"I wish," said President Roosevelt, in a recent address in Washington, “to see in the average American citizen the determination not to shrink back when temporarily beaten in life, as each will be now and then, but to come up again and wrest triumph from defeat.”
"To come up again and wrest triumph from defeat." That is the secret of the success of every brave and noble life that ever was lived.
Perhaps the past has been a bitter disappointment to you. In looking it over you may feel that you have been a failure, or at best have been plodding along in mediocrity. You may not have succeeded in the particular things you expected to do; you may have lost money when you expected to make it; or you may have lost friends and relatives who were very dear to you. You may have lost your business, and even your home may have been wrenched from you because you could not pay the mortgage on it, or because of sickness and consequent inability to work. A serious accident may have apparently robbed you of power. The New Year may present a very discouraging outlook to you. Yet, in spite of any or all of these misfortunes, if you refuse to be conquered, victory is awaiting you farther on the road.
A little boy was asked how he learned to skate. “Oh, by getting up every time I fell down,” he replied. This is the spirit that leads men and armies to victory. It is not the fall but the not getting up that is defeat.
After twelve thousand of Napoleon's soldiers had been overwhelmed by the advance of seventy-five thousand Austrian troops, he addressed them thus: “I am displeased with you. You have evinced neither discipline nor valor. You have allowed yourselves to be driven from positions where a handful of resolute men might have arrested an army. You are no longer French soldiers. Chief of Staff, cause it to be written on their standards, 'They are no longer of the army of Italy.’”
In tears the battered veterans replied: "We have been misrepresented. The soldiers of the enemy were three to one. Try us once more. Place us in the post of danger and see if we do not belong to the army of Italy." In the next battle they were placed in the van, and they made good their pledge by rolling back the great Austrian army.
He is a pretty poor sort of man who loses courage and fears to face the world just because he has made a mistake or a slip somewhere, because his business has failed, because his property has been swept away by some general disaster, or because of other trouble impossible for him to avert.
This is the test of your manhood: how much is there left in you after you have lost everything outside of yourself? If you lie down now, throw up your hands, and acknowledge yourself worsted, there is not much in you. But if, with heart undaunted and face turned forward, you refuse to give up or to lose faith in yourself, if you scorn to beat a retreat, you will show that the man left in you is bigger than your loss, greater than your cross, and larger than any defeat.
"I know no such unquestionable badge and ensign of a sovereign mind," said Emerson, " as that tenacity of purpose which, through all changes of companions, or parties, or fortunes, changes never, bates no jot of heart or hope, but wearies out opposition and arrives at its port."
It is men like Ulysses S. Grant, who, whether in the conflict of opposing armies on the battlefield, or in the wear and tear of civic strife, fighting against reverses, battling for a competence for his loved ones, even while the hand of death lay chill upon him, "bates no jot of heart or hope," that wring victory from the most forbidding circumstances. It is men like Napoleon, who refuse to recognize defeat, who declare that "impossible" is not in their vocabularies, that accomplish things.
You may say that you have failed too often, that there is no use in trying, that it is impossible for you to succeed, and that you have fallen too often even to attempt to get on your feet again. Nonsense! There is no failure for a man whose spirit is unconquered. No matter how late the hour or how many and repeated his failures, success is still possible. The evolution of Scrooge, the miser, in the closing years of his life, from a hard, narrow, heartless money-grubber, whose soul was imprisoned in his shining heap of hoarded gold, to a generous, genial lover of his kind, is no mere myth of Dickens' brain. Time and again in the history of our daily lives, chronicled in our newspapers, recorded in biographies, or exhibited before our eyes, we see men and women redeeming past failures, rising up out of the stupor of discouragement, and boldly turning face forward once more.
There are thousands of people who have lost everything they had in the world who are just as far from failure as they were before their loss, because of their unconquerable spirit, — stout hearts that never quail. How much we owe to this great army of the invincible which is forever amongst us wringing victory from defeat!
There can be no failure to a man who has not lost his courage, his character, his self-respect, or his self-confidence. He is still a king.
If you are made of the stuff that wins, if you have grit and nerve in you, your misfortunes, losses, and defeats will call them out and make you all the stronger. "It is defeat," says Beecher, "that turns bone to flint and gristle to muscle and makes men invincible."
Some people get along beautifully for half a lifetime, perhaps, while everything goes smoothly. While they are accumulating property and gaining friends and reputation their characters seem to be strong and well-balanced; but the moment there is friction anywhere — the moment trouble comes, a failure in business, a panic, or a great crisis in which they lose their all — they are overwhelmed. They despair, lose heart, courage, faith, hope and power to try again, — everything. Their manhood or womanhood is swallowed up by a mere material loss.
This is failure, indeed, and there is small hope for anyone who falls to such a depth of despair. There is hope for an ignorant man who cannot write his name, even, if he has stamina and backbone. There is hope for a cripple who has courage; there is hope for a boy who has nerve and grit, even though he is so hemmed in that he has apparently no chance in the world, but there is no hope for a man who cannot or will not stand up after he falls, but loses heart when opposition strikes him, and lays down his arms after defeat.
Let everything else go, if you must, but never lose your grip on yourself. Do not let your manhood or womanhood go. This is your priceless pearl, dearer to you than your breath. Cling to it with all your might Give up life itself first.
