LX. WHY SO MANY MARRIED WOMEN DETERIORATE…

LX. WHY SO MANY MARRIED WOMEN DETERIORATE

A woman writes me: "You would laugh if you knew the time I have had in getting the dollar which I enclose for your inspiring magazine. I would get a pound less of butter, a bar less of soap. I never have a cent of my own. Do you think it wrong of me to deceive my husband in this way? I either have to do this or give up trying at all."

There are thousands of women who work harder than their husbands and really have more right to the money, who are obliged to practise all sorts of deceit in order to get enough to buy clothing and other things essential to decent living.

The difficulty of extracting money from an unwilling husband has been the beginning of thousands of tragedies. The majority of husbands are inclined to exert a censorship over their wives' expenditures. I have heard women say that they would go without necessary articles of clothing and other requirements just as long as possible and worry for days and weeks before they could summon courage to ask for money, because they dreaded a scene and the consequent discord in the home. Many women make it a rule never to ask for money, except when the husband is leaving the house and in a hurry to get away. The disagreeable scene is thus cut as short as possible, as he has not time then to go into all the details of his wife's alleged extravagances and find out what has become of every cent of the money given her on some similar previous occasion.

The average man does not begin to realize how it humiliates his wife to feel that she must ask him for fifty cents, a dollar, or five dollars every time she needs it, and to tell him just exactly what she is going to do with it, and then perhaps be met with a sharp reproof for her extravagance of foolish expenditures.

Men who are extremely kind and considerate with their wives in most things are often contemptibly mean regarding money matters. Many a man who is generous with his tips and buys expensive cigars and orders costly lunches for himself and friends at the club because he wants to be considered a "good fellow," will go home at night and bicker with his wife over the smallest expenditure, destroying the whole peace of the household, when perhaps she does not spend as much upon herself as he does for cigars and drink.

Why is it that men are so afraid to trust their wives with money when they trust them implicitly with everything else, especially as women are usually much more economical than men would be in managing the home and providing for the children? A large part of the friction in the average home centers around money matters and could be avoided by a simple, definite understanding between husband and wife, and a business arrangement of household finances. A regular advance to the wife for the household and a certain sum for personal use which she need not account for, would do more to bring about peace and harmony in the majority of homes than almost anything else.

To be a slave to the home, as many women are, and then to be obliged to assume the attitude of a beggar for every little bit of money she needs for herself, or to have to give an accounting for every cent she spends and tell her lord and master what she did with her last money before she can get any more, is positively degrading.

When the husband gets ready to regard his wife as an equal partner in the marriage firm instead of as an employee with one share in a million-dollar company, or as merely a housekeeper; when he is willing to regard his income as much his wife's as his own and not put her in the position of a beggar for every penny she gets; when he will grant her the same privileges he demands for himself; when he is willing to allow his wife to live her own life in her own way without trying to "boss" her, we shall have more true marriages, happier homes, a higher civilization.

Some one says that a man is never so happy as when he has a few dollars his wife knows nothing about. And there is a great deal of truth in it. Men who are perfectly honest with their wives about most things are often secretive about money matters. They hoodwink them regarding their incomes and especially about any ready cash they have on hand.

No matter how much the average man may think of his wife, or how considerate he may be in other matters, he rarely considers that she has the same right to his cash that he has, although he may be boasting to outsiders of her superior management in matters of economy. He feels that he is the natural guardian of the money, as he makes it; that he has a little more right to it than has his wife, and that he must protect it and dole it out to her.

What disagreeable experiences, unfortunate bickerings, misunderstandings and family prejudice could be avoided if newly-married women would insist upon having a certain proportion of the income set aside for the maintenance of the home and for their own personal needs, without the censorship of their husbands and without being obliged to give an itemized account of their expenditures!

It is a rare thing to find a man who does not waste ten times as much money on foolish things as does his wife, and yet he would make ten times the talk about his wife's one-tenth foolishness as his own ten-tenths.

On the other hand, thousands of women, starving for affection, protest against their husband's efforts to substitute money for it--to satisfy their cravings, their heart-hunger, with the things that money can buy.

It is an insult to womanhood to try to satisfy her nature with material things, while the affections are famishing for genuine sympathy and love, for social life, for contact with the great, throbbing world outside. Women do admire beautiful things; but there is something they admire infinitely more. Luxuries do not come first in any real woman's desires. She prefers poverty with love to luxury with an indifferent or loveless husband.

How gladly would these women whose affections are blighted by cold indifference or the unfaithfulness of their husbands, exchange their liberal allowance, their luxuries, for genuine sympathy and affection!

One of the most pathetic spectacles in American life is that of the faded, outgrown wife, standing helpless in the shadow of her husband's prosperity and power, having sacrificed her youth, beauty, and ambition--nearly everything that the feminine mind holds dear--to enable an indifferent, selfish, brutish husband to get a start in the world.

It does not matter that in her unselfish effort to help him she burned up much of her attractiveness over the cooking stove; that she lost more of it at the washtub, in scrubbing and cleaning, and rearing and caring for their children during the slavery of her early married life; it does not matter how much she suffered during those terrible years of poverty and privation. Just as soon as the selfish husband begins to get prosperous, finds that he is succeeding, feels his power, he often begins to be ashamed of the woman who has given up everything to make his success possible.

It is a sad thing to see any human being whose life is blighted by the lack of love; but it is doubly pathetic to see a woman who has given everything to the man she loved and who gets in return only her board and clothes and an allowance, great or small.

Some men seem to think that the precept, "Man does not live by bread alone," was not meant to include woman. They can not understand why she should not be happy and contented if she has a comfortable home and plenty to eat and wear. They would be surprised to learn that many a wife would gladly give up luxuries and live on bread and water, if she could only have her husband's sympathy in her aspirations, his help and encouragement in the unfolding of her stifled talents.

I know a very able, promising young man who says that if he had had a rich father he never would have developed his creative power; that his ambition would have been strangled; that it was the desperate struggle to make a place for himself in the world that developed the real man in him.

This young man married a poor girl who had managed by the hardest kind of work and sacrifice to pay her way through college. She had just begun to develop her power, to feel her wings, when her husband caged her in his home, took away her highest incentive for self-development. He said that a man who could not support a wife without her working had no business to marry. He dressed his wife like a queen; gave her horses and carriages and servants. But all the time he was discouraging her from developing her self-reliance, taking away all motives for cultivating her resourcefulness and originality.

At first the wife was very eager to work. Her ambition rebelled against the gilded chains by which she was bound. She was restless, nervous, and longed to use her powers to do something for herself and the world.

But her husband did not believe in a woman doing the things she wished to do. He wanted his wife to look pretty and fresh when he returned from his business at night; to keep young and to shine in society. He was proud of her beauty and vivacity. He thought he loved her, but it was a selfish love, for real love has a tender regard for a person's highest good, for that person's sake.

Gradually the glamour of society, the lethe of a luxurious life, paralyzed her ambition, which clamored less and less peremptorily for recognition, until at length she subsided into a life of almost total inaction.

Multitudes of women in this country to-day are vegetating in luxurious homes, listless, ambitionless, living narrow, superficial, rutty lives, because the spur of necessity has been taken away from them; because their husbands, who do not want them to work, have taken them out of an ambition-arousing environment.

But a life of leisure is not the only way of paralyzing the development of a wife's individuality. It can be done just as effectively by her becoming a slave of her family. I believe that the average wife is confined to her home a great deal too much.

Many women do not seem to have any existence outside of the little home orbit; do not have any special interests or pleasures to speak of apart from their husbands. They have been brought up to think that wives have very little purpose in life other than to be the slaves and playthings of their lords and masters, to bear and bring up children, and to keep meekly in the background.

The wife who wishes to hold her husband's affection, if he is ambitious, must continue to grow, must keep pace with him mentally. She must make a continual investment in self-improvement and in intellectual charm so that her mental growth will compensate for the gradual loss of physical charm. She must keep her husband's admiration, and if he is a progressive man he is not likely to admire a wife who stands still mentally. Admiration is a very important part of love.

You may be very sure that if you have an ambitious husband you must do something to keep up with him besides lounging, idling about the home, reading silly novels, dressing stylishly and waiting for him to return at night. If he sees that your sun rises and sets in him, that you have little interest outside, that you are not broadening and deepening your life in other ways by extending your interests, reaching out for self-enlargement, self-improvement, he will be disappointed in you, and this will be a great strain upon his love.

It is impossible for a girl who has had only a little schooling to appreciate the transforming power that comes from liberal education and broad culture. For the sake of her husband and children and her own peace of mind and satisfaction, she should try to improve herself in every possible way. Think of what it means to be able to surround one's home with an atmosphere of refinement, culture and superior intelligence! The quality of one's own ideals has a great deal to do with the quality of the ideals of one's family.

Even considered alone from the standpoint of self-protection, as a safeguard, a woman ought to get a liberal education; a college education, if possible. The conditions of home life in this country are such that it is very difficult for the wife to keep up with her husband's growth, to keep pace with him, because he is constantly in an ambition-arousing, stimulating environment. Unless she is unusually ambitious and has great power of application and concentration and plenty of leisure, she is likely to drop behind her husband.

As a rule, the husband has infinitely more to encourage and stimulate him than has the wife. Success itself is a tremendous tonic. The consciousness of perpetual triumph, of conquering things, is a great stimulus.

It is true that women have developed more admirable and loving qualities in their home life than have men; but during all these centuries, while women have been shut up in the home, men have been touching hands with the great, busy world, absorbing knowledge of human nature and broadening their minds by coming into contact with men and things. They have developed independence, stamina, strength, by being compelled to solve the larger, more practical problems of life.

The business man and the professional man are really in a perpetual school, a great practical university. The strenuous life, however dangerous, is essentially educative. The man has the incalculable advantage of a great variety of experiences and of freshness of view. He is continually coming in contact with new people, new things, being molded by a vast number of forces in the busy world which never touch the wife.

If women, equally with men, do not continue to grow and expand after marriage, how can we expect race improvement? Woman must ascend to higher, wider planes, or both man and woman must descend. "Male and female created He them." There is no separating them; they must rise or fall together.

"The woman's cause is man's; they rise or sink Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free."

Many a man has tired of his wife because she has not kept pace with him; because, instead of growing broader and keener as the years pass, she has become narrow. It never occurs to him that the fault may be wholly his own. In the early years of their married life he perhaps laughed at her "dreams," as he called her longings for self-improvement. He discouraged, if he did not actually oppose, every effort she made to grow to the full stature of her womanhood. His indifference or hostility quenched the hopes she had indulged before marriage. The bitterness of her disappointment crushed her spirit. She lost her buoyancy and enthusiasm and gradually sank to the level of a household drudge. And the husband wonders what has changed the joyous, high-spirited girl he married into the dull, apathetic woman who now performs her duties like an automaton.

There are to-day thousands of wives doing the work of ordinary housemaids, who, putting it on a low standard, are smothering ability to earn perhaps more money than the men who enslave them, if they only had an opportunity to unfold the powers which God has given them; but they have been brought up from infancy to believe that marriage is the only real career for a woman, that these longings and hungerings for self-expression are to be smothered, covered up by the larger duties of a wife and mother.

If the husbands could change places with their wives for a year, they would feel the contracting, narrowing influence in which the average wife lives. Their minds would soon cease to reach out, they would quickly feel the pinching, paralyzing effect of the monotonous existence, of doing the same things every day, year in and year out. The wives, on the other hand, would soon begin to broaden out. Their lives would become richer, fuller, more complete, from contact with the world, from the constant stretching of their minds over large problems.

I have heard men say that remaining in the home on Sundays or holidays just about uses them up; that it is infinitely harder and more trying than the same time spent in their occupations, and that while they love their children their incessant demands, the noise and confusion would drive them to drink if they had to bear it all the time. Strong men admit that they can not stand these little nerve-racking vexations of the home. Yet they wonder why the wife and mother is nervous, and seem to think that she can bear this sort of thing three hundred and sixty-five days in the year without going away and getting relief for a half-dozen days during the whole time. Few men would exchange places with their wives. Their hours are shorter, and when their day's work is done, it is done, while a wife and mother not only works all day, but is also likely to be called during the night. If any one is disturbed in the night by the children, it is the mother; rarely the father.

How long would men continue to conduct their business offices or factories with the primitive, senseless methods in vogue in the average kitchen to-day? Man puts all his inventiveness, his ingenuity, in improving methods, in facilitating his business and getting the drudgery out of his work in his office and factory, but the wife and mother still plods along in an ill-fitted kitchen and laundry. And yet our greatest modern inventor has said that the cares of the home could be reduced to a minimum and the servant problem solved if the perfectly practicable devices, for lightening household labor were adopted in the home!

"But," many of our men readers will say, "is there any profession in the world grander than that of home making? Can anything be more stimulating, more elevating, than home making and the rearing of children? How can such a vocation be narrowing or monotonous?"

Of course it is grand. There is nothing grander in the universe than the work of a true wife, a noble mother. But it would require the constitution of a Hercules, an infinitely greater patience than that of a Job, to endure such work with almost no change or outside variety, year in and year out, as many wives and mothers do, without breaking down.

The average man does not appreciate how almost devoid of incentives to broadmindedness, to many-sidedness, to liberal growth, the home life of many women is.

There is a disease called arrested development, in which the stature of the adult remains that of a child, all physical growth and expansion having stopped.

One of the most pitiable phases of American life and one of the most discouraging elements in our civilization is the suppressed wife who is struggling with arrested development after marriage.

I have known of beautiful young wives who went to their husbands with the same assurance of confidence and trust as to their hopes and ambitions with which a child would approach its mother, only to meet with a brutal rebuff for even venturing to have an ambition which did not directly enhance the husband's comfort or convenience in his home.

It is a strange fact that most men think that when a woman marries she goes to her new home with as rigid vows as the monks take on entering the monastery, or the nuns the convent, and they regard the suggestion of a career for her, which does not directly bear upon the home, as domestic treason.

There are some women, especially sensitive ones, who would never again tell their husbands of their hopes and aspirations after they had been laughed at and ridiculed a few times, but would be forever silent, even when the canker of bitter disappointment was consuming them.

Suppose a girl has the brains and the ability of a George Eliot and she marries a young business man who thinks that writing articles or books or devoting a large part of her time to music is all nonsense; that her place is at home, taking care of it and bringing up her children, and denies her the right to exercise her talent. How would he like to have the conditions reversed? It is true that woman is peculiarly fitted for the home, and every normal woman should have a home of her own, but her career should not be confined or limited to it any more than a man's. I do not see why she should not be allowed to live the life normal to her; why she should be denied the right of self-expression, any more than the man. And I regard that man as a tyrant who tries to cramp her in the natural expression of her ambition or sneers at, nags, and criticizes her for seeking to bring out, to unfold, the sacred thing which the Creator has given her. This is one of her inalienable rights which no man should dare interfere with. If he does, he deserves the unhappiness which is likely to come to his home.

