← catalogue

Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden · English · Gutenberg #21291 · 1,468,947 chars · public domain (US)

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Pushing to the Front
    
This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and
most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions
whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms
of the Project Gutenberg License included with this eBook or online
at www.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States,
you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located
before using this eBook.

Title: Pushing to the Front

Author: Orison Swett Marden


        
Release date: May 4, 2007 [eBook #21291]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/21291

Credits: Produced by Al Haines


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PUSHING TO THE FRONT ***




Produced by Al Haines










[Frontispiece: Orison Swett Marden]






Pushing to the Front


BY

ORISON SWETT MARDEN



"The world makes way for the determined man."




PUBLISHED BY

The Success Company's

Branch Offices

PETERSBURG, N.Y. ---- TOLEDO ---- DANVILLE

OKLAHOMA CITY ---- SAN JOSE




COPYRIGHT, 1911,

By ORISON SWETT MARDEN.




FOREWORD

This revised and greatly enlarged edition of "Pushing to the Front" is
the outgrowth of an almost world-wide demand for an extension of the
idea which made the original small volume such an ambition-arousing,
energizing, inspiring force.

It is doubtful whether any other book, outside of the Bible, has been
the turning-point in more lives.

It has sent thousands of youths, with renewed determination, back to
school or college, back to all sorts of vocations which they had
abandoned in moments of discouragement.  It has kept scores of business
men from failure after they had given up all hope.

It has helped multitudes of poor boys and girls to pay their way
through college who had never thought a liberal education possible.

The author has received thousands of letters from people in nearly all
parts of the world telling how the book has aroused their ambition,
changed their ideals and aims, and has spurred them to the successful
undertaking of what they before had thought impossible.

The book has been translated into many foreign languages.  In Japan and
several other countries it is used extensively in the public schools.
Distinguished educators in many parts of the world have recommended its
use in schools as a civilization-builder.

Crowned heads, presidents of republics, distinguished members of the
British and other parliaments, members of the United States Supreme
Court, noted authors, scholars, and eminent people in many parts of the
world, have eulogized this book and have thanked the author for giving
it to the world.

This volume is full of the most fascinating romances of achievement
under difficulties, of obscure beginnings and triumphant endings, of
stirring stories of struggles and triumphs.  It gives inspiring stories
of men and women who have brought great things to pass.  It gives
numerous examples of the triumph of mediocrity, showing how those of
ordinary ability have succeeded by the use of ordinary means.  It shows
how invalids and cripples even have triumphed by perseverance and will
over seemingly insuperable difficulties.

The book tells how men and women have seized common occasions and made
them great; it tells of those of average ability who have succeeded by
the use of ordinary means, by dint of indomitable will and inflexible
purpose.  It tells how poverty and hardship have rocked the cradle of
the giants of the race.  The book points out that most people do not
utilize a large part of their effort because their mental attitude does
not correspond with their endeavor, so that although working for one
thing, they are really expecting something else; and it is what we
expect that we tend to get.

No man can become prosperous while he really expects or half expects to
remain poor, for holding the poverty thought, keeping in touch with
poverty-producing conditions, discourages prosperity.

Before a man can lift himself he must lift his thoughts.  When we shall
have learned to master our thought habits, to keep our minds open to
the great divine inflow of life force, we shall have learned the truths
of human endowment, human possibility.

The book points out the fact that what is called success may be
failure; that when men love money so much that they sacrifice their
friendships, their families, their home life, sacrifice position,
honor, health, everything for the dollar, their life is a failure,
although they may have accumulated money.  It shows how men have become
rich at the price of their ideals, their character, at the cost of
everything noblest, best, and truest in life.  It preaches the larger
doctrine of equality; the equality of will and purpose which paves a
clear path even to the Presidential chair for a Lincoln or a Garfield,
for any one who will pay the price of study and struggle.  Men who feel
themselves badly handicapped, crippled by their lack of early
education, will find in these pages great encouragement to broaden
their horizon, and will get a practical, helpful, sensible education in
their odd moments and half-holidays.

Dr. Marden, in "Pushing to the Front," shows that the average of the
leaders are not above the average of ability.  They are ordinary
people, but of extraordinary persistence and perseverance.  It is a
storehouse of noble incentive, a treasury of precious sayings.  There
is inspiration and encouragement and helpfulness on every page.  It
teaches the doctrine that no limits can be placed on one's career if he
has once learned the alphabet and has push; that there are no barriers
that can say to aspiring talent, "Thus far, and no farther."
Encouragement is its keynote; it aims to arouse to honorable exertion
those who are drifting without aim, to awaken dormant ambitions in
those who have grown discouraged in the struggle for success.

THE PUBLISHERS.




CONTENTS


CHAPTER

       I. THE MAN AND THE OPPORTUNITY
      II. WANTED--A MAN
     III. BOYS WITH NO CHANCE
      IV. THE COUNTRY BOY
       V. OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE
      VI. POSSIBILITIES IN SPARE MOMENTS
     VII. HOW POOR BOYS AND GIRLS GO TO COLLEGE
    VIII. YOUR OPPORTUNITY CONFRONTS YOU--WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?
      IX. ROUND BOYS IN SQUARE HOLES
       X. WHAT CAREER?
      XI. CHOOSING A VOCATION
     XII. CONCENTRATED ENERGY
    XIII. THE TRIUMPHS OF ENTHUSIASM
     XIV. "ON TIME," OR, THE TRIUMPH OF PROMPTNESS
      XV. WHAT A GOOD APPEARANCE WILL DO
     XVI. PERSONALITY AS A SUCCESS ASSET
    XVII. If YOU CAN TALK WELL
   XVIII. A FORTUNE IN GOOD MANNERS
     XIX. SELF-CONSCIOUSNESS AND TIMIDITY FOES TO SUCCESS
      XX. TACT OR COMMON SENSE
     XXI. ENAMORED OF ACCURACY
    XXII. DO IT TO A FINISH
   XXIII. THE REWARD OF PERSISTENCE
    XXIV. NERVE--GRIP, PLUCK
     XXV. CLEAR GRIT
    XXVI. SUCCESS UNDER DIFFICULTIES
   XXVII. USES OF OBSTACLES
  XXVIII. DECISION
    XXIX. OBSERVATION AS A SUCCESS FACTOR
     XXX. SELF-HELP
    XXXI. THE SELF-IMPROVEMENT HABIT
   XXXII. RAISING OF VALUES
  XXXIII. PUBLIC SPEAKING
   XXXIV. THE TRIUMPHS OF THE COMMON VIRTUES
    XXXV. GETTING AROUSED
   XXXVI. THE MAN WITH AN IDEA
  XXXVII. DARE
 XXXVIII. THE WILL AND THE WAY
   XXXIX. ONE UNWAVERING AIM
      XL. WORK AND WAIT
     XLI. THE MIGHT OF LITTLE THINGS
    XLII. THE SALARY YOU DO NOT FIND IN YOUR PAY ENVELOPE
   XLIII. EXPECT GREAT THINGS OF YOURSELF
    XLIV. THE NEXT TIME YOU THINK YOU ARE A FAILURE
     XLV. STAND FOR SOMETHING
    XLVI. NATURE'S LITTLE BILL
   XLVII. HABIT--THE SERVANT,--THE MASTER
  XLVIII. THE CIGARETTE
    XLIX. THE POWER OF PURITY
       L. THE HABIT OF HAPPINESS
      LI. PUT BEAUTY INTO YOUR LIFE
     LII. EDUCATION BY ABSORPTION
    LIII. THE POWER OF SUGGESTION
     LIV. THE CURSE OF WORRY
      LV. TAKE A PLEASANT THOUGHT TO BED WITH YOU
     LVI. THE CONQUEST OF POVERTY
    LVII. A NEW WAY OF BRINGING UP CHILDREN
   LVIII. THE HOME AS A SCHOOL OF GOOD MANNERS
     LIX. MOTHER
      LX. WHY SO MANY MARRIED WOMEN DETERIORATE
     LXI. THRIFT
    LXII. A COLLEGE EDUCATION AT HOME
   LXIII. DISCRIMINATION IN READING
    LXIV. READING A SPUR TO AMBITION
     LXV. WHY SOME SUCCEED AND OTHERS FAIL
    LXVI. RICH WITHOUT MONEY




ILLUSTRATIONS


Orison Swett Marden . . . . . . . . . . _Frontispiece_

House in which Abraham Lincoln was born

Ulysses S. Grant

William Ewart Gladstone

John Wanamaker

Jane Addams

Thomas Alva Edison

Henry Ward Beecher

Lincoln studying by the firelight

Marshall Field

Joseph Jefferson [Transcriber's note: Jefferson was a prominent actor
during the latter half of the 1800's.]

Theodore Roosevelt

Helen Keller

William McKinley

Julia Ward Howe

Mark Twain




PUSHING TO THE FRONT


CHAPTER I

THE MAN AND THE OPPORTUNITY

No man is born into this world whose work is not born with him.--LOWELL.

Things don't turn up in this world until somebody turns them
up.--GARFIELD.

Vigilance in watching opportunity; tact and daring in seizing upon
opportunity; force and persistence in crowding opportunity to its
utmost of possible achievement--these are the martial virtues which
must command success.--AUSTIN PHELPS.

"I will find a way or make one."

There never was a day that did not bring its own opportunity for doing
good that never could have been done before, and never can be
again.--W. H. BURLEIGH.

  "Are you in earnest?  Seize this very minute;
  What you can do, or dream you can, _begin_ it."


"If we succeed, what will the world say?" asked Captain Berry in
delight, when Nelson had explained his carefully formed plan before the
battle of the Nile.

"There is no if in the case," replied Nelson.  "That we shall succeed
is certain.  Who may live to tell the tale is a very different
question."  Then, as his captains rose from the council to go to their
respective ships, he added: "Before this time to-morrow I shall have
gained a peerage or Westminster Abbey."  His quick eye and daring
spirit saw an opportunity of glorious victory where others saw only
probable defeat.

"Is it POSSIBLE to cross the path?" asked Napoleon of the engineers who
had been sent to explore the dreaded pass of St. Bernard.  "Perhaps,"
was the hesitating reply, "it is within the limits of _possibility_."

"FORWARD THEN," said the Little Corporal, without heeding their account
of apparently insurmountable difficulties.  England and Austria laughed
in scorn at the idea of transporting across the Alps, where "no wheel
had ever rolled, or by any possibility could roll," an army of sixty
thousand men, with ponderous artillery, tons of cannon balls and
baggage, and all the bulky munitions of war.  But the besieged Massena
was starving in Genoa, and the victorious Austrians thundered at the
gates of Nice, and Napoleon was not the man to fail his former comrades
in their hour of peril.

When this "impossible" deed was accomplished, some saw that it might
have been done long before.  Others excused themselves from
encountering such gigantic obstacles by calling them insuperable.  Many
a commander had possessed the necessary supplies, tools, and rugged
soldiers, but lacked the grit and resolution of Bonaparte, who did not
shrink from mere difficulties, however great, but out of his very need
made and mastered his opportunity.

Grant at New Orleans had just been seriously injured by a fall from his
horse, when he received orders to take command at Chattanooga, so
sorely beset by the Confederates that its surrender seemed only a
question of a few days; for the hills around were all aglow by night
with the camp-fires of the enemy, and supplies had been cut off.
Though in great pain, he immediately gave directions for his removal to
the new scene of action.

On transports up the Mississippi, the Ohio, and one of its tributaries;
on a litter borne by horses for many miles through the wilderness; and
into the city at last on the shoulders of four men, he was taken to
Chattanooga.  Things assumed a different aspect immediately.  _A
master_ had arrived who was _equal to the situation_.  The army felt
the grip of his power.  Before he could mount his horse he ordered an
advance, and although the enemy contested the ground inch by inch, the
surrounding hills were soon held by Union soldiers.

Were these things the result of chance, or were they compelled by the
indominable determination of the injured General?

Did things _adjust themselves_ when Horatius with two companions held
ninety thousand Tuscans at bay until the bridge across the Tiber had
been destroyed?--when Leonidas at Thermopylae checked the mighty march
of Xerxes?--when Themistocles, off the coast of Greece, shattered the
Persian's Armada?--when Caesar, finding his army hard pressed, seized
spear and buckler, fought while he reorganized his men, and snatched
victory from defeat?--when Winkelried gathered to his heart a sheaf of
Austrian spears, thus opening a path through which his comrades pressed
to freedom?--when for years Napoleon did not lose a single battle in
which he was personally engaged?--when Wellington fought in many climes
without ever being conquered?--when Ney, on a hundred fields, changed
apparent disaster into brilliant triumph?--when Perry left the disabled
_Lawrence_, rowed to the _Niagara_, and silenced the British
guns?--when Sheridan arrived from Winchester just as the Union retreat
was becoming a rout, and turned the tide by riding along the
line?--when Sherman, though sorely pressed, signaled his men to hold
the fort, and they, knowing that their leader was coming, held it?

History furnishes thousands of examples of men who have seized
occasions to accomplish results deemed impossible by those less
resolute.  Prompt decision and whole-souled action sweep the world
before them.

True, there has been but one Napoleon; but, on the other hand, the Alps
that oppose the progress of the average American youth are not as high
or dangerous as the summits crossed by the great Corsican.

Don't wait for extraordinary opportunities.  _Seize common occasions
and make them great_.

On the morning of September 6, 1838, a young woman in the Longstone
Lighthouse, between England and Scotland, was awakened by shrieks of
agony rising above the roar of wind and wave.  A storm of unwonted fury
was raging, and her parents could not hear the cries; but a telescope
showed nine human beings clinging to the windlass of a wrecked vessel
whose bow was hanging on the rocks half a mile away.  "We can do
nothing," said William Darling, the light-keeper.  "Ah, yes, we must go
to the rescue," exclaimed his daughter, pleading tearfully with both
father and mother, until the former replied: "Very well, Grace, I will
let you persuade me, though it is against my better judgment."  Like a
feather in a whirlwind the little boat was tossed on the tumultuous
sea, but, borne on the blast that swept the cruel surge, the shrieks of
those shipwrecked sailors seemed to change her weak sinews into cords
of steel.  Strength hitherto unsuspected came from somewhere, and the
heroic girl pulled one oar in even time with her father.  At length the
nine were safely on board.  "God bless you; but ye're a bonny English
lass," said one poor fellow, as he looked wonderingly upon this
marvelous girl, who that day had done a deed which added more to
England's glory than the exploits of many of her monarchs.

"If you will let me try, I think I can make something that will do,"
said a boy who had been employed as a scullion at the mansion of Signer
Faliero, as the story is told by George Cary Eggleston.  A large
company had been invited to a banquet, and just before the hour the
confectioner, who had been making a large ornament for the table, sent
word that he had spoiled the piece.  "You!" exclaimed the head servant,
in astonishment; "and who are you?"  "I am Antonio Canova, the grandson
of Pisano, the stone-cutter," replied the pale-faced little fellow.

"And pray, what can you do?" asked the major-domo.  "I can make you
something that will do for the middle of the table, if you'll let me
try."  The servant was at his wits' end, so he told Antonio to go ahead
and see what he could do.  Calling for some butter, the scullion
quickly molded a large crouching lion, which the admiring major-domo
placed upon the table.

Dinner was announced, and many of the most noted merchants, princes,
and noblemen of Venice were ushered into the dining-room.  Among them
were skilled critics of art work.  When their eyes fell upon the butter
lion, they forgot the purpose for which they had come in their wonder
at such a work of genius.  They looked at the lion long and carefully,
and asked Signer Faliero what great sculptor had been persuaded to
waste his skill upon such a temporary material.  Faliero could not
tell; so he asked the head servant, who brought Antonio before the
company.

When the distinguished guests learned that the lion had been made in a
short time by a scullion, the dinner was turned into a feast in his
honor.  The rich host declared that he would pay the boy's expenses
under the best masters, and he kept his word.  Antonio was not spoiled
by his good fortune, but remained at heart the same simple, earnest,
faithful boy who had tried so hard to become a good stone-cutter in the
shop of Pisano.  Some may not have heard how the boy Antonio took
advantage of this first great opportunity; but all know of Canova, one
of the greatest sculptors of all time.

_Weak men wait for opportunities, strong men make them_.

"The best men," says E. H. Chapin, "are not those who have waited for
chances but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the
chance; and made chance the servitor."

There may not be one chance in a million that you will ever receive
unusual aid; but opportunities are often presented which you can
improve to good advantage, if you will only _act_.

The lack of opportunity is ever the excuse of a weak, vacillating mind.
Opportunities!  Every life is full of them.  Every lesson in school or
college is an opportunity.  Every examination is a chance in life.
Every patient is an opportunity.  Every newspaper article is an
opportunity.  Every client is an opportunity.  Every sermon is an
opportunity.  Every business transaction is an opportunity,--an
opportunity to be polite,--an opportunity to be manly,--an opportunity
to be honest,--an opportunity to make friends.  Every proof of
confidence in you is a great opportunity.  Every responsibility thrust
upon your strength and your honor is priceless.  Existence is the
privilege of effort, and when that privilege is met like a man,
opportunities to succeed along the line of your aptitude will come
faster than you can use them.  If a slave like Fred Douglass, who did
not even own his body, can elevate himself into an orator, editor,
statesman, what ought the poorest white boy to do, who is rich in
opportunities compared with Douglass?

It is the idle man, not the great worker, who is always complaining
that he has no time or opportunity.  Some young men will make more out
of the odds and ends of opportunities which many carelessly throw away
than other will get out of a whole life-time.  Like bees, they extract
honey from every flower.  Every person they meet, every circumstance of
the day, adds something to their store of useful knowledge or personal
power.

"There is nobody whom Fortune does not visit once in his life," says a
cardinal; "but when she finds he is not ready to receive her, she goes
in at the door and out at the window."

Cornelius Vanderbilt saw his opportunity in the steamboat, and
determined to identify himself with steam navigation.  To the surprise
of all his friends, he abandoned his prosperous business and took
command of one of the first steamboats launched, at a salary of one
thousand dollars a year.  Livingston and Fulton had acquired the sole
right to navigate New York waters by steam, but Vanderbilt thought the
law unconstitutional, and defied it until it was repealed.  He soon
became a steamboat owner.  When the government was paying a large
subsidy for carrying the European mails, he offered to carry them free
and give better service.  His offer was accepted, and in this way he
soon built up an enormous freight and passenger traffic.

Foreseeing the great future of railroads in a country like ours, he
plunged into railroad enterprises with all his might, laying the
foundation for the vast Vanderbilt system of to-day.

Young Philip Armour joined the long caravan of Forty-Niners, and
crossed the "Great American Desert" with all his possessions in a
prairie schooner drawn by mules.  Hard work and steady gains carefully
saved in the mines enabled him to start, six years later, in the grain
and warehouse business in Milwaukee.  In nine years he made five
hundred thousand dollars.  But he saw his great opportunity in Grant's
order, "On to Richmond."  One morning in 1864 he knocked at the door of
Plankinton, partner in his venture as a pork packer.  "I am going to
take the next train to New York," said he, "to sell pork 'short.'
Grant and Sherman have the rebellion by the throat, and pork will go
down to twelve dollars a barrel."  This was his opportunity.  He went
to New York and offered pork in large quantities at forty dollars per
barrel.  It was eagerly taken.  The shrewd Wall Street speculators
laughed at the young Westerner, and told him pork would go to sixty
dollars, for the war was not nearly over.  Mr. Armour, however, kept on
selling, Grant continued to advance.  Richmond fell, pork fell with it
to twelve dollars a barrel, and Mr. Armour cleared two millions of
dollars.

John D. Rockefeller saw his opportunity in petroleum.  He could see a
large population in this country with very poor lights.  Petroleum was
plentiful, but the refining process was so crude that the product was
inferior, and not wholly safe.  Here was Rockefeller's chance.  Taking
into partnership Samuel Andrews, the porter in a machine shop where
both men had worked, he started a single barrel "still" in 1870, using
an improved process discovered by his partner.  They made a superior
grade of oil and prospered rapidly.  They admitted a third partner, Mr.
Flagler, but Andrews soon became dissatisfied.  "What will you take for
your interest?" asked Rockefeller.  Andrews wrote carelessly on a piece
of paper, "One million dollars."  Within twenty-four hours Mr.
Rockefeller handed him the amount, saying, "Cheaper at one million than
ten."  In twenty years the business of the little refinery, scarcely
worth one thousand dollars for building and apparatus, had grown into
the Standard Oil Trust, capitalized at ninety millions of dollars, with
stock quoted at 170, giving a market value of one hundred and fifty
millions.

