million Americans into Asia Minor and straightway their
thoughts will take on these visible shapes called houses and
factories, temples of learning, altars of praise and prayer. For what
we call Saxon civilization is only a magnificent incarnation of a
certain mental type and a moral character. Not only individuals, but
nations are such stuff as thoughts are made of.

In his famous story of archery Virgil represents Acestes as shooting
his arrow with such force that it took fire as it flew and went up
into the air all aflame, thus opening from the place where the archer
stood a pathway of light into the heavens. Now it is given to man's
thoughts to fulfill this beautiful story, in that they open up shining
pathways along which the human steps may move. On the practical side,
it is by the thinking alone that man solves his bread-winning problem.
Standing, each in his place, using his strongest faculty and working
in the line of least resistance, each must conquer for himself food
and support. To say that society owes us a living or to consume more
than we produce is to sink to the level of pauper and parasite. The
successful man is one whose thoughts about his bread-winning problem
have been wise thoughts; paupers and tramps, with their hunger and
rags, are men who have thought foolishly about how they could best
earn a livelihood.

He who has one strong faculty, the using of which would give delight
and success, yet passes it by, to use a weaker faculty, is doomed to
mediocrity and heart-breaking failure. The eagle has powerful muscles
under the wings, but slender and feeble legs; the fawn lacks the
weight of the draught horse, but has limbs for swiftness. Now, if an
eagle should become a competitor in a walking race and if the fawn
should enter the list of draught horses, we should have that which
answers precisely to the way in which some men seek to gain their
livelihood, by tying up their strongest gift and using their feeblest
faculties. When it is said that only five merchants out of a hundred
succeed we perceive that the great majority of men do not think to any
purpose in choosing an occupation. Recalling his friends who had
misfitted themselves, Sidney Smith once said: "If we represent the
occupations of life by holes in a table, some round, some square, some
oblong, and persons by bits of wood of like shapes, we shall generally
find that the triangular person has got into the square hole, the
oblong into th