The supreme end of each man's life is to take individual care of his own garden. When this is neglected his life is wasted, and there is no immorality that is comparable to the immorality of a wasted life--and every life is wasted unless its owner has made it yield its full capacity. If it is only a ten-bushel-an-acre field, he has done worthy work who has reaped ten bushels from an acre; if it is a seventy-bushel-an-acre field it is dishonorable to have reaped sixty-nine bushels from an acre. God gives us the chance; the improvement of it we give ourselves. The spirit of self-help is the root of all genuine growth. Help from the outside may be convenient, but it enfeebles; all self-help invigorates. The self-helper must be self-reliant; the measure of his self-help is always proportioned to the measure of his self-reliance. The self-reliant does not consider himself as the creature of circumstances, but the architect of them. "All that Adam had, all that Cæsar could, we have had and can." The self-reliant and the self-helpful are the minority; the majority are forever looking toward and relying upon some government or some institution to do for them what they should only do for themselves. A real man wants no protection; so long as his human powers are left to him, he asks nothing more than the freedom to win his own battles. The best any government or any institution can do for men is to leave them as free as possible from either guidance or help, so that they may best develop and improve themselves. As it has been during the centuries, we put too much faith in government and other institutions, and too little in ourselves. Men who count for something do not wait for opportunities from any source--they help themselves to their opportunities. They can win who believe they can, and the strong-hearted always ultimately achieve success. A nation is worth just what the individuals of that nation are worth, and the highest philanthropy and patriotism does not wholly consist in aiding institutions and enacting laws--especially the laws which teach men to lean--but they rather consist in helping men to improve themselves through their own self-help. There is no aid comparable to the aid that is given a man to help himself--we may stand him upon his feet, but remaining upon them should be his own task. He is a magnificent somebody who steadfastly refuses to hang upon others; and nothing brings the blush sooner to the true-hearted man, than to feel that he has been unnecessarily helped to anything by men or by governments. There is no man who rides through life so well as the man who has learned to ride by being set upon the bare-backed horse called self-dependence. Paradise was not meant for cowards; self-reliance and self-help is the manliness of the soul.