SUCCESS AND SYMPATHY.

Dunstan Times, Issue 3142, 6 November 1922, Page 2

SUCCESS AND SYMPATHY.

(By Cicely Hamilton.) Mr Richards, chief inspector of elementary schools, remarked the other day in the course of an address that the brighter children of the working classes —the children who passed through the secondary schools? and made their way into professions—were not, as a rule, "too sympathetic" to the class they had ceased to belong to. The statement is interesting, but should not be surprising, or regarded as a proof of modern snobbery: the self-made man, in all ages and callings, is inclined to be more or less contemptuous of those who started as bis equal and have fallen behind him in the race. .... They began, he argues, as he did —with just the same chances, just the same advantages l or lack of them—and. by failure in a straight-run contest have proved themselves weaklings and inferiors: with his grit, his character and ■ staying-power, they also would have risen in the world. Thus —frankly or unconsciously be looks down on the laggards and makes fewer excuses for their want of success than the man who started' life ahead of them. Mr Jones, who was born to ten thousand a year, may have secret doubts of bis own capacity to earn the amount by bis personal energy and talents; for that reason he will possibly be more tolerant of the wastrel, more lenient to the failure than bis neighbor, Mr Brown, who was born in the workhouse, and amassed a fortune of ten thousand a year in the course of a determined existence. Mr Brown knows definitely—bis whole life has proved it. without shadow of doubt —that be is a stronger man than the wastrel who might have been his equal. Mr Jones is not nearly so sure of bis standing: as a matter of hard and undoubted fact, he knows only that the fates have been exceedingly kind to him—saved him from the wastrel's disadvantages and a struggle that might have been too much for him. Perhaps it is this frequent tendency of the self-made man to be "not too sympathetic" to those he has outstripped that encourages our common and natural inclination to regard him witli something like suspicion. For. taken as ;i class, the man who "gels on" very .swiftly and surprisingly is not a really popular character; in all generations be has been sneered at consistently—by those ho has outdistanced in the race for prosperity as well as hv those he overtakes. If lie makes money, we jump to conclusions and label him at once as profiteer; and. having so labelled him, wo dislike him as heartily as our grandfathers disliked their "nouveaux riches." It would seem that, much as we clamor i\>\- equality of opportunity, we sire- apt to be annoyed with the enterprising person who grasps the opportunity offered him ! What wonder, then, if he. on his side, is not "too sympathetic" to the rest of us—the everyday muddlers who end where we began and sniff at a. success which we cannot achieve for ourselves.