It would be absurd to claim that every excellent and competent special performer who sticks incorruptibly to his individual purpose and standard can succeed in creating a special public, molded somewhat by his personal influence.  The ability to succeed is not given to everybody.  It cannot always be obtained by sincere industry and able and single-minded work.  The qualities needed in addition to those mentioned will vary in different occupations and according to the accidental circumstances of different cases; but they are not always the qualities which a man can acquire.  Men will fail who have deserved to succeed and who might have succeeded with a little more tenacity or under slightly more favorable conditions.  Men who have deserved to fail will succeed because of certain collateral but partly irrelevant merits—­just as an architect may succeed who is ingenious about making his clients’ houses comfortable and building them cheap.  In a thousand different ways an individual enterprise, conceived and conducted with faith and ability, may prove to be abortive.  Moreover, the sacrifices necessary to success are usually genuine sacrifices.  The architect who wishes to build up a really loyal following by really good work must deliberately reject many possible jobs; and he must frequently spend upon the accepted jobs more money than is profitable.  But the foregoing is merely tantamount to saying, as we have said, that the adventure involves a real risk.  A resolute, intelligent man undertakes a doubtful and difficult enterprise, not because it is sure to succeed, but because if it succeeds, it is worth the risk and the cost, and such is the case with the contemporary American adventurer.  The individual independence, appreciation, and fulfillment which he secures in the event of success are assuredly worth a harder and a more dangerous fight than the one by which frequently he is confronted.  In any particular case a man, as we have admitted, may put up a good fight without securing the fruits of victory, and his adventure may end, not merely in defeat, but in self-humiliation.  But if any general tendency exists to shirk, or to back down, or to place the responsibility for personal ineptitude on the public, it means, not that the fight was hopeless, but that the warriors were lacking in the necessary will and ability.

The case of the statesman, the man of letters, the philanthropist, or the reformer does not differ essentially from that of the architect.  They may need for their particular purposes a larger or a smaller popular following, a larger or smaller amount of moral courage, and a more or less peculiar kind of intellectual efficiency; but wherever there is any bridge to be built between their own purposes and standards and those of the public, they must depend chiefly upon their own resources for its construction.  The best that society can do to assist them at present is to establish good schools of preliminary instruction.  For the rest