Jasper County Democrat, Volume 15, Number 33, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 July 1912 — Philosophy of the Unsuccessful. [ARTICLE]

Philosophy of the Unsuccessful.

We are perhaps too prone to get our ideas and standards of worth from the successful, without reflecting that the interpretations of life which patriotic legend, copy-book philosophy, and the sayings of the wealthy give us, are pitifully Inadequate for those who fall behind in the race. Surely there are enough people to whom the task of making a decent living and maintaining themselves and their families In their social class, or of winning and keeping the respect of their fellows, is a hard and bitter task, to make a philosophy gained through personal disability and failure as just and true a 1 method of appraising the life around us as the cheap optimism of the ordinary professional man. And certainly a kindlier, for It has no shade of contempt or disparagement about it—Atlantic.