2 The Young Man Who Cannot Go
But what of the young man who stands without the college gates? What of him upon whom Fate has locked the doors of this arsenal of power and life’s equipment? “Why does not some one give counsel and encouragement to the boy who, for any one of a thousand reasons, cannot take four years or four months from his life of continuous toil in order to go to college?” asked a young man full of the vitality of purpose, but to whom even the education of our high schools was an absolute impossibility.
After all, for most of our eighty millions, the college is practically beyond their reach. Even among those young men who have the nerve, ability, and ambition to “work their way through college,” there are tens of thousands who cannot do even that, no matter if they were willing for four years to toil at sawbuck, live on gruel, and dress in overalls and hickory shirt.
I have in mind now a spirited young American of this class whose father died when his son was still a boy, and on whose shoulders, therefore, fell the duty of “supporting mother” and helping the girls, even before his young manhood had begun. For that young man, college or university might just as well be Jupiter, or Saturn, or Arcturus.
Very well. What of this young man? What of the myriads of young Americans like him? What hope does our complex industrial civilization, which every day grows more intense, hold out to these children of hard circumstances, whose muscles daily strain at the windlasses of necessary duty?
I repeat the question, and multiply the forms in which I put it. It is so pressingly important. It concerns the most abundant and valuable material with which free institutions work—the neglected man, he whom fortune overlooks. It is a strange weakness of human nature that makes everybody interested in the man at the top, and nobody interested in the man at the bottom. Yet it is the man at the bottom upon whom our Republican institutions are established. It is the man at the bottom whom Science tells us will, by the irresistible processes of nature, produce the highest types after a while.
The young Bonaparte proved himself a very wizard of human nature when he exclaimed: “Every soldier of France carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” And did not the Master, with a wisdom wholly divine, choose as the seed-bearers of our faith throughout the world the neglected men? Only one of the apostles was what we would term to-day a “college man”—St. Luke, the physician. What said the Teacher, “The stone which was rejected to the builder, has become the chief of the corner.”
Yes—the neglected man is the important man. We do not think so day by day, we idle observers of our Vanity Fair, we curbstone watchers of the street parade. We think it is the conspicuous man who counts. Our attention is mostly for him who wears the epaulettes of prominence and favorable condition. Therefore most articles, papers, and volumes on young men consider only that lucky favorite-of-fortune-for-the-hour, the college man.
But this paper is addressed to the neglected man. I would have speech with those young men with stout heart, true intention, and good ability, who labor outside those college walls to which they look with longing, but may not enter.
“Every soldier of France carries a marshal’s baton in his knapsack.” Ah, yes! Very well. But what was a soldier of France in Napoleon’s time to a young American to-day? If Joubert, from an ignorant private who could not write his name, became one of the greatest generals of the world’s greatest commander, what may you not become! Joubert did it by deserving. Use the same method, you. There is no magic but merit.
First, then, do not let the conditions that keep you out of college discourage you. If such a little thing as that depresses you, it is proof that you are not the character who would have succeeded if you had a lifetime of college education. If you are discouraged because you cannot go to college, what will happen to you when life hereafter presents to you much harder situations? Remember that every strong man who prevails in the merciless contest with events, faces conditions which to weaker men seem inaccessible—are inaccessible.
But it is the scaling of these heights, or the tunneling through them, or the blasting of them out of their way and out of existence, which makes these strong men strong. It is the overcoming of these obstacles day after day and year after year, as long as life lasts, which gives these mighty ones much of their power.
What is it you so admire in men whom you think fortunate—what is it but their mastery of adversity after adversity? What is that which you call success but victory over untoward events? Do not, then, let your resolution be softened by the hard luck that keeps you out of college. If that bends you, you are not a Damascus blade of tempered steel; you are a sword of lead, heavy, dull, and yielding.
Next to Collis P. Huntington, the railroad man of the last generation, whose ability rose to genius, was President Scott of the Pennsylvania System. He thought, with Mr. Huntington, that a college training was unnecessary; and his own life demonstrated that the very ultimate of achieving, the very crest of effort and reward may be reached by men who know neither Greek nor Latin, nor Science as taught in schools, nor mental philosophy as set down in books.
Colonel Scott was a messenger-boy—just such a messenger-boy as you may see any day running errands, carrying parcels, doing the humble duties of one who serves and waits. From a messenger-boy with bundle in his hand, to the general of an industrial army of thousands of men, and the directing mind planning the expenditure of scores of millions of dollars belonging to great capitalists—such was the career of Thomas Scott.
