toward all of our acquaintances. We magnify their perfidy. It is, as Epictetus says, the part of weak men to make their commonplace misfortunes into tragedies. Your trouble, if you tell it, never seems to me so great as to you. Plutarch says we must look at our misfortunes just as we estimate another's. Pythagoras it was who said "If you are defamed, keep silent. Talk will convince no one: your life and character must proclaim you, not your words. Be silent, just, industrious, and moderate, seek not to arouse others to punish your enemies nor to punish them yourself. Nemesis belongs to God, not to you. Be silent." "The Fool," says Epictetus, "runs to the gods complaining that his nose runs. Let him wipe his nose. Give me the man who wipes his own nose, for have the gods not given hands and endurance and magnanimity, and manliness? Wherefore, then, shall we not use them?"

To give way to weakness and depression is a seductive habit. "Womanish men enjoy a good snivel." Mortimer Granville wrote this in a medical treatise. He thought that repetition of the practise developed a microscopic power of viewing one's own troubles. Opening one's eyes with sympathetic interest one sees the truth of the proverb, "Everybody has his own grief." Blue men often say that they came into the world with a disposition that they can not change and that they live in circumstances that they can not control. This is a surrender before the fight. How can one say this at least until he is dead? Unless one has been in every circumstance and has tried every remedy, let him hush. You were never, at any waking moment, possest of any disposition of mind which you could not modify, nor have you ever seen such a person unless he was ill. "I ought," says Kant, "implies I can.”

Mr. Bardeen, who has studied us for years, and recorded us with startling frankness, says we schoolmen have more need to make ourselves over than any other class alive. Only a severe punishment seems adequate to awaken a schoolmaster to the defects that bring about the contumely he receives. One reason why he gets rebuffs is because he shows

they hurt. No one cares to pound a man who doesn't make a fuss. The problem is how to change from a man who minds it to one who doesn't. The Epictetian doctrine is that externals can not really harm a man and most of the worrying that men do is about externals altogether. As Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to his friend, "Disappointment, except at one's self, is not a very capital affair.”

But whether it is outside or inside things that make the schoolman suffer, he can ordinarily put a guard at his gate and a policeman within to keep outside trouble from entering and inside discontent from making a disturbance. Why sing "my mind to me a kingdom is," if I am not able to rule it? Burke's statement, "It is the prerogative of a man to be in a great degree the creature of his own making," is a truism of most value to a man when he believes that powerful people are trying to unmake him. One of the satisfactions of your enemies is to see your mortification on being degraded to a lower place. There is so much luck in the appointment of schoolmen that half the time the opposite result follows a dismissal.

Recently I ran across this brief news note in the Journal of Education:

A. had a bitter fight with his school board when he was approaching the dead line of fifty. He lost a $3,800 position but was soon elected to a neighboring city at $4,000.

D., persistently opposed by a minority of the Board, one day found a majority against him. He had to turn his back on $4,000 a year. Altho nearly fifty years old he at once secured a $6,000 position.

B., over fifty years old, superintendent at $4,000, for several years endured attacks by persons without influence until one of his critics got upon the board and got him out. He at once secured a better position.

M., nearly fifty, superintendent at $2,500, for several years with only the ordinary opposition, without warning was superseded. He was at once elected to a $4,000 position.

These are only a few of similar instances. Supervision exposes a man to the kicks of petty natures, but often these kicks are boosts upwards to better things.

So there is the element of luck and hope to entertain a man, but even if he's doomed to an inferior grade next time, this is a matter of externals. We know that our inner judgment tells us that our service is as valuable in a small place; no doubt we can do more real service because there is less machinery. It is what others will think that hurts us-the others who are casting us out-the others who do not care enough about us to lift a hand. Why do we fret about their opinion?

But no one can search into school opportunities very long without remarking that the high places are generally the farthest removed from genuine service. In them opposition is greater; maintaining defenses consumes time and effort which might be given to service. In high places, friendships are fewer. The delights of helping and getting close to the real pleasure of teaching are excluded by the baser enjoyments of power, of receiving deference, of building big systems, and being party to various schemes, plottings, and gossipings which infest educational headquarters.

