The True Citizen, How To Become One | Page 3

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 all these points, and many others also; but it must never be allowed to destroy the pupil's individuality. It must teach that a person can be himself, and study all the models he pleases. Webster studied the orations of Cicero so thoroughly that he could repeat most of them by heart; but they did not destroy or compromise his individuality, because