h must be liquidated at any cost. It
is precisely in time of depression that the men of business ought to
press their selling and organise their sales organisation to the utmost
limit. If finance, commerce, and industry could only be persuaded to
take this course in the slack times, then every action in this direction
would cure the evil by lessening the duration of the bad times. Not
till the surplus stocks have been unloaded will the winter pass and the
summer come again in the enterprise of the world. Selling is the final
cure for depression.

XI

FAILURE

The bitterest thing in life is failure, and the pity is that it is
almost always the result of some avoidable error or misconception. With
the rare exception of a man who is by nature a criminal or a waster,
there need be no such thing as failure. Every man has a career before
him, or, at worst, every man can find a niche in the social order into
which he can fit himself with success.

The trouble in so many cases is that it takes time and opportunity for a
man to discover in what direction his natural bent lies. He springs from
a certain stock or class, and the circumstances which surround him in
youth naturally dictate to him the choice of a career. In many cases it
will be a method of living to which he is totally unsuited. But once he
is embarked on it the clogs are about his feet, and it is hard to break
away and begin all over again. And this ill-fitting of men to jobs may
not even embrace so wide a divergence as that between one kind of
activity and business and another. A young man may be in the right
business for him, and yet in the wrong department of it. In any case,
the result is the same. The employer votes him no use, or at least just
passable, or second rate. Much worse, the employee knows himself that he
has failed to make good, and that at the best nothing but a career of
mediocrity stretches out before him. He admits a failure, and by that
very act of admission he has failed. The waters of despair close above
his head, and the consequence may be ruin.

Such mistakes spring from a wrong conception of the nature of the human
mind. We are too apt to believe in a kind of abstraction called "general
ability," which is expected to exhibit itself under any and every
condition. According to this doctrine, if a man is clever at one thing
or successful under one set of circumstances, he must be equally clever
at everything and equally successf