A wife should neither be a drudge nor a dressed-up doll; she should develop herself by self-effort, just as her husband develops himself. She should not put herself in a position where her inventiveness, resourcefulness, and individuality will be paralyzed by lack of motive.

We hear a great deal about the disinclination of college girls to marry. If this is a fact, it is largely due to the unfairness of men. The more education girls get, the more they will hesitate to enter a condition of slavery, even under the beautiful guise of home.

Is it any wonder that so many girls refuse to marry, refuse to take chances of suppressing the best thing in them? Is it any wonder that they protest against putting themselves in a position where they will not be able to deliver to the world the sacred message which the Creator has given them?

I believe in marriage, but I do not believe in that marriage which paralyzes self-development, strangles ambition, discourages evolution and self-growth, and which takes away the life purpose.

To be continually haunted by the ghosts of strangled talents and smothered faculties prevents real contentment and happiness. Many a home has been made miserable, not because the husband was not kind and affectionate, not because there was not enough to eat and to wear, but because the wife was haunted with unrealized hopes and disappointed ambitions and expectations.

Is there anything more pitiful than such a stifled life with its crushed hopes? Is there anything sadder than to go through life conscious of talents and powers which we can not possibly develop; to feel that the best thing in us must be strangled for the want of opportunity, for the lack of appreciation even by those who love us best; to know that we can never by any possibility reach our highest expression, but must live a sordid life when under different conditions a higher would be possible?

A large part of the marital infelicity about which we hear so much comes from the husband's attempt to cramp his wife's ambition and to suppress her normal expression. A perversion of native instinct, a constant stifling of ambition, and the longing to express oneself naturally, gradually undermine the character and lead to discontentment and unhappiness. A mother who is cramped and repressed transmits the seeds of discontent and one-sided tendencies to her children.

The happiest marriages are those in which the right of husband and wife to develop broadly and naturally along individual lines has been recognized by each. The noblest and most helpful wives and mothers are those who develop their powers to their fullest capacity.

Woman is made to admire power, and she likes to put herself under the domination of a masterful man and rest in his protection. But it must be a voluntary obedience which comes from admiration of original force, of sturdy, rugged, masculine qualities.

The average man can not get away from the idea of his wife's service to him personally; that she is a sort of running mate, not supposed to win the race, but to help to pull him along so that he will win it. He can not understand why she should have an ambition which bears no direct relation to his comfort, his well-being, his getting on in the world.

The very suggestion of woman's inferiority, that she must stand in the man's shadow and not get ahead of him, that she does not have quite the same rights in anything that he has, the same property rights, the same suffrage rights; in other words, the whole suggestion of woman's inferiority, has been a criminal wrong to her. Many women who are advocating woman's suffrage perhaps would not use the ballot if they had it. Their fight is one for freedom to do as they please, to live their own lives in their own way. The greatest argument in the woman's suffrage movement is woman's protest against unfair, unjust treatment by men. Man's opposition to woman suffrage is merely a relic of the old-time domestic barbarism. It is but another expression of his determination to "boss" everybody and everything about him.

The time will come when men will be ashamed that they ever opposed woman's suffrage. Think of a man considering it right and just for his most ignorant workman to have an equal vote with himself on public matters and yet denying the right to his educated wife and daughters!

LXI. THRIFT

"Mony a mickle makes a muckle."--SCOTCH PROVERB.

"A penny saved is a penny earned."--ENGLISH SAYING.

"Beware of little extravagances; a small leak will sink a big ship."--FRANKLIN.

"No gain is more certain than that which proceeds from the economical use of what we have."--LATIN PROVERB.

"Make all you can, save all you can, give all you can."--JOHN WESLEY.

"All fortunes have their foundation laid in economy."--J. G. HOLLAND.

In the philosophy of thrift, the unit measure of prosperity is always the smallest of coins current. Thrift is measured not by the pound but by the penny, not by the dollar but by the cent. Thus any person in receipt of an income or salary however small finds it in his power to practise thrift and to lay the foundation of prosperity.

The word thrift in its origin means the grasping or holding fast the things that we have. It implies economy, carefulness, as opposed to waste and extravagance. It involves self-denial and frugal living for the time being, until the prosperity which grows out of thrift permits the more liberal indulgence of natural desires.

One of the primary elements of thrift is to spend less than you earn, to save something however small from the salary received, to lay aside at regular intervals when possible some part of the money earned or made, in provision for the future.

"Every boy should realize, in starting out, that he can never accumulate money unless he acquires the habit of saving," said Russell Sage. "Even if he can save only a few cents at the beginning, it is better than saving nothing at all; and he will find, as the months go on, that it becomes easier for him to lay by a part of his earnings. It is surprising how fast an account in a savings bank can be made to grow, and the boy who starts one and keeps it up stands a good chance of enjoying a prosperous old age. Some people who spend every cent of their income on their living expenses are always bewailing the fact that they have never become rich. They pick out some man who is known to have made a fortune and speak of him as being 'lucky.' There is practically no such thing as luck in business, and the boy who depends upon it to carry him through is very likely not to get through at all. The men who have made a success of their lives are men who started out right when they were boys. They studied while at school, and when they went to work, they didn't expect to be paid wages for loafing half the time. They weren't always on the lookout for an 'easy snap' and they forged ahead, not waiting always for the opportunities that never came, and bewailing the supposed fact that times are no longer what they used to be."

"A young man may have many friends," says Sir Thomas Lipton, "but he will find none so steadfast, so constant, so ready to respond to his wants, so capable of pushing him ahead, as a little leather-covered book, with the name of a bank on the cover. Saving is the first great principle of success. It creates independence, it gives a young man standing, it fills him with vigor, it stimulates him with proper energy; in fact, it brings to him the best part of any success,--happiness and contentment."

It is estimated that if a man will begin at twenty years of age to lay by twenty-six cents every working day, investing at seven per cent. compound interest, he will at seventy years of age have amassed thirty-two thousand dollars.

"Economy is wealth." This proverb has been repeated to most of us until we are either tired of it or careless of it, but it is well to remember that a saying becomes a proverb because of its truth and significance. Many a man has proved that if economy is not actual wealth, it is, in many cases, potentially so.

Professor Marshall, the noted English economist, estimates that $500,000,000 is spent annually by the British working classes for things that do nothing to make their lives nobler or happier. At a meeting of the British Association, the president, in an address to the economic section, expressed his belief that the simple item of food-waste alone would justify the above-mentioned estimate. One potent cause of waste to-day is that very many of the women do not know how to buy economically, and are neither passable cooks nor good housekeepers. Edward Atkinson estimated that in the United States the waste from bad cooking alone is over a hundred million dollars a year!

"Provided he has some ability and good sense to start with, is thrifty, honest, and economical," said Philip D. Armour, "there is no reason why any young man should not accumulate money and attain so-called success in life." When asked to what qualities he attributed his own success, Mr. Armour said: "I think that thrift and economy had much to do with it. I owe much to my mother's training and to a good line of Scotch ancestors, who have always been thrifty and economical."

"A young man should cultivate the habit of always saving something," said the late Marshall Field, "however small his income." It was by living up to this principle that Mr. Field became the richest and most successful merchant in the world. When asked by an interviewer, whom I sent to him on one occasion, what he considered the turning point in his career, he answered, "Saving the first five thousand dollars I ever had, when I might just as well have spent the modest salary I made. Possession of that sum, once I had it, gave me the ability to meet opportunities. That I consider the turning point."

The first savings prove the turning point in many a young man's career. But it is true that the lack of thrift is one of the greatest curses of modern civilization. Extravagance, ostentatious display, a desire to outshine others, is a vice of our age, and especially of our country. Some one has said that "investigation would place at the head of the list of the cause of poverty, wastefulness inherited from wasteful parents."

"If you know how to spend less than you get," said Franklin, "you have the philosopher's stone." The great trouble with many young people is that they do not acquire the saving habit at the start, and never find the "philosopher's stone." They don't learn to spend less than they get. If they learned that lesson in time, they would have little difficulty in making themselves independent. It is this first saving that counts.

John Jacob Astor said it cost him more to get the first thousand dollars than it did afterwards to get a hundred thousand; but if he had not saved the first thousand, he would have died poor.

"The first thing that a man should learn to do," says Andrew Carnegie, "is to save his money. By saving his money he promotes thrift,--the most valued of all habits. Thrift is the great fortune-maker. It draws the line between the savage and the civilized man. Thrift not only develops the fortune, but it develops, also, the man's character."

The savings bank is one of the greatest encouragements to thrift, because it pays a premium on deposits in the form of interest on savings. One of the greatest benefits ever extended by this government to its citizens is the opening of Postal Savings Banks where money can be deposited with absolute security against loss, because the Federal Government would have to fail before the bank could fail. The economies which enable a man to start a savings account are not usually pinching economies, not the stinting of the necessaries of life, but merely the foregoing of selfish pleasures and indulgences which not only drain the purse but sap the physical strength and undermine the health of brain and body.

The majority of people do not even try to practise self-control; are not willing to sacrifice present enjoyment, ease, for larger future good. They spend their money at the time for transient gratification, for the pleasure of the moment, with little thought for to-morrow, and then they envy others who are more successful, and wonder why they do not get on better themselves. They store up neither money nor knowledge for the future. The squirrels know that it will not always be summer. They store food for the winter, which their instinct tells them is coming; but multitudes of human beings store nothing, consume everything as they go along, so that when sickness or old age come, there is no reserve, nothing to fall back upon. They have sacrificed their future for the present.

The facility with which loose change slips away from these people is most insidious and unaccountable. I know young men who spend more for unnecessary things, what they call "incidentals"--cigars, drinks, all sorts of sweets, soda-water and nick-nacks of various kinds--than for their essentials, board, clothes, rooms. Then they wonder where all their money goes to, as they never keep any account of it, and rarely restrain a desire. They do not realize it when they fling out a nickel here and a dime there, pay a quarter for this and a quarter for that; but in a week it counts up, and in a year it amounts to a large sum.

"He never lays up a cent" is an expression which we hear every day regarding those who earn enough to enable them to save a competence.

A short time ago, a young man in New York complained to a friend of poverty and his inability to save money.

"How much do you spend for luxuries?" asked the friend.

"Luxuries!" answered the young man, "if by luxuries you mean cigars and a few drinks, I don't average,--including an occasional cigar or a glass of light wine for a friend,--over six dollars a week. Most of the boys spend more, but I make it a rule to be moderate in my expenditures."

"Ten years ago," declared the friend, "I was spending about the same every week for the same things, and paying thirty dollars a month for five inconvenient rooms up four flights of stairs. I had just married then, and one day I told my wife that I longed to have her in a place befitting her needs and refinement. 'John,' was her reply, 'If you love me well enough to give up two things which are not only useless, but extremely harmful to you, we can, for what those things alone cost, own a pretty home in ten years.'

"She sat down by me with a pencil and paper, and in less than five minutes had demonstrated that she was right. You dined with me in the suburbs the other day, and spoke of the beauty and convenience of our cottage. That cottage cost three thousand dollars, and every dollar of it was my former cigar and drink money. But I gained more than a happy wife and pretty home by saving; I gained self-control, better health, self-respect, a truer manhood, a more permanent happiness. I desire every young man who is trying to secure pleasure through smoking and drinking, whether moderately or immoderately, to make use of his judgment, and pencil and paper, and see if he is not forfeiting in a number of directions far more than he is gaining."

There is an impressive fact in the Gospel story of the Prodigal Son. The statement "he wasted his substance in riotous living" means more than that he wasted his funds. It implies that he wasted himself. And the most serious phase of all waste is not the waste of substance but the waste of self, of one's energy, capital, the lowering of morals, the undermining of character, the loss of self-respect which thrift encourages and promotes.

Thrift is not only one of the foundation-stones of a fortune, but also one of character. The habit of thrift improves the quality of the character.

The saving of money usually means the saving of a man. It means cutting off indulgences or avoiding vicious habits which are ruinous. It often means health in the place of dissipation. It often means a clear instead of a cloudy and muddled brain.

Furthermore, the saving habit indicates an ambition to get on and up in the world. It develops a spirit of independence, of self-reliance. A little bank account or an insurance policy indicates a desire to improve one's condition, to look up in life. It means hope, it means ambition, a determination to "make good."

People believe in the young man, who, without being mean or penurious, saves a part of his income. It is an indication of many sterling qualities. Business men naturally reason that if a young man is saving his money, he is also saving his energy, his vitality, from being wasted, that he is looking up in the world, and not down; that he is longheaded, wise; that he is determined not to sacrifice the larger gain of the future for the gratification of the hour.

A snug little bank account will add to your self-respect and self-confidence, because it shows that you have practicability, a little more independence. You can look the world in the face with a little more assurance, you can stand a little more erect and face the future with more confidence, if you know that there stands between yourself and want a little ready money or a safe investment of some kind.

The very consciousness that there is something back of you that will prove a barrier to the wolf which haunts so many human beings, and which is a terror and an efficiency destroyer to so many, will strengthen and buttress you at every point. It will relieve you from worry and anxiety about the future; it will unlock your faculties, release them from the restraint and suppression which uncertainty, fear, and doubt impose, and leave you free to do your best work.

Another great aid and incentive to thrift is the life insurance policy. "Primarily devised for the support of widows and orphans, life insurance practise has been developed so as to include the secure investment of surplus earnings in conjunction with the insurance of a sum payable at death."

I am a great believer in the efficiency of savings-banks as character builders; but life insurance has some greater advantages, especially in furnishing that imperious "must," that spur of necessity so important as a motive to most people.

People can put money into savings-banks when they get it, provided some stronger desire does not overcome the inclination; but they feel that they must pay their insurance premium.

Then again, money obtainable just by signing the name is so easily withdrawn for spending in all sorts of ways. This is one reason why I often recommend life insurance to young people as a means of saving. It has been of untold value as an object-lesson of the tremendous possibilities in acquiring the saving habit.

I believe that life insurance is doing a great deal to induce the habit of saving. When a young man on a salary or a definite income takes out an insurance policy he has a definite aim. He has made up his mind positively to save so much money every year from his income to pay his premium. Then it is easier for him to say "No," to the hundred-and-one alluring temptations to spend his money for this and that. He can say "No," then with emphasis, because he knows he must keep up his insurance.

