The True Citizen, How To Become One | Page 3

the oblong into the triangular, and a square
fellow has squeezed into the round hole."
A fundamental need is to find out the elements of power within us, and
how they can be trained to good service and yoked to the chariot of
influence. We need to know exactly for what work or sphere we are
best fitted, so that when opportunities for service open before us, we
may invest our mental capital with success and profit.
Self-knowledge must not be confused with self-conceit; for it implies
no immodesty or egotism. Even if the faithful study of one's self
reveals a high order of natural gifts, it is not needful to imitate the son
of the Emerald Isle who always lifted his hat and made an obsequious
bow when he spoke of himself or mentioned his own name. George
Eliot hits off pompous self-conceit happily when she likens its
possessor to "a cock that thinks the sun rises in the morning to hear him
crow."
Margaret Fuller wrote: "I now know all the people in America worth
knowing, and I have found no intellect comparable with my own."
Even if she did not overrate herself, such self-estimate implied no little
boldness in expression. We also read in Greek history, how, when the
commanders of the allied fleets gave in, by request, a list of the names
of those who had shown the highest valor and skill at the battle of

Salamis, each put his own name first, graciously according to
Themistocles, the real hero of the day, the second rank.
Not a few come to know themselves only through failures and
disappointments. Strangers to their own defects--perhaps also to their
own powers--they see how they might have succeeded only when
success is finally forfeited. Their eyes open too late. A Southern orator
tells of a little colored lad who very much wished to have a kitten from
a newborn litter, and whose mistress promised that, as soon as they wer
old enough, he should take one. Too impatient to wait, he slyly carried
one off to his hut. Its eyes were not open, and, in disgust, he drowned it.
But, subsequently finding the kitten lying in the pail dead, but with
open eyes, he exclaimed, "Umph! When you's alive, you's blind. Now
you's dead, you see!" It will be a real calamity to us if our eyes only
open when it is too late to make our life of any use.
All true life-power has a basis of high moral integrity. Far higher in the
scale than any life of impulse, passion, or even opinion, is the life
regulated by principle. The end of life is something more than pleasure.
Man is not a piece of vitalized sponge, to absorb all into himself. The
essentials of happiness are something to love, something to hope for,
something to do--affection, aspiration, action.
We must also educate our dispositions. Some one has said:
"Disposition is a lens through which men and things are seen. A fiery
temper, like a red glass, gives to all objects a lurid glare; a melancholic
temper, like a blue lens, imparts its own hue; through the green
spectacles of jealousy every one else becomes an object of distrust and
dislike; and he who looks through the black glass of malice, finds
others wearing the aspect of his own malevolence. Only the cheerful
and charitable soul sees through a clear and colorless medium, whose
transparency shows the world as it is."
Disposition has also its concave and convex lenses, which magnify
some things and minify others. The self-satisfied man sees every one's
faults in giant proportions; and every one's virtues, but his own,
dwarfed into insignificance. To the fretful man others seem fretful; to
the envious man, envious; and so with the well-disposed, gentle, and

generous; sunshine prevails over shadows. The world is different to
different observers, largely because they have different media through
which they look at it.
Cheerful tempers manufacture solace and joy out of very unpromising
material. They are the magic alchemists who extract sweet essences out
of bitter herbs, like the old colored woman in the smoky hut, who was
"glad of anything to make a smoke with," and, though she had but two
teeth, thanked God they were "opposite each other!"
Goodness outranks even uprightness, because the good man aims to do
good to others. Uprightness is the beauty of integrity; goodness is the
loveliness of benevolence. The good man visits the hut of misery, the
hovel of poverty, leaving in a gentle and delicate way, a few comforts
for the table or wardrobe, dainties for the fevered palate of the sick, or
such other helps as the case may call for, as far as his means and
circumstances will allow.
A true education should cover