The quality of Humility is by far the most difficult to attain.  There is something deep down in the nature of a successful man of affairs which seems to conflict with it.  His career is born in a sense of struggle and courage and conquest, and the very type of the effort seems to invite in the completed form a temperament of arrogance.  I cannot pretend to be humble myself; all I can confess is the knowledge that in so far as I could acquire humility I should be happier.  Indeed, many instances prove that success and humility are not incompatible.  One of the most eminent of our politicians is by nature incurably modest.  The difficulty in reconciling the two qualities lies in that “perpetual presence of self to self which, though common enough in men of great ambition and ability, never ceases to be a flaw.”

But there is certainly one form of humility which all successful men ought to be able to practise.  They can avoid a fatal tendency to look down on and despise the younger men who are planting their feet in their own footsteps.  The established arrogance which refuses credit or opportunity to rising talent is unpardonable.  A man who gives way to what is really simply a form of jealousy cannot hope to be happy, for jealousy is above all others the passion which tears the heart.

The great stumbling block which prevents success embracing humility is the difficulty of distinguishing between the humble mind and the cowardly one.  When does humility merge into moral cowardice and courage into arrogance?  Some men in history have had this problem solved for them.  Stonewall Jackson is a type of the man of supreme courage and action and judgment who was yet supremely humble—­but he owed his bodily and mental qualities to nature and his humility to the intensity of his Presbyterian faith.  Few men are so fortunately compounded.

Still, if the moral judgment is worth anything, a man should be able to practise courage without arrogance and to walk humbly without fear.  If he can accomplish the feat he will reap no material reward, but an immense harvest of inner well-being.  He will have found the blue bird of happiness which escapes so easily from the snare.  He will have joined Justice to Mercy and added Humility to Courage, and in the light of this self-knowledge he will have attained the zenith of a perpetual satisfaction.

III

LUCK

Some of the critics do not believe that the pinnacle of success stands only on the three pillars of Judgment, Industry, and Health.  They point out that I have omitted one vital factor—­Luck.  So widespread is this belief, largely pagan in its origin, that mere fortune either makes or unmakes men, that it seems worth while to discuss and refute this dangerous delusion.