d before Queen Victoria, she said to
him: "Mr. Paderewsky, you are a genius." "Ah, your Majesty," he replied,
"perhaps. But before I was a genius, I was a drudge." And this is true. It
is said that Paderewsky spent hours every day, even after achieving his
fame, practising the scale, improving his technique, and keeping himself
in prime condition.

Study the life and achievement of any great man of genius. His genius has
consisted principally in his wonderful capacity to labor for perfection in
the most minute detail. And yet most ambitious misfits are unwilling to
work hard. Their products always show lack of finish due to slipshod
methods, unwillingness to spend time, to take pains to bring what they do
up to a standard of beautiful perfection, so far as perfection is humanly
possible. Those who are mentally lazy do not belong in an artistic
vocation. There are probably many things that they can do and do well in
some less spectacular lines, some calling that does not require such
mental effort.

MISFITS IN THE PROFESSIONS

In the traditional educational system the common school is not
particularly adapted to prepare its pupils for life, but rather to prepare
them for either a high school or a preparatory school. Passing on to the
high school, the same condition prevails. The whole question in every high
school and every preparatory school is whether the training will accredit
one to certain colleges and universities. So the traditional high school
graduate is not prepared for life; he is prepared for college or the
university. He goes on to the university. There he finds that he is being
prepared chiefly for four or five learned professions--the law, the
ministry, medicine, engineering, and teaching. In the beginning, the
university was supposed to train a man, not for work, but for leisure. The
very word scholar means a man of leisure. People were trained, therefore,
not for usefulness, but for show; not to earn their living in the world,
but rather, their living having been provided for them by a thoughtful
government or a kind-hearted parent, to present evidences of the fact. One
of the chief of such evidences was the ability to go to a college or
university and to take the time to learn a great deal of useless knowledge
about dead languages, philosophies, and dry-as-dust sciences. While this
is not true to so great an extent to-day, there is still much of the old
tradition clinging about colleges and universiti