These are illustrations of seizing opportunity for the purpose of
making money.  But fortunately there is a new generation of
electricians, of engineers, of scholars, of artists, of authors, and of
poets, who find opportunities, thick as thistles, for doing something
_nobler than merely amassing riches_.  Wealth is not an end to strive
for, but an opportunity; not the climax of a man's career, but an
incident.

Mrs. Elizabeth Fry, a Quaker lady, saw her opportunity in the prisons
of England.  From three hundred to four hundred half-naked women, as
late as 1813, would often be huddled in a single ward of Newgate,
London, awaiting trial.  They had neither beds nor bedding, but women,
old and young, and little girls, slept in filth and rags on the floor.
No one seemed to care for them, and the Government merely furnished
food to keep them alive.  Mrs. Fry visited Newgate, calmed the howling
mob, and told them she wished to establish a school for the young women
and the girls, and asked them to select a schoolmistress from their own
number.  They were amazed, but chose a young woman who had been
committed for stealing a watch.  In three months these "wild beasts,"
as they were sometimes called, became harmless and kind.  The reform
spread until the Government legalized the system, and good women
throughout Great Britain became interested in the work of educating and
clothing these outcasts.  Fourscore years have passed, and her plan has
been adopted throughout the civilized world.

A boy in England had been run over by a car, and the bright blood
spurted from a severed artery.  No one seemed to know what to do until
another boy, Astley Cooper, took his handkerchief and stopped the
bleeding by pressure above the wound.  The praise which he received for
thus saving the boy's life encouraging him to become a surgeon, the
foremost of his day.

"The time comes to the young surgeon," says Arnold, "when, after long
waiting, and patient study and experiment, he is suddenly confronted
with his first critical operation.  The great surgeon is away.  Time is
pressing.  Life and death hang in the balance.  Is he equal to the
emergency?  Can he fill the great surgeon's place, and do his work?  If
he can, he is the one of all others who is wanted.  _His opportunity
confronts him_.  He and it are face to face.  Shall he confess his
ignorance and inability, or step into fame and fortune?  It is for him
to say."

Are you prepared for a great opportunity?

"Hawthorne dined one day with Longfellow," said James T. Fields, "and
brought a friend, with him from Salem.  After dinner the friend said,
'I have been trying to persuade Hawthorne to write a story based upon a
legend of Acadia, and still current there,--the legend of a girl who,
in the dispersion of the Acadians, was separated from her lover, and
passed her life in waiting and seeking for him, and only found him
dying in a hospital when both were old.'  Longfellow wondered that the
legend did not strike the fancy of Hawthorne, and he said to him, 'If
you have really made up your mind not to use it for a story, will you
let me have it for a poem?'  To this Hawthorne consented, and promised,
moreover, not to treat the subject in prose till Longfellow had seen
what he could do with it in verse.  Longfellow seized his opportunity
and gave to the world 'Evangeline, or the Exile of the Acadians.'"

Open eyes will discover opportunities everywhere; open ears will never
fail to detect the cries of those who are perishing for assistance;
open hearts will never want for worthy objects upon which to bestow
their gifts; open hands will never lack for noble work to do.

Everybody had noticed the overflow when a solid is immersed in a vessel
filled with water, although no one had made use of his knowledge that
the body displaces its exact bulk of liquid; but when Archimedes
observed the fact, he perceived therein an easy method of finding the
cubical contents of objects, however irregular in shape.

Everybody knew how steadily a suspended weight, when moved, sways back
and forth until friction and the resistance of the air bring it to
rest, yet no one considered this information of the slightest practical
importance; but the boy Galileo, as he watched a lamp left swinging by
accident in the cathedral at Pisa, saw in the regularity of those
oscillations the useful principle of the pendulum.  Even the iron doors
of a prison were not enough to shut him out from research.  He
experimented with the straw of his cell, and learned valuable lessons
about the relative strength of tubes and rods of equal diameters.

For ages astronomers had been familiar with the rings of Saturn, and
regarded them merely as curious exceptions to the supposed law of
planetary formation; but Laplace saw that, instead of being exceptions,
they are the sole remaining visible evidences of certain stages in the
invariable process of star manufacture, and from their mute testimony
he added a valuable chapter to the scientific history of Creation.

There was not a sailor in Europe who had not wondered what might lie
beyond the Western Ocean, but it remained for Columbus to steer boldly
out into an unknown sea and discover a new world.

Innumerable apples had fallen from trees, often hitting heedless men on
the head as if to set them thinking, but Newton was the first to
realize that they fall to the earth by the same law which holds the
planets in their courses and prevents the momentum of all the atoms in
the universe from hurling them wildly back to chaos.

Lightning had dazzled the eyes, and thunder had jarred the ears of men
since the days of Adam, in the vain attempt to call their attention to
the all-pervading and tremendous energy of electricity; but the
discharges of Heaven's artillery were seen and heard only by the eye
and ear of terror until Franklin, by a simple experiment, proved that
lightning is but one manifestation of a resistless yet controllable
force, abundant as air and water.

Like many others, these men are considered great, simply because they
improved opportunities common to the whole human race.  Read the story
of any successful man and mark its moral, told thousands of years ago
by Solomon: "Seest thou a man diligent in his business? he shall stand
before kings."  This proverb is well illustrated by the career of the
industrious Franklin, for he stood before five kings and dined with two.

He who improves an opportunity sows a seed which will yield fruit in
opportunity for himself and others.  Every one who has labored honestly
in the past has aided to place knowledge and comfort within the reach
of a constantly increasing number.

Avenues greater in number, wider in extent, easier of access than ever
before existed, stand open to the sober, frugal, energetic and able
mechanic, to the educated youth, to the office boy and to the
clerk--avenues through which they can reap greater successes than ever
before within the reach of these classes in the history of the world.
A little while ago there were only three or four professions--now there
are fifty.  And of trades, where there was one, there are a hundred now.

"What is its name?" asked a visitor in a studio, when shown, among many
gods, one whose face was concealed by hair, and which had wings on its
feet.  "Opportunity," replied the sculptor.  "Why is its face hidden?"
"Because men seldom know him when he comes to them."  "Why has he wings
on his feet?"  "Because he is soon gone, and once gone, cannot be
overtaken."

"Opportunity has hair in front," says a Latin author; "behind she is
bald; if you seize her by the forelock, you may hold her, but, if
suffered to escape, not Jupiter himself can catch her again."

But what is the best opportunity to him who cannot or will not use it?

"It was my lot," said a shipmaster, "to fall in with the ill-fated
steamer _Central America_.  The night was closing in, the sea rolling
high; but I hailed the crippled steamer and asked if they needed help.
'I am in a sinking condition,' cried Captain Herndon.  'Had you not
better send your passengers on board directly?' I asked.  'Will you not
lay by me until morning?' replied Captain Herndon.  'I will try,' I
answered 'but had you not better send your passengers on board _now_?'
'Lay by me till morning,' again shouted Captain Herndon.

"I tried to lay by him, but at night, such was the heavy roll of the
sea, I could not keep my position, and I never saw the steamer again.
In an hour and a half after he said, 'Lay by me till morning,' his
vessel, with its living freight, went down.  The captain and crew and
most of the passengers found a grave in the deep."

Captain Herndon appreciated the value of the opportunity he had
neglected when it was beyond his reach, but of what avail was the
bitterness of his self-reproach when his last moments came?  How many
lives were sacrificed to his unintelligent hopefulness and indecision!
Like him the feeble, the sluggish, and the purposeless too often see no
meaning in the happiest occasions, until too late they learn the old
lesson that the mill can never grind with the water which has passed.

Such people are always a little too late or a little too early in
everything they attempt.  "They have three hands apiece," said John B.
Gough; "a right hand, a left hand, and a little behindhand."  As boys,
they were late for school, and unpunctual in their home duties.  That
is the way the habit is acquired; and now, when responsibility claims
them, they think that if they had only gone yesterday they would have
obtained the situation, or they can probably get one to-morrow.  They
remember plenty of chances to make money, or know how to make it some
other time than now; they see how to improve themselves or help others
in the future, but perceive no opportunity in the present.  They cannot
_seize their opportunity_.

Joe Stoker, rear brakeman on the ---- accommodation train, was
exceedingly popular with all the railroad men.  The passengers liked
him, too, for he was eager to please and always ready to answer
questions.  But he did not realize the full responsibility of his
position.  He "took the world easy," and occasionally tippled; and if
any one remonstrated, he would give one of his brightest smiles, and
reply, in such a good-natured way that the friend would think he had
over-estimated the danger: "Thank you.  I'm all right.  Don't you
worry."

One evening there was a heavy snowstorm, and his train was delayed.
Joe complained of extra duties because of the storm, and slyly sipped
occasional draughts from a flat bottle.  Soon he became quite jolly;
but the conductor and engineer of the train were both vigilant and
anxious.

Between two stations the train came to a quick halt.  The engine had
blown out its cylinder head, and an express was due in a few minutes
upon the same track.  The conductor hurried to the rear car, and
ordered Joe back with a red light.  The brakeman laughed and said:

"There's no hurry.  Wait till I get my overcoat."

The conductor answered gravely, "Don't stop a minute, Joe.  The express
is due."

"All right," said Joe, smilingly.  The conductor then hurried forward
to the engine.

But the brakeman did not go at once.  He stopped to put on his
overcoat.  Then he took another sip from the flat bottle to keep the
cold out.  Then he slowly grasped the lantern and, whistling, moved
leisurely down the track.

He had not gone ten paces before he heard the puffing of the express.
Then he ran for the curve, but it was too late.  In a horrible minute
the engine of the express had telescoped the standing train, and the
shrieks of the mangled passengers mingled with the hissing escape of
steam.

Later on, when they asked for Joe, he had disappeared; but the next day
he was found in a barn, delirious, swinging an empty lantern in front
of an imaginary train, and crying, "Oh, that I had!"

He was taken home, and afterwards to an asylum, and there is no sadder
sound in that sad place than the unceasing moan, "Oh, that I had!  Oh,
that I had!" of the unfortunate brakeman, whose criminal indulgence
brought disaster to many lives.

"Oh, that I had!" or "Oh, that I had not!" is the silent cry of many a
man who would give life itself for the opportunity to go back and
retrieve some long-past error.

"There are moments," says Dean Alford, "which are worth more than
years.  We cannot help it.  There is no proportion between spaces of
time in importance nor in value.  A stray, unthought-of five minutes
may contain the event of a life.  And this all-important moment--who
can tell when it will be upon us?"

"What we call a turning-point," says Arnold, "is simply an occasion
which sums up and brings to a result previous training.  Accidental
circumstances are nothing except to men who have been trained to take
advantage of them."

The trouble with us is that we are ever looking for a princely chance
of acquiring riches, or fame, or worth.  We are dazzled by what Emerson
calls the "shallow Americanism" of the day.  We are expecting mastery
without apprenticeship, knowledge without study, and riches by credit.

Young men and women, why stand ye here all the day idle?  Was the land
all occupied before you were born?  Has the earth ceased to yield its
increase?  Are the seats all taken? the positions all filled? the
chances all gone?  Are the resources of your country fully developed?
Are the secrets of nature all mastered?  Is there no way in which you
can utilize these passing moments to improve yourself or benefit
others?  Is the competition of modern existence so fierce that you must
be content simply to gain an honest living?  Have you received the gift
of life in this progressive age, wherein all the experience of the past
is garnered for your inspiration, merely that you may increase by one
the sum total of purely animal existence?

Born in an age and country in which knowledge and opportunity abound as
never before, how can you sit with folded hands, asking God's aid in
work for which He has already given you the necessary faculties and
strength?  Even when the Chosen People supposed their progress checked
by the Red Sea, and their leader paused for Divine help, the Lord said,
"Wherefore criest thou unto me?  Speak unto the children of Israel,
_that they go forward_."

With the world full of work that needs to be done; with human nature so
constituted that often a pleasant word or a trifling assistance may
stem the tide of disaster for some fellow man, or clear his path to
success; with our own faculties so arranged that in honest, earnest,
persistent endeavor we find our highest good; and with countless noble
examples to encourage us to dare and to do, each moment brings us to
the threshold of some new opportunity.

Don't _wait_ for your opportunity.  _Make it_,--make it as the
shepherd-boy Ferguson made his when he calculated the distances of the
stars with a handful of glass beads on a string.  Make it as George
Stephenson made his when he mastered the rules of mathematics with a
bit of chalk on the grimy sides of the coal wagons in the mines.  Make
it, as Napoleon made his in a hundred "impossible" situations.  Make
it, as _all leaders of men_, in war and in peace, have made their
chances of success.  Golden opportunities are nothing to laziness, but
industry makes the commonest chances golden.

  "There is a tide in the affairs of men,
  Which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune;
   Omitted, all the voyage of their life
  Is bound in shallows and in miseries;
   And we must take the current when it serves,
  Or lose our ventures."

  "'Tis never offered twice; seize, then, the hour
  When fortune smiles, and duty points the way;
  Nor shrink aside to 'scape the specter fear,
  Nor pause, though pleasure beckon from her bower;
  But bravely bear thee onward to the goal."




CHAPTER II

WANTED--A MAN

  "Wanted; men:
  Not systems fit and wise,
  Not faiths with rigid eyes,
  Not wealth in mountain piles,
  Not power with gracious smiles,
  Not even the potent pen;
  Wanted; men."

All the world cries, Where is the man who will save us?  We want a man!
Don't look so far for this man.  You have him at hand.  This man,--it
is you, it is I, it is each one of us! . . .  How to constitute one's
self a man?  Nothing harder, if one knows not how to will it; nothing
easier, if one wills it.--ALEXANDRE DUMAS.


Diogenes sought with a lantern at noontide in ancient Athens for a
perfectly honest man, and sought in vain.  In the market place he once
cried aloud, "Hear me, O men"; and, when a crowd collected around him,
he said scornfully: "I called for men, not pygmies."

Over the door of every profession, every occupation, every calling, the
world has a standing advertisement: "Wanted--A Man."

Wanted, a man who will not lose his individuality in a crowd, a man who
has the courage of his convictions, who is not afraid to say "No,"
though all the world say "Yes."

Wanted, a man who, though he is dominated by a mighty purpose, will not
permit one great faculty to dwarf, cripple, warp, or mutilate his
manhood; who will not allow the over-development of one faculty to
stunt or paralyze his other faculties.

Wanted, a man who is larger than his calling, who considers it a low
estimate of his occupation to value it merely as a means of getting a
living.  Wanted, a man who sees self-development, education and
culture, discipline and drill, character and manhood, in his occupation.

A thousand pulpits vacant in a single religious denomination, a
thousand preachers standing idle in the market place, while a thousand
church committees scour the land for men to fill those same vacant
pulpits, and scour in vain, is a sufficient indication, in one
direction at least, of the largeness of the opportunities of the age,
and also of the crying need of good men.

Wanted, a man of courage who is not a coward in any part of his nature.

Wanted, a man who is well balanced, who is not cursed with some little
defect of weakness which cripples his usefulness and neutralizes his
powers.

Wanted, a man who is symmetrical, and not one-sided in his development,
who has not sent all the energies of his being into one narrow
specialty and allowed all the other branches of his life to wither and
die.  Wanted, a man who is broad, who does not take half views of
things; a man who mixes common sense with his theories, who does not
let a college education spoil him for practical, every-day life; a man
who prefers substance to show, and one who regards his good name as a
priceless treasure.

Wanted, a man "who, no stunted ascetic, is full of life and fire, but
whose passions are trained to heed a strong will, the servant of a
tender conscience; who has learned to love all beauty, whether of
nature or of art, to hate all vileness, and to respect others as
himself."

The world wants a man who is educated all over; whose nerves are
brought to their acutest sensibility; whose brain is cultured, keen,
incisive, broad; whose hands are deft; whose eyes are alert, sensitive,
microscopic; whose heart is tender, magnanimous, true.

The whole world is looking for such a man.  Although there are millions
out of employment, yet it is almost impossible to find just the right
man in almost any department of life, and yet everywhere we see the
advertisement: "Wanted--A Man."

Rousseau, in his celebrated essay on education, says; "According to the
order of nature, men being equal, their common vocation is the
profession of humanity; and whoever is well educated to discharge the
duty of a man can not be badly prepared to fill any of those offices
that have a relation to him.  It matters little to me whether my pupil
be designed for the army, the pulpit, or the bar.  Nature has destined
us to the offices of human life antecedent to our destination
concerning society.  To live is the profession I would teach him.  When
I have done with him, it is true he will be neither a soldier, a
lawyer, nor a divine.  _Let him first be a man_; Fortune may remove him
from one rank to another as she pleases, he will be always found in his
place."

A little, short doctor of divinity in a large Baptist convention stood
on a step and said he thanked God he was a Baptist.  The audience could
not hear and called "Louder."  "Get up higher," some one said.  "I
can't," he replied.  "To be a Baptist is as high as one can get."  But
there is something higher than being a Baptist, and that is being a
_man_.

As Emerson says, Talleyrand's question is ever the main one; not, is he
rich? is he committed? is he well-meaning? has he this or that faculty?
is he of the movement? is he of the establishment? but is he anybody?
does he stand for something?  He must be good of his kind.  That is all
that Talleyrand, all that the common sense of mankind asks.

When Garfield as a boy was asked what he meant to be he answered:
"First of all, I must make myself a man; if I do not succeed in that, I
can succeed in nothing."

Montaigne says our work is not to train a soul by itself alone, nor a
body by itself alone, but to train a man.

One great need for the world to-day is for men and women who are good
animals.  To endure the strain of our concentrated civilization, the
coming man and woman must have good bodies and an excess of animal
spirits.

What more glorious than a magnificent manhood, animated with the
bounding spirits of overflowing health?

It is a sad sight to see thousands of students graduated every year
from our grand institutions whose object is to make stalwart,
independent, self-supporting men, turned out into the world saplings
instead of stalwart oaks, "memory-glands" instead of brainy men,
helpless instead of self-supporting, sickly instead of robust, weak
instead of strong, leaning instead of erect.  "So many promising
youths, and never a finished man!"

The character sympathizes with and unconsciously takes on the nature of
the body.  A peevish, snarling, ailing man can not develop the vigor
and strength of character which is possible to a healthy, robust,
cheerful man.  There is an inherent love in the human mind for
_wholeness_, a demand that man shall come up to the highest standard;
and there is an inherent protest or contempt for preventable
deficiency.  Nature, too, demands that man be ever at the top of his
condition.

As we stand upon the seashore while the tide is coming in, one wave
reaches up the beach far higher than any previous one, then recedes,
and for some time none that follows comes up to its mark, but after a
while the whole sea is there and beyond it.  So now and then there
comes a man head and shoulders above his fellow men, showing that
Nature has not lost her ideal, and after a while even the average man
will overtop the highest wave of manhood yet given to the world.

Apelles hunted over Greece for many years, studying the fairest points
of beautiful women, getting here an eye, there a forehead and there a
nose, here a grace and there a turn of beauty, for his famous portrait
of a perfect woman which enchanted the world.  So the coming man will
be a composite, many in one.  He will absorb into himself not the
weakness, not the follies, but the strength and the virtues of other
types of men.  He will be a man raised to the highest power.  He will
be a self-centered, equipoised, and ever master of himself.  His
sensibility will not be deadened or blunted by violation of Nature's
laws.  His whole character will be impressionable, and will respond to
the most delicate touches of Nature.

The first requisite of all education and discipline should be
man-timber.  Tough timber must come from well grown, sturdy trees.
Such wood can be turned into a mast, can be fashioned into a piano or
an exquisite carving.  But it must become timber first.  Time and
patience develop the sapling into the tree.  So through discipline,
education, experience, the sapling child is developed into hardy
mental, moral, physical man-timber.

If the youth should start out with the fixed determination that every
statement he makes shall be the exact truth; that every promise he
makes shall be redeemed to the letter; that every appointment shall be
kept with the strictest faithfulness and with full regard for other
men's time; if he should hold his reputation as a priceless treasure,
feel that the eyes of the world are upon him that he must not deviate a
hair's breadth from the truth and right; if he should take such a stand
at the outset, he would, like George Peabody, come to have almost
unlimited credit and the confidence of everybody who knows him.

What are palaces and equipages; what though a man could cover a
continent with his title-deeds, or an ocean with his commerce; compared
with conscious rectitude, with a face that never turns pale at the
accuser's voice, with a bosom that never throbs with fear of exposure,
with a heart that might be turned inside out and disclose no stain of
dishonor?  To have done no man a wrong; to have put your signature to
no paper to which the purest angel in heaven might not have been an
attesting witness; to walk and live, unseduced, within arm's length of
what is not your own, with nothing between your desire and its
gratification but the invisible law of rectitude;--_this is to be a
man_.

