Collis P. Huntington was a notable practical success. He was wise with the hard wisdom of the world, and he had the genius of the great captain for choosing men. No business general ever selected his lieutenants with more accurate judgment. His opinion on men and affairs was always worth while. And he thought young men who meant to do anything except in the learned professions wasted time by going to college.
So when, searching for my final answer to the question this moment being asked by so many young Americans, "Shall I go to college," I answer in the affirmative, I do so admitting that a negative answer has been given by men whose opinions are entitled to the greatest possible respect.
I admit, too, that nearly every city—yes, almost every town—contains conspicuous illustrations of men who learned how to "get there" by attending the school of hard knocks.Certainly some of the most distinguished business careers in New York have been made by young men who never saw a college.
You find the same thing in every town. I have a man in mind whose performances in business have been as solid as they are astonishing. Twenty years ago he was a street-car conductor; to-day he controls large properties in which he is himself a heavy owner; and a dozen graduates of the high-class universities of Europe and America beg the crums that fall from the table of his affairs.
In his Phi Beta Kappa Address Wendell Phillips cleverly argues that the reformers of the world, and most of those whose memories are the beloved and cherished treasures of the race, were men whose vitality had not been reduced by college training, and whose kinship with the people and oneness with the soil had not been divorced by the artificial refinement of a college life. But Phillips was bitter—even fanatical—on this subject; and was, in himself, a living denial of his own doctrine.
Remember, then, you who for any reason have not had those years of mental discipline called "a college education," that this does not excuse you from doing great work in the world. Do not whine, and declare that you couldhave done so much better if you had "only had a chance to go to college." You can be a success if you will, college or no college. At least three of those famous masters of business which Chicago, the commercial capital of the continent, has given to the world, and whose legitimate operations in tangible merchandizing are so vast that they are almost weird, had no college education, and very little education of any kind.
I think, indeed, that very few of America's kings of trade ever attended college. There are the masters of railroad management, too. Few of them have been college men, although the college man is now appearing among them—witness President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania System, a real Napoleon of railroading, who, I hear, is a graduate of the German universities and of American polytechnic schools.
Burns did not go to college. Neither did Shakespeare.
Some of our greatest lawyers "read law" in the unrefined but honest and strengthening environment of the old-time law office. Lincoln was not a college man; neither was Washington. So do not excuse yourself to your family and the world upon the groundthat you never had a college education. That is not the reason why you fail.
You can succeed—I repeat it—college or no college; all you have to do in the latter case is to put on a little more steam. And remember that some of the world's sages of the practical have closed their life's wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind.
You see, I am trying to take into account every possible view of this weighty question; for I know how desperate a matter it is to hundreds of thousands of my young countrymen. I know how earnestly they are searching for an answer; how hard it will be for hosts of them to obey an affirmative answer; how intense is the desire of the great majority of young Americans to decide this question wisely. For most of them have no time to lose, little money to spend and none to waste, no energy to spare, and yet are inspired with high resolve to make the best and most of life. And I know how devoutly they pray that, in deciding, they may choose the better part.
Still, with all this in mind, my advice is this: Go to college. Go to the best possible collegeforyou. Patiently hold on through the sternest discipline you can stand, until the course is completed. It will not be fatal to your success if you do not go; but you will be better prepared to meet the world if you do go. I do not mean that your mind will be stored with much more knowledge that will be useful to you if you go through college than if you do not go through college.
Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in college, acquires more information that will be "useful" to him in his practical career. But the college man who has not thrown away his college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman.
Nobody contends that a college adds an ounce of brain power. But if college opportunities are not wasted, such mind as the student does have is developed up to the highest possible point of efficiency. The college man who has not scorned his work will understand any given situation a great deal quicker than his brother who, with equal ability, has not had the training of the university.
A man who has been instructed in boxing is more than a match for a stronger and braver man unskilled in what is called the "manly art." That is your college and non-college man over again with muscle substituted for brain.
Five years ago I saw the soldiers of Japan going through the most careful training. They were taught how to march, how to charge, how to do everything. I shall never forget the bayonet exercises which an officer and myself chanced upon. They were conducted with all the ferocity of a real fight; no point was neglected.
With all their fatalism and the utter fearlessness thereof, the Japanese could not have bested the Russians if to their courage and devotion they had not added years of painstaking drill, which an American soldier would have considered an unnecessary hardship. Very well. A college education is precisely that kind of a preparation for the warfare of life.