An insurance policy has often changed the habits of an entire family from thriftlessness and spendthrift tendencies to thrift and order. The very fact that a certain amount must be saved from the income every week, or every month, or every year, has often developed the faculty of prudence and economy of the entire household. Everybody is cautioned to be careful because the premium must be paid. And oftentimes it is the first sign of a program or order,--system in the home.

The consciousness of a sacred obligation to make payments on that which means protection for those dear to you often shuts out a great deal of foolishness, and cuts out a lot of temptation to spend money for self-gratification and to cater to one's weak tendencies.

The life insurance policy has thus proved to be a character insurance as well, an insurance against silly expenditures, an insurance against one's own weak will power, or vicious, weak tendencies; a real protection against one's self, one's real enemy.

Among the sworn enemies of thrift may be named going into debt, borrowing money, keeping no itemized account of daily expenditures, and buying on the instalment plan. That great English preacher Spurgeon said that debt, dirt, and the devil made up the trinity of evil. And debt can discount the devil at any time for possibilities of present personal torment. The temptations to go into debt are increasing rapidly. On every hand in the cities one may read such advertisements as "We Trust You," "Your Credit is Good With Us," and with these statements come offers of clothing, furniture, and what not "on easy payments." But as the Irishman remarked after an experience with the instalment purchase of furniture: "Onaisy payments they sure are." As a matter of fact, the easy payments take all the ease and comfort out of life--they are easy only for the man who receives them.

Beware of the delusions of buying on the instalment plan. There are thousands of poor families in this country who buy organs and sets of books and encyclopedias, lightning rods, farming implements, and all sorts of things which they might get along without, because they can pay for them a little at a time. In this way, they keep themselves poor. They are always pinching, sacrificing, to save up for the agent when he comes around to collect.

All through the South there are poor homes of both colored and white families, where there are not sufficient cooking utensils and knives, forks, and spoons to enable the members to eat with comfort, and yet you will find expensive things in their homes which they have bought on the instalment plan, and which keep them poor for years trying to pay for them.

As far as borrowing money is concerned the bitter experience of countless men and women is crystallized in that old saying: "He that goes a borrowing goes a sorrowing." There is a world of safety for the man who follows Shakespeare's advice: "Neither a borrower nor a lender be."

It is sometimes said flippantly that "poverty is no disgrace but it's mighty uncomfortable." And yet poverty is often a real disgrace. People born to poverty may rise above it. People who have poverty thrust upon them may overcome it. In this great land of abundance and opportunity poverty is in most cases a disgrace and a reproach.

Dr. Johnson said to Boswell, "I admonish you avoid poverty, the temptation and worry it breeds." There is something humiliating in being poor. The very consciousness that we have nothing to show for our endeavor besides a little character and the little we have done, is anything but encouraging. Somehow, we feel that we have not amounted to much, and we know the world looks upon us in the same way if we have not managed to accumulate something. It is a reflection upon our business ability, upon our judgment, upon our industry. It is not so much for the money, as for what it means to have earned and saved money; it is the idea of thrift. If we have not been thrifty, if we have not saved anything, the world will look upon us as good for nothing, as partial failures, as either lazy, slipshod, or extravagant. They regard us as either not having been able to make money, or if we have, not being able to save it.

But let it be remembered that thrift is not parsimony not miserliness. It often means very liberal spending. It is a perpetual protest against putting the emphasis on the wrong thing.

No one should make the mistake of economizing to the extent of planting seeds, and then denying liberal nourishment to the plants that grow from them; of conducting business without advertising; or of saving a little extra expense by pinching on one's table or dress. "A dollar saved is a dollar earned," but a dollar spent well and liberally is often several dollars earned. A dollar saved is often very many dollars lost. The progressive, generous spirit, nowadays, will leave far behind the plodder that devotes time to adding pennies that could be given to making dollars.

The only value a dollar has is its buying power. "No matter how many times it has been spent, it is still good." Hoarded money is of no more use than gold so inaccessible in old Mother Earth that it will never feel the miner's pick. There is plenty in this world, if we keep it moving and keep moving after it. Imagine everybody in the world stingy, living on the principle of "We can do without that," or "Our grandfathers got along without such things, and I guess I can." What would become of our parks, grand buildings, electrical improvements; of music and art? What would become of labor that nurses a tree from a forest to a piano or a palace car? What would become of those dependent upon the finished work? What would happen, what panic would follow, if everybody turned stingy, is indefinable.

"So apportion your wants that your means may exceed them," says Bulwer. "With one hundred pounds a year I may need no man's help; I may at least have 'my crust of bread and liberty.' But with five thousand pounds a year, I may dread a ring at my bell; I may have my tyrannical master in servants whose wages I can not pay; my exile may be at the fiat of the first long-suffering man who enters judgement against me; for the flesh that lies nearest my heart, some Shylock may be dusting his scales and whetting his knife. Every man is needy who spends more than he has; no man is needy who spends less. I may so ill manage that, with five thousand a year, I purchase the worst evils of poverty,--terror and shame; I may so well manage my money that, with one hundred pounds a year, I purchase the best blessings of wealth,--safety and respect."

LXII. A COLLEGE EDUCATION AT HOME

"Tumbling around in a library" was the phrase Oliver Wendell Holmes used in describing in part his felicities in boyhood. One of the most important things that wise students get out of their schooldays is a familiarity with books in various departments of learning. The ability to pick out from a library what is needed in life is of the greatest practical value. It is like a man selecting his tools for intellectual expansion and social service. "Men in every department of practical life," says President Hadley of Yale, "men in commerce, in transportation, or in manufactures--have told me that what they really wanted from our colleges was men who have this selective power of using books efficiently. The beginnings of this kind of knowledge are best learned in any home fairly well furnished with books."

Libraries are no longer a luxury, but a necessity. A home without books and periodicals and newspapers is like a house without windows. Children learn to read by being in the midst of books; they unconsciously absorb knowledge by handling them. No family can now afford to be without good reading.

Children who are well supplied with dictionaries, encyclopedias, histories, works of reference, and other useful books, will educate themselves unconsciously, and almost without expense, and will learn many things of their own accord in moments which would otherwise be wasted; and which, if learned in schools, academies, or colleges, would cost ten times as much as the expense of the books would be. Besides, homes are brightened and made attractive by good books, and children stay in such pleasant homes; while those whose education has been neglected are anxious to get away from home, and drift off and fall into all manner of snares and dangers.

It is astonishing how much a bright child will absorb from being brought up in the atmosphere of good books, being allowed to constantly use them, to handle them, to be familiar with their bindings and titles. It is a great thing for children to be brought up in the atmosphere of books.

Many people never make a mark on a book, never bend down a leaf, or underscore a choice passage. Their libraries are just as clean as the day they bought them, and, often, their minds are just about as clean of information. Don't be afraid to mark your books. Make notes in them. They will be all the more valuable. One who learns to use his books in early life, grows up with an increasing power for effective usefulness.

It is related that Henry Clay's mother furnished him with books by her own earnings at the washtub.

Wear threadbare clothes and patched shoes if necessary, but do not pinch or economize on books. If you can not give your children an academic education you can place within their reach a few good books which will lift them above their surroundings, into respectability and honor.

Is not one's early home the place where he should get his principal training for life? It is here we form habits which shape our careers, and which cling to us as long as we live. It is here that regular, persistent mental training should fix the life ever after.

I know of pitiable cases where ambitious boys and girls have longed to improve themselves, and yet were prevented from doing so by the pernicious habits prevailing in the home, where everybody else spent the evenings talking and joking, with no effort at self-improvement, no thought of higher ideals, no impulse to read anything better than a cheap, exciting story. The aspiring members of the family were teased and laughed at until they got discouraged and gave up the struggle.

If the younger ones do not want to read or study themselves, they will not let anybody else so inclined do so. Children are naturally mischievous, and like to tease. They are selfish, too, and can not understand why anyone else should want to go off by himself to read or study when they want him to play.

Were the self-improvement habit once well established in a home, it would become a delight. The young people would look forward to the study hour with as much anticipation as to playing.

Were it possible for every family that squanders precious time, to spend an evening in such a home, it would be an inspiration. A bright, alert, intelligent, harmonious atmosphere so pervades a self-improving home that one feels insensibly uplifted and stimulated to better things.

I know a New England family in which all the children and the father and mother, by mutual consent, set aside a portion of each evening for study or some form of self-culture. After dinner, they give themselves completely to recreation. They have a regular romp and play, and all the fun possible for an hour. Then when the time comes for study, the entire house becomes so still that you could hear a pin drop. Everyone is in his place reading, writing, studying, or engaged in some form of mental work. No one is allowed to speak or disturb anyone else. If any member of the family is indisposed, or for any reason does not feel like working, he must at least keep quiet and not disturb the others. There is perfect harmony and unity of purpose, an ideal condition for study. Everything that would scatter the efforts or cause the mind to wander, all interruptions that would break the continuity of thought, is carefully guarded against. More is gained in one hour of close, uninterrupted study, than in two or three broken by many interruptions, or weakened by mind wandering.

Sometimes the habits of a home are revolutionized by the influence of one resolute youth who declares himself, taking a stand and announcing that, as for himself, he does not propose to be a failure, that he is going to take no chances as to his future. The moment he does this, he stands out in strong contrast with the great mass of young people who are throwing away their opportunities and have not grit and stamina enough to do anything worth while.

The very reputation of always trying to improve yourself in every possible way, of being dead in earnest, will attract the attention of everybody who knows you, and you will get many a recommendation for promotion which never comes to those who make no special effort to climb upward.

There is a great deal of time wasted even in the busiest lives, which, if properly organized, might be used to advantage.

Many housewives who are so busy from morning to night that they really believe they have no time for reading books, magazines, or newspapers would be amazed to find how much they would have if they would more thoroughly systematize their work. Order is a great time saver, and we certainly ought to be able to so adjust our living plan that we can have a fair amount of time for self-improvement, for enlarging life. Yet many people think that their only opportunity for self-improvement depends upon the time left after everything else has been attended to.

What would a business man accomplish if he did not attend to important matters until he had time that was not needed for anything else? The good business man goes to his office in the morning and plunges right into the important work of the day. He knows perfectly well that if he attends to all the outside matters, all the details and little things that come up, sees everybody that wants to see him, and answers all the questions people want to ask, that it will be time to close his office before he gets to his main business.

Most of us manage somehow to find time for the things we love. If one is hungry for knowledge, if one yearns for self-improvement, if one has a taste for reading, he will make the opportunity.

Where the heart is, there is the treasure. Where the ambition is, there is time.

It takes not only resolution but also determination to set aside unessentials for essentials, things pleasant and agreeable to-day for the things that will prove best for us in the end. There is always temptation to sacrifice future good for present pleasure; to put off reading to a more convenient season, while we enjoy idle amusements or waste the time in gossip or frivolous conversation.

The greatest things of the world have been done by those who systematized their work, organized their time. Men who have left their mark on the world have appreciated the preciousness of time, regarding it as the great quarry.

If you want to develop a delightful form of enjoyment, to cultivate a new pleasure, a new sensation which you have never before experienced, begin to read good books, good periodicals, regularly every day. Do not tire yourself by trying to read a great deal at first. Read a little at a time, but read some every day, no matter how little. If you are faithful you will soon acquire a taste for reading--the reading habit; and it will, in time, give you infinite satisfaction, unalloyed pleasure.

In a gymnasium, one often sees lax, listless people, who, instead of pursuing a systematic course of training to develop all the muscles of the body, flit aimlessly from one thing to another, exercising with pulley-weights for a minute or two, taking up dumb-bells and throwing them down, swinging once or twice on parallel bars, and so frittering away time and strength. Far better it would be for such people to stay away from a gymnasium altogether, for their lack of purpose and continuity makes them lose rather than gain muscular energy. A man or woman who would gather strength from gymnastic exercise must set about it systematically and with a will. He must put mind and energy into the work, or else continue to have flabby muscles and an undeveloped body.

The physical gymnasium differs only in kind from the mental one. Thoroughness and system are as necessary in one as in the other. It is not the tasters of books--not those who sip here and there, who take up one book after another, turn the leaves listlessly and hurry to the end,--who strengthen and develop the mind by reading.

To get the most from your reading you must read with a purpose. To sit down and pick up a book listlessly, with no aim except to pass away time, is demoralizing. It is much as if an employer were to hire a boy, and tell him he could start when he pleased in the morning, work when he felt like it, rest when he wanted to, and quit when he got tired!

Never go to a book you wish to read for a purpose, if you can possibly avoid it, with a tired, jaded mentality. If you do, you will get the same in kind from it. Go to it fresh, vigorous, and with active, never passive, faculties. This practise is a splendid and effective cure for mind-wandering, which afflicts so many people, and which is encouraged by the multiplicity of and facility of obtaining reading matter at the present day.

What can give greater satisfaction than reading with a purpose, and that consciousness of a broadening mind that follows it, and growth, of expansion, of enriching the life, the consciousness that we are pushing ignorance, bigotry, and whatever clouds the mind and hampers progress a little further away from us?

The kind of reading that counts, that makes mental fiber and stamina is that upon which the mind is concentrated; approaching a book with all one's soul intent upon its contents.

How few people ever learn to concentrate their attention. Most of us waste a vast amount of precious time dawdling and idling. We sit or stand over our work without thinking. Our minds are blank much of the time.

Passive reading is even more harmful in its effects than desultory reading. It no more strengthens the brain than sitting down in a gymnasium develops the body. The mind remains inactive, in a sort of indolent revery, wandering here and there, without focusing anywhere. Such reading takes the spring and snap out of the mental faculties, weakens the intellect, and makes the brain torpid and incapable of grappling with great principles and difficult problems.

What you get out of a book is not necessarily what the author puts into it, but what you bring to it. If the heart does not lead the head; if the thirst for knowledge, the hunger for a broader and deeper culture, are not the motives for reading, you will not get the most out of a book. But, if your thirsty soul drinks in the writer's thought as the parched soil absorbs rain, then your latent possibilities and the potency of your being, like delayed germs and seeds in the soil, will spring forth into new life.

When you read, read as Macaulay did, as Carlyle did, as Lincoln did--as did every great man who has profited by his reading--with your whole soul absorbed in what you read, with such intense concentration that you will be oblivious of everything else outside of your book.

"Reading furnishes us only with the materials of knowledge," said John Locke; "it is thinking that makes what we read ours."

In order to get the most out of books, the reader must be a thinker. The mere acquisition of facts is not the acquisition of power. To fill the mind with knowledge that can not be made available is like filling our houses with furniture and bric-a-brac until we have no room to move about.

