r buy what you cannot pay for, never sell
what you haven't got." How simple great men's rules are! How easy
it is to be a great man! Order, diligence, patience, honesty,--just
what you and I must use in order to put our dollar in the
savings-bank, to do our school-boy sum, to keep the farm thrifty,
and the house clean, and the babies neat. Order, diligence,
patience, honesty! There is wide difference between men, but truly
it lies less in some special gift or opportunity granted to one and
withheld from another, than in the differing degree in which these
common elements of human power are owned and used. Not how much
talent have I, but how much will to use the talent that I have, is
the main question. Not how much do I know, but how much do I do
with what I know? To do their great work the great ones need more
of the very same habits which the little ones need to do their
smaller work. Goethe, Spencer, Agassiz, Jesus, share, not
achievements, but conditions of achievement, with you and me. And
those conditions for them, as for us, are largely the plod, the
drill, the long disciplines of toil. If we ask such men their
secret, they will uniformly tell us so.

Since we lay the firm substrata of ourselves in this way, then, and
only in this way; and since the higher we aim, the more, and not
the less, we need these firm substrata,--since this is so, I think
we ought to make up our minds and our mouths to sing a hallelujah
unto Drudgery: _Blessed be Drudgery_,--the one thing that we cannot
spare!

II

But there is something else to be said. Among the people who are
drudges there are some who have given up their dreams of what, when
younger, they used to talk or think about as their "ideals"; and
have grown at last, if not content, resigned to do the actual work
before them. Yes, here it is,--before us, and behind us, and on all
sides of us; we cannot change it; we have accepted it. Still, we
have not given up one dream,--the dream of _success_ in this work
to which we are _so_ clamped. If we cannot win the well-beloved
one, then success with the ill-beloved,--this at least is left to
hope for. Success may make _it_ well-beloved, too,--who knows?
Well, the secret of this success still lies in the same old word,
"drudgery." For drudgery is t