"I am sure I would wish that," said Rothschild; "I wish them to give mind, and soul, and heart, and body, and everything to business; that is the way to be happy." "Stick to one business, young man," he added, addressing a young brewer; "stick to your brewery, and you may be the great brewer of London. But be a brewer, and a banker, and a merchant, and a manufacturer, and you will soon be in the Gazette."
Not many things indifferently, but one thing supremely, is the demand of the hour. He who scatters his efforts in this intense, concentrated age, cannot hope to succeed.
"Goods removed, messages taken, carpets beaten, and poetry composed on any subject," was the sign of a man in London who was not very successful at any of these lines of work, and reminds one of Monsieur Kenard, of Paris, "a public scribe, who digests accounts, explains the language of flowers, and sells fried potatoes."
The great difference between those who succeed and those who fail does not consist in the amount of work done by each, but in the amount of intelligent work. Many of those who fail most ignominiously do enough to achieve grand success; but they labor at haphazard, building up with one hand only to tear down with the other. They do not grasp circumstances and change them into opportunities. They have no faculty of turning honest defeats into telling victories. With ability enough, and time in abundance,—the warp and woof of success,—they are forever throwing back and forth an empty shuttle, and the real web of life is never woven.
If you ask one of them to state his aim and purpose in life, he will say: "I hardly know yet for what I am best adapted, but I am a thorough believer in genuine hard work, and I am determined to dig early and late all my life, and I know I shall come across something—either gold, silver, or at least iron." I say most emphatically, no. Would an intelligent man dig up a whole continent to find its veins of silver and gold? The man who is forever looking about to see what he can find never finds anything. If we look for nothing in particular, we find just that and no more. We find what we seek with all our heart. The bee is not the only insect that visits the flower, but it is the only one that carries honey away. It matters not how rich the materials we have gleaned from the years of our study and toil in youth, if we go out into life with no well-defined idea of our future work, there is no happy conjunction of circumstances that will arrange them into an imposing structure, and give it magnificent proportions.
"What a immense power over the life," says Elizabeth Stuart Phelps Ward, "is the power of possessing distinct aims. The voice, the dress, the look, the very motions of a person, define and alter when he or she begins to live for a reason. I fancy that I can select, in a crowded street, the busy, blessed women who support themselves. They carry themselves with an air of conscious self-respect and self-content, which a shabby alpaca cannot hide, nor a bonnet of silk enhance, nor even sickness nor exhaustion quite drag out."
It is said that the wind never blows fair for that sailor who knows not to what port he is bound.
"The weakest living creature," says Carlyle, "by concentrating his powers on a single object, can accomplish something; whereas the strongest, by dispersing his over many, may fail to accomplish anything. The drop, by continually falling, bores its passage through the hardest rock. The hasty torrent rushes over it with hideous uproar and leaves no trace behind."
"When I was young I used to think it was thunder that killed men," said a shrewd preacher; "but as I grew older, I found it was lightning. So I resolved to thunder less, and lighten more."
The man who knows one thing, and can do it better than anybody else, even if it only be the art of raising turnips, receives the crown he merits. If he raises the best turnips by reason of concentrating all his energy to that end, he is a benefactor to the race, and is recognized as such.