Food does not become physical force, brain, or muscle until it has been thoroughly digested and assimilated, and has become an integral part of the blood, brain, and other tissues. Knowledge does not become power until digested and assimilated by the brain, until it has become a part of the mind itself.

If you wish to become intellectually strong, after reading with the closest attention, form this habit: frequently close your book and sit and think, or stand and walk and think--but think, contemplate, reflect. Turn what you have read over and over in your mind.

It is not yours until you have assimilated it by your thought. When you first read it, it belongs to the author. It is yours only when it becomes an integral part of you.

Many people have an idea that if they keep reading everlastingly, if they always have a book in their hands at every leisure moment, they will, of necessity, become full-rounded and well-educated.

But they might just as well expect to become athletes by eating at every opportunity. It is even more necessary to think than to read. Thinking, contemplating what we have read, is what digestion and assimilation are to the food.

Some of the biggest fools I know are always cramming themselves with knowledge. But they never think. When they get a few minutes' leisure they grab a book and go to reading. In other words, they are always eating intellectually, but never digesting their knowledge or assimilating it.

I know a young man who has formed such a habit of reading that he is almost never without a book, a magazine, or a paper. He is always reading at home, on the cars, at the railway stations, and he has acquired a vast amount of knowledge. He has a perfect passion for knowledge, and yet his mind seems to have been weakened by this perpetual brain stuffing.

By every reader let Milton's words be borne in mind:

"Who reads Incessantly, and to his reading brings not A spirit and judgment equal or superior, . . . Uncertain and unsettled still remains, Deep versed in books and shallow in himself, Crude or intoxicate, collecting toys And trifles for choice matters, worth a sponge, As children gathering pebbles on the shore."

When Webster was a boy, books were scarce, and so precious that he never dreamed that they were to be read only once, but thought they ought to be committed to memory, or read and re-read until they became a part of his very life.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning says, "We err by reading too much, and out of proportion to what we think. I should be wiser, I am persuaded, if I had not read half as much; should have had stronger and better exercised faculties, and should stand higher in my own appreciation."

Those who live more quietly do not have so many distracting influences, and consequently think more deeply and reflect more than others. They do not read so much but they are better readers.

You should bring your mind to the reading of a book, or to the study of any subject, as you take an ax to the grindstone; not for what you get from the stone, but for the sharpening of the ax.

The greatest advantage of books does not always come from what we remember of them, but from their suggestiveness, their character-building power.

"It is not in the library, but in yourself," says Fr. Gregory, "in your self-respect and your consciousness of duty nobly done--that you are to find the 'Fountain of Youth,' the 'Elixir of Life,' and all the other things that tend to preserve life's freshness and bloom.

"It is a grand thing to read a good book--it is a grander thing to live a good life--and in the living of such life is generated the power that defies age and its decadence."

It is not the ability, the education, the knowledge that one has that makes the difference between men. The mere possession of knowledge is not always the possession of power; knowledge which has not become a part of yourself, knowledge which can not swing into line in an emergency is of little use, and will not save you at the critical moment.

To be effective, a man's education must become a part of himself as he goes along. All of it must be worked up into power. A little practical education that has become a part of one's being and is always available, will accomplish more in the world than knowledge far more extensive that can not be utilized.

No one better illustrates what books will do for a man, and what a thinker will do with his books, than Gladstone, who was always far greater than his career. He rose above Parliament, reached out beyond politics, and was always growing. He had a passion for intellectual expansion. His peculiar gifts undoubtedly fitted him for the church, or he would have made a good professor at Oxford or Cambridge. But, circumstances led him into the political arena, and he adapted himself readily to his environment. He was an all round well read man, who thought his way through libraries and through life.

One great benefit of a taste for reading, and access to the book world, is the service it renders as a diversion and a solace.

What a great thing to be able to get away from ourselves, to fly away from the harassing, humiliating, discouraging, depressing things about us, to go at will to a world of beauty, joy, and gladness!

If a person is discouraged or depressed by any great bereavement or suffering, the quickest and the most effective way of restoring the mind to its perfect balance, to its normal condition, is to immerse it in a sane atmosphere, an uplifting, encouraging, inspiring atmosphere, and the most good in the world is found in the best books. I have known people who were suffering under the most painful mental anguish, from losses and shocks which almost unbalanced their minds, to be completely revolutionized in their mental state by the suggestive power which came from becoming absorbed in a great book.

Everywhere we see rich old men sitting around the clubs, smoking, looking out of the windows, lounging around hotels, traveling about, uneasy, dissatisfied, not knowing what to do with themselves, because they had never prepared for this part of their lives. They put all their energy, ambition, everything into their vocation.

I know an old gentleman who has been an exceedingly active business man. He has kept his finger upon the pulse of events. He has known what has been going on in the world during his whole active career. And he is now as happy and as contented as a child in his retirement, because he has always been a great reader, a great lover of his kind.

People who keep their minds bent in one direction too long at a time soon lose their elasticity, their mental vigor, freshness, spontaneity.

If I were to quote Mr. Dooley, it would be:--"Reading is not thinking; reading is the next thing this side of going to bed for resting the mind."

To my own mind, however, I would rather cite that versatile Englishman, Lord Rosebery. In a speech at the opening of a Carnegie library at West Calder, Midlothian, he made a characteristic utterance upon the value of books, saying in substance:

"There is, however, one case in which books are certainly an end in themselves, and that is to refresh and to recruit after fatigue. When the object is to refresh and to exalt, to lose the cares of this world in the world of imagination, then the book is more than a means. It is an end in itself. It refreshes, exalts, and inspires the man. From any work, manual or intellectual, the man with a happy taste for books comes in tired and soured and falls into the arms of some great author, who raises him from the ground and takes him into a new heaven and a new earth, where he forgets his bruises and rests his limbs, and he returns to the world a fresh and happy man."

"Who," asks Professor Atkinson, "can overestimate the value of good books, those strips of thought, as Bacon so finely calls them, voyaging through seas of time, and carrying their precious freight so safely from generation to generation? Here are finest minds giving us the best wisdom of present and past ages; here are the intellects gifted far beyond ours, ready to give us the results of lifetimes of patient thought, imaginations open to the beauty of the universe."

The lover of good books can never be very lonely; and, no matter where he is, he can always find pleasant and profitable occupation and the best of society when he quits work.

Who can ever be grateful enough for the art of printing; grateful enough to the famous authors who have put their best thoughts where we can enjoy them at will? There are some advantages of intercourse with great minds through their books over meeting them in person. The best of them live in their books, while their disagreeable peculiarities, their idiosyncrasies, their objectionable traits are eliminated. In their books we find the authors at their best. Their thoughts are selected, winnowed in their books. Book friends are always at our service, never annoy us, rasp or nettle us. No matter how nervous, tired, or discouraged one may be, they are always soothing, stimulating, uplifting.

We may call up the greatest writer in the middle of the night when we can not sleep, and he is just as glad to see us as at any other time. We are not excluded from any nook or corner in the great literary world; we can visit the most celebrated people that ever lived without an appointment, without influence, without the necessity of dressing or of observing any rules of etiquette. We can drop in upon a Milton, a Shakespeare, an Emerson, a Longfellow, a Whittier without a moment's notice and receive the warmest welcome.

"You get into society, in the widest sense," says Geikie, "in a great library, with the huge advantage of needing no introductions, and not dreading repulses. From that great crowd you can choose what companions you please, for in the silent levees of the immortals there is no pride, but the highest is at the service of the lowest, with a grand humility. You may speak freely with any, without a thought of your inferiority; for books are perfectly well bred, and hurt no one's feelings by any discriminations."

"It is not the number of books," says Professor William Mathews, "which a young man reads that makes him intelligent and well informed, but the number of well-chosen ones that he has mastered, so that every valuable thought in them is a familiar friend."

It is only when books have been read and reread with ever deepening delight, that they are clasped to the heart, and become what Macaulay found them to be, the old friends who are never found with new faces, who are the same to us in our wealth and in our poverty, in our glory and in our obscurity. No one gets into the inmost heart of a beautiful poem, a great history, a book of delicate humor, or a volume of exquisite essays, by reading it once or twice. He must have its precious thoughts and illustrations stored in the treasure-house of memory, and brood over them in the hours of leisure.

"A book may be a perpetual companion. Friends come and go, but the book may beguile all experiences and enchant all hours."

"The first time," says Goldsmith, "that I read an excellent book, it is to me just as if I had gained a new friend; when I read over a book I have perused before, it resembles the meeting with an old one."

"No matter how poor I am," says William Ellery Channing, "no matter though the prosperous of my own time will not enter my obscure dwelling; if the sacred writers will enter and take up their abode under my roof--if Milton will cross my threshold to sing to me of Paradise; and Shakespeare to open to me the worlds of imagination and the workings of the human heart,--I shall not pine for want of intellectual companionship, though excluded from what is called the best society in the place where I live."

"Books," says Milton, "do preserve as in a violl, the purest efficacie and extraction of that living intellect that bred them. A good Booke is the pretious life-blood of a master spirit, imbalm'd and treasur'd up on purpose to a Life beyond Life."

"A book is good company," said Henry Ward Beecher. "It comes to your longing with full instruction, but pursues you never. It is not offended at your absent-mindedness, nor jealous if you turn to other pleasures, of leaf, or dress, or mineral, or even of books. It silently serves the soul without recompense, not even for the hire of love. And yet more noble, it seems to pass from itself, and to enter the memory, and to hover in a silvery transformation there, until the outward book is but a body and its soul and spirit are flown to you, and possess your memory like a spirit."

LXIII. DISCRIMINATION IN READING

A few books well read, and an intelligent choice of those few,--these are the fundamentals for self-education by reading.

If only a few well chosen, it is better to avail yourself of choices others have already made--old books, the standard works tested by many generations of readers. If only a few, let them be books of highest character and established fame. Such books are easily found even in small public libraries.

For the purpose of this chapter, which is to aid in forming a taste for reading, there should be no confusion of choice by naming too many books of one author. If you read one and like it, you can easily find another.

It is a cardinal rule that if you do not like a book, do not read it. What another likes, you may not. Any book list is suggestive; it can be binding only on those who prize it. Like attracts like.

Did you ever think that the thing you are looking for is looking for you; that it is the very law of affinities to get together?

If you are coarse in your tastes, vicious in your tendencies, you do not have to work very hard to find coarse vicious books; they are seeking you by the very law of attraction.

One's taste for reading is much like his taste for food. Dull books are to be avoided, as one refuses food disagreeable to him; to someone else the book may not be dull, nor the food disagreeable. Whole nations may eat cabbage, or stale fish, while I like neither. Ultimately, therefore, every reader must make his own selection, and find the book that finds him. Any one not a random reader will soon select a short shelf of books that he may like better than a longer shelf that exactly suits some one else. Either will be a shelf of good books, neither a shelf of the best books, since if best for you or me, they may not be best for everybody.

A most learned man in India, in turning the leaves of a book, as he read, felt a little prick in his finger; a tiny snake dropped out and wriggled out of sight. The pundit's finger began to swell, then his arm; and in an hour, he was dead.

Who has not noticed in the home a snake in a book that has changed the character of a boy through its moral poison so that he was never quite the same again?

How well did Carlyle divide books into sheep and goats.

It is probable that the careers of the majority of criminals in our prisons to-day might have been vastly different if the character of their reading when young had been different; had it been up-lifting, wholesome, instead of degrading.

"Christian Endeavor" Clark read a notice conspicuously posted in a large city:--"All boys should read the wonderful story of the desperado brothers of the Western plains, whose strange and thrilling adventures of successful robbery and murder have never before been equaled. Price five cents." The next morning, Dr. Clark read in a newspaper of that city that seven boys had been arrested for burglary, and four stores broken into by the "gang." One of the ringleaders was only ten years old. At their trial, it appeared that each had invested five cents in the story of border crime. "Red-eyed Dick, the Terror of the Rockies," or some such story has poisoned many a lad's life. A seductive, demoralizing book destroys the ambition unless for vicious living. All that was sweet, beautiful, and wholesome in the character before seems to vanish, and everything changes after the reading of a single bad book. It has aroused the appetite for more forbidden pleasures, until it crowds out the desire for everything better, purer, healthier. Mental dissipation from this exciting literature, often dripping with suggestiveness of impurity, giving a passport to the prohibited; this is fatal to all soundness of mind.

A lad once showed to another a book full of words and pictures of impurity. He only had it in his hands a few moments. Later in life he held high office in the church, and years afterward told a friend that he would have given half he possessed had he never seen it.

Light, flashy stories, with no intention in them, seriously injured the mind of a brilliant young lady, I once knew. Like the drug fiend whose brain has been stupefied, her brain became completely demoralized by constant mental dissipation. Familiarity with the bad, ruins the taste for the good. Her ambition and ideas of life became completely changed. Her only enjoyment was the excitement of her imagination through vicious books.

Nothing else will more quickly injure a good mind than familiarity with the frivolous, the superficial. Even though they may not be actually vicious, the reading of books which are not true to life, which carry home no great lesson, teach no sane or healthful philosophy, but are merely written to excite the passions, to stimulate a morbid curiosity, will ruin the best of minds in a very short time. It tends to destroy the ideals and to ruin the taste for all good reading.

Read, read, read all you can. But never read a bad book or a poor book. Life is too short, time too precious, to spend it in reading anything but the best.

Any book is bad for you, the reading of which takes away your desire for a better one.

Many people still hold that it is a bad thing for the young to read works of fiction. They believe that young minds get a moral twist from reading that which they know is not true, the descriptions of mere imaginary heroes and heroines, and of things which never happened. Now, this is a very narrow, limited view of a big question. These people do not understand the office of the imagination; they do not realize that many of the fictitious heroes and heroines that live in our minds, even from childhood's days, are much more real in their influence on our lives than some of those that exist in flesh and blood.

Dickens' marvelous characters seem more real to us than any we have ever met. They have followed millions of people from childhood to old age, and influenced their whole lives for good. Many of us would look upon it as a great calamity to have these characters of fiction blotted out of our memory and their influence taken out of our lives.

Readers are sometimes so wrought up by a good work of fiction, their minds are raised to such a pitch of courage and daring, all their faculties so sharpened and braced, their whole nature so stimulated, that they can for the time being attempt and accomplish things which were impossible to them without the stimulus.

This, it seems to me, is one of the great values of fiction. If it is good and elevating, it is a splendid exercise of all the mental and moral faculties; it increases courage; it rouses enthusiasm; it sweeps the brain-ash off the mind, and actually strengthens its ability to grasp new principles and to grapple with the difficulties of life.

