Strange he should make such a criticism of Louis Stevenson, in literature pronouncedly the successful man. For success in the abstract, and successful men and women in the concrete--the word success is here used in its vulgar, popular sense, in reference to material advancement, not to ethical or spiritual development--he worships. Success is a chief god in his pantheon,--to have returns greater than one’s effort or worth deserve. Yet he believes with the author of Lorna Doone, “the excess of price over value is the true test of success in life.” None of us would think of saying Shakespeare was a success; or Milton; or John Brown; or Martin Luther. But Pope, with his clever money-making, we might call a success, as did Swift in 1728: “God bless you, whose great genius has not so transported you as to leave you to the constancy of mankind, for wealth is liberty, and liberty is a blessing fittest for a philosopher.” The means to end, the processes by which the successful issue of a matter is gained, our neighbor of St. Louis tells you with a smile not to be finikin about. Many who have had success have not been. Look at all history, from Abraham to Joe Smith and Cecil Rhodes and many of our millionaires. He himself is not, he declares, but his acts often contradict his assertion. So long as a man, or a woman, “gets there,” it does not matter much how. “Work through a corporation or trust,” he tells you, and smiling at you with honest eyes, adds, “A corporation can do things the individual man would not.” The one who succeeds is the model; he is to be envied; he is the ideal the ancients sought--the happy man. Pass by noblesse oblige, human heartedness, elevation that would not stoop to exploit human labor, human need, and human sacrifice--that is, as corporations pass these qualities by. In short, let us, in fact, and not by legend alone, have the character formerly ascribed by average English folk to the Yankee. Assumption of excellence, he knows, goes far toward persuading people that you have it. There is not so great difference in people after all, this democrat believes. When one has every material privilege that will allow him to assume, that will hedge and fence his assumption about, he is pretty apt to succeed, he thinks, and be cried up as a man of extraordinary virtue, of taste, of attainment. In any success, commonly so-called, he asks little of the great marks by which a man should be judged. “He has done this.” “He has got that.” “He is clever,” he says. He rarely cries, “He is honest.” “He is true.” Marriage he is not so apt as the brilliant woman beside him to consider impermanent. This is wholly a result of convention, for women, by their very nature and the conditions of married life, cling more closely to the permanence of the union.