You are at no disadvantage because the people do not have for you that admiration which the doing of things compels.  The fact that your neighbors do not suspect your potentialities is really an advantage.  If you have that righteous and permissible craft which every man should have, and if you take advantage of it, you can begin the work which will bring you success without that envy and competition, that friction of jealousy, which every man of acknowledged power arouses.  But if you, a man of fifty or over, go into a new environment, you carry with you that heaviest of all burdens, the necessity of making explanations.

“Why have you come among us at your age?” the people ask.  “What is the story of your past?” they very properly inquire.  “It must be that you are not a man of integrity which commanded the respect and support of your old home,” they will not unnaturally conclude; “either this, or else you were a failure there.”

These are the two necessary and inevitable deductions, and either horn of that cruel dilemma of logic is enough to impale you.  If you escape them, you do it because you do not attract notice, and this, in itself, is failure.  And in any event, to gain the substantial confidence of the people you must spend several years of right living among them.  And you have no time to waste in building up confidence at your period of life.  That is an asset which your whole career of unsuccessful probity should have accumulated for you; and it is dissipated if you remove from among those in whose minds that belief in you exists.

I have seen this serious error made so many times, and nearly always with such destroying results, that I give it more space than its relative proportion deserves.  I have in mind now two men who did precisely this thing.  Their success in the two country towns where they had lived had been reasonable, but not considerable.  It did not appear to be success at all to them, though.

They were quite sure that they were bigger than their opportunities—­yes, that was what was the matter—­they needed larger opportunities, “larger fields,” more “scope” for their powers.  Each man was about fifty years of age.  Each was a man of far more than ordinary talent.  Each removed to a city.  And in the city which each chose, each miserably, utterly, hopelessly failed.

Had they remained where for years they had been planting the seeds of confidence, respect, and achievement, and had they awaited the slow processes of the harvest, each man would soon have become the leading man in his town, county, and district, and would have remained so until the end of his days; for the harvest was nearly theirs.  They did not understand that while it takes a long time to prepare the soil and sow the seed, and let it grow to maturity, the ripening of the harvest comes in a few golden days.

It is true that there are exceptions to the above rule—­the rule of abiding, of standing fast.  But the exception is justified only when you have made so many definite, tangible, and public failures in your old home that there is absolutely no possibility of further hope.  Of course, if you are a man of lion heart and lion power, this is another matter.  Any place on earth is a fit field for achievement by these savages of enterprise.