Many a discouraged soul has been refreshened, re-invigorated, has taken on new life by the reading of a good romance. I recall a bit of fiction, called "The Magic Story," which has helped thousands of discouraged souls, given them new hope, new life, when they were ready to give up the struggle.

The reading of good fiction is a splendid imagination exerciser and builder. It stimulates it by suggestions, powerfully increases its picturing capacity, and keeps it fresh and vigorous and wholesome, and a wholesome imagination plays a very great part in every sane and worthy life. It makes it possible for us to shut out the most disagreeable past, to shut out at will all hideous memories of our mistakes, failures, and misfortunes; it helps us to forget our trouble and sorrows, and to slip at will into a new, fresh world of our own making, a world which we can make as beautiful, as sublime, as we wish. The imagination is a wonderful substitute for wealth, luxuries, and for material things. No matter how poor we may be, or how unfortunate, we may be bedridden even, we can by its aid travel round the world, visit its greatest cities, and create the most beautiful things for ourselves.

Sir John Herschel tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order. In a certain village the blacksmith had got hold of Richardson's novel "Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded," and used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. "At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and, procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing."

"It all comes back to us now," said the brilliant editor of the "Interior" not long ago, "that winter evening in the old home. The curtains are down, the fire is sending out a cheerful warmth and the shaded lamps diffusing a well-tempered radiance. The lad of fifteen is bent over a borrowed volume of sea tales. For hours he reads on, oblivious of all surroundings, until parental attention is drawn toward him by the unusual silence. The boy is seen to be trembling from head to foot with suppressed excitement. A fatherly hand is laid upon the volume, closing it firmly, and the edict is spoken, 'No more novels for five years.' And the lad goes off to bed, half glad, half grieved, wondering whether he has found fetters or achieved freedom.

"In truth he had received both; for that indiscriminating command forbade to him during a formative period of his life works which would have kindled his imagination, enriched his fancy, and heightened his power of expression; but if it closed to him the Garden of Hesperides, it also saved him from a possible descent to the Inferno; it made heroes of history, not demigods of mythology, his companions, and reserved to maturer years those excursions in the literature of the imagination which may lead a young man up to heaven or as easily drag him down to hell.

"The boy who is permitted to saturate his mind with stories of 'battle, murder, and sudden death,' is fitting himself, as the records of our juvenile courts show, for the penitentiary or perhaps the gallows. No man can handle pitch without defilement. We may choose our books, but we can not choose their effects. We may plant the vine or sow the thistle, but we can not command what fruit each shall bear. We may loosely select our library, but by and by it will fit us close as a glove.

"There was never such a demand for fiction as now, and never larger opportunities for its usefulness. Nothing has such an attraction for life as life. But what the heart craves is not 'life as it is.' It is life as it ought to be. We want not the feeble but the forceful; not the commonplace but the transcendent. Nobody objects to the 'purpose novel' except those who object to the purpose. Dealing as it does in the hands of a great master, with the grandest passions, the most tender emotions, the divinest hopes, it can portray all these spiritual forces in their majestic sweep and uplift. And as a matter of history, we have seen the novel achieve in a single generation the task at which the homily had labored ineffectively for a hundred years. Realizing this, it is safe to say that there is not a theory of the philosopher, a hope of the reformer, or a prayer of the saint which does not eventually take form in a story. The novel has wings, while logic plods with a staff. In the hour it takes the metaphysician to define his premises, the story-teller has reached the goal--and after him tumbles the crowd tumultuous."

With the assistance of Rev. Dr. E. P. Tenney, I venture upon the following lists of books in various lines of reading:

Fiction

"The Arabian Nights Entertainment."

"Stories from the Arabian Nights" (Riverside School Library), contains many of the more famous stories. 50 c.

Irving Bachelder's [Transcriber's note: "Bacheller"?] "Eben Holden," is a good book. 400,000 copies were sold.

J. M. Barrie's "Little Minister," a story of Scottish life, is very bright reading.

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress," is one of the most famous of allegories.

Cervantes' "Don Quixote" is so widely known that any well-read man should know it. Its humor never grows old.

Ralph Connor's three books,--"The Man from Glengarry," "Black Rock," and "The Sky Pilot,"--have sold 400,000 copies.

Of George W. Cable's books, "The Cavalier," and "Old Creole Days" are among the best.

Dinah Mulock Craik's "John Halifax, Gentleman," is of rare merit.

C. E. Craddock's (pseudonym), "In the Tennessee Mountains" is entertaining. A powerful story of mountain-life.

Of F. Marion Crawford's stories, among the best are "Mr. Isaacs" and "A Roman Singer."

Alexander Dumas' "Count of Monte Christo" [Transcriber's note: "Cristo"?] is a world-famous romance.

Of George Eliot, "Silas Marner" is the best of the short stories, and "Romola" the best of the long. "Adam Bede" ranks barely second to "Silas Marner."

Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre" remains a classic among earlier English novels.

Edward Everett Hale's "Man without a Country" will be read as long as the American flag flies.

Hawthorne's "Mosses from an Old Manse" are stories of unique interest, and "The Scarlet Letter" is known to all well-read people.

Of Rudyard Kipling, read "Kim," and "The Man Who Would be King."

Pierre Loti's "Iceland Fisherman" is translated by A. F. de Koven. McClurg, $1.00.

S. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne" sold 125,000 copies.

Thomas Nelson Page's "Gordon Keith" sold 200,000 copies.

If you read only one of Walter Scott's novels, take "Ivanhoe," or "The Talisman." Five more of those most read are likely to follow.

Henryk Sienkiewicz's "Quo Vadis" is most notable.

Robert L. Stevenson's "Treasure Island," and "Doctor Jekyll and Mr. Hyde," and "The Merry Men and Other Tales," are fair examples of the charm and insight of this author.

He who reads Frank Stockton's "Rudder Grange" is likely to read more of this author's books.

Mrs. H. B. Stowe's "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is still one of the great stories of the world.

Of Mark Twain, "Huckleberry Finn," "The Innocents Abroad," and the "Story of Joan of Arc" are representative volumes.

Miss Warner's "Wide, Wide World" is unique in American fiction.

John Watson's "Beside the Bonnie Briar Bush," sold 200,000 copies in America.

Lew Wallace's "Ben Hur" is the greatest of scriptural romances.

Thirty-eight books by twenty-eight authors. It would have been easier to name a hundred authors and two hundred books.

I will add from "The Critic" a list whose sales have reached six figures:--

Books of Every-day Life

"David Harum," by Westcott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 727,000 "Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch," by Alice Hegan Rice 345,000 "The Virginian," by Owen Wister . . . . . . . . . . . 250,000 "Lovey Mary," by Alice Hegan Rice . . . . . . . . . . 188,000 "The Birds' Christmas Carol," by Mrs. Wiggin . . . . . 100,000 "The Story of Patsy," by Mrs. Wiggin . . . . . . . . . 100,000 "The Leopard's Spots," by Thomas G. Dixon, Jr. . . . 125,000

Romantic

"Richard Carvel," by Winston Churchill . . . . . . . . 400,000 "The Crisis," by Winston Churchill . . . . . . . . . . 400,000 "Graustark," by G. B. McCutcheon . . . . . . . . . . . 300,000 "The Eternal City," by Hall Caine . . . . . . . . . . 175,000 "Dorothy Vernon," by Charles Major . . . . . . . . . . 150,000 "The Manxman," by Hall Caine . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113,000 "When Knighthood Was in Flower," by Charles Major . . 400,000 "To Have and to Hold," by Miss Johnston . . . . . . . 300,000 "Audrey," by Miss Johnston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165,000 "The Helmet of Navarre," by Bertha Runkle . . . . . . 100,000

LXIV. READING A SPUR TO AMBITION

The great use in reading is for self-discovery. Inspirational, character-making, life-shaping books are the main thing.

Cotton Mather's "Essay to Do Good" influenced the whole career of Benjamin Franklin.

There are books that have raised the ideals and materially influenced entire nations.

Who can estimate the value of books that spur ambition, that awaken slumbering possibilities?

Are we ambitious to associate with people who inspire us to nobler deeds? Let us then read uplifting books, which stir us to make the most of ourselves.

We all know how completely changed we sometimes are after reading a book which has taken a strong, vigorous hold upon us.

Thousands of people have found themselves through the reading of some book, which has opened the door within them and given them the first glimpse of their possibilities. I know men and women whose whole lives have been molded, the entire trend of their careers completely changed, uplifted beyond their dreams by the books they have read.

When Senator Petters of Alabama went to California on horseback in 1849, he took with him a Bible, Shakespeare, and Burns's poems. He said that those books read and thought about, on the great plains, forever after spoiled him for reading poorer books. "The silence, the solitude," he said, "and the strange flickering light of the camp fire, seemed to bring out the tremendous significance of those great books; and I treasure them to-day as my choicest possessions."

Marshall Field and other proprietors of the great business houses of Chicago petitioned the school authorities for improved instruction along moral lines, affirming that the boys needed religious ideas to make them more reliable in business affairs.

It has been said by President White of Cornell that,--"The great thing needed to be taught in this country is truth, simple ethics, the distinction between right and wrong. Stress should be laid upon what is best in biography, upon noble deeds and sacrifices, especially those which show that the greatest man is not the greatest orator, or the tricky politician. They are a curse; what we need is noble men. National loss comes as the penalty for frivolous boyhood and girlhood, that gains no moral stamina from wholesome books."

If youths learn to feed on the thoughts of the great men and women of all times, they will never again be satisfied with the common or low; they will never again be satisfied with mediocrity; they will aspire to something higher and nobler.

A day which is passed without treasuring up some good thought is not well spent. Every day is a leaf in the book of life. Do not waste a day any more than you would tear out leaves from the book of life.

The Bible, such manuals as "Daily Strength for Daily Needs," such books as Professor C. C. Everett's "Ethics for Young People"; Lucy Elliott Keeler's "If I Were a Girl Again"; "Beauty through Hygiene," by Dr. Emma F. Walker, such essays as Robert L. Stevenson's "Gentlemen" (in his "Familiar Studies of Men and Books") Munger's "On the Threshold"; John Ruskin's "Sesame and Lilies"--these are the books that make young men and maidens so trustworthy that the Marshall Fields and John Wanamakers want their aid in the conduct of great business concerns. Blessed are they who go much farther in later years, and who become familiar with those

"Olympian bards who sang Divine ideas below, Which always find us young And always keep us so."

The readers who do not know the Concord philosopher Emerson, and the great names of antiquity, Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus and Plato, have yet great pleasures to come.

Aside from reading fiction, books of travel are of the best for mental diversion; then there are Nature Studies, and Science and Poetry,--all affording wholesome recreation, all of an uplifting character, and some of them opening up study specialties of the highest order, as in the great range of books classified as Natural Science.

The reading and study of poetry is much like the interest one takes in the beauties of natural scenery. Much of the best poetry is indeed a poetic interpretation of nature. Whittier and Longfellow and Bryant lead their readers to look on nature with new eyes, as Ruskin opened the eyes of Henry Ward Beecher.

A great deal of the best prose is in style and sentiment of a true poetic character, lacking only the metrical form. To become familiar with Tennyson and Shakespeare, and the brilliant catalogue of British poets is in itself a liberal education. Rolfe's Shakespeare is in handy volumes, and so edited as to be of most service. Palgrave's "Golden Treasury" of the best songs and lyrical poems in the English language was edited with the advice and collaboration of Tennyson. His "Children's Treasury" of lyrical poetry is most attractive. Emerson's Parnassus, and Whittier's "Three Centuries of Song" are excellent collections of the most famous poems of the ages.

Of Books of Travel, here are a dozen titles, where one might easily name twelve hundred:--

Edmondo de Amicis,--"Holland and Its People," and his "Constantinople."

Frank T. Bullen's "Cruise of the Cachelot Round the World After Sperm Wales."

J. M. Hoppin's "Old England."

Clifton Johnson, "Among English Hedgerows."

W. D. Howell's "Venetian Life"; "Italian Journeys."

Irving's "Sketch Book," and the "Alhambra."

Henry James, "Portraits of Places."

Arthur Smith's "Chinese Characteristics," and especially his "Village Life in China."

It would be impossible to list books more interesting and more useful than most fiction, which may be called Nature Studies.

I will name a few books that will certainly incite the reader to search for more:--

Ernest Ingersoll's "Book of the Ocean."

Professor E. S. Holder's "The Sciences," a reading book for children.

Jean Mace's "History of a Mouthful of Bread."

E. A. Martin's "Story of a Piece of Coal."

Professor Charles A. Young's "The Sun," revised edition 1895.

Serviss' "Astronomy with an Opera-Glass," "Pleasures of the Telescope," "The Skies and the Earth."

Thoreau's "Walden; or Life in the Woods."

Mrs. F. T. Parsons' (Smith) Dana. "According to Seasons"; talks about the flowers in the order of their appearance in the woods and fields. Describes wild flowers in order of blooming, with information about their haunts and habits. Also, by the same author, "How to Know the Wild Flowers". Describes briefly more than 400 varieties common east of Chicago, grouping them by color.

Seton-Thompson's "Wild Animals I have Known"; of which 100,000 copies have been sold.

F. A. Lucas' "Animals of the Past"

Bradford Towey's "Birds in the Bush," and "Everyday Birds."

President D. S. Jordan's "True Tales of Birds and Beasts."

D. L. Sharp's "A Watcher in the Woods."

W. H. Gibson's "Sharp Eyes."

M. W. Morley's "The Bee-people."

Never before was a practical substitute for a college education at home made so cheap, so easy, and so attractive. Knowledge of all kinds is placed before us in a most attractive and interesting manner. The best of the literature of the world is found to-day in thousands of American homes where fifty years ago it could only have been obtained by the rich.

What a shame it is that under such conditions as these an American should grow up ignorant, should be uneducated in the midst of such marvelous opportunities for self-improvement! Indeed, most of the best literature in every line to-day appears in the current periodicals, in the form of short articles. Many of our greatest writers spend a vast amount of time in the drudgery of travel and investigation in gathering material for these articles, and the magazine publishers pay thousands of dollars for what a reader can get for ten or fifteen cents. Thus the reader secures for a trifle in periodicals or books the results of months and often years of hard work and investigation of our greatest writers.

A New York millionaire,--a prince among merchants,--took me over his palatial residence on Fifth Avenue, every room of which was a triumph of the architect's, of the decorator's, and of the upholsterer's art. I was told that the decorations of a single sleeping-room had cost ten thousand dollars. On the walls were paintings secured at fabulous prices, and about the rooms were pieces of massive and costly furniture, and draperies representing a small fortune, and carpets on which it seemed almost sacrilege to tread covered the floors. But there was scarcely a book in the house. He had expended a fortune for physical pleasures, comforts, luxury, and display. It was pitiful to think of the physical surfeit and mental starvation of the children of such a home as that. When I went out, he told me that he came to the city a poor boy, with all his worldly possessions done up in a little red bandana. "I am a millionaire," he said, "but I want to tell you that I would give half I have to-day for a decent education."