Man is the only great thing in the universe.  All the ages have been
trying to produce a perfect model.  Only one complete man has yet
evolved.  The best of us are but prophesies of what is to come.

   What constitutes a state?
  Not high-raised battlement or labored mound,
   Thick wall or moated gate;
  Not cities proud with spires and turrets crowned;
   Not bays and broad-armed ports,
  Where, laughing at the storm, rich navies ride;
   Not starred and spangled courts,
  Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride.
   No: men, high-minded men,
  With powers as far above dull brutes endued
   In forest, brake, or den,
  As beasts excel cold rocks and brambles rude,--
   Men who their duties know,
  But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain,
   Prevent the long-aimed blow,
   And crush the tyrant while they rend the chain.
      WILLIAM JONES.

  God give us men.  A time like this demands
  Strong minds, great hearts, true faith and ready hands:
  Men whom the lust of office does not kill;
  Men whom the spoils of office cannot buy;
  Men who possess opinions and a will;
  Men who have honor--men who will not lie;
  Men who can stand before a demagogue
  And scorn his treacherous flatteries without winking;
  Tall men sun-crowned, who live above the fog
  In public duty, and in private thinking.
      ANON.




CHAPTER III

BOYS WITH NO CHANCE

In the blackest soils grow the fairest flowers, and the loftiest and
strongest trees spring heavenward among the rocks.--J. G. HOLLAND.

Poverty is very terrible, and sometimes kills the very soul within us,
but it is the north wind that lashes men into Vikings; it is the soft,
luscious south wind which lulls them to lotus dreams.--OUIDA.

Poverty is the sixth sense.--GERMAN PROVERB.

It is not every calamity that is a curse, and early adversity is often
a blessing.  Surmounted difficulties not only teach, but hearten us in
our future struggles.--SHARPE.

There can be no doubt that the captains of industry to-day, using that
term in its broadest sense, are men who began life as poor boys.--SETH
LOW.

  'Tis a common proof,
  That lowliness is young ambition's ladder!
      SHAKESPEARE.


"I am a child of the court," said a pretty little girl at a children's
party in Denmark; "_my_ father is Groom of the Chambers, which is a
very high office.  And those whose names end with 'sen,'" she added,
"can never be anything at all.  We must put our arms akimbo, and make
the elbows quite pointed, so as to keep these 'sen' people at a great
distance."

"But my papa can buy a hundred dollars' worth of bonbons, and give them
away to children," angrily exclaimed the daughter of the rich merchant
Peter_sen_.  "Can your papa do that?"

"Yes," chimed in the daughter of an editor, "my papa can put your papa
and everybody's papa into the newspaper.  All sorts of people are
afraid of him, my papa says, for he can do as he likes with the paper."

"Oh, if I could be one of them!" thought a little boy peeping through
the crack of the door, by permission of the cook for whom he had been
turning the spit.  But no, _his_ parents had not even a penny to spare,
and his name ended in "sen."

Years afterwards when the children of the party had become men and
women, some of them went to see a splendid house, filled with all kinds
of beautiful and valuable objects.  There they met the owner, once the
very boy who thought it so great a privilege to peep at them through a
crack in the door as they played.  He had become the great sculptor
Thorwald_sen_.

This sketch is adapted from a story by a poor Danish cobbler's son,
another whose name did not keep him from becoming famous,--Hans
Christian Ander_sen_.

"There is no fear of my starving, father," said the deaf boy, Kitto,
begging to be taken from the poorhouse and allowed to struggle for an
education; "we are in the midst of plenty, and I know how to prevent
hunger.  The Hottentots subsist a long time on nothing but a little
gum; they also, when hungry, tie a ligature around their bodies.
Cannot I do so, too?  The hedges furnish blackberries and nuts, and the
fields, turnips; a hayrick will make an excellent bed."

The poor deaf boy with a drunken father, who was thought capable of
nothing better than making shoes as a pauper, became one of the
greatest Biblical scholars in the world.  His first book was written in
the workhouse.

Creon was a Greek slave, as a writer tells the story in Kate Field's
"Washington," but he was also a slave of the Genius of Art.  Beauty was
his god, and he worshiped it with rapt adoration.  It was after the
repulse of the great Persian invader, and a law was in force that under
penalty of death no one should espouse art except freemen.  When the
law was enacted he was engaged upon a group for which he hoped some day
to receive the commendation of Phidias, the greatest sculptor living,
and even the praise of Pericles.

What was to be done?  Into the marble block before him Creon had put
his head, his heart, his soul, his life.  On his knees, from day to
day, he had prayed for fresh inspiration, new skill.  He believed,
gratefully and proudly, that Apollo, answering his prayers, had
directed his hand and had breathed into the figures the life that
seemed to animate them; but now,--now, all the gods seemed to have
deserted him.

Cleone, his devoted sister, felt the blow as deeply as her brother.  "O
Aphrodite!" she prayed, "immortal Aphrodite, high enthroned child of
Zeus, my queen, my goddess, my patron, at whose shrine I have daily
laid my offerings, to be now my friend, the friend of my brother!"

Then to her brother she said: "O Creon, go to the cellar beneath our
house.  It is dark, but I will furnish light and food.  Continue your
work; the gods will befriend us."

To the cellar Creon went, and guarded and attended by his sister, day
and night, he proceeded with his glorious but dangerous task.

About this time all Greece was invited to Athens to behold an exhibit
of works of art.  The display took place in the Agora.  Pericles
presided.  At his side was Aspasia.  Phidias, Socrates, Sophocles, and
other renowned men stood near him.

The works of the great masters were there.  But one group, far more
beautiful than the rest,--a group that Apollo himself must have
chiseled,--challenged universal attention, exciting at the same time no
little envy among rival artists.

"Who is the sculptor of this group?"  None could tell.  Heralds
repeated the question, but there was no answer.  "A mystery, then!  Can
it be the work of a slave?"  Amid great commotion a beautiful maiden
with disarranged dress, disheveled hair, a determined expression in her
eyes, and with closed lips, was dragged into the Agora.  "This woman,"
cried the officers, "this woman knows the sculptor; we are sure of it;
but she will not tell his name."

Cleone was questioned, but was silent.  She was informed of the penalty
of her conduct, but her lips remained closed.  "Then," said Pericles,
"the law is imperative, and I am the minister of the law.  Take the
maid to the dungeon."

As he spoke a youth with flowing hair, emaciated, but with black eyes
that beamed with the flashing light of genius, rushed forward, and
flinging himself before him exclaimed: "O Pericles, forgive and save
the maid!  She is my sister.  I am the culprit.  The group is the work
of my hands, the hands of a slave."

The indignant crowd interrupted him and cried, "To the dungeon, to the
dungeon with the slave."  "As I live, no!" said Pericles, rising.
"Behold that group!  Apollo decides by it that there is something
higher in Greece than an unjust law.  The highest purpose of law should
be the development of the beautiful.  If Athens lives in the memory and
affections of men, it is her devotion to art that will immortalize her.
Not to the dungeon, but to my side bring the youth."

And there, in the presence of the assembled multitude, Aspasia placed
the crown of olives, which she held in her hands, on the brow of Creon;
and at the same time, amid universal plaudits, she tenderly kissed
Creon's affectionate and devoted sister.

The Athenians erected a statue to Aesop, who was born a slave, that men
might know that the way to honor is open to all.  In Greece, wealth and
immortality were the sure reward of the man who could distinguish
himself in art, literature, or war.  No other country ever did so much
to encourage and inspire struggling merit.

"I was born in poverty," said Vice-President Henry Wilson.  "Want sat
by my cradle.  I know what it is to ask a mother for bread when she has
none to give.  I left my home at ten years of age, and served an
apprenticeship of eleven years, receiving a month's schooling each
year, and, at the end of eleven years of hard work, a yoke of oxen and
six sheep, which brought me eighty-four dollars.  I never spent the sum
of one dollar for pleasure, counting every penny from the time I was
born till I was twenty-one years of age.  I know what it is to travel
weary miles and ask my fellow men to give me leave to toil. . . .  In
the first month after I was twenty-one years of age, I went into the
woods, drove a team, and cut mill-logs.  I rose in the morning before
daylight and worked hard till after dark, and received the magnificent
sum of six dollars for the month's work!  Each of these dollars looked
as large to me as the moon looks to-night."

Mr. Wilson determined never to lose an opportunity for self-culture or
self-advancement.  Few men knew so well the value of spare moments.
_He seized them as though they were gold_ and would not let one pass
until he had wrung from it every possibility.  He managed to read a
thousand good books before he was twenty-one--what a lesson for boys on
a farm!  When he left the farm he started on foot for Natick, Mass.,
over one hundred miles distant, to learn the cobbler's trade.  He went
through Boston that he might see Bunker Hill monument and other
historical landmarks.  The whole trip cost him but one dollar and six
cents.  In a year he was the head of a debating club at Natick.  Before
eight years had passed, he made his great speech against slavery, in
the Massachusetts Legislature.  Twelve years later he stood shoulder to
shoulder with the polished Sumner in Congress.  With him, _every
occasion was a great occasion_.  He ground every circumstance of his
life into material for success.

"Don't go about the town any longer in that outlandish rig.  Let me
give you an order on the store.  Dress up a little, Horace."  Horace
Greeley looked down on his clothes as if he had never before noticed
how seedy they were, and replied: "You see Mr. Sterrett, my father is
on a new place, and I want to help him all I can."  He had spent but
six dollars for personal expenses in seven months, and was to receive
one hundred and thirty-five from Judge J. M. Sterret of the Erie
"Gazette" for substitute work.  He retained but fifteen dollars and
gave the rest to his father, with whom he had moved from Vermont to
Western Pennsylvania, and for whom he had camped out many a night to
guard the sheep from wolves.  He was nearly twenty-one; and, although
tall and gawky, with tow-colored hair, a pale face and whining voice,
he resolved to seek his fortune in New York City.  Slinging his bundle
of clothes on a stick over his shoulder, he walked sixty miles through
the woods to Buffalo, rode on a canal boat to Albany, descended the
Hudson in a barge, and reached New York, just as the sun was rising,
August 18, 1831.

He found board over a saloon at two dollars and a half a week.  His
journey of six hundred miles had cost him but five dollars.  For days
Horace wandered up and down the streets, going into scores of buildings
and asking if they wanted "a hand"; but "no" was the invariable reply.
His quaint appearance led many to think he was an escaped apprentice.
One Sunday at his boarding-place he heard that printers were wanted at
"West's Printing-office."  He was at the door at five o'clock Monday
morning, and asked the foreman for a job at seven.  The latter had no
idea that a country greenhorn could set type for the Polyglot Testament
on which help was needed, but said: "Fix up a case for him and we'll
see if he _can_ do anything."  When the proprietor came in, he objected
to the new-comer and told the foreman to let him go when his first
day's work was done.  That night Horace showed a proof of the largest
and most correct day's work that had then been done.

In ten years he was a partner in a small printing-office.  He founded
the "New Yorker," the best weekly paper in the United States, but it
was not profitable.  When Harrison was nominated for President in 1840,
Greeley started "The Log-Cabin," which reached the then fabulous
circulation of ninety thousand.  But on this paper at a penny per copy
he made no money.  His next venture was "The New York Tribune," price
one cent.  To start it he borrowed a thousand dollars and printed five
thousand copies of the first number.  It was difficult to give them all
away.  He began with six hundred subscribers, and increased the list to
eleven thousand in six weeks.  The demand for the "Tribune" grew faster
than new machinery could be obtained to print it.  It was a paper whose
editor, whatever his mistakes, always tried to be right.

James Gordon Bennett had made a failure of his "New York Courier" in
1825, of the "Globe" in 1832, and of the "Pennsylvanian" a little
later, and was only known as a clever writer for the press, who had
saved a few hundred dollars by hard labor and strict economy for
fourteen years.  In 1835 he asked Horace Greeley to join him in
starting a new daily paper, the "New York Herald."  Greeley declined,
but recommended two young printers, who formed partnership with
Bennett, and the "Herald" was started on May 6, 1835, with a cash
capital to pay expenses for _ten days_.  Bennet hired a small cellar in
Wall Street, furnished it with a chair and a desk composed of a plank
supported by two barrels; and there, doing all the work except the
printing, began the work of making a really great daily newspaper, a
thing then unknown in America, as all its predecessors were party
organs.  Steadily the young man struggled towards his ideal, giving the
news, fresh and crisp, from an ever-widening area, until his paper was
famous for giving the current history of the world as fully and quickly
as any competitor, and often much more thoroughly and far more
promptly.  Neither labor nor expense was spared in obtaining prompt and
reliable information on every topic of general interest.  It was an
up-hill job, but its completion was finally marked by the opening at
the corner of Broadway and Ann Street of the most complete newspaper
establishment then known.

One of the first things to attract the attention on entering George W.
Childs' private office in Philadelphia was this motto, which was the
key-note of the success of a boy who started with "no chance": "Nihil
sine labore."  It was his early ambition to own the "Philadelphia
Ledger" and the great building in which it was published; but how could
a poor boy working for $2.00 a week ever hope to own such a great
paper?  However, he had great determination and indomitable energy; and
as soon as he had saved a few hundred dollars as a clerk in a
bookstore, he began business as a publisher.  He made "great hits" in
some of the works he published, such as "Kane's Arctic Expedition."  He
had a keen sense of what would please the public, and there seemed no
end to his industry.

In spite of the fact that the "Ledger" was losing money every day, his
friends could not dissuade him from buying it, and in 1864 the dreams
of his boyhood found fulfilment.  He doubled the subscription price,
lowered the advertising rates, to the astonishment of everybody, and
the paper entered upon a career of remarkable prosperity, the profits
sometimes amounting to over four hundred thousand dollars a year.  He
always refused to lower the wages of his employees even when every
other establishment in Philadelphia was doing so.

At a banquet in Lyons, nearly a century and a half ago, a discussion
arose in regard to the meaning of a painting representing some scene in
the mythology or history of Greece.  Seeing that the discussion was
growing warm, the host turned to one of the waiters and asked him to
explain the picture.  Greatly to the surprise of the company, the
servant gave a clear concise account of the whole subject, so plain and
convincing that it at once settled the dispute.

"In what school have you studied, Monsieur?" asked one of the guests,
addressing the waiter with great respect.  "I have studied in many
schools, Monseigneur," replied the young servant: "but the school in
which I studied longest and learned most is the school of adversity."
Well had he profited by poverty's lessons; for, although then but a
poor waiter, all Europe soon rang with the fame of the writings of the
greatest genius of his age and country, Jean Jacques Rousseau.

The smooth sand beach of Lake Erie constituted the foolscap on which,
for want of other material, P. R. Spencer, a barefoot boy with no
chance, perfected the essential principles of the Spencerian system of
penmanship, the most beautiful exposition of graphic art.

For eight years William Cobbett had followed the plow, when he ran away
to London, copied law papers for eight or nine months, and then
enlisted in an infantry regiment.  During his first year of soldier
life he subscribed to a circulating library at Chatham, read every book
in it, and began to study.

"I learned grammar when I was a private soldier on the pay of sixpence
a day.  The edge of my berth, or that of the guard-bed, was my seat to
study in; my knapsack was my bookcase; a bit of board lying on my lap
was my writing-table, and the task did not demand anything like a year
of my life.  I had no money to purchase candles or oil; in winter it
was rarely that I could get any evening light but that of the fire, and
only my turn, even, of that.  To buy a pen or a sheet of paper I was
compelled to forego some portion of my food, though in a state of half
starvation.  I had no moment of time that I could call my own, and I
had to read and write amidst the talking, laughing, singing, whistling,
and bawling of at least half a score of the most thoughtless of men,
and that, too, in the hours of their freedom from all control.  Think
not lightly of the _farthing_ I had to give, now and then, for pen,
ink, or paper.  That farthing was, alas! a great sum to me.  I was as
tall as I am now, and I had great health and great exercise.  The whole
of the money not expended for us at market was _twopence a week_ for
each man.  I remember, and well I may! that upon one occasion I had,
after all absolutely necessary expenses, made shift to have a
half-penny in reserve, which I had destined for the purpose of a red
herring in the morning, but so hungry as to be hardly able to endure
life, when I pulled off my clothes at night, I found that I had lost my
half-penny.  I buried my head in the miserable sheet and rug, and cried
like a child."

But Cobbett made even his poverty and hard circumstances serve his
all-absorbing passion for knowledge and success.  "If I," said he,
"under such circumstances could encounter and overcome this task, is
there, can there be in the whole world, a youth to find any excuse for
its non-performance?"

Humphrey Davy had but a slender chance to acquire great scientific
knowledge, yet he had true mettle in him, and he made even old pans,
kettles, and bottles contribute to his success, as he experimented and
studied in the attic of the apothecary-store where he worked.

"Many a farmer's son," says Thurlow Weed, "has found the best
opportunities for mental improvement in his intervals of leisure while
tending 'sap-bush.'  Such, at any rate, was my own experience.  At
night you had only to feed the kettles and keep up the fires, the sap
having been gathered and the wood cut before dark.  During the day we
would always lay in a good stock of 'fat-pine,' by the light of which,
blazing bright before the sugar-house, I passed many a delightful night
in reading.  I remember in this way to have a history of the French
Revolution, and to have obtained a better and more enduring knowledge
of its events and horrors and of the actors in that great national
tragedy than I have received from all subsequent reading.  I remember,
also, how happy I was in being able to borrow the books of a Mr. Keyes,
after a two-mile tramp through the snow, shoeless, my feet swaddled in
remnants of rag carpet."

"May I have a holiday to-morrow, father?" asked Theodore Parker one
August afternoon.  The poor Lexington millwright looked in surprise at
his youngest son, for it was a busy time, but he saw from the boy's
earnest face that he had no ordinary object in view, and granted the
request.  Theodore rose very early the next morning, walked through the
dust ten miles to Harvard College, and presented himself for a
candidate for admission.  He had been unable to attend school regularly
since he was eight years old, but he had managed to go three months
each winter, and had reviewed his lessons again and again as he
followed the plow or worked at other tasks.  All his odd moments had
been hoarded, too, for reading useful books, which he borrowed.  One
book he could not borrow, but he felt that he must have it; so on
summer mornings he rose long before the sun and picked bushel after
bushel of berries, which he sent to Boston, and so got the money to buy
that coveted Latin dictionary.

"Well done, my boy!" said the millwright, when his son came home late
at night and told of his successful examination; "but, Theodore, I
cannot afford to keep you there!"  "True, father," said Theodore, "I am
not going to stay there; I shall study at home, at odd times, and thus
prepare myself for a final examination, which will give me a diploma."
He did this; and, by teaching school as he grew older, got money to
study for two years at Harvard, where he was graduated with honor.
Years after, when, as the trusted friend and adviser of Seward, Chase,
Sumner, Garrison, Horace Mann, and Wendell Phillips, his influence for
good was felt in the hearts of all his countrymen, it was a pleasure
for him to recall his early struggles and triumphs among the rocks and
bushes of Lexington.

"The proudest moment of my life," said Elihu Burritt, "was when I had
first gained the full meaning of the first fifteen lines of Homer's
Iliad."  Elihu Burritt's father died when he was sixteen, and Elihu was
apprenticed to a blacksmith in his native village of New Britain, Conn.
He had to work at the forge for ten or twelve hours a day; but while
blowing the bellows, he would solve mentally difficult problems in
arithmetic.  In a diary kept at Worcester, whither he went some ten
years later to enjoy its library privileges, are such entries as
these,--"Monday, June 18, headache, 40 pages Cuvier's 'Theory of the
Earth,' 64 pages French, 11 hours' forging.  Tuesday, June 19, 60 lines
Hebrew, 30 Danish, 10 lines Bohemian, 9 lines Polish, 15 names of
stars, 10 hours' forging.  Wednesday, June 20, 25 lines Hebrew, 8 lines
Syriac, 11 hours' forging."  He mastered 18 languages and 32 dialects.
He became eminent as the "Learned Blacksmith," and for his noble work
in the service of humanity.  Edward Everett said of the manner in which
this boy with no chance acquired great learning: "It is enough to make
one who has good opportunities for education hang his head in shame."

The barefoot Christine Nilsson in remote Sweden had little chance, but
she won the admiration of the world for her wondrous power of song,
combined with rare womanly grace.