Very well, why should you not do as well? “Because my competitors have college education and I have not,” do you answer? But, man, Colonel Scott had no college education. “Because the other fellows have friends and influence and I have none,” do you protest? But neither President Scott nor most monumental successes had friends or influence to start with. Don’t excuse yourself, then. Come! Buck up! Be a man!
“I am greatly troubled,” said to me the general superintendent of one of the most extensive railroad systems in the world as we rode from Des Moines, Iowa, to Chicago. “I am greatly troubled,” said he, “to find an assistant superintendent. There are now under me seven young engineers, every man a graduate of a college; four of them with uncommon ability, and all of them relatives of men heavily interested in this network of railroads. But not one of them will do. Three nights ago all of them happened to meet in Chicago. While there all of them went out to have what they called ‘a good time’ together—drinking, etc.
“That, in itself, is enough to blacklist every man for the position of my assistant and my successor. This road will not entrust its operating management to a man who wilfully makes himself less than his best every day and every night. Besides this, each of them has some defect. One is brilliant, but not steady; another is steady, but not resourceful—not inventive—and so forth and so on. We are looking all over the United States for the young man who has the ability, character, health, and habits which my assistant must have.”
This general superintendent, under whose orders more than ten thousand men daily performed their complex and delicately adjusted functions, is fifty-five years of age. Now listen to this, you who cannot go to college: This man started thirty-eight years ago as a freight-handler in Chicago at one dollar per day for this same railroad company, which was then a comparatively small and obscure line. Ah! but you say, “That was thirty-eight years ago.” Yes, and that is the trouble with you, is it not? You want to start in as superintendent of a great system or the head of a mighty business, do you not? Very well—get that out of your head. It cannot—it ought not—to be done.
If you are willing to work as hard as this man worked, as hard as President Scott of the Pennsylvania System worked; if you are willing to stay right by your job, year in, year out, through the weary decades, instead of changing every thirty minutes; if you are willing to wait as long as they; if you are willing to plant the seed of success in the soil of good hard work, and then water it with good hard work, and attend its growth with good hard work, and wait its flowering and fruitage with patience, its flowering and fruitage will come. Doubt it not.
For, mark you, this man at the time he told me that his System was looking all over the United States for a young man capable of being his assistant, had seven high-grade college men on his hands at that very moment. He would have been more than delighted to have taken any one of them.
Also, he would have taken a man who had not seen a college just as quickly if he could have found such a one who knew enough about operating a railroad, and had the qualities of leadership, the gift of organizing ability. It did not matter to this superintendent whether the assistant he sought had been to college or not, whether he was rich or poor.
He cared no more about that than he cared whether the man for whom this place was seeking was a blond or a brunette. The only question that he was asking was, “Where is the man who is equal to the job?”
And that, my young friend, is the question which all industry is asking in every field of human effort; that is the question your Fate is putting to you who are anxious to do big work, “Are you equal to the job?” If you are not, then be honest enough to step out of the contest. Be honest enough not to envy the other young men who are equal to the job.
Yes, be honest enough to applaud the man who is equal to the job and who goes bravely to his task. Don’t find fault with him. Don’t swear that “There is no chance for a young man any more.” That’s not true, you know. And remember always that if you do all you are fitted for, you do as well as your abler brother, and better than he if you do your best and he does not.
A young man whom fortune had kept from college, but who is too stout-hearted to let that discourage him, said to me the other day: “I don’t think that a college education confers, or the absence of it prevents, success. But I do think that where there are two men of equal health, ability, and character, that one will be chosen who has been to college, and to this extent the college man has a better chance.” This is true for the ordinary man—the man who is willing to put forth no more than the ordinary effort.
But you who read—you are willing to put forth extraordinary effort, are you not? You are willing to show these favored sons of cap and gown that you will run as fast and as far as they, with all their training, will you not? You are willing—yes, and determined, to use every extra hour which your college brother, thinking he has the advantage of you, will probably waste.
Very well. If you do, biography (that most inspiring of all literature) demonstrates that your reward will be as rich as the college man’s reward. Yes, richer, for the gold which your refinery purges from the dross of your disadvantages will be doubly refined by the fires of your intenser effort.
