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Show COMPANIONSHIP. Place the most liberally educated president of the highest institution of learning alone on a desert island, and. If he lives, he will soon become more animal than man, perhaps crawling on all fours, forgetting his native tongue, and becoming intellectually below the domestic dog in intelli. gence. He will even forget how ta talk to himself. By ourselves we amount to practically prac-tically nothing. Although the human brain does not lack individuality, it is pre-eminently a receptacle for the storage of what comes to it from the outside. Not what we possess, but what we obtain from others, or, to put it differently, what we collectively receive by exchanging ex-changing experiences with others, rounds out a man and lifts him be yond the animal. Man, collectively, is almost all-pow erful; to him impossibility does noj seem to exist. Individually, he is, oi would be, a worthless product. One of the principal causes of failure fail-ure is the tendency to live too much within ourselves, to depend upon ourselves, our-selves, to judge for ourselves. I am not asking anyone to give up his individuality, or to allow others to dictate his every action, but I am saying to you, young man, and to you, young woman, that, if you would round yourself out in usefulness, and obtain a character and a reputation, you must depend upon others, exchanging ex-changing your ideas for those of" others, oth-ers, giving and taking, drawing from the great world at large all that it can give you, or, rather, all that you can take of it. There Is no other way. ; The more friends you have, the more you mix intelligently with others, the more you get together, the more you will amount to. You will not forfeit for-feit your individuality, but, rather, you will combine It with that of others, oth-ers, making exchanges, swapping experiences. ex-periences. Depending upon yourself is laudable and to be encouraged, but when you carry that self-dependence to the extreme, ex-treme, you will find that you have nothing back of you which will sustain sus-tain you, even in small emergencies. You need companions, companions of your own kind you cannot have any other kind. To be an acceptable and useful citizen citi-zen and to succeed in business, contact con-tact with your fellows is absolutely ' essential. Progressive business men are members of boards of trade and chambers of commerce. They keep in touch with financial movements and are never ignorant of those current events which have a bearing upon their vocations. Even competitors lunch together and exchange experiences, experi-ences, realizing that only in this way can they keep abreast of the times. This intermingling is as necessary in social life as it is in business. Unless Un-less you are constantly in touch with your fellows, you ..will become too rusty to be considered of any consequence conse-quence in any community. The more you fraternize with intelligent in-telligent and honest others, the more intelligent and the more honest you will be. You cannot escape your fellows, fel-lows, unless you shut yourself away from them; and, if you do, you might as well jump overboard and stay there, for the world does not want you and there is no reason why it should. |