How to Succeed | Page 9

but
he did it well and with enthusiasm. In fact he was bound to do it as well
as it could be done. Young Gould supported himself by odd jobs at
surveying, paying his way by erecting sundials for farmers at a dollar
apiece, frequently taking his pay in board. Thus he laid the foundation
for the business career in which he became so rich.
Fred. Douglass started in life with less than nothing, for he did not own
his own body, and he was pledged before his birth to pay his master's
debts. To reach the starting-point of the poorest white boy, he had to
climb as far as the distance which the latter must ascend if he would
become President of the United States. He saw his mother but two or
three times, and then in the night, when she would walk twelve miles to
be with him an hour, returning in time to go into the field at dawn. He
had no chance to study, for he had no teacher, and the rules of the
plantation forbade slaves to learn to read and write. But somehow,
unnoticed by his master, he managed to learn the alphabet from scraps
of paper and patent medicine almanacs, and no limits could then be
placed to his career. He put to shame thousands of white boys. He fled
from slavery at twenty-one, went North and worked as a stevedore in
New York and New Bedford. At Nantucket he was given an
opportunity to speak in an anti-slavery meeting, and made so favorable
an impression that he was made agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of

Massachusetts. While traveling from place to place to lecture, he would
study with all his might. He was sent to Europe to lecture, and won the
friendship of several Englishmen, who gave him $750, with which he
purchased his freedom. He edited a paper in Rochester, N. Y., and
afterward conducted the New Era in Washington. For several years he
was Marshal of the District of Columbia. He became the first colored
man in the United States, the peer of any man in the country, and died
honored by all in 1895.
"What has been done can be done again," said the boy with no chance
who became Lord Beaconsfield, England's great prime minister. "I am
not a slave, I am not a captive, and by energy I can overcome greater
obstacles." Jewish blood flowed in his veins, and everything seemed
against him, but he remembered the example of Joseph, who became
prime minister of Egypt four thousand years before, and that of Daniel,
who was prime minister to the greatest despot of the world five
centuries before the birth of Christ. He pushed his way up through the
lower classes, up through the middle classes, up through the upper
classes, until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of
political and social power. Rebuffed, scorned, ridiculed, hissed down in
the House of Commons, he simply said, "The time will come when you
shall hear me." The time did come, and the boy with no chance but a
determined will, swayed the sceptre of England for a quarter of a
century.
"I learned grammar when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence
a day," said William Cobbett. "The edge of my berth, or that of the
guard-bed, was my seat to study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a
bit of board lying on my lap was my writing table, and the task did not
demand anything like a year of my life. I had no money to purchase
candles or oil; in winter it was rarely that I could get any evening light
but that of the fire, and only my turn, even of that. To buy a pen or a
sheet of paper I was compelled to forego some portion of my food,
though in a state of half starvation. I had no moment of time that I
could call my own, and I had to read and write amidst the talking,
laughing, singing, whistling, and bawling of at least half a score of the
most thoughtless of men, and that, too, in the hours of their freedom

from all control. Think not lightly of the farthing I had to give, now and
then, for pen, ink, or paper. That farthing was, alas! a great sum to me. I
was as tall as I am now, and I had great health and great exercise. The
whole of the money not expended for us at market was twopence a
week for each man. I remember, and well I may! that upon one
occasion I had, after all absolutely necessary expenses, on a Friday,
made shift to have a half-penny in reserve, which I