across the rails for a smash-up? Then come to your daily work with an aching brain, a muddled judgment, and trembling nerves. It will only be a question of time. Now let us turn again to our great budget of correspondence, to see what else our forty men had to say concerning the matter of failure.

A man who sat for a generation in the House of Representatives wrote that it often came" from an unwise or unfortunate confidence in others." A man is to be despised who goes through the world holding every man in suspicion; who thinks with the old cynic that "every man has his price." To trust nobody is to prove yourself eminently unworthy of trust; but a man does not need to be a simpleton in order to be trustful; we simply have to use our judgment. And a leading dry goods man remarks that failure often comes from poor judgment; from an inability to discern the character of others.

Some have spoken upon the matter of thrift; as a certain millionaire puts it: "Unwillingness to economize on the start, hoping that some fortunate turn in affairs will bring fortune and fame."

Others, realizing that this lesson may be over-learned, see a peculiar but a true reason for failure, as a certain prominent man puts it," in a lack of ability to steer between the Scylla of spendthriftness and the Charybdis of miserliness." other words, not to be too stingy or too generous.

In

This is a hard path to steer; no man is so despicable as the man who sponges; who gets all he can and yields up nothing; who saves and hoards, and says with the leech, "Give, give, but gives nothing himself. That man may not financially fail, but he will fail in every other way. And, after all, it is not all of life to "have."

But, on the other hand, there is the over-generous man; the kind man that will take the shirt off his back to give to the poor; but what is the use of it, after all, if he catches pneumonia by it and dies? There is the safe middle course, into which we all ought to try to steer.

Yet one correspondent seems to think that city boys are in no danger of steering upon the rock of miserliness. This gentleman, the proprietor of a large iron industry, says: "Much failure comes from non-attention to habits of saving,

habits that are usually of necessity instilled into the minds of boys brought up in the country; and from my experience," he says, "such habits are almost impossible to teach the citybred boys."

Possibly that is put too strongly; there is a great deal of heroism in a fellow's being thrifty when he has to be, but there is more virtue in a fellow's being thrifty when he thinks it is best to be. Rusticity almost invariably enforces thrift, but in a city, a fellow can more often choose for himself whether he will be prodigal or miserly.

Don't let us think, however, that it is impossible to teach thrift to a city boy. Hundreds of young men are learning and practicing this lesson.

But there is one thing sure, and a leading capitalist hits the nail on the head when he says: "Men fail when they are not adapted to the work in which they are occupied. The truth is, every man should be called to his work, as was Paul; though comparatively few are called to the same work as was Paul." True enough; and yet there is a certain luxurious sound to that, is there not? As if all young men could wait around until just the thing for which they think themselves adapted turns up. Yet there is nothing more important to you than to try to find out the thing for which you are the best adapted. Find out the thing you can best do, and make that thing the order of your life.

But this may take some time; it may perhaps take you clean up to your majority; what then? Shall you be in the meantime idle, earning nothing, just hanging round living on your father, waiting for the revelation of an adaptation? By no means; work at something, study at something, redeem the time; be constantly reading along some given and instructive line, and in due time you will see a vision and hear a voice; and that vision and voice will guide you on, and there will be success rather than failure for you.

But the above presupposes some mental ability and shrewdness on the part of the young man; and we are reminded that a correspondent gives as one reason for failure, the fact of one's being "born without ability, or brain to acquire it."

It looks as though that were rather a polite definition of a fool; one born without ability, or brain to acquire it. But

there are very few young men these days who cannot do a great deal toward making up for early deficiencies if they want to do so.

But you may put the conundrum: "Can a natural born fool ever become anything else?" And to give an honest and candid answer, we are compelled to say, no; but you may press further than that you may ask how a natural born fool would act; what he would do in order to insure failure to himself and his business career.