Many a rich man has confessed to confidential friends and his own heart that he would give much of his wealth,--all, if necessary,--to see his son a manly man, free from the habits which abundance has formed and fostered till they have culminated in sin and degradation and perhaps crime; and has realized that, in all his ample provision, he has failed to provide that which might have saved his son and himself from loss and torture,--good books.

There is a wealth within the reach of the poorest mechanic and day-laborer in this country that kings in olden times could not possess, and that is the wealth of a well-read, cultured mind. In this newspaper age, this age of cheap books and periodicals, there is no excuse for ignorance, for a coarse, untrained mind. To-day no one is so handicapped, if he have health and the use of his faculties, that he can not possess himself of wealth that will enrich his whole life, and enable him to converse and mingle with the most cultured people. No one is so poor but that it is possible for him to lay hold of that which will broaden his mind, which will inform and improve him, and lift him out of the brute stage of existence into their god-like realm of knowledge.

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montague; "nor any pleasure so lasting." Good books elevate the character, purify the taste, take the attractiveness out of low pleasures, and lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living.

"A great part of what the British spend on books," says Sir John Lubbock, "they save in prisons and police."

It seems like a miracle that the poorest boy can converse freely with the greatest philosophers and scientists, statesmen, warriors, authors of all time with little expense, that the inmates of the humblest cabin may follow the stories of the nations, the epochs of history, the story of liberty, the romance of the world, and the course of human progress.

Have you just been to a well educated sharp-sighted employer to find work? You did not need to be at any trouble to tell him the names of the books you have read, because they have left their indelible mark upon your face and your speech. Your pinched, starved vocabulary, your lack of polish, your slang expressions, tell him of the trash you have given your precious time to. He knows that you have not rightly systemized your hours. He knows that thousands of young men and women whose lives are crowded to overflowing with routine work and duties, manage to find time to keep posted on what is going on in the world, and for systematic, useful reading.

Carlyle said that a collection of books is a university. What a pity that the thousands of ambitious, energetic men and women who missed their opportunities for an education at the school age, and feel crippled by their loss, fail to catch the significance of this, fail to realize the tremendous cumulative possibilities of that great life-improver that admirable substitute for a college or university education--reading.

"Of the things which man can do or make here below," it was said by the sage of Chelsea, "by far the most momentous, wonderful, and worthy, are the things we call Books! Those poor bits of rag-paper with black ink on them; from the Daily Newspaper to the sacred Hebrew Book, what have they not done, what are they not doing?"

President Schurmann of Cornell, points with pride to a few books in his library which he says he bought when a poor boy by going many a day without his dinner.

The great German Professor Oken was not ashamed to ask Professor Agassiz to dine with him on potatoes and salt, that he might save money for books.

King George III, used to say that lawyers do not know so much more law than other people; but they know better where to find it.

A practical working knowledge of how to find what is in the book world, relating to any given point, is worth a vast deal from a financial point of view. And by such knowledge, one forms first an acquaintance with books, then friendship.

"When I consider," says James Freeman Clarke, "what some books have done for the world, and what they are doing, how they keep up our hope, awaken new courage and faith, soothe pain, give an ideal of life to those whose homes are hard and cold, bind together distant ages and foreign lands, create new worlds of beauty, bring down truths from heaven,--I give eternal blessings for this gift."

For the benefit of the younger readers we give below a list of forty juveniles.

Aesop's "Fables."

Louise M. Alcott's "Little Women," "Little Men," which stood at the top of a list of books chosen in eleven thousand elementary class-rooms in New York.

T. B. Aldrich's "Story of a Bad Boy."

Anderson's "Fairy Tales."

Amelia E. Barr's "The Bow of Orange Ribbon," a book for girls.

"Black Beauty."

E. S. Brooks, "True Story of General Grant."

Bulfinch's "Children's Lives of Great Men," "Age of Chivalry," and "Age of Fable."

Bullen's "Log of a Sea Waif."

Burnett's "Little Lord Fauntleroy," and "Sara Crewe," the latter a book for girls.

Butterworth's "Zig-Zag Journeys."

Carleton Coffin's, "Boys' of '76."

Eva Lovett Carson's "The Making of a Girl."

Ralph Connor's "Gwen," a book for girls.

Louis Carroll's "Alice in Wonderland," and "Through the Looking Glass."

Dana's "Two Years Before the Mast."

"De Amicin's Cuore," which has sold 200,000 in Italy.

DeFoe's "Robinson Crusoe."

Mary Mapes Dodge, "Hans Brinker," or "The Silver Skates," "Life in Holland."

Eugene Field's "A Little Book of Profitable Tales." It has sold 200,000 copies.

Grimm's "Fairy Tales."

Habberton's "Helen's Babies."

E. E. Hale's "Boy Heroes."

Chandler Harris' "Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country; What the Children Saw and Heard There." Fantastic tale interweaving negro animal stories and other Georgia folklore with modern inventions. "Mr. Rabbit At Home"; sequel to "Little Mr. Thimblefinger and His Queer Country." Animal stories told to children.

Charles Kingsley's "Water Babies."

Kipling's "Jungle Books," which have sold 175,000 copies.

Knox's "Boy Travelers."

Lanier's "Boy Froissart," and "Boy's King Arthur."

Edward Lear's "Nonsense Books."

Mabie's "Norse Stories."

Samuel's "From the Forecastle to the Cabin." The experiences of the author who ran away from home and shipped as cabin boy; points out dangers that beset a seafaring life.

Mrs. A. D. T. Whitney's "Faith Gartney's Girlhood."

Kate Douglas Wiggin's "Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm."

Not long ago President Eliot of Harvard College aroused widespread controversy over his selection of a library of books, which might be contained on a five-foot shelf. We append his selections as indicative of the choice of a great scholar and educator.

The following sixteen titles may be had in Everyman's Library, cloth 350. net per volume; leather 70 c. net per volume:

President Eliot's Five-Foot Shelf

Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography.

Sir Thomas Browne's "Religio Medici."

"Confessions of St. Augustine."

Shelley's "The Cenci" (contained in volume two of the complete works).

Emerson's "English Traits," and "Representative Men."

Emerson's Essays.

Chaucer's "Canterbury Tales."

Bacon's Essays.

Walton's "Complete Angler."

Milton's Poems.

Goethe's "Faust."

Marlowe's "Dr. Faustus."

Marcus Aurelius' "Meditations."

Browning's "Blot on the Scutcheon" (contained in volume one of the poems).

Dante's "Divine Comedy."

Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress."

Thomas A. Kempis' "Imitation of Christ."

Burns's "Tam O'Shanter."

Dryden's "Translation of the Aeneid."

Walton's Lives of Donne, and Herbert.

Ben Johnson's "Volpone."

Smith's "Wealth of Nations."

Plutarch's "Lives."

Letters of Pliny.

Cicero's Select Letters.

Plato's "Phaedrus."

Epictetus' Discourses.

Socrates' "Apology and Crito."

Beaumont and Fletcher's "Maid's Tragedy."

Milton's Tractate on Education.

Bacon's "New Atlantis."

Darwin's "Origin of Species."

Webster's "Duchess of Malfi."

Dryden's "All for Love."

Thomas Middleton's "The Changeling."

John Woolman's Journal.

"Arabian Nights."

Tennyson's "Becket."

Penn's "Fruits of Solitude."

Milton's "Areopagitica."

The following list of books is offered as suggestive of profitable lines of reading for all classes and tastes:

Books on Nature

Thoreau's, "Cape Cod," "Maine Woods," "Excursions."

Burroughs' "Ways of Nature," "Wake Robin," "Signs and Seasons," "Pepacton."

Jefferies' "Life of the Fields," "Wild Life in a Southern Country," and "Idylls of Field and Hedgerow."

Lubbock's "Beauties of Nature."

Maeterlinck's "Life of the Bee."

Thompson's "My Winter Garden."

Warner's "My Summer in a Garden."

Van Dyke's "Little Rivers," "Fisherman's Luck."

White's "The Forest."

Mrs. Wright's "Garden of a Commuter's Wife."

Wordsworth's and Bryant's Poems.

Novels Descriptive of American Life

Simms' "The Partisan."

Cooper's "The Spy."

Hawthorne's "The House of the Seven Gables."

Cable's "Old Creole Days," "The Grandissimes."

Howells' "The Rise of Silas Lapham."

Howells' "A Hazard of New Fortunes."

Eggleston's "A Hoosier Schoolmaster."

Bret Harte's "Luck of Roaring Camp and Other Stories."

Mary Hallock Foote's "The Led-Horse Claim."

Octave Thanet's "Heart of Toil," "Stories of a Western Town."

Wister's "The Virginian," "Lady Baltimore."

E. Hopkinson Smith's "The Fortune of Oliver Horn."

Thomas Nelson Page's "Short Stories," and "Red Rock."

Mrs. Delands' "Old Chester Tales."

J. L. Allen's "Flute and Violin," "The Choir Invisible."

Frank Norris' "The Octopus," "The Pit"

Garland's "Main Traveled Roads."

Miss Jewett's "Country of the Pointed Firs," "The Tory Lover."

Miss Wilkins' "New England Nun," "Pembroke."

Churchill's "The Crisis," "Coniston," "Mr. Crewe's Career."

Brander Matthews' "His Father's Son."

S. Weir Mitchell's "Hugh Wynne."

Fox's "The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come."

Mrs. Wharton's "The House of Mirth."

Robert Grant's "Unleavened Bread."

Robert Herrick's "The Common Lot," "The Memoirs of an American Citizen."

Grace E. King's "Balcony Stories."

Books Which Interpret American Ideals

Emerson's Addresses and Essays.

Lowell's Essay on Democracy.

Lincoln's Inaugural Addresses.

Booker T. Washington's "Up from Slavery."

Jacob Riis' "The Making of An American."

Higginson's "The New World and the New Book."

Brander Matthews' "Introduction to American Literature."

Whittier's "Snow-Bound."

Louise Manley's "Southern Literature."

Thomas Nelson Page's "The Old South."

E. J. Turner's "The Rise of the New West"

Churchill's "The Crossing."

James Bryce's "American Commonwealth."

Some of the Best Biographies

"Life of Sir Walter Scott," Lockhart.

"Life of Frederick the Great," Carlyle.

"Alfred Lord Tennyson," by his son.

"Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley," by his son.

Plutarch's "Lives."

"Lives of Seventy of the Most Eminent Painters, Sculptors and Architects," Vasari.

"Cicero and His Friends," Boissier.

"Life of Samuel Johnson," Boswell.

Autobiography of Leigh Hunt.

"Memoirs of My Life and Writings," Gibbon.

Autobiography of Martineau.

"Life of John Sterling," Carlyle.

"Life and Times of Goethe," Grimm.

"Life and Letters of Macaulay," Trevelyan.

"Life of Charles James Fox," Trevelyan.

"Life of Carlyle," Froude.

Benvenuto Cellini's Autobiography.

Boswell's "Johnson."

Trevelyan's "Life of Macaulay."

Carlyle's, "Frederick the Great."

Stanley's, "Thomas Arnold."

Hughes', "Alfred the Great."

Mrs. Kingsley's, "Charles Kingsley."

Lounsbury's, "Cooper."

Greenslet's, "Lowell," and "Aldrich."

Mims', "Sidney Lanier."

Wister's, "Seven Ages of Washington."

Grant's Autobiography.

Morley's, "Chatham."

Harrison's, "Cromwell."

W. Clark Russell's, "Nelson."

Morse's, "Benjamin Franklin."

Twenty-four American Biographies

"Abraham Lincoln," Schurz.

"Life of George Washington," Irving.

"Charles Eliot, Landscape Architect," Eliot.

"Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife," Hawthorne.

"Henry Wadsworth Longfellow," Higginson.

"James Russell Lowell," Greenslet.

"Life of Francis Parkman," Farnham.

"Edgar Alien Poe," Woodberry.

Autobiography of Joseph Jefferson.

"Walt Whitman," Perry.

"Life and Letters of Whittier," Pickard.

"James Russell Lowell and His Friends," Hale.

"George Washington," Wilson.

Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.

"Story of My Life," Helen Keller.

"Autobiography of a Journalist," Stillman.

"Autobiography of Seventy Years," Hoar.

"Life of Thomas Bailey Aldrich," Greenslet.

"Life of Alice Freeman Palmer," Palmer.

"Personal Memoirs," Grant.

"Memoirs," Sherman.

"Memoirs of Ralph Waldo Emerson," Cabot.

"Sidney Lanier," Mims.

"Life of J. Fenimore Cooper," Lounsbury.

The books enumerated have been selected as examples of the best in their respective classes. Even those books of fiction chosen, primarily, for entertainment, are instructive and educational. Whether the reader's taste runs to history, biography, travel, nature study, or fiction, he may select any one of the books named in these respective classifications and be assured of possessing a volume worthy of reading and ownership.

It is the author's hope and desire that the list of books he has given, limited as it is, may prove of value to those seeking self-education, and that the books may encourage the disheartened, stimulate ambition, and serve as stepping stones to higher ideals and nobler purposes in life.

LXV. WHY SOME SUCCEED AND OTHERS FAIL

Life's highway is strewn with failures, just as the sea bed is strewn with wrecks.

A large percentage of those who embark in commercial undertakings fail, according to the records of commercial agencies.

Why do men fail? Why do adventures into business, happily launched, terminate in disastrous wreck?

Why do the few succeed and the many fail? Some failures are relative and not absolute; a partial success is achieved; a success that goes limping along through life; but the goal of ambition is unreached, the heart's desire unattained.

There are so many elements that enter into business that it is impossible to more than indicate them. Health, natural aptitude, temperament, disposition, a right start and in the right place, hereditary traits, good judgment, common sense, level-headedness, etc., are all factors which enter into one's chance of success in life. The best we can do in one chapter is to hang out the red flag over the dangerous places; to chart the rocks and shoals, whereon multitudes of vessels, which left the port of youth with flying colors, favoring breezes and every promise of a successful voyage, have been wrecked and lost.

The lack of self-confidence and lack of faith in one's ideas in one's mission in life have caused innumerable failures.

People who don't get on and who don't know why, do not realize the power of trifles to mar a career, what little things are killing their business or injuring their profession; do not realize how little things injure their credit; such as the lack of promptness in paying bills, or meeting a note at the bank.

