There are fifty thousand young men in your position at
this moment, all bent as you are on solving one and the same problem
--how to acquire a fortune rapidly. You are but a unit in that
aggregate. You can guess, therefore, what efforts you must make, how
desperate the struggle is. There are not fifty thousand good positions
for you; you must fight and devour one another like spiders in a pot.
Do you know how a man makes his way here? By brilliant genius or by
skilful corruption. You must either cut your way through these masses
of men like a cannon ball, or steal among them like a plague. Honesty
is nothing to the purpose. Men bow before the power of genius; they
hate it, and try to slander it, because genius does not divide the
spoil; but if genius persists, they bow before it. To sum it all up in
a phrase, if they fail to smother genius in the mud, they fall on their
knees and worship it. Corruption is a great power in the world, and
talent is scarce. So corruption is the weapon of superfluous
mediocrity; you will be made to feel the point of it everywhere. You
will see women who spend more than ten thousand francs a year on
dress, while their husband's salary (his whole income) is six thousand
francs.
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