In 1847 two men were born who have blessed mankind with productive work which, rich as are now its benefits to the race, will create a new wealth of human helpfulness with each succeeding year as long as time endures. Both these men have lived, almost to a day, the same number of years; both of them are still alive; both of them have labored in neighboring sections of the same field. They are alike, too, in character, almost duplicates in ability. Here, then, is material for a perfect comparison.
Mark, now, the parallel. One of them was a college man, the son of a noted educator and himself a professor in the University of Boston. He used the gifts which God gave him for that purpose, and as long as the transmission of human speech continues among men, the name of Alexander Graham Bell will be rightly honored by all the world.
The other of these men could no more have gone to college than he could have crossed the Atlantic on a sheet of paper. You who read this never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy. Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was and is. But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used himself?
At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. That didn’t satisfy him. The mystery of the telegraph (and what is more mysterious?) constantly called him. The click of the instrument was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.
And so Thomas A. Edison, without a dollar or a friend, set himself to work to master the telegraph and to explore the mysteries behind it. Result: the duplex telegraph and the developments from that; the phonograph, the incandescent electric light, and those numerous inventions which, one after another, have confounded the bigotry and ignorance of the world.
Edison and Bell, Bell and Edison, one a college man and the other a laborer without the gates, unlike in preparation but similar in character, devotion, and ability, and equal winners of honor and reward at the hands of a just if doubting world.
Of course I might go on all day with illustrations like this. History is brilliant with the names of those who have wrought gloriously without a college training. These men, too, have succeeded in every possible line of work. They are among the living, too, as well as among those whose earthly careers have ended.
The men who never went to college have not only built great railroads, but also have written immortal words; not only have they been great editors, but also they have created vast industries, and piled mountain high their golden fortunes; not only have they made epoch-making discoveries in science, but they have set down in words of music a poetry whose truth and sweetness makes nobler human character and finer the life’s work of all who read those sentences of light.
Among the fathers who established this Government, the greatest never went to college. Hamilton was not a college man. Washington, to this day the first of Americans, never even attended school after he was sixteen years old. Of the great founders of modern journalism—the four extraordinary men whom their profession to this day refers to as the great journalists—only one was a college graduate—Raymond, who established the New York Times. Charles A. Dana, who made the New York Sun the most quoted newspaper of his generation, was not a college graduate. William Cullen Bryant, who gave to the New York Evening Post a peculiar distinction and preeminence, went to college only one year.
Samuel Bowles, who founded the Springfield Republican and made its influence felt for righteousness throughout the Nation, attended a private institution for a while. James Gordon Bennett, the editor whose resourceful mind sent Stanley to the heart of African jungles to find Livingstone, was never a college student.
Horace Greeley, that amazing mind and character, who created the New York Tribune, and who, through it, for many years exercised more power over public opinion than any other single influence in the Republic, never went to college; and Greeley’s famous saying, “Of all horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate,” remained for a quarter of a century a standing maxim in the editorial rooms of all the big newspapers of the country.
Stevenson, who invented the steam-engine, was not a college man. He was the son of a fireman in one of the English collieries. As a boy, he was himself a laborer in the mines. Undoubtedly the greatest engineer America has yet produced was Captain Eades, whose fame was world wide; yet this Indiana boy, who constructed the jetties of the Mississippi, built the ship railroad across the Isthmus of Panama and other like wonders, never had a day’s instruction in any higher institution of learning than the common schools of Dearborn County. Ericsson, who invented the Monitor, and whose creative genius revolutionized naval warfare, was a Swedish immigrant. Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat, never went to college.
And take literature: John Bunyan was not only uneducated, but actually ignorant. If Milton went to college, I repeat that Shakespeare had no other alma mater than the university of human nature, and that Robert Burns was not a college man. Our own Washington Irving never saw the inside of any higher institution of learning. I have already noted that the author of “Thanatopsis” went to college for only a single year.
Among the writers, Lew Wallace, soldier, diplomat, and author, was self-educated. John Stuart Mill, who is distinguished as a philosopher, is innocent of a college training. James Whitcomb Riley, our American Burns, is not a “college man.” Hugh Miller, the Scotchman, whose fame as a geologist is known to all the world of science, did not go to college.
Take statesmanship. Henry Clay wrested his education from books, experience, and downright hard thinking; and we Americans still like to tell of the immortal Lincoln poring over the pages of his few and hard-won volumes before the glare of the wood-fire on the hearth, or the uncertain light of the tallow dip. Benjamin Franklin got his education in a print-shop.