"Let me say in regard to your adverse worldly circumstances," says Dr.
Talmage to young men, "that you are on a level now with those who are
finally to succeed.  Mark my words, and think of it thirty years from
now.  You will find that those who are then the millionaires of this
country, who are the orators of the country, who are the poets of the
country, who are the strong merchants of the country, who are the great
philanthropists of the country,--mightiest in the church and
state,--are now on a level with you, not an inch above you, and in
straightened circumstances.

"No outfit, no capital to start with?  Young man, go down to the
library and get some books, and read of what wonderful mechanism God
gave you in your hand, in your foot, in your eye, in your ear, and then
ask some doctor to take you into the dissecting-room and illustrate to
you what you have read about, and never again commit the blasphemy of
saying you have no capital to start with.  _Equipped_?  _Why, the
poorest young man is equipped as only the God of the whole universe
could afford to equip him_."

A newsboy is not a very promising candidate for success or honors in
any line of life.  A young man can't set out in life with much less
chance than when he starts his "daily" for a living.  Yet the man who
more than any other is responsible for the industrial regeneration of
this continent started in life as a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway.
Thomas Alva Edison was then about fifteen years of age.  He had already
begun to dabble in chemistry, and had fitted up a small itinerant
laboratory.  One day, as he was performing some occult experiment, the
train rounded a curve, and the bottle of sulphuric acid broke.  There
followed a series of unearthly odors and unnatural complications.  The
conductor, who had suffered long and patiently, promptly ejected the
youthful devotee, and in the process of the scientist's expulsion added
a resounding box upon the ear.

Edison passed through one dramatic situation after another--always
mastering it--until he attained at an early age the scientific throne
of the world.  When recently asked the secret of his success, he said
he had always been a total abstainer and singularly moderate in
everything but work.

Daniel Manning who was President Cleveland's first campaign manager and
afterwards Secretary of the Treasury, started out as a newsboy with
apparently the world against him.  So did Thurlow Weed; so did David B.
Hill.  New York seems to have been prolific in enterprising newsboys.

What nonsense for two uneducated and unknown youths who met in a cheap
boarding-house in Boston to array themselves against an institution
whose roots were embedded in the very constitution of our country, and
which was upheld by scholars, statesmen, churches, wealth, and
aristocracy, without distinction of creed or politics!  What chance had
they against the prejudices and sentiment of a nation?  But these young
men were fired by a lofty purpose, and they were thoroughly in earnest.
One of them, Benjamin Lundy, had already started in Ohio a paper called
"The Genius of Universal Liberty," and had carried the entire edition
home on his back from the printing-office, twenty miles, every month.
He had walked four hundred miles on his way to Tennessee to increase
his subscription list.  He was no ordinary young man.

With William Lloyd Garrison, he started to prosecute his work more
earnestly in Baltimore.  The sight of the slave-pens along the
principal streets; of vessel-loads of unfortunates torn from home and
family and sent to Southern ports; the heartrending scenes at the
auction blocks, made an impression on Garrison never to be forgotten;
and the young man whose mother was too poor to send him to school,
although she early taught him to hate oppression, resolved to devote
his life to secure the freedom of these poor wretches.

In the first issue of his paper, Garrison urged an immediate
emancipation, and called down upon his head the wrath of the entire
community.  He was arrested and sent to jail.  John G. Whittier, a
noble friend in the North, was so touched at the news that, being too
poor to furnish the money himself, he wrote to Henry Clay, begging him
to release Garrison by paying the fine.  After forty-nine days of
imprisonment he was set free.  Wendell Phillips said of him, "He was
imprisoned for his opinion when he was twenty-four.  He had confronted
a nation in the bloom of his youth."

In Boston, with no money, friends, or influence, in a little upstairs
room, Garrison started the "Liberator."  Read the declaration of this
poor young man with "no chance," in the very first issue: "I will be as
harsh as truth, as uncompromising as justice.  I am in earnest.  I will
not equivocate, I will not excuse; I will not retreat a single inch,
and I will be heard."  What audacity for a young man, with the world
against him!

Hon. Robert Y. Hayne, of South Carolina, wrote to Otis, mayor of
Boston, that some one had sent him a copy of the "Liberator," and asked
him to ascertain the name of the publisher.  Otis replied that he had
found a poor young man printing "this insignificant sheet in an obscure
hole, his only auxiliary a negro boy, his supporters a few persons of
all colors and little influence."

But this poor young man, eating, sleeping, and printing in this
"obscure hole," had set the world to thinking, and must be suppressed.
The Vigilance Association of South Carolina offered a reward of fifteen
hundred dollars for the arrest and prosecution of any one detected
circulating the "Liberator."  The Governors of one or two States set a
price on the editor's head.  The legislature of Georgia offered a
reward of five thousand dollars for his arrest and conviction.

Garrison and his coadjutors were denounced everywhere.  A clergyman
named Lovejoy was killed by a mob in Illinois for espousing the cause,
while defending his printing-press, and in the old "Cradle of American
Liberty" the wealth, power, and culture of Massachusetts arrayed itself
against the "Abolitionists" so outrageously, that a mere spectator, a
young lawyer of great promise, asked to be lifted upon the high
platform, and replied in such a speech as was never before heard in
Faneuil Hall.  "When I heard the gentleman lay down the principles
which place the murderers of Lovejoy at Alton side by side with Otis
and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams," said Wendell Phillips, pointing to
their portraits on the walls.  "I thought those pictured lips would
have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer
of the dead.  For the sentiments that he has uttered, on soil
consecrated by the prayers of the Puritans and the blood of patriots.
the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

The whole nation was wrought to fever heat.

Between the Northern pioneers and Southern chivalry the struggle was
long and fierce, even in far California.  The drama culminated in the
shock of civil war.  When the war was ended, and, after thirty-five
years of untiring, heroic conflict, Garrison was invited as the
nation's guest, by President Lincoln, to see the stars and stripes
unfurled once more above Fort Sumter, an emancipated slave delivered
the address of welcome, and his two daughters, no longer chattels in
appreciation presented Garrison with a beautiful wreath of flowers.

About this time Richard Cobden, another powerful friend of the
oppressed, died in London.

His father had died leaving nine children almost penniless.  The boy
earned his living by watching a neighbor's sheep, but had no chance to
attend school until he was ten years old.  He was sent to a
boarding-school, where he was abused, half starved, and allowed to
write home only once in three months.  At fifteen he entered his
uncle's store in London as a clerk.  He learned French by rising early
and studying while his companions slept.  He was soon sent out in a gig
as a commercial traveler.

He called upon John Bright to enlist his aid in fighting the terrible
"Corn-Laws" which were taking bread from the poor and giving it to the
rich.  He found Mr. Bright in great grief, for his wife was lying dead
in the house.

"There are thousands of homes in England at this moment," said Richard
Cobden, "where wives, mothers, and children are dying of hunger.  Now,
when the first paroxysm of grief is passed, I would advise you to come
with me, and we will never rest until the Corn-Laws are repealed."
Cobden could no longer see the poor man's bread stopped at the
Custom-House and taxed for the benefit of the landlord and farmer, and
he threw his whole soul into this great reform.  "This is not a party
question," said he, "for men of all parties are united upon it.  It is
a pantry question,--a question between the working millions and the
aristocracy."  They formed the "Anti-Corn-Law League," which, aided by
the Irish famine,--for it was hunger that at last ate through those
stone walls of protection,--secured the repeal of the law in 1846.  Mr.
Bright said: "There is not in Great Britain a poor man's home that has
not a bigger, better, and cheaper loaf through Richard Cobden's labors."

John Bright himself was the son of a poor working man, and in those
days the doors of the higher schools were closed to such as he; but the
great Quaker heart of this resolute youth was touched with pity for the
millions of England's and Ireland's poor, starving under the Corn-Laws.
During the frightful famine, which cut off two millions of Ireland's
population in a year, John Bright was more powerful than all the
nobility of England.  The whole aristocracy trembled before his
invincible logic, his mighty eloquence, and his commanding character.
Except possibly Cobden, no other man did so much to give the laborer a
shorter day, a cheaper loaf, an added shilling.

Over a stable in London lived a poor boy named Michael Faraday, who
carried newspapers about the streets to loan to customers for a penny
apiece.  He was apprenticed for seven years to a bookbinder and
bookseller.  When binding the Encyclopaedia Britannica, his eyes caught
the article on electricity, and he could not rest until he had read it.
He procured a glass vial, an old pan, and a few simple articles, and
began to experiment.  A customer became interested in the boy, and took
him to hear Sir Humphry Davy lecture on chemistry.  He summoned courage
to write the great scientist and sent the notes he had taken of his
lecture.  One night, not long after, just as Michael was about to
retire, Sir Humphry Davy's carriage stopped at his humble lodging, and
a servant handed him a written invitation to call upon the great
lecturer the next morning.  Michael could scarcely trust his eyes as he
read the note.  In the morning he called as requested, and was engaged
to clean instruments and take them to and from the lecture-room.  He
watched eagerly every movement of Davy, as with a glass mask over his
face, he developed his safety-lamp and experimented with dangerous
explosives.  Michael studied and experimented, too, and it was not long
before this poor boy with no chance was invited to lecture before the
great philosophical society.

He was appointed professor at the Royal Academy of Woolwich, and became
the wonder of the age in science.  Tyndall said of him, "He is the
greatest experimental philosopher the world has ever seen."  When Sir
Humphry Davy was asked what was his greatest discovery, he replied
"Michael Faraday."

"What has been done can be done again," said the boy with no chance,
Disraeli, who become Lord Beaconsfield, England's great Prime Minister.
"I am not a slave, I am not a captive, and by energy I can overcome
greater obstacles."  Jewish blood flowed in his veins and everything
seemed against him, but he remembered the example of Joseph, who became
Prime Minister of Egypt four thousand years before, and that of Daniel,
who was Prime Minister to the greatest despot of the world five
centuries before the birth of Christ.  He pushed his way up through the
lower classes, up through the middle classes, up through the upper
classes, until he stood a master, self-poised upon the topmost round of
political and social power.  Rebuffed, scorned, ridiculed, hissed down
in the House of Commons, he simply said, "The time will come when you
will hear me."  The time did come, and the boy with no chance but a
determined will swayed the scepter of England for a quarter of a
century.

Henry Clay, the "mill-boy of the slashes," was one of seven children of
a widow too poor to send him to any but a common country school, where
he was drilled only in the "three R's."  But he used every spare moment
to study without a teacher, and in after years he was a king among
self-made men.  The boy who had learned to speak in a barn, with only a
cow and a horse for an audience, became one of the greatest of American
orators and statesmen.

See Kepler struggling with poverty and hardship, his books burned in
public by order of the state, his library locked up by the Jesuits, and
himself exiled by public clamor.  For seventeen years he works calmly
upon the demonstration of the great principles that planets revolve in
ellipses, with the sun at one focus; that a line connecting the center
of the earth with the center of the sun passes over equal spaces in
equal times, and that the squares of the times of revolution of the
planets above the sun are proportioned to the cubes by their mean
distances from the sun.  This boy with no chance became one of the
world's greatest astronomers.

"When I found that I was black," said Alexandre Dumas, "I resolved to
live as if I were white, and so force men to look below my skin."

How slender seemed the chance of James Sharples, the celebrated
blacksmith artist of England!  He was very poor, but he often rose at
three o'clock to copy books he could not buy.  He would walk eighteen
miles to Manchester and back after a hard day's work to buy a
shilling's worth of artist's materials.  He would ask for the heaviest
work in the blacksmith shop, because it took a longer time to heat at
the forge, and he could thus have many spare minutes to study the
precious book, which he propped up against the chimney.  He was a great
miser of spare moments and used every one as though he might never see
another.  He devoted his leisure hours for five years to that wonderful
production, "The Forge," copies of which are to be seen in many a home.

What chance had Galileo to win renown in physics or astronomy, when his
parents compelled him to go to a medical school?  Yet while Venice
slept, he stood in the tower of St. Mark's Cathedral and discovered the
satellites of Jupiter and the phases of Venus, through a telescope made
with his own hands.  When compelled on bended knee to publicly renounce
his heretical doctrine that the earth moves around the sun, all the
terrors of the Inquisition could not keep this feeble man of threescore
years and ten from muttering to himself, "Yet it does move."  When
thrown into prison, so great was his eagerness for scientific research
that he proved by a straws in his cell that a hollow tube is relatively
much stronger than a solid rod of the same size.  Even when totally
blind, he kept constantly at work.

Imagine the surprise of the Royal Society of England when the poor
unknown Herschel sent in the report of his discovery of the star
Georgium Sidus, its orbit and rate of motion; and of the rings and
satellites of Saturn.  The boy with no chance, who had played the oboe
for his meals, had with his own hands made the telescope through which
he discovered facts unknown to the best-equipped astronomers of his
day.  He had ground two hundred specula before he could get one perfect.

George Stephenson was one of eight children whose parents were so poor
that all lived in a single room.  George had to watch cows for a
neighbor, but he managed to get time to make engines of clay, with
hemlock sticks for pipes.  At seventeen he had charge of an engine,
with his father for fireman.  He could neither read nor write, but the
engine was his teacher, and he a faithful student.  While the other
hands were playing games or loafing in liquor shops during the
holidays, George was taking his machine to pieces, cleaning it,
studying it, and making experiments in engines.  When he had become
famous as a great inventor of improvements in engines, those who had
loafed and played called him lucky.

Without a charm of face or figure, Charlotte Cushman resolved to place
herself in the front rank as an actress, even in such characters as
Rosalind and Queen Katherine.  The star actress was unable to perform,
and Miss Cushman, her understudy, took her place.  That night she held
her audience with such grasp of intellect and iron will that it forgot
the absence of mere dimpled feminine grace.  Although poor, friendless,
and unknown before, when the curtain fell upon her first performance at
the London theater, her reputation was made.  In after years, when
physicians told her she had a terrible, incurable disease, she flinched
not a particle, but quietly said, "I have learned to live with my
trouble."

A poor colored woman in a log-cabin in the South had three boys, but
could afford only one pair of trousers for the three.  She was so
anxious to give them an education that she sent them to school by
turns.  The teacher, a Northern girl, noticed that each boy came to
school only one day out of three, and that all wore the same
pantaloons.  The poor mother educated her boys as best she could.  One
became a professor in a Southern college, another a physician, and the
third a clergyman.  What a lesson for boys who plead "no chance" as an
excuse for wasted lives!

Sam Cunard, the whittling Scotch lad of Glasgow, wrought many odd
inventions with brain and jack-knife, but they brought neither honor
nor profit until he was consulted by Burns & McIvor, who wished to
increase their facilities for carrying foreign mails.  The model of a
steamship which Sam whittled out for them was carefully copied for the
first vessel of the great Cunard Line, and became the standard type for
all the magnificent ships since constructed by the firm.

The new Testament and the speller were Cornelius Vanderbilt's only
books at school, but he learned to read, write, and cipher a little.
He wished to buy a boat, but had no money.  To discourage him from
following the sea, his mother told him if he would plow, harrow, and
plant with corn, before the twenty-seventh day of the month, ten acres
of rough, hard, stony land, the worst on his father's farm, she would
lend him the amount he wished.  Before the appointed time the work was
done, and well done.  On his seventeenth birthday he bought the boat,
but on his way home it struck a sunken wreck and sank just as he
reached shallow water.

But Cornelius Vanderbilt was not the boy to give up.  He at once began
again, and in three years saved three thousand dollars.  He often
worked all night, and soon had far the largest patronage of any boatman
in the harbor.  During the War of 1812 he was awarded the Government
contract to carry provisions to the military stations near the
metropolis.  He fulfilled his contract by night so that he might run
his ferry-boat between New York and Brooklyn by day.

The boy who gave his parents all his day earnings and had half of what
he got at night, was worth thirty thousand dollars at thirty-five, and
when he died, at an advanced age, he left to his thirteen children one
of the largest fortunes in America.

Lord Eldon might well have pleaded "no chance" when a boy, for he was
too poor to go to school or even to buy books.  But no; he had grit and
determination, and was bound to make his way in the world.  He rose at
four o'clock in the morning and copied law books which he borrowed, the
voluminous "Coke upon Littleton" among others.  He was so eager to
study that sometimes he would keep it up until his brain refused to
work, when he would tie a wet towel about his head to enable him to
keep awake and to study.  His first year's practice brought him but
nine shillings, yet he was bound not to give up.

When Eldon was leaving the chamber the Solicitor tapped him on the
shoulder and said, "Young man, your bread and butter's cut for life."
The boy with "no chance" became Lord Chancellor of England, and one of
the greatest lawyers of his age.

Stephen Girard had "no chance."  He left his home in France when ten
years old, and came to America as a cabin boy.  His great ambition was
to get on and succeed at any cost.  There was no work, however hard and
disagreeable, that he would not undertake.  Midas like, he turned to
gold everything he touched, and became one of the wealthiest merchants
of Philadelphia.  His abnormal love of money cannot be commended, but
his thoroughness in all he did, his public spirit at times of national
need, and willingness to risk his life to save strangers sick with the
deadly yellow fever, are traits of character well worthy of imitation.

John Wanamaker walked four miles to Philadelphia every day, and worked
in a bookstore for one dollar and twenty-five cents a week.  He next
worked in a clothing store at an advance of twenty-five cents a week.
From this he went up and up until he became one of the greatest living
merchants.  He was appointed Postmaster-General by President Harrison
in 1889, and in that capacity showed great executive ability.

Prejudice against her race and sex did not deter the colored girl,
Edmonia Lewis, from struggling upward to honor and fame as a sculptor.

Fred Douglass started in life with less than nothing, for he did not
own his own body, and he was pledged before his birth to pay his
master's debts.  To reach the starting-point of the poorest white boy,
he had to climb as far as the distance which the latter must ascend if
he would become President of the United States.  He saw his mother but
two or three times, and then in the night, when she would walk twelve
miles to be with him an hour, returning in time to go into the field at
dawn.  He had no chance to study, for he had no teacher, and the rules
of the plantation forbade slaves to learn to read and write.  But
somehow, unnoticed by his master, he managed to learn the alphabet from
scraps of paper and patent medicine almanacs, and then no limits could
be placed to his career.  He put to shame thousands of white boys.  He
fled from slavery at twenty-one, went North, and worked as a stevedore
in New York and New Bedford.  At Nantucket he was given an opportunity
to speak at an anti-slavery meeting, and made so favorable an
impression that he was made agent of the Anti-Slavery Society of
Massachusetts.  While traveling from place to place to lecture, he
would study with all his might.  He was sent to Europe to lecture, and
won the friendship of several Englishmen, who gave him $750, with which
he purchased his freedom.  He edited a paper in Rochester, N. Y., and
afterwards conducted the "New Era" in Washington.  For several years he
was Marshal of the District of Columbia.

Henry E. Dixey, the well-known actor, began his career upon the stage
in the humble part of the hind legs of a cow.

P. T. Barnum rode a horse for ten cents a day.

It was a boy born in a log-cabin, without schooling, or books, or
teacher, or ordinary opportunities, who won the admiration of mankind
by his homely practical wisdom while President during our Civil War,
and who emancipated four million slaves.

Behold this long, lank, awkward youth, felling trees on the little
claim, building his homely log-cabin, without floor or windows,
teaching himself arithmetic and grammar in the evening by the light of
the fireplace.  In his eagerness to know the contents of Blackstone's
Commentaries, he walked forty-four miles to procure the precious
volumes, and read one hundred pages while returning.  Abraham Lincoln
inherited no opportunities, and acquired nothing by luck.  His good
fortune consisted simply of untiring perseverance and a right heart.

In another log-cabin, in the backwoods of Ohio, a poor widow is holding
a boy eighteen months old, and wondering if she will be able to keep
the wolf from her little ones.  The boy grows, and in a few years we
find him chopping wood and tilling the little clearing in the forest,
to help his mother.  Every spare hour is spent in studying the books he
has borrowed, but cannot buy.  At sixteen he gladly accepts a chance to
drive mules on a canal towpath.  Soon he applies for a chance to sweep
floors and ring the bell of an academy, to pay his way while studying
there.

His first term at Geauga Seminary cost him but seventeen dollars.  When
he returned the next term he had but a sixpence in his pocket, and this
he put into the contribution box at church the next day.  He engaged
board, washing, fuel, and light of a carpenter at one dollar and six
cents a week, with the privilege of working at night and on Saturdays
all the time he could spare.  He had arrived on a Saturday and planed
fifty-one boards that day, for which he received one dollar and two
cents.  When the term closed, he had paid all expenses and had three
dollars over.  The following winter he taught school at twelve dollars
a month and "board around."  In the spring he had forty-eight dollars,
and when he returned to school he boarded himself at an expense of
thirty-one cents a week.

