24 Life and Sport on the Pacific Slope 



tradition and convention that hamper the strivers 

 in older countries. In the West runners are nude 

 when they start: the race is to the swift, the 

 battle to the strong. Each is given credit for what 

 he does, not for what he is. Indeed, in a country 

 where the only gentlemen of leisure are tramps, it 

 is shameful to be other than a bread-winner. Dives 

 works harder than Lazarus. Only the other day 

 a millionaire, a comparatively young man, was 

 stricken down. He died of — over-work. Why 

 did he not take it easy? Surely, he had enough. 

 I knew this man, and he told me that he laboured 

 more diligently than the meanest clerk in his 

 employ, and for practically the same wage : clothes, 

 board, and lodging. He dared not do less than he 

 did. It is against the spirit of the West to shirk 

 responsibilities. 



Mr. Clarence Urmy, a Californian, whose tuneful 

 verses are familiar to readers of American maga- 

 zines, has written some charming lines upon this 

 theme. According to Mr. Urmy, those only fail 

 who strive not. The sentiment is as pretty as the 

 verses that embalm it. And it is a sentiment 

 essentially of the West. But it would be truer 

 to say that only those who strive can know the 

 bitterness of failure. In a new country the strife 

 is so strenuous, it demands so many sacrifices, that 

 failure becomes almost a synonym for death. God 

 help the man who, in the accounting that comes 

 to all of us sooner or later, finds his balance on 

 the wrong side of the ledger. Surely, in that dark 

 hour the sense of what he has suffered and endured 

 becomes a crown of thorns. Later, perhaps, he 



