and ends his responsibilities.

The death of enthusiasm is the greatest possible calamity-fight against it.

Enthusiasm is hope, confidence in yourself, courage, a determination to succeed, or, at least, to struggle on trying.

Said Goethe: "Money lost, something lost.

"Honor lost, much lost.

"Courage lost, everything lost-better you were never born."

Enthusiasm includes courage in its meaning. Enthusiasm lost, everything lost-better you were never born.

What shall a man do who feels courage gradually leaving him and doubt, worry creeping in?

Can enthusiasm be kept alive in spite of disappointments, in spite of the disillusion that follows effort?

That each man must find out for himself.

Life grows wearisome. Every year seems like another mile in a long race.

Others fly past us. We seem to stand still. Enthusiasm flickers in the early morning, fades away by noon, gloom and depression finish the day.

What can a man do who feels enthusiasm dying within him, who remembers with a bitter smile the hope of his boyhood and his impatience to meet the world?

What cure is there for the deadly disease worse than death, the disease that the doctors do not know, the disease of dying enthusiasm that attacks nearly all men before they die, and a majority before they are thirty?

least talk to ourselves earnestly and determinedly, as we would talk to a man sitting dejected on the roadside. To him we should say:

"Get up and walk on. You have every chance now that you ever had.

"You are older than some who have succeeded, true. But many succeed when much older than you and after discouragements much greater than yours.

"You have been so discouraged that you have thought of suicide. What of it? In all the list of the world's greatest successes there is probably not one but has felt as you feel-longed for death, and been tempted to seek it.

"Don't let the work that you have done already go to waste.

"Don't moan over time wasted. Let the thought of that time drive you to use the time that remains.

"The road is no steeper or rougher than it used to be. Thousands with more cause of complaint are struggling on, refusing to give up hope."

Hope goes but can be called back. out, but it can be made strong again,

Enthusiasm dies

Age is no bar to success if the enthusiasm is there. Weakness does not prevent success if only the body is weak. It is weak courage that keeps men sitting down as failures when they should be going ahead traveling the road.

The trouble in the average man is not lack of ability, intelligence, strength or health. It is lack of the courage that comes from enthusiasm.

enthusiasm really dead and gone, your body lives still upon this earth, but, like the miserable creatures in Dante's Inferno, the real you is not here.

Courage is the man, and a man without courage is dead.

The only real wealth is human labor. If you don't waste that, nothing matters. Be as big a fool as you like, with your money.

To let hatred sink too deeply into the mind and heart is bad for the hater.

Of one thing be sure, young gentlemen: this and the next few years hold great possibilities for those that now have little. When the water is rough and weather uncertain, look out for valuable wreckage coming ashore. Of those that have, many will have left little or nothing before long. Changed and changing conditions will develop a new crop of the prosperous. Things will have to be done in a new way, the man with the new idea will have a chance.

Life is a short walk along a narrow thread of destiny, begin ning and ending in a mysterious unknown. Hope keeps us balanced as we walk the narrow line. Life is short as we see it, but in reality it is without beginning, and never ends—and, long or short, it is all that we have.

You are the figure walking on a slender thread. Each of us walks alone and must balance himself through life. Many millions walk but a few steps and fall back into the infinite whence they came. Other millions walk half or three-quarters of the way-a small percentage finish the full natural span of a normal life.

Hesitating, balancing, leaning to this side and to that side, you go along the span that leads from birth to death.

This is a subject about which all the writers have written, all the poets have sung, all the philosophers have speculated, and all the law makers have legislated.

We have all got to take the journey, walk the span, whether we like it or not. We are not asked when we come here whether we want to come. And it is not left to us to say when we shall go. We come without knowing why, we go without knowing why, and we travel our journey balanced on a thread stretched between the finger and thumb of Destiny.

We are not, however, mere machines wound up and set in motion. Something is left to our own decision.

thousands of generations, and it is true that we can have only what they give us.

But we have above everything, and in addition to everything, will power, the power of thought based on observation and guided by conscience.

We can use our character and temperament as the sculptor uses the block of marble, and we can carve inheritance as we will and at least make of it the best that it can produce.

This you see illustrated in the portraits of human beings taken in childhood and in old age. You may find two pictures of children much alike—the faces filled with goodness, cheerfulness, kindness and hope.

And the same two faces in old age will be as far apart as vice and kindness. One will have grown stronger and better, and the other will show the stamp of the evil thoughts and the uncontrolled passions and wasted will power.

Those that are most fortunate among men are able, in the brief span of life, to accomplish work that lasts for centuries, helping others that follow on the shaky walk across the taut thread. Some have been able, in one life, to benefit endless millions of lives after them. These have been the great teachers, discoverers, explorers, scientists, philosophers-and, above all, the fearless tellers of new truths.

Blessed are those able to do in one life a work that will help hundreds of millions.

But there is good work that every human being can do, there are rules that all can follow, and each man,