Soon we find him in Williams College, where in two years he is
graduated with honors.  He reaches the State Senate at twenty-six and
Congress at thirty-three.  Twenty-seven years from the time he applied
for a chance to ring the bell at Hiram College, James A. Garfield
became President of the United States.  The inspiration of such an
example is worth more to the young men of America than all the wealth
of the Astors, the Vanderbilts, and the Goulds.

Among the world's greatest heroes and benefactors are many others whose
cradles were rocked by want in lowly cottages, and who buffeted the
billows of fate without dependence, save upon the mercy of God and
their own energies.

"The little gray cabin appears to be the birthplace of all your great
men," said an English author who had been looking over a book of
biographies of eminent Americans.

With five chances on each hand and one unwavering aim, no boy, however
poor, need despair.  There is bread and success for every youth under
the American flag who has energy and ability to seize his opportunity.
It matters not whether the boy is born in a log-cabin or in a mansion;
if he is dominated by a resolute purpose and upholds himself, neither
men nor demons can keep him down.




CHAPTER IV

THE COUNTRY BOY

The Napoleonic wars so drained the flower of French manhood that even
to-day the physical stature of the average Frenchman is nearly half an
inch below what it was at the beginning of Napoleon's reign.

The country in America to-day is constantly paying a similar tribute to
the city in the sacrifice of its best blood, its best brain, the finest
physical and mental fiber in the world.  This great stream of superb
country manhood, which is ever flowing cityward, is rapidly
deteriorated by the softening, emasculating influences of the city,
until the superior virility, stamina and sturdy qualities entirely
disappear in two or three generations of city life.  Our city
civilization is always in a process of decay, and would, in a few
generations, become emasculated and effeminate were it not for the
pure, crystal stream of country youth flowing steadily into and
purifying the muddy, devitalized stream of city life.  It would soon
become so foul and degenerate as to threaten the physical and moral
health of city dwellers.

One of our great men says that one of the most unfortunate phases of
modern civilization is the drift away from the farm, the drift of
country youth to the city which has an indescribable fascination for
him.  His vivid imagination clothes it with Arabian Nights
possibilities and joys.  The country seems tame and commonplace after
his first dream of the city.  To him it is synonymous with opportunity,
with power, with pleasure.  He can not rid himself of its fascination
until he tastes its emptiness.  He can not know the worth of the
country and how to appreciate the glory of its disadvantages and
opportunities until he has seen the sham and shallowness of the city.

One of the greatest boons that can ever come to a human being is to be
born on a farm and reared in the country.  Self-reliance and grit are
oftenest country-bred.  The country boy is constantly thrown upon his
own resources, forced to think for himself, and this calls out his
ingenuity and inventiveness.  He develops better all-round judgment and
a more level head than the city boy.  His muscles are harder, his flesh
firmer, and his brain-fiber partakes of the same superior quality.

The very granite hills, the mountains, the valleys, the brooks, the
miracle of the growing crops are every moment registering their mighty
potencies in his constitution, putting iron into his blood and stamina
into his character, all of which will help to make him a giant when he
comes to compete with the city-bred youth.

The sturdy, vigorous, hardy qualities, the stamina, the brawn, the grit
which characterize men who do great things in this world, are, as a
rule, country bred.  If power is not absorbed from the soil, it
certainly comes from very near it.  There seems to be a close
connection between robust character and the soil, the hills, mountains
and valleys, the pure air and sunshine.  There is a very appreciable
difference between the physical stamina, the brain vigor, the solidity
and the reliability of country-bred men and that of those in the city.

The average country-bred youth has a better foundation for
success-building, has greater courage, more moral stamina.  He has not
become weakened and softened by the superficial ornamental, decorative
influences of city life.  And there is a reason for all this.  We are
largely copies of our environment.  We are under the perpetual
influence of the suggestion of our surroundings.  The city-bred youth
sees and hears almost nothing that is natural, aside from the faces and
forms of human beings.  Nearly everything that confronts him from
morning till night is artificial, man-made.  He sees hardly anything
that God made, that imparts solidity, strength and power, as do the
natural objects in the country.  How can a man build up a solid,
substantial character when his eyes and ears bring him only sights and
sounds of artificial things?  A vast sea of business blocks,
sky-scrapers and asphalt pavements does not generate character-building
material.

Just as sculpture was once carried to such an extreme that pillars and
beams were often so weakened by the extravagant carvings as to threaten
the safety of the structure, so the timber in country boys and girls,
when brought to the city, is often overcarved and adorned at the cost
of strength, robustness and vigor.

In other words, virility, forcefulness, physical and mental stamina
reach their maximum in those who live close to the soil.  The moment a
man becomes artificial in his living, takes on artificial conditions,
he begins to deteriorate, to soften.

Much of what we call the best society in our cities is often in an
advanced process of decay.  The muscles may be a little more delicate
but they are softer; the skin may be a little fairer, but it is not so
healthy; the thought a little more supple, but less vigorous.  The
whole tendency of life in big cities is toward deterioration.  City
people rarely live really normal lives.  It is not natural for human
beings to live far from the soil.  It is Mother Earth and country life
that give vitality, stamina, courage and all the qualities which make
for manhood and womanhood.  What we get from the country is solid,
substantial, enduring, reliable.  What comes from the artificial
conditions of the city is weakening, enervating, softening.

The country youth, on the other hand, is in the midst of a perpetual
miracle.  He can not open his eyes without seeing a more magnificent
painting than a Raphael or a Michael Angelo could have created in a
lifetime.  And this magnificent panorama is changing every instant.

There is a miracle going on in every growing blade of grass and flower.
Is it not wonderful to watch the chemical processes in nature's
laboratory, mixing and flinging out to the world the gorgeous colorings
and marvelous perfumes of the rose and wild flower!  No city youth was
ever in such a marvelous kindergarten, where perpetual creation is
going on in such a vast multitude of forms.

The city youth has too many things to divert his attention.  Such a
multiplicity of objects appeals to him that he is often superficial; he
lacks depth; his mind is perpetually drawn away from his subject, and
he lacks continuity of thought and application.  His reading is
comparatively superficial.  He glances through many papers; magazines
and periodicals and gives no real thought to any.  His evenings are
much more broken up than those of the country boy, who, having very
little diversion after supper, can read continuously for an entire
evening on one subject.  The country boy does not read as many books as
the city boy, but, as a rule, he reads them with much better results.

The dearth of great libraries, books and periodicals is one reason why
the country boy makes the most of good books and articles, often
reading them over and over again, while the city youth, in the midst of
newspapers and libraries, sees so many books that in most instances he
cares very little for them, and will often read the best literature
without absorbing any of it.

The fact is that there is such a diversity of attractions and
distractions, of temptation and amusement in the city, that unless a
youth is made of unusual stuff he will yield to the persuasion of the
moment and follow the line of least resistance.  It is hard for the
city-bred youth to resist the multiplicity of allurements and pleasures
that bid for his attention, to deny himself and turn a deaf ear to the
appeals of his associates and tie himself down to self-improvement
while those around him are having a good time.

These exciting, diverting, tempting conditions of city life are not
conducive to generating the great master purpose, the one unwavering
life aim, which we often see so marked in the young man from the
country.  Nor do city-bred youths store up anything like the reserve
power, the cumulative force, the stamina, which are developed in the
simple life of the soil.

For one thing, the country boy is constantly developing his muscular
system.  His health is better.  He gets more exercise, more time to
think and to reflect; hence, he is not so superficial as the city boy.
His perceptions are not so quick, he is not so rapid in his movements,
his thought action is slower and he does not have as much polish, it is
true, but he is better balanced generally.  He has been forced to do a
great variety of work and this has developed corresponding mental
qualities.

The drudgery of the farm, the chores which we hated as boys, the rocks
which we despised, we have found were the very things which educated
us, which developed our power and made us practical.  The farm is a
great gymnasium, a superb manual training school, nature's
kindergarten, constantly calling upon the youth's self-reliance and
inventiveness.  He must make the implements and toys which he can not
afford to buy or procure.  He must run, adjust and repair all sorts of
machinery and farm utensils.  His ingenuity and inventiveness are
constantly exercised.  If the wagon or plow breaks down it must be
repaired on the spot, often without the proper tools.  This training
develops instinctive courage, strong success qualities, and makes him a
resourceful man.

Is it any wonder that the boy so trained in self-reliance, so superbly
equipped with physical and mental stamina, should take such
pre-eminence, should be in such demand when he comes to the city?  Is
it any wonder that he is always in evidence in great emergencies and
crises?  Just stand a stamina-filled, self-reliant country boy beside a
pale, soft, stamina-less, washed-out city youth.  Is it any wonder that
the country-bred boy is nearly always the leader; that he heads the
banks, the great mercantile houses?  It is this peculiar,
indescribable something; this superior stamina and mental caliber, that
makes the stuff that rises to the top in all vocations.

There is a peculiar quality of superiority which comes from dealing
with _realities_ that we do not find in the superficial city
conditions.  The life-giving oxygen, breathed in great inspirations
through constant muscular effort, develops in the country boy much
greater lung power than is developed in the city youth, and his outdoor
work tends to build up a robust constitution.  Plowing, hoeing, mowing,
everything he does on the farm gives him vigor and strength.  His
muscles are harder, his flesh firmer, and his brain-fiber partakes of
the same superior quality.  He is constantly bottling up forces,
storing up energy in his brain and muscles which later may be powerful
factors in shaping the nation's destiny or which may furnish backbone
to keep the ship of state from floundering on the rocks.  This
marvelous reserve power which he stores up in the country will come out
in the successful banker, statesman, lawyer, merchant, or business man.

Self-reliance and grit are oftenest country-bred.  The country boy is
constantly thrown upon his own resources; he is forced to think for
himself, and this calls out his ingenuity and makes him self-reliant
and strong.  It has been found that the use of tools in our manual
training schools develops the brain, strengthens the deficient
faculties and brings out latent powers.  The farm-reared boy is in the
best manual training school in the world and is constantly forced to
plan things, make things; he is always using tools.  This is one of the
reasons why he usually develops better all-round judgment and a more
level head than the city boy.

It is human nature to exaggerate the value of things beyond our reach.
People save money for years in order to go to Europe to visit the great
art centers and see the famous masterpieces, when they have really
never seen the marvelous pictures painted by the Divine Artist and
spread in the landscape, in the sunset, in the glory of flowers and
plant life, right at their very doors.

What a perpetual inspiration, what marvels of beauty, what miracles of
coloring are spread everywhere in nature, confronting us on every hand!
We see them almost every day of our lives and they become so common
that they make no impression upon us.  Think of the difference between
what a Ruskin sees in a landscape and the impression conveyed to his
brain, and what is seen by the ordinary mind, the ordinary person who
has little or no imagination and whose esthetic faculties have scarcely
been developed!

We are immersed in a wilderness of mysteries and marvelous beauties.
Miracles innumerable in grass and flower and fruit are performed right
before our eyes.  How marvelous is Nature's growing of fruit, for
example!  How she packs the concentrated sunshine and delicious juices
into the cans that she makes as she goes along, cans exactly the right
size, without a particle of waste, leakage or evaporation, with no
noise of factories, no hammering of tins!  The miracles are wrought in
a silent laboratory; not a sound is heard, and yet what marvels of
skill, deliciousness and beauty?

What interrogation points, what wonderful mysteries, what
wit-sharpeners are ever before the farmer boy, whichever way he turns!
Where does all this tremendous increase of corn, wheat, fruit and
vegetables come from?  There seems to be no loss to the soil, and yet,
what a marvelous growth in everything!  Life, life, more life on every
hand!  Wherever he goes he treads on chemical forces which produce
greater marvels than are described in the Arabian Nights.  The trees,
the brooks, the mountains, the hills, the valleys, the sunsets, the
growing animals on the farm, are all mysteries that set him thinking
and to wondering at the creative processes which are working on every
hand.

Then again, the delicious freedom of it all, as contrasted with the
cramped, artificial life in the city!  Everything in the country tends
to set the boy thinking, to call out his dormant powers and develop his
latent forces.  And what health there is in it all!  How hearty and
natural he is in comparison with the city boy, who is tempted to turn
night into day, to live an artificial, purposeless life.

The very temptation in the city to turn night into day is of itself
health-undermining, stamina-dissipating and character-weakening.

While the city youth is wasting his precious energy capital in late
hours, pleasure seeking, and often dissipation, the country youth is
storing up power and vitality; he is being recharged with physical
force by natural, refreshing sleep, away from the distracting influence
and enervating excitement of city life.  The country youth does not
learn to judge people by the false standards of wealth and social
standing.  He is not inculcated with snobbish ideas.  Everything in the
great farm kindergarten teaches him sincerity, simplicity and honesty.

The time was when the boy who gave no signs of genius or unusual
ability was consigned to the farm, and the brilliant boy was sent to
college or to the city to make a career for himself.  But we are now
beginning to see that man has made a botch of farming only because he
looked upon it as a sort of humdrum occupation; as a means provided by
nature for living-getting for those who were not good for much else.
Farming was considered by many people as a sort of degrading occupation
desirable only for those who lacked the brains and education to go into
a profession or some of the more refined callings.  But the searchlight
of science has revealed in it possibilities hitherto undreamed of.  We
are commencing to realize that it takes a high order of ability and
education to bring out the fullest possibilities of the soil; that it
requires fine-grained sympathetic talent.  We are now finding that
agriculture is as great a science as astronomy, and that ignorant men
have been getting an indifferent living from their farms simply because
they did not know how to mix brains with the soil.

The science of agriculture is fast becoming appreciated and is more and
more regarded as a high and noble calling, a dignified profession.
Think of what it means to go into partnership with the Creator in
bringing out larger, grander products from the soil; to be able to
co-operate with that divine creative force, and even to vary the size,
the beauty, the perfume of flowers; to enlarge, modify and change the
flavor of fruits and vegetables to our liking!

Think what it must mean to be a magician in the whole vegetable
kingdom, like Luther Burbank, changing colors, flavors, perfumes,
species!  Almost anything is possible when one knows enough and has
heart and sympathy enough to enter into partnership with the great
creative force in nature.  Mr. Burbank says that the time will come
when man will be able to do almost anything he wishes in the vegetable
kingdom; will be able to produce at will any shade or color he wishes,
and almost any flavor in any fruit; that the size of all fruits and
vegetables and flowers is just a matter of sufficient understanding,
and that Nature will give us almost anything when we know enough to
treat her intelligently, wisely and sympathetically.

The history of most great men shows that there is a disadvantage in
having too many advantages.

Who can tell what the consequences would have been had Lincoln been
born in New York and educated at Harvard?  If he had been reared in the
midst of great libraries, brought up in an atmosphere of books, of only
a small fraction of which he could get even a superficial knowledge,
would he have had that insatiable hunger which prompted him to walk
twenty miles in order to borrow Blackstone's "Commentaries" and to read
one hundred pages on the way home?

[Illustration: House in which Abraham Lincoln was born]

What was there in that rude frontier forest, where this poor boy
scarcely ever saw any one who knew anything of books, to rouse his
ambition and to stimulate him to self-education?  Whence came that
yearning to know the history of men and women who had made a nation; to
know the history of his country?  Whence came that passion to devour
the dry statutes of Indiana, as a young girl would devour a love story?
Whence came that all-absorbing ambition to be somebody in the world; to
serve his country with no selfish ambition?  Had his father been rich
and well-educated instead of a poor man who could neither read nor
write and who was generally of a shiftless and roving disposition,
there is no likelihood that Lincoln would ever have become the powerful
man he was.

Had he not felt that imperious "must" calling him, the prod of
necessity spurring him on, whence would have come the motive which led
him to struggle for self-development, self-unfoldment?  If he had been
born and educated in luxury, his character would probably have been
soft and flabby in comparison with what it was.

Where in all the annals of history is there another record of one born
of such poor parentage and reared in such a wretched environment, who
ever rose to such eminence?  Imagine a boy of to-day, so hungry for an
education that he would walk nine miles a day to attend a rude frontier
school in a log cabin!  What would the city boys of to-day, who do not
want to walk even a few blocks to school, think of a youth who would do
what Lincoln did to overcome his handicap?




CHAPTER V

OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE

  To each man's life there comes a time supreme;
   One day, one night, one morning, or one noon,
   One freighted hour, one moment opportune,
  One rift through which sublime fulfillments gleam,
  One space when fate goes tiding with the stream,
   One Once, in balance 'twixt Too Late, Too Soon,
   And ready for the passing instant's boon
  To tip in favor the uncertain beam.
  Ah, happy he who, knowing how to wait,
   Knows also how to watch and work and stand
   On Life's broad deck alert, and at the prow
  To seize the passing moment, big with fate,
   From Opportunity's extended hand,
   When the great clock of destiny strikes Now!
      MARY A. TOWNSEND.

What is opportunity to a man who can't use it?  An unfecundated egg,
which the waves of time wash away into non-entity.--GEORGE ELIOT.

The secret of success in life is for a man _to be ready for his
opportunity_ when it comes.--DISRAELI.


"There are no longer any good chances for young men," complained a
youthful law student to Daniel Webster.  "There is always room at the
top," replied the great statesman and jurist.

No chance, no opportunities, in a land where thousands of poor boys
become rich men, where newsboys go to Congress, and where those born in
the lowest stations attain the highest positions?  The world is all
gates, all opportunities to him who will use them.  But, like Bunyan's
Pilgrim in the dungeon of Giant Despair's castle, who had the key of
deliverance all the time with him but had forgotten it, we fail to rely
wholly upon the ability to advance all that is good for us which has
been given to the weakest as well as the strongest.  We depend too much
upon outside assistance.

  "We look too high
  For things close by."


A Baltimore lady lost a valuable diamond bracelet at a ball, and
supposed that it was stolen from the pocket of her cloak.  Years
afterward she washed the steps of the Peabody Institute, pondering how
to get money to buy food.  She cut up an old, worn-out, ragged cloak to
make a hood, when lo! in the lining of the cloak she discovered the
diamond bracelet.  During all her poverty she was worth $3500, but did
not know it.

Many of us who think we are poor are rich in opportunities, if we could
only see them, in possibilities all about us, in faculties worth more
than diamond bracelets.  In our large Eastern cities it has been found
that at least ninety-four out of every hundred found their first
fortune at home, or near at hand, and in meeting common every-day
wants.  It is a sorry day for a young man who can not see any
opportunities where he is, but thinks he can do better somewhere else.
Some Brazilian shepherds organized a party to go to California to dig
gold, and took along a handful of translucent pebbles to play checkers
with on the voyage.  After arriving in San Francisco, and after they
had thrown most of the pebbles away, they discovered that they were
diamonds.  They hastened back to Brazil, only to find that the mines
from which the pebbles had been gathered had been taken up by other
prospectors and sold to the government.

The richest gold and silver mine in Nevada was sold by the owner for
$42, to get money to pay his passage to other mines, where he thought
he could get rich.  Professor Agassiz once told the Harvard students of
a farmer who owned a farm of hundreds of acres of unprofitable woods
and rocks, and concluded to sell out and get into a more profitable
business.  He decided to go into the coal-oil business; he studied coal
measures and coal-oil deposits, and experimented for a long time.  He
sold his farm for $200, and engaged in his new business two hundred
miles away.  Only a short time after, the man who bought his farm
discovered upon it a great flood of coal-oil, which the farmer had
previously ignorantly tried to drain off.

Hundreds of years ago there lived near the shore of the river Indus a
Persian by the name of Ali Hafed.  He lived in a cottage on the river
bank, from which he could get a grand view of the beautiful country
stretching away to the sea.  He had a wife and children; an extensive
farm, fields of grain, gardens of flowers, orchards of fruit, and miles
of forest.  He had plenty of money and everything that heart could
wish.  He was contented and happy.  One evening a priest of Buddha
visited him, and, sitting before the fire, explained to him how the
world was made, and how the first beams of sunlight condensed on the
earth's surface into diamonds.

The old priest told that a drop of sunlight the size of his thumb was
worth more than large mines of copper, silver, or gold; that with one
of them he could buy many farms like his; that with a handful he could
buy a province, and with a mine of diamonds he could purchase a
kingdom.  Ali Hafed listened, and was no longer a rich man.  He had
been touched with discontent, and with that all wealth vanishes.  Early
the next morning he woke the priest who had been the cause of his
unhappiness, and anxiously asked him where he could find a mine of
diamonds.  "What do you want of diamonds?" asked the astonished priest.
"I want to be rich and place my children on thrones."  "All you have to
do is to go and search until you find them," said the priest.  "But
where shall I go?" asked the poor farmer.  "Go anywhere, north, south,
east, or west."  "How shall I know when I have found the place?"  "When
you find a river running over white sands between high mountain ranges,
in those white sands you will find diamonds," answered the priest.

