The Young Man and the World

Collis P. Huntington was a notable practical success. He was wise with the hard wisdom of the world, and he had the genius of the great captain for choosing men. No business general ever selected his lieutenants with more accurate judgment. His opinion on men and affairs was always worth while. And he thought young men who meant to do anything except in the learned professions wasted time by going to college.

So when, searching for my final answer to the question this moment being asked by so many young Americans, "Shall I go to college," I answer in the affirmative, I do so admitting that a negative answer has been given by men whose opinions are entitled to the greatest possible respect.

I admit, too, that nearly every city-yes, almost every town-contains conspicuous illustrations of men who learned how to "get there" by attending the school of hard knocks. Certainly some of the most distinguished business careers in New York have been made by young men who never saw a college.

You find the same thing in every town. I have a man in mind whose performances in business have been as solid as they are astonishing. Twenty years ago he was a street-car conductor; to-day he controls large properties in which he is himself a heavy owner; and a dozen graduates of the high-class universities of Europe and America beg the crums that fall from the table of his affairs.

In his Phi Beta Kappa Address Wendell Phillips cleverly argues that the reformers of the world, and most of those whose memories are the beloved and cherished treasures of the race, were men whose vitality had not been reduced by college training, and whose kinship with the people and oneness with the soil had not been divorced by the artificial refinement of a college life. But Phillips was bitter-even fanatical-on this subject; and was, in himself, a living denial of his own doctrine.

Remember, then, you who for any reason have not had those years of mental discipline called "a college education," that this does not excuse you from doing great work in the world. Do not whine, and declare that you could have done so much better if you had "only had a chance to go to college." You can be a success if you will, college or no college. At least three of those famous masters of business which Chicago, the commercial capital of the continent, has given to the world, and whose legitimate operations in tangible merchandizing are so vast that they are almost weird, had no college education, and very little education of any kind.

I think, indeed, that very few of America's kings of trade ever attended college. There are the masters of railroad management, too. Few of them have been college men, although the college man is now appearing among them-witness President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania System, a real Napoleon of railroading, who, I hear, is a graduate of the German universities and of American polytechnic schools.

Burns did not go to college. Neither did Shakespeare.

Some of our greatest lawyers "read law" in the unrefined but honest and strengthening environment of the old-time law office. Lincoln was not a college man; neither was Washington. So do not excuse yourself to your family and the world upon the ground that you never had a college education. That is not the reason why you fail.

You can succeed-I repeat it-college or no college; all you have to do in the latter case is to put on a little more steam. And remember that some of the world's sages of the practical have closed their life's wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind.

You see, I am trying to take into account every possible view of this weighty question; for I know how desperate a matter it is to hundreds of thousands of my young countrymen. I know how earnestly they are searching for an answer; how hard it will be for hosts of them to obey an affirmative answer; how intense is the desire of the great majority of young Americans to decide this question wisely. For most of them have no time to lose, little money to spend and none to waste, no energy to spare, and yet are inspired with high resolve to make the best and most of life. And I know how devoutly they pray that, in deciding, they may choose the better part.

Still, with all this in mind, my advice is this: Go to college. Go to the best possible college for you. Patiently hold on through the sternest discipline you can stand, until the course is completed. It will not be fatal to your success if you do not go; but you will be better prepared to meet the world if you do go. I do not mean that your mind will be stored with much more knowledge that will be useful to you if you go through college than if you do not go through college.

Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in college, acquires more information that will be "useful" to him in his practical career. But the college man who has not thrown away his college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman.

Nobody contends that a college adds an ounce of brain power. But if college opportunities are not wasted, such mind as the student does have is developed up to the highest possible point of efficiency. The college man who has not scorned his work will understand any given situation a great deal quicker than his brother who, with equal ability, has not had the training of the university.

A man who has been instructed in boxing is more than a match for a stronger and braver man unskilled in what is called the "manly art." That is your college and non-college man over again with muscle substituted for brain.

Five years ago I saw the soldiers of Japan going through the most careful training. They were taught how to march, how to charge, how to do everything. I shall never forget the bayonet exercises which an officer and myself chanced upon. They were conducted with all the ferocity of a real fight; no point was neglected.

With all their fatalism and the utter fearlessness thereof, the Japanese could not have bested the Russians if to their courage and devotion they had not added years of painstaking drill, which an American soldier would have considered an unnecessary hardship. Very well. A college education is precisely that kind of a preparation for the warfare of life.

But mind you, these Japanese soldiers and their officers were in earnest. They meant to show the world that, small as they are in stature and recent as their adoption of modern methods has been, they nevertheless would try to be the highest type of soldier that ever marched to a battle-field. If you go to college, young man, you have got to be in earnest, too. You have got to say to yourself, "I am going to make more out of what is in me than any man with like ability ever did before." You cannot dawdle-remember that.

Imagine every day, and every hour of every day, that you are in the real world and in the real conflicts thereof, instead of in college with its practise conflicts, and handle yourself precisely as you would if your whole career depended upon each task set for you. If you mean to go to college for the principal purpose of idling around, wearing a small cap and good clothes, and being the adoration of your mother and your sisters on your vacation, you had a good deal better be at work at some gainful occupation. College is not helping you if that is what you are doing. It is hurting you.

Go to college, therefore, say I; but go to college for business. Those drill years are the most important ones of your life.

Be in earnest, therefore. I know I have said that before; yes, and I am going to say it again. For if you are not going to be in earnest, quit-get out. Resolve to get absolutely everything there is to be had out of your college experience, and then get it. Get it, I say, for that is what you will have to do. Nobody is going to give it to you.

The spirit with which you enter college is just as important as going to college at all. It is more important. For if a man has the spirit that will get for him all that a college education has to give, it will also make him triumph in a contest with the world, even if he does not get his college education. It will only be a little harder for him, that is all.

But if a man has not that mingled will and wish for a college education flaming through his young veins that makes him capable of any sacrifice to get through college, I do not see what good a college education will do him-no, nor any other kind of an education. The quicker such a man is compelled to make his own living without help from any source, the better for him.

So if you mean business, but have not decided whether it is better for you to go to college or not to go to college, settle the question to-day by deciding to go to college. Then pick your college. That is as important a matter as choosing your occupation in life. One college is not as good as another for you. A score of colleges may be equally excellent in the ability of their faculties, in the perfection of their equipment.

But each has its own atmosphere and traditions; each has its personality, if you may apply such a word to an institution. And you want to select the place where your mental roots will strike in the earth most readily, and take from the intellectual soil surrounding you the greatest possible amount of mental force and vigor.

Take plenty of time to find out which, out of a score of colleges, is the best one for you. Study their "catalogues"; talk to men who have been to these various institutions; read every reputable article you can find about them. Keep this up long enough, and you will become conscious of an unreasoned knowledge that such and such an institution is not the place for you to go. Finally, write to the president or other proper officer of the colleges you are thinking of attending.

You will get some sort of an answer from each of them; but if it is only three lines, that answer will breathe something of the spirit of the institution. Of course the great universities will answer you very formally, or perhaps not at all. Their attitude is the impersonal one. They say to the world, and to the youth thereof: "Here we are. We are perfectly prepared. We have on hand a complete stock of education. Take it, or leave it. It is not of the slightest concern to us."

I have no quarrel with that attitude. These institutions are going on the assumption that you already have character and purpose; that you already know what you are about. They are ready for you if you are ready for them. And if you are not ready for them, if you are only a rich person or a mere stroller along the highways of life, what is that to them? Why should it be anything to them? Why should it be anything to anybody? The world is busy, young man; you have got to make yourself worth while if it pays any attention to you.

Making sure always that the college of your choice is well equipped, select the one where you will feel the most at home. Other things being equal, go where there are the most men in whose blood burns the fire which is racing through your veins. Go to the college in whose atmosphere you will find most of the ozone of earnestness. It may well be that you will find this thing in one of the smaller colleges, of which there are so many and such excellent ones scattered all over the Nation.

Certainly these little colleges have this advantage: their students are usually very poor boys, who have to struggle and deny themselves to go to college at all-young men whose determination to do their part in the world is so great that hunger is a small price to pay for that preparation which they think a college education gives them; men whose resolve to "make something of themselves," as the common saying goes, is so irresistible that they simply cannot endure to stay away from college.

Such men have hard muscles, made strong and tense by youthful toil; great lungs, expanded by plow in field or ax in forest; nerves of steel, tempered by days of labor in open air and nights of dreamless slumber, which these hypnotics of Nature always induce. These men have strong, firm mouths; clear, honest eyes, that look you straight and fair; and a mental and moral constitution which fit these physical manifestations of it.

And these are just the kind of men among whom you ought to spend your college life, if you are one of the same kind-and perhaps much more if you are not.

Fellows like these believe in the honor of men, the virtue of women, the sacredness of home, and that the American people have a mission in the world marked out for them by the Ruler of the Universe-though this is not a fair distinction since all Americans believe in these high, sweet things of life and destiny. It is a faith common to all Americans and monopolized by no class.

But you know what kind of a man you are, and therefore you will find out, if you search with care, what college is the best for you. I insist upon the importance of this selection. It is a real, practical problem. You will never have a more important task set you in class-room, or even throughout your entire life, than to select the college which is going to do you the most good. So go about it with all the care that you would plan a campaign if you were a general in the field, or conduct an experiment if you were a scientist in the laboratory.

This one word of definite helpfulness on this subject: Do not choose any particular college because you want to be known as a Yale man, a Harvard man, a Princeton man, or any other kind of man. Remember that the world cares less than the snap of its fingers what particular college man you are.

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

It won't help you a bit in the business of your life to have it known that you graduated from any particular college or university. If you are in politics, it won't give you a vote; if a manufacturer, it will not add a brick to your plant; if a merchant, it will not sell a dollar's worth of your goods.

Nobody cares what college you went to. Nobody cares whether you went to college at all.

But everybody cares whether you are a real force among men; and everybody cares more and more as it becomes clearer and clearer that you are not only a force, but a trained, disciplined force. That is why you ought to go to college-to be a trained, disciplined force. But how and where you got your power-the world of men and women is far too interested in itself to be interested in that.

When you do finally go to college, take care of yourself like a man. I am told that there are men in college who have valets to attend them, their rooms, and their clothes. Think of that! Don't do anything like that, even if you are a hundred times a millionaire. Of course you won't-you who read this-because not one out of ten thousand young Americans can afford to have a valet in college-thank heaven!

Don't do any of the many things which belong to that life of self-indulgence of which the keeping of a valet in college is a flaring illustration. Don't let kind friends litter up your room with a lot of cushions, and such stuff. The world for which you are preparing is no "cushiony" place, let me tell you; and if you let luxury relax your nerves and soften your brain tissues and make your muscles mushy, a similar mental and moral condition will develop. And then, when you go out into real life, you will find some sturdy young barbarian, with a Spartan training and a merciless heart, elbowing you clear off the earth.

For, mark you, these strong, fearless, masterful young giants, who are every day maturing among the common people of America, ask no quarter and give none; and it is such fellows you must go up against. And when you do go up against them there will be no appealing to father and mother to help you. Father and mother cannot help you. Nobody can help you but yourself. You will find that the cushion business, and the mandolin business, and all that sort of thing, do not go in real life.

Consider West Point and Annapolis. My understanding is that the men whom the Nation is training there for the skilled defense of the Republic, and who therefore must be developed into the very highest types of effective manhood, are taught to clean and polish their own shoes, make their own beds, care for their own guns, and do everything else for themselves. Do you think that is a good training for our generals and admirals? Of course you do.

Well, then, do you imagine that you are going to have an easier time in your business or profession than the officers in our army and navy? Don't you believe it for a minute. You are not going to have an easier time than they. You are going to have a great deal harder time. And by "hard time" I do not mean an unhappy time. Unhappy time! What greater joy can there be for a man than the sheer felicity of doing real work in the world?

While I am on this subject I might as well say another thing: Do not think that you have got to smoke in order to be or look like a college man. A pipe in the mouth of a youth does not make him look like a college man, or any other kind of man. It merely makes him look absurd, that is all. And if there is ever a time on earth when you do not need the stimulus of tobacco, it is while you are in college.

Tobacco is a wonderful vegetable. It is, I believe, the only substance in the world which is at the same time a stimulant and a narcotic, a heart excitant and a nerve sedative. Very well. You are too young yet to need a heart stimulant, too young to need anything to quiet your nerves.

If at your tender age your nerves are so inflamed that they must be soothed, and if at the very sunrise of your life your heart is so feeble that it must be forced with any stimulant, you had better quit college. College is no place for you if you are such a decadent; yes, and you will find the world a good deal harder place than college.