A man should be so much greater than any material failure that can come to him that it would scarcely be mentioned in his biography, and that it would be regarded as a mere incident in his career — inconvenient but not very important. In true manhood there is something which rises higher than worldly success or failure. No matter what reverses come to him, what disappointments or failures, a really great man rises superior to them. He never loses his equanimity. In the midst of storms and trials to which a weak nature would succumb, his serene soul, his calm confidence still assert themselves, so completely dominating all outward conditions that they have no power to harm him. Like a great monarch of the forest, amid the war of elements he stands unshaken through all changes and ravages of time.
I have been in the track of a terrible tornado the day after it had swept on its path of destruction. It had uprooted everything that was weak, and had twisted off every tree that was rotten at heart or that was not firm of fiber. Only the stalwart and true, those that were sound to the core, withstood the awful test. All the buildings in a village through which I passed, except the strongest, whose foundations were deep and firm, went down before its terrible force. When the great historic panics swept over this country the weak houses, with small capital, or headed by men without great resources of experience and character went down by thousands. Only the sound and vigorous, with great reserves of power and capital, withstood the ordeal. Little, weak, backboneless, nerveless men are the first to go down when an emergency comes, and hard times and panics frighten capital. Obstacles paralyze the weak, but strengthen the strong.
“What is defeat?” says Wendell Phillips. “Nothing but the first steps to something higher.” Many a one has finally succeeded only because he has failed after repeated efforts. If he had never met defeat, he would never have known any great victory. There is something in defeat which puts new determination into a man of mettle. He, perhaps, would be content to go along in comparative mediocrity but for the stimulus of failure. This rouses him to do his best. He comes to himself after some stinging defeat, and perhaps for the first time feels his real power, like a horse who takes the bit in his mouth and runs away for the first time when he had previously thought that he was a slave of his master.
A great many people never really discover themselves until ruin stares them in the face. They do not seem to know how to bring out their reserves until they are overtaken by an overwhelming disaster, or until the sight of their blighted prospects and of the wreck of their homes and happiness stirs them to the very center of their beings.
Young men who never amounted to much, when suddenly overtaken by some great sorrow or loss, or other misfortune, have developed a power for self-assertion, for aggressiveness, an ability to grapple with the difficulty or trouble confronting them which they never before dreamed they possessed, and of which no one who knew them conceived them capable. The very desperation of the situation spurred them on to do what they would not have thought possible in their former ease and luxury. They had never touched their power before and did not know their strength until the emergency came.
Many a girl who has been reared in luxury and ease, who has never had practical training, is suddenly thrown upon her own resources by the death of her father, or the loss of property, and instead of being cared for, nursed and caressed by tender parents, she finds herself obliged, not only to support herself, but also to take care of brothers and sisters and an invalid mother. This crisis which confronts her calls out her reserve and develops an independence and power of self-effort which no one ever imagined she possessed, and which is amazing even to herself.
There is a certain something in our nature, a divine force, which we cannot describe or explain, which does not seem to inhere in any of our ordinary faculties, which lies deeper than any visible attribute, but which rushes to our assistance in great emergencies, in supreme crises. When death or danger threatens in railroad or steamship accidents how often we see men, and sometimes frail women, exert the power of giants in their efforts to extricate themselves from the impending peril. In disasters at sea, during the great fires or floods, how often have delicate girls and women performed Herculean tasks, tasks which they would have deemed impossible had it not been for the magic stimulus born of the emergency.
It is the locked-up spiritual forces within us — forces that we do not, as a rule, call to our aid in the ordinary experiences of life — that make men giants, that stamp humanity with the divine seal. The man who uses all the resources that the Divine Power has implanted with him cannot fail. It would be strange, indeed, if the grandest of God's creatures were ever, in his real character, at the mercy of the accidents which make and unmake fortunes. No, there is no failure for the man who realizes his power, who never knows when he is beaten; there is no failure for the determined endeavor; the unconquerable will. There is no failure for the man who gets up every time he falls, who rebounds like a rubber ball, who persists when everyone else gives up, who pushes on when everyone else turns back.
"Something Which Brings Things Out Right in Spite of Me."
How many times we come to a crisis in life when some obstacle confronts us which we think will be a terrible calamity and will perhaps ruin us if we cannot avoid it. We fear that our ambition will be thwarted, or that our lives, perhaps, will be wrecked. The dread of the shock which we think will overwhelm us as we come nearer and nearer to it, without any possibility of averting it, is something frightful.
Many a time in the writer's life has he come to such a point, — when it seemed as if all was lost, — and yet something beyond his control has straightened out the tangle, solved the puzzle which seemed insoluble; the storm which threatened shipwreck has passed over, the sun has come out again, and everything has become tranquil and serene once more. If we look ahead, the troubles seem thick and threatening, but when we get there, we usually find a clear path, plenty of room, pleasant faces, and people to help us in case of need. When we look back over our lives how few accidents have really happened to us. Many have threatened, but, somehow, things have come out right in spite of us, so that we have wasted our vitality, we have grown old and wrinkled and bent, and have shortened our youth anticipating troubles and worrying about calamities which never were to happen. Why should we thus needlessly throw away happiness and usefulness?
It seems strange that when we know perfectly well that we are dependent for every breath we draw upon a Divine Power which is constantly providing for us and protecting us, we do not learn to trust it with absolute confidence and resignation.
There is only one thing for us to do, and that is to do our level best right where we are every day of our lives; to use our best judgment and then to trust the rest to that Power which holds the forces of the universe in His hand and which does all things well.