haunts your dreams and will not let you sleep ?

Would you excel in literature ? Would not the dread of rejected manuscript, returned with thanks, dishearten you after you had given it years of your ripest thought and great sacrifice ? Are you willing to be unrecognized and die unknown ? You would have written Shakespeare's plays, but could you wait two hundred years for recognition, and die without even receiving mention from your greatest contemporary ?

Would you pay Goethe's price for distinction ? "Each bon mot of mine," said he, "has cost a purse of gold. Half a million of my own money, the fortune I inherited, my salary, and the large income derived from my writings for fifty years back, have been expended to instruct me in what I know." Would you have laboriously created and dictated "Paradise Lost" in a world you could not see, and then sell it for fifteen pounds, in an age in which a learned London critic could say:

" The blind schoolmaster has written a tedious poem on ' The Fall of Man,' and unless length has merit, it has none"?

Would not the grating of the jail door and the long nights in a dungeon dampen your ardor for the authorship of even the immortal " Pilgrim's Progress " ? Would you endure the agonies of a De Quincey in order to write his matchless visions and analyses ? Would you live on the border-land of want and woe and temptation for many years, with Poe, even for the sake of pioneering human thought into unexplored regions of weird and mystic speculation, of exquisite, ethereal
beauty ? Would you endure the misery of Cowper that you might wail your anguish in song, or dally with the story of the inimitable John Gilpin ? Could you, with Euripides, be content to devote three days to five lines, that those lines might live centuries after your language had ceased to be spoken ? Could you have the patience and perseverance of Moore, that you might produce ten immortal lines a day ?

Could you have the persistence of Isaac Newton, who, after spending long years on an intricate calculation, had his papers destroyed by his dog Diamond, and then cheerfully began to replace them ? Have you the courage of Carlyle, who, after he had lent the manuscript of the "French Revolution "to a friend, whose servant carelessly used it to kindle the fire, calmly went to work and rewrote it ? Would you wheel supplies in a barrow through the streets of Philadelphia, with a Franklin ?

Would you be a soldier ? Could you, like Napoleon, wait for an appointment seven years after you had prepared yourself thoroughly, and use all your enforced leisure in further intense study ? Could you, while losing nine battles out of every ten, still press on with an iron determination which would win you Blucher's title of "Marshal Forward" ? Could you, while losing more battles than you won, go on with Washington and conquer by the power of your character ?

Would you bless your race by inventions or discoveries ? Could you cheerfully earn the means to carry on your experiments by working in Richard Arkwright's barber-shop in a basement, with this sign over your door: " Come to the Subterraneous Barber- a Clean Shave for a Halfpenny" ? Could you plod on with enthusiasm after seeing a mob tear down the mill you had erected for the employment of your machinery ? Is incessant labor for fifteen weary years too great a price to pay for George Stephenson's first successful locomotive ? Is thirty years too long to spend with Watt amid want and woe in perfecting the condensing engine ? Is your determination strong enough to carry you to the verge of ruin, time and again, and to enable you when your credit is exhausted, and your wife has turned against you, to burn the palings of your fence and the furniture and floor of your house, and then add the shelves of your pantry to the fire which develops an enamel like Palissy's ? If cast into prison, could you experiment with the straw in your cell, with Galileo ? Can you lie more than once in a debtor's prison and live on charity much of the time, for ten years, to win the triumph of Goodyear, whose friend could truthfully say: "If you see a man with an India-rubber coat on, India-rubber shoes, and India-rubber cap, and in his pocket an India-rubber purse, with not a cent in it, that is Goodyear" ? Could you have the heart to perfect, an invention beyond almost any other at its first introduction, only to find with Eli Whitney or Elias Howe, that those whom it was intended to bless refused to use it at first, and later tried to steal it ?

Could you wait eight years for a patent on telegraphy with Samuel F. B. Morse, and then almost fight for a chance to introduce it ? Could you invent a hay-tedder, and then pay a farmer for trying it on his hay, because he said it would "knock the seeds off " ?Would you, after inventing McCormick's reaper, have the persistence to introduce it into England amid the ridicule of the press, the “London Times" calling it "a cross between an Astley chariot, a wheelbarrow, and a flying machine" ? Would you live in the woods for years to reproduce Audubon's drawings of North American birds, after they had been destroyed by Norway rats, or toil over Alps and Andes with Agassiz, or go with Pliny to describe the volcano, Mt. Vesuvius, that was to destroy your life ? Would your passion for art give you nerve like that of Vernet to sketch the towering wave on the Mediterranean that threatened to engulf your vessel ?

Would your patience suffice to practice on Handel's harpsichord in secret until every key was hollowed by your fingers to resemble the bowl of a spoon? If a physician, would you inoculate yourself with a yellow fever or cholera bacillus, to test its power ? Would you take three grains of opium to test the power of a new antidote you believed you had discovered, permanganate of potash ?

