Let us not shift the responsibility of our being other than we desire upon the shoulders of either our progenitors or circumstances, but, taking what is, as a fact, we should try to so regulate our conduct that what we wish may come to pass. It is not he who mourns the power which he has not--who becomes either the master of himself or of others, as the parable of the talents tells us, but it is he who, with a strong heart, dares and does, that achieves the great things on this earth. Perhaps as close an analogy as we can get to the real life-condition, is to represent the individual's power over himself and his destiny, by one line, and the power of heredity and forced environment by one of equal length; then his power of accomplishment will be the _vector sum_ of these two lines. The line representing the uncontrollable condition will necessarily be longer (as the influence is more powerful) in youth, while, during the life period, it gradually shortens up until it reaches its minimum at the physical and mental culmination of life, or when the individual is at his best, and lengthens again as old age comes on, and the physical and mental forces decline, and habit and environment become the prevailing factors. With our responsibility clearly before us, then, let us investigate what is worth having. At this particular time, when all of the Occidental world is hopelessly insane with its Machiavelian money greed, it would seem that one of Horace's sentiments, uttered satirically, had become the slogan of the battle: "Get place and wealth, if possible, with grace; If not, by any means, get wealth and place." Everything is thrown away by the average individual to-day, in his haste to satisfy his desire for inordinate wealth;--friendship, liberty, decency, humanity, honor, and even life itself, is hurled into the maw of this Mammon, which is not satisfied with such sacrifices, and gives only hard, cold gold as a return for the priceless jewels of the human soul, and even this usually at a time in life when the little value which the mental ever possessed has gone, since there are no longer desires to gratify by it, with the one exception of that calling constantly for more of the counters which have lost their purchasing power. Our forefathers thought of wealth as worth having only because with it came leisure, and with leisure came culture through application. Sir John Lubbock has well said, "If wealth is to be valued because it gives leisure, clearly it would be a mistake to sacrifice leisure in the struggle for wealth."