tors. Your measure is and should be taken for what your own net
worth is.

The aristocracy of boodle is the slimmest aristocracy of all. Yet there
are more people who try to get into that lodge than any other. The
possession of the dollar seems to be the ambition of everyone, and
usually the first thing we try to find out about a man is "how much is
he worth?" The thinker, however, knows that the possession of money
doesn't make a man any better than his neighbor who has no money--their
morals and their acts being even.

Brains. That's the true aristocracy. The professor in college who has
spent a lifetime in study and has devoted his talents to uplifting
mankind is an aristocrat. He may be getting two or three thousand
dollars a year, while his brother with lesser knowledge is getting ten
times that much in another vocation. The aristocracy of brains always
has been, is now and ever will be the enduring aristocracy. Even those
who belong to the aristocracies of birth and boodle find they are sham
counterfeits and many of them turn to study and to good impulses hoping
they may get into the lodge of the aristocracy of brain.

In business the aristocracy of birth or the aristocracy of boodle is a
decided handicap. They make the individual think he is superior and he
is above doing things which seem to him trivial, because he thinks he
is a superior being. The man with brains, however, digs as well as
climbs. Without brains, business would go to the dogs, for if business
were conducted by men of birth and boodle without brains, you can
easily see that the whole fabric would fall to pieces.

Backbone and Wishbone

In proportion as a man's backbone weakens his wishbone seems to
develop.

The ten dollar a week man spends his time saying: "I wish I had the
luck other people have." He says: "I wish I had this place, or I wish I
had that job." He is ever wishing.

Things in our body, whether muscle or bone, develop by usage, and if we
use the wishbone all the time it will develop into huge proportions. On
the other hand if we develop our backbone and use it frequently, we may
not have cause to use the wishbone so much.

Brace up. Stand erect. Strengthen your backbone and, with it, your jaw
bone.

Say "I will" instead of "I wish." The world bestows her prizes on men
with backbone and the blanks on those who use their wishbone.

Do Good

Doing good is planting seed, the harvest may not show at present