firm on your dizzy height. Your fortune was
experience to you, joy, growth, discipline, and character; to him it
will be a temptation, an anxiety, which will probably dwarf him. It
was wings to you, it will be a dead weight to him; it was education to
you and expansion of your highest powers; to him it may mean inaction,
lethargy, indolence, weakness, ignorance. You have taken the priceless
spur--necessity--away from him, the spur which has goaded man to nearly
all the great achievements in the history of the world.

You thought it a kindness to deprive yourself in order that your son
might begin where you left off. You thought to spare him the drudgery,
the hardships, the deprivations, the lack of opportunities, the meagre
education, which you had on the old farm. But you have put a crutch
into his hand instead of a staff; you have taken away from him the
incentive to self-development, to self-elevation, to self-discipline
and self-help, without which no real success, no real happiness, no
great character is ever possible. His enthusiasm will evaporate, his
energy will be dissipated, his ambition, not being stimulated by the
struggle for self-elevation, will gradually die away. If you do
everything for your son and fight his battles for him, you will have a
weakling on your hands at twenty-one.

"My life is a wreck," said the dying Cyrus W. Field, "my fortune gone,
my home dishonored. Oh, I was so unkind to Edward when I thought I was
being kind. If I had only had firmness enough to compel my boys to
earn their living, then they would have known the meaning of money."
His table was covered with medals and certificates of honor from many
nations, in recognition of his great work for civilization in mooring
two continents side by side in thought, of the fame he had won and
could never lose. But grief shook the sands of life as he thought only
of the son who had brought disgrace upon a name before unsullied, the
wounds were sharper than those of a serpent's tooth.

During the great financial crisis of 1857 Maria Mitchell, who was
visiting England, asked an English lady what became of daughters when
no property was left them. "They live on their brothers," was the
reply. "But what becomes of the American daughters," asked the English
lady, "when there is no money left?" "They earn it," was the reply.

Men who have been bolstered up all their lives are seldom good for
anything in a crisis. When misfortune c