e triangular, while the square person has squeezed
himself into the round hole." For lack of wise thinking beforehand,
multitudes have died of broken hearts midst failure and misery who
might have achieved great happiness and success had they used their
thoughts in choosing their life-work. He who approaches his task with
a leaden heart is out of the race before he is in it. Success means
that the heart loves what the hand does. The bread-winning problem is
the one that touches us first and most closely, and to wise thoughts
only is it given to solve that problem.

The number and value of our thoughts determine a man's value to
society. No investments bring so high a rate of interest as
investments of brain. Hand work earns little, but head work much. In a
Western camp one miner put his lower brain into the pickaxe and earned
$2.00 a day; another miner put his higher brain into the stamp-mill
and soon was receiving a score of dollars daily for his work; a third
youth, toiling in the same mine, put his genius into an electric
process for extracting ore, and sold his invention for a fortune. It
seems that wealth was not in the pick, but in the thoughts that
handled it. Had God intended man to do his work through the body,
man's legs would have been long enough to cover leagues at a stride,
his biceps would have been strong enough to turn the crank for
steamships, his back would have been Atlantean for carrying freight
cars across the plains.

But, instead of giving man long legs, God gave him a mind able to make
locomotives. Instead of telescopic eyes, he gave man mind to invent
far-seeing glasses. Instead of a thousand fingers for weaving, he gave
man five fingers and genius for inventing a thousand steel fingers to
do his spinning. Wealth is not in things, but in the brain that shapes
raw material. Vast was the sum of gold taken out of California, but
this nation might well pay down a hundred Californias for a man to
invent a process to make coal drive the engine without the
intervention of steam. That inventor would enable the street cars for
one cent to carry the people of the tenement-house district ten miles
into the country in ten minutes, and thereby, through sunshine and
fresh air and solitude, would solve a hundred problems that now vex
the statesman and the moralist. A young botanist in Kansas has just
announced his purpose to cross the milkweed and the strawberry, so
that hereafter strawberries and cream may