How to Succeed | Page 7

according to the Boston Herald. Whatever he may have been at home,
it counts for nothing until he has done something that makes known the
quality of the stuff that is in him. If he shirks work, however humble it
may be, the work will soon be inclined to shirk him. But the youth who
comes into a city to make his way in the world, and is not afraid of
doing his best whether he is paid for it or not, is not long in finding
remunerative employment. The people who seem so indifferent to
employing young people from the country are eagerly watching for the
newcomers, but they look for qualities of character and service in
actual work before they manifest confidence or give recognition. It is
the youth who is deserving that wins his way to the front, and when
once he has been tested his promotion is only a question of time. It is
the same with young women. There are seemingly no places for them
where they can earn a decent living, but the moment they fill their
places worthily there is room enough for them, and progress is rapid.
What the city people desire most is to find those who have ability to
take important places, and the question of gaining a position in the city
resolves itself at once into the question of what the young persons have
brought with them from home. It is the staying qualities that have been

in-wrought from childhood which are now in requisition, and the
success of the boy or girl is determined by the amount of energetic
character that has been developed in the early years at home. Take up
the experience of every man or woman who has made a mark in the
city for the last hundred years, and it has been the sterling qualities of
the home training that have constituted the success of later years.
Don't think you have no chance in life because you have no capital to
begin with. Most of the rich men of to-day began poor. The chances are
you would be ruined if you had capital. You can only use to advantage
what has become a part of yourself by your earning it. It is estimated
that not one rich man's son in ten thousand dies rich. God has given
every man a capital to start with; we are born rich. He is rich who has
good health, a sound body, good muscles; he is rich who has a good
head, a good disposition, a good heart; he is rich who has two good
hands, with five chances on each. Equipped? Every man is equipped as
only God could equip him. What a fortune he possesses in the
marvelous mechanism of his body and mind. It is individual effort that
has accomplished everything worth accomplishing in this world.
Money to start with is only a crutch, which, if any misfortune knocks it
from under you, would only make your fall all the more certain.
CHAPTER III.
HOW DID HE BEGIN?
There can be no doubt that the captains of industry to-day, using that
term in its broadest sense, are men who began life as poor boys.
--SETH LOW.
Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us, but
it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft, luscious
south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams. --OUIDA.
'Tis a common proof, That lowliness is young ambition's ladder
--SHAKESPEARE.
"Fifty years ago," said Hezekiah Conant, the millionaire manufacturer

and philanthropist of Pawtucket, R. I., "I persuaded my father to let me
leave my home in Dudley, Mass., and strike out for myself. So one
morning in May, 1845, the old farm horse and wagon was hitched up,
and, dressed in our Sunday clothes, father and I started for Worcester.
Our object was to get me the situation offered by an advertisement in
the Worcester County Gazette as follows:
BOY WANTED.
WANTED IMMEDIATELY.--At the Gazette Office, a well disposed
boy, able to do heavy rolling. Worcester, May 7.
"The financial inducements were thirty dollars the first year, thirty-five
the next, and forty dollars the third year and board in the employer's
family. These conditions were accepted, and I began work the next day.
The Gazette was an ordinary four-page sheet. I soon learned what
'heavy rolling' meant for the paper was printed on a 'Washington'
hand-press, the edition of about 2000 copies requiring two laborious
intervals of about ten hours each, every week. The printing of the
outside was generally done Friday and kept me very busy all day. The
inside went to press about three or four o'clock Tuesday afternoon, and
it was after three o'clock on Wednesday morning before I could