The Young Man and the World Part 10

The little inst.i.tution 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 a.s.sociations 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 inst.i.tution.

Its depositors were satisfied, its customers pleased. One day the attorney of this a.s.sociation, 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 inst.i.tution 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 inst.i.tutions whose venerable names had been their sufficient guarantee collapsed in a day. Most building and loan a.s.sociations, 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 inst.i.tution 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 compet.i.tor.

Now for the other ill.u.s.tration: 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 ent.i.tled 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 ill.u.s.tration 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.

IV

THE NEW HOME

Your father made the old home. Prove yourself worthy of him by making the new home. He built the roof-tree which sheltered you. Build you a roof-tree that may in its turn shelter others. What abnormal egotism the att.i.tude of him who says, "This planet, and all the uncounted centuries of the past, were made for _me_ and n.o.body else, and I will live accordingly. I will go it alone."

"I wish John had not married so young," said a woman of wealth, fashion, and brilliant talents in speaking of her son. "Why, how old was he?" asked her friend. "Twenty-five," said she; "he ought to have waited ten years longer." "I think not," was the response of the world-wise man with whom she was conversing. "If he got a good wife he was in great luck that he did not wait longer." "No," persisted the mother, "he ought to have taken more time 'to look around.' These early marriages interfere with a young man's career."

This fragment of a real conversation, which is typical of numberless others like it, reveals the false and shallow philosophy which, if it becomes our code of national living, will make the lives of our young people abnormal and our twentieth century civilization artificial and neurotic. Even now too many people are thinking about a "career."

Mothers are talking about "careers" for their sons. Young men are dreaming of their "careers."

It is a.s.sumed that a young man can "carve out his career" if his attention is not distracted and his powers are not diminished by a wife and children whom he must feed, clothe, and consider. The icy selfishness of this hypothesis of life ought to be enough to reject it without argument. Who is any man, that he should have a "career"? and what does a "career" amount to, anyway? What is it for? Fame? Surely not, because

"Imperious Caesar dead and turned to clay, Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

says Shakespeare. And Shakespeare ought to know; he is not quite three centuries dead, and even now the world is sadly confused as to whether he wrote Shakespeare. "Career!" Let your "career" grow out of the right living of your life--not the living of your life grow out of your "career." "Don't get the cart before the horse."

Is it to accomplish some good thing for humanity that you want this "career," which is to keep you single until you are too old to be interesting? Very well. Just what is it that you expect to do with these self-centered and single years during which you intend so to help the race? If you cannot tell, you are "down and out" on that score.

And, besides, you will find that the enormous majority of men who by their service have uplifted or enriched humanity have been men enough to lead the natural life. They have been men who have founded homes.

And how can you better benefit mankind than by founding a home among your fellow men, a pure, normal, sweet, and beautiful home?

That would be getting down to business. That would be doing something definite, something "you can put your finger on." It would be "getting down to earth," as the saying is. You would be "benefiting humanity"

sure enough and in real earnest by taking care of some actual human being among this great indefinite ma.s.s called mankind. The making of a home is the beginning of human usefulness.

The Boers were a splendid type of the human animal. It took all the power of the greatest empire on earth to crush a handful of them; and even then Great Britain was able to subdue them only at astonishing loss of men and money, and irreparable impairment of prestige. They were glorious fighting men, these Boers. The blood that flowed in their veins was unadulterated Dutch--the only unconquered blood in history; for you will remember that even Caesar could not overcome them, and, with the genius of the statesman-soldier that he was, he made terms with them.

But these Boers were a good deal more than mere fighting animals; they were perhaps the most religious people on earth. If they were mighty creatures physically, they were also exalted beings spiritually. They knew how to pray as well as to fight. They made their living, too, and asked no favors. Also they builded them a state. It was a fine thing in the English to acknowledge the high qualities of these African Dutchmen, after the war with them was over.

It is said that there was not an unmarried man above twenty-one years of age among them. Very generally the same thing was true of "The Fathers" who founded this republic. Indeed, all great constructive periods and peoples have lived in harmony with the laws of Nature. It has been the races of marrying men that have made the heroic epochs in human history. The point is that the man who is not enough of a man to make a home, need not be counted. He is a "negligible quant.i.ty," as the scientists put it.

So if your arm is not strong enough to protect a wife, and your shoulders are not broad enough to carry aloft your children in a sort of grand gladness, you are really not worth while. For it will take a man with veins and arteries swollen with masculine blood pumped by a great, big, strong heart, working as easily and joyfully as a Corliss engine; with thews of steel wire and step as light as a tiger's and masterful as an old-time warrior's; with brain so fertile and vision so clear that he fears not the future, and knows that what to weaker ones seem dangers are in reality nothing but shadows--it will take this kind of a man to make any "career" that is going to be made.

Very well. Such a man will be searching for his mate and finding her, planning a home and building it before he is twenty-five; and the man who does not, is either too weak or too selfish to do it. In either case you need not fear him. "He will never set the world afire."