The discontented man sold the farm for what he could get, left his
family with a neighbor, took the money he had at interest, and went to
search for the coveted treasure.  Over the mountains of Arabia, through
Palestine and Egypt, he wandered for years, but found no diamonds.
When his money was all gone and starvation stared him in the face,
ashamed of his folly and of his rags, poor Ali Hafed threw himself into
the tide and was drowned.  The man who bought his farm was a contented
man, who made the most of his surroundings, and did not believe in
going away from home to hunt for diamonds or success.  While his camel
was drinking in the garden one day, he noticed a flash of light from
the white sands of the brook.  He picked up a pebble, and pleased with
its brilliant hues took it into the house, put it on the shelf near the
fireplace, and forgot all about it.

The old priest of Buddha who had filled Ali Hafed with the fatal
discontent called one day upon the new owner of the farm.  He had no
sooner entered the room than his eye caught that flash of light from
the stone.  "Here's a diamond! here's a diamond!" he shouted in great
excitement.  "Has Ali Hafed returned?"  "No," said the farmer, "nor is
that a diamond.  That is but a stone."  They went into the garden and
stirred up the white sand with their fingers, and behold, other
diamonds more beautiful than the first gleamed out of it.  So the
famous diamond beds of Golconda were discovered.  Had Ali Hafed been
content to remain at home, and dug in his own garden, instead of going
abroad in search for wealth, he would have been one of the richest men
in the world, for the entire farm abounded in the richest of gems.

You have your own special place and work.  Find it, fill it.  Scarcely
a boy or girl will read these lines but has much better opportunity to
win success than Garfield, Wilson, Franklin, Lincoln, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, Frances Willard, and thousands of others had.  But to succeed
you must be prepared to seize and improve the opportunity when it
comes.  Remember that four things come not back: the spoken word, the
sped arrow, the past life, and the neglected opportunity.

It is one of the paradoxes of civilization that the more opportunities
are utilized, the more new ones are thereby created.  New openings are
as easy to find as ever to those who do their best; although it is not
so easy as formerly to obtain great distinction in the old lines,
because the standard has advanced so much, and competition has so
greatly increased.  "The world is no longer clay," said Emerson, "but
rather iron in the hands of its workers, and men have got to hammer out
a place for themselves by steady and rugged blows."

Thousands of men have made fortunes out of trifles which others pass
by.  As the bee gets honey from the same flower from which the spider
gets poison, so some men will get a fortune out of the commonest and
meanest things, as scraps of leather, cotton waste, slag, iron filings,
from which others get only poverty and failure.  There is scarcely a
thing which contributes to the welfare and comfort of humanity,
scarcely an article of household furniture, a kitchen utensil, an
article of clothing or of food, that is not capable of an improvement
in which there may be a fortune.

Opportunities?  They are all around us.  Forces of nature plead to be
used in the service of man, as lightning for ages tried to attract his
attention to the great force of electricity, which would do his
drudgery and leave him to develop the God-given powers within him.
There is power lying latent everywhere waiting for the observant eye to
discover it.

First find out what the world needs and then supply the want.  An
invention to make smoke go the wrong way in a chimney might be a very
ingenious thing, but it would be of no use to humanity.  The patent
office at Washington is full of wonderful devices of ingenious
mechanism, but not one in hundreds is of use to the inventor or to the
world.  And yet how many families have been impoverished, and have
struggled for years amid want and woe, while the father has been
working on useless inventions.  A. T. Stewart, as a boy, lost
eighty-seven cents, when his capital was one dollar and a half, in
buying buttons and thread which shoppers did not call for.  After that
he made it a rule never to buy anything which the public did not want,
and so prospered.

An observing man, the eyelets of whose shoes pulled out, but who could
not afford to get another pair, said to himself, "I will make a
metallic lacing hook, which can be riveted into the leather."  He was
then so poor that he had to borrow a sickle to cut grass in front of
his hired tenement.  He became a very rich man.

An observing barber in Newark, N. J., thought he could make an
improvement on shears for cutting hair, invented clippers, and became
rich.  A Maine man was called in from the hayfield to wash clothes for
his invalid wife.  He had never realized what it was to wash before.
Finding the method slow and laborious, he invented the washing machine,
and made a fortune.  A man who was suffering terribly with toothache
felt sure there must be some way of filling teeth which would prevent
their aching and he invented the method of gold filling for teeth.

The great things of the world have not been done by men of large means.
Ericsson began the construction of the screw propellers in a bathroom.
The cotton-gin was first manufactured in a log cabin.  John Harrison,
the great inventor of the marine chronometer, began his career in the
loft of an old barn.  Parts of the first steamboat ever run in America
were set up in the vestry of a church in Philadelphia by Fitch.
McCormick began to make his famous reaper in a grist-mill.  The first
model dry-dock was made in an attic.  Clark, the founder of Clark
University of Worcester, Mass., began his great fortune by making toy
wagons in a horse shed.  Farquhar made umbrellas in his sitting-room,
with his daughter's help, until he sold enough to hire a loft.  Edison
began his experiments in a baggage car on the Grand Trunk Railroad when
a newsboy.

Michael Angelo found a piece of discarded Carrara marble among waste
rubbish beside a street in Florence, which some unskilful workman had
cut, hacked, spoiled, and thrown away.  No doubt many artists had
noticed the fine quality of the marble, and regretted that it should
have been spoiled.  But Michael Angelo still saw an angel in the ruin,
and with his chisel and mallet he called out from it one of the finest
pieces of statuary in Italy, the young David.

Patrick Henry was called a lazy boy, a good-for-nothing farmer, and he
failed as a merchant.  He was always dreaming of some far-off
greatness, and never thought he could be a hero among the corn and
tobacco and saddlebags of Virginia.  He studied law for six weeks; when
he put out his shingle.  People thought he would fail, but in his first
case he showed that he had a wonderful power of oratory.  It then first
dawned upon him that he could be a hero in Virginia.  From the time the
Stamp Act was passed and Henry was elected to the Virginia House of
Burgesses, and he had introduced his famous resolution against the
unjust taxation of the American colonies, he rose steadily until he
became one of the brilliant orators of America.  In one of his first
speeches upon this resolution he uttered these words, which were
prophetic of his power and courage: "Caesar had his Brutus, Charles the
First his Cromwell, and George the Third--may profit by their example.
If this be treason, make the most of it."

The great natural philosopher, Faraday, who was the son of a
blacksmith, wrote, when a young man, to Humphry Davy, asking for
employment at the Royal Institution.  Davy consulted a friend on the
matter.  "Here is a letter from a young man named Faraday; he has been
attending my lectures, and wants me to give him employment at the Royal
Institution--what can I do?"  "Do? put him to washing bottles; if he is
good for anything he will do it directly; if he refuses he is good for
nothing."  But the boy who could experiment in the attic of an
apothecary shop with an old pan and glass vials during every moment he
could snatch from his work saw an opportunity in washing bottles, which
led to a professorship at the Royal Academy at Woolwich.  Tyndall said
of this boy with no chance, "He is the greatest experimental
philosopher the world has ever seen."  He became the wonder of his age
in science.

There is a legend of an artist who long sought for a piece of
sandalwood, out of which to carve a Madonna.  He was about to give up
in despair, leaving the vision of his life unrealized, when in a dream
he was bidden to carve his Madonna from a block of oak wood which was
destined for the fire.  He obeyed, and produced a masterpiece from a
log of common firewood.  Many of us lose great opportunities in life by
waiting to find sandalwood for our carvings, when they really lie
hidden in the common logs that we burn.  One man goes through life
without seeing chances for doing anything great, while another close
beside him snatches from the same circumstances and privileges
opportunities for achieving grand results.

Opportunities?  They are everywhere.  "America is another name for
opportunities.  Our whole history appears like a last effort of divine
Providence in behalf of the human race."  Never before were there such
grand openings, such chances, such opportunities.  Especially is this
true for girls and young women.  A new era is dawning for them.
Hundreds of occupations and professions, which were closed to them only
a few years ago, are now inviting them to enter.

We can not all of us perhaps make great discoveries like Newton,
Faraday, Edison, and Thompson, or paint immortal pictures like an
Angelo or a Raphael.  But we can all of us make our lives sublime, by
_seizing common occasions and making them great_.  What chance had the
young girl, Grace Darling, to distinguish herself, living on those
barren lighthouse rocks alone with her aged parents?  But while her
brothers and sisters, who moved to the cities to win wealth and fame,
are not known to the world, she became more famous than a princess.
This poor girl did not need to go to London to see the nobility; they
came to the lighthouse to see her.  Right at home she had won fame
which the regal heirs might envy, and a name which will never perish
from the earth.  She did not wander away into dreamy distance for fame
and fortune, but did her best where duty had placed her.

If you want to get rich, study yourself and your own wants.  You will
find that millions have the same wants.  The safest business is always
connected with man's prime necessities.  He must have clothing and
dwelling; he must eat.  He wants comforts, facilities of all kinds for
pleasure, education, and culture.  Any man who can supply a great want
of humanity, improve any methods which men use, supply any demand of
comfort, or contribute in any way to their well-being, can make a
fortune.

    "The golden opportunity
  Is never offered twice; seize then the hour
  When Fortune smiles and Duty points the way."

  Why thus longing, thus forever sighing,
   For the far-off, unattained and dim,
  While the beautiful, all around thee lying
   Offers up its low, perpetual hymn?
      HARRIET WINSLOW.




CHAPTER VI

POSSIBILITIES IN SPARE MOMENTS

Dost thou love life?  Then do not squander time, for that is the stuff
life is made of.--FRANKLIN.

Eternity itself cannot restore the loss struck from the minute.--ANCIENT
POET.

_Periunt et imputantur_,--the hours perish and are laid to our
charge.--INSCRIPTION ON A DIAL AT OXFORD.

I wasted time, and now doth time waste me.--SHAKESPEARE.

Believe me when I tell you that thrift of time will repay you in after
life with a usury of profit beyond your most sanguine dreams, and that
waste of it will make you dwindle alike in intellectual and moral stature
beyond your darkest reckoning.--GLADSTONE.

Lost!  Somewhere between sunrise and sunset, two golden hours, each set
with sixty diamond minutes.  No reward is offered, for they are gone
forever.--HORACE MANN.


"What is the price of that book?" at length asked a man who had been
dawdling for an hour in the front store of Benjamin Franklin's newspaper
establishment.  "One dollar," replied the clerk.  "One dollar," echoed
the lounger; "can't you take less than that?"  "One dollar is the price,"
was the answer.

The would-be purchaser looked over the books on sale a while longer, and
then inquired: "Is Mr. Franklin in?"  "Yes," said the clerk, "he is very
busy in the press-room."  "Well, I want to see him," persisted the man.
The proprietor was called, and the stranger asked: "What is the lowest,
Mr. Franklin, that you can take for that book?"  "One dollar and a
quarter," was the prompt rejoinder.  "One dollar and a quarter!  Why,
your clerk asked me only a dollar just now."  "True," said Franklin, "and
I could have better afforded to take a dollar than to leave my work."

The man seemed surprised; but, wishing to end a parley of his own
seeking, he demanded: "Well, come now, tell me your lowest price for this
book."  "One dollar and a half," replied Franklin.  "A dollar and a half!
Why, you offered it yourself for a dollar and a quarter."  "Yes," said
Franklin coolly, "and I could better have taken that price then than a
dollar and a half now."

The man silently laid the money on the counter, took his book, and left
the store, having received a salutary lesson from a master in the art of
transmuting time, at will, into either wealth or wisdom.

Time-wasters are everywhere.

On the floor of the gold-working room, in the United States Mint at
Philadelphia, there is a wooden lattice-work which is taken up when the
floor is swept, and the fine particles of gold-dust, thousands of
dollars' yearly, are thus saved.  So every successful man has a kind of
network to catch "the raspings and parings of existence, those leavings
of days and wee bits of hours" which most people sweep into the waste of
life.  He who hoards and turns to account all odd minutes, half hours,
unexpected holidays, gaps "between times," and chasms of waiting for
unpunctual persons, achieves results which astonish those who have not
mastered this most valuable secret.

"All that I have accomplished, expect to, or hope to accomplish," said
Elihu Burritt, "has been and will be by that plodding, patient,
persevering process of accretion which builds the ant-heap--particle by
particle, thought by thought, fact by fact.  And if ever I was actuated
by ambition, its highest and warmest aspiration reached no further than
the hope to set before the young men of my country an example in
employing those invaluable fragments of time called moments."

"I have been wondering how Ned contrived to monopolize all the talents of
the family," said a brother, found in a brown study after listening to
one of Burke's speeches in Parliament; "but then I remember; when we were
at play, he was always at work."

The days come to us like friends in disguise, bringing priceless gifts
from an unseen hand; but, if we do not use them, they are borne silently
away, never to return.  Each successive morning new gifts are brought,
but if we failed to accept those that were brought yesterday and the day
before, we become less and less able to turn them to account, until the
ability to appreciate and utilize them is exhausted.  Wisely was it said
that lost wealth may be regained by industry and economy, lost knowledge
by study, lost health by temperance and medicine, but lost time is gone
forever.

"Oh, it's only five minutes or ten minutes till mealtime; there's no time
to do anything now," is one of the commonest expressions heard in the
family.  But what monuments have been built up by poor boys with no
chance, out of broken fragments of time which many of us throw away!  The
very hours you have wasted, if improved, might have insured your success.

Marion Harland has accomplished wonders, and she has been able to do this
by economizing the minutes to shape her novels and newspaper articles,
when her children were in bed and whenever she could get a spare minute.
Though she has done so much, yet all her life has been subject to
interruptions which would have discouraged most women from attempting
anything outside their regular family duties.  She has glorified the
commonplace as few other women have done.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, too,
wrote her great masterpiece, "Uncle Tom's Cabin," in the midst of
pressing household cares.  Beecher read Froude's "England" a little each
day while he had to wait for dinner.  Longfellow translated the "Inferno"
by snatches of ten minutes a day, while waiting for his coffee to boil,
persisting for years until the work was done.

Hugh Miller, while working hard as a stone-mason, found time to read
scientific books, and write the lessons learned from the blocks of stone
he handled.

Madame de Genlis, when companion of the future Queen of France, composed
several of her charming volumes while waiting for the princess to whom
she gave her daily lessons.  Burns wrote many of his most beautiful poems
while working on a farm.  The author of "Paradise Lost" was a teacher,
Secretary of the Commonwealth, Secretary of the Lord Protector, and had
to write his sublime poetry whenever he could snatch a few minutes from a
busy life.  John Stuart Mill did much of his best work as a writer while
a clerk in the East India House.  Galileo was a surgeon, yet to the
improvement of his spare moments the world owes some of its greatest
discoveries.

If a genius like Gladstone carried through life a little book in his
pocket lest an unexpected spare moment slip from his grasp, what should
we of common abilities not resort to, to save the precious moments from
oblivion?  What a rebuke is such a life to the thousands of young men and
women who throw away whole months and even years of that which the "Grand
Old Man" hoarded up even to the smallest fragments!  Many a great man has
snatched his reputation from odd bits of time which others, who wonder at
their failure to get on, throw away.  In Dante's time nearly every
literary man in Italy was a hard-working merchant, physician, statesman,
judge, or soldier.

While Michael Faraday was employed binding books, he devoted all his
leisure to experiments.  At one time he wrote to a friend, "Time is all I
require.  Oh, that I could purchase at a cheap rate some of our modern
gentlemen's spare hours--nay, days."

Oh, the power of ceaseless industry to perform miracles!

Alexander von Humboldt's days were so occupied with his business that he
had to pursue his scientific labors in the night or early morning, while
others were asleep.

One hour a day withdrawn from frivolous pursuits and profitably employed
would enable any man of ordinary capacity to master a complete science.
One hour a day would in ten years make an ignorant man a well-informed
man.  It would earn enough to pay for two daily and two weekly papers,
two leading magazines, and at least a dozen good books.  In an hour a day
a boy or girl could read twenty pages thoughtfully--over seven thousand
pages, or eighteen large volumes in a year.  An hour a day might make all
the difference between bare existence and useful, happy living.  An hour
a day might make--nay, has made--an unknown man a famous one, a useless
man a benefactor to his race.  Consider, then, the mighty possibilities
of two--four--yes, six hours a day that are, on the average, thrown away
by young men and women in the restless desire for fun and diversion!

Every young man should have a hobby to occupy his leisure hours,
something useful to which he can turn with delight.  It might be in line
with his work or otherwise, only _his heart must be in it_.

If one chooses wisely, the study, research, and occupation that a hobby
confers will broaden character and transform the home.

"He has nothing to prevent him but too much idleness, which, I have
observed," says Burke, "fills up a man's time much more completely and
leaves him less his own master, than any sort of employment whatsoever."

Some boys will pick up a good education in the odds and ends of time
which others carelessly throw away, as one man saves a fortune by small
economies which others disdain to practise.  What young man is too busy
to get an hour a day for self-improvement?  Charles C. Frost, the
celebrated shoemaker of Vermont, resolved to devote one hour a day to
study.  He became one of the most noted mathematicians in the United
States, and also gained an enviable reputation in other departments of
knowledge.  John Hunter, like Napoleon, allowed himself but four hours of
sleep.  It took Professor Owen ten years to arrange and classify the
specimens in Comparative Anatomy, over twenty-four thousand in number,
which Hunter's industry had collected.  What a record for a boy who began
his studies while working as a carpenter!

John Q. Adams complained bitterly when robbed of his time by those who
had no right to it.  An Italian scholar put over his door the
inscription: "Whoever tarries here must join in my labors."  Carlyle,
Tennyson, Browning, and Dickens signed a remonstrance against
organ-grinders who disturbed their work.

Many of the greatest men of history earned their fame outside of their
regular occupations in odd bits of time which most people squander.
Spenser made his reputation in his spare time while Secretary to the Lord
Deputy of Ireland.  Sir John Lubbock's fame rests on his prehistoric
studies, prosecuted outside of his busy banking-hours.  Southey, seldom
idle for a minute, wrote a hundred volumes.  Hawthorne's notebook shows
that he never let a chance thought or circumstance escape him.  Franklin
was a tireless worker.  He crowded his meals and sleep into as small
compass as possible so that he might gain time for study.  When a child,
he became impatient of his father's long grace at table, and asked him if
he could not say grace over a whole cask once for all, and save time.  He
wrote some of his best productions on shipboard, such as his "Improvement
of Navigation" and "Smoky Chimneys."

What a lesson there is in Raphael's brief thirty-seven years to those who
plead "no time" as an excuse for wasted lives!

Great men have ever been misers of moments.  Cicero said: "What others
give to public shows and entertainments, nay, even to mental and bodily
rest, I give to the study of philosophy."  Lord Bacon's fame springs from
the work of his leisure hours while Chancellor of England.  During an
interview with a great monarch, Goethe suddenly excused himself, went
into an adjoining room and wrote down a thought for his "Faust," lest it
should be forgotten.  Sir Humphry Davy achieved eminence in spare moments
in an attic of an apothecary's shop.  Pope would often rise in the night
to write out thoughts that would not come during the busy day.  Grote
wrote his matchless "History of Greece" during the hours of leisure
snatched from his duties as a banker.

George Stephenson seized the moments as though they were gold.  He
educated himself and did much of his best work during his spare moments.
He learned arithmetic during the night shifts when he was an engineer.
Mozart would not allow a moment to slip by unimproved.  He would not stop
his work long enough to sleep, and would sometimes write two whole nights
and a day without intermission.  He wrote his famous "Requiem" on his
death-bed.

Caesar said: "Under my tent in the fiercest struggle of war I have always
found time to think of many other things."  He was once shipwrecked, and
had to swim ashore; but he carried with him the manuscript of his
"Commentaries," upon which he was at work when the ship went down.

Dr. Mason Good translated "Lucretius" while riding to visit his patients
in London.  Dr. Darwin composed most of his works by writing his thoughts
on scraps of paper wherever he happened to be.  Watt learned chemistry
and mathematics while working at his trade of a mathematical
instrument-maker.  Henry Kirke White learned Greek while walking to and
from the lawyer's office where he was studying.  Dr. Burney learned
Italian and French on horseback.  Matthew Hale wrote his "Contemplations"
while traveling on his circuit as judge.

