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The new movement, six years after its initiation, had succeeded beyond the most sanguine expectations of its promoters. All over the country the idea of self-help was taking firm hold of the imagination of the people.

The other criticism which I think it necessary to anticipate would, if ignored, leave room for a wrong impression as to much of the work which is being done both on the self-help and on the State-aid sides of the new movement.

"Oh, that's easy enough," said young Bates, the master. "You'll only have to work out of hours as a carpenter, take odd jobs in your vacations, live plainly, and there you are." In England there are few schools where such a plan would be practicable; but in rough-and-ready America, where self-help is no disgrace, there are many, and they are all well attended.

But he had a way with him. He said the League was a great scheme of self, with the "ish" left off. In the League one practiced self-help, and enjoyed the twin luxuries of self-direction and self-expression, and came sooner or later to that strange new knowledge which is self-discovery.

For them it is only too easy to postpone self-help till sheer necessity drives, or till some one in whom they believe inspires them. The work of re-equipping these with initiative, with a new interest in life, with work which they can do, is one of infinite difficulty and complexity. Nevertheless, it must be done.

Of which Treaty we shall only say farther, commiserating our poor readers, That Friedrich considerably MORE than kept his side of it; and France very considerably LESS than hers. So that, had not there been punctual preparation at all points, and good self-help in Friedrich, Friedrich had come out of this new Adventure worse than he did!

There are foolish empiricists who believe that the granting of a paper constitution, prefaced by some high-sounding declaration, of itself confers the power of self-government upon a people. This is never so. Nobody can "give" a people "self-government," any more than it is possible to "give" an individual "self-help." You know that the Arab proverb runs, "God helps those who help themselves."

On such shoes as we ourselves can get. On frost and mud, if you will, but honestly on that; On the reality and substance which nature gives us, not on the semblance, on the thing she has give another than us! "And yet with all this rugged pride of manhood and self-help, was there ever soul more tenderly affectionate, loyally submissive to what was really higher than he?

General Armstrong saw, as few people did, the moral and intellectual value of industrial training aside from its merely economic importance. He founded a school on an entirely different basis from any that had been known before the basis of character-building through practical education, industrial training, and self-help.

When you have ministered to a person's self-respect, when you have contributed to his self-reliance, when you have inspired him to self-help, you have given him something. And you are conscious of it, and so is he, though you both find it hard to express in the old terms. All the old Christmas cheer is in these reciprocities of friendship that have lost every touch of condescension.