On the other hand, to employ an extreme example--and yet it is shown by statistics that there are one hundred thousand tramps and vagrants in this country--the man who folds his arms and defiantly proclaimes that the world owes him a living, mutinies against the sacred order of things--"fouls his own nest," as it were. To that man society replies: "If any man is not willing to work, neither let him eat." And this is the dominant note of the twentieth century as truly as it was in the first when spoken by the Roman philosopher. To harbor the doctrine that the world owes every man a living, not only discounts the character value of the individual, but has a reflex action on the entire social organism. Just as one wheel out of play in the mechanism of a watch throws the entire works out of order, or one team in a procession halting the whole train behind it, the individual failing to do his part affects the equilibrium of the whole. Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo and died in exile, a prisoner at St. Helena, because one of his marshals, failing to comply with orders, arrived too late with re-enforcements. Remember that you have an important part to perform, that, as in mathematics, you are a quantity so connected with another quantity that if any alteration be made in the former there will be a consequent alteration in the latter. In the busy hive of twentieth-century civilization scant space has been provided for drones. The drone is a minus quantity in the problem of life; instead of adding to the common weal, he is ever subtracting from it. Like an owl he sits in the gloom of indolence hooting at the caravan of events. The eye of the world is quick to observe the man who is resting on his oars. A more graphic picture of the man who is ever magnifying the world's duty to him, and minimizing his duty to the world, could not be painted than that one which James Russell Lowell has penned: "The busy world shoves angrily aside The man who stands with arms akimbo set." The world has but one duty to this man, namely, to dispel the cloud from his vision and arouse him to worthy action. To contend that the world owes every man a living would be as preposterous as to assert that the government owes every citizen under the flag a pension. The world owes no man anything except that for which he pays a just equivalent. Every man is indebted to the world; he owes it all his best possessions--his talent, time, and effort. And the individual who attempts to throw off this yoke of duty is violating one of nature's great laws. Even the lower forms of life afford example of this supreme law. Solomon startles the sluggard with his sharp admonition to betake himself to the ant. And Sir John Lubbock points men to the insect world to learn real diligence and thrift.