On the other hand, to employ an extreme example--and yet it is shown by
statistics that there are one hundred thousand tramps and vagrants in this
country--the man who folds his arms and defiantly proclaimes that the
world owes him a living, mutinies against the sacred order of
things--"fouls his own nest," as it were. To that man society replies: "If
any man is not willing to work, neither let him eat." And this is the
dominant note of the twentieth century as truly as it was in the first
when spoken by the Roman philosopher. To harbor the doctrine that the
world owes every man a living, not only discounts the character value of
the individual, but has a reflex action on the entire social organism.
Just as one wheel out of play in the mechanism of a watch throws the
entire works out of order, or one team in a procession halting the whole
train behind it, the individual failing to do his part affects the
equilibrium of the whole. Napoleon lost the Battle of Waterloo and died in
exile, a prisoner at St. Helena, because one of his marshals, failing to
comply with orders, arrived too late with re-enforcements. Remember that
you have an important part to perform, that, as in mathematics, you are a
quantity so connected with another quantity that if any alteration be made
in the former there will be a consequent alteration in the latter.

In the busy hive of twentieth-century civilization scant space has been
provided for drones. The drone is a minus quantity in the problem of life;
instead of adding to the common weal, he is ever subtracting from it. Like
an owl he sits in the gloom of indolence hooting at the caravan of events.
The eye of the world is quick to observe the man who is resting on his
oars. A more graphic picture of the man who is ever magnifying the world's
duty to him, and minimizing his duty to the world, could not be painted
than that one which James Russell Lowell has penned: