SUCCESSFUL MEN.

Evening Post, Volume XLVII, Issue 88, 14 April 1894, Page 2 (Supplement)

SUCCESSFUL MEN.

How do men succeed ? I will answer this question by asking you (says a writer in The Young Man) to imagine yourself in the office of the New York correspondent of a Western newspaper. Do you see that telegraph operator over there dozing over his key ? News is dull, and he has nothing else to do ; but it is the first break in sixteen hours' continuous labour, and he has three more to put in, making nineteen hours for his day's work. A long stretch, isn't it ? Yet that man haß stood it for thirty months, taking no^acations except the brief rest of the Sabbath. He works as a telegraph operator at night, and studies dentistry by day. Next spring he will graduate from the Dental College, and five years hence he will probably be pulling the teeth of American millionaires at £4 apiece. It takes a good deal of pluck to travel in the hard road that this young man has marked out for himself, but, after all, it is pluck and plodding that tell in the merciless battle for existence that is waged every day. The men who have made a place for themselves are those who started just like this telegraph operator, and who have passed the milestones in the journey of life only by wearisome, but never-ending, trudging along its stoniest pacha. Take the successful American in statecraft. Benjamin Harrison is a type. He is a plodder. Look over his career, and you will find it studded with what are popularly known as " brilliants," though in reality only moonstones. Yet every step he has taken up the ladder of fame has been a firm one, and be has never had a fall back. Grover Cleveland is another of the army of plodders. As President of the United States he is the foremost citizen of the land. Make a mental photograph of him siuing at his desk in his shirt-sleeves until after midnight, poring over his work with as close attention to detail as he gave his duties aa Sheriff when he cut the hangman's rope instead of allowing a deputy to perform that unenviable task. As Sheriff, Mayor, or Governor, Cleveland was for yean persistently and continuously a drudge and a slave to detail. Yet this "plodder" was pitted against a man whose brilliancy no one questioned ; the idol of a party, the leader of a nation. Accident, fate or what you will, as each may view the contest of 1884, elected Cleveland and defeated Blame. The former won the highest gift the people could give him, and then the hand of a lovely youug girl. What more happiness could the world give —what better reward for years of plodding ? Read the lives of the great men in any lino except, possibly, the Army and the Stock Exchange, and almost without exception jou will find that their days and nights wcro a ceateless round of toil and plodding of the most tireless kind.