Doing Things Well.

M. WOOLSEY STRYKER, D.D., LL.D., President Hamilton College.

T

HE word well is allied to the word weal. It has the notion of will and of wish. It suggests both an ideal and a purpose. One might write a book upon the immorality of carelessness. Whoever consents to less than his thorough best is neither shrewd nor good. To do things by halves or thirds, to put only a part of one's self into the given task, whether the tool is a pen or a pick, is to add to the general bulk of unrighteousness.

The old sculptor who said of his carvings, whose backs were to be out of all possible inspection, "but the gods will see," touched this matter to the quick. A result which one passes for his honest best, and which he knows is not that, is a kind of counterfeit. This felony has its reflex penalty in the slow effacing of the capacity to excel. It reacts in the deterioration of those faculties which gain by exactions, and dwindle by indulgences. Skill is wit plus will. To accept conventional estimates, to excuse one's self by averages, to let facility cheat thoroughness, to intermit that stern self-censorship, which both fidelity and farsightedness command, is to be always an apprentice, and never a master.

This adroit shirking when it becomes deliberate, or even chronic, puts a period both to mental and moral growth. Putty will for a while cover a multitude of sins; but, whether men discover the ill doer or no, the sins of superficiality will find the man out and wreak their inward penalty by making his soul shallower.

The genuine man, whether his product is books or boots,

whether he works by the year or by the day, will not willingly sacrifice quality to quantity. He will value the idea that lies in that keen German proverb, "The good is enemy to the best," which is to say that the passable blinds us to the perfect, and that offering a medium result we come to be incapable of the maximum. The so-called "pretty good" thus becomes the very bad.

The men who renounce mediocrity and uplift the average of the world are such as are never complacent with any present performance, and who by the energy of a great ideal first grasp and then tread every rung of the ladder. When a genuine and capable nature apprehends that slovenly performance is positively depraved, and that individuality is only another term for exceptional devotion to some line of effort, there breaks upon him vertical light.

The

Such a vision of what is possible to faithfulness and determination, will, if it is adopted into purpose, exorcise lethargy, indecision, procrastination, and all their fellow devils. little idols of seeming and getting and all the inane pantheon will fall before the right-angled determination to do and never to be satisfied with half doing.

"Heartily know

That the half gods go

When the gods arrive."

Doing well does not mean that we are to pause because we have done as well as another, nor because yet another's best is to us at present inaccessible.

It is not a relative but an absolute well-doing that God and men have a right to require at our hands. However, that is a noble discouragement which gauges its progress up by the topmost rather than midmost competitor. I have always found help in a wise paragraph of Richard C. Trench-"Fit, square, polish thyself. Thy turn will come. Thou wilt not lie in the way. The builders will have need of thee. The wall has more need of thee than thou hast of the wall."

66

Seconds" may go cheap; but there is always a market for prime men. It will be found in the long run, and often in the short dash, that there is nothing more practical than a high and relentless ideal. And the ultimate and inestimable reward of work well done is the answer of a man's own soul in deep approval. Self-respect attends the outlay of one's total energy for worthy ends. The mere hireling, whether carpenter or king, is one who never tastes the pure springs of manliness. The solid soul who writes not alone on a crest, but on his heart, ich dien, attains "a peace above all earthly dignities." "In the morning," says Marcus Aurelius, "when thou art sluggish at rousing thee, let this thought be present, I am rising to a man's work.""

And the Sage of sages speaks yet as he spake through the seer of Patmos, "I know thy works." His "well done" will be the recognition and reward of all true men.

Self-Made if Ever Made.

IN

PROF. D. COLLIN WELLS, PH.D., Dartmouth College, New Hampshire.

'N July, 1870, the armies of France and Germany stood face to face upon the Rhine. Appearances favored France. She was richer and more populous; the organization of her forces appeared to be perfect. "On to Berlin," was the cry from Paris as the armies met. To the astonishment of Europe the French forces were cut in two and rolled into Metz and around Sedan like shore wreckage driven before a tidal wave. Within a few weeks, two great armies and the Emperor surrendered. Paris was taken, and German troopers paraded her streets. It was wonderful.

As men thought it out, they came to see that it was not France that was beaten, but only Louis Napoleon and a lot of nobles, influential because they bore titles or were favorites, Unhappy Louis Napoleon, the feeble bearer of a great name! Emperor, because of his name and criminal daring, upon the throne of his illustrious uncle, the man who made himself and the name! By a series of happy accidents he had gained some credit in the Crimean War, and at Magenta and Solferino. The unmasking time had come, as it always comes when sham, artificial toy-men meet genuine self-made men.

Such were the leaders on the German side. What a group they were, merely those four out of a great number,-every man the creator of his own greatness! King William, Bismarck, Von Moltke, and Von Roon.

66

William, strong, upright, warlike, and beloved by his people, every inch a king." The German soldier, disciplined to perfection in the school and barracks, equipped and supplied by

Von Roon, Minister of War, a master of administrative detail. Arms in perfect order, provisions enough and just where they were wanted, and a railway system so nicely organized as to handle the armies with utmost ease. Bismarck, the master mind of European politics, no miscalculation here. Above all, Von Moltke, chief of staff, who hurled armies by telegraph, as he sat at his cabinet, as easily as a master moves chessmen against a stupid opponent.

of

A rare man this Von Moltke! One who made himself ready for his opportunities beyond all men known to the modern world. Of an impoverished family, he rose very slowly and by his own merit. He yielded to no temptation, vice, or dishonesty, course, nor to the greater and ever present temptation to idleness, for he constantly worked to the limit of human endurance. He was ready for every emergency, not by accident, but because he made himself ready by painstaking labor, before the opportunity came. His favorite motto was, "Help yourself and others will help you." Hundreds of his age in the Prussian army were of nobler birth, thousands of greater fortune, but he made himself superior to them all by extraordinary fidelity and diligence.

The greatest master of strategy the world has ever seen was sixty-six years at school to himself before he was ready for his task. Though born with the century, and an army officer at nineteen, he was an old man when, in 1866, as Prussian chief of staff, he crushed Austria at Sadowa and drove her out of Germany. Four years later the silent, modest soldier of seventy, ready for the still greater opportunity, smote France, and changed the map of Europe. Glory and the field marshal's baton, after fifty-one years of hard work! No wonder Louis Napoleon was beaten by such men as he. All Louis Napoleons have been, and always will be. Opportunity always finds out frauds. It does not make men, but shows the world what they have made of themselves.

On January 25, 1830, in the Senate of the United States, Hayne of South Carolina presented the Southern doctrine of nullification and state rights, in a powerful and plausible speech.