Cut out tobacco, therefore. For a young fellow in college it is a ridiculous affectation-nothing more. Why? Because you do not need tobacco; that is why. At least you do not need it yet. The time may come when you will find tobacco helpful, but it will not be until you have been a long while out of college. As to whether tobacco is good for a man at any stage of life the doctors disagree, and "where doctors disagree, who shall decide?"

Ruskin says that no really immortal work has been done in the world since tobacco was introduced; but we know that this is not true. I would not be understood as having a prejudice for or against the weed. Whether a full-grown man shall use it or not is something for himself to decide. Personally I liked it so well that I made up my mind a long time ago to give it up altogether.

But there is absolutely no excuse for a man young enough to still be in college to use it at all. And it does not look right. For a boy to use tobacco has something contemptible about it. I will not argue whether this is justified or not. That is the way most people feel about it. Whether their feeling is a prejudice or not, there is no use of your needlessly offending their prejudice. And this is to be taken into account. For you want to succeed, do you not? Very well. You cannot mount a ladder of air; you must rise on the solid stepping-stones of the people's deserved regard.

And, of course, you will not disgrace yourself by drinking. There is absolutely nothing in it. If you have your fling at it you will learn how surely Intoxication's apples of gold turn to the bitterest ashes in the eating. But when you do find how fruitless of everything but regrets dissipation is, be honest with yourself and quit it. Be honest with the mother who is at home praying for you, and quit it. But this is weak advice. Be honest with that mother who is at home praying for you, and never begin it. That's the thing-never begin it!

In a word, be a man; and you will be very little of a man, very little indeed, if you have got to resort to tobacco and liquor to add to your blood and conduct that touch of devilishness which you may think is a necessary part of manliness. Indeed, between fifteen and thirty years of age your veins will be quite full enough of the untamed and desperate. I do not object in the least to this wild mustang period in a man's life.

Is a fellow to have no fun? you will say. Of course, have all the fun you want; the more the better. But if you need stimulants and tobacco to key you up to the capacity for fun, you are a solemn person indeed-"solemn as cholera morbus" to appropriate an American newspaper's description of one of our public men. What I mean is that you shall do nothing that will destroy your effectiveness. Play, sports, fun, do not do that; they increase your effectiveness. Go in for athletics all you please; but do not forget that that is not why you are going to college.

Nobody cares how mad are the pranks you play. Take the curb and snaffle off of the humors of your blood whenever you please; that is all right. I never took much stock in the outcry against hazing. We cannot change our sex, or the nature and habits of it. A young man is a male animal after all, and those who object to his rioting like a young bull are in a perpetual quarrel with Nature.

One thing I must warn you against, and warn you supremely: the critical habit of mind which somehow or other a college education does seem to produce. This is especially true of the great universities of our East. Nobody admires those splendid institutions more than I do-the Nation is proud of them, and ought to be. The world of learning admires them, and with reason. Neither the English, Scotch, nor German universities surpass them.

But has not every one of us many times heard their graduates declare that a mischief had been done them while in those universities by the cultivation of a sneering attitude toward everybody-especially toward every other young man-whom they see doing anything actual, positive, or constructive. One of the best of these men-a man with a superb mind highly trained-said to me on this very subject:

"I confess that I came out of college with my initiative atrophied. I was afraid to do anything. I was afraid I would make a mistake if I did anything; afraid I was not well enough equipped to do the things that suggested themselves; afraid that if I did try to do anything everybody would criticize what I did; afraid that my old college mates would laugh at me.

"And I confess in humility that I myself acquired the habit of intellectual suspicion toward everybody who does try to do any real thing. I find myself unconsciously sneering at young men who are accomplishing things. Yes, and that is not the worst of it; I find myself sneering at myself." That is pathos-a soul doubting, denying itself. Pathos! yes, it is tragedy!

Confirm this confession by dropping into a club where such men gather and hearing the talk about the ones who are doing things in the world. You will find that until the men who are doing things have actually done them, done them well, and forced hostility itself to accept what they have done as good, honest pieces of work, the talk in these clubs will be that of harsh criticism, sneering contempt, and prophecy of failure. Guard against that habit night and day. You would better become an opium-eater than to permit this paralysis of mind and soul.

Believe in things. Believe in other young men. When you see other young men trying to do things in business, politics, art, the professions, believe in the honesty of their purpose and their ability to do well what they have started out to do. Assume that they will succeed until they prove that they cannot. Do not discourage them. Do not sneer at them. That will only weaken yourself. Believe in other young men, and you will soon find yourself believing in yourself.

That is the most important thing of all: Belief in yourself. Have faith in yourself though the whole universe jeers. "Trust thyself; every heart vibrates to that iron string," is the sentence from Emerson we used to write endlessly in our copy-books when we went to school. And what a glorious motto for Americans it is!

Remember that the high places, now filled by men whom the years are aging, must by and by be filled by men now young. Be in no haste then-the years are your allies. Time will dispose of your rivals. Just believe in yourself, and work and wait and dare-and keep on working, waiting, daring. Never let up; and never doubt your ultimate success. Think of Columbus, Drake, Magellan-the story of every master-mariner has in it food for your necessary egotism.

Do not underestimate your strength. There are things you would like to do; very well, sail in and do them. Do not be afraid of making a mistake. Do not be afraid that you will fail. Suppose you do fail. Millions have failed before you. I am repeating this thought and I wish it would bear repetition on every page.

But never admit to yourself that you have failed. Try it again. You will win next time, sure! "If at first you don't succeed, try, try again." How much sense there is in these common maxims of the common people, proverbs not written by any one man, but axioms that spring out of the combined intelligence of the millions, meditating through the centuries. The sayings of the people are always simple and wise.

What a fine thing it was that Grant said at Shiloh. The first day closed in disaster. The enemy had all but driven the Union Army into the river. Not a great distance from the banks of the stream they will point out to you the tree under which Grant stood, cigar clinched between his teeth, directing the disposition of his forces. Some one reported to him a fresh disaster.

With the calmness of the certainty that nobody could defeat him, so the story runs, Grant replied, "Never mind; I will lick them to-morrow." Very like C?sar, was it not? "I came, I saw, I conquered." Or that other audacity of the great Roman, when the ship was actually sinking: "Fear not," said he; "fear not, you carry C?sar and his fortunes."

In the same battle it is credibly reported that Grant rode to an important position held by a large number of his troops under one of his most trusted generals. "What have you been doing?" asked Grant. "Fighting," answered the commander in charge of that position, equally laconic. For a while Grant surveyed the field, and, turning, was about to ride away. "But what shall I do now, General?" asked his subordinate. "Keep on fighting," answered Grant.

Do not get into the habit of feeling that you are not sufficiently well equipped. This comes of a very honest intellectual process-the understanding, as we get more knowledge, of how very little we really know; as we get more skill, of how very unskilled we really are; the feeling that, high as our training is, there is some one else more highly trained. Of course there is; but if that is any excuse why you should do nothing-because there is some person who can do it better-you will never do anything; and then what will happen when all of the other fellows who "could do it better" die?

You will by that time be too old to do anything at all. So sail in yourself, and pat on the back every other young fellow that sails in. If you learn the law, for example, understand that the way to acquire the art of practising law is to practise it, and not merely watch somebody else practise it. Suppose every young man with a scientific mind had declined to make any experiment because there were abler scientists than he: how many Pasteurs and Finsens and Marconis and Edisons and Bells would the world have had? And I might go on for an hour with similar illustrations.

So go ahead and try to do things you would like to do-things Nature has fitted you to do. Believe that you can do these things. For you can, you know. You will be amazed at your own powers. If you do not believe in yourself, how do you expect the world to believe in you? The world has no time to pet and coddle you, remember that. So get the habit of faith in yourself and your fellow men. Cultivate a noble intellectual generosity. It is a fine tonic for mind and soul-a fine tonic even for the body.

The doctors say that envy, malice, jealousy, produce a distinctly depressing effect upon the nervous system. And some go so far as to say that if intense enough these states of mind actually poison the secretions. Don't, therefore, let these hyena passions abide with you. Be generous. Have faith. Make mistakes or achieve success; fail or win; but do things. Share the common lot. Be hearty. Be whole-souled. Be a man. Never doubt for a moment that

"God's in his heaven;

All's well with the world."

This paper has been devoted to your mental and moral attitude toward your college and your college life, rather than to what particular things you will study there; for the way you look at your college and the life you lead there-the spirit with which you enter upon these golden years-is the main thing. The studies themselves are the methods by which you apply that spirit and purpose.

But most young men with whom I have talked want to know what "courses" to take, what "studies" to specialize upon. No general counsel can be given which will be very valuable to you upon this point. But I will venture this: Do not choose entirely by yourself what things you will study in college, or what "courses" you will "elect."

You are so apt to pick the things that are easiest for you, and not the things that are best for you. Even the strongest-willed men quite unconsciously select those things that will mean the least work. You do not think you are selecting certain courses or studies for this reason, and perhaps you are not; but then, again, perhaps you are, and you cannot yourself determine that.

Therefore I suggest that you advise with four or five of the ablest and most successful men you know. Let two of these be educators, and the others professional or business men. Try to get them to interest themselves enough in you to take the time to think the whole subject over very carefully as applied to your particular case, and to take further time to talk it over thoroughly with you. Then take the consensus of their opinion, unless your own view is decided, clear, and emphatic.

When you have such an opinion of your own, such a command coming from the sources of your own mentality, obey that, in choosing your studies and course, rather than the counsel of any other man or number of men. Yes, obey that voice in making such a choice, and in making every choice throughout your whole life; for it is the voice of your real self-that inward counselor which never fails those who are fortunate enough to have it.

Of course, what you study ought to be influenced by what you intend to do in life. For example, the career of civil engineer requires a special kind of preparation. So do the various occupations and professions. But no matter what particular thing you intend to do through life, it is the belief of most men who have given this subject any thought that a young man ought to take a complete general college course, and supplement this by special preparation for the particular work to which he intends to devote his life.

But there is one thing to which the attention of young Americans should be directed as influencing their college life. Our country is no longer isolated. We can no longer be called a provincial people. We are decidedly a very intimate part of the world. Our relations with other peoples grow closer and closer, and they will keep on growing closer as the years pass by. A thousand Americans travel over sea to-day where one went abroad fifty years ago. Our foreign commerce is now greater in a single year than it used to be in an entire decade-yes, and quite recently, too, so swift our increase.

Other countries are several times nearer to us than they were even in the last generation. It took Emerson almost a month to cross the Atlantic. Now you go over in a week. You can send a cablegram to any country in the world and have it delivered, translated into the language of the person to whom it is sent, a great deal quicker than the dawn can travel. Invention has made snail-like the speed of light.

What does all this mean? It means that in our relations we have become cosmopolitan. Therefore we Americans ought to know other languages than our own. Charles Sumner said that if he had to go through college again he would study nothing but modern languages and history. Of course I do not presume to advise you who are reading this paper to do that, although it is precisely what I should do if I were going through college again. But I do advise you to do this: Acquire at least two languages in addition to your own-French and German.

Indeed, you ought to have three languages besides your own-French, German, and Spanish. For, consider! Here is Mexico, our next-door neighbor-its people speak Spanish; Cuba, a kind of national ward of ours-its people speak Spanish. The people of our possessions in the Pacific speak Spanish; of Porto Rico, Spanish; of the Central and South American "Republics"-with all of whom we are destined, in spite of ourselves, to have relations of ever-increasing intimacy-all speak Spanish.

And French? You can travel all over Europe intelligently if you speak French. And German-the language that is going to make a good race with English itself as the commercial language of the world is German. For example, you can go all through commercial Russia without a guide if you speak German. You can get along in any port of the Orient if you speak German. So you can if you speak English, it is true. And think of how many millions of excellent people in our own country are still German-speaking (although our German citizens are so splendidly patriotic that they acquire English just as soon as they possibly can).

But the point is, that your usefulness in every direction will be increased by a knowledge of the languages. The other things that you study in college you will largely forget, anyhow; and, besides, you study them principally for the mental discipline in them. But if you get a language, and get it correctly, thoroughly, you can find enough use for it to keep brushed up on it. And of course you can read it all the time, whether you have a chance to talk it or not.

It is impossible to use words sufficiently emphatic in urging the study of history. You cannot get too much history in college and out of it. Sir William Hamilton was right-history is the study of studies. The man who occupies the chair of history in any college ought to be not only an able man, he ought to be a great man. If ever you find such a professor, make yourself agreeable to him, absorb him, possess yourself of him.