In American productive industry, the most conspicuous name, undoubtedly, is that of Andrew Carnegie; yet this great ironmaster, and master of gold as well, who has written as vigorously as he has wrought, was a Scotch immigrant. George Peabody, the philanthropist, never was inside a college as a student. He was a clerk when he was eleven years old.
At least three of the most astonishing though legitimate business successes which have been made in the last decade in New York were made by men not yet forty-five years old, none of whom had any other education than our common schools. I am not sure, but I will hazard the guess that a majority of the great business men of Chicago never saw a college.
These illustrations occur to the mind as I write, and without special selection. Doubtless, the entire space of this paper might be occupied by nothing more than the names of men who have blessed the race and become historic successes in every possible department of human industry, none of whom ever saw the inside of either college or university.
But all of these do not prove that you ought not to go to college if you can. Certainly you ought to go to college if it is possible. But the lives of these men do prove that no matter how hard the conditions that you think surround you, success is yours in spite of them, if you are willing to pay the price of success—if you are willing to work and wait; if you are willing to be patient, to keep sweet, to maintain fresh and strong your faith in God, your fellow men, and in yourself.
The life of any one of the men whom I have mentioned is not only an inspiration but an instruction to you who, like these men, cannot go to college. Consider, for example, how Samuel B. Raymond established the New York Times. He wrote his own editorials; he did his own reporting; he set his own type; he distributed his own papers. That was the beginning.
One of the most successful merchants that I know opened a little store in the midst of large and pretentious mercantile establishments. He bought his own goods; he was his own clerk; he swept and dusted his own storeroom, and polished his own show-cases. He was up at five in the morning, and he worked to twelve and one at night, and then slept on the counter. That was less than thirty years ago. To-day he is at the head of the largest department store in one of the considerable cities of this country, and he owns his store.
This is an illustration so common that every country town, as well as London, Paris, and New York, can show examples like it. And, mark you, most of these men were weighted down with responsibilities as great as yours can possibly be, and hindered by obstacles as numerous and difficult as those which you have confronting you.
Yet they succeeded brilliantly. The world rewarded them as richly as any graduate of any university who went to his life’s work from the very head of his class. For you know this, don’t you, that the world hands down success to any man who pays the price. Very well, the price is not a college education. The price is effectiveness, and the college is valuable only as it helps you to be effective.
Here is a true picture of our earthly work and its rewards: Behind a counter stands the salesman, Fortune, with just but merciless scales. On the shelves this Merchant of Destiny has both failure and success, in measure large and small. Every man steps up to this counter and purchases what he receives and receives what he purchases. And when he buys success he pays for it in the crimson coin of his life’s blood.
This is a sinister illustration, I know, but it is the truth, and the truth is what you are after, is it not? You can do about what you will within the compass of your abilities; but you accomplish all your achievings with heart-beats. This is a rule which has no exceptions, and applies with equal force to the man who goes to college and to him who cannot go. What is that that some poet says about the successful man:
“... Who while others slept
Was climbing upward through the night.”
So do not let the fact that you cannot go to college excuse yourself to yourself for being a failure. Do not say, “I have no chance because I am not a college man,” and blame the world for its injustice. What Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you:
“The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”
So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself. No whimper should come from a masculine throat.
A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not to succeed—and he will not succeed. Indeed, how do you know that these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character. Certainly that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your normal level. “You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” is our pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.
“What do you raise on these shaly hills?” I asked one time of that ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut. “Manhood,” answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive ability, and dauntless courage.
The very effort required to live in these ungenerous surroundings, the absolute necessity to make every blow tell, to preserve every fragment of value; the perpetual exercise of the inventive faculty, thus making the intellect more productive by the continuous and creative use of it—all these develop those powers of mind and heart which through all history have distinguished the inhabitants of such countries as Switzerland and New England. “And so,” said Connecticut’s great senator, “these rocky hills produce manhood.”
Apply this to your own circumstance, you who cannot go to college because you must “support the family,” or have inherited a debt which your honor compels you to pay, or any one of those unhappy conditions which fortune has laid on your young shoulders.
Most men with wealth, friends, and influence accept them as a matter of course. Not many young men who are happily situated at the beginning, employ the opportunities which are at their hand. They don’t understand their value. Having “influence” to help them, they usually rely on this artificial aid—seldom upon themselves. Having friends, they depend upon these allies rather than upon the ordered, drilled, disciplined troops of their own powers and capabilities. Having money, they do not see as vividly the necessity of toiling to make more.
“What’s the use of my working; father did enough of that for our family,” wittily said one of these young men. Having the training of the best universities very much as they have their food and clothing, these men are too apt to be blind to the greater skill this equipment gives them, and thus to neglect the using of it.
And so, young man—you who cannot go to college, you who are without friends and “influence”—your brother born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and trained by tutors, finished by professors, and clothed with all the “advantages,” has not such a great start of you after all. For you are without friends to begin with. You have not inherited comrades and kindred hearts. You have inherited aloneness and solitude.
Very well, you must depend on yourself, then. If you have the right kind of stuff in you, you will make every ohm of your force do something for you. You will see to it that there is no wasted energy. You will economize every instant of your time, for you will understand, in the wise language of the common people, that “time is money”; and that is something, mind you, which the heir of wealth with whom you are competing does not understand at all. You know what an advantage your competitor, who is a college man, has of you; and this knowledge of yours, coupled with your college competitor’s possible lack of it, turns his advantage over you into your advantage over him.
It is like a man who has a dozen shots for his rifle against another who has a hundred. The first will make every shot bring down his game, because he knows he must make every shot tell; he cannot waste a cartridge. But he of abundant ammunition fires without certain aim, and so wastes his treasure of shells until for the actual purposes of fruitful marksmanship he has not as many cartridges left as the man who started with fewer. Also his aim is not so accurate.
Or use an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of crops, differential fertilizing, and the like, would have been laughed at by the farmer, heedless in the richness of his acres.
But the German farmer on his sandy soil could take no such risks. Every vestige of fertility that skill, science, and economy could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of the Mississippi Valley.
So what you have got to do, young man who cannot go to college, is to develop yourself with the most vigorous care. Take your reading, for example. Choose your books with an eye single to their helpfulness. Let all your reading be for the strengthening of your understanding, the increase of your knowledge.
Your more fortunate competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be “resting his mind” with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, daily accumulating useful material.
And when you read, make what you read yours. Think about it. Absorb it. Make it a part of your mental being. Far more important than this, make every thought you read in books, every fact which the author furnishes you, the seed for new thoughts of your own. Remember that no fact in the universe stands by itself, but that every fact is related to every other fact. Trace out the connection of truth with truth, and you will soon confront that most amazing and important of all truths, the correlation of all force, all thought, all matter.
And thus, too will your mind acquire a trained and systematic strength which is the chief purpose of all the training which college and university give. For, mind you, the principal purpose of going to college is not to acquire knowledge. That is only secondary. The chief reason for a college education is the making of a trained mind and the building of a sound character.
These suggestions as to reading apply to everything else: to men, business, society, life. Because you must compete with the college men, you cannot be careless with books—in the selection of books, or in the use of them. For the same reason, you cannot be indifferent with men and your relationship with them. If other men are loose and inaccurate in reading the character of their fellows, most certainly you cannot be.
If the men who have battalions of friends to start with become negligent of their associations, welcoming all fish that come to their net, and frogs, too, you dare not take the risk of a dissolute companionship, or any other companionship that will weaken the daily discipline of yourself, or lower you in the esteem of the people.
Thus you become a careful student of human nature. And never forget that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning from the days of Socrates till now could give him.
Conscious from day to day of your limited resources, and understanding by the severe tuition of your daily life that the world now demands effectiveness, you will nurture your physical and nervous powers where the rich young man with a college training is apt to waste his. He may smoke, but you dare not. You cannot afford it, for one thing.
For another thing, it is a long race that you are running before you reach the point from which your fellow runner starts; so you have got to save your wind. You need all your nerve. You have got to keep “clean to the bone,” as Jack London expresses it.
You have got to take thought of the morrow. You have got to do all those things which your employer, and all observers of you, will, consciously or unconsciously, approve; and refrain from doing anything that your employer, or his wife, or the world, or anybody who is watching you, will disapprove of, even subconsciously.
Thus your profound understanding that effectiveness is what counts will cut out every questionable habit, every association of idleness and sloth. No social club for you; that institution is for the man of dollars and of Greek. No evenings with gay parties for you; you must use those precious hours for reading, planning, sleep.
You cannot dally with brilliant indirectness; you must make every man and woman understand that you are goldenly sincere, forcefully earnest, earnestly honest, high of intention, sound of purpose, direct of method. Out of all these you will finally wring everything which the college is designed to give: skilled intellect, mind equipped with systematized knowledge, simple, earnest, upright character.