But mind you, these Japanese soldiers and their officers were in earnest. They meant to show the world that, small as they are in stature and recent as their adoption of modern methods has been, they nevertheless would try to be the highest type of soldier that evermarched to a battle-field. If you go to college, young man, you have got to be in earnest, too. You have got to say to yourself, "I am going to make more out of what is in me than any man with like ability ever did before." You cannot dawdle—remember that.
Imagine every day, and every hour of every day, that you are in the real world and in the real conflicts thereof, instead of in college with its practise conflicts, and handle yourself precisely as you would if your whole career depended upon each task set for you. If you mean to go to college for the principal purpose of idling around, wearing a small cap and good clothes, and being the adoration of your mother and your sisters on your vacation, you had a good deal better be at work at some gainful occupation. College is not helping you if that is what you are doing. It is hurting you.
Go to college, therefore, say I; but go to college for business. Those drill years are the most important ones of your life.
Be in earnest, therefore. I know I have said that before; yes, and I am going to say it again. For if you are not going to be in earnest, quit—get out. Resolve to get absolutely everything there is to be had out ofyour college experience, and thenget it.Get it, I say, for that is what you will have to do. Nobody is going to give it to you.
The spirit with which you enter college is just as important as going to college at all. It is more important. For if a man has the spirit that will get for him all that a college education has to give, it will also make him triumph in a contest with the world, even if he does not get his college education. It will only be a little harder for him, that is all.
But if a man has not that mingled will and wish for a college education flaming through his young veins that makes him capable of any sacrifice to get through college, I do not see what good a college education will do him—no, nor any other kind of an education. The quicker such a man is compelled to make his own living without help from any source, the better for him.
So if you mean business, but have not decided whether it is better for you to go to college or not to go to college, settle the question to-day by deciding to go to college. Then pick your college. That is as important a matter as choosing your occupation in life. One college is not as good as another foryou. A score of colleges may be equally excellent inthe ability of their faculties, in the perfection of their equipment.
But each has its own atmosphere and traditions; each has its personality, if you may apply such a word to an institution. And you want to select the place where your mental roots will strike in the earth most readily, and take from the intellectual soil surrounding you the greatest possible amount of mental force and vigor.
Take plenty of time to find out which, out of a score of colleges, is the best one for you. Study their "catalogues"; talk to men who have been to these various institutions; read every reputable article you can find about them. Keep this up long enough, and you will become conscious of an unreasoned knowledge that such and such an institution is not the place foryouto go. Finally, write to the president or other proper officer of the colleges you are thinking of attending.
You will get some sort of an answer from each of them; but if it is only three lines, that answer will breathe something of the spirit of the institution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their attitude is the impersonal one. They say to the world, and tothe youth thereof: "Here we are. We are perfectly prepared. We have on hand a complete stock of education. Take it, or leave it. It is not of the slightest concern to us."
I have no quarrel with that attitude. These institutions are going on the assumption that you already have character and purpose; that you already know what you are about. They are ready for you if you are ready for them. And if you are not ready for them, if you are only a rich person or a mere stroller along the highways of life, what is that to them? Why should it be anything to them? Why should it be anything to anybody? The world is busy, young man; you have got to make yourself worth while if it pays any attention to you.
Making sure always that the college of your choice is well equipped, select the one where you will feel the most at home. Other things being equal, go where there are the most men in whose blood burns the fire which is racing through your veins. Go to the college in whose atmosphere you will find most of the ozone of earnestness. It may well be that you will find this thing in one of the smaller colleges, of which there are so many and such excellent ones scattered all over the Nation.
Certainly these little colleges have thisadvantage: their students are usually very poor boys, who have to struggle and deny themselves to go to college at all—young men whose determination to do their part in the world is so great that hunger is a small price to pay for that preparation which they think a college education gives them; men whose resolve to "make something of themselves," as the common saying goes, is so irresistible that they simply cannot endure to stay away from college.
Such men have hard muscles, made strong and tense by youthful toil; great lungs, expanded by plow in field or ax in forest; nerves of steel, tempered by days of labor in open air and nights of dreamless slumber, which these hypnotics of Nature always induce. These men have strong, firm mouths; clear, honest eyes, that look you straight and fair; and a mental and moral constitution which fit these physical manifestations of it.
And these are just the kind of men among whom you ought to spend your college life, if you are one of the same kind—and perhaps much more if you are not.
Fellows like these believe in the honor of men, the virtue of women, the sacredness of home, and that the American people have amission in the world marked out for them by the Ruler of the Universe—though this is not a fair distinction since all Americans believe in these high, sweet things of life and destiny. It is a faith common to all Americans and monopolized by no class.
