Hold the victorious attitude toward life and you will overcome all unfavorable conditions.
CHAPTER VIII
THE SUGGESTION OF INFERIORITY
As the initials which boys cut in the bark of a sapling become great, ugly scars on the grown tree, so the suggestions of inferiority etched upon the young mind become great ugly scars in the life of the adult.
You may succeed when others do not believe in you, when everybody else denounces you even, but never when you do not believe in yourself.
In olden times criminals, fugitives from justice, and slaves were branded. The words, "I am a fugitive," "I am a thief," or others indicating their crime or their inferior status were seared on some part of the body with a red hot iron.
In Rome robbers were branded on the forehead with a degrading letter. Laborers in mines, convicts, and gladiators were also branded. In Greece slaves were sometimes branded with a favorite poetical passage of their master. In France the branding iron used on slaves and criminals often took the form of the fleur-de-lis. In England deserters from the army were marked with the letter D, and vagabonds, robbers and brawlers were branded in some way to advertise their disgrace.
The barbarous custom of branding human beings with the badge of crime or inferiority persisted in America even after it had been discontinued in the mother country. Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter" gives us a vivid picture of the suffering inflicted on the moral delinquent by Puritan moralists in Colonial days. The tragic heroine, Hester Prynn, is never allowed to forget her sin. The sinister scarlet letter with which she is branded proclaims her shame to every one she meets. While long after the Colonial period, up to the time of their emancipation, slaves were branded in Christian America with the initials of their owners as they were in Pagan Greece and Rome.
The mere idea of this stamping human beings with an indelible badge of disgrace, of inferiority, shocks us moderns. Yet we do not hesitate to mark people to-day with the scarlet letter of outlawry, the brand of ostracism. We put the criminal badge on our prisoners by shaving their heads and clothing them in stripes, thus perpetually keeping before them the suggestion that they are criminals, outlaws, apart from their kind.