-a chance to make good, just as the acorn makes good by becoming a magnificent oak. We are ushered into this world of marvelous possibilities and beauties, with ability to match our chance. We are given all of the tools necessary to develop this ability, to equip ourselves superbly for our work, the work that was born with us.

Each one of us has been assigned an important part in the great drama of life, a part which no one else can play, and which will make or mar the success of the whole according to whether we make it a bungle or a masterpiece. We have our chance to play a noble part, and we shall be judged by the use we make of it. On this will depend our further advancement. The questions that will be asked each actor at the close of this life drama are: "What have you to show as a result of your opportunities? What message did your life work leave behind you? What did it mean to the world, to your fellow-men? What did it mean to you? Did you look upon it as an opportunity to make the grandest possible man of yourself? What did you do with the talents you had? Did you wrap them in a napkin and bury them, or did you put them out to interest?

"You were sent to the world, which contains the cumulative force and the facilities of thousands of years of civilization, the inventions and discoveries of millions of people who preceded you. They lifted civilization up to where you found it.

What did it mean to you? Did you push it along a little further? Did you appreciate all you owed to those who had gone before you, all that they had done in making your life so much easier and pleasanter than theirs had been; in passing up to you all the accumulated expertness and facility they had gained in struggling with hard conditions so that you could do your work so much better and with so much less labor and strain?"

It seems unbelievable that any human being would fail to back up his chance with all the force and resources he possesses, and yet most people do not look at this magnificent life chance as anything very remarkable. In fact, multitudes look upon it very indifferently, look upon life as a sort of a bore, living getting as drudgery, when it is really the only means of developing a man, of calling out a superb character.

When

The task set us is big enough and great enough to call out every resource of a man, physical, spiritual, and mental, to measure up to it. we see all about us many men who were ambitious to make good, whose whole careers have been wrecked by some miserable little weakness, some yellow streak or loose screw somewhere in their make-up, it certainly behooves us to remedy these things in ourselves. It behooves us to make our foundations so broad and deep, our preparation so thorough, and our defenses against failure so impregnable that there will be no possibility of defeat in the great work before us.

UNTIL A BETTER MAN

COMES ALONG

All the world cries: "We want a man." Don't look so far for this man. You have him right at hand—it is you, it is I, it is each one of us.— Dumas.

Before man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

Lowell.

HAVE two hundred millions in my coffers, but I would give them all for Marshal Ney!" exclaimed Napoleon in a great emergency. The Corsican conqueror wanted a man—and this has been the great cry, since the world began, "Give us a man."

The scarcest thing in the world is a real man. The hardest thing to find is a fully developed human being, a man who has delved down into himself and brought out and cultivated his highest possibilities, a man with concentrated energy, a man who has a definite purpose and knows how to fling his life out to it with all the weight of his being. Such a man is needed in every calling.

This century calls loudly for men who know how to transmute their knowledge into power. We are living in a very practical age; theories and theorists are not in demand. The cry is ever for

a man who can deliver the goods, a man possessing practical ability and executive force.

"How long do you think I will be able to keep my place?" an anxious employee asked his employer. "Until a better man comes along," was the prompt reply. "I make it a rule to better the personnel of my employees whenever a better man or woman appears. This is the way I keep up the high standard of my establishment. I am always weeding out the culls, displacing good with better, better with best. This is my rule."

This may sound very cold-blooded. But it is business, and there is no sentiment in business. Everyone in this man's model establishment knows that he can only hold his job until his better comes along, and this is a perpetual spur to each employee, from the highest to the lowest, to keep constantly growing and improving, making himself the biggest man it is possible for him to be.

How many of those who grumble about the hardness of luck, of fate, the cruelty of the world do this? How many of us can say with Jean Paul Richter, "I have made as much of myself as could be made of the stuff, and no man should require more"?

Let no man dare complain that he has been ill treated by the world until he has made the most of "the stuff" that was given him, the talents and possibilities the Creator implanted in him.

This is what the new progressive era expec:s

from every child born to its privileges and opportunities that he raise to its highest possible value, "the stuff" that has been given him. To do this he must hammer out a place for himself by "steady and regular blows" or be content to leave "the stuff" in as crude and undeveloped a state as that in which he received it.

Every now and then in human history Nature has thrown out a specimen which has approximated the man or woman God intended; but most of us are dwarfs of what we were expected to be, what we are capable of being, if we only do our part in finishing the work the Creator began— making man.

Every one has two callings. One is the art or profession, the occupation or work, whatever it may be, which shall give him a living, provide for his material wants; the other, the highest call which comes to every human being, is first, to be a

man.

The secret of Garfield's success was that from the start he heard and obeyed the higher call. When but a mere boy he was asked what he intended to do in life. He replied, "I am going to try to make myself a man; for, if I do not do that first I shall not be able to make anything of myself." This is the secret of every true success.

To be a large, full-rounded man, not merely a great engineer or a great merchant, an eminent lawyer or physician, ought to be a man's principal