But you know what kind of a man you are, and therefore you will find out, if you search with care, what college is the best for you. I insist upon the importance of this selection. It is a real, practical problem. You will never have a more important task set you in class-room, or even throughout your entire life, than to select the college which is going to do you the most good. So go about it with all the care that you would plan a campaign if you were a general in the field, or conduct an experiment if you were a scientist in the laboratory.
This one word of definite helpfulness on this subject: Do not choose any particular college because you want to be known as a Yale man, a Harvard man, a Princeton man, or any other kind of man. Remember that the world cares less than the snap of its fingers what particularcollegeman you are.
What the world cares about it that you shouldbea man—a realman.
It won't help you a bit in the business of your life to have it known that you graduated from any particular college or university. If you are in politics, it won't give you a vote; if a manufacturer, it will not add a brick to your plant; if a merchant, it will not sell a dollar's worth of your goods.
Nobody cares what college you went to. Nobody cares whether you went to college at all.
But everybody cares whether you are a real force among men; and everybody cares more and more as it becomes clearer and clearer that you are not only a force, but a trained, disciplined force. That is why you ought to go to college—to be a trained, disciplined force. But how and where you got your power—the world of men and women is far too interested in itself to be interested in that.
When you do finally go to college, take care of yourself like a man. I am told that there are men in college who have valets to attend them, their rooms, and their clothes. Think of that! Don't do anything like that, even if you are a hundred times a millionaire. Of courseyouwon't—you who read this—because not one out of ten thousand youngAmericans can afford to have a valet in college—thank heaven!
Don't do any of the many things which belong to that life of self-indulgence of which the keeping of a valet in college is a flaring illustration. Don't let kind friends litter up your room with a lot of cushions, and such stuff. The world for which you are preparing is no "cushiony" place, let me tell you; and if you let luxury relax your nerves and soften your brain tissues and make your muscles mushy, a similar mental and moral condition will develop. And then, when you go out into real life, you will find some sturdy young barbarian, with a Spartan training and a merciless heart, elbowing you clear off the earth.
For, mark you, these strong, fearless, masterful young giants, who are every day maturing among the common people of America, ask no quarter and give none; and it is such fellows you must go up against. And when you do go up against them there will be no appealing to father and mother to help you. Father and mother cannot help you. Nobody can help you but yourself. You will find that the cushion business, and the mandolin business, and all that sort of thing, do not go in real life.
Consider West Point and Annapolis. My understanding is that the men whom the Nation is training there for the skilled defense of the Republic, and who therefore must be developed into the very highest types of effective manhood, are taught to clean and polish their own shoes, make their own beds, care for their own guns, and do everything else for themselves. Do you think that is a good training for our generals and admirals? Of course you do.
Well, then, do you imagine that you are going to have an easier time in your business or profession than the officers in our army and navy? Don't you believe it for a minute. You are not going to have an easier time than they. You are going to have a great deal harder time. And by "hard time" I do not mean an unhappy time. Unhappy time! What greater joy can there be for a man than the sheer felicity of doing real work in the world?
While I am on this subject I might as well say another thing: Do not think that you have got to smoke in order to be or look like a college man. A pipe in the mouth of a youth does not make him look like a college man, or any other kind of man. It merely makes him look absurd, that is all. And if there is evera time on earth when you do not need the stimulus of tobacco, it is while you are in college.
Tobacco is a wonderful vegetable. It is, I believe, the only substance in the world which is at the same time a stimulant and a narcotic, a heart excitant and a nerve sedative. Very well. You are too young yet to need a heart stimulant, too young to need anything to quiet your nerves.
If at your tender age your nerves are so inflamed that they must be soothed, and if at the very sunrise of your life your heart is so feeble that it must be forced with any stimulant, you had better quit college. College is no place for you if you are such a decadent; yes, and you will find the world a good deal harder place than college.
Cut out tobacco, therefore. For a young fellow in college it is a ridiculous affectation—nothing more. Why? Because you do not need tobacco; that is why. At least you do not need it yet. The time may come when you will find tobacco helpful, but it will not be until you have been a long while out of college. As to whether tobacco is good for a man at any stage of life the doctors disagree, and "where doctors disagree, who shall decide?"
Ruskin says that no really immortal work has been done in the world since tobacco was introduced; but we know that this is not true. I would not be understood as having a prejudice for or against the weed. Whether a full-grown man shall use it or not is something for himself to decide. Personally I liked it so well that I made up my mind a long time ago to give it up altogether.
