“ Give and taken 
499 
in return. Theirs is the sharpness of the half-fool. Cent-per-cent. 
rules in the busy world; favor for favor with politicians; love for 
love in the kingdom of the heart. Everywhere, as in the world of 
nature, it is give and take—something for something. Even in the 
relative positions of benefactor and benefited, within reasonable 
limits, the pleasures of giving and receiving are reciprocal and pay 
each for the other. 
But it becomes at last wearisome to do for a person who is al¬ 
ways asking to be done for and who never does anything in return; 
is hardly thankful indeed, but takes your best efforts as a matter of 
course almost. The chief delight of generosity to the donor lies in 
its being involuntary. But chronic mendicancy of any sort weighs 
on the elasticity of this spring. The chief charm of a supplicant is 
gratitude; shorn of that, he is but a brazen beggar at best. Per¬ 
haps the most loathsome, but at the same time the most expressive 
synonym to the parasitic tendency, is the Horseleech’s daughter, 
with her cry of “Give! give! ” 
\Ye all recognize instinctively the bitter discouragment that 
comes from showering gifts upon a barren, unresponsive soil—that 
is to say, upon a selfish, grasping person. 
No matter how cleverly sharp such a one may be, the world finds 
him out in the end and leaves him to himself—gets tired of putting 
its hands into its pockets for one w’ho never put his near his own, 
excepting to deposite something therein and button them safely up 
immediately afterward, to remain so until he has something else to 
put into them! 
The best business men always recognize fully the maxim of some¬ 
thing for something. So do all great statesmen and society leaders 
—in fact, all successful people do. It is at the basis of their success 
and popularity. For if one have all the other good qualities and 
be utterly selfish, he will never really and truly succeed. His con¬ 
temporaries find him out and send him down to posterity with his 
character pinned to his back. 
So, if you have a tendency to be greedy, to get your cake as alms, 
rather than as the rightful return for the legal-tender of labor of 
some sort that shall benefit the world, and want to go into a corner 
to eat it all by yourself, try to get the better of that inclination. 
It will help you to do so to study for a little while the movements 
of the wheels within the wheels of the machinery of daily life—to 
