Architects of Fate; Or, Steps to Success and Power

by Orison Swett Marden

"Your lordships," said Wellington in Parliament, "must all feel the high and honorable character of the late Sir Robert Peel. I was long connected with him in public life. We were both in the councils of our sovereign together, and I had long the honor to enjoy his private friendship. In all the course of my acquaintance with him, I never knew a man in whose truth and justice I had greater confidence, or in whom I saw a more invariable desire to promote the public service. In the whole course of my communication with him, I never knew an instance in which he did not show the strongest attachment to truth; and I never saw in the whole course of my life the smallest reason for suspecting that he stated anything which he did not firmly believe to be the fact."

"The Secretary stood alone," said Grattan of the elder Pitt. "Modern degeneracy had not reached him. Original and unaccommodating, the features of his character had the hardihood of antiquity. His august mind overawed majesty; and one of his sovereigns thought royalty so impaired in his presence, that he conspired to remove him, in order to be relieved from his superiority. No state chicanery, no narrow system of vicious politics, sunk him to the level of the vulgar great; but, overbearing, persuasive, and impracticable, his object was England, his ambition, fame. A character so exalted, so unsullied, so various, so authoritative, astonished a corrupt age, and the Treasury trembled at the name of Pitt through all the classes of venality. Corruption imagined, indeed, that she had found defects in this statesman, and talked much of the inconsistency of his policy, and much of the ruin of his victories; but the history of his country and the calamities of the enemy answered and refuted her. Upon the whole, there was in this man something that could create, subvert, or reform; an understanding, a spirit, and an eloquence to summon mankind to united exertion, or to break the bonds of slavery asunder, and to rule the wilderness of free minds with unbounded authority; something that could establish or overwhelm an empire, and strike a blow in the world that would resound through the universe."

Pitt was Paymaster-General for George II. When a subsidy was voted a foreign office, it was customary for the office to claim one half per cent. for honorarium. Pitt astonished the King of Sardinia by sending him the sum without any deduction, and further astonished him by refusing a present as a compliment to his integrity. He was a poor man.

Washington would take no pay as commander-in-chief of the Continental armies. He would keep a strict account of his expenses; and these, he doubted not, would be discharged.

Remember, the main business of life is not to do, but to become; an action itself has its finest and most enduring fruit in character.

In 1837, after George Peabody moved to London, there came a commercial crisis in the United States. Many banks suspended specie payments. Many mercantile houses went to the wall, and thousands more were in great distress. Edward Everett said, "The great sympathetic nerve of the commercial world, credit, as far as the United States were concerned, was for the time paralyzed." Probably not a half dozen men in Europe would have been listened to for a moment in the Bank of England upon the subject of American securities, but George Peabody was one of them. His name was already a tower of strength in the commercial world. In those dark days his integrity stood four-square in every business panic. Peabody retrieved the credit of the State of Maryland, and, it might almost be said, of the United States. His character was the magic wand which in many a case changed almost worthless paper into gold. Merchants on both sides of the Atlantic procured large advances from him, even before the goods consigned to him had been sold.

Thackeray says, "Nature has written a letter of credit upon some men's faces which is honored wherever presented. You cannot help trusting such men; their very presence gives confidence. There is a 'promise to pay' in their very faces which gives confidence, and you prefer it to another man's indorsement." Character is credit.

With most people, as with most nations, "things are worth what they will sell for," and the dollar is mightier than the sword. As good as gold has become a proverb—as though it were the highest standard of comparison.

Themistocles, having conceived the design of transferring the government of Greece from the hands of the Lacedaemonians into those of the Athenians, kept his thoughts continually fixed on this great project. Being at no time very nice or scrupulous in the choice of his measures, he thought anything which could tend to the accomplishment of the end he had in view just and lawful. Accordingly in an assembly of the people one day, he intimated that he had a very important design to propose; but he could not communicate it to the public at large, because the greatest secrecy was necessary to its success, and he therefore desired that they would appoint a person to whom he might explain himself on the subject. Aristides was unanimously selected by the assembly, which deferred entirely to his opinion. Themistocles, taking him aside, told him that the design he had conceived was to burn the fleet belonging to the rest of the Grecian states, which then lay in a neighboring port, when Athens would assuredly become mistress of all Greece. Aristides returned to the assembly, and declared to them that nothing could be more advantageous to the commonwealth than the project of Themistocles, but that, at the same time, nothing in the world could be more unfair. The assembly unanimously declared that, since such was the case, Themistocles should wholly abandon his project.

A tragedy by Aeschylus was once represented before the Athenians, in which it was said of one of the characters, "that he cared not more to be just than to appear so." At these words all eyes were instantly turned upon Aristides as the man who, of all the Greeks, most merited that distinguished reputation. Ever after he received, by universal consent, the surname of the Just,—a title, says Plutarch, truly royal, or rather truly divine. This remarkable distinction roused envy, and envy prevailed so far as to procure his banishment for years, upon the unjust suspicion that his influence with the people was dangerous to their freedom. When the sentence was passed by his countrymen, Aristides himself was present in the midst of them, and a stranger who stood near, and could not write, applied to him to write for him on his shell-ballot. "What name?" asked the philosopher. "Aristides," replied the stranger.