HOW TO DIE 



that has enabled us to win in life's race, rather than 

 vain of what we term "our" accomplishment. 



It is traditional that there are several generations of 

 good blood behind every gentleman. And the man 

 who speaks of himself as "self-made" is self-made 

 only in a very narrow sense of the words. He, too, 

 had ancestors stretching back in the ever-widening 

 company of a geometrical ratio into the past ; and what- 

 ever the misfortunes or deficiencies of one or two genera- 

 tions of his immediate progenitors, it is the net inheri- 

 tance from those ancestors and not his own unaided 

 effort that has made him what he is. 



It does not follow, of course, that your optimism, 

 your altruism, should be of the maudlin variety, which 

 makes no distinction between bathos and pathos, be- 

 tween sentiment and sentimentality. Blind, unreason- 

 ing optimism, which closes its eyes to the facts of human 

 nature, is the utmost folly. The indiscriminate ex- 

 tension of charity to whoever may ask it is worse than 

 folly it is an economic crime against society. But 

 a wisely sympathetic outlook toward the real needs of 

 the weakly; a well-reasoned willingness to extend the 

 helping hand, are essential qualities in whoever would 

 show himself a normal member of a civilized com- 

 munity. For without such concessions of the strong 

 to the weak, civilization as we know it could not have 

 developed; nor, having developed, could it be main- 

 tained. 



It is not, however, the needs of the many, but your own 

 individual happiness, that furnishes our present theme. 



