ments,--all these expressions of energy are manifestations of
successful effort, and are necessary to the onward march of
civilization. Yet the visible achievement is not, after all, the
realization of the highest ideal of success.

The conditions of success may best be approached by a clearly defined
idea of what success itself means, what it stands for to us, what
proportion of our real life it represents. Success is the watchword of
American life--one might almost, indeed, say that it is made the test of
our national life to a far greater degree than in any other country.
The elements are well defined in Emerson's phrase of "the _flowing_
conditions of life." They are, indeed, more than merely plastic and
malleable; they are fluid, flowing, and the constant advance into higher
states of life is precisely in proportion to the mental and moral force
of the individual brought to bear upon them. Even this assertion,
however, is to hold in the light of the true conception of success
itself. We see a man whose life is conspicuously that of mental and
moral force, working faithfully and ably day by day, year by year, and
yet never being free from certain financial anxieties, if not financial
needs; while his neighbor, who is neither very learned nor able, nor yet
in any wise remarkable in his moral development, is living much after
the fashion of Midas, whose touch turned everything to gold. But is gold
the test of success?

The panorama of life is a complicated one. It used to be the fashion of
the novelists to represent the world of riches and fashion as the world
devoid of sympathy and love, and often, indeed, as devoid even of moral
principle; while the world of poverty and toil was held up as composed
of men and women whose lives were all unselfishness and sacrifice, and
as those who truly followed the example of Him who was meek and lowly of
heart. But the panorama of actual life reveals no such sharply defined
divisions as that. Virtue and vice are not checked off into special and
separate regions; wealth has its greatness of mind and beneficence of
sympathy and love, and poverty has its selfishness and cruelty and
injustice. Other things being equal, the command of unlimited means may
be so used as to make it one of the great blessings of life, and this
fact is attended and illustrated by such an increasing array of evidence
as to make the statement merely the trite one of every-day fact. Again,
that prominence in