generation does well to emphasize the principle of social sympathy
and social liability. But, because individual worth is being
threatened, the time seems to have fully come for also emphasizing
man's duty to love and make the most of himself. Of late, self-care
and self-enrichment, as a principle of life, have been berated and
harshly condemned. Yet Christ recognized selfness as a principle most
proper and praiseworthy and one to be used as the basis and measure of
all moral worth. By so much as man loves and secures for himself the
physical benefits and social incitements of life, by that much he is
to love his fellows. And the failure to love one's self wisely and
passionately ends by making it impossible for man to love his fellows.
Plato's thought is ever with us: "The granary must be filled before
the poor are fed; knowledge must be gained before knowledge is given."
Happy the philanthropist whose generosity has founded school or
library. But this gift of to-day is made possible only by the industry
and thrift of yesterday. Happy the surgeon whose skill in a crisis
hour has saved some valuable life. But the hand that performs what
seems a miracle of surgery has back of it twenty years of vigilant
study and practice.

Ours is a world in which the amount of wisdom or wealth or friendship
to be distributed is predetermined by the amount required. The flow of
the faucet is determined by the fullness of the reservoir. The speed
of the electric car is fixed by the energy stored in the power house.
The power of the piston is in the push of the accumulated steam. The
Nile has force to feed civilizations, because there are a thousand
streams and rivers, a thousand hills and mountains lying back of the
Nile's current, and crowding it forward. If we could sit down by the
famous Santa Barbara vine, and speaking with it as with a familiar
friend, ask how it came to give man a half-ton of purple treasure in a
single summer, the reply would be that this rich treasure was grown
and given in one summer because two hundred summers were given to
growing a vast root and trunk, to large stems and stalks.

When Nestor stood forth before the Greek generals and counseled attack
upon Troy, he said: "The secret of victory is in getting a good
ready." Wendell Phillips was once asked how he acquired his skill in
the oratory of the lost arts. The answer was: "By getting a hundred
nights of delivery back of me." Shakespeare tells us all that