DON’T CALL ANY MAN A FAILURE.

Manawatu Herald, Volume XXX, Issue 386, 7 March 1908, Page 4

DON’T CALL ANY MAN A FAILURE.

Next time you are tempted to speak of a man as a failure in life, be careful; the person to whom you are speaking may be wise enough to call you a fool! How do you know whether or not a man is a failure ? What elaborate laboratory methods have you evolved whereby under the microscope of your sociological pathology you can determine that a man's life is a failure ? No failure of man that can be pointed out is other than a logical effect of an existing cause. No man ever failed in life who never had incentive to tiy to do something. Society merely failed to give him the brain or the schooled impetus for doing. On the other hand, no man who ever had the ambition to do and who has tried earnestly in the doing can be called a failure. It is the buffeted, storm-tossed man in this great sea of life who most bids for the hasty judgment of “ Failure.” But in the marks of this buffeting alone the wise observer reads the story of this man’s fight. Can a man fight a stronger force than himself, and not grow stronger, provided society in negligible quantity has not handicapped him too far already in heredity and early environment ? When that man, equipped for success, goes out against the world prepared to fight his way to that goal, the hardness of the fight, and the handicaps and discouragements which he faces on his way to success becomes as stars in the crown of his final attainments. Shall one deny that men have fonght as valiently, bravely, and untiringly in order that in the end the unthinking may commiserate them as failures ? No man ever made a strong, earnest honest fight for worldly success, and, failing, felt himself a failure. Honest earnestness no more could be called failure than inate virtue can be called vice. It is the rare fortune of many a dishonest success that he has a trusted employee as occasional man who Las made an honest failure ! These 1 onest failures may have been the leaven of his success, without which the successful man must have gone upon the rocks.