If he will persist in being foolish, if he will insist on inviting failure, then here is the way for him to go about it: Form bad habits, and keep bad associates; let him drink and be dishonest, and forget the Golden Rule; let him fear to say "No," and drift with the tide; let him gamble and indulge himself in laziness; let him have a lordly disdain for application and correct business methods ; let him think himself to be feeble, incompetent, worthless; if he does, everybody else will, the world largely takes a man at his own valuation ; let him sneer at early discipline, laugh at holding a definite purpose, and think that economy is good for only poor people; let him think that there is no especial value in possessing a manly character, and in having everybody think well of him; let him go through the world careless of people's feelings,— a boor in society,- a trial to his own best friends; let him think that it makes no difference if he keeps his engagements ten minutes late; let him procrastinate,-never doing to-day what he can put off until to-morrow, and never doing to-morrow what he can get some one else to do; let him drink and swear and break the Sabbath; let him forget or trample on the laws of virtue and purity; let him become a prodigal son, and live in open sin, trusting that somewhere and sometime there is a stable with a fattening calf in it waiting for him. Let him lead that kind of a life, and follow that kind of a program! What are these things? The brand of Cain? No; they are the marks of a fool; yes, of a fool, because not a single one of them is necessary. All can choose just the opposite things if they want to do so. It is merely a question of choice; merely a question of "looking diligently lest any man fail.”

SONAL APPEARANCE HIS ESTIMATE OF THE PATENT PIRATE A CLOSER VIEW OF EDISON INDIFFERENCE TO PLAUDITS AS A BUSINESS MANA SENSITIVE NATURE PLACE AMONG SCIENTISTS

PHONOGRAPH

ECONOMIC FEATURES OF HIS

AT WORK -THE

TRICAL EXPERIMENTS — HIS PRINCIPAL INVENTIONS

THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

ACHIEVEMENTS OF

EDISON THE MAN. THE VALUE OF AN IDEA.

I never did anything worth doing, by accident, nor did any of my inventions come indirectly through accident, except

the phonograph. When I have fully decided that a result is worth getting, I go ahead on it and make trial after trial until it comes. Well directed ambition and perseverance will accomplish almost everything.

I like work. Some people like to collect postage stamps. Anything I have begun is always on my mind, and I am not easy while away from it until it is finished.

I have always kept strictly within the lines of commercially useful inventions. I

have never had any time to put on electrical wonders, valuable simply as novelties to catch the popular fancy.

Thomas A Edison

F one were to ask what person best symbolized the industrial regeneration for which we, as a nation, will stand, it would be marvelously easy to answer, Thomas Alva Edison. The precocious self-reliance and the restless energy of the New World; its brilliant defiance of traditions; the immediate adaptation of means to ends; and, above all, the distinctive inventive faculty have reached in him their apogee.

The mere mass of this extraordinary man's work gives in itself a striking idea of the force which he exerts in our material progress. Up to a few days ago the government had granted Edison no less than seven hundred and sixty-five patents, while he had in addition one hundred and fifty applications on file. And this during a working period that has not yet brought him within many years of the grand climacteric, and much of it accomplished in the face of discouraging financial obstacles.

Mr. Edison is fifty-five years of age and was born in Milan, Erie county, Ohio. He comes of Dutch parentage, the family having emigrated to America in 1730. His great grandfather was a banker of high standing in New York. When Mr. Edison was but a child of seven the family fortunes suffered reverses so serious as to make it necessary that he should become a wage-earner at an unusually early age, and that the family should move from his birthplace to Michigan.

Only four years later the boy was reading Newton's "Principia" with the entirely logical result of becoming deeply and permanently disgusted with pure mathematics. Indeed, he seems to have displayed all the due precocity of genius, one of his notable feats about this time being an attempt to read through the entire free library of Detroit!

Nor was he by any means a youthful bookworm and dreamer. The distinctly practical bent of his character was shown in his operations as newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway especially in the brilliant coup by which in 1869 he bought up on "futures" a thousand copies of the Detroit Free Press containing important war news, and, gaining a little time on his rivals, sold the entire batch like hot cakes, so that the price reached twenty-five cents a paper before the end of his route. It was at this period, too, that he was posing as