This final word: Mingle with your fellow students. Talk with people, with real people; those who are living real lives, doing real things under normal and natural conditions. Do all this in order that you may keep human; for you must not get the habit of keeping to your room and believing that all wisdom is confined to books. It is not. All wisdom is not confined to any one place. Some of it is in books, and some of it is in trees and the earth and the stars.

But so far as you are concerned most of it is in human touch with your fellows; for it is men with whom you must work. It is men who are to employ you. It is men whom in your turn you are to employ. It is the world of men which in the end you are to serve. And it is that you may serve it well that you are going to college at all, is it not?

Be one of these men, therefore; and be sure that while you are being one of them, you are one indeed. Be a man in college and out, and clear down to the end. Be a man-that is the sum of all counsel.

But what of the young man who stands without the college gates? What of him upon whom Fate has locked the doors of this arsenal of power and life's equipment? "Why does not some one give counsel and encouragement to the boy who, for any one of a thousand reasons, cannot take four years or four months from his life of continuous toil in order to go to college?" asked a young man full of the vitality of purpose, but to whom even the education of our high schools was an absolute impossibility.

After all, for most of our eighty millions, the college is practically beyond their reach. Even among those young men who have the nerve, ability, and ambition to "work their way through college," there are tens of thousands who cannot do even that, no matter if they were willing for four years to toil at sawbuck, live on gruel, and dress in overalls and hickory shirt.

I have in mind now a spirited young American of this class whose father died when his son was still a boy, and on whose shoulders, therefore, fell the duty of "supporting mother" and helping the girls, even before his young manhood had begun. For that young man, college or university might just as well be Jupiter, or Saturn, or Arcturus.

Very well. What of this young man? What of the myriads of young Americans like him? What hope does our complex industrial civilization, which every day grows more intense, hold out to these children of hard circumstances, whose muscles daily strain at the windlasses of necessary duty?

I repeat the question, and multiply the forms in which I put it. It is so pressingly important. It concerns the most abundant and valuable material with which free institutions work-the neglected man, he whom fortune overlooks. It is a strange weakness of human nature that makes everybody interested in the man at the top, and nobody interested in the man at the bottom. Yet it is the man at the bottom upon whom our Republican institutions are established. It is the man at the bottom whom Science tells us will, by the irresistible processes of nature, produce the highest types after a while.

The young Bonaparte proved himself a very wizard of human nature when he exclaimed: "Every soldier of France carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack." And did not the Master, with a wisdom wholly divine, choose as the seed-bearers of our faith throughout the world the neglected men? Only one of the apostles was what we would term to-day a "college man"-St. Luke, the physician. What said the Teacher, "The stone which was rejected to the builder, has become the chief of the corner."

Yes-the neglected man is the important man. We do not think so day by day, we idle observers of our Vanity Fair, we curbstone watchers of the street parade. We think it is the conspicuous man who counts. Our attention is mostly for him who wears the epaulettes of prominence and favorable condition. Therefore most articles, papers, and volumes on young men consider only that lucky favorite-of-fortune-for-the-hour, the college man.

But this paper is addressed to the neglected man. I would have speech with those young men with stout heart, true intention, and good ability, who labor outside those college walls to which they look with longing, but may not enter.

"Every soldier of France carries a marshal's baton in his knapsack." Ah, yes! Very well. But what was a soldier of France in Napoleon's time to a young American to-day? If Joubert, from an ignorant private who could not write his name, became one of the greatest generals of the world's greatest commander, what may you not become! Joubert did it by deserving. Use the same method, you. There is no magic but merit.

First, then, do not let the conditions that keep you out of college discourage you. If such a little thing as that depresses you, it is proof that you are not the character who would have succeeded if you had a lifetime of college education. If you are discouraged because you cannot go to college, what will happen to you when life hereafter presents to you much harder situations? Remember that every strong man who prevails in the merciless contest with events, faces conditions which to weaker men seem inaccessible-are inaccessible.

But it is the scaling of these heights, or the tunneling through them, or the blasting of them out of their way and out of existence, which makes these strong men strong. It is the overcoming of these obstacles day after day and year after year, as long as life lasts, which gives these mighty ones much of their power.

What is it you so admire in men whom you think fortunate-what is it but their mastery of adversity after adversity? What is that which you call success but victory over untoward events? Do not, then, let your resolution be softened by the hard luck that keeps you out of college. If that bends you, you are not a Damascus blade of tempered steel; you are a sword of lead, heavy, dull, and yielding.

Next to Collis P. Huntington, the railroad man of the last generation, whose ability rose to genius, was President Scott of the Pennsylvania System. He thought, with Mr. Huntington, that a college training was unnecessary; and his own life demonstrated that the very ultimate of achieving, the very crest of effort and reward may be reached by men who know neither Greek nor Latin, nor Science as taught in schools, nor mental philosophy as set down in books.

Colonel Scott was a messenger-boy-just such a messenger-boy as you may see any day running errands, carrying parcels, doing the humble duties of one who serves and waits. From a messenger-boy with bundle in his hand, to the general of an industrial army of thousands of men, and the directing mind planning the expenditure of scores of millions of dollars belonging to great capitalists-such was the career of Thomas Scott.

Very well, why should you not do as well? "Because my competitors have college education and I have not," do you answer? But, man, Colonel Scott had no college education. "Because the other fellows have friends and influence and I have none," do you protest? But neither President Scott nor most monumental successes had friends or influence to start with. Don't excuse yourself, then. Come! Buck up! Be a man!

"I am greatly troubled," said to me the general superintendent of one of the most extensive railroad systems in the world as we rode from Des Moines, Iowa, to Chicago. "I am greatly troubled," said he, "to find an assistant superintendent. There are now under me seven young engineers, every man a graduate of a college; four of them with uncommon ability, and all of them relatives of men heavily interested in this network of railroads. But not one of them will do. Three nights ago all of them happened to meet in Chicago. While there all of them went out to have what they called 'a good time' together-drinking, etc.

"That, in itself, is enough to blacklist every man for the position of my assistant and my successor. This road will not entrust its operating management to a man who wilfully makes himself less than his best every day and every night. Besides this, each of them has some defect. One is brilliant, but not steady; another is steady, but not resourceful-not inventive-and so forth and so on. We are looking all over the United States for the young man who has the ability, character, health, and habits which my assistant must have."

This general superintendent, under whose orders more than ten thousand men daily performed their complex and delicately adjusted functions, is fifty-five years of age. Now listen to this, you who cannot go to college: This man started thirty-eight years ago as a freight-handler in Chicago at one dollar per day for this same railroad company, which was then a comparatively small and obscure line. Ah! but you say, "That was thirty-eight years ago." Yes, and that is the trouble with you, is it not? You want to start in as superintendent of a great system or the head of a mighty business, do you not? Very well-get that out of your head. It cannot-it ought not-to be done.

If you are willing to work as hard as this man worked, as hard as President Scott of the Pennsylvania System worked; if you are willing to stay right by your job, year in, year out, through the weary decades, instead of changing every thirty minutes; if you are willing to wait as long as they; if you are willing to plant the seed of success in the soil of good hard work, and then water it with good hard work, and attend its growth with good hard work, and wait its flowering and fruitage with patience, its flowering and fruitage will come. Doubt it not.

For, mark you, this man at the time he told me that his System was looking all over the United States for a young man capable of being his assistant, had seven high-grade college men on his hands at that very moment. He would have been more than delighted to have taken any one of them.

Also, he would have taken a man who had not seen a college just as quickly if he could have found such a one who knew enough about operating a railroad, and had the qualities of leadership, the gift of organizing ability. It did not matter to this superintendent whether the assistant he sought had been to college or not, whether he was rich or poor.

He cared no more about that than he cared whether the man for whom this place was seeking was a blond or a brunette. The only question that he was asking was, "Where is the man who is equal to the job?"

And that, my young friend, is the question which all industry is asking in every field of human effort; that is the question your Fate is putting to you who are anxious to do big work, "Are you equal to the job?" If you are not, then be honest enough to step out of the contest. Be honest enough not to envy the other young men who are equal to the job.

Yes, be honest enough to applaud the man who is equal to the job and who goes bravely to his task. Don't find fault with him. Don't swear that "There is no chance for a young man any more." That's not true, you know. And remember always that if you do all you are fitted for, you do as well as your abler brother, and better than he if you do your best and he does not.

A young man whom fortune had kept from college, but who is too stout-hearted to let that discourage him, said to me the other day: "I don't think that a college education confers, or the absence of it prevents, success. But I do think that where there are two men of equal health, ability, and character, that one will be chosen who has been to college, and to this extent the college man has a better chance." This is true for the ordinary man-the man who is willing to put forth no more than the ordinary effort.

But you who read-you are willing to put forth extraordinary effort, are you not? You are willing to show these favored sons of cap and gown that you will run as fast and as far as they, with all their training, will you not? You are willing-yes, and determined, to use every extra hour which your college brother, thinking he has the advantage of you, will probably waste.

Very well. If you do, biography (that most inspiring of all literature) demonstrates that your reward will be as rich as the college man's reward. Yes, richer, for the gold which your refinery purges from the dross of your disadvantages will be doubly refined by the fires of your intenser effort.

In 1847 two men were born who have blessed mankind with productive work which, rich as are now its benefits to the race, will create a new wealth of human helpfulness with each succeeding year as long as time endures. Both these men have lived, almost to a day, the same number of years; both of them are still alive; both of them have labored in neighboring sections of the same field. They are alike, too, in character, almost duplicates in ability. Here, then, is material for a perfect comparison.

Mark, now, the parallel. One of them was a college man, the son of a noted educator and himself a professor in the University of Boston. He used the gifts which God gave him for that purpose, and as long as the transmission of human speech continues among men, the name of Alexander Graham Bell will be rightly honored by all the world.

The other of these men could no more have gone to college than he could have crossed the Atlantic on a sheet of paper. You who read this never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy. Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was and is. But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used himself?

At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway. That didn't satisfy him. The mystery of the telegraph (and what is more mysterious?) constantly called him. The click of the instrument was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.

And so Thomas A. Edison, without a dollar or a friend, set himself to work to master the telegraph and to explore the mysteries behind it. Result: the duplex telegraph and the developments from that; the phonograph, the incandescent electric light, and those numerous inventions which, one after another, have confounded the bigotry and ignorance of the world.

Edison and Bell, Bell and Edison, one a college man and the other a laborer without the gates, unlike in preparation but similar in character, devotion, and ability, and equal winners of honor and reward at the hands of a just if doubting world.

Of course I might go on all day with illustrations like this. History is brilliant with the names of those who have wrought gloriously without a college training. These men, too, have succeeded in every possible line of work. They are among the living, too, as well as among those whose earthly careers have ended.

The men who never went to college have not only built great railroads, but also have written immortal words; not only have they been great editors, but also they have created vast industries, and piled mountain high their golden fortunes; not only have they made epoch-making discoveries in science, but they have set down in words of music a poetry whose truth and sweetness makes nobler human character and finer the life's work of all who read those sentences of light.

Among the fathers who established this Government, the greatest never went to college. Hamilton was not a college man. Washington, to this day the first of Americans, never even attended school after he was sixteen years old. Of the great founders of modern journalism-the four extraordinary men whom their profession to this day refers to as the great journalists-only one was a college graduate-Raymond, who established the New York Times. Charles A. Dana, who made the New York Sun the most quoted newspaper of his generation, was not a college graduate. William Cullen Bryant, who gave to the New York Evening Post a peculiar distinction and preeminence, went to college only one year.

Samuel Bowles, who founded the Springfield Republican and made its influence felt for righteousness throughout the Nation, attended a private institution for a while. James Gordon Bennett, the editor whose resourceful mind sent Stanley to the heart of African jungles to find Livingstone, was never a college student.

Horace Greeley, that amazing mind and character, who created the New York Tribune, and who, through it, for many years exercised more power over public opinion than any other single influence in the Republic, never went to college; and Greeley's famous saying, "Of all horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate," remained for a quarter of a century a standing maxim in the editorial rooms of all the big newspapers of the country.

Stevenson, who invented the steam-engine, was not a college man. He was the son of a fireman in one of the English collieries. As a boy, he was himself a laborer in the mines. Undoubtedly the greatest engineer America has yet produced was Captain Eades, whose fame was world wide; yet this Indiana boy, who constructed the jetties of the Mississippi, built the ship railroad across the Isthmus of Panama and other like wonders, never had a day's instruction in any higher institution of learning than the common schools of Dearborn County. Ericsson, who invented the Monitor, and whose creative genius revolutionized naval warfare, was a Swedish immigrant. Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat, never went to college.

And take literature: John Bunyan was not only uneducated, but actually ignorant. If Milton went to college, I repeat that Shakespeare had no other alma mater than the university of human nature, and that Robert Burns was not a college man. Our own Washington Irving never saw the inside of any higher institution of learning. I have already noted that the author of "Thanatopsis" went to college for only a single year.

