Page:(Commercial character) The Joseph Fisher lecture in commerce, delivered at the University of Adelaide (IA commercialcharac00jessrich).pdf/34

30 position. But this means self-denial and an irrepressible determination to succeed; no golden gate welcomes the loiterer on the primrose path of dalliance nowadays. In every walk of life courage, endurance, and ready wit count.

Such a lecture as this is naturally merely suggestive, and I leave it at that, and will conclude, harking back to my original theme, "Character," with a few words such as boys may well take in good part from one who has been "on his own," as the modern phrase goes, for not far short of half a century. I have known men to whom the feelings, the fortunes, even the lives, of their fellows, were as nothing in their struggle to gain the golden citadel. Some have succeeded, some have failed, but take my word for it, when settling day came none ever thanked God he'd been a rogue. I am too conscious of my own shortcomings to pose as a preacher, but I trust that you will credit me with sincerity when I express my conviction that no better, safer principle can be instilled into the youthful mind than that embodied in an old German motto, Thue recht und scheue niemand. Do right and fear nobody. I do not pretend that of such are the kingdom of the plutocrat's heaven. I do not aver that the Pagoda tree will drop its golden fruit into their laps at their shaking. It is more than likely that they will experience aspirations unrealized, anticipations unfulfilled, and the futility of fight for a foremost place; but if no satisfaction is to be found save in a successful progress over the bodies of our compeers, heedless of their cries, regardless of their struggles; if no complacency is to be derived from a sense of difficulties surmounted without lying, cheating, loss of self-respect, and a prostitution of our manhood generally; if