HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN, AN IRON WILL & PUSHING TO THE FRONT. Orison Swett Marden
to get away from poverty has been a great man-developer. Had every human being been born with a silver spoon in his mouth—had there been no necessity put upon him to work—the race would still be in its infancy. Had everybody in this country been born wealthy, ours would be one of the dark ages. The vast resources of our land would still be undeveloped, the gold would still be in the mines, and our great cities would still be in the forest and the quarry. Civilization owes more to the perpetual struggle of man to get away from poverty than to anything else. We are so constituted that we make our greatest efforts and do our best work while struggling to attain that for which the heart longs. It is practically impossible for most people to make their utmost exertions without imperative necessity for it. It is the constant necessity to improve his condition that has urged man onward and developed the stamina and sterling character of the whole race. History abounds in stories of failures of men who started with wealth; and, on the other hand, it is illuminated with examples of those who owe everything to the spur of necessity.
A glance at the history of our own country will show that the vast majority of our successful men in every field were poor boys at the start. Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Andrew Jackson, Henry Clay, Daniel Webster, Abraham Lincoln, Horace Mann, George Peabody, Ulysses S. Grant, James A. Garfield—to mention but a few of the great names of past generations—rose to distinction from an iron environment and direst poverty. Our most useful and successful men of to-day have, also, been evolved from the school of want and stern necessity. Our great merchants, railroad presidents, university presidents and professors, inventors, scientists, manufacturers, statesmen—men in every line of human activity—have for the most part, been pushed forward by the goad of necessity, and led onward by the desire to make the most of themselves.
A youth, born and bred in the midst of luxury, who has always leaned upon others, who has never been obliged to- fight his way up to his own loaf, and who has been coddled from his infancy, rarely develops great stamina or staying power. He is like the weak sapling in the forest compared with the giant oak which has fought every inch of its way up from the acorn by struggling with storms and tempests.
Power is the result of force overcome. The giant is made strong in wrestling with difficulties. It is impossible for one who does not have to struggle and to fight obstacles to develop fiber or stamina. “To live without trial is to die but half a man.”
Strength of character is a thing which must be wrung out of obstacles overcome. Life is a great gymnasium, and no man who sits in a chair and watches the parallel bars and other apparatus ever develops muscles or endurance. A father, by exercising for his son, while he sits down, will never develop his muscle. The son will be a weakling until he uses the dumb-bells and pulley weights himself. How many fathers try to do the exercises for their boys, while they sit on soft benches or easy chairs, watching the process! And still those fathers wonder that their boys come out of the gymnasium weak, with as soft and flabby muscles as they had when they entered.
Isn’t it strange that so many successful men who take pride in having made themselves, and consider it the most fortunate thing in the world that they were thrown upon their own resources and were obliged to develop their independence and stamina and self-reliance, should work so hard to keep their children from having the same experience? Isn’t it strange that they should provide crutches so that it will be all the more difficult for them to walk alone?—that they should take away the strongest possible motive for the development of power by making it unnecessary for them to strive, by providing for every want and guarding them on all sides by wealth?
A famous artist, who was asked if he thought a young man who was studying with him would make a great painter, replied, “No, never. He has an income of six thousand pounds a year.” This artist knew how the great struggle against thwarting difficulties brings out power, and how hard it is to develop a strong, manly fiber in the sunshine of wealth.
How many young immigrants have come to this country uneducated, ignorant of our language, friendless and penniless, and yet have risen to positions of distinction and wealth, putting to shame tens of thousands of native-born youths who possessed every advantage of wealth, education, and opportunity, but who have never been heard from!
I have in mind a young man of this class who came to this country a comparatively short time ago, but who has already risen to a very important position wholly unaided. He is a remarkable example of a self-educated self-trained, self-disciplined man; and, in the persistent process of his development he has evolved a very strong, positive, aggressive character. He has brought out his latent powers and strengthened his weaker faculties. He has pruned out of his mentality and habits those things which would embarrass and hinder his progress, and has gained such a strong momentum that there seems to be scarcely any limits to what he is likely to become. His is an inspiring example of the possibilities of manhood in America, one which explodes all excuses of the poor boy and girl who think they have absolutely no chance to get up in the world.
I am no advocate of the blessings of poverty, considered as a finality. Poverty is of no value except as a vantage ground for a starting point. It is only good as is the apparatus in the gymnasium—to develop the man. In itself it is a curse—slavery—but it is the great thing to get away from; and it is the getting away from it—if honestly and conscientiously done—that calls out the man, that develops the human giant.
We did not always see, at the time, that what we got incidentally on the way up from poverty was infinitely better and more precious than the thing we were aiming for—a living, a competence; that the development of a strong man in the mighty struggle with necessity was a thousand times more valuable than the living, the money, or the property gained.
Grover Cleveland, who was once a poor clerk at a salary of fifty dollars a year, in speaking of poverty as a developer, says: “There is surely no development of mental traits, and no stimulation of the forces of true manhood so thorough and so imperiously effective as those produced by the combination of well-regulated ambition with the healthful rigors of poverty.”
It is the student who has to struggle hardest to obtain an education that gets the most discipline and good out of it. Boys who are “born scholars,” and who only need to read a lesson over to know it and to be able to pass an examination upon it, do not derive half so much from their college course as do those who have to fight hard for everything they get. It is not, as a rule, the youth who has a regular income and every want supplied by indulgent parents who makes the most of his opportunities at college, but the one who has to work his way through, who has to toil in college and out to make his expenses, or else go without an education.
What would the average youth do if he were not compelled by necessity to work—if he were not obliged to exert himself in order to get the thing he wants? If he already has all he wants, why should he struggle for more? Not one in ten thousand would go through the struggle with poverty—the wrestling with necessity—just to produce character and make himself a stronger man, but he would do it for selfish reasons—to satisfy his ambition and get that which he longs for for himself and those he loves.
“I’m not wasting my sympathy on the children of the poor,” says U. S. Senator J. P. Dolliver, once a poor boy himself. “What little sympathy I have I will give to the children of the rich. If you have one hundred thousand dollars, and give it to a boy to start him out in life, he doesn’t start. I suggest keeping that hundred thousand and that boy apart; it will be better for the boy. The cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born did not shelter the childhood of a king, but something better than a king—a man.”
The boy who is conscious that he has a fortune awaiting him says to himself, “What is the use of getting up early in the morning and working one’s life out? I have money enough coming to me to take care of me as long as I live.” So he turns over and takes another nap, while the boy who has nothing in the world but his own self to depend upon feels the spur of necessity forcing him out of bed in the morning. He knows there is no other way open for him but the way of struggle. He has nobody to lean on—nobody to help him. He knows that it is a question either of being a nobody or getting up and hustling for dear life.
Thus, shrewd Nature, in making man get that which he wants most by the way of necessity, brings about her great ends of civilization and character-development