directed to _you_. Burst the
trammels that impede your progress, and cling to hope. Place high thy
standard, and with a firm tread and fearless eye press steadily onward.

Not ease, but effort, not facility, but difficulty, makes men.
Toilsome culture is the price of great success, and the slow growth of
a great character is one of its special necessities. Many of our best
poets

"Are cradled into poetry by wrong,
And learn in suffering what they teach in song."

Byron was stung into a determination to go to the top by a scathing
criticism of his first book, "Hours of Idleness," published when he was
but nineteen years of age. Macaulay said, "There is scarce an instance
in history of so sudden a rise to so dizzy an eminence as Byron
reached." In a few years he stood by the side of such men as Scott,
Southey, and Campbell, and died at thirty-seven, that age so fatal to
genius. Many an orator like "stuttering Jack Curran," or "Orator Mum,"
as he was once called, has been spurred into eloquence by ridicule and
abuse.

This is the crutch age. "Helps" and "aids" are advertised everywhere.
We have institutes, colleges, universities, teachers, books, libraries,
newspapers, magazines. Our thinking is done for us. Our problems are
all worked out in "explanations" and "keys." Our boys are too often
tutored through college with very little study. "Short roads" and
"abridged methods" are characteristic of the century. Ingenious
methods are used everywhere to get the drudgery out of the college
course. Newspapers give us our politics, and preachers our religion.
Self-help and self-reliance are getting old fashioned. Nature, as if
conscious of delayed blessings, has rushed to man's relief with her
wondrous forces, and undertakes to do the world's drudgery and
emancipate him from Eden's curse.

But do not misinterpret her edict. She emancipates from the lower only
to call to the higher. She does not bid the world go and play while
she does the work. She emancipates the muscles only to employ the
brain and heart.

The most beautiful as well as the strongest characters are not
developed in warm climates, where man finds his bread ready made on
trees, and where exertion is a great effort, but rather in a trying
climate and on a stubborn soil. It is no chance that returns to the
Hindoo ryot a penny and to the American laborer a dollar for his daily
toil; that makes Mexico with its mineral wealth poor, and N