The present time is the raw material out of which we make whatever we
will.  Do not brood over the past, or dream of the future, but seize the
instant and _get your lesson from the hour_.  The man is yet unborn who
rightly measures and fully realizes the value of an hour.  As Fenelon
says, God never gives but one moment at a time, and does not give a
second until he withdraws the first.

Lord Brougham could not bear to lose a moment, yet he was so systematic
that he always seemed to have more leisure than many who did not
accomplish a tithe of what he did.  He achieved distinction in politics,
law, science, and literature.

Dr. Johnson wrote "Rasselas" in the evenings of a single week, in order
to meet the expenses of his mother's funeral.

Lincoln studied law during his spare hours while surveying, and learned
the common branches unaided while tending store.  Mrs. Somerville learned
botany and astronomy and wrote books while her neighbors were gossiping
and idling.  At eighty she published "Molecular and Microscopical
Science."

The worst of a lost hour is not so much in the wasted time as in the
wasted power.  Idleness rusts the nerves and makes the muscles creak.
Work has system, laziness has none.

President Quincy never went to bed until he had laid his plans for the
next day.

Dalton's industry was the passion of his life.  He made and recorded over
two hundred thousand meteorological observations.

In factories for making cloth a single broken thread ruins a whole web;
it is traced back to the girl who made the blunder and the loss is
deducted from her wages.  But who shall pay for the broken threads in
life's great web?  We cannot throw back and forth an empty shuttle;
threads of some kind follow every movement as we weave the web of our
fate.  It may be a shoddy thread of wasted hours or lost opportunities
that will mar the fabric and mortify the workman forever; or it may be a
golden thread which will add to its beauty and luster.  We cannot stop
the shuttle or pull out the unfortunate thread which stretches across the
fabric, a perpetual witness of our folly.

No one is anxious about a young man while he is busy in useful work.  But
where does he eat his lunch at noon?  Where does he go when he leaves his
boarding-house at night?  What does he do after supper?  Where does he
spend his Sundays and holidays?  The way he uses his spare moments
reveals his character.  The great majority of youths who go to the bad
are ruined after supper.  Most of those who climb upward to honor and
fame devote their evenings to study or work or the society of those who
can help and improve them.  Each evening is a crisis in the career of a
young man.  There is a deep significance in the lines of Whittier:--

  This day we fashion Destiny, our web of Fate we spin;
  This day for all hereafter choose we holiness or sin.


Time is money.  We should not be stingy or mean with it, but we should
not throw away an hour any more than we would throw away a dollar-bill.
Waste of time means waste of energy, waste of vitality, waste of
character in dissipation.  It means the waste of opportunities which will
never come back.  Beware how you kill time, for all your future lives in
it.

"And it is left for each," says Edward Everett, "by the cultivation of
every talent, by watching with an eagle's eye for every chance of
improvement, by redeeming time, defying temptation, and scorning sensual
pleasure, to make himself useful, honored, and happy."




CHAPTER VII

HOW POOR BOYS AND GIRLS GO TO COLLEGE

"Can I afford to go to college?" asks many an American youth who has
hardly a dollar to his name and who knows that a college course means
years of sacrifice and struggle.

It seems a great hardship, indeed, for a young man with an ambition to
do something in the world to be compelled to pay his own way through
school and college by hard work.  But history shows us that the men who
have led in the van of human progress have been, as a rule,
self-educated, self-made.

The average boy of to-day who wishes to obtain a liberal education has
a better chance by a hundredfold than had Daniel Webster or James A.
Garfield.  There is scarcely one in good health who reads these lines
but can be assured that if he will he may.  Here, as elsewhere, the
will can usually make the way, and never before was there so many
avenues of resource open to the strong will, the inflexible purpose, as
there are to-day--at this hour and this moment.

"Of the five thousand persons--students,--directly connected with
Harvard University," writes a graduate, "five hundred are students
entirely or almost entirely dependent upon their own resources.  They
are not a poverty-stricken lot, however, for half of them make an
income above the average allowance of boys in smaller colleges.  From
$700 to $1,000 are by no means exceptional yearly earnings of a student
who is capable of doing newspaper work or tutoring,--branches of
employment that pay well at Harvard.

"There are some men that make much more.  A classmate of the writer
entered college with about twenty-five dollars.  As a freshman he had a
hard struggle.  In his junior year, however, he prospered and in his
last ten months of undergraduate work he cleared above his college
expenses, which were none too low, upward of $3,000.

"He made his money by advertising schemes and other publishing
ventures.  A few months after graduation he married.  He is now living
comfortably in Cambridge."

A son of poor parents, living in Springfield, New York, worked his way
through an academy.  This only whetted his appetite for knowledge, and
he determined to advance, relying wholly on himself for success.
Accordingly, he proceeded to Schenectady, and arranged with a professor
of Union College to pay for his tuition by working.  He rented a small
room, which served for study and home, the expense of his
bread-and-milk diet never exceeding fifty cents a week.  After
graduation, he turned his attention to civil engineering, and, later,
to the construction of iron bridges of his own design.  He procured
many valuable patents, and amassed a fortune.  His life was a success,
the foundation being self-reliance and integrity.

Albert J. Beveridge, the junior United States Senator from Indiana,
entered college with no other capital than fifty dollars loaned to him
by a friend.  He served as steward of a college club, and added to his
original fund of fifty dollars by taking the freshman essay prize of
twenty-five dollars.  When summer came, he returned to work in the
harvest fields and broke the wheat-cutting records of the county.  He
carried his books with him morning, noon and night, and studied
persistently.  When he returned to college he began to be recognized as
an exceptional man.  He had shaped his course and worked to it.

The president of his class at Columbia University recently earned the
money to pay for his course by selling agricultural implements.  One of
his classmates, by the savings of two years' work as a farm laborer,
and money earned by tutoring, writing, and copying done after study
hours, not only paid his way through college, but helped to support his
aged parents.  He believed that he could afford a college training and
he got it.

At Chicago University many hundreds of plucky young men are working
their way.  The ways of earning money are various, depending upon the
opportunities for work, and the student's ability and adaptability.  To
be a correspondent of city daily papers is the most coveted occupation,
but only a few can obtain such positions.  Some dozen or more teach
night school.  Several teach in the public schools in the daytime, and
do their university work in the afternoons and evenings, so as to take
their degrees.  Scores carry daily papers, by which they earn two and
one-half to three and one-half dollars a week; but, as this does not
pay expenses, they add other employments.  A few find evening work in
the city library.  Some attend to lawns in summer and furnaces in
winter; by having several of each to care for, they earn from five to
ten dollars a week.  Many are waiters at clubs and restaurants.  Some
solicit advertisements.  The divinity students, after the first year,
preach in small towns.  Several are tutors.  Two young men made twelve
hundred dollars apiece, in this way, in one year.  One student is a
member of a city orchestra, earning twelve dollars a week.  A few serve
in the university postoffice, and receive twenty cents an hour.

A representative American college president recently said: "I regard it
as, on the whole, a distinct advantage that a student should have to
pay his own way in part as a condition of obtaining a college
education.  It gives a reality and vigor to one's work which is less
likely to be obtained by those who are carried through college.  I do
not regard it, however, as desirable that one should have to work his
own way entirely, as the tax upon strength and time is likely to be
such as to interfere with scholarship and to undermine health."

Circumstances have rarely favored great men.  A lowly beginning is no
bar to a great career.  The boy who works his way through college may
have a hard time of it, but he will learn how to work his way in life,
and will often take higher rank in school, and in after life, than his
classmate who is the son of a millionaire.  It is the son and daughter
of the farmer, the mechanic and the operative, the great average class
of our country, whose funds are small and opportunities few, that the
republic will depend on most for good citizenship and brains in the
future.  The problem of securing a good education, where means are
limited and time short, is of great importance both to the individual
and the nation.  Encouragement and useful hints are offered by the
experience of many bright young people who have worked their way to
diplomas worthily bestowed.

Gaius B. Frost was graduated at the Brattleboro, Vt., High School,
taught district schools six terms, and entered Dartmouth College with
just money enough to pay the first necessary expenses.  He worked in
gardens and as a janitor for some time.  During his course he taught
six terms as principal of a high school, and one year as assistant
superintendent in the Essex County Truant School, at Lawrence, Mass.,
pushed a rolling chair at the Columbian Exposition, Chicago, was porter
one season at Oak Hill House, Littleton, N. H., and canvassed for a
publishing house one summer in Maine.  None of his fellow-students did
more to secure an education.

Isaac J. Cox of Philadelphia worked his way through Kimball Academy,
Meriden, N. H., and through Dartmouth College, doing many kinds of
work.  There was no honest work within the limits of his ability that
he would not undertake to pay his way.  He served summers as waiter in
a White Mountain hotel, finally becoming head-waiter.  Like Mr. Frost,
he ranked well in his classes, and is a young man of solid character
and distinguished attainments.

For four years Richard Weil was noted as the great prize winner of
Columbia College, and for "turning his time, attention and energy to
any work that would bring remuneration."  He would do any honest work
that would bring cash,--and every cent of this money as well as every
hour not spent in sleep throughout the four years of his college course
was devoted to getting his education.

All these and many more from the ranks of the bright and well-trained
young men who have been graduated from the colleges and universities of
the country in recent years believed--sincerely, doggedly
believed--that a college training was something that they must have.
The question of whether or not they could afford it does not appear to
have occasioned much hesitancy on their part.  It is evident that they
did not for one instant think that they could not afford to go to
college.

In an investigation conducted to ascertain exact figures and facts
which a poor boy must meet in working his way through college, it was
found that, in a list of forty-five representative colleges and
universities, having a student population of somewhat over forty
thousand, the average expense per year is three hundred and four
dollars; the average maximum expense, five hundred and twenty-nine
dollars.  In some of the smaller colleges the minimum expense per year
is from seventy-five dollars to one hundred and ten dollars.  There are
many who get along on an expenditure of from one hundred and fifty
dollars to two hundred dollars per year, while the maximum expense
rises in but few instances above one thousand dollars.

In Western and Southern colleges the averages are lower.  For example,
eighteen well-known Western colleges and universities have a general
average expense of two hundred and forty-two dollars per year, while
fourteen as well-known Eastern institutions give an average expense of
four hundred and forty-four dollars.

Statistics of expense, and the opportunities for self-help, at some of
the best known Eastern institutions are full of interest:

Amherst makes a free gift of the tuition to prospective ministers; has
one hundred tuition scholarships for other students of good character,
habits, and standing; has some free rooms; makes loans at low rates;
students have chances to earn money at tutoring, table-waiting,
shorthand, care of buildings, newspaper correspondence, agencies for
laundries, sale of books, etc.  Five hundred dollars a year will defray
all necessary expenses.

Bowdoin has nearly a hundred scholarships, fifty dollars to
seventy-five dollars a year: "no limits placed on habits or social
privileges of recipients;" students getting employment in the library
or laboratories can earn about one-fourth of their expenses; these will
be, for the college year, three hundred dollars to four hundred dollars.

Brown University has over a hundred tuition scholarships and a loan
fund; often remits room rent in return for services about the college
buildings; requires studiousness and economy in the case of assisted
students.  Many students earn money in various ways.  The average
yearly expenditure is five hundred dollars.

The cost at Columbia University averages five hundred and forty-seven
dollars, the lowest being three hundred and eighty-seven dollars.  A
great many students who know how to get on in a great city work their
way through Columbia.

Cornell University gives free tuition and free rooms to seniors and
juniors of good standing in their studies and of good habits.  It has
thirty-six two-year scholarships (two hundred dollars), for freshmen,
won by success in competitive examination.  It has also five hundred
and twelve state tuition scholarships.  Many students support
themselves in part by waiting on table, by shorthand, newspaper work,
etc.  The average yearly expenditure per student is five hundred
dollars.

Dartmouth has some three hundred scholarships; those above fifty
dollars conditioned on class rank; some rooms at nominal rent;
requirements, economy and total abstinence; work of one sort or another
to be had by needy students; a few get through on less than two hundred
and fifty dollars a year; the average expenditure is about four hundred
dollars.

Harvard has about two hundred and seventy-five scholarships, sixty
dollars to four hundred dollars apiece, large beneficiary and loan
funds, distributed or loaned in sums of forty dollars to two hundred
and fifty dollars to needy and promising under-graduates; freshmen
(usually) barred; a faculty employment committee; some students earning
money as stenographers, typewriters, reporters, private tutors, clerks,
canvassers, and singers; yearly expenditure (exclusive of clothes,
washing, books, and stationery, laboratory charges, membership in
societies, subscriptions and service), three hundred and fifty-eight
dollars to one thousand and thirty-five dollars.

The University of Pennsylvania in a recent year gave three hundred and
fifteen students forty-three thousand, two hundred and forty-two
dollars in free scholarships and fellowships; no requirements except
good standing.  No money loaned, no free rooms.  Many students support
themselves in part, and a few wholly.  The average expenditure per
year, exclusive of clothes, railway fares, etc., is four hundred and
fifty dollars.

Wesleyan University remits tuition wholly or in part to two-thirds of
its under-graduates.  Loan funds are available.  "Beneficiaries must be
frugal in habits, total abstainers, and maintain good standing and
conduct."  Many students are self-supporting, thirty-five per cent of
the whole undergraduate body earning money.  The yearly expenditure is
three hundred and twenty-five dollars.

Yale is pretty well off now for fellowships and prizes; remits all but
forty dollars of term bills, in case of worthy students, regular in
attendance and studious; many such students earning money for
themselves; average yearly expenditure, about six hundred dollars.

There is a splendid chance for girls at some of the soundest and best
known girls' colleges in the United States.

The number of girls in the University of Michigan who are paying their
own way is large.  "Most of them," says Dr. Eliza M. Mosher, woman's
dean of the college, "have earned the money by teaching.  It is not
unusual for students to come here for two years and go away for a time,
in order to earn money to complete the course.  Some of our most worthy
graduates have done this.  Some lighten their expenses by waiting on
tables in boarding-houses, thus paying for their board.  Others get
room and board in the homes of professors by giving, daily, three hours
of service about the house.  A few take care of children, two or three
hours a day, in the families of the faculty.  One young woman, who is
especially brave and in good earnest, worked as a chambermaid on a lake
steamer last year and hurried away this year to do the same.  It is her
aim to earn one hundred dollars.  With this sum, and a chance to pay
for room and board by giving service, she will pay the coming year's
expenses.  Because it is especially difficult to obtain good servants
in this inland town, there are a few people who are glad to give the
college girls such employment."

"It is my opinion," said Miss Mary E. Woolley, president of Mount
Holyoke College, "that, if a girl with average intelligence and energy
wishes a college education, she can obtain it.  As far as I know, the
girls who have earned money to pay their way through college, at least
in part, have accomplished it by tutoring, typewriting or stenography.
Some of them earn pin-money while in college by tutoring, typewriting,
sewing, summer work in libraries and offices, and in various little
ways such as putting up lunches, taking care of rooms, executing
commissions, and newspaper work.  There are not many opportunities at
Mount Holyoke to earn large amounts of money, but pin-money may be
acquired in many little ways by a girl of ingenuity."

The system of compulsory domestic service obtaining now at Mount
Holyoke--whereby, in return for thirty, or at the most, fifty minutes a
day of light household labor, every student reduces her college
expenses by a hundred dollars or a hundred and fifty,--was formerly in
use at Wellesley; now, however, it is confined there to a few cottages.
It has no foothold at Bryn Mawr, Smith and Vassar, or at the affiliated
colleges, Barnard and Radcliffe.

At city colleges, like the last two mentioned, board and lodging cost
more than in the country; and in general it is more difficult for a
girl to pay any large part of her expenses through her own efforts and
carry on her college work at the same time.

A number of girls in Barnard are, however, paying for their clothes,
books, car fares, etc., by doing what work they can find.  Tutoring in
Barnard is seldom available for the undergraduates, because the lists
are always full of experienced teachers, who can be engaged by the
hour.  Typewriting is one of the favorite resources.  One student has
done particularly well as agent for a firm that makes college caps and
gowns.  Another girl, a Russian Jewess, from the lower East Side, New
York, runs a little "sweat shop," where she keeps a number of women
busy making women's wrappers and children's dresses.  She has paid all
the expenses of her education in this way.

"Do any of your students work their way through?" was asked of a Bryn
Mawr authority.

"Some,--to a certain extent," was the reply; "but not many.  The lowest
entire expenses of a year, are between four hundred and five hundred
and fifty dollars.  This amount includes positively everything.  Two
girls may pay part of their expenses by taking charge of the library,
and by selling stationery; another, by distributing the mail, and
others by 'tutoring'.  Those who 'tutor' receive a dollar, a dollar and
a half, and sometimes a very good one receives two dollars and a half,
a lesson.  But to earn all of one's way in a college year, and at the
same time to keep up in all the studies, is almost impossible, and is
not often done.  Yet several are able to pay half their way."

A similar question put to a Vassar student brought the following
response:

"Why, yes, I know a girl who has a sign on the door of her
room,--'Dresses pressed,'--and she earns a good deal of money, too.  Of
course, there are many wealthy girls here who are always having
something like that done, and who are willing to pay well for it.  And
so this girl makes a large sum of money, evenings and Saturdays.

"There are other girls who are agents for two of the great
manufacturers of chocolate creams.

"The girl that plays the piano for the exercises in the gymnasium is
paid for that, and some of the girls paint and make fancy articles,
which they sell here, or send to the stores in New York, to be sold.
Some of them write for the newspapers and magazines, too, and still
others have pupils in music, etc., in Poughkeepsie.  Yes, there are a
great many girls who manage to pay most of their expenses."

Typewriting, tutoring, assistance rendered in library or laboratory or
office, furnish help to many a girl who wishes to help herself, in
nearly every college.  Beside these standard employments, teaching in
evening schools occasionally offers a good opportunity for steady eking
out of means.

In many colleges there is opportunity for a girl with taste and cunning
fingers to act as a dressmaker, repairer, and general refurnisher to
students with generous allowances.  Orders for gymnasium suits and
swimming suits mean good profits.  The reign of the shirt-waist has
been a boon to many, for the well-dressed girl was never known to have
enough pretty ones, and by a judicious display of attractive samples
she is easily tempted to enlarge her supply.  Then, too, any girl who
is at all deft in the art of sewing can make a shirt-waist without a
professional knowledge of cutting and fitting.

No boy or girl in America to-day who has good health, good morals and
good grit need despair of getting a college education unless there are
extremely unusual reasons against the undertaking.

West of the Alleghanies a college education is accessible to all
classes.  In most of the state universities tuition is free.  In
Kansas, for example, board and a room can be had for twelve dollars a
month; the college fees are five dollars a year, while the average
expenditure of the students does not exceed two hundred dollars per
annum.  In Ohio, the state university has abolished all tuition fees;
and most of the denominational colleges demand fees even lower than
were customary in New England half a century ago.  Partly by reason of
the cheapness of a college education in Ohio, that state now sends more
students to college than all of New England.  Yet if the total cost is
less in the West, on the other hand, the opportunities for self-help
are correspondingly more in the East.  Every young man or woman should
weigh the matter well before concluding that a college education is out
of the question.

Former President Tucker of Dartmouth says: "The student who works his
way may do it with ease and profit; or he may be seriously handicapped
both by his necessities and the time he is obliged to bestow on outside
matters.  I have seen the sons of rich men lead in scholarship, and the
sons of poor men.  Poverty under most of the conditions in which we
find it in colleges is a spur.  Dartmouth College, I think, furnishes a
good example.  The greater part of its patronage is from poor men.
Without examining the statistics, I should say, from facts that have
fallen under my observation, that a larger percentage of Dartmouth men
have risen to distinction than those of almost any other American
college."

The opportunities of to-day are tenfold what they were half a century
ago.  Former President Schurman of Cornell says of his early life: "At
the age of thirteen I left home.  I hadn't definite plans as to my
future.  I merely wanted to get into a village, and to earn some money.

"My father got me a place in the nearest town,--Summerside,--a village
of about one thousand inhabitants.  For my first year's work I was to
receive thirty dollars and my board.  Think of that, young men of
to-day!  Thirty dollars a year for working from seven in the morning
until ten at night!  But I was glad to get the place.  It was a start
in the world, and the little village was like a city to my country eyes.

"From the time I began working in the store until to-day, I have always
supported myself, and during all the years of my boyhood I never
received a penny that I did not earn myself.  At the end of my first
year, I went to a larger store in the same town, where I was to receive
sixty dollars a year and my board.  My salary was doubled; I was
getting on swimmingly.

