gullies, tossing the traveller from side to side and dashing his head against the dashboard.  These depressions are called “thank you marms,” because that is the ejaculation with which the victim informs his companions that he has recovered his equanimity.  The man who will never sell on a falling market is the man who will not face the “thank you marms.”  He will “go while the going is good,” but he will not accept the corollary to the dictum, “But don’t stop because going is bad.”  He has not the nerve to face the bump and come up smiling.  Don’t be afraid to sell on a falling market, or you will be afraid to sell at all until you are forced to sell at far lower prices because of the weight of stocks or commitments which must be liquidated at any cost.  It is precisely in time of depression that the men of business ought to press their selling and organise their sales organisation to the utmost limit.  If finance, commerce, and industry could only be persuaded to take this course in the slack times, then every action in this direction would cure the evil by lessening the duration of the bad times.  Not till the surplus stocks have been unloaded will the winter pass and the summer come again in the enterprise of the world.  Selling is the final cure for depression.

XI

FAILURE

The bitterest thing in life is failure, and the pity is that it is almost always the result of some avoidable error or misconception.  With the rare exception of a man who is by nature a criminal or a waster, there need be no such thing as failure.  Every man has a career before him, or, at worst, every man can find a niche in the social order into which he can fit himself with success.

The trouble in so many cases is that it takes time and opportunity for a man to discover in what direction his natural bent lies.  He springs from a certain stock or class, and the circumstances which surround him in youth naturally dictate to him the choice of a career.  In many cases it will be a method of living to which he is totally unsuited.  But once he is embarked on it the clogs are about his feet, and it is hard to break away and begin all over again.  And this ill-fitting of men to jobs may not even embrace so wide a divergence as that between one kind of activity and business and another.  A young man may be in the right business for him, and yet in the wrong department of it.  In any case, the result is the same.  The employer votes him no use, or at least just passable, or second rate.  Much worse, the employee knows himself that he has failed to make good, and that at the best nothing but a career of mediocrity stretches out before him.  He admits a failure, and by that very act of admission he has failed.  The waters of despair close above his head, and the consequence may be ruin.

Such mistakes spring from a wrong conception of the nature of the human mind.  We are too apt to believe in a kind of abstraction called “general ability,” which is expected to exhibit itself under any and every condition.  According to this doctrine, if a man is clever at one thing or successful under one set of circumstances, he must be equally clever at everything and equally successful under all conditions.  Such a view is manifestly untrue.