Evening Republican, Volume 18, Number 39, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 14 February 1914 — The Ambition to do Nothing. [ARTICLE]

The Ambition to do Nothing.

Ambitions Fule the world and control human destinies. Know a man’s ambitions and you know his life. Some men have ambitions to do things. Then the world hears of an Alexander, a Caesar, a Napoleon, a Grant or a Roosevelt. With men of this stamp ambition Is a position, driving hard spurs of necessity Into the foremost horse that drawß the chariot of progress. Other men there are whose only ambition is to do nothing, not even “sit by the fire and spin.’ , Men who have ambition to do nothing are found everywhere. They are the curse of society, the drag of business and the dregs in the cup of life. Nothing comes from nothing is the old law of life. It needs to be emphasized again and again. Every great creation of art, every masterpiece in literature, every victory for the right and truth, has been won at the price of hard and continuous labor. Work is valuable not simply because of the outward thing it constructs, such as bridges, ships and towers. More useful is it in the secret character that it constructs enabling the building of greater thingß as the years roll by. If you would have true happiness, be an ambitious worker, not an unwise shirker, — ■ ■ '— If our written words, bur thoughts, are the occult spiritual shapes of our ideas, they need to be embodied in attractive physical form. That is to ■ay, worthy thoughts need to he w4ll and tastefully v set up.” Many a rood idea Is buried alive in a tomb of type. A merchant asked a newspaper reporter if there was any way by which be could keep moths out of JUr stock of goods, and bts apt answSr was. ’Sura; advertise.’’