The Young Man and the World Part 6

Let the messages that you send back to the old home be joyful--full of faith. No matter how hard a time you are having, don't let "the folks at home" know it. Besides, you are not having such a hard time, after all. Hundreds of thousands of other men who have become splendidly successful had a great deal harder time than you are having or ever dreamed of having. Resolve to live up to what the home which reared you expects of you, and work like mad on that resolve, and you will find that you are becoming all that "the folks at home" expected of you, and a great deal more.

Go back to the old home as often as you can; but be sure that you go back with words of cheer and a story of things done. "The folks at home"--especially the mother--will want to hear all about it. There may be wars whose high-leaping flames illumine all the heavens; there may be political campaigns on hand where issues of fate are thrilling the nerves of the millions; there may be strange tidings from the council-board of the nations; there may be catastrophes and glories, scourges and blessings, famine or opulence; but any and all of these are of no interest to the mother, compared with what _you_ will have to tell her of _your_ own puny little deeds.

They are not puny deeds to her; they are quite the most considerable performances given in all the universe of men. For _you_ did them, you know, and that is enough. To his mother every man is a hero.

So let your tale to her be boldly told and lovingly. And be sure that it is a narrative of purity, things honorable and of good report.

Return to the habit of your youth, and at her knees establish again the old confessional. And then, with your secrets handed over to her and safely locked in her heart, with her hand of blessing on your head, and her smile of confidence, pride, and approval glorifying her face, resolve to again go out into the world where your place is, and be worthy of this new baptism of manhood you have again received in the sanctuary of the old home.

These are all simple things, commonplace things, things easy to do.

They have nothing extraordinary about them. And yet, if you will do them, the world will back you as a winner against men who are a great deal smarter than you are, but who with all their smartness are not smart enough to do these plain and kindly things.

III

THE COLLEGE?

_1. The Young Man who Goes_

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 ent.i.tled to the greatest possible respect.

I admit, too, that nearly every city--yes, almost every town--contains conspicuous ill.u.s.trations 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-cla.s.s 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 could have 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 Ca.s.satt, 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 ground that 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 college for _you_. 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.

n.o.body 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 subst.i.tuted for brain.

Five years ago I saw the soldiers of j.a.pan 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 j.a.panese 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 j.a.panese 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 ever marched 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 princ.i.p.al 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 of your college experience, and then _get it_. _Get it_, I say, for that is what you will have to do. n.o.body 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 for _you_. A score of colleges may be equally excellent in the 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 inst.i.tution. 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 inst.i.tutions; 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 inst.i.tution is not the place for _you_ to 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 inst.i.tution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their att.i.tude is the impersonal one.

They say to the world, and to the 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 att.i.tude. These inst.i.tutions are going on the a.s.sumption 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 this advantage: 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 const.i.tution 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 a mission 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 cla.s.s.

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 cla.s.s-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 particular _college_ man you are.

What the world cares about it that you should _be_ a man--a real _man_.

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.