"I kept this place for two years, and then I gave it up, against the
wishes of my employer, because I had made up my mind that I wanted to
get a better education.  I determined to go to college.

"I did not know how I was going to do this, except that it must be by
my own efforts.  I had saved about eighty dollars from my
store-keeping, and that was all the money I had in the world.

"When I told my employer of my plan, he tried to dissuade me from it.
He pointed out the difficulties in the way of my going to college, and
offered to double my pay if I would stay in the store.

"That was the turning-point in my life.  In one side was the certainty
of one hundred and twenty dollars a year, and the prospect of promotion
as fast as I deserved it.  Remember what one hundred and twenty dollars
meant on Prince Edward Island, and to me, a poor boy who had never
possessed such a sum in his life.  On the other side was my hope of
obtaining an education.  I knew that it involved hard work and
self-denial, and there was the possibility of failure in the end.  But
my mind was made up.  I would not turn back.  I need not say that I do
not regret that early decision, although I think that I should have
made a successful storekeeper.

"With my capital of eighty dollars, I began to attend the village high
school, to get my preparation for college.  I had only one year to do
it in.  My money would not last longer than that.  I recited in Latin,
Greek, and algebra, all on the same day, and for the next forty weeks I
studied harder than I ever had before or have since.  At the end of the
year I entered the competitive examination for a scholarship in Prince
of Wales College, at Charlottetown, on the Island.  I had small hope of
winning it, my preparation had been so hasty and incomplete.  But when
the result was announced, I found that I had not only won the
scholarship from my county, but stood first of all the competitors on
the Island.

"The scholarship I had won amounted to only sixty dollars a year.  It
seems little enough, but I can say now, after nearly thirty years, that
the winning of it was the greatest success I ever have had.  I have had
other rewards, which, to most persons, would seem immeasurably greater,
but with this difference: that first success was essential; without it
I could not have gone on.  The others I could have done without, if it
had been necessary."

For two years young Schurman attended Prince of Wales College.  He
lived on his scholarship and what he could earn by keeping books for
one of the town storekeepers, spending less than one hundred dollars
during the entire college year.  Afterward, he taught a country school
for a year, and then went to Acadia College in Nova Scotia to complete
his course.

One of Mr. Schurman's fellow-students in Acadia says that he was
remarkable chiefly for taking every prize to which he was eligible.  In
his senior year, he learned of a scholarship in the University of
London offered for competition by the students of Canadian colleges.
The scholarship paid five hundred dollars a year for three years.  The
young student in Acadia was ambitious to continue his studies in
England, and saw in this offer his opportunity.  He tried the
examination and won the prize, in competition with the brightest
students in the larger Canadian colleges.

During the three years in the University of London, Mr. Schurman became
deeply interested in the study of philosophy, and decided that he had
found in it his life-work.  He was eager to go to Germany to study
under the great leaders of philosophic thought.  A way was opened for
him, through the offer of the Hibbard Society, in London, of a
traveling fellowship with two thousand dollars a year.  The honor men
of the great English Universities like Oxford and Cambridge were among
the competitors, but the poor country boy from Prince Edward Island was
again successful, greatly to the surprise of the others.

At the end of his course in Germany, Mr. Schurman, then a Doctor of
Philosophy, returned to Acadia College to become a teacher there.  Soon
afterward, he was called to Dalhousie University, at Halifax, Nova
Scotia.  In 1886, when a chair of philosophy was established at
Cornell, President White, who had once met the brilliant young
Canadian, called him to that position.  Two years later, Dr. Schurman
became dean of the Sage School of Philosophy at Cornell; and, in 1892,
when the president's chair became vacant, he was placed at the head of
the great university.  At that time he was only thirty-eight years of
age.

A well-known graduate of Amherst college gives the following figures,
which to the boy who earnestly wants to go to college are of the most
pertinent interest:

"I entered college with $8.42 in my pocket.  During the year I earned
$60; received from the college a scholarship of $60, and an additional
gift of $20; borrowed $190.  My current expenses during my freshman
year were $4.50 per week.  Besides this I spent $10.55 for books;
$23.45 for clothing; $10.57 for voluntary subscriptions; $15 for
railroad fares; $8.24 for sundries.

"During the next summer I earned $100.  I waited on table at a $4
boarding-house all of my sophomore year, and earned half board,
retaining my old room at $1 per week.  The expenses of the sophomore
year were $394.50.  I earned during the year, including board, $87.20;
received a scholarship of $70, and gifts amounting to $12.50, and
borrowed $150, with all of which I just covered expenses.

"In my junior year I engaged a nice furnished room at $60 per year,
which I agreed to pay for by work about the house.  By clerical work,
etc., I earned $37; also earned full board waiting upon table; received
$70 for a scholarship; $55 from gifts; borrowed $70, which squared my
accounts for the year, excepting $40 due on tuition.  The expenses for
the year, including, of course, the full value of board, room, and
tuition, were $478.76.

"During the following summer I earned $40.  Throughout the senior year
I retained the same room, under the same conditions as the previous
year.  I waited on table all the year, and received full board; earned
by clerical work, tutoring, etc., $40; borrowed $40; secured a
scholarship of $70; took a prize of $25; received a gift of $35.  The
expenses of the senior year, $496.64 were necessarily heavier than
these of previous years.  But having secured a good position as teacher
for the coming year, I was permitted to give my note for the amount I
could not raise, and so was enabled to graduate without financial
embarrassment.

"The total expense for the course was about $1,708; of which (counting
scholarships as earnings) I earned $1,157."

Twenty-five of the young men graduated at Yale not long ago paid their
way entirely throughout their courses.  It seemed as if they left
untried no avenue for earning money.  Tutoring, copying, newspaper
work, and positions as clerks were well-occupied fields; and painters,
drummers, founders, machinists, bicycle agents, and mail carriers were
numbered among the twenty-five.

In a certain district in Boston there are ten thousand students.  Many
of them come from the country and from factory towns.  A large number
come from the farms of the West.  Many of these students are paying for
their education by money earned by their own hands.  It is said that
unearned money does not enrich.  The money that a student earns for his
own education does enrich his life.  It is true gold.

Every young man or woman should weigh the matter well before concluding
that a college education is out of the question.

If Henry Wilson, working early and late on a farm with scarcely any
opportunities to go to school, bound out until he was twenty-one for
only a yoke of oxen and six sheep, could manage to read a thousand good
books before his time had expired; if the slave Frederick Douglass, on
a plantation where it was almost a crime to teach a slave to read,
could manage from scraps of paper, posters on barns, and old almanacs,
to learn the alphabet and lift himself to eminence; if the poor deaf
boy Kitto, who made shoes in an alms-house, could become the greatest
Biblical scholar of his age, where is the boy or girl to-day, under the
American flag, who cannot get a fair education and escape the many
disadvantages of ignorance?

"If a man empties his purse into his head," says Franklin, "no man can
take it away from him.  An investment in knowledge always pays the best
interest."





CHAPTER VIII

YOUR OPPORTUNITY CONFRONTS YOU--WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?

Never before was the opportunity of the educated man so great as
to-day.  Never before was there such a demand for the trained man, _the
man who can do a thing superbly well_.  At the door of every vocation
is a sign out, "Wanted--a man."  No matter how many millions are out of
employment, the whole world is hunting for a man who can do things; a
trained thinker who can do whatever he undertakes a little better than
it has ever before been done.  Everywhere it is the educated, the
trained man, the man whose natural ability has been enlarged, enhanced
one hundredfold by superior training, that is wanted.

On all sides we see men with small minds, but who are well educated,
pushing ahead of those who have greater capabilities, but who are only
half educated.  A one-talent man, superbly trained, often gets the
place when a man with many untrained or half-trained talents loses it.
Never was ignorance placed at such a disadvantage as to-day.

While the opportunities awaiting the educated man, the college
graduate, on his entrance into practical life were never before so
great and so numerous as to-day, so also the dangers and temptations
which beset him were never before so great, so numerous, so insidious.

All education which does not elevate, refine, and ennoble its recipient
is a curse instead of a blessing.  A liberal education only renders a
rascal more dishonest, more dangerous.  _Educated rascality is
infinitely more of a menace to society than ignorant rascality_.

Every year, thousands of young men and young women graduate full of
ambition and hope, full of expectancy, go out from the schools, the
colleges, and the universities, with their diplomas, to face for the
first time the practical world.

There is nothing else, perhaps, which the graduate needs to be
cautioned against more than the money madness which has seized the
American people, for nothing else is more fatal to the development of
the higher, finer instincts and nobler desires.

Wealth with us multiplies a man's power so tremendously that everything
gravitates toward it.  A man's genius, art, what he stands for, is
measured largely by how many dollars it will bring.  "How much can I
get for my picture?"  "How much royalty for my book?"  "How much can I
get out of my specialty, my profession, my business?"  "How can I make
the most money?" or "How can I get rich?" is the great interrogation of
the century.  How will the graduate, the trained young man or woman
answer it?

The dollar stands out so strongly in all the undertakings of life that
the ideal is often lowered or lost, the artistic suffers, the soul's
wings are weighted down with gold.  The commercial spirit tends to drag
everything down to its dead, sordid level.  It is the subtle menace
which threatens to poison the graduate's ambition.  _Whichever way you
turn, the dollar-mark will swing info your vision_.  The money-god,
which nearly everybody worships in some form or other, will tempt you
on every hand.

Never before was such pressure brought to bear on the trained youth to
sell his brains, to coin his ability into dollars, to prostitute his
education, as to-day.  The commercial prizes held up to him are so
dazzling, so astounding, that it takes a strong, vigorous character to
resist their temptation, even when the call in one to do something
which bears little relation to money-making speaks very loudly.

The song of the money-siren to-day is so persistent, so entrancing, so
overwhelming that it often drowns the still small voice which bids one
follow the call that runs in his blood, that is indicated in the very
structure in his brain.

Tens of thousands of young people just out of school and college stand
tiptoe on the threshold of active life, with high ideals and glorious
visions, full of hope and big with promise, but many of them will very
quickly catch the money contagion; the fatal germ will spread through
their whole natures, inoculating their ambition with its vicious virus,
and, after a few years, their fair college vision will fade, their
yearnings for something higher will gradually die and be replaced by
material, sordid, selfish ideals.

The most unfortunate day in a youth's career is that one on which his
ideals begin to grow dim and his high standards begin to drop; that day
on which is born in him the selfish, money-making germ, which so often
warps and wrenches the whole nature out of its legitimate orbit.

You will need to be constantly on your guard to resist the attack of
this germ.  After you graduate and go out into the world, powerful
influences will be operative in your life, tending to deteriorate your
standards, lower your ideals, and encoarsen you generally.

When you plunge into the swim of things, you will be constantly thrown
into contact with those of lower ideals, who are actuated only by
sordid, selfish aims.  Then dies the man, the woman in you, unless you
are made of superior stuff.

What a contrast that high and noble thing which the college diploma
stands for presents to that which many owners of the diploma stand for
a quarter of a century later!  It is often difficult to recognize any
relationship between the two.

American-Indian graduates, who are so transformed by the inspiring,
uplifting influences of the schools and colleges which are educating
them that they are scarcely recognizable by their own tribes when they
return home, very quickly begin to change under the deteriorating
influences operating upon them when they leave college.  They soon
begin to shed their polish, their fine manners, their improved
language, and general culture; the Indian blanket replaces their modern
dress, and they gradually drift back into their former barbarism.  They
become Indians again.

The influences that will surround you when you leave college or your
special training school will be as potent to drag you down as those
that cause the young Indian to revert to barbarism.  The shock you will
receive in dropping from the atmosphere of high ideals and beautiful
promise in which you have lived for four years to that of a very
practical, cold, sordid materiality will be a severe test to your
character, your manhood.

But the graduate whose training, whose education counts for anything
ought to be able to resist the shock, to withstand all temptations.

The educated man ought to be able to do something better, something
higher than merely to put money in his purse.  Money-making can not
compare with man-making.  There is something infinitely better than to
be a millionaire of money, and that is to be a millionaire of brains,
of culture, of helpfulness to one's fellows, a millionaire of
character--a gentleman.

Whatever degrees you carry from school or college, whatever distinction
you may acquire in your career, no title will ever mean quite so much,
will ever be quite so noble, as that of gentleman.

"A keen and sure sense of honor," says Ex-President Eliot, of Harvard
University, "is the finest result of college life."  The graduate who
has not acquired this keen and sure sense of honor, this thing that
stamps the gentleman, misses the best thing that a college education
can impart.

Your future, fortunate graduate, like a great block of pure white
marble, stands untouched before you.  You hold the chisel and
mallet--your ability, your education--in your hands.  There is
something in the block for you, and it lives in your ideal.  Shall it
be angel or devil?  What are your ideals, as you stand tiptoe on the
threshold of active life?  Will you smite the block and shatter it into
an unshapely or hideous piece; or will you call out a statue of
usefulness, of grace and beauty, a statue which will tell the unborn
generations the story of a noble life?

Great advantages bring great responsibilities.  You can not divorce
them.  A liberal education greatly increases a man's obligations.
There is coupled with it a responsibility which you can not shirk
without paying the penalty in a shriveled soul, a stunted mentality, a
warped conscience, and a narrow field of usefulness.  It is more of a
disgrace for a college graduate to grovel, to stoop to mean, low
practises, than for a man who has not had a liberal education.  The
educated man has gotten a glimpse of power, of grander things, and he
is expected to look up, not down, to aspire, not to grovel.

We cannot help feeling that it is worse for a man to go wrong who has
had all the benefits of a liberal education, than it is for one who has
not had glimpses of higher things, who has not had similar advantages,
because where much is given, much is expected.  The world has a right
to expect that wherever there is an educated, trained man people should
be able to say of him as Lincoln said of Walt Whitman, "There goes a
man."

The world has a right to expect that the graduate, having once faced
the light and felt its power, will not turn his back on it; that he
will not disgrace his _alma mater_ which has given him his superior
chance in life and opened wide for him the door of opportunity.  It has
a right to expect that a man who has learned how to use skilfully the
tools of life, will be an artist and not an artisan; that he will not
stop growing.  Society has a right to look to the collegian to be a
refining, uplifting force in his community, an inspiration to those who
have not had his priceless chance; it is justified in expecting that he
will raise the standard of intelligence in his community; that he will
illustrate in his personality, his finer culture, the possible glory of
life.  It has a right to expect that he will not be a victim of the
narrowing, cramping influence of avarice; that he will not be a slave
of the dollar or stoop to a greedy, grasping career: that he will be
free from the sordidness which often characterizes the rich ignoramus.

If you have the ability and have been given superior opportunities, it
simply means that you have a great commission to do something out of
the ordinary for your fellows; a special message for humanity.

If the torch of learning has been put in your hand, its significance is
that you should light up the way for the less fortunate.

If you have received a message which carries freedom for people
enslaved by ignorance and bigotry, you have no right to suppress it.
Your education means an increased obligation to live your life up to
the level of your gift, your superior opportunity.  Your duty is to
deliver your message to the world with all the manliness, vigor, and
force you possess.

What shall we think of a man who has been endowed with godlike gifts,
who has had the inestimable advantage of a liberal education, who has
ability to ameliorate the hard conditions of his fellows, to help to
emancipate them from ignorance and drudgery; what shall we think of
this man, so divinely endowed, so superbly equipped, who, instead of
using his education to lift his fellow men, uses it to demoralize, to
drag them down; who employs his talents in the book he writes, in the
picture he paints, in his business, whatever it may be, to mislead, to
demoralize, to debauch; who uses his light as a decoy to lure his
fellows on the rocks and reefs, instead of as a beacon to guide them
into port?

We imprison the burglar for breaking into our houses and stealing, but
what shall we do with the educated rascal who uses his trained mind and
all his gifts to ruin the very people who look up to him as a guide?

"The greatest thing you can do is to be what you ought to be."

A great man has said that no man will be content to live a half life
when he has once discovered it is a half life, because the other half,
the higher half, will haunt him.  Your superior training has given you
a glimpse of the higher life.  Never lose sight of your college vision.
Do not permit yourself to be influenced by the maxims of a low, sordid
prudence, which will be dinned into your ears wherever you go.  Regard
the very suggestion that you shall coin your education, your high
ideals into dollars; that you lower your standards, prostitute your
education by the practise of low-down, sordid methods, as an insult.

Say to yourself, "_If the highest thing in me will not bring success,
surely the lowest, the worst, cannot._"

The mission of the trained man is to show the world a higher, finer
type of manhood.

The world has a right to expect better results from the work of the
educated man; something finer, of a higher grade, and better quality,
than from the man who lacks early training, the man who has discovered
only a small part of himself.  "Pretty good," "Fairly good," applied
either to character or to work are bad mottoes for an educated man.
You should be able to demonstrate that the man with a diploma has
learned to use the tools of life skilfully; has learned how to focus
his faculties so that he can bring the whole man to his task, and not a
part of himself.  Low ideals, slipshod work, aimless, systemless,
half-hearted endeavors, should have no place in your program.

It is a disgrace for a man with a liberal education to botch his work,
demoralize his ideals, discredit his teachers, dishonor the institution
which has given him his chance to be a superior man.

"Keep your eye on the model, don't watch your hands," is the injunction
of a great master as he walks up and down among his pupils, criticizing
their work.  The trouble with most of us is that we do not keep our
eyes on the model; we lose our earlier vision.  A liberal education
ought to broaden a man's mind so that he will be able to keep his eye
always on the model, the perfect ideal of his work, uninfluenced by the
thousand and one petty annoyances, bickerings, misunderstandings, and
discords which destroy much of the efficiency of narrower, less
cultivated minds.

The graduate ought to be able to rise above these things so that he can
use all his brain power and energy and fling the weight of his entire
being into work that is worth while.

After the withdrawal of a play that has been only a short time on the
stage, we often read this comment, "An artistic success, but a
financial failure."  While an education should develop all that is
highest and best in a man, it should also make him a practical man, not
a financial failure.  Be sure that you possess your knowledge, that
your knowledge does not possess you.

The mere possession of a diploma will only hold you up to ridicule,
will only make you more conspicuous as a failure, if you cannot bring
your education to a focus and utilize it in a practical way.

_Knowledge is power only when it can be made available, practical_.

Only what you can use of your education will benefit you or the world.

The great question which confronts you in the practical world is "What
can you do with what you know?"  Can you transmute your knowledge into
power?  Your ability to read your Latin diploma is not a test of true
education; a stuffed memory does not make an educated man.  The
knowledge that can be utilized, that can be translated into power,
constitutes the only education worthy of the name.  There are thousands
of college-bred men in this country, who are loaded down with knowledge
that they have never been able to utilize, to make available for
working purposes.  There is a great difference between absorbing
knowledge, making a sponge of one's brain, and transmuting every bit of
knowledge into power, into working capital.

As the silkworm transmutes the mulberry leaf into satin, so you should
transmute your knowledge into practical wisdom.

There is no situation in life in which the beneficent influence of a
well-assimilated education will not make itself felt.

The college man _ought_ to be a superb figure anywhere.  The
consciousness of being well educated should put one at ease in any
society.  The knowledge that one's mentality has been broadened out by
college training, that one has discovered his possibilities, not only
adds wonderfully to one's happiness, but also increases one's
self-confidence immeasurably, and _self-confidence is the lever that
moves the world_.  On every hand we see men of good ability who feel
crippled all their lives and are often mortified, by having to confess,
by the poverty of their language, their sordid ideals, their narrow
outlook on life, that they are not educated.  The superbly trained man
can go through the world with his head up and feel conscious that he is
not likely to play the ignoramus in any company, or be mortified or
pained by ignorance of matters which every well-informed person is
supposed to know.  This assurance of knowledge multiplies
self-confidence and gives infinite satisfaction.

In other words, a liberal education makes a man think a little more of
himself, feel a little surer of himself, have more faith in himself,
because he has discovered himself.  There is also great satisfaction in
the knowledge that one has not neglected the unfoldment and expansion
of his mind, that he has not let the impressionable years of youth go
by unimproved.

But the best thing you carry from your _alma mater_ is not what you
there prized most, not your knowledge of the sciences, languages,
literature, art; it is something infinitely more sacred, of greater
value than all these, and that is _your aroused ambition, your
discovery of yourself, of your powers, of your possibilities; your
resolution to be a little more of a man, to play a manly part in life,
to do the greatest, grandest thing possible to you_.  This will mean
infinitely more to you than all you have learned from books or lectures.

The most precious thing of all, however, if you have made the most of
your chance, is the uplift, encouragement, inspira

Showing first 200,000 characters. Full text: gutenberg.org/ebooks/21291