with men and women unfitted for their tasks, both by natural inheritance
and by education and training. There follows mediocre Work, poor service,
low pay, poverty, disease, and misery.

FAMILY TRADITIONS

There are traditions in some families which carry their curse along with
them down through the generations. There are families of preachers,
families of soldiers, families of lawyers, families of physicians,
families of teachers. Many a young man who would have otherwise been a
success in the world has toiled along at a poor, dying rate, trying to
live up to the family tradition and make a success of himself as a
teacher, or lawyer, when he ought to have been a mechanic, an actor, or a
banker.

Another form of parental prejudice is a father's desire to have his son
become a success in the vocation which he himself longed to enter, but
could not. "My father is a successful business man," said a young man to
us not long ago. "When he was a young man he wanted to enter law school
and practice law, but because of lack of funds and because he had to
support his widowed mother's family, he did not have the opportunity. All
his life he has regretted that he was unable to realize his ambition. From
my earliest years he has talked to me about becoming a great lawyer; he
spent thousands of dollars in sending me through high school, college and
law school; he has given me years of post-graduate work in law. I have now
been trying to practice law for two years and have made a complete failure
of it. Yet, so intense is his desire that I shall realize his ambition,
that he is willing to finance me, in the hope that, eventually, I may be
able to succeed in the practice of law. And yet I hate it. I hate it so
that it seems to me I cannot drive myself ever to enter a law office for