He pulled himself up suddenly at length with a feeling almost of terror. He was in danger of becoming what he had condemned so much in others. The force and subtlety of the temptation stood revealed as in a blinding flash. It was so splendid to have strength, to be able to stalk across the land like a giant, to do just what pleased him to do, to consult no one in the doing of it. It was just in that the temptation and the danger lay. It was so easy to forget the weak, to overlook the insignificant, to treat the feeble as of no account. Strength did not constitute right.
That was a truth that tyrants never learned and that Governments too frequently shut their eyes to. God would hold him responsible for his strength. If he had the strength of ten thousand men, he still had no right to do wrong.
So at length he got to see things in their true proportion and perspective. The strength that had come to him was only an adventitious kind of strength, after all. Unless he had another and a better kind of strength to balance it, it might prove his destruction. What he needed most was moral strength, strength to use wisely and justly his opportunities, strength to hold the balance evenly, strength to do the right, whatever it might cost him, to suffer loss for conscience' sake, to do to others what he would they should do to him.
If he ever forgot the pit out of which he had been digged, success would be a failure in the most direful sense.
He trembled when he saw the danger, and prayed God to help him. He was walking on the edge of a precipice and knew it; a precipice over which thousands of so-called successful men had fallen.
"Ruth," he said to his sister one evening, with a grave look in his eyes, "if you ever see me growing proud, remind me that my mother died in a workhouse."
"Ralph?" she questioned, with a look of surprise on her face.
"I am not joking," he said solemnly. "I was never in more sober earnest. I have stood in slippery places many times before, but never in one so slippery as this."
"Are not things going well at the mine?" she asked, in alarm.
"Too well," he answered. "The shareholders will get twenty per cent. on their money the first year."
"And you are a large shareholder," she said, with a look of elation in her eyes.