Among the writers, Lew Wallace, soldier, diplomat, and author, was self-educated. John Stuart Mill, who is distinguished as a philosopher, is innocent of a college training. James Whitcomb Riley, our American Burns, is not a "college man." Hugh Miller, the Scotchman, whose fame as a geologist is known to all the world of science, did not go to college.

Take statesmanship. Henry Clay wrested his education from books, experience, and downright hard thinking; and we Americans still like to tell of the immortal Lincoln poring over the pages of his few and hard-won volumes before the glare of the wood-fire on the hearth, or the uncertain light of the tallow dip. Benjamin Franklin got his education in a print-shop.

In American productive industry, the most conspicuous name, undoubtedly, is that of Andrew Carnegie; yet this great ironmaster, and master of gold as well, who has written as vigorously as he has wrought, was a Scotch immigrant. George Peabody, the philanthropist, never was inside a college as a student. He was a clerk when he was eleven years old.

At least three of the most astonishing though legitimate business successes which have been made in the last decade in New York were made by men not yet forty-five years old, none of whom had any other education than our common schools. I am not sure, but I will hazard the guess that a majority of the great business men of Chicago never saw a college.

These illustrations occur to the mind as I write, and without special selection. Doubtless, the entire space of this paper might be occupied by nothing more than the names of men who have blessed the race and become historic successes in every possible department of human industry, none of whom ever saw the inside of either college or university.

But all of these do not prove that you ought not to go to college if you can. Certainly you ought to go to college if it is possible. But the lives of these men do prove that no matter how hard the conditions that you think surround you, success is yours in spite of them, if you are willing to pay the price of success-if you are willing to work and wait; if you are willing to be patient, to keep sweet, to maintain fresh and strong your faith in God, your fellow men, and in yourself.

The life of any one of the men whom I have mentioned is not only an inspiration but an instruction to you who, like these men, cannot go to college. Consider, for example, how Samuel B. Raymond established the New York Times. He wrote his own editorials; he did his own reporting; he set his own type; he distributed his own papers. That was the beginning.

One of the most successful merchants that I know opened a little store in the midst of large and pretentious mercantile establishments. He bought his own goods; he was his own clerk; he swept and dusted his own storeroom, and polished his own show-cases. He was up at five in the morning, and he worked to twelve and one at night, and then slept on the counter. That was less than thirty years ago. To-day he is at the head of the largest department store in one of the considerable cities of this country, and he owns his store.

This is an illustration so common that every country town, as well as London, Paris, and New York, can show examples like it. And, mark you, most of these men were weighted down with responsibilities as great as yours can possibly be, and hindered by obstacles as numerous and difficult as those which you have confronting you.

Yet they succeeded brilliantly. The world rewarded them as richly as any graduate of any university who went to his life's work from the very head of his class. For you know this, don't you, that the world hands down success to any man who pays the price. Very well, the price is not a college education. The price is effectiveness, and the college is valuable only as it helps you to be effective.

Here is a true picture of our earthly work and its rewards: Behind a counter stands the salesman, Fortune, with just but merciless scales. On the shelves this Merchant of Destiny has both failure and success, in measure large and small. Every man steps up to this counter and purchases what he receives and receives what he purchases. And when he buys success he pays for it in the crimson coin of his life's blood.

This is a sinister illustration, I know, but it is the truth, and the truth is what you are after, is it not? You can do about what you will within the compass of your abilities; but you accomplish all your achievings with heart-beats. This is a rule which has no exceptions, and applies with equal force to the man who goes to college and to him who cannot go. What is that that some poet says about the successful man:

"... Who while others slept

Was climbing upward through the night."

So do not let the fact that you cannot go to college excuse yourself to yourself for being a failure. Do not say, "I have no chance because I am not a college man," and blame the world for its injustice. What Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself. No whimper should come from a masculine throat.

A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not to succeed-and he will not succeed. Indeed, how do you know that these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character. Certainly that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your normal level. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is our pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.

"What do you raise on these shaly hills?" I asked one time of that ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut. "Manhood," answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive ability, and dauntless courage.

The very effort required to live in these ungenerous surroundings, the absolute necessity to make every blow tell, to preserve every fragment of value; the perpetual exercise of the inventive faculty, thus making the intellect more productive by the continuous and creative use of it-all these develop those powers of mind and heart which through all history have distinguished the inhabitants of such countries as Switzerland and New England. "And so," said Connecticut's great senator, "these rocky hills produce manhood."

Apply this to your own circumstance, you who cannot go to college because you must "support the family," or have inherited a debt which your honor compels you to pay, or any one of those unhappy conditions which fortune has laid on your young shoulders.

Most men with wealth, friends, and influence accept them as a matter of course. Not many young men who are happily situated at the beginning, employ the opportunities which are at their hand. They don't understand their value. Having "influence" to help them, they usually rely on this artificial aid-seldom upon themselves. Having friends, they depend upon these allies rather than upon the ordered, drilled, disciplined troops of their own powers and capabilities. Having money, they do not see as vividly the necessity of toiling to make more.

"What's the use of my working; father did enough of that for our family," wittily said one of these young men. Having the training of the best universities very much as they have their food and clothing, these men are too apt to be blind to the greater skill this equipment gives them, and thus to neglect the using of it.

And so, young man-you who cannot go to college, you who are without friends and "influence"-your brother born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and trained by tutors, finished by professors, and clothed with all the "advantages," has not such a great start of you after all. For you are without friends to begin with. You have not inherited comrades and kindred hearts. You have inherited aloneness and solitude.

Very well, you must depend on yourself, then. If you have the right kind of stuff in you, you will make every ohm of your force do something for you. You will see to it that there is no wasted energy. You will economize every instant of your time, for you will understand, in the wise language of the common people, that "time is money"; and that is something, mind you, which the heir of wealth with whom you are competing does not understand at all. You know what an advantage your competitor, who is a college man, has of you; and this knowledge of yours, coupled with your college competitor's possible lack of it, turns his advantage over you into your advantage over him.

It is like a man who has a dozen shots for his rifle against another who has a hundred. The first will make every shot bring down his game, because he knows he must make every shot tell; he cannot waste a cartridge. But he of abundant ammunition fires without certain aim, and so wastes his treasure of shells until for the actual purposes of fruitful marksmanship he has not as many cartridges left as the man who started with fewer. Also his aim is not so accurate.

Or use an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of crops, differential fertilizing, and the like, would have been laughed at by the farmer, heedless in the richness of his acres.

But the German farmer on his sandy soil could take no such risks. Every vestige of fertility that skill, science, and economy could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of the Mississippi Valley.

So what you have got to do, young man who cannot go to college, is to develop yourself with the most vigorous care. Take your reading, for example. Choose your books with an eye single to their helpfulness. Let all your reading be for the strengthening of your understanding, the increase of your knowledge.

Your more fortunate competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, daily accumulating useful material.

And when you read, make what you read yours. Think about it. Absorb it. Make it a part of your mental being. Far more important than this, make every thought you read in books, every fact which the author furnishes you, the seed for new thoughts of your own. Remember that no fact in the universe stands by itself, but that every fact is related to every other fact. Trace out the connection of truth with truth, and you will soon confront that most amazing and important of all truths, the correlation of all force, all thought, all matter.

And thus, too will your mind acquire a trained and systematic strength which is the chief purpose of all the training which college and university give. For, mind you, the principal purpose of going to college is not to acquire knowledge. That is only secondary. The chief reason for a college education is the making of a trained mind and the building of a sound character.

These suggestions as to reading apply to everything else: to men, business, society, life. Because you must compete with the college men, you cannot be careless with books-in the selection of books, or in the use of them. For the same reason, you cannot be indifferent with men and your relationship with them. If other men are loose and inaccurate in reading the character of their fellows, most certainly you cannot be.

If the men who have battalions of friends to start with become negligent of their associations, welcoming all fish that come to their net, and frogs, too, you dare not take the risk of a dissolute companionship, or any other companionship that will weaken the daily discipline of yourself, or lower you in the esteem of the people.

Thus you become a careful student of human nature. And never forget that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning from the days of Socrates till now could give him.

Conscious from day to day of your limited resources, and understanding by the severe tuition of your daily life that the world now demands effectiveness, you will nurture your physical and nervous powers where the rich young man with a college training is apt to waste his. He may smoke, but you dare not. You cannot afford it, for one thing.

For another thing, it is a long race that you are running before you reach the point from which your fellow runner starts; so you have got to save your wind. You need all your nerve. You have got to keep "clean to the bone," as Jack London expresses it.

You have got to take thought of the morrow. You have got to do all those things which your employer, and all observers of you, will, consciously or unconsciously, approve; and refrain from doing anything that your employer, or his wife, or the world, or anybody who is watching you, will disapprove of, even subconsciously.

Thus your profound understanding that effectiveness is what counts will cut out every questionable habit, every association of idleness and sloth. No social club for you; that institution is for the man of dollars and of Greek. No evenings with gay parties for you; you must use those precious hours for reading, planning, sleep.

You cannot dally with brilliant indirectness; you must make every man and woman understand that you are goldenly sincere, forcefully earnest, earnestly honest, high of intention, sound of purpose, direct of method. Out of all these you will finally wring everything which the college is designed to give: skilled intellect, mind equipped with systematized knowledge, simple, earnest, upright character.

And to crown it all, you will discover in this hard discipline of your faculties and of your soul a happiness whose steady felicity is unknown to the lounger of the club or the frequenter of the ballroom. For remember this-you who in your heart cherish a secret envy of those other young men whom you believe, by reason of family, wealth, or any favorable circumstance, are getting more of the joy of living than you get-remember this, that this world knows only one higher degree of happiness than that which comes from discipline, only one pleasure nobler than the pleasure of achieving.

Let me close with two illustrations within my own personal observation. In one of the most charming inland cities of the United States, or of the world, for that matter, I met some fifteen years ago a young man of German parentage. His father was poor. The son simply had to help support the family by his daily work. He never got nearer college than in his dreams.

He knew something of printing, and was employed by a vigorous new house at an humble salary. By processes such as I have analyzed above, he made himself the best man in technical work in the firm's employ. The next step was to demonstrate his ability as a manager and financier as well as a skilled workman. There was a nut to crack, was it not? But see, now, how simply he broke the shell of that problem.

With some other sound young men of like quality, he established a building and loan association, one of those banks of the people which flourished in those days. He had no capital behind him. His acquaintance was small. Never mind, he made acquaintances among people of his own class. So did his fellow directors. Those common people from which this young man sprang furnished from their earnings the necessary money.

The little institution was conducted with all our American dash, with all his German caution. Of course it prospered. How could it help prospering? While other building and loan associations undertook alluring but hazardous experiments, this little concern rejected them with all the calm and haughty disfavor of the most conservative old bank.

After a while people began to take notice of this small institution. Its depositors were satisfied, its customers pleased. One day the attorney of this association, also a young man, called his fellow directors together, and resigned, upon the ground that he thought the movement of gold abroad and other financial phenomena indicated a panic within the next two or three years.

Did this dismay the young German-American? Not much. "This is just what I am looking for," said he. "I have been able to manage this institution in prosperous times; now if I can only have a chance to close it up so that no man loses a dollar, when big banks around me are falling, I will accomplish all I have started to accomplish."

Sure enough, the panic of 1893 arrived, and the young man's opportunity came. Bank after bank went down; old institutions whose venerable names had been their sufficient guarantee collapsed in a day. Most building and loan associations, taking advantage of certain provisions of the law, and of their charters, refused to pay their depositors on demand. The men and women who had put their money in found that they could not "withdraw" for some time, and then only at a loss.

But not so with the model experiment of my young friend, by which he proposed to demonstrate his ability to organize, manage, and support a difficult business, and to properly handle complex financial questions. He closed his institution up amid the appreciation and praise of everybody who knew about it.

In the mean time he had worked a little harder than ever for the firm that employed him. He took part in politics, too. His acquaintance grew slowly but steadily, and then with ever-increasing rapidity, as each new-made friend enthusiastically described him to others.

It soon got on the tongues of the people that even in his politics this young man didn't drink, smoke, nor swear. More marvelous than all, it was said that he was even religious. And the saying was true. During all these years when he had no time for anything else, he also had no time to stay away from Sunday-school and church. He had certain convictions and spoke them out.

He had no time for "society"; not a moment for parties; not an hour for the clubs. But he did have time for one girl, and for her he did not have time enough. All this was not so very long ago. To-day this young man is a member of the firm for which he began as a common workman, and which has since grown to be one of the largest concerns of its kind in the entire country. Successful banks have made him a director. On all hands his judgment is sought and taken by old and able men in business, politics, and finance.

