If the avenue to success lay in one direction only--that of accumulating a fortune, little incentive would be felt by those in the lower walks of life. Moreover, if it were possible for all men to become millionaires, the very organization of human society would become disrupted; for who then would till the soil, run the factories, clean the streets? Nature has been wise in the distribution of her talents. Anticipating the havoc of endowing all mankind with equal powers, she established a wide diversity in the range of human ability. To one she has given the gift of sagacity to achieve success in the world of trade; to another mechanical skill to create the ideals of inventive genius into reality; to another the highly artistic sense, and withholding these higher attributes from still others, she has chosen to endow them with a wealth of muscular force that the physical requirements of organized human effort might be made effective. So that any way we choose to look at this question we must concede that temporal wealth does not constitute the broadest idea of success, nor is capable in itself of producing it. Even failure may be an element of a glorious success. The volcano that pours its vengeance upon the fair plantation below, leaving wreck and ruin in its path, bestows a wealth of sulphur which plays an important part in the world of commerce. The same frost that kills the harvest of a season also destroys the locust, preserving the harvests of a century. The death of the cocoon is the production of the silk, and the failure of the caterpillar the birth of the butterfly. If the boy Newton had not failed utterly on the farm, he would never have been started in college to become the mighty man of science. The fall of Rome meant the rise of the German Empire. "All men," says Frederick Arnold, "need through errors attain to truth, through struggles to victory, through regrets to that sorrow which is a very source of life. Men must rise in an ever-ascending scale, like the ladder of St. Augustine, by which men, through stepping-stones of their dead selves rise to higher things; or those steps of Alciphron, which crumbled away into nothingness as fast as each foot-fall left them." Thus our very failures we may overrule and convert into stepping-stones to success. Lifted to a loftier sphere, to a nobler experience, we are apt to receive greater benefit than though we escaped disappointment and rejoiced in easy fruition.