all reap if ye faint not."

CHAPTER XXXII

RAISING OF VALUES

"Destiny is not about thee, but within,--
Thyself must make thyself."

"The world is no longer clay, but rather iron in the hands of its
workers," says Emerson, "and men have got to hammer out a place for
themselves by steady and rugged blows."

To make the most of your "stuff," be it cloth, iron, or
character,--this is success. Raising common "stuff" to priceless value
is great success.

The man who first takes the rough bar of wrought iron may be a
blacksmith, who has only partly learned his trade, and has no ambition
to rise above his anvil. He thinks that the best possible thing he can
do with his bar is to make it into horseshoes, and congratulates
himself upon his success. He reasons that the rough lump of iron is
worth only two or three cents a pound, and that it is not worth while
to spend much time or labor on it. His enormous muscles and small
skill have raised the value of the iron from one dollar, perhaps, to
ten dollars.

Along comes a cutler, with a little better education, a little more
ambition, a little finer perception, and says to the blacksmith: "Is
this all you can see in that iron? Give me a bar, and I will show you
what brains and skill and hard work can make of it." He sees a little
further into the rough bar. He has studied many processes of hardening
and tempering; he has tools, grinding and polishing wheels, and
annealing furnaces. The iron is fused, carbonized into steel, drawn
out, forged, tempered, heated white-hot, plunged into cold water or oil
to improve its temper, and ground and polished with great care and
patience. When this work is done, he shows the astonished blacksmith
two thousand dollars' worth of knife-blades where the latter only saw
ten dollars' worth of crude horseshoes. The value has been greatly
raised by the refining process.

"Knife-blades are all very well, if you can make nothing better," says
another artisan, to whom the cutler has shown the triumph of his art,
"but you haven't half brought out what is in that bar of iron. I see a
higher and better use; I have made a study of iron, and know what there
is in it and what can be made of it."

This artisan has a more delicate touch, a finer perception, a better
training, a higher ideal, and superior determination, which enable him
to look still further into the molecules of the rough bar,--past the
horse-shoes, past the kn