In politics, could you persevere to be a candidate sixteen times in vain, to be elected Governor Marcus Morton of Massachusetts in 1840, by a majority of but one vote ? Could you endure the most bitter persecution for years, to rank with William Lloyd Garrison as a benefactor of an unfortunate race ? After acquiring fortune, could you give up your well-earned leisure, devote years of almost hopeless drudgery, and risk all your wealth, amid the scoffs of men, in a seemingly futile attempt to bind two continents together by an electric cord, with Cyrus W. Field ?

Success is the child of drudgery and perseverance. Fame never comes because it is craved.

If you are built of such material as this, you will succeed; if not, in spite of all your dreams and wishes you will fail. Most people look upon poverty as bad fortune, and forget that it has ever been the priceless spur in nearly all great achievements, all down the ages.

Jean Paul Richter, who suffered greatly from poverty, said that he would not have been rich for worlds. " How unfortunate it is for a boy to have rich parents," said James Gordon Bennett to George W. Childs. "If you and I had been born that way, we would never have done anything worth mentioning."

"I began life with a sixpence," said Girard, "and believe that a man's best capital is his industry."

How nature laughs at puny society caste, and at attempts to confine greatness behind brown-stone fronts !
She drops an idiot on Fifth Avenue or Beacon Street, where a millionaire looked for a Webster or a Sumner, and leaves a Garfield in a log-cabin in the wilderness, where humble parents expected only a pioneer. She astonishes a poor blacksmith with a Burritt, and gives a dunce to a wealthy banker. A fool may be born in a palace, and the Saviour of the world in a stable. Truly royal men and women look out of cold and miserable attic windows, from factories and poorhouses, upon people much their inferiors, though dressed in broad cloths and satins, whose dishonesty and craft have overcome them in the battle of life.

What an army of young men enters the success contest every year as raw recruits! Many of them are country youths flocking to the cities to buy success. Their young ambitions have been excited by some book, or fired by the story of some signal success, and they dream of becoming Astom or Girards, Stewarts or Wanamakers, Vanderbilts or Goulds, Lincolns or Garfields, until their innate energy impels them to try their own fortune in the magic metropolis. But what are you willing to pay for "success," as you call it, young man? Do you realize what that word means in a great city in the nineteenth century, where men grow gray at thirty and die of old age at forty, -where the race of life has become so intense that the runners are treading on the heels of those before them; and "woe to him who stops to tie his shoestring"? Do you know that only two or three out of every hundred will ever win permanent success, and only because they have kept everlastingly at it; and that the rest will sooner or later fail and many die in poverty because they have given up the struggle ?

It is said of the young men who entered business on State Street, Boston, forty years ago, that even their names are almost forgotten. Most of them were killed in the fierce struggle of competition.

Read the diary of an old man on Long Wharf, Boston, where the battle waged less fiercely: " Of all I knew in business, only five have succeeded in forty years. All the others failed or died in want." Of a thousand depositors in the Union Bank, all but six failed or died poor. "Bankruptcy," said one of the old bank directors, "is like death and almost as certain They fall single and alone, and are thus forgotten but there is no escape, and he is fortunate who fails young." In Pemberton Square among the lawyers, an old friend of Rufus Choate and Daniel Webster tells us there are two thousand attorneys in Boston, and only four hundred get a living by their profession, and only now and then one becomes distinguished.

In a work on business, published in eighteen hundred and fifty-two, Edwin T. Freedley gave a select list of the first-class wholesale houses in Philadelphia. On reexamining the list twenty-three years later, he found but two out of seventeen of the importing firms be had mentioned; two out of twenty-two dry goods houses; four out of twenty-five dry goods jobbing houses; nine of the silk firms; eight out of twenty-five drug houses; one out of seventeen boot and shoe jobbers; and a total of only twenty-five out of the one hundred and seventy-seven wholesale firms he had considered the most solid in the City of Brotherly Love. The thought of this cold reality is appalling, and we almost shrink from effort when success seems so much like a lottery with very few prizes.

But he who would succeed must pay the price. He must not look for a "'soft job." Into work which he feels to be a part of his very existence he must pour his whole heart and soul. He must be fired by a determination which knows no defeat, which cares not for hunger or ridicule, which spurns hardships and laughs at want and disaster. They were not men of luck and broadcloth, nor of legacy and laziness, but men inured to hardship and deprivation, - not afraid of threadbare clothes and honest poverty, men who fought their way to their own loaf, -who have pushed the world up from chaos into the light of the highest civilization. They were men who, as they climbed, expanded and lifted others to a higher plane and opened wider the doors of narrow lives.

If thou canst plan a noble deed,

And never flag till it succeed,

Though in the strife thy heart should bleed;

Whatever obstacles control,

Thine hour will come, -go on, true soul,

Thou' lt win the prize, - thou'lt reach the goal.

CHARLES MACKAY.

No pain, no palm; no thorns, no throne; no gall, no glory; no cross, no crown. - Penn.