And to crown it all, you will discover in this hard discipline of your faculties and of your soul a happiness whose steady felicity is unknown to the lounger of the club or the frequenter of the ballroom. For remember this—you who in your heart cherish a secret envy of those other young men whom you believe, by reason of family, wealth, or any favorable circumstance, are getting more of the joy of living than you get—remember this, that this world knows only one higher degree of happiness than that which comes from discipline, only one pleasure nobler than the pleasure of achieving.
Let me close with two illustrations within my own personal observation. In one of the most charming inland cities of the United States, or of the world, for that matter, I met some fifteen years ago a young man of German parentage. His father was poor. The son simply had to help support the family by his daily work. He never got nearer college than in his dreams.
He knew something of printing, and was employed by a vigorous new house at an humble salary. By processes such as I have analyzed above, he made himself the best man in technical work in the firm’s employ. The next step was to demonstrate his ability as a manager and financier as well as a skilled workman. There was a nut to crack, was it not? But see, now, how simply he broke the shell of that problem.
With some other sound young men of like quality, he established a building and loan association, one of those banks of the people which flourished in those days. He had no capital behind him. His acquaintance was small. Never mind, he made acquaintances among people of his own class. So did his fellow directors. Those common people from which this young man sprang furnished from their earnings the necessary money.
The little institution was conducted with all our American dash, with all his German caution. Of course it prospered. How could it help prospering? While other building and loan associations undertook alluring but hazardous experiments, this little concern rejected them with all the calm and haughty disfavor of the most conservative old bank.
After a while people began to take notice of this small institution. Its depositors were satisfied, its customers pleased. One day the attorney of this association, also a young man, called his fellow directors together, and resigned, upon the ground that he thought the movement of gold abroad and other financial phenomena indicated a panic within the next two or three years.
Did this dismay the young German-American? Not much. “This is just what I am looking for,” said he. “I have been able to manage this institution in prosperous times; now if I can only have a chance to close it up so that no man loses a dollar, when big banks around me are falling, I will accomplish all I have started to accomplish.”
Sure enough, the panic of 1893 arrived, and the young man’s opportunity came. Bank after bank went down; old institutions whose venerable names had been their sufficient guarantee collapsed in a day. Most building and loan associations, taking advantage of certain provisions of the law, and of their charters, refused to pay their depositors on demand. The men and women who had put their money in found that they could not “withdraw” for some time, and then only at a loss.
But not so with the model experiment of my young friend, by which he proposed to demonstrate his ability to organize, manage, and support a difficult business, and to properly handle complex financial questions. He closed his institution up amid the appreciation and praise of everybody who knew about it.
In the mean time he had worked a little harder than ever for the firm that employed him. He took part in politics, too. His acquaintance grew slowly but steadily, and then with ever-increasing rapidity, as each new-made friend enthusiastically described him to others.
It soon got on the tongues of the people that even in his politics this young man didn’t drink, smoke, nor swear. More marvelous than all, it was said that he was even religious. And the saying was true. During all these years when he had no time for anything else, he also had no time to stay away from Sunday-school and church. He had certain convictions and spoke them out.
He had no time for “society”; not a moment for parties; not an hour for the clubs. But he did have time for one girl, and for her he did not have time enough. All this was not so very long ago. To-day this young man is a member of the firm for which he began as a common workman, and which has since grown to be one of the largest concerns of its kind in the entire country. Successful banks have made him a director. On all hands his judgment is sought and taken by old and able men in business, politics, and finance.
And to crown all these achievings, he has builded him a home where all the righteous joys abound, and over which presides the “girl he went to see” in the hard days of his beginnings, when he had no time for “society” except that which he found in her presence. As he was then, so he is now—“clean to the bone,” strong, upright, faithful, joyous in the unsullied happiness of the manly living of a manly life.
Very well, I tell you over again that this man did not go to college because he could not go to college; that he had no opportunities, no friends, few acquaintances. But he did have right principles, good health, and an understanding that every drop of his blood must be wrought into a deed, every minute of his time compounded into power. And this young man is not yet forty years of age.
I will venture to say that his example can be repeated in every town in the United States, in every city of the Republic. Certainly I personally know of a score of such successes in my own home city. I personally know of many such examples in other States. You ask for the inspiration of example, young man who cannot go to college. Look around you—they are on every hand.
