Article November 20, 1902 Issue

The Overcoming of Disadvantage

Wayland Hoyt with contributions from Mazzini

There is often an advantage in what looks like the disadvantage of defeat and disappointment. When the great historian, Dr. Edward Augustus Freeman, was at the University of Oxford, he earnestly competed for the prize offered for an essay on the Norman Conquest of England. He failed of getting it. Long afterward he said: "Fortunately I failed to win the prize. Had I won it, I should have flattered myself I knew all about the subject. As it was, I went on and learned something about it." The issue of that further learning is his monumental "History of the Norman Conquest," his chief service as historian and the reason of his undiminishing fame. When one will take defeat and disappointment as a spur, immediately he changes them into weal. You remember those brave lines of Robert Browning, of one who

Never turned his back, but marched breast onward;
Never dreamed though right were worsted, wrong would conquer;
Held—we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better,
Sleep to wake.

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