But there is absolutely no excuse for a man young enough to still be in college to use it at all. And it does not look right. For a boy to use tobacco has something contemptible about it. I will not argue whether this is justified or not. That is the way most people feel about it. Whether their feeling is a prejudice or not, there is no use of your needlessly offending their prejudice. And this is to be taken into account. For you want to succeed, do you not? Very well. You cannot mount a ladder of air; you must rise on the solid stepping-stones of the people's deserved regard.
And, of course, you will not disgrace yourself by drinking. There is absolutely nothing in it. If you have your fling at it you will learn how surely Intoxication's apples of gold turn to the bitterest ashes in the eating. Butwhen you do find how fruitless of everything but regrets dissipation is, be honest with yourself and quit it. Be honest with the mother who is at home praying for you, and quit it. But this is weak advice. Be honest with that mother who is at home praying for you, andnever begin it. That's the thing—never begin it!
In a word, be a man; and you will be very little of a man, very little indeed, if you have got to resort to tobacco and liquor to add to your blood and conduct that touch of devilishness which you may think is a necessary part of manliness. Indeed, between fifteen and thirty years of age your veins will be quite full enough of the untamed and desperate. I do not object in the least to this wild mustang period in a man's life.
Is a fellow to have no fun? you will say. Of course, have all the fun you want; the more the better. But if you need stimulants and tobacco to key you up to the capacity for fun, you are a solemn person indeed—"solemn as cholera morbus" to appropriate an American newspaper's description of one of our public men. What I mean is that you shall do nothing that will destroy your effectiveness. Play, sports, fun, do not do that; they increaseyour effectiveness. Go in for athletics all you please; but do not forget that that is not why you are going to college.
Nobody cares how mad are the pranks you play. Take the curb and snaffle off of the humors of your blood whenever you please; that is all right. I never took much stock in the outcry against hazing. We cannot change our sex, or the nature and habits of it. A young man is a male animal after all, and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with Nature.
One thing I must warn you against, and warn you supremely: the critical habit of mind which somehow or other a college education does seem to produce. This is especially true of the great universities of our East. Nobody admires those splendid institutions more than I do—the Nation is proud of them, and ought to be. The world of learning admires them, and with reason. Neither the English, Scotch, nor German universities surpass them.
But has not every one of us many times heard their graduates declare that a mischief had been done them while in those universities by the cultivation of a sneering attitude toward everybody—especially toward every other young man—whom they see doinganything actual, positive, or constructive. One of the best of these men—a man with a superb mind highly trained—said to me on this very subject:
"I confess that I came out of college with my initiative atrophied. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid I would make a mistake if I did anything; afraid I was not well enough equipped to do the things that suggested themselves; afraid that if I did try to do anything everybody would criticize what I did; afraid that my old college mates would laugh at me.
"And I confess in humility that I myself acquired the habit of intellectual suspicion toward everybody who does try to do any real thing. I find myself unconsciously sneering at young men who are accomplishing things. Yes, and that is not the worst of it; I find myself sneering at myself." That is pathos—a soul doubting, denying itself. Pathos! yes, it is tragedy!
Confirm this confession by dropping into a club where such men gather and hearing the talk about the ones who are doing things in the world. You will find that until the men whoaredoing things have actuallydonethem, done them well, and forced hostility itself toaccept what they have done as good, honest pieces of work, the talk in these clubs will be that of harsh criticism, sneering contempt, and prophecy of failure. Guard against that habit night and day. You would better become an opium-eater than to permit this paralysis of mind and soul.
Believe in things.Believe in other young men.When you see other young men trying to do things in business, politics, art, the professions, believe in the honesty of their purpose and their ability to do well what they have started out to do. Assume that they will succeed until they prove that they cannot. Do not discourage them. Do not sneer at them. That will only weaken yourself. Believe in other young men, and you will soon find yourself believing in yourself.
That is the most important thing of all: Belief in yourself. Have faith in yourself though the whole universe jeers. "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string," is the sentence from Emerson we used to write endlessly in our copy-books when we went to school. And what a glorious motto for Americans it is!
Remember that the high places, now filled by men whom the years are aging, must byand by be filled by men now young. Be in no haste then—the years are your allies. Time will dispose of your rivals. Just believe in yourself, and work and wait and dare—and keep onworking, waiting, daring.Never let up; and never doubt your ultimate success.Think of Columbus, Drake, Magellan—the story of every master-mariner has in it food for your necessary egotism.
