SELF-HELP
Although Samuel Smiles's "Self-Help" is the first and perhaps the best of the many inspirational books that have been written of late years, it is by far the most serviceable of all to any one who wishes and intends to stand squarely on his own feet and to fight his own battle of life from start to finish. That book is attractive because it is anecdotal of life and character, and because of the interest that all men feel in those who have achieved great things through their own labors, their trials, and their struggles. It abounds with references to men who were forced to be self-helpful, who were born lowly enough, but died among God's gentlemen, and often among the aristocracy of the land, through sheer force of character, labor, and determination. They have left their "footprints on the sands of time" mainly because they were self-reliant and self-helpful.
The aids to the royal life are all within, and no life is worthless unless its owner wills it; the fountain of all good is within, and it will bubble up, if we dig.
Doctor Holland used to say that there is a super-abundance of inspiration in America, but a lamentable dearth of perspiration. Aspiration plus perspiration carries men to dizzy heights of success; aspiration minus perspiration often lands them in the gutter.
Self-help is not selfishness. The duty of helping oneself in the highest sense always involves the duty of helping others. The self-helpful are not always the men who have achieved greatest success in what vulgarians call success. That man's life is a success which has attained the end for which he started out—the greatest failure may sometimes be the hugest success through the discipline it has afforded. They tell us that men never fail who die in a worthy cause; that it is nobler to have failed in a noble cause than to have won in a low one; that it is not failure, but low aim, that is wicked. God sows the seed and starts us all out with about the same quantity and the same quality; whether the crop shall be abundant depends upon the environment in which we grow and the way we take care of the field.
The supreme end of each man's life is to take individual care of his own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life—and every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the improvement of it we give ourselves.
The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, we have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some government or some institution to do for them what they should only do for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win his own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other institutions, and too little in ourselves.
Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any source—they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws—especially the laws which teach men to lean—but they rather consist in helping men to improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself—we may stand him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by governments. There is no man who rides through life so well as the man who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called self-dependence.
Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the manliness of the soul.
The solid foundations of all liberty rest upon individual character, and individual character is the only sure guaranty for social security and national progress. Whatever crushes individuality is despotism, no matter by what other name you call it. The gods are always on the side of the man who relies on himself and helps himself; men's arms are long enough to reach stars, if they will only stretch them. It is so contrary to the spirit of our nation to be anything but self-helpful. "The flag of freedom cannot long float over a nation of deadheads; only those who determine to pay their way from cradle to grave have a right to make the journey." Schiller says that the kind of education that perfects the human race is action, conduct, self-culture, self-control. It has been said that the individual is perfected far more by work than by reading, by action more than by study, by character more than by biography; these are courses that are given by the University of Life more completely than in all other institutions known to men.
The great men of science, literature, art, action—those apostles of great thoughts and lords of the great heart—belong to no special rank. They come from colleges, workshops, farms, from poor men's huts and rich men's mansions; but they all began with reliance upon themselves, and with an instinctive feeling that they must help themselves solely in climbing to the work or the station which they had assigned to themselves. Many of God's greatest apostles of thought and feeling and action have come from the humblest stations, but the most insuperable difficulties have not long been obstacles to them. These greatest of difficulties are true men's greatest helpers—they stimulate powers that might have lain dormant all through life, but often have readily yielded to the stout and reliant heart. There is no greater blessing in the world than poverty which is allied to self-reliance and the spirit of self-help. "Poverty is the northwind which lashes men into vikings." Lord Bacon says that men believe too great things of riches, and too little of indomitable perseverance.
Every nation that has a history has a long list of men who began life in the humblest stations, yet rose to high station in honor and service. No inheritance and environments can do for a man what he can do for himself. Cook, the navigator, Brindley, the engineer, and Burns, the poet, are three men who began life as day laborers; the most poetic of clergymen, Jeremy Taylor; the inventor of the spinning-jenny and founder of cotton manufacture, Sir Richard Arkwright; the greatest of landscape painters, Turner, and that most distinguished Chief-justice Tenterden were barbers. Ben Jonson, the poet; Telford, the engineer; Hugh Miller, the geologist; Cunningham, the sculptor, were English stone-masons. Inigo Jones, the architect; Hunter, the physiologist; Romney and Poie, the painters; Gibson, the sculptor; Fox, the statesman; Wilson, the ornithologist; Livingstone, the missionary—started life as weavers. Admiral Sir Cloudesly Shovel; Bloomfield, the poet; Carey, the missionary—were shoemakers. Bunyan, was a tinker; Herschel, a musician; Lincoln, a rail-splitter; Faraday, a book-binder; Stephenson, the inventor of the locomotive, a stoker; Watt, the discoverer of steam-power, a watchmaker; Franklin, a printer; President Johnson, a tailor; President Garfield, an employee on a canal-boat; Louisa Alcott, both housemaid and laundress; James Whitcomb Riley, an itinerant sign-painter; Thoreau, a man-of-all-work for Emerson; the poets, Keats and Drake, as well as Sir Humphry Davy, were druggists.
Benjamin Thompson was a humble New Hampshire schoolmaster whose industry, perseverance, and integrity, coupled to his genius and a truly benevolent spirit, ultimately made him the companion of kings and philosophers, Count Rumford of the Holy Roman Empire. He declined to participate in the Revolution, and was compelled to flee from his home in Rumford, now Concord (New Hampshire), leaving behind his mother, wife, and friends; but this persecution by his countrymen led to his greatness. In the spring of 1776 General Howe sent him to England with important despatches for the Ministry. At once the English government appreciated his worth and scientific men sought his acquaintance. In less than four years after he landed in England he became Under-Secretary of State. In 1788, he left England with letters to the Elector of Bavaria, who immediately offered him honorable employment which the English government permitted him to accept after he had been knighted by the king.
In Bavaria he became lieutenant-general, commander-in-chief of staff, minister of war, member of the council of state, knight of Poland, member of the academy of science in three cities, commander-in-chief of the general staff, superintendent of police of Bavaria, and chief of the regency during the sovereign's compulsory absence in 1798. During his ten years' service he made great civil and military reforms and produced such salutary changes in the condition of the people that they erected a monument in his honor in the pleasure-grounds of Munich, which he had made for them. When Munich was attacked by an Austrian army in 1796, he conducted the defense so successfully that he was accorded the highest praise throughout Europe. The Bavarian monarch showed his appreciation by making him a count; he chose the title of Count Rumford as an honor to the birthplace of his wife and child. He ended his days at Paris in literary and scientific studies and in the society of the most learned men of Europe.
The Rumford professorship at Harvard was very liberally endowed by him, and he gave five thousand dollars to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1796.