And to crown all these achievings, he has builded him a home where all the righteous joys abound, and over which presides the "girl he went to see" in the hard days of his beginnings, when he had no time for "society" except that which he found in her presence. As he was then, so he is now-"clean to the bone," strong, upright, faithful, joyous in the unsullied happiness of the manly living of a manly life.

Very well, I tell you over again that this man did not go to college because he could not go to college; that he had no opportunities, no friends, few acquaintances. But he did have right principles, good health, and an understanding that every drop of his blood must be wrought into a deed, every minute of his time compounded into power. And this young man is not yet forty years of age.

I will venture to say that his example can be repeated in every town in the United States, in every city of the Republic. Certainly I personally know of a score of such successes in my own home city. I personally know of many such examples in other States. You ask for the inspiration of example, young man who cannot go to college. Look around you-they are on every hand.

Can you not find them in your own town? Or, if you live on a farm, do you not see them in your own county? I personally know of country boys who started out as farm hands at sixteen dollars per month and board, who to-day own the farms on which they were employed, and yet who are not now much past middle life. They have done it by the simple rules that are as old as human industry.

Come, then, don't mope. Sleep eight hours. Then three hours for your meals, and a chance for your stomach to begin digesting them after you have eaten them. That makes eleven hours, and leaves you thirteen hours remaining. Take one of these for getting to and from your business. Then work the other twelve. Every highly successful man whom I know worked even longer during the years of his beginnings.

What, no recreation? say you. Certainly I say recreation, and I say pleasure, too. But remember that you have got to overcome the college man's advantage over you-and that can only be done by hard work. But what of that? For a young man like you, full of that boundless vigor of youth, what higher pleasure can there be than the doing of your work better than anybody else does the same kind of work?

And what finer happiness can there be than the certainty that such a life as that will make realities of your dreams? For sure it is that this is the road by which you can walk to unfailing success, even over the bodies of your rivals who, with greater "advantages" than yours, neglect them and fall upon the steep ascent up which, with harder muscles, steadier nerves, and stouter heart, you climb with ease, gaining strength with every step you take instead of losing power as you advance, as did your flabbier fibered competitor.

Now for the other illustration: Three years ago a certain young man came to me from New York, the son of a friend who occupied a Government position. He was studying law. He was "quivering" with ambition. But his lungs were getting weak. Would it be possible to get him a place on some ranch for six or eight months? Yes, it was possible. An acquaintance was glad to take him.

At the end of his time he returned, still "quivering" with ambition. He was going to make a lawyer, that's what he was going to make-the very best lawyer that ever mastered Blackstone. He already had a clerkship promised in one of the great legal establishments in the metropolis. This clerkship paid him enough to live on, and gave him the chance to do the very work which is necessary to the making of a lawyer.

Splendid thus far. But observe the next step. In about twelve months this young man came to me again. Would I help to get a certain man who held a Government position paying him $150 a month promoted? This last man's record was admirable; he deserved promotion on his own account. But why the interest of the would-be lawyer, who was "quivering" with ambition?

It developed that if the other fellow was promoted, this embryo Erskine could, with the aid of influential political friends, be appointed in his place. But why did he want this position? Well, answered the young man, it would enable him to take his law course at one of the law schools of the Capitol and get his degree, and all that sort of thing. Also, it would enable him to live at home with mother, would it not? Yes, that was a consideration, he admitted.

But did he think that that was as good a training for his profession, and would give him the chance of a business acquaintance while he was getting that training, as well as the clerkship in the New York office would? Perhaps not, but, after all, he didn't get very much salary in the New York law office. Why, how much did he get? Only twenty dollars a week.

But was not that enough to live on at a modest boarding-house, and get a room with bed, table, one chair, and a washstand, and buy him the necessary clothing? Oh, yes! of course he could scratch along on it, but it was hardly what a young man of his standing and family ought to have.

Oh! it didn't enable him to get out into society, was that it? Well, yes, he must admit there was something in that. Washington had social advantages, to be sure, and $150 a month would enable him to have some of that life which a young man was entitled to and at the very same time be getting his legal education. Well! That young man did not get what he wanted.

That young man had the wrong notion of life. Of course, no man would do anything for him. Until he changed his point of view utterly, success was absolutely impossible for him. What that young man needed was the experience of going back to New York and having to apply for position after position until his shoe soles wore out, and he felt the pangs of hunger. He needed iron in his blood, that is what he needed. All the colleges in the world would not enable that man to do anything worth doing until he mastered the sound principles of living and of working.

Right before him in New York was an illustration of this. One of the most notable successes at the bar which that city or this country has witnessed in the last fifteen years has been made by a young man who had neither college education, money, nor friends. He was, I am told, a stenographer in one of New York's great legal establishments. But that young man had done precisely what I have been pounding at over and over again in this paper. Very well. To-day he is one among half a dozen of the most notable lawyers in the greatest city of the greatest nation in the world.

It is all in the using of what you have. Let me repeat again what I have said in a previous paper-the inscription which Doc Peets inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished "Wolfville" with its first funeral:

"Jack King, deceased.

Life ain't the holding of a good hand,

But

The playing of a poor hand well."

And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of the talents. After all, it is not what we have, but what we make out of what we have that counts in this world of work. And, what's more, that is the only thing that ought to count.

* * *

IVToC

THE NEW HOME

Your father made the old home. Prove yourself worthy of him by making the new home. He built the roof-tree which sheltered you. Build you a roof-tree that may in its turn shelter others. What abnormal egotism the attitude of him who says, "This planet, and all the uncounted centuries of the past, were made for me and nobody else, and I will live accordingly. I will go it alone."

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

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

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

"Imperious C?sar dead and turned to clay,

Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

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

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

And, besides, you will find that the enormous majority of men who by their service have uplifted or enriched humanity have been men enough to lead the natural life. They have been men who have founded homes. And how can you better benefit mankind than by founding a home among your fellow men, a pure, normal, sweet, and beautiful home?

That would be getting down to business. That would be doing something definite, something "you can put your finger on." It would be "getting down to earth," as the saying is. You would be "benefiting humanity" sure enough and in real earnest by taking care of some actual human being among this great indefinite mass called mankind. The making of a home is the beginning of human usefulness.

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

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

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

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

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

I am assuming that you are man enough to be a man-not a mere machine of selfishness on the one hand, or an anemic imitation of masculinity on the other hand. I am assuming that you think-and, what is more important, feel-that Nature knows what she is about; that "God is not mocked"; and that therefore you propose to live in harmony with universal law.

Therefore, I am assuming that you have established, or will establish, the new home in place of the old home. I am assuming that you will do this before there is a gray hair in your head or a wrinkle under your eye. These new homes which young Americans are building will be the sources of all the power and righteousness of this Republic to-morrow, just as the lack of them will be the source of such weakness as our future develops.

Within these new homes which young Americans are to build, the altar must be raised again on which the sacred fire of American ideals must be kept burning, just as it was kept burning in the old homes which these young Americans have left. And precisely to the extent that these new homes are not erected will American ideals pale, and finally perish.

It is a question, you see, which travels quite to the horizon of our vision and beyond it, and which searches the very heart of our national purity and power. No wonder that Bismarck considered the perpetuation of the German home, with its elemental and joyous productivity, as the source of all imperial puissance on the one hand, and the purpose and end of all statesmanship on the other hand.

It would be far better for America if our public men were more interested in these simple, vital, elemental matters than in "great problems of statesmanship," many of which, on analysis, are found to be imaginary and supposititious. Yes, and it would be better for the country if our literary men would describe the healthful life of the Nation's plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort of thing.

They would sell more books, too. I never yet heard that anybody got tired of "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I think it quite likely that the Book of Ruth will outlast all the short stories that will be written during the present decade. Yes, decidedly, our public men, and our writers, too, ought to "get down to earth." There is where the people live. The people walk upon the brown soil and the green grass. They dwell beneath the apple-blossoms. How fine a thing it is that our American President is preaching the doctrine of the American home so forcefully that he impresses the Nation and the world with these basic truths of living and of life.

It is a good deal more important that the institution of the American home shall not decay, than that the Panama Canal be built or our foreign trade increase. So, in considering the young man and the new home, we are dealing with an immediate and permanent and an absolutely vital question, not only from the view-point of the young man himself, but from that of the Nation as well.

Of course nobody means that young men should hurl themselves into matrimony. The fact that it is advisable for you to learn to swim does not mean that you should jump into the first stream you come to, with your clothes and shoes on. Undoubtedly you ought first to get "settled"; that is, you ought to prepare for what you are going to do in life and begin the doing of it. Don't take this step while you are in college. If you mean to be a lawyer, you ought to get your legal education and open your office; if a business man, you should "get started"; if an artizan, you should acquire your trade, etc. But it is inadvisable to wait longer.

It is not necessary for you to "build up a practise" in the profession, or make a lot of money in business, or secure unusual wages as a skilled laborer. Begin at the beginning, and live your lives together, win your successes together, share your hardships together, and let your fortune, good or ill, be of your joint making. It will help you, too, in a business way.

Everybody else is, or was, situated nearly as you are, and there is a sort of fellow-feeling in the hearts of other men and women who once had to "hoe the same row" you are hoeing; and it is among these men and women you must win your success. It is largely through their favor and confidence that you will get on at all. If you are making a new home you are in harmony with the world about you, and the very earth itself exhales a vital and sustaining sympathy.

It is not at all necessary that you should be able to provide as good a house and the furnishings thereof as that from which your wife comes. Nobody expects you to be as successful in the very beginning of your life as her father was at the close of his. Least of all does she herself expect it. And even if this were possible, it is not from such continuous luxury that the best character is made. The absolute necessity to economize compels the ordinary young American couple to learn the value of things-the value of a dollar and the value of life.

They learn to "know how it comes," again to employ one of the wise sayings of the common people. And the numberless experiences of their first few years of comparative hardship are the very things necessary to bring out in them sweetness, self-sacrifice, and uplifting hardihood of character. In these sharp experiences, too, there is greatest happiness. How many hundreds of times have you heard men and women say of their early married years, "Those were the happiest days of my life."

As a matter of good business on the one hand, and of sheer felicity on the other hand, make the ideals of this new home of yours as high as you possibly can. Don't make them so high that neither you nor any other human being can live up to them, of course; but if you can put them a notch beyond those even of the exalted standard of the old home, by all means do it. Do it, that is, if you can live up to them.

It is remarkable what individual power grows out of clean living. It is profitable also. The mere business value of a reputation for a high quality of home life will be one of the best assets that you can accumulate. "They are attending strictly to business and will make their mark," said a wise old banker to a group of friends in discussing a fine type of young business man, and the equally fine type of the young American woman who was his wife.

I do not know whether that young man was borrowing money for his business from that particular bank or not, but I do know that he could borrow it if he wanted it. And one reason why his credit was established with the money-wise old financier was the ideal home life which he and his wife were leading.

For, mark you, they were not "living beyond their means." That was the first thing. That is one of the best rules you can follow. Who has not known of the premature withering of young business men and lawyers (yes, and sometimes men not so young, alas!) who have suddenly blossomed out with houses and clothes and horses, and a lot of other things which their business or practise ought not reasonably to stand.

On the other hand, do not begin your life as a miser. Do not let the new home proclaim by its barrenness that it is the abode of a poor young man asking sympathy and aid of his friends. "Yes, rent a piano, by all means. Do not economize on your wife and your home," advised an old Methodist preacher noted for his horse-sense. And he was right.

After all, what is the purpose and end of all your labor? If it is not that very home, I do not know what it is. Put on a little more steam, therefore, and earn enough extra to buy a picture. And get a good one while you are at it. It will not break you up to buy a really good etching. A fine "print" is infinitely better than a poor painting. Anything is better than a poor painting. If she has good taste, your wife will make the walls of that new home most attractive with an astonishingly small amount of money.

It is the new home you and she are making, remember that. Very well; you cannot make it in a flat. "Apartments" cannot by any magic be converted into a home. For the purposes of a home, better a separate dwelling with dry-goods box for table and camp-stools for chairs than tapestried walls, mosaic floors, and all luxuriousness in those modern structures where human beings hive.

These buildings have their indispensable uses, but home-making is not one of them. "Apartments" are not cheaper for you and easier for her than a house to yourselves-no, not if you got the finest apartments for nothing, not even if you were paid to live in gilded rooms. For the making of a home is priceless. And that cannot be done in flats or hotels or other walled and roofed herding places. Every man would like to have a picture of "the house he was born in"; but who would choose a hotel for a birthplace? Boniface himself would not "admire" (to use one of our Westernisms) to have you select his hostelry for that purpose.

