thousand he now greatly extended his business with a purpose to become one of the merchant princes of the land. But while he could conduct his little business well, he was not adapted to work his enlarged field, and, making poor investments, he soon became bankrupt, and was subsequently obliged to seek work as a clerk in the very store of which he had been the former owner. The fourth to whom the fortune came was a poor widow unblessed of suitors. She at once became " very attractive" to a swarm of admirers, one of whom she soon married. He was a gay, dashing cavalier and spent the fortune for her in an amazingly short time. Then they separated. Then came a divorce, and she was left far worse off than when a "poor, lone widow woman." The fifth fortunate owner of the prize was a noted singer in his country, who had already earned a small competence by his talent. He gave up his profession and launched out as a banker and broker, intent on becoming a millionaire. But he quickly found others more skillful than he, and they soon took from him the hundred thousand and the little fortune, and he had to begin life over again. The sixth to win was a poor, laboring man of naturally penurious habits. When the gold came to him, he hoarded it most religiously, loaning it only at exorbitant rates, and constantly fretting lest some of it should be lost or stolen. He became a sordid, miserable miser, living for and gloating only over gold, and was at last meaner than the meanest poverty could make him. While his stock of gold increased, his soul grew smaller and smaller, and he died as many another has done, shamefully, wickedly rich,-but only in gold. The seventh to whom the fortune came, led, like most of the others, the spendthrift's short, gay life to poverty and misery and ruin, and lost his all when he parted with righteousness to gain the unhallowed gold.

If the time, energy, ingenuity and perseverance exercised by the thousands in trying to make a fortune quickly and by illegitimate means were turned into an honest channel the world would be infinitely better, happiness and prosperity more general, and there would be less poverty, vice, and crime.

Cutting 'Cross Lots to Success.

IT

GEORGE F. MOSHER, LL.D., President Hillsdale College, Mich.

T is generally not a good thing to attempt. Napoleon III. tried it at Sedan and was ignominiously defeated. Grant fought it out "on this line," counting neither time nor effort as too costly for the end in view. From the time of Alexander, who desired his preceptor to show him some shorter and easier way to learn geometry, men have found that the shortest cut to success has been the patient pursuit of a toilsome and possibly tedious way.

But the "short cut" has a siren voice and mien. It especially tempts the business man. If three-fourths of the men who enter business make a failure of it, it will be found that threefourths of the failures are among those who have tried the short cut. Tweed and his famous ring tried it. Winslow, since 1876 in hiding in some quarter of the globe, tried it. The staked-out towns in our western country, with more vacant than occupied lots, and with more grass than traffic in their streets, are signs of it. If any of these have succeeded, it has been because patient industry and conservative capital have centered there and furnished the conditions which have made the boom a bargain, and given the corner lot its value.

The foundation of business prosperity may be laid in some crucial moment, as when one resists some great temptation to be dishonest, and masters the evil tendency; but the building of the structure itself is a long task. "There is nothing," said Beecher, "like a fixed, steady aim, with an honorable purpose." An esteemed citizen of Massachusetts died in 1893 leaving an

honorable name and thirty million dollars. The beginnings of both his wealth and his good name lay in the purpose rigidly adhered to by his grandfather "to make a little better shovel than anybody else,-in fact, the best shovel that can be made." "I know of no short cut to wealth," said the elder Rothschild, "but I have generally found it to be a good rule to buy when others wanted to sell, and to sell when others wanted to buy." Take care of the cents," said Stephen Girard, "the dollars will take care of themselves." "No abilities, however splendid," said the great merchant prince of New York city, "can command success without intense labor and persevering application." "This one hundred dollars shall gain me one thousand," the writer heard a young man say at Monte Carlo in 1882. He played, lost a fortune of seven thousand dollars in twentyfour hours, and then sent a bullet through his brain in the garden of the gambling hall. The Bible did not contradict sound business experience in pronouncing a woe on those "who make haste to be rich."

The same temptation is also strong for the student and the professional man. Two or three hours on a given lesson when one may "cram" the text into the mind in an hour or less; seven years in the college course and the professional school when one might buy a diploma at a trifling cost of money and almost of no time, seem like great obstacles to the young man or woman impatient of discipline, or delay. The preacher who buys or borrows his sermons, the lawyer who works for fees rather than to protect truth and justice, the editor who drives his brain with stimulants, the physician who is willing to violate law and morality because "there is money in it,"-all these are examples of the prevailing desire to win success suddenly, and of its failure. They are the men who are "plucked" at commencement time, who soon come to be known in the newspaper offices as "penny-a-liners," and who are designated by the honorable and painstaking members of the other professions as "quacks," "plagiarists," and "pettifoggers." Wasted energies, a discredited name, public distrust, poverty and

shame, these are among the penalties to those who try to win success at the expense of virtue and honor.

After all, it depends mainly on the true nature of success, and whether it lies in the direction of the short cut or not. That is not success which is not essentially worthy of achievement, and a worthy end is spoiled if it be sought by base means. Given the worthy end, and sometimes the dash wins it. It was thus that Napoleon I. added another kingdom to his empire at Marengo, and that Sheridan won a victory at Winchester. It is the quick move that often decides in business ventures. "Be an off-hand man; make your bargains at once," was the advice of the great English financier to his apprentice. But that implies genius, and even genius somebody has defined as being "infinite patience." The fable of the hare and the tortoise still has its message for this rushing age. "Prayer and provender," says the proverb, "hinder no man's journey. There is no time lost in sharpening the scythe."

Even if there be such a possibility as "cutting 'cross lots to success," it is only in exceptional cases, and doubtless in those cases somebody's care and persistence have gained what somebody else's smartness has seized. It is Goodyear in his rude laboratory enduring poverty and failure until the pasty rubber is at length hardened; it is Edison biding his time in baggage car and in printing office until that mysterious light and power glows and throbs at his command; it is Carey on his cobbler's bench nourishing the great purpose that at length carried the message of love to benighted India;-these are the cases and examples of true success.

Macaulay describes the boy Warren Hastings, then a lad of seven, lying on the banks of the stream which flowed through his ancestral estates, and vowing in his poverty and weakness to regain that lost domain. That purpose never forsook him. He pursued it with that calm but unyielding will which was one of his characteristics. In India ruling fifty million people, amid all the distracting cares of war, finance, and legislation, through all the turns of his sad and eventful career, this end was never

lost sight of, and before his long public life, so singularly checkered with good and evil, honor and shame, was ended, he had become Hastings of Daylesford, and when at length he died, it was to this home of his fathers that he was borne for burial.

Most real successes are won that way. It is the old route of patience and labor. It is lesson after lesson with the scholar, it is venture after venture with the merchant, it is trial after trial with the inventor, it is voyage after voyage, even against mutiny and tempest, with the discoverer, it is picture after picture with the painter, even failure after failure with the poet and writer, that at length wins this prize that most men are seeking. If now and then, with Byron, some one awakes to find himself suddenly famous, yet the majority of people find, with the Duke of Wellington, that "the secret of success is firmly doing your duty in that station of life to which it has pleased God to call you."