WHAT CAN WE DO FOR THESE RANK FAILURES?

Nothing.  We can take warning from them.  “A failure establishes only this,” says Bovee, “that our determination was not strong enough.”  This is very nearly the truth.  We fail because we feel the game to be hardly worth the candle.  We are not willing to pay the price and the value of success.  We had rather slide down the hill than climb up higher.  When you hit your head against a door in the dark, you are stunned.  You are then twice as likely as before to hurt yourself.  Bear that in mind.  Stop.  Move with the greatest of caution.

THIS IS WHY SHAKSPEARE SAYS

that when sorrows come, they come not single spies, but in battalions.  When you have failed, try and get a new start, clear of the consequences of the last disaster.  You know exactly where you erred, and can guard against the weak places in your judgment, the cause of your defeat.  Above all, study the “dead rank failure” in your community, and do everything precisely opposite to the way he invariably operates.

[Illustration]

GAINS AND BRAINS.

                               Virtue without success
     Is a fair picture shown by an ill light;
     But lucky men are favorites of heaven: 
     All own the chief, when fortune owns the cause.—­Dryden.

Lucky men are favorites of heaven, simply because they have been endowed with that charming blindness which keeps them from seeing when they are whipped in the battle of life.  The man of success has usually a greater sense of the value of a ten-dollar note than his clerk who, like the braggart Pistol, has got the world for his oyster, and expects to open that tough old mollusk with his rusty sword.  The man of success sees each young helper around him given better opportunities than he himself had to begin with.  His astonishment that inexperienced young men should think they have no chance is always noticeable.  He half-envies some stripling soldier in the battle who is yet a high private in the rear rank.  The high private cannot understand how this envy can be possible, and will not believe it exists.  If you will study the lucky man you will see that his “luck” is usually more of a matter of course than an extraordinary happening.  Reverse the thing, and you can comprehend it.  Here is a brakeman.  He gets killed by the cars.

WAS IT NOT ASTONISHING?

Well, yes, it was; still, if anybody were going to be killed, the brakeman would be the most likely to be the victim.  Go to the accident insurance office and observe how little anxious they are to take such a risk, and what an enormous premium they ask when they do take one!  Here is a man running a powder-factory.  The insurance men will not touch him at all!  Now our man of success is like the brakeman, in a sense.  He is always on the train, always between the cars, always standing in the frog.  If any such thing as luck is out, it must hit him, or some other brakeman like him.  Certainly, it will not touch the man asleep in his house