o the end of his
life, and had time and a little space of calm from which to look back upon
it, who did not know and acknowledge that it was what he had done
unselfishly and for others, and nothing else, that satisfied him in the
retrospect, and made him feel that he had played the man. That alone seems
to him the real measure of himself, the real standard of his manhood. And
so men grow by having responsibility laid upon them, the burden of other
people's business. Their powers are put out at interest, and they get usury
in kind. They are like men multiplied. Each counts manifold. Men who live
with an eye only upon what is their own are dwarfed beside them--seem
fractions while they are integers. The trustworthiness of men trusted seems
often to grow with the trust.

It is for this reason that men are in love with power and greatness: it
affords them so pleasurable an expansion of faculty, so large a run for
their minds, an exercise of spirit so various and refreshing; they have the
freedom of so wide a tract of the world of affairs. But if they use power
only for their own ends, if there be no unselfish service in it, if its
object be only their personal aggrandizement, their love to see other men
tools in their hands, they go out of the world small, disquieted, beggared,
no enlargement of soul vouchsafed them, no usury of satisfaction. They have
added nothing to themselves. Mental and physical powers alike grow by use,
as every one knows; but labor for one's self alone is like exercise in a
gymnasium. No healthy man can remain satisfied with it, or regard it as
anything but a preparation for tasks in the open, amid the affairs of the
world--not sport, but business--where there is no orderly apparatus, and
every man must devise the means by which he is to make the most of himself.
To make the most of himself means the multiplication of his activities, and
he must turn away from himself for that. He looks about him, studies the
face of business or of affairs, catches some intimation of their larger
objects, is guided by the intimation, and presently finds himself part of
the motive force of communities or of nations. It makes no difference how
small a part, how insignificant, how unnoticed. When his powers begin to
play outward, and he loves the task at hand not because it gains him a
livelihood but because it makes him a life, he has come to himself.

Necessity is no mother to enthusiasm. Necessity carries a whip. Its