to advance, who has been in the habit of winning, is able to accomplish more than the man of much greater ability who has been cowed and whose faith in himself has been weakened or undermined by many failures.

The tonic of success is a marvelous producer as well as stimulant. By the law of mental magnetism one success attracts another, and after we begin to win it is comparatively easy to keep on winning. It is easy to persist, to press on, when everything seems to be coming our way. It requires no effort to be cheerful, hopeful, and brave, to work with vim, buoyancy and abounding enthusiasm, when the tide has turned and we are going up on the crest of the success wave. The consciousness of progress, of getting on in the world, stimulates the whole nature, turns drudgery into delight, and makes the faculties give out their best.

But when we are in the atmosphere of discouragement and failure, when our environment is stifling to growth, is poverty-stricken, permeated with the suggestion of failure, when the way is so dark that we cannot see, when even hope is shut out, then it takes a man or woman of sterling qualities to persist, to keep up courage and press on to the goal. When afflictions and sorrows confront us and we see the years slip by without any improvement or better prospects it takes stout hearts to keep plodding on as though we were advancing rapidly.

These are the conditions that test our stamina, our grit and courage. What we do when defeat stares us in the face is the real touchstone of character. But the very fact that success has time and again proved the means of awakening people to the knowledge of greater ability than they ever before dreamed they possessed, ought to hearten and encourage us to keep on no matter how often we fail. If we brace ourselves and continue to push forward we will ultimately win out.

There are many stalwart, noble souls who never discover their greatest power until everything has gone against them, until they have been stripped of everything for which most people struggle.

There are numberless people in the failure ranks to-day who, if they could only regain the courage they lost when reverses came, would soon get on their feet again.

Many of us are more or less in doubt as to the amount and quality of our ability until we have demonstrated our power through achievement. The first success arouses, feeds, latent energies, calls out more resources, and the second success still more, until a man begins to see that his potential achievement is practically limitless. With each new victory his courage rises, his ambition grows, his latent potencies develop and he constantly increases his power to do greater and greater things.

The stimulating force of achievement has been

strikingly illustrated in Theodore Roosevelt's career. Every one of Roosevelt's successive advances, from his election to the New York Legislature, soon after his graduation from Harvard University, to the office of Commissioner of Police of New York City, Governor of New York State, Assistant Secretary of the Navy, Vice-President, and President of the United States, showed a visible enlargement of his ability, a decided increase in his powers. After each one of these advances he seemed to take on new force. His marvelous energy, his enthusiasm, his dead-in-earnestness, seemed to increase and carry him forward by their

own momentum.

In every walk of life, in every career, the driving power of success is the same. Take, for example, the girl who thinks she has musical ability and who struggles for years against poverty and all sorts of opposition from her parents and others, who think she is laboring under a delusion, and who is on the point of giving up under discouragement when she makes a hit at some local concert. The stimulus is instantaneous. When the

people applaud her, show belief in her, she takes new heart, redoubles her efforts and finally wins out. On her way to an established place in the musical world, every little victory is a new encourager that helps her onward.

It is said that Henry Ford's action in the unprecedented raising of the salaries of all employees

in his factories has worked a miracle in the ambition, the aspirations, and the enthusiasm of every one of them. Even ordinary workmen, who never before exhibited any unusual ambition or energy, have braced up tremendously under the tonic of new hope, new possibilities in their lives.

I know a publisher who for many years had struggled against ill fortune. Every enterprise he undertook failed. The man had excellent ability, but for some reason or another everything seemed to go against him. He had almost lost heart when he purchased a newspaper which was so run down that he got it for a song. He made up his mind that this should be his last venture, and he threw himself into the work of building up his paper with the boldness and energy of desperation. The result was that he succeeded. In fact, his success was so complete and so rapid that it gave him an idea of tremendous possibilities in that line. His courage rose as his funds increased. He started other publications, and to-day he owns a number of successful papers and periodicals.

It is doubtful whether there is any human being who would not become discouraged after the depressing influence of years of defeat and failure. But to be temporarily discouraged is one thing; to give up the fight is another and quite a different thing. No one is beaten until he lays down his arms. The man or woman who continues to fight in spite of reverses can not be defeated.

During the Abolition movement in this country many of its enthusiastic and zealous advocates, men and women of high ideals, after working against fearful odds for a time, became discouraged and gave up. They could not stand the jeers and hisses, the abuse and denunciation, the physical violence of the pro-slavery element—in the early days so overwhelmingly preponderant. It took men of the Wendell Phillips and William Lloyd Garrison mold to stand up against the malignant thrusts of the enemy, the taunts, the coarse abuse, the rotten eggs, the danger of bodily injury, imprisonment, and the threats of the gallows. It took a Henry Ward Beecher to stand up against the pro-slavery mob in England, where sentiment among a large section was so rampant against abolition.

During the early days of our Civil War it was almost as much as a man's life was worth for an anti-slavery sympathizer to express his feelings before a public audience in that country. But in Beecher the mad mob met its match. What cared one of his stamina and fiber for the derision, the hisses and threats of a turbulent angry crowd? Unflinchingly he stood before them. They could not squelch or down him. For three hours he waited in a hall packed with slaverysympathizers, who were doing their best to silence him, to drive him off the platform. But he would not be driven off, he would not be silenced. There he stood firm and unafraid as eternal principle, until he compelled his baffled tormentors to listen.