Of course you will spend all of your extra time at home. That is what home is for. Live in your home; do not merely eat and sleep there. It is not a boarding-house, remember that. Books are there, and music and a human sympathy and a marvelous care for you, under whose influence alone the soul of a young man grows into real grandeur, power, and beauty. And be sure that you let each day have its play-hour.

"I would not care to live," said one of the very ablest and most eminent members of the American Catholic priesthood-"I would not care to live," said he, "if I could not have my play-hour, music, and flowers. They are God's gifts and my necessity. Every young man who has a home commits a crime if he does not each day bring one hour of joy into his household."

The man who said that is not only brilliant and wise, but one of the most exalted souls it has ever been my fortune to know. And his words have good sense in them, have they not? Make that good sense yours, then. Make a play-hour each day for yourself and wife and children. I say children, for I assume, of course, that when you are making a new home you are making a home indeed.

Very well. The absence of children is either unfortunate or immoral. A purposely childless marriage is no marriage at all; it is merely an arrangement. Robert Louis Stevenson calls it "a friendship recognized by the police." A house undisturbed and unglorified by the wailings and laughter of little ones is not a home-it is a habitation.

There is in children a certain immortality for you. Most of us believe in life after death; and that belief is a priceless possession of every human being who has it. But even the man who has not this faith beholds his own immortality in his children. "Why of course I am immortal," said a scientist who believed that death ends all. "Of course I am immortal," said he, "there goes my reincarnation"; and he pointed to his little son, glorious with the promise of an exhaustless vitality.

There is no doubt at all that association with infancy and youth puts back the clock of time for each of us. Besides all this, it is the natural life, and that is the only thing worth while. The "simple life" is all right, and the "strenuous life" excellent. The "artistic life" is charming, no doubt, and all the other kinds of "lives" have their places, I suppose. I am interested in all of them. But I am much more interested in the natural life. That alone is truthful. And, after all, only the truthful is important.

Get into the habit of happiness. It is positively amazing how you can turn every little incident into a sunbeam. And, mark you, it is quite as easy to take the other course. But what a coward a man is who releases in his home all the pent-up irritability and disappointment of the day.

There is no sense in it, either. It does not make you less black of spirit to fill your home with gloom. You ought not to do it, even from the view-point of good health. If you eat your meal in a sour silence which almost curdles the cream and scares your wife half to death, you do not and cannot digest your food. If you have had a hard day, say to yourself, "Well, that was a hard day. Now for some rest and some fun."

Get into the habit of being happy, I tell you. You can do it. Practise saying to yourself, when you waken in the morning, "Everything is all right," and keep on saying it. You will be surprised to find how nearly "all right" the mere saying of it at the beginning of the day will really make everything, after all. This is true of business as well as of the new home. Prophets of gloom are never popular, and ought not to be.

Then, too, a quiet cheeriness of heart makes you treat your fellow man better; and this is important in your dealings with other human male animals. They will make it unpleasant for you if you don't. But it is far more important in your new home than it is out in the world of men. That is what the new home is for-to exercise and multiply the beauties of character and conduct.

Returning again to the view-point of business wisdom, you cannot treat your wife too well, as a mere matter of policy-though you will never treat her well, nor anybody else, from that low motive. I am merely calling the attention of your commercial mind to the fact that there are actually dollars and cents in a reputation for chivalrous bearing in your new home.

You know yourself how you feel toward a man of whom everybody says, "He is good to his wife." Everybody wants to help that kind of a fellow. If he is a strong man, his community glories in his strength and increases it by their admiration and support. If he is not a strong man, everybody wishes that he were, and tries in a thousand ways, which a general kindly disposition toward him suggests, to supply his deficiencies.

And this is no jug-handled rule either. The same thing is true of the wife. When her acquaintances declare of any woman, "She is lovely in her home," they have placed upon her brow the crown of their ultimate tribute and regard. It depends upon both, of course, whether these domestic beatitudes will exist in the new home.

Undoubtedly, however, it depends upon the young man more than the young woman. He is a man-and that is everything. And being a man, he should have a large and kindly forbearance, a sort of soothing strength and calming serenity. And to all this the rule of smile and cheeriness is helpful, if not essential.

When I was a boy in the logging-camps, I read in some stray newspaper an article about the influence which the pleasant countenance exercises over groups of men. The idea was that men work willingly under the control of a strong man who is strong enough to carry in his daily look the suggestion of a smile. It worked splendidly. It has never been satisfactorily explained why it is next to impossible for a man "to be down on his luck" if he will only keep the corners of his mouth turned up. Perhaps it is the mental effort of forcing this mechanism of a smile which brings a really happy state of mind.

Whatever the cause, it is literally true that you cannot look blackly on the world and your own fortunes if the lines of your face are ascending instead of drooping. This muscular state of your countenance is connected in some strange way with that mysterious thing called the mind; for you will find, if you try it, that a sort of serenity of soul comes to you, and a strong confidence that "everything will come out right in the end." When we Americans are older we shall pay more attention to these things.

The Japanese neglect none of these deep psychological truths in warfare. It is said that they are taught to smile in action, and especially when they charge. Doubtless this report is true. It has at bottom the same reason that music in battle has. What could be more terrifying than the approach of an enemy determined on your death, and who looks upon your execution as so pleasant and easy a thing that he smiles about it or who regards his own possible extinction as no unhappy consummation?

Also it is interesting to note how a pleasant expression begets its like. I have observed this even in Manchuria, and other parts of China-a smile unfailingly won a return smile from children who were watching you from the fields, whereas a frown would instantly becloud the little face with a kindred expression of disfavor. I am spending a good deal of time upon this item of good cheer in the new home, because I think that as long as happiness surrounds the American fireside all is well with the Republic.

There is no investment which yields such dividends as the society you will find in your home. The company, the talk, the silent sympathy of that sagacious and congenial person who is your wife yield a return in spirit, wisdom, moral tone, and pure pleasure to be found in like measure nowhere else on earth.

It is said that Charles James Fox, the most resourceful debater the British Parliament has ever seen, was so fond of his home and his wife that he would actually absent himself from Parliament for the sheer pleasure of her presence and conversation. Lord Beaconsfield, who, we are told, married for the mere purpose of ambition, afterward fell deeply in love with his wife and spent every moment he could in her society. She proved, too, to be his shrewdest counselor.

Bismarck's boundless love for his princess increased with the years; yet she was chiefly, and perhaps only, a German "hausfrau"-an ideal housewife. The German people particularly loved the wife of Bismarck because of these exclusively domestic traits. Perhaps that was why he adored her more and more as the years went by. Gladstone, who was a very surly and irritable person, declared that his wife had made his life "cushiony."

Of course it is taken for granted in this paper that the young American wife is this kind of a woman-wise and gentle and good-natured-above all things good-natured. For says the Bible, "It is better to dwell in the wilderness than with a contentious and an angry woman." But read what is written in the Book of the right kind of a woman-one "in whose tongue is the law of kindness," as the Scriptures' exquisite phraseology has it.

I don't like the tone of the common comment of the American medical profession about the neurotic condition of our American women. Our physicians are saying that there is not one American woman in a hundred who is nervously normal. The profession declares that they are excitable, irritable, peevish, and that this unfortunate state is produced by the unnatural and absurd tension they are under all the time.

Their so-called "social duties"; the minute and nerve-destroying precision of their housekeeping; their unnecessary overloading of themselves with tasks futile and fictitious; the determination to "appear" a little better than their neighbors, and, above all, to have their children (their one or two children) particularly spick and span; the long catalogue of folly into which our high-geared, modern civilization has led our women, and through no fault of theirs-"all these," said an eminent neurologist, in talking of this absorbing topic, "are impairing the agreeableness and curtailing the usefulness of our women, and will in the end destroy our women themselves."

I hope it is not true. If it is true, we had better find the cause of it and apply the remedy, or we are a lost people; for that nation is doomed whose women have ceased to be vital, good-tempered, and home-loving.

May not the too heavy early education of young girls have something to do with this later desperation of their nerves? Is not the blood taken from vital centers where Nature meant it to go for the upbuilding of womanhood and forced into the brain at a period when Nature meant that brain to be the very paradise of joyous dreams and happy imaginings? While we may thus gain a staccato smartness, a jerky and inconsequent brilliancy, do we not lose something of the natural woman and the delicious heartiness, spontaneous wit and instinctive wisdom of her? I venture no opinion here-I merely suggest the query. Why don't the doctors begin a crusade about this? It is their business.

The keen, practical sense of women in purely business affairs has been noted in other papers, and the causes of it. The young man who neglects this helpfulness simply throws away wisdom. Not to counsel with your wife on business matters that affect your mutual fortune is sheer stupidity. Also, it is morally wrong. From the very nature of her she is more interested than you in strengthening the walls of your new home, in making your joint experiment in the living of life a beautiful success. Her words are the counsel of instinct, and therefore of Nature. And Nature is wise.

Of course there are some things you cannot tell her. If you are a lawyer, or a doctor, you are dishonorable if you tell your wife or any other human being any secret of client or patient. Not that she is not to be trusted-for she is. She will carry to her grave any secret that affects you. But the disclosures of client or patient are not your secrets. If they were, she would be entitled to know them-ought to know them. But no woman of sense will permit you to tell her any professional confidences. Don't expect her to be helpful to you in your profession or occupation except by counsel.

Of course there is the great and inestimable help that comes from the mere fact that she is your wife. After all, that is the very greatest help any woman can be to any man. The care of home, the upbringing of children, the strengthening of a husband's character here and there, the detection of those thousand little vices of manner and speech and thought which develop in every man-in short, the living of a natural woman's life-is the only method of real helpfulness of a woman to a man. And it is a priceless helpfulness.

Particularly is this true of political life and career. A man who must be lifted to distinction by his wife's apron-strings, does not deserve distinction. In the end, he does not get it-the apron-strings usually break, and they ought to break. It may be stated as a general truth that a man is never helped by the active participation of the wife in his political affairs.

There are notable exceptions, just as there are to every rule. But as a generalization this statement is accurate. Men resent that kind of thing in politics. They want a man who aspires to anything to be worthy of that thing on his own account. They want their leader to be a leader; and no leader is "managed" in politics by his wife. They are right about it, too. But whether they are right or wrong, that is the way they feel.

So the only help which a woman can be to a man in politics is just to be a wife in all that that term implies. And what greater help than that could there be? She who impresses the American millions with the fact that she is the ideal wife and mother has made the strongest, subtlest appeal to the nation. But she cannot do this by "mixing up in politics," by trying to plan and manage her husband's campaigns, and so forth. For the people's instinct is unerring. We Americans are a home-making and a home-loving people; and as a people we adore the American wife and mother-the maker and keeper of the American home.

So you attend to your politics or your business and let your wife attend to hers; and she will be happy and glad to make your home the exclusive scene of her activities if you will only be man enough to do a man's full part in the world and leave no room for a woman of spirit to see that you are not doing a man's full part, and, therefore, to try to help you out.

I sometimes think that the propaganda that woman is the equal of man, and that it is all right for her to take on man's work in business and the professions, is due not so much to an abnormal development in her character as it is to a decadence in our manhood. At least I have always observed that the wife of a really masterful man finds her greatest happiness in being merely his wife, and never attempts to take any of his tasks upon her. And why should she assume his labor? Her natural work in the world is as much harder than his as it is nobler and finer.

Speaking of politics, I have always thought men, young and old, ought to consult their wives and families about how they cast their ballot. What right has any man to vote as he individually thinks best? He is the head of the family, it is true, but he is only one of the family, after all. This Republic is not made up of individuals; it is made up of families. Its unit is not the boarding-house, but the home.

The Senate of the United States is the greatest forum of free debate on earth; but the counsel of the American fireside is far more powerful. Wife and children have a vital interest in every ballot deposited by father and husband-an interest as definite and tangible as his own. Every voter, therefore, ought to discuss with wife and children, with parents, brothers, and sisters, all public questions, and vote according to the composite family conviction.

No greater method of public safety can be imagined than for the American family to "size up" the American public man, and then have the voters of that family sustain or reject him at the polls, according to the verdict of the household. If such were the rule, only those men who are of the people when they are first placed in public office, and who keep close to the people ever after, would be elected to anything.

Such a method, too, would insure a steadier current of national policy, subject to fewer variations. There would not be so many fads to deflect sound and sane statesmanship. So by all means, young man, begin your career as a citizen by making your wife a partner in every vote you cast.

