Chapter II.
Getting Aroused

“HOW’S the boy gittin’ on, Davis?” asked Farmer John Field, as he watched his son, Marshall, waiting upon a customer. “Well, John, you and I are old friends,” replied Deacon Davis, as he took an apple from a barrel and handed it to Marshall’s father as a peace offering; “we are old friends, and I don’t want to hurt your feelin’s; but I’m a blunt man, and air goin’ to tell you the truth. Marshall is a good, steady boy, all right, but he wouldn’t make a merchant if he stayed in my store a thousand years. He weren’t cut out for a merchant. Take him back to the farm, John, and teach him how to milk cows!”

If Marshall Field had remained as clerk in Deacon Davis’s store in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, where he got his first position, he could never have become one of the world’s merchant princes. But when he went to Chicago and saw the marvelous examples around him of poor boys who had won success, it aroused his ambition and fired him with the determination to be a great merchant himself. “If others can do such wonderful things,” he asked himself, “why cannot I?”

Of course, there was the making of a great merchant in Mr. Field from the start; but circumstances, an ambition-arousing environment, had a great deal to do with stimulating his latent energy and bringing out his reserve force. It is doubtful if he would have climbed so rapidly in any other place than Chicago. In 1856, when young Field went there, this marvelous city was just starting on its unparalleled career. It had then only about eighty-five thousand inhabitants. A few years before it had been a mere Indian trading village. But the city grew by leaps and bounds, and always beat the predictions of its most sanguine inhabitants. Success was in the air. Everybody felt that there were great possibilities there.

Many people seem to think that ambition is a quality born within us; that it is not susceptible to improvement; that it is something thrust upon us which will take care of itself. But it is a passion that responds very quickly to cultivation, and it requires constant care and education, just as the faculty for music or art does, or it will atrophy.

If we do not try to realize our ambition, it will not keep sharp and defined. Our faculties become dull and soon lose their power if they are not exercised. How can we expect our ambition to remain fresh and vigorous through years of inactivity, indolence, or indifference? If we constantly allow opportunities to slip by us without making any attempt to grasp them, our inclination will grow duller and weaker.

“What I most need,” as Emerson says, “is somebody to make me do what I can.” To do whatI can, that is my problem; not what a Napoleon or a Lincoln could do, but whatI can do. It makes all the difference in the world to me whether I bring out the best thing in me or the worst,—whether I utilize ten, fifteen, twenty-five, or ninety per cent, of my ability.

Everywhere we see people who have reached middle life or later without being aroused. They have developed only a small percentage of their success possibilities. They are still in a dormant state. The best thing in them lies so deep that it has never been awakened. When we meet these people we feel conscious that they have a great deal of latent power that has never been exercised. Great possibilities of usefulness and of achievement are, all unconsciously, going to waste within them.

Some time ago there appeared in the newspapers an account of a girl who had reached the age of fifteen years, and yet had only attained the mental development of a small child. Only a few things interested her. She was dreamy, inactive, and indifferent to everything around her most of the time until, one day, while listening to a hand organ on the street, she suddenly awakened to full consciousness. She came to herself; her faculties were aroused, and in a few days she leaped forward years in her development. Almost in a day she passed from childhood to budding" womanhood. Most of us have an enormous amount of power, of latent force, slumbering within us, as it slumbered in this girl, which could do marvels if we would only awaken it.

The judge of the municipal court in a flourishing western city, one of the most highly esteemed jurists in his state, was in middle life, before his latent power was aroused, an illiterate blacksmith. He is now sixty, the owner of the finest library in his city, with the reputation of being its best-read man, and one whose highest endeavor is to help his fellow man. What caused the revolution in his life? The hearing of a single lecture on the value of education. This was what stirred the slumbering power within him, awakened his ambition, and set his feet in the path of self-development.