Many men fail because they thought they had the field and were in no danger from competition, so that the heads of the firm took it easy, or because some enterprising up-to-date, progressive young man came to town, and, before they realized it, took their trade away from them, because they got into a rut, and didn't keep up-to-date stock and an attractive store.

They don't realize what splendid salesmen, an attractive place of business, up-to-date methods, and courteous treatment of customers mean.

Men often fail because they do not realize that creeping paralysis, caused by dry rot, is gradually strangling their business. Many business men fail because they dare not look their business conditions in the face when things go wrong, and do not adopt heroic methods, but continue to use palliatives, until the conditions are beyond cure, even with a surgeon's knife.

Lots of men fail because they don't know how to get rid of deadwood in their establishment, or retain non-productive employees, who with slip-shod methods, and indifference drive away more business than the proprietors can bring in by advertising.

Many other men fail because they tried bluff in place of capital, and proper training, or because they didn't keep up with the times.

Lots of young people fail to get ahead and plod along in mediocrity because they never found their place. They are round pegs in square holes. Others are not capable of coping with antagonism. Favoritism of proprietors and managers has killed many a business. A multitude of men fail to get on because they take themselves too seriously. They deliver their goods in a hearse, employ surly, unaccommodating clerks. Bad business manners have killed many a business. Slave-driving methods, inability to get along with others, lack of system, defective organizing ability, have cut short many a career.

A great many men are ruined by "side-lines" things outside their regular vocation. Success depends upon efficiency, and efficiency is impossible without intense, persistent concentration. Many traveling men think that they can pick up a little extra money and increase their income by taking up some "side-line." But it is always the small man, never the big one, who has a "side-line." Many of these men remain small, and are never able to rise to a big salaried position because they split up their endeavor, dissipate their energy. "Side-lines" are dangerous because they divert the mind, scatter effort, and nothing great can be accomplished without intense concentration.

Many people are always driving success away from them by their antagonistic manner, and their pessimistic thought. They work for one thing, but expect something else. They don't realize that their mental attitude must correspond with their ambition; that if they are working hard to get on, they must expect prosperity, and not kill their prospects by their adverse mental attitude--their doubts and fears.

Lots of men are ruined by "a sure thing," an inside tip, buying stocks on other people's judgment.

Many people fail because they lose their grit after they fail, or when they get down, they don't know how to get up. Many are victims of their moods, slaves of despondency. Courage and an optimistic outlook upon life are imperative to the winner. Fear is fatal to success. Many a young man fails because he can not multiply himself in others, can not delegate his work, is lost in detail. Other men fail in an attempt to build up a big business; their minds are not trained to grasp large subjects, to generalize, to make combinations; they are not self-reliant, depending upon other people's judgment and advice.

Many a man who works hard himself, does not know how to handle men, and does not know how to use other people's brains.

Thousands of youths fail to get on because they never fall in love with their work. Work that is drudgery never succeeds.

Fifty years ago, a stable-boy cleaned the horses of a prosperous hotel proprietor, who drove into Denver for supplies. That boy became Governor of Colorado, and later the hotel-keeper, with shattered fortunes, was glad to accept a place as watchman at the hand of the former stable-boy.

Life is made up of such contrasts. Every successful man, in whatever degree and in whatever line, has, at every step of his life, been on seemingly equal terms with hundreds of his fellows who, later, reached no such measure of success as he. Every miserable failure has had at some time as many chances, and at least as much possibility of cultivating the same qualities, as the successful people have had at some time in their lives.

Since humble birth and handicaps of every sort and degree have not prevented success in the determined man; since want has often spurred to needed action and obstacles but train to higher leaping, why should men fail? What causes the failures and half-successes that make up the generality of mankind?

The answer is manifold, but its lesson is plain. As one writer has expressed it, "Every mainspring of success is a mainspring of failure, when wound around the wrong way." Every opportunity for advancement, for climbing for success, is just as much an opportunity for failure. Every success quality can be turned to one's disadvantage through excessive development or wrong use. No matter how broad and strong the dike may be, if a little hole lets the water through, ruin and disaster are sure. Possession of almost all the success-qualities may be absolutely nullified by one or two faults or vices. Sometimes one or two masterful traits of character will carry a person to success, in spite of defects that are a serious clog.

The numerous failures who wish always to blame their misfortunes upon others, or upon external circumstances, find small comfort in statistics compiled by those who have investigated the subject. In analyzing the causes of business failure in a recent year Bradstreet's found that seven-tenths were due to faults of those failing, and only three-tenths to causes entirely beyond their control. Faults causing failure, with per cent. of failures caused by each, are given as follows: incompetence, 19 per cent.; inexperience, 7.8 per cent.; lack of capital, 30.3 per cent.; unwise granting of credit, 3.6 per cent.; speculation, 2.3 per cent. It may be explained that "lack of capital" really means attempting to do too much with inadequate capital. This is a purely commercial analysis of purely commercial success. Character delinquencies must be read between the lines.

Forty successful men were induced, not long ago, to answer in detail the question, "What, in your observation, are the chief causes of the failure in life of business or professional men?" The causes attributed by these representative men were as follows:

Bad habits; bad judgment; bad luck; bad associates; carelessness of details; constant assuming of unjustifiable risks; desire to become rich too fast; drinking; dishonest dealings; desire of retrenchment; dislike to say no at the proper time; disregard of the Golden Rule; drifting with the tide; expensive habits of life; extravagance: envy; failure to appreciate one's surroundings; failure to grasp one's opportunities; frequent changes from one business to another; fooling away of time in pursuit of a so-called good time, gambling; inattention; incompetent assistants; incompetency; indolence; jealousy. Lack of attention to business; of application; of adaptation; of ambition; of business methods; of capital; of conservatism; of close attention to business; of confidence in self; of careful accounting; of careful observation; of definite purpose; of discipline in early life; of discernment of character; of enterprise; of energy; of economy; of faithfulness; of faith in one's calling; of industry; of integrity; of judgment; of knowledge of business requirements; of manly character; of natural ability; of perseverance; of pure principles; of proper courtesy toward people; of purpose; of pluck; of promptness in meeting business engagements; of system. Late hours; living beyond one's income; leaving too much to one's employees; neglect of details; no inborn love for one's calling; over-confidence in the stability of existing conditions; procrastination; speculative mania; selfishness; self-indulgence in small vices; studying ease rather than vigilance; social demoralization; thoughtless marriages; trusting one's work to others; undesirable location; unwillingness to pay the price of success; unwillingness to bear early privations; waste; yielding too easily to discouragement.

Surely, here is material enough for a hundred sermons if one cared to preach them. Without attempting to discuss all these causes of failure, some few may be profitably examined.

No youth can hope to succeed who is timid, who lacks faith in himself, who has not the courage of his convictions, and who always seeks for certainty before he ventures. "Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures," said one. "In the assurance of strength there is strength, and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers."

"The ruin which overtakes so many merchants," said another, "is due, not so much to their lack of business talent, as to their lack of business nerve. How many lovable persons we see in trade, endowed with brilliant capacities, but cursed with yielding dispositions--who are resolute in no business habits and fixed in no business principles--who are prone to follow the instincts of a weak good nature, against the ominous hints of a clear intelligence; now obliging this friend by indorsing an unsafe note, and then pleasing that neighbor by sharing his risk in a hopeless speculation, and who, after all the capital they have earned by their industry and sagacity has been sunk in benevolent attempts to assist blundering or plundering incapacity, are doomed, in their bankruptcy, to be the mark of bitter taunts from growling creditors and insolent pity from a gossiping public."

Scattering one's forces has killed many a man's success. Withdrawal of the best of yourself from the work to be done is sure to bring final disaster. Every particle of a man's energy, intellect, courage, and enthusiasm is needed to win success in one line. Draw off part of the supply of any one or all of these, and there is danger that what is left will not suffice. A little inattention to one's business at a critical point is quite sufficient to cause shipwreck. The pilot who pays attention to a pretty passenger is not likely to bring his ship to port. Attractive side issues, great schemes, and flattering promises of large rewards, too often lure the business or professional man from the safe path in which he may plod on to sure success. Many a man fails to become a great man, by splitting into several small ones, choosing to be a tolerable Jack-at-all-trades, rather than to be an unrivalled specialist.

Lack of thoroughness is another great cause of failure. The world is overcrowded with men, young and old, who remain stationary, filling minor positions, and drawing meager salaries, simply because they have never thought it worth while to achieve mastery in the pursuits they have chosen to follow.

Lack of education has caused many failures; if a man has success qualities in him, he will not long lack such education as is absolutely necessary to his success. He will walk fifty miles if necessary to borrow a book, like Lincoln. He will hang by one arm to a street lamp, and hold his book with the other, like a certain Glasgow boy. He will study between anvil blows, like Elihu Burritt; he will do some of the thousand things that other noble strugglers have done to fight against circumstances that would deprive them of what they hunger for.

"The five conditions of failure," said H. H. Vreeland, president of the Metropolitan Street Railway Company of New York, "may be roughly classified thus: first, laziness, and particularly mental laziness; second, lack of faith in the efficiency of work; third, reliance on the saving grace of luck; fourth, lack of courage, initiative and persistence: fifth, the belief that the young man's job affects his standing, instead of the young man's affecting the standing of his job."

Look where you will, ask of whom you will, and you will find that not circumstances, but personal qualities, defects and deficiencies, cause failures. This is strongly expressed by a wealthy manufacturer who said: "Nothing else influences a man's career in life so much as his disposition. He may have capacity, knowledge, social position, or money to back him at the start; but it is his disposition that will decide his place in the world at the end. Show me a man who is, according to popular prejudice, a victim of bad luck, and I will show you one who has some unfortunate, crooked twist of temperament that invites disaster, He is ill-tempered, or conceited, or trifling, or lacks enthusiasm."

There are some men whose failure to succeed in life is a problem to others, as well as to themselves. They are industrious, prudent, and economical; yet after a long life of striving, old age finds them still poor. They complain of ill luck, they say fate is against them. But the real truth is that their projects miscarry, because they mistake mere activity for energy. Confounding two things essentially different, they suppose that if they are always busy, they must of necessity be advancing their fortunes; forgetting that labor misdirected is but a waste of activity.

The worst of all foes to success is sheer, downright laziness. There is no polite synonym for laziness. Too many young men are afraid to work. They are lazy. They aim to find genteel occupations, so that they can dress well, and not soil their clothes, and handle things with the tips of their fingers. They do not like to get their shoulders under the wheel, and they prefer to give orders to others, or figure as masters, and let some one else do the drudgery. There is no place in this century for the lazy man. He will be pushed to the wall. Labor ever will be the inevitable price for everything that is valuable.

A metropolitan daily newspaper not long ago invited confessions by letter from those who felt that their lives had been failures. The newspaper agreed not to disclose the name or identity of any person making such a confession, and requested frank statements. Two questions were asked: "Has your life been a failure? Has your business been a failure?"

Some of the replies were pitiable in the extreme.

Some attributed their failures to a cruel fate which seemed to pursue them and thwart all their efforts, some to hereditary weaknesses, deformities, and taints, some to a husband or a wife, others to "inhospitable surroundings," and "cruel circumstances."

It is worthy of note that not one of these failures mentioned laziness as a cause.

Here are some of the reasons they did give:

"J. P. T." considered that his life was a failure from too much genius. He said he thought he could do anything, and therefore he couldn't wait to graduate from college, but left and began the practise of law, was principal of an academy, overworked himself, and had too many irons in the fire. He failed, he said, from dissipating his energies, and having too much confidence in men.

"Rutherford," said he had four chances to succeed in life, but lost them all. The first cause of his failure was lack of perseverance. He tired of the sameness and routine of his occupation. His second shortcoming was too great liberality, too much confidence in others. Third, economy was not in his dictionary. Fourth, "I had too much hope, even in the greatest extremities." Fifth, "I believed too much in friends and friendships. I couldn't read human nature, and did not make allowance enough for mistakes." Sixth, "I never struck my vocation." Seventh, "I had no one to care for, to spur me on to do something in the world. I am seventy years old, never drank, never had bad habits, always attended church. But I am as poor as when I started for myself."

"G. C. S." failed dismally. "My weakness was building air-castles. I had a burning desire to make a name in the world, and came to New York from the country. Rebuffed, discouraged, I drifted. I had no heart for work. I lacked ability and push, without which no life can be a success."

"Lacked ability and push."--Push is ability. Laziness is lack of push. Nothing can take the place of push. Push means industry and endurance and everlasting stick-to-it-ive-ness.

"A somewhat varied experience of men has led me, the longer I live," said a great man, "to set less value on mere cleverness; to attach more and more importance to industry and physical endurance."

Goethe said that industry is nine-tenths of genius, and Franklin that diligence is the mother of good luck. A thousand other tongues and pens have lauded work. Idleness and shiftlessness may be set down as causing a large part of the failures of the world.

On every side we see persons who started out with good educations and great promise, but who have gradually "gone to seed." Their early ambition oozed out, their early ideals gradually dropped to lower standards. Ambition is a spring that sets the apparatus going. All the parts may be perfect, but the lack of a spring is a fatal defect. Without wish to rise, desire to accomplish and to attain, no life will succeed largely.

"Chief among the causes which bring positive failure or a disappointing portion of half success to thousands of honest strugglers is vacillation," said Thomas B. Bryan.

Many a business man has made his fortune by promptly deciding at some nice juncture to expose himself to a considerable risk. Yet many failures are caused by ill-advised changes and causeless vacillation of purpose. The vacillating man, however strong in other respects, is always pushed aside in the race of life by the determined man, the decisive man, who knows what he wants to do and does it; even brains must give way to decision. One could almost say that no life ever failed that was steadfastly devoted to one aim, if that aim were not in itself unworthy.

I am a great believer in a college education, but a great many college graduates have made failures of their lives who might have succeeded had they not gone to college, because they depended upon theoretical, impractical knowledge to help them on, and were not willing to begin at the bottom after graduation.

On every hand we see men who did well in college, but who do very poorly in life. They stood high in their classes, were conscientious, hard workers, but somehow when they get out into life, they do not seem able to catch on. They are not practical. It would be hard to tell why they never get ahead, but there seems to be something lacking in their make-up, some screw loose somewhere. These brilliant graduates, but indifferently successful men, are often enigmas to themselves. They don't understand why they don't get on.

There is no doubt that ill-health is often the cause of failure, but this is often due to a wrong mental attitude, wrong thinking. The pessimistic, discouraged mental attitude is very injurious to good health. Worry, fear, anxiety, jealousy, extreme selfishness, poison the system, so that it does not perform its functions perfectly, and will cause much ill-health.