Nobody denies that men and women should have equality of privilege and equality of rights; but equality of duties and similarity of work is absurd. The contrary idea was beautifully satirized in the now famous toast:

"Here's to our women: God bless them! Once our superiors, now our equals."

The truth is that it is impossible to compare men and women. They are not the same beings. They have different characteristics, different methods, different capacities, and different view-points of life. Each supplements the other. Doubtless the woman has the choicer lot. Surely this is true abstractly speaking. Suppose we should all stand disembodied souls, or rather unembodied souls, on the edge of the forming universe; and suppose that, to these abstract intelligences, the Creator should say:

"I am forming the universe. I am creating a wonderful place called Earth. I am going to clothe you each in human form, marvelously and beautifully made, the highest work of my hands. Some of you shall be men. To these men I will give the task of labor in the fields, of warfare with wild beasts. It shall be your duty to subdue wildernesses, and to construct and defend a dwelling-place for this other one whom I am going to make a woman. Therefore I shall give you men large bones to deal strong blows, and a heavy skull to withstand the like. I shall give you courage and physical power and audacity and daring.

"The woman's mission shall be different. It shall be for her to create and preserve human happiness. She shall do this in the dwelling-place which the man constructs for her, and which will be called home. There shall she bind up his wounds and give him rest and comfort. I will give into her keeping also the making of the race, and thus the control of the destiny of the world. And so this woman shall be given delicate bones and a deft touch and voice of music and eye of peace and heart of tenderness and mind of beautiful wisdom."

Does this comparison not make it clear that woman has by far a more exalted mission than man? But the mission of both man and woman is sufficiently grand and noble if each performs it, and within its limitations is content.

Have plenty of friends. Cultivate them. You cultivate your business. You cultivate vegetables. But friends are more precious than either business or vegetables. Cultivate friends, therefore. Call on them and let them call on you. And do it in the good old-fashioned, hearty, American way.

But be sure you make your friends for the sake of the relation itself. Do not misuse that sacred relation for your personal advantage. Do not make friends for the purposes of success. Make friends for the purposes of friendship. Be true to them, therefore. Don't neglect them when they can no longer serve you. And serve you them. And let your service to your friends be a glad service, a service which is its own reward.

He who seeks another's friendship because he needs it in his politics or business, will throw that friendship away like a worn-out glove when his ends have been accomplished. Make friends and nourish friendship because friends and friendships are life itself. Remember that you do not live in order to achieve success; you achieve success in order to live.

It is the twentieth century you are living in-don't forget that. Keep up, therefore; keep abreast of things. Keep in the current of the world's thought and feeling. Newspapers are literally indispensable to you; and you should take two of them-the morning paper and the evening paper. Get up fifteen minutes earlier in the morning, so that you may have time to look over the morning paper carefully.

Do not read it idly. Read it with discrimination. And do not read it without discussing it with your little family. The war in Manchuria, the character of a public man, the policy of an administration, the state of the Nation's business-all these are mental food which you need as much as you need your breakfast. One thoroughly up-to-date magazine also is helpful. Build you a library also. You do not want the new home to be a mere physical habitation. You want it to be a home for the mind as well as the body, do you not?

I heard of a young lawyer who put aside a little of every fee as a sinking-fund for a library. He and his wife bought books with that-not books for the office, but books for their home. He succeeded-"won out"-"won out" with his cases, which was his profession's business, and "won out" with his happiness and hers, which was his life's business.

The theater is the highest form of combined education, amusement, and repose which human intelligence has yet invented. It was so in Greece, and it is so now. The theater occasionally is good for you. But let the play you go to see be high-grade. Inferior performances on the stage will destroy your taste as surely as will the continued propinquity of poor pictures. The same is true of music.

Music has a mysterious quality which exalts. It has been noted that soldiers gladly go to their death under its influence, who otherwise would fight unwillingly. It is a great producer of thought also. Some men can write well only under its inspiration. Educate yourself up in it, therefore. Do not be content with the simple melodies and old songs. They will never lose their charm, and ought not; but they are not the best which music has for you.

What I am now insisting upon is a constant and careful nourishment of the mind and soul within you, so that the new home may each day be more and more the dwelling-place of beauty and the abode of real happiness. You cannot think of the old home without thinking of your mother; and you cannot think of your mother without thinking of the Bible.

A young man and a young woman who are making a new home make an irreparable mistake if they leave out the religious influence. Both ought to belong to church, and to the same church. This is a matter of prudence as well as of righteousness; for get it into your consciousness that you must be in harmony with the people of whom you two are one. Your new home must be in accord with the millions of other homes which make up this Nation; and the American people at bottom are a religious people.

Also, you will find that nothing will please your wife so much as to resolve upon regular church attendance, and then to reduce that resolve to a habit. It is good for you, too; you feel as though you had taken a moral bath after you get home from service every Sunday.

Of course, being an American and a gentleman, you will have the American gentleman's conception of all womanhood, and his adoring reverence for the one woman who has blessed him with her life's companionship. You will cherish her, therefore, in that way which none but the American gentleman quite understands. You will be gentle with her, and watchful of her health and happiness.

You will be ever brave and kind, wise and strong, deserving that respect which she is so anxious to accord you; earning that devotion which by the very nature of her being she must bestow on you; winning that admiration which it is the crowning pride of her life to yield to you; and, finally, receiving that care which only her hands can give, and a life-long joy which, increasing with the years, is fullest and most perfect when both your heads are white and your mutual steps no longer wander from the threshold of that "new home" which you built in the beginning of your lives, and which is now the "old home" to your children, who beneath its roof "rise up and call you blessed."

* * *

VToC

THE YOUNG LAWYER AND HIS BEGINNINGS

It used to be a part of the creed of a certain denomination that a man should not be admitted to the ministry who had not received his "call." It was necessary that he should hear the Voice speaking with his tongue, and saying, "Woe is unto me, if I preach not the Gospel."

This is true of the profession of law. So, at the beginning of your beginnings, do not begin at all unless you see a certainty of misery if you do not. Unless you are convinced that you would rather work, toil, nay, slave for years to secure recognition in the law, than to be honored and enriched in some other occupation, do not enter this profession of supreme ardor.

And above all things, do not enter it if you expect to practise law principally for the purpose of making money. It is not a money-making profession. The same effort, acumen, and enthusiasm expended in almost any other occupation will bring you financial returns tremendously out of proportion to your most successful compensation in the law, measured by mere money. The money-making conception of our profession is not only erroneous, but ruinous; for you must remember, to begin with, that you are practising the science of justice.

If possible, get a thorough college education before you touch a law book. If you can get a college education, do not "read law" while you are at college. If you go to college, do not take what is known as the "scientific" course, or "physical" course. Take the classical course. Next to geometry and logarithms and the Bible, the best discipline preparatory to making you a lawyer is the translation of Latin. Latin is the most logical language the world has ever seen, or is likely ever to see.

After you get your college course, then go to a thoroughly first-class law school. After this, spend two or three years in active work in the office of some successful lawyer who has lots of practise, and who will load off on your shoulders as much work as possible.

If you cannot go to a law school, your training in the law office will do you nearly as well. You can get along without your law school, but you can never get along without your training in the law office. The way to learn to swim is to swim.

But if you cannot get a college education, do not get discouraged. It is possible that you are an Abraham Lincoln, or a John Marshall, or some person like that; and if you are you will succeed anyhow. Even if you are not so highly gifted you can win in the law without a college education if you are naturally a lawyer and will work hard enough. If you have to choose between a law school and a college education, take the latter. But the training afforded by a clerkship in an active lawyer's office is more helpful than either.

If you can be so fortunate as to get the firm or attorney with whom you are studying to let you draft pleadings, take depositions, examine witnesses, make arguments to court and jury, get out transcripts for appeal, write briefs, petitions, motions, and all the rest of that careful and painstaking work which makes the daily life of the lawyer, you will equip yourself for actual practise better than in any other way I know of.

The firm will gladly let you do this work if you show yourself competent. But this does not mean that you are merely to sit around the office and say "bright things." There is nothing in "bright things"-there is everything in good judgment and downright hard work.

In active practise never forget that you are a sworn officer of justice quite as much as is the judge on the bench. It is impossible for you to put your ideals of your profession too high or to attach yourself to them too firmly. I am no admirer of the acidulous character of John Adams (not that he was not both great and good, however, for he was-but he was too sour), yet he announced a great thing, and lived up to it, when he declared that he was practising law for the purposes of justice first and a living afterward. (But, then, John Adams announced many great things; and what he announced he lived up to. He was supremely honest.)

"Never take a case," said Horace Mann, "unless you believe your client is right and his cause is just." On the contrary, Lord Brougham declared that "the conscientious lawyer must be at the service of the criminal as well as of the state." And this great lawyer proceeds to argue with characteristic ability that it is as much the duty of the lawyer to work for the cause he knows to be wrong as for the cause he knows to be right.

Briefly, the reason is that it is the very essence of justice that every man shall have his day in court; that the attorney is but the trained and educated mouthpiece of his client; and that to refuse the cause of a client in which the attorney does not believe is to relegate all the controversies to the judge in the first instance, which, of course, would render the administration of practical justice impossible.

This is the prevailing practise of our profession, and it is a serious thing to question its correctness. Its ethics are as wide as they are ingenious, and when one beholds them through the medium of the great Englishman's wonderful argument they seem radiant with aggressive truth. Nevertheless, I am almost of opinion that Horace Mann was right. It is certain that in his beginnings the young lawyer ought to lean to that view.

If you consider it your duty to take any side of any case that offers, right or wrong, it is no far cry to considering it your duty to make the cause you have espoused a good one before the court. And when that conception has shot its cancerous roots and filaments through your brain and conscience, the suggestion to your unscrupulous client of facts that do not exist, and all the alluring infamies of sharp practise, are possible.

It is said that burglary exercises such a fascination that, once the delirium of its danger is tasted, a man can never put that fatal wine away. An old and distinguished lawyer once told me that one of the most brilliant young lawyers he ever knew said to him, at the conclusion of a legal duel in which he had resorted to the sharpest practise and won, "That was the most delicious experience of my life."

Yes, and it was the most fatal. He became, and is, an attorney of uncommon resource, ability, and success, with many cases and heavy fees; nevertheless his life is a failure, for his profession and even his clients know him for a dealer in tricks. Senator McDonald, an ideal lawyer in the ethics, learning, and practise of his profession, told me that one of the justices of the Supreme Court once said to him of a certain great corporation lawyer of acknowledged power and almost unrivaled learning:

"Mr. -- would be the greatest lawyer in the world if he were not a scoundrel. As it is, I brace myself to resist him every time he appears before me." One of the ablest Circuit Court judges of the Federal bench said almost precisely the same thing to me of the same man.

So you perceive it does not pay to be understood to be capable, or even great, in the wrong. In time it means ruin; and therefore I think, on the whole, that it would be wise for you never to take a cause which, after you have a full statement from your client, you believe to be wrong.

Many of the most excellent men of our profession will dissent from this view. Their argument is usually that of Lord Brougham, summarized above. Also they will declare that a lawyer may be quite wrong in his first impression that his client has not the right of an impending controversy. They will cite you instances where they have entered into the conduct of a case with much doubt in their hearts as to the rightfulness of their client's position; but that this doubt became an affirmative certainty before they were half through with it-they knew their client was right.

The answer to this is that any man can work himself into an enthusiastic belief in almost anything if he goes upon the theory that the thing is true, and gives all his energy and ability to proving its truthfulness to others and to himself. This is peculiarly the case with the most sincere and genuine men. I repeat, therefore, that upon a point so vital, and about which there are such sharp differences of opinion by equally good and wise men, it is better for you to incline to the stricter view of legal ethics.

So if you believe your client to be in the wrong, frankly tell him so; show him why; induce him to compromise and to settle, if he ought. If he will not because he is obstinate, he will probably lose his case anyhow, and of course blame his lawyer for the loss. So that if you do not have that case you have lost nothing. On the other hand, you have gained. The client will say: "If I had followed his advice I should not have had the expense and humiliation of defeat."

In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the honest client will respect you for your position. If the client persists in his course because he is a scoundrel, then, doubly, you cannot afford to take his unjust case. After a few years of such practise you will have acquired a moral influence with court, jury, and people which will be, even from a money point of view, the most valuable item in your equipment. Public confidence is the young man's best asset. And you will be surprised to find how little you will lose, in the way of fees, by this course.

Of course there is a large class of cases in which the correct application of the law is very doubtful, with lines of decisions on both sides; as, for example, in cases of the distribution of funds of an insolvent corporation, constitutional questions, and the relative equities of conflicting interests. These are fair examples of controversies where a lawyer may rightfully and righteously accept a retainer upon any of half-a-dozen sides. But in the ordinary course of practise perhaps it is better to stick to Horace Mann rather than to Lord Brougham, and reject employment in a case you believe to be wrong.

