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.