We see then, the futility of trying all of one thing or aspiring to reach all of one thing. You can not succeed because you have a mere smattering of many details, and not a perfect knowledge of any single detail. This however, makes the road to success much easier than in the old days. You can become perfect in some one thing, and life is not too short to learn it; it can be mastered. It goes without saying, that in our intercourse with men we must put them on an equality with us and place ourselves on an equality with them. Are you an inferior man? Then go elsewhere for employment. “I want skilled workmen,” says the employer. “I want a physician that will cure me, not one to experiment upon me,” says the sick man. It is always man to man now-a-days. No cringing, remember, and on the other hand, no bluffing. THE MAN OF HOPE; THE MAN OF DESPAIR; AND THE MAN OF “DON’T CARE” Optimism, Pessimism, Indifference The people of the earth are made up generally of three classes: optimists, pessimists, indifferents. The radical optimist floats in a balmy spring air on a rosy cloud, stringing his banjo and singing lullabies to the gorgeously feathered songsters that surround him. The pessimist is like a fly with its wings stuck on fly paper, and bemoans his fate as that of every other fly. The indifferent is a devil-may-care sort of a person who does not care whether the sun shines, or whether it rains. The extreme optimist is too happy to be of any use on earth; the pessimist sends us all to perdition and is afraid to walk under a ladder lest it fall on him, while the indifferent is of no use because he does not take any interest in the things around him. He is usually a tramp, or a free lunch fiend. He will offer to shovel the snow from your walks in July, and gladly offer his services as a harvest hand in January. Apart from indifference, which is the offspring of the other two, optimism and pessimism, though extremes, meet among men, but possess different working machinery. One is really the aid of the other. The earth was created in an optimistic spirit. Of that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man who believes in creation at all. But by the extraordinary conduct of our first parents in the Garden of Eden, this creation by the supreme Optimist, was changed into the most radical of pessimistic ventures—judged from the human standpoint, of course. We hear it from the most pious divines and it is probably correct. A large gulf was dug in the original optimism and filled with the darkness of pessimism, where, floundering in it, man looks back to the joys lost to him forever by another’s folly, and then forward to the forbidding cliffs that bar his entrance to the joys to come, unless he engage in a mighty struggle and a hand-to-hand conflict with his animal nature. He may and must scale the cliffs.