Courage is adversity’s lamp.  Perhaps the young man’s courage is more sorely tried than that of the man of middle age, for age dreads the whip of events, while youth champs their bit.  Youth cannot endure the thought of a long siege.  The ladders must be put against the walls, the breach must be clambered through, and if the citadel be strong, the rash onset will be repulsed with heavy loss.  But Hope dotes on youth.  The young are her flock, her fold, her children.  Into the hands of her children she puts the scimitar of courage, and bids them go forth again.  Let us suppose you have been cast down your ladder, and have little but your courage.  It may be necessary to leave your pleasant little town and seek employment where men are used as machines—­in the great cities.  Such a fate is, indeed, a sad reverse.  The safety of home, the magazines of moral ammunition stored all about you, the bomb-proofs against the shells of soul-destruction aimed at every soldier in life, will all be torn from you, and you will be as a Knight of the Cross, alone on the desert.  Perhaps

YOU HAVE REACHED THE GREAT CITY.

Now buckle on your armor.  You do not need an intrepid courage, now; intrepid courage may have brought you here; intrepid courage is but a holiday kind of a virtue, to be seldom exercised, as experience will teach you.  You need firmness to resist all kinds of attacks.  You need good-nature, and yet you must repel temptation with a look as black as Erebus.  You need affability, yet you must speak almost by rote, and the opportunities to keep from speaking outnumber the exigencies in which you must speak by ten to one.  You must be tender, and yet you must be cruel as a surgeon.  Without these opposites well balanced in your character, you will not fight the battle successfully.

NAPOLEON

won his battles by hurling ten thousand men upon two thousand.  Simple, was it not?  Now you are one young soldier.  You will have to find a place in the enemy’s lines which is even weaker than you before you can throw yourself against it with success.  You, therefore, cannot be too circumspect.  If the General pushes two thousand men against one thousand, on ground that is otherwise even, he is a wise leader, but if he finds four thousand enemies there, and if his principal attack is hazarded in the action, he is always accounted a daring fool.  Let me recall

THE ATTACK OF A YOUNG MAN

who broke through the enemy’s lines, in the City of Chicago.  He got eight dollars a week in a city on the Mississippi River, and was led to believe that, if he went to Chicago, he could get ten dollars.  He was employed as a clerk in a Commercial Agency, a business which aims to ascertain the standing and degree of success or lack of fortune of the retail dealers of the region it covers.  He felt that