They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty of turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough and time in abundance-the warp and woof of success-they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle, and the real web of life is

never woven.

If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and late all my life, and I know I shall come across something either gold, silver, or, at least, iron."

I say most emphatically, No. Would an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver and gold? The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find never finds anything. We find what we seek with all our hearts, and if we look for nothing in particular we find just that and no more. The bee is not the only insect that visits the flower, but it is the only one that carries honey away. It matters not how rich the materials we have gleaned from the years of our study and toil in youth; if we go out in life with no well-defined idea of our future work, there is no happy conjunction of circumstances that will arrange them into an imposing structure, and give it magnificent proportions it does not deserve.

WHY SOME MEN NEVER SUCCEED

Every non-successful man has his own reasons for failing. Failures who have given up trying-and the world is full of such-throw dust in their own eyes, and into those of their friends, and deny that all men have equal chances of winning the race of life.

The successful man and the failure both start from scratch; certainly both have the same chances of winning the race; the onlookers hesitate to back either of the competitors, for both at the outset are likely winners; yet, notwithstanding all these equal chances of victory that both men have in the beginning, the race has hardly begun when the better man of the two "draws away" and in the end wins.

Is this chance? Can anybody with the most elastic imagination believe that fate, or chance, or fortune, or luck has favored the winner? Hardly; yet the failure will rub his eyes and wonder why he lost. So do we; and his friends will pat him on the back sympathetically and wonder, too. They may ascribe his failure to ill luck. The truth is, he wasn't up to form.

Nobody can command success, as Addison tells us, but we can try to deserve it. The world is full of disappointed men who have in the past striven to win success, who have worked hard, who have denied themselves all pleasures and recreations, who have buckled to and labored incessantly all their lives to woo and win Fortune, but that dame-fickle she may be has turned her back upon her suitors. Why? cry the failures.

Those who have won have first of all wooed her properly. Her non-successful admirers have perhaps been equally as energetic, as persevering, as sincere, but they have fallen short in their leap, they have miscalculated their distance, have missed the perfect way by which, and which only, you can secure her blessing.

What is this perfect way? The being able to judge properly between the relative importance of this thing and that. Discrimination is a great power and the essence of all judgment. The biography of the successful man is yet to be written wherein it will not be stated that "great discerning judgment" was the lever of his success. If we fail to discern we err in judgment. If we in error give a high place to that which deserves a lower place, our judgment is in fault; we fail to grasp the meaning of relative importance, and the result is failure.

Because a man splatters and splutters, fumes and foams when going about his work, fusses and frets, worries and wearies himself all day long, it does not signify that that man is bound to become a millionaire. He may have an immense supply of energy on hand, and may command at all times volumes of good forcible human steam power, yet that is not everything. Unless he have the gift of being able to gauge things and fix their relative importance in connection with other matters, his

fuming and fretting, spluttering and splattering will be of no avail.

It is the pitiful tale of many a good man who has spent years of his life in trying to succeed, that he cannot get beyond the first rung of the ladder. He moans and groans over his failure, and pitches his tale in such a melancholy key that his domestic circle and his friends of the inner ring think him the most abused man in creation. Sara Bernhardt boasts that "she burns her boats behind her," meaning that she forgets the past. It shows her judgment.

FALSE IDEAS ABOUT GETTING RICH

"Every day we see a few men growing enormously rich without any exertion," is the old cry, says the "Dry Goods Chronicle."

The truth seems to be that the people-the plain, plodding people-only see the enormously rich men after they have made their money: they never see them while they are getting there. Away back somewhere in their lives, these enormously rich men have done something. They have worked with a tenacity and an intelligence that would make the packing-box orator and peace-disturber shrivel up. No man, barring a few of fortune's freak-favorites, ever got anything without working for it.

Of course, some are born rich—the nobility, for instance, or those of that glittering circle seen at the opera, the horse show, and other exploitive functions. But of these their riches are as the sea. Where once an atom was, an atom is not; but, mayhap, there is a new atom. Those people can do nothing but buy, buy, buy. Their laces, their diamonds, their food, and even their loves and friendships-they all mean the outpour of money. They pass through the world only by dipping their hands into their gold bags and scattering the contents.

And any man with a good brain and a good body, or with a fair average of both, can get some of it if he will only half try, if he will quit solving unsolvable problems, and trying to develop schemes to make the active lazy and the dull quick-witted. If

he will build a house, or sweep a street, or bake bread, part of this money is for him.

The really serious crime of the money-maker is not making, but keeping it. Happily, human nature is so constituted that keeping or hoarding, as a general thing, does not exist. Where Nature does produce her occasional miser, she always takes particular care to attach to him persons who make sea foam of his pile before his lips are well cold. This is her retributive act.

COUNSELS OF SUCCESSFUL MEN

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Why Young Men Fail

OBERT C. OGDEN, upon whose able shoulders rests the executive responsibility of John Wanamaker's great New York establishment, is of opinion, based on forty-odd years' experience in the employment of young men, that all the causes contributive to failure in a business career are embraced in a single comprehensive negative quality: lack of thoroughness-that paucity of intellect which begets the perfunctory performance of duty and deprives the hand of dominating skill. Perhaps no man in the dry goods trade is better qualified to speak convincingly on the subject of why men fail than Mr. Ogden, and this is what he says about that very important question:

THE LACK OF THOROUGHNESS

"Failure to achieve success in business, the falling short of great desires and high aims on the part of young men, is traceable to one primal cause-the absence of thoroughness. In the race for supremacy in all commercial undertakings, nine out of every ten men either fail absolutely or become nonentities, not because they lack ambition, not because the proper opportunities for advancement have not come to them, not because they have not received the best educational advantages or are handicapped by poor health, but because they have never been at the pains to master completely the thing that has been given them to do. The world is overcrowded with men, young and old, who remain stationary, filling minor positions and drawing meager salaries, simply because they have never