Can you not find them in your own town? Or, if you live on a farm, do you not see them in your own county? I personally know of country boys who started out as farm hands at sixteen dollars per month and board, who to-day own the farms on which they were employed, and yet who are not now much past middle life. They have done it by the simple rules that are as old as human industry.
Come, then, don’t mope. Sleep eight hours. Then three hours for your meals, and a chance for your stomach to begin digesting them after you have eaten them. That makes eleven hours, and leaves you thirteen hours remaining. Take one of these for getting to and from your business. Then work the other twelve. Every highly successful man whom I know worked even longer during the years of his beginnings.
What, no recreation? say you. Certainly I say recreation, and I say pleasure, too. But remember that you have got to overcome the college man’s advantage over you—and that can only be done by hard work. But what of that? For a young man like you, full of that boundless vigor of youth, what higher pleasure can there be than the doing of your work better than anybody else does the same kind of work?
And what finer happiness can there be than the certainty that such a life as that will make realities of your dreams? For sure it is that this is the road by which you can walk to unfailing success, even over the bodies of your rivals who, with greater “advantages” than yours, neglect them and fall upon the steep ascent up which, with harder muscles, steadier nerves, and stouter heart, you climb with ease, gaining strength with every step you take instead of losing power as you advance, as did your flabbier fibered competitor.
Now for the other illustration: Three years ago a certain young man came to me from New York, the son of a friend who occupied a Government position. He was studying law. He was “quivering” with ambition. But his lungs were getting weak. Would it be possible to get him a place on some ranch for six or eight months? Yes, it was possible. An acquaintance was glad to take him.
At the end of his time he returned, still “quivering” with ambition. He was going to make a lawyer, that’s what he was going to make—the very best lawyer that ever mastered Blackstone. He already had a clerkship promised in one of the great legal establishments in the metropolis. This clerkship paid him enough to live on, and gave him the chance to do the very work which is necessary to the making of a lawyer.
Splendid thus far. But observe the next step. In about twelve months this young man came to me again. Would I help to get a certain man who held a Government position paying him $150 a month promoted? This last man’s record was admirable; he deserved promotion on his own account. But why the interest of the would-be lawyer, who was “quivering” with ambition?
It developed that if the other fellow was promoted, this embryo Erskine could, with the aid of influential political friends, be appointed in his place. But why did he want this position? Well, answered the young man, it would enable him to take his law course at one of the law schools of the Capitol and get his degree, and all that sort of thing. Also, it would enable him to live at home with mother, would it not? Yes, that was a consideration, he admitted.
But did he think that that was as good a training for his profession, and would give him the chance of a business acquaintance while he was getting that training, as well as the clerkship in the New York office would? Perhaps not, but, after all, he didn’t get very much salary in the New York law office. Why, how much did he get? Only twenty dollars a week.
But was not that enough to live on at a modest boarding-house, and get a room with bed, table, one chair, and a washstand, and buy him the necessary clothing? Oh, yes! of course he could scratch along on it, but it was hardly what a young man of his standing and family ought to have.
Oh! it didn’t enable him to get out into society, was that it? Well, yes, he must admit there was something in that. Washington had social advantages, to be sure, and $150 a month would enable him to have some of that life which a young man was entitled to and at the very same time be getting his legal education. Well! That young man did not get what he wanted.
That young man had the wrong notion of life. Of course, no man would do anything for him. Until he changed his point of view utterly, success was absolutely impossible for him. What that young man needed was the experience of going back to New York and having to apply for position after position until his shoe soles wore out, and he felt the pangs of hunger. He needed iron in his blood, that is what he needed. All the colleges in the world would not enable that man to do anything worth doing until he mastered the sound principles of living and of working.
Right before him in New York was an illustration of this. One of the most notable successes at the bar which that city or this country has witnessed in the last fifteen years has been made by a young man who had neither college education, money, nor friends. He was, I am told, a stenographer in one of New York’s great legal establishments. But that young man had done precisely what I have been pounding at over and over again in this paper. Very well. To-day he is one among half a dozen of the most notable lawyers in the greatest city of the greatest nation in the world.
It is all in the using of what you have. Let me repeat again what I have said in a previous paper—the inscription which Doc Peets inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished “Wolfville” with its first funeral:
“Jack King, deceased.
Life ain’t the holding of a good hand,
But
The playing of a poor hand well.”
And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of the talents. After all, it is not what we have, but what we make out of what we have that counts in this world of work. And, what’s more, that is the only thing that ought to count.