and the rewards are great.
Therefore Emerson's phrase, "infinite aspiration and infinitesimal
performance." Contentment is the exception, aspiration is universal.
Indeed, the national temptation is ambition. An American merchant
lives more in a year than an Oriental in eighty years; more in an hour
than an Indian merchant in twenty-four. So powerful are the
provocatives to thinking and planning that cerebral excitement is
well-nigh continuous. Moving forward, the youth finds every pathway
open and is told that every honor and position are possible
achievements; the result is that the individual finds himself
competing with all the rest of the nation. How fierce the strife! What
intense rivalries! What battles between opponents! What conflicts in
business!

In politics, coveting national honors, men spend months in laying out
a campaign. A vast human mechanism is organized with ramifications
extending through the nation. As in the olden times in the court of
King Arthur, knights entered the tournament and some Lancelot clothed
in steel armor rode forth to meet some Ivanhoe in mortal combat; so it
is to-day when one plumed knight meets another in the political
arena--one conquers, and one is killed, in that he suffers a broken
heart.

In commerce the strife is not less fierce. Men literally stand over
against each other like gunboats, carrying deadly missiles. If
to-morrow conflict and strife should spring up in each garden--if the
rose should strike its thorn into the honeysuckle; if the violet from
its lowly sphere should fling mire upon the lily's whiteness; if the
wheat should lift up its stalk to beat down the barley; if the robin
should become jealous of the lark's sweet voice, and the oriole
organize a campaign for exterminating the thrush, we should have a
conflict in nature that would answer to the strife and warfare in
society. The universality of the conflicts in society is indicated by
the fact that England's national symbol is not a dove, but a lion;
America's is an eagle, and other nations' are the leopard and the
bear. In national wars, where men by years of toil have planted
vineyards, reared orchards, builded houses and cities, they proceed to
burn up the homes, destroy the granaries, cut down the vineyards and
orchards; and these periodic public quarrels do but typify the equally
destructive private feuds and troubles. Darwin thought that men have
descended from animals, and some men have so literally