Do not underestimate your strength. There are things you would like to do; very well, sail in and do them. Do not be afraid of making a mistake. Do not be afraid that you will fail. Suppose you do fail. Millions have failed before you. I am repeating this thought and I wish it would bear repetition on every page.
But never admit to yourself that you have failed. Try it again. You will win next time, sure! "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." How much sense there is in these common maxims of the common people, proverbs not written by any one man, but axioms that spring out of the combined intelligence of the millions, meditating through the centuries. The sayings of the people are always simple and wise.
What a fine thing it was that Grant said atShiloh. The first day closed in disaster. The enemy had all but driven the Union Army into the river. Not a great distance from the banks of the stream they will point out to you the tree under which Grant stood, cigar clinched between his teeth, directing the disposition of his forces. Some one reported to him a fresh disaster.
With the calmness of the certainty that nobody could defeathim, so the story runs, Grant replied, "Never mind; I will lick them to-morrow." Very like Cæsar, was it not? "Icame,Isaw,Iconquered." Or that other audacity of the great Roman, when the ship was actually sinking: "Fear not," said he; "fear not, you carryCæsarandhisfortunes."
In the same battle it is credibly reported that Grant rode to an important position held by a large number of his troops under one of his most trusted generals. "What have you been doing?" asked Grant. "Fighting," answered the commander in charge of that position, equally laconic. For a while Grant surveyed the field, and, turning, was about to ride away. "But what shall I do now, General?" asked his subordinate. "Keep on fighting," answered Grant.
Do not get into the habit of feeling thatyou are not sufficiently well equipped. This comes of a very honest intellectual process—the understanding, as we get more knowledge, of how very little we really know; as we get more skill, of how very unskilled we really are; the feeling that, high as our training is, there is some one else more highly trained. Of course there is; but if that is any excuse why you should do nothing—because there is some person who can do it better—you will never do anything; and then what will happen when all of the other fellows who "could do it better" die?
You will by that time be too old to do anything at all. So sail in yourself, and pat on the back every other young fellow that sails in. If you learn the law, for example, understand that the way to acquire the art ofpractisinglaw is topractiseit, and not merely watch somebody else practise it. Suppose every young man with a scientific mind had declined to make any experiment because there were abler scientists than he: how many Pasteurs and Finsens and Marconis and Edisons and Bells would the world have had? And I might go on for an hour with similar illustrations.
So go ahead and try to do things you wouldliketo do—things Nature has fitted you to do.Believe that you can do these things. For youcan, you know. You will be amazed at your own powers. If you do not believe in yourself, how do you expect the world to believe in you? The world has no time to pet and coddle you, remember that. So get the habit of faith in yourself and your fellow men. Cultivate a noble intellectual generosity. It is a fine tonic for mind and soul—a fine tonic even for the body.
The doctors say that envy, malice, jealousy, produce a distinctly depressing effect upon the nervous system. And some go so far as to say that if intense enough these states of mind actually poison the secretions. Don't, therefore, let these hyena passions abide with you. Be generous. Have faith. Make mistakes or achieve success; fail or win; but do things. Share the common lot. Be hearty. Be whole-souled. Be a man. Never doubt for a moment that
"God's in his heaven;All's well with the world."
"God's in his heaven;All's well with the world."
This paper has been devoted to your mental and moral attitude toward your college and your college life, rather than to what particular things you will study there; for the wayyou look at your college and the life you lead there—the spirit with which you enter upon these golden years—is the main thing. The studies themselves are the methods by which you apply that spirit and purpose.
But most young men with whom I have talked want to know what "courses" to take, what "studies" to specialize upon. No general counsel can be given which will be very valuable to you upon this point. But I will venture this: Do not choose entirely by yourself what things you will study in college, or what "courses" you will "elect."
You are so apt to pick the things that are easiest for you, and not the things that are best for you. Even the strongest-willed men quite unconsciously select those things that will mean the least work. You do not think you are selecting certain courses or studies for this reason, and perhaps you are not; but then, again, perhaps you are, and you cannot yourself determine that.
Therefore I suggest that you advise with four or five of the ablest and most successful men you know. Let two of these be educators, and the others professional or business men. Try to get them to interest themselves enough in you to take the time to think thewhole subject over very carefully as applied to your particular case, and to take further time to talk it over thoroughly with you. Then take the consensus of their opinion, unless your own view is decided, clear, and emphatic.
When you have such an opinion of your own, such a command coming from the sources of your own mentality, obey that, in choosing your studies and course, rather than the counsel of any other man or number of men. Yes, obey that voice in making such a choice, and in making every choice throughout your whole life; for it is the voice of your real self—that inward counselor which never fails those who are fortunate enough to have it.