If you are losing one of these places, dwell on the compensation. You will be getting nearer to the real work for which you went into the business. Observe that, except so far as externals go, you will be better off in the smaller position. There is little justification for you to be afflicted with the material worries of the busy, accumulative crowd about you. You must realize that you turned your back on that when you entered this occupation. It is doubtful whether the philosophy of Bacon and Locke, with their great effort to reach happiness by adjustment of external conditions, is good for a schoolmaster. In American life what newspapers say about us seems of more concern than what is true. We care too much how we appear, how our superiors rate us. Somebody says " X. is a brainy and capable schoolman." X's heartbeats quicken. Another one says "X. is an educational fakir." His temperature goes down. These are externals. To the self-controlled man they make little difference. Within your breast is the best judge whether an act of yours is that of a capable schoolman or of an educational fakir. He who lets

externals guide him neglects to apply the motive power and rudder ready at his hand. Let him use his resentment for fuel with which to generate more power. Trouble is the strong man's opportunity. It is the weak man's means of growing strong. However heavy your burdens are, however weak you seem to be, by searching literature and life you can find many weaker than you made strong by heavier burdens. "At first," says Andrew D. White, "attacks embittered me, but I grew to see that they were valuable in arousing me to new effort."" To have suffered, nay to suffer," wrote Stevenson to Archer, "sets a keen edge on what remains. This is a great truth and has need to be learned in the fire." It is a law of life that opposition and disappointment must come. The future of most of us is like to have more of these things than the past. Why not then acquire the habit of making these things give up their nutritive juices to us? Balfour believed that Stevenson had known the greatest bitterness of humiliation and sounded the darkest depths of the spirit and that the sufferer felt that the purpose of this is to keep a man awake, to keep him alive to his own soul and its fixt design of righteousness. We are not only under the education of words and doctors but "beneath the sharp ferule of calamity we are God's scholars till we die."

"I can not recover from this blow!" a good schoolman wrote me two years after his failure in succeeding himself in an elective office. "His disappointment killed him" was common talk about a well-known superintendent who fell out of his place. "He sits and broods over his defeat all the time," they say of another. This is spiritual suicide. Have we not heard some of the world's best men testify that they never knew what it was to appreciate art, or poetry, or nature until they turned to these things for solace and inspiration in time of trial? Nothing will make us seek solace and inspiration so soon as the need of them. It is pain and sorrow that bring us into our birthright. Unless a man is bruised he never knows the richness of experience of giving sympathy. When things are running well with one he can not know the suffering of others, even that which he himself

has made. Longing for sympathy, he can realize the value of giving it. He is to be congratulated that he has received the scourges that have made so many men gentle and considerate. Thus John White Chadwick:

"Things that hurt and things that mar

Shape the man for perfect praise,

Shock and strain and ruin are

Friendlier than the smiling days."

Have we not seen men whose every outward act resulted in seeming failure, going on from strength to strength, even to virtues of heroic mold? "After I had suffered much contempt and derision and had been committed to gaols or while I would be threatened with death by mobs," wrote Howell Harris in his journal, "a joy unspeakable and great glory would come into my heart so that I was happy in my soul and full of courage." If you do not get abuse and criticism and humiliation you must be lazy. For the active man goes out looking for these things as cultivators of his manhood. Eager desire to suffer and to fight," wrote Roosevelt to Mrs. Van Vorst, "are fundamental virtues, strong elemental qualities without which there can be no strong races."

66

It is not discredit, or lack of appreciation, or a fall to lower place, or injury to reputation to be afraid of, but, as Epictetus said, it is fear itself which we should avoid. The standard for a schoolmaster to set is that of those men of whom Emerson speaks as rising refreshed on hearing a threat, to whom a crisis comes beloved as a bride.

These are the chaps who have learned the art of transmutation. It seems as tho a costumer stood at the entrance of their souls with inexhaustible chests from which to clothe, as wanted, anything that entered. These men digest insult, and absorb nourishment from it. Do you remember a retort of Aristippus? He had been assigned by Dionysius to a very mean place at a banquet, altho a few days before he had occupied a seat of power, "How do you like your seat?" sneered Dionysius. "How is it?"

"Fine," cried Aristippus.

"How so?" demanded Dionysius.