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what should be done whether they do it or not. Our social code is not a
complicated one, and there is no excuse except for the youngsters who
have just growed up like Topsy or have been brought up by jerks like
Pip. It is, without doubt, easier to be polite among people who are
naturally courteous than among those who snap and snarl at one another,
but it is a mistake to place too much emphasis on this part of it. Too
many men--business men, at that--have come up out of the mire for us to
be able to offer elaborate apologies for those who have stayed in it.
The background is of minor importance. A cockroach is a cockroach
anywhere you put him.

It is easy to envy the men who have had superior advantages, and many a
man feels that if he had another's chance he, too, might have become a
great gentleman. It is an idle speculation. His own opportunities are
the only ones any man can attend to, and if he is sensible he will take
quick advantage of those that come, not in dreams, but in reality, and
will remember what a very sagacious English statesman said about matters
of even graver import: "It makes no difference where you are going.
You've got to start from where you are."

The lack of early training is a handicap but not a formidable one,
especially to a business man. As the Spaniards say, there is little
curiosity about the pedigree of a good man. And no man needs to be
ashamed of his origin. The president of a firm would naturally be
interested in the ancestry of a young man who came to ask him for the
hand of his daughter, but if the man has come to sell a bill of goods he
does not care a snap. In discussions of the social evil it is often said
that every child has a right to be well born, but Robert Louis Stevenson
saw more deeply and spoke more truly when he said, "We are all nobly
born; fortunate those who know it; blessed those who remember."

The finest Gentleman the world has ever seen was born some two thousand
years ago to the wife of a carpenter in Bethlehem and spent most of His
time among fishermen, tax-collectors, cripples, lepers, and outcasts of
various sorts; and yet in the entire record of His short and troubled
life there is not one mention of an ungraceful or an ungainly action. He
was careful to observe even the trivialities of social life. Mary and
Martha were quarreling before dinner. He quieted them with a few
gracious words. The people at the marriage feast at Cana were worried
beca