Whatever other factors enter into the problem, this is the factor which it concerns labor to look after if it would reach the equation of the good time coming.

No reconstruction of society can avail for incompetent, indifferent, thriftless men who cannot work together.
Self-help must precede all other help.

Dreamers may picture utopias, where all our present laws are suspended, and demagogues may cover up the disagreeable facts of labor's own responsibility for its pitiful condition, but sensible workingmen will remember that, as Renan told his countrymen after the Franco-Prussian war, "the first duty is to face the facts of the situation." There are no royal roads to an honest mastery of fortune, though there seem to be plenty of by-ways to dishonest success.

Nature is a hard school-mistress.

She allows no makeshifts for the discipline of hard work and of self-denial, for the culture of all the strengthful qualities.