exclaimed
"If I fall I fight on my knees."

Of all human qualities that have lit up the sombreness of
this tragic earth, I count this, of being a thoroughbred,
the happiest.

It has saved more souls than penance and punishment, it has
rescued more business enterprises than shrewdness, it has
won more battles and more games, and altogether felicitously
loosed more hard knots in the tangled skein of destiny than
any other virtue.

Most people are quitters. They reach the limit. They are
familiar with the last straw.

But the hundredth man is a thoroughbred. You cannot corner
him. He will not give up. He cannot find the word "fail" in
his lexicon. He has never learned to whine.

What shall we do with him? There's nothing to do but to hand
him success. It's just as well to deliver him the prize, for
he will get it eventually. There's no use trying to drown
him, for he won't sink.

There's only one creature in the world better than the man
who is a thoroughbred. It is the woman who is a
thoroughbred.

X

IF I WERE TWENTY-ONE I WOULD MAKE SOME PERMANENT, AMICABLE
ARRANGEMENT WITH MY CONSCIENCE

God, Duty, Death, and Moral Responsibility are huge facts which no
life can escape. They are the external sphinxes by the road of every
man's existence. He must frame some sort of an answer to them.

It may please the reader to know how I have answered them. It is
very simple.

I am familiar, to some extent, with most of the religions, cults,
and creeds of mankind. There are certain points common to every
decent religion, for in every kind of church you are taught to be
honest, pure-minded, unselfish, reverent, brave, loyal, and the
like.

These elements of religion may be called the Great Common Divisor of
all faiths.

This G. C. D. is my religion. It is what more than fifty years of
thought and experience has winnowed out for me. It is my religion.
And I think I glimpse what Emerson meant when he wrote that "all
good men are of one religion."

And the matter can be reduced to yet plainer terms. There is but
"one thing needful," and there's no use being "careful and troubled
about many things." That one thing is to _do right_.

To do Right and not Wrong will save any man's soul, and if he
believes any doctrine that implies doing wrong he is lost.

So, let a man of twenty-one resolve, and keep his purpose, that, no
mat