Of course, what you study ought to be influenced by what you intend to do in life. For example, the career of civil engineer requires a special kind of preparation. So do the various occupations and professions. But no matter what particular thing you intend to do through life, it is the belief of most men who have given this subject any thought that a young man ought to take a complete general college course, and supplement this by special preparation for the particular work to which he intends to devote his life.
But there is one thing to which the attentionof young Americans should be directed as influencing their college life. Our country is no longer isolated. We can no longer be called a provincial people. We are decidedly a very intimate part of the world. Our relations with other peoples grow closer and closer, and they will keep on growing closer as the years pass by. A thousand Americans travel over sea to-day where one went abroad fifty years ago. Our foreign commerce is now greater in a single year than it used to be in an entire decade—yes, and quite recently, too, so swift our increase.
Other countries are several times nearer to us than they were even in the last generation. It took Emerson almost a month to cross the Atlantic. Now you go over in a week. You can send a cablegram to any country in the world and have it delivered, translated into the language of the person to whom it is sent, a great deal quicker than the dawn can travel. Invention has made snail-like the speed of light.
What does all this mean? It means that in our relations we have become cosmopolitan. Therefore we Americans ought to know other languages than our own. Charles Sumner said that if he had to go through college againhe would study nothing but modern languages and history. Of course I do not presume to advise you who are reading this paper to do that, although it is precisely what I should do if I were going through college again. But I do advise you to do this: Acquire at least two languages in addition to your own—French and German.
Indeed, you ought to have three languages besides your own—French, German, and Spanish. For, consider! Here is Mexico, our next-door neighbor—its people speak Spanish; Cuba, a kind of national ward of ours—its people speak Spanish. The people of our possessions in the Pacific speak Spanish; of Porto Rico, Spanish; of the Central and South American "Republics"—with all of whom we are destined, in spite of ourselves, to have relations of ever-increasing intimacy—all speak Spanish.
And French? You can travel all over Europe intelligently if you speak French. And German—the language that is going to make a good race with English itself as the commercial language of the world is German. For example, you can go all throughcommercialRussia without a guide if you speak German. You can get along in any port of the Orientif you speak German. So you can if you speak English, it is true. And think of how many millions of excellent people in our own country are still German-speaking (although our German citizens are so splendidly patriotic that they acquire English just as soon as they possibly can).
But the point is, that your usefulness in every direction will be increased by a knowledge of the languages. The other things that you study in college you will largely forget, anyhow; and, besides, you study them principally for the mental discipline in them. But if you get a language, and get it correctly, thoroughly, you can find enough use for it to keep brushed up on it. And of course you can read it all the time, whether you have a chance to talk it or not.
It is impossible to use words sufficiently emphatic in urging the study of history.You cannot get too much history in college and out of it.Sir William Hamilton was right—history is the study of studies. The man who occupies the chair of history in any college ought to be not only an able man, he ought to be a great man. If ever you find such a professor, make yourself agreeable to him, absorb him, possess yourself of him.
This final word: Mingle with your fellow students. Talk with people, with real people; those who are living real lives, doing real things under normal and natural conditions. Do all this in order that you may keep human; for you must not get the habit of keeping to your room and believing that all wisdom is confined to books. It is not. All wisdom is not confined to any one place. Some of it is in books, and some of it is in trees and the earth and the stars.
But so far asyouare concerned most of it is in human touch with your fellows; for it ismenwith whom you must work. It ismenwho are to employ you. It ismenwhom in your turn you are to employ. It is the world ofmenwhich in the end you are to serve. And it is that you may serve it well that you are going to college at all, is it not?
Beoneof thesemen, therefore; and be sure that while you are being one of them, you are one indeed. Be a man in college and out, and clear down to the end. Be a man—that is the sum of all counsel.
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 ofmillions 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 mysuccessor. 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 tostart inas 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 thisman 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 caredwhether 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 onewill 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 calledhim. 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 writtenimmortal 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 YorkTimes. Charles A. Dana, who made the New YorkSunthe most quoted newspaper of his generation, was not a college graduate. William Cullen Bryant, who gave to the New YorkEvening Posta peculiar distinction and preeminence, went to college only one year.
Samuel Bowles, who founded the SpringfieldRepublicanand 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 YorkTribune, 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 theMonitor,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-wonvolumes 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 YorkTimes. 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 thenslept 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 thiscounter 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: