de me feel that this was the position she
expected me to fill; and her faith spurred me on and gave me the power
to attain it."

Everything that a man has and is he owes to his mother. From her he
gets health, brain, encouragement, moral character, and all his chances
of success.

"In the shadow of every great man's fame walks his mother," says
Dorothy Dix. "She has paid the price of his success. She went down
into the Valley of the Shadow to give him life, and every day for years
and years thereafter she toiled incessantly to push him on toward his
goal.

"She gave the labor of her hands for his support; she poured into him
ambition when he grew discouraged; she supplemented his weakness with
her strength; she filled him with her hope and faith when his own
failed.

"At last he did the Big Thing, and people praised him, and acclaimed
him, and nobody thought of the quiet, insignificant little woman in the
background, who had been the real power behind the throne. Sometimes
even the king himself forgets who was the kingmaker."

Many a man is enjoying a fame which is really due to a self-effacing,
sacrificing mother. People hurrah for the governor, or mayor, or
congressman, but the real secret of his success is often tucked away in
that little unknown, unappreciated, unheralded mother. His education
and his chance to rise may have been due to her sacrifices.

It is a strange fact that our mothers, the molders of the world, should
get so little credit and should be so seldom mentioned among the
world's achievers. The world sees only the successful son; the mother
is but a round in the ladder upon which he has climbed. Her name or
face is seldom seen in the papers; only her son is lauded and held up
to our admiration. Yet it was that sweet, pathetic figure in the
background that made his success possible.

The woman who merits the greatest fame is the woman who gives a
brilliant mind to the world. The mothers of great men and women
deserve just as much honor as the great men and women themselves, and
they will receive it from the better understanding of the coming days.

"A wife may do much toward polishing up a man and boosting him up the
ladder, but unless his mother first gave him the intellect to
scintillate and the muscles to climb with, the wife labors in vain,"
continues Dorothy Dix, in the _Evening Journal_.

"You can not make a clod shine. You can not make a mollusk aspire.
You must have the