l; York and
Canterbury as pleasant as a dominance in Lombard Street or Burlington
House.

For my own part I speak of the only field of success I know--the world
of ordinary affairs. And I start with a contradiction in terms. Success
is a constitutional temperament bestowed on the recipient by the gods.
And yet you may have all the gifts of the fairies and fail utterly. Man
cannot add an inch to his stature, but by taking thought he can walk
erect; all the gifts given at birth can be destroyed by a single curse.

Like all human affairs, success is partly a matter of predestination and
partly of free will. You cannot make the genius, but you can either
improve or destroy it, and most men and women possess the assets which
can be turned into success.

But those who possess the precious gifts will have both to hoard and to
expand them.

What are the qualities which make for success? They are three:
Judgment, Industry, and Health, and perhaps the greatest of these is
judgment. These are the three pillars which hold up the fabric of
success. But in using the word judgment one has said everything.

In the affairs of the world it is the supreme quality. How many men have
brilliant schemes and yet are quite unable to execute them, and through
their very brilliancy stumble unawares upon ruin? For round judgment
there cluster many hundred qualities, like the setting round a jewel:
the capacity to read the hearts of men; to draw an inexhaustible
fountain of wisdom from every particle of experience in the past, and
turn the current of this knowledge into the dynamic action of the
future. Genius goes to the heart of a matter like an arrow from a bow,
but judgment is the quality which learns from the world what the world
has to teach and then goes one better. Shelley had genius, but he would
not have been a success in Wall Street--though the poet showed a flash
of business knowledge in refusing to lend money to Byron.

In the ultimate resort judgment is the power to assimilate knowledge
and to use it. The opinions of men and the movement of markets are all
so much material for the perfected instrument of the mind.

But judgment may prove a sterile capacity if it is not accompanied by
industry. The mill must have grist on which to work, and it is industry
which pours in the grain.

A great opportunity may be lost and an irretrievable error committed by
a brief break in the lucidity of the intellect or in the train of
thought.