A complete reversal of the mental attitude would bring robust health to multitudes of those who suffer from "poor health." If people would only think right, and live right, ill-health would be very rare. A wrong mental attitude is the cause of a large part of physical weakness, disease, and suffering.

It has been said that the two chief factors of success are industry and health. But the history of human triumphs over difficulties shows that the sick, the crippled, the deformed, have often outrun the strong and hale to the goal of success, in spite of tremendous physical handicaps. Many such instances are cited in other chapters of this volume.

Where men have built an abiding success, industry and perseverance have proven the foundation stone? of their great achievements. Every man may lay this foundation and build on it for himself. Whatever a man's natural advantages may be, great or small, industry and perseverance are his, if he chooses. By the exercise of these qualities he may rise, as others have done, to success, if like Palissy he

"Labors and endures and waits And what he can not find creates."

WHEN IS SUCCESS A FAILURE?

When you are doing the lower while the higher is possible.

When you are not a cleaner, finer, larger man on account of your life-work.

When you live only to eat, drink, have a good time, and accumulate money.

When you do not carry a higher wealth in your character than in your pocketbook.

When your highest brain cells have been crowded out of business by greed.

When it has made conscience an accuser, and shut the sunlight out of your life.

When all sympathy has been crushed out by selfish devotion to your vocation.

When the attainment of your ambition has blighted the aspirations and crushed the hopes of others.

When you plead that you never had time to cultivate your friendships, politeness, or good manners.

When you have lost on your way your self-respect, your courage, your self-control, or any other quality of manhood.

When you do not overtop your vocation; when you are not greater as a man than as a lawyer, a merchant, a physician, or a scientist.

When you have lived a double life and practised double-dealing.

When it has made you a physical wreck--a victim of "nerves" and moods.

When the hunger for more money, more land, more houses and bonds has grown to be your dominant passion.

When it has dwarfed you mentally and morally, and robbed you of the spontaneity and enthusiasm of youth. When it has hardened you to the needs and sufferings of others, and made you a scorner of the poor and unfortunate.

When there is a dishonest or a deceitful dollar in your possession; when your fortune spells the ruin of widows and orphans, or the crushing of the opportunities of others.

When your absorption in your work has made you practically a stranger to your family.

When you go on the principle of getting all you can and giving as little as possible in return.

When your greed for money has darkened and cramped your wife's life, and deprived her of self-expression, of needed rest and recreation, or amusement of any kind.

When the nervous irritability engendered by constant work, without relaxation, has made you a brute in your home and a nuisance to those who work for you.

When you rob those who work for you of what is justly their due, and then pose as a philanthropist by contributing a small fraction of your unjust gains to some charity or to the endowment of some public institution.

LXVI. RICH WITHOUT MONEY

Let others plead for pensions; I can be rich without money, by endeavoring to be superior to everything poor. I would have my services to my country unstained by any interested motive.--LORD COLLINGWOOD.

I ought not to allow any man, because he has broad lands, to feel that he is rich in my presence. I ought to make him feel that I can do without his riches, that I can not be bought,--neither by comfort, neither by pride,--and although I be utterly penniless, and receiving bread from him, that he is the poor man beside me.--EMERSON.

He is richest who is content with the least, for content is the wealth of nature.--SOCRATES.

My crown is in my heart, not on my head, Nor decked with diamonds and Indian stones, Nor to be seen: my crown is called content; A crown it is, that seldom kings enjoy. SHAKESPEARE.

Many a man is rich without money. Thousands of men with nothing in their pockets are rich.

A man born with a good, sound constitution, a good stomach, a good heart and good limbs, and a pretty good head-piece is rich.

Good bones are better than gold, tough muscles than silver, and nerves that carry energy to every function are better than houses and land.

"Heart-life, soul-life, hope, joy, and love, are true riches," said Beecher.

Why should I scramble and struggle to get possession of a little portion of this earth? This is my world now; why should I envy others its mere legal possession? It belongs to him who can see it, enjoy it. I need not envy the so-called owners of estates in Boston or New York. They are merely taking care of my property and keeping it in excellent condition for me. For a few pennies for railroad fare whenever I wish I can see and possess the best of it all. It has cost me no effort, it gives me no care; yet the green grass, the shrubbery, and the statues on the lawns, the finer sculptures and the paintings within, are always ready for me whenever I feel a desire to look upon them. I do not wish to carry them home with me, for I could not give them half the care they now receive; besides, it would take too much of my valuable time, and I should be worrying continually lest they be spoiled or stolen. I have much of the wealth of the world now. It is all prepared for me without any pains on my part. All around me are working hard to get things that will please me, and competing to see who can give them the cheapest. The little that I pay for the use of libraries, railroads, galleries, parks, is less than it would cost to care for the least of all I use. Life and landscape are mine, the stars and flowers, the sea and air, the birds and trees. What more do I want? All the ages have been working for me; all mankind are my servants. I am only required to feed and clothe myself, an easy task in this land of opportunity.

A millionaire pays a big fortune for a gallery of paintings, and some poor boy or girl comes in, with open mind and poetic fancy, and carries away a treasure of beauty which the owner never saw. A collector bought at public auction in London, for one hundred and fifty-seven guineas, an autograph of Shakespeare; but for nothing a schoolboy can read and absorb the riches of "Hamlet."

"Want is a growing giant whom the coat of Have was never large enough to cover." "A man may as soon fill a chest with grace, or a vessel with virtue," says Phillips Brooks, "as a heart with wealth."

Shall we seek happiness through the sense of taste or of touch? Shall we idolize our stomachs and our backs? Have we no higher missions, no nobler destinies? Shall we "disgrace the fair day by a pusillanimous preference of our bread to our freedom"?

What does your money say to you: what message does it bring to you? Does it say to you, "Eat, drink, and be merry, for to-morrow we die"? Does it bring a message of comfort, of education, of culture, of travel, of books, of an opportunity to help your fellow-men or is the message "More land, more thousands and millions"? What message does it bring you? Clothes for the naked, bread for the starving, schools for the ignorant, hospitals for the sick, asylums for the orphans, or of more for yourself and none for others? Is it a message of generosity or of meanness, breadth or narrowness? Does it speak to you of character? Does it mean a broader manhood, a larger aim, a nobler ambition, or does it cry, "More, more, more"?

Are you an animal loaded with ingots, or a man filled with a purpose? He is rich whose mind is rich, whose thought enriches the intellect of the world.

A sailor on a sinking vessel in the Caribbean Sea eagerly filled his pockets with Spanish dollars from a barrel on board while his companions, about to leave in the only boat, begged him to seek safety with them. But he could not leave the bright metal which he had so longed for and idolized, and when the vessel went down he was prevented by his very riches from reaching shore.

"Who is the richest of men?" asked Socrates. "He who is content with the least, for contentment is nature's riches."

In More's "Utopia" gold was despised. Criminals were forced to wear heavy chains of it, and to have rings of it in their ears; it was put to the vilest uses to keep up the scorn of it. Bad characters were compelled to wear gold head-bands. Diamonds and pearls were used to decorate infants, so that the youth would discard and despise them.

"Ah, if the rich were as rich as the poor fancy riches!" exclaims Emerson.

In excavating Pompeii a skeleton was found with the fingers clenched round a quantity of gold. A man of business in the town of Hull, England, when dying, pulled a bag of money from under his pillow, which he held between his clenched fingers with a grasp so firm as scarcely to relax under the agonies of death.

"Oh! blind and wanting wit to choose, Who house the chaff and burn the grain; Who hug the wealth ye cannot use, And lack the riches all may gain."

Poverty is the want of much, avarice the want of everything.

A poor man while scoffing at the wealthy for not enjoying themselves was met by a stranger who gave him a purse, in which he was always to find a ducat. As fast as he took one out another was to drop in, but he was not to begin to spend his fortune until he had thrown away the purse. He took ducat after ducat out, but continually procrastinated and put off the hour of enjoyment until he had got "a little more," and died at last counting his millions.

A beggar was once met by Fortune, who promised to fill his wallet with gold, as much as he might desire, on condition that whatever touched the ground should turn at once to dust. The beggar opened his wallet, asked for more and yet more, until the bag burst. The gold fell to the ground, and all was lost.

When the steamer Central America was about to sink, the stewardess, having collected all the gold she could from the staterooms, and tied it in her apron, jumped for the last boat leaving the steamer. She missed her aim, fell into the water and the gold carried her down head first.

Franklin said money never made a man happy yet; there is nothing in its nature to produce happiness. The more a man has, the more he wants. Instead of filling a vacuum, it makes one. A great bank account can never make a man rich. It is the mind that makes the body rich. No man is rich, however much money or land he may possess, who has a poor heart. If that is poor, he is poor indeed, though he own and rule kingdoms. He is rich or poor according to what he is, not according to what he has.

Some men are rich in health, in constant cheerfulness, in a mercurial temperament which floats them over troubles and trials enough to sink a shipload of ordinary men. Others are rich in disposition, family, and friends. There are some men so amiable that everybody loves them; so cheerful that they carry an atmosphere of jollity about them.

The human body is packed full of marvelous devices, of wonderful contrivances, of infinite possibilities for the happiness and enrichment of the individual. No physiologist, inventor, nor scientist has ever been able to point out a single improvement, even in the minutest detail, in the mechanism of the human body. No chemist has ever been able to suggest a superior combination in any one of the elements which make up the human structure.

One of the first great lessons of life is to learn the true estimate of values. As the youth starts out in his career all sorts of wares will be imposed upon him and all kinds of temptations will be used to induce him to buy. His success will depend very largely upon his ability to estimate properly, not the apparent but the real value of everything presented to him. Vulgar Wealth will flaunt her banner before his eyes, and claim supremacy over everything else. A thousand different schemes will be thrust into his face with their claims for superiority. Every occupation and vocation will present its charms and offer its inducements in turn. The youth who would succeed must not allow himself to be deceived by appearance, but must place the emphasis of life upon the right thing.

Raphael was rich without money. All doors opened to him, and he was more than welcome everywhere. His sweet spirit radiated sunshine wherever he went.

Henry Wilson, the sworn friend of the oppressed, whose one question, as to measures or acts, was ever "Is it right; will it do good?" was rich without money. So scrupulous had this Natick cobbler been not to make his exalted position a means of worldly gain, that when he came to be inaugurated as Vice-President of the country, he was obliged to borrow of his fellow-senator, Charles Sumner, one hundred dollars to meet the necessary expenses of the occasion.

Mozart, the great composer of the "Requiem," left barely enough money to bury him, but he has made the world richer.

A rich mind and noble spirit will cast over the humblest home a radiance of beauty which the upholsterer and decorator can never approach. Who would not prefer to be a millionaire of character, of contentment, rather than possess nothing but the vulgar coins of a Croesus? Whoever uplifts civilization, though he die penniless, is rich, and future generations will erect his monument.

An Asiatic traveler tells us that one day he found the bodies of two men laid upon the desert sand beside the carcass of a camel. They had evidently died from thirst, and yet around the waist of each was a large store of jewels of different kinds, which they had doubtless been crossing the desert to sell in the markets of Persia.

The man who has no money is poor, but one who has nothing but money is poorer. He only is rich who can enjoy without owning; he is poor who though he have millions is covetous. There are riches of intellect, and no man with an intellectual taste can be called poor. He is rich as well as brave who can face compulsory poverty and misfortune with cheerfulness and courage.

We can so educate the will power that it will focus the thoughts upon the bright side of things, and upon objects which elevate the soul, thus forming a habit of happiness and goodness which will make us rich. The habit of making the best of everything and of always looking on the bright side is a fortune in itself.

He is rich who values a good name above gold. Among the ancient Greeks and Romans honor was more sought after than wealth. Rome was imperial Rome no more when the imperial purple became an article of traffic.

Diogenes was captured by pirates and sold as a slave. His purchaser released him, giving him charge of his household and of the education of his children. Diogenes despised wealth and affectation, and lived in a tub. "Do you want anything?" asked Alexander the Great, greatly impressed by the abounding cheerfulness of the philosopher under such circumstances. "Yes," replied Diogenes, "I want you to stand out of my sunshine and not take from me what you can not give me." "Were I not Alexander," exclaimed the great conqueror, "I would be Diogenes."

"Do you know, sir," said a devotee of Mammon to John Bright, "that I am worth a million sterling?" "Yes," said the irritated but calm-spirited respondent, "I do; and I know that it is all you are worth."

What power can poverty have over a home where loving hearts are beating with a consciousness of untold riches of the head and heart?

St. Paul was never so great as when he occupied a prison cell under the streets of Rome; and Jesus Christ reached the height of His success when, smitten, spat upon, tormented, and crucified, He cried in agony, and yet with triumphant satisfaction, "It is finished."

Don't start out in life with a false standard; a truly great man makes official position and money and houses and estates look so tawdry, so mean and poor, that we feel like sinking out of sight with our cheap laurels and our gold.

One of the great lessons to teach in this century of sharp competition and the survival of the fittest is how to be rich without money and to learn how to live without success according to the popular standard.

In the poem, "The Changed Cross," a weary woman is represented as dreaming that she was led to a place where many crosses lay, crosses of divers shapes and sizes. The most beautiful one was set in jewels of gold. It was so tiny and exquisite that she changed her own plain cross for it, thinking she was fortunate in finding one so much lighter and lovelier. But soon her back began to ache under the glittering burden, and she changed it for another, very beautiful and entwined with flowers. But she soon found that underneath the flowers were piercing thorns which tore her flesh. At last she came to a very plain cross without jewels, without carving, and with only the word, "Love," inscribed upon it. She took this one up and it proved the easiest and best of all. She was amazed, however, to find that it was her old cross which she had discarded.

It is easy to see the jewels and the flowers in other people's crosses, but the thorns and heavy weight are known only to the bearers. How easy other people's burdens seem to us compared with our own! We do not realize the secret burdens which almost crush the heart, nor the years of weary waiting for delayed success--the aching hearts longing for sympathy, the hidden poverty, the suppressed emotion in other lives.

William Pitt, the Great Commoner, considered money as dirt beneath his feet compared with the public interest and public esteem. His hands were clean.

The object for which we strive tells the story of our lives. Men and women should be judged by the happiness they create in those around them. Noble deeds always enrich, but millions of mere dollars may impoverish. Character is perpetual wealth, and by the side of him who possesses it the millionaire who has it not seems a pauper.

Invest in yourself, and you will never be poor. Floods can not carry your wealth away, fire can not burn it, rust can not consume it.

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

Howe'er it be, it seems to me, 'Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood. TENNYSON.