There are successes more melancholy than any failure. There are failures more noble than success. The man who began life as a ploughboy, who went from his father's farm to the great city with his wardrobe tied up in his handkerchief, and one dollar in his pocket, and who by application, economy, and forecast has amassed a fortune, is not necessarily a successful man. If his object was to amass a fortune, he is so far successful; but it is a mean and miserable object, and his life would be a contemptible, if it were not a terrible, failure.
We do not keep this sufficiently in mind. American society, and perhaps all society, is too apt to do homage to material prosperity; but material prosperity may be obtained by the sacrifice of moral grandeur; and so obtained, it is an apple of Sodom. A man may call out his whole energy, wield all his power, and wealth follow as one of the results. This is well.
Wealth may even be an object, if it be a subordinate object,--the servant of a higher power. Wealth may minister to the best part of man,--but only minister, not master. Only as a minister it deserves regard. When it usurps the throne and becomes monarch, it is of all things most pitiful and abject.
The man who sets out with the determination to be rich as an end, sets out with a very ignoble determination; and he who seeks or values wealth for the respect which it secures and the position it gives, is not very much higher in the scale; yet such people are often held up to the admiration and imitation of American youth; and oftener still have those men been held up for imitation who, whether by determination or drift, had become rich, and whose sole claim to distinction was that they had become rich. Again and again I have seen "success" which seemed to me to be the brand of ignominy rather than the stamp of worth,--the epitaph of culture, if not of character. I look on with a profound and regretful pity. You successful,--YOU! with half your powers lying dormant,--you, with your imagination stifled, your conscience unfaithful, your chivalry deadened into shrewdness, your religion a thing of tithes and forms;--you successful, in whom romance has died out; to whom fidelity and constancy and aspiration are nothing but a voice;who remember love and heroism and self-sacrifice only as the vaporings of youth; who measure principles by your purse, utility by your using; who see nothing glorious this side of honesty; nothing terrible in the surrender of faith; nothing degrading that is not amenable to the law; nothing in your birthright that may not be sold for a mess of pottage, if only the mess be large enough, and the pottage savory;--you successful? Is this success? Then, indeed, humanity is a base and bitter failure.
It is not necessary that a man should be a robber or a murderer, in order to degrade himself. Without defrauding his neighbor of a cent, without laying himself open to a single accusation of illegality or violence, a man may destroy himself. A moral suicide, he kills out all that belongs to his highest nature, and leaves but a bare and battered wreck where the temple of the holy Ghost should rise.
"Measure not the work Until the day's out, and the labor done;Then bring your gauges."
Is that man successful who trades on his country's necessities?