While the law is not a money-making profession, either in theory or practise, the young lawyer should begin by charging every cent his services are worth. It is not only degrading, but reveals a base attitude of mind and character, to charge a little fee in the beginning as a bait for a bigger one in future cases. Maintain the dignity of your effort.

I am assuming that Nature began the work of making you a lawyer before you were born; that you have been preparing yourself, with the enthusiasm of the artist and the passion of professional devotion, for the work of your great calling, by years and years of discipline and study such as no other calling requires; that, with your natural qualification and your general equipment, you are bringing to your client's particular case an industry that knows no limit in his immediate service.

This being true, tell him frankly that you propose to give him the best that is in you (and that best is your very life-no less-for you write "victory" at the end of every one of your cases with your heart's blood; or "defeat," if you do not win), and that for this best which is in you you will charge the highest professional fee justified by your services and the magnitude and difficulty of his case.

At the same time, never turn a poor client away from your office door because that client comes with no gold in his hand. When a lawyer is too busy to give counsel without fee and without charge to a poor man or woman, that lawyer has too much business. I know-we all know-of very eminent lawyers constantly engaged in causes involving large interests, who nevertheless find leisure, many times each year, to serve by advice and counsel, and sometimes even by the active conduct of cases, numbers of the children of poverty, and to serve them without a penny of compensation.

Be very careful of the class of business you accept at first. I knew a young lawyer who had just opened his office, and within a month, by one of those accidents that occur to every attorney, he was offered a case on a contingent fee in which the probability of considerable reward amounted almost to a certainty.

He needed the money-was nearly penniless. He was newly married, had no clients and few acquaintances; but it was not the quality of practise to which he wished to devote his career. He courteously declined the case as though he had been a millionaire, and directed his would-be client to an attorney who would care for it properly.

Out of that case the latter attorney, by a compromise, in two weeks made fifteen hundred dollars. Nevertheless, the young man was right, and acted with a far-seeing wisdom as rare as the courage which accompanied it. Of course, I assume that you are going into the profession for the purpose of becoming a lawyer, and not a mere conductor of legal strifes. If you are, you must deny yourself.

Self-denial is the price of strength, as any college athlete will tell you. Self-denial is the road to wealth, as any banker will tell you. Self-denial is the method of all excellencies, as all human experience will tell you. But this is moralizing.

I do not mean that you should decline small cases. By no means. Take a five-dollar case, and work with the same sincerity that you would on a fifty-thousand-dollar case. "Despise not the day of small things." In selecting your business, I refer to the quality, and not the magnitude, of cases. Again, again, and still again, this counsel: Care for your small case with the same painstaking labor you bestow upon a large one.

Never lose sight of the fact that your greatest reward is not your fee, but the doing of a perfect piece of work. The same fervor and ideality should govern your labors in a lawsuit that inspire and control the great artist and inventor. A distinguished sculptor said to me one evening:

"I wish the matter of compensation could be wiped out of my consideration. I must give it attention for obvious reasons, but it is the matter of least moment to me, and has absolutely no influence upon my work."

It is no wonder that that man achieved an immortal renown at thirty-seven. Doctor Barker, the recent occupant of the Chair of Anatomy in the University of Chicago, recently elected to an even more notable position in the Johns Hopkins University, who has won for himself a permanent place in the high seats of his profession by his work on neurology, was in a company one evening. Said one of his admirers:

"Why don't you go into practise? You could easily make a great fortune before you are forty."

Listen to the answer: "Money does not interest me."

We all remember Agassiz's famous reply to a proposition to deliver one lecture for a large fee: "I must decline, gentlemen; I have no time to make money." That was why he was Agassiz.

Quite as lofty ideals should inspire the work of those who make their vows to the greatest of all sciences, the science of justice, and the greatest of all arts, the art of adjusting the rights of men. No lawyer can become great who does not resolve, at the beginning of each case, to make his conduct of it a perfect piece of work, regardless of compensation.

John M. Butler, the partner of Senator McDonald, and one of the best lawyers the Central Western states ever produced, was so careful of pleadings and briefs that he would not endure a blurred or broken letter, and bad punctuation was a source of real irritation to him. Many times have I, as his clerk, required his printer to take out an indistinct letter. It was Mr. Butler's ideal to achieve perfection as nearly as possible.

The most perfect legal argument I ever heard occupied less than an hour. Not a word was wasted. Not a single digression weakened the force of the reasoning. Not a decision was read from. It was assumed that the learned judges before whom the cause was being heard knew something of the law and the decisions themselves.

You see the same thing in its highest form in Marshall's decisions. I once advised a class of law students to commit to memory half a dozen of Marshall's greatest opinions. After years of reflection I think I shall stand by that advice.

In making an argument before a court or jury, remember that the most important thing is the statement of your case. A case properly stated is a case nearly won. Beware of digression. It calls attention from your main idea. It is a fault, too, which is well-nigh universal. I advise every young lawyer, as a practise in accurate thought, to demonstrate a theorem of geometry every morning.

There is no such remorseless logic as that of logarithms. It will produce a habit of definiteness, directness, and concentration invaluable to you. The young gallants of a century ago used to practise fencing for an hour each morning. Why should not you do the same thing in intellectual fencing-you, the devotee of the noblest swordsmanship known to man, the swordsmanship of the law?

Do not waste too much time quoting precedents to a court; it produces weariness rather than conviction on the part of the judge, who himself is a daily maker of decisions and knows their value. He knows the stifling mass of precedents, and sighs under them. It is rare that more than two cases should be cited in oral argument on any given point. Those cases ought to be the most controlling you can find-not necessarily the latest. They should be cases decided upon reason rather than upon authority. Your true judge likes to syllogize.

Do not, however, go into a court without having thoroughly reviewed and mastered all the precedents bearing on every phase of your proposition. It requires desperate labor to do this and will shorten your life; but such is the hard fate of the profession you choose, and such is the condition of our absurd system of multiplying reports.

Do not be what is known as a "case lawyer"-an attorney who does not know the law as a science, but merely looks up precedents and texts concerning a particular case. You may prevail in your "lawsuit," but you will not be a lawyer. Stick close to the elemental Blackstone. You can never get along without Blackstone. Do not read a condensed edition of that great commentator; it is like reading expurgated Shakespeare.

I understand that one of the Justices of the Supreme Court still reads Blackstone once each year. This may be a fable, but I hope it is not. You cannot do a better thing. Thirty minutes each day will give you Blackstone from cover to cover in less than a year, with many holidays. Few modern "text-books" are of permanent value. Pomeroy's "Equity Jurisprudence" is an exception.

But, of course, I cannot give here a list of those books which should be your daily food; any really educated lawyer will mention them to you. The great mass of text-books are nothing more than digests. But don't miss the introduction to Stephens' "Pleading," and also the introduction to Stephens' "Digest of the Law of Evidence." Both are classics and give you the reason and the spirit of our law in fascinating form.

Let your reading in the law be mainly upon the general principles of the common law. The study of the civil law will also be helpful-although English jurisprudence developed of and by itself with only moderate help from the Romans. Reading statutes is unprofitable. You should never answer a question or proceed in a case on the presumption that you remember the statute. The rule of Sir Edwin Coke ought to be your rule.

"I should," said Coke, "feel that I ought to be put out of my profession if I could not answer a question in the common law without referring to the books. I should feel that I ought to be put out of my profession if I would answer a question in the statute law without referring to the statute."

Do not confine yourself to law-books. A man who does so is like the farmer who persists in planting the same soil with the same crop; exhaustion, barrenness, and unprofitableness are the results in each case. Read generously, widely. It is impossible for a man to be a great lawyer, so far as the learning of his profession is concerned, who has not saturated himself with the Bible. He may be a great practitioner, but not a great lawyer. It illuminates all our law-is the source of much of it. There is no more curious and fascinating study than a comparison of the ordinances of the Hebrews with what we think our modern statutes.

Read deeply in science. Read widely the great novelists. They are scientists of human nature, and you are dealing with human nature in your profession. Read profoundly in history. A comprehensive knowledge of history is absolutely indispensable to an understanding of our Constitution. The Federalist, the constitutional debates, and all the discussions that preceded and accompanied the adoption of our organic law are bewilderingly full of historical references. If you were to study every decision on constitutional questions made by every court in this country, you could not understand the Constitution.

You must go back to the roots of it. Trace out the growth of our institutions in Holland. Work out the modifications by these upon institutions adopted from England. Follow the indigenous development of both of these from the old Crown Charters, and finally up to the Constitution itself.

Then take Bancroft's "History of the United States"; then that great monument of intellectual achievement in the realm of historical criticism, Von Holtz's "Constitutional History of the United States." Books like Douglass Campbell's remarkable production, Fisher's convincing yet novel essay, and other like serious and original works, too numerous to properly mention here, are helpful.

Nothing is more disgusting to an informed court than to hear a surface argument on constitutional law by an advocate who thinks he has mastered that tremendous subject by studying all the decisions upon any given point.

You will say this is a heavy task I am assigning you. It is, indeed. But have you not chosen the profession of the law? And, if so, do you dare to be less than a lawyer? How dare you not shoulder your glorious burden with patience, fortitude, and determination? Do not be as if you were to enlist as a soldier, and end as a camp-follower.

I am told that the leader of the American bar has a standing order with his booksellers to send him every new book of approved merit in all the departments of literature. The result is that when he comes before the court his mind is fresh and sparkling with clear ideas and varied knowledge poured into his brain from every mountain-peak of inspiration in all the world of human thought. He brings to the service of his client not only a study of his case and an understanding of the grand science of the law, but the vivifying, vitalizing power of all the great minds in all the realms of intellect.

If you say you have no time for all this, the answer is: If that is true, you have no time to be a great lawyer. You have the time, if you will use it. A little less lingering at the club, an economy of hours here and there-this will give you time, and to spare. Of course if you would rather "loaf" than be great, if you hunger rather after the flesh-pots than the lawyer's wreaths, this advice is not for you.

Do not use intoxicants. Even beware of coffee; it is one of the most powerful nerve and brain stimulants. The coffee habit is as easily formed, and as remorseless, as the alcohol habit. After a while, if excessively used, it produces its sure result; your faculties have been sharpened by this intellectual emery-wheel until the edges begin to crumble. Your mind becomes dull; you pass your hand wearily over your eyes; you don't know what is the matter with you and say so. Overwork, over-stimulation, and the worry these produce are what is the matter with you.

There are lawyers in every town who day by day and year by year find that they have to work harder to understand a case or master a precedent than they did the year before. Whereas formerly they could get the point of a precedent by reading it over once, they must now read it over four or five times. You usually find them the victims of ceaseless toil without rest, of that destroying fretfulness which brain-fag brings, and of some flogger of exhausted nerves, such as coffee in excess.

Do not work late at night. It is a fictitious clearness of mind that comes to the midnight toiler. This also grows into a habit. Conform to Nature. Go to bed early. Get up early, and do your fine and original work in the morning. It will be hard for you to form the habit, but after you have done it you will be amazed at the comparatively immense nervous power you possess in the morning hours.

In trying a case before a jury, never be trivial. Do not bandy gibes, no matter how witty you may know yourself to be in repartee. The jury, and even the court, may laugh, but they are not impressed, and you have not helped your case; and you are there to win your case. As in your argument, so in your examination of witnesses, keep to the point.

In arguing a case, no matter what its nature, before a court or jury, never rage or rave. Get to the point. Speak with great earnestness, but not with violence or volume of sound. Remember that even the most terrible emotions of the human heart in their most intense expression are comparatively quiet. Be earnest. Be sincere. Be the master of your case, and the result must be satisfactory.

It sometimes becomes necessary for an attorney to assert his rights and privileges to the judge himself. Do not shrink from it. It is your duty to your client, your profession, and the cause of justice. Never cringe to a court. Never cringe to any one. He will despise you for it, and properly so. Remember the dignity of your profession. Erskine, in his first case, rebuked a prejudiced and perhaps an unjust judge with such vigor that England rang with it.

Cultivate lucidity of style. You will do that at some risk at first. When a young lawyer is extremely clear, he is apt to be regarded as not deep. Abstruseness in expression is very frequently regarded as an indication of profundity. Nevertheless, persist in a clear and simple style. Make the statement of your case and the argument in support of your propositions so lucid and plain that the judge or jury will say: "Why, of course, that is so. What is the use of the young man stating that?"

The study of Abraham Lincoln's speeches will be very helpful. Two or three of Roscoe Conkling's arguments after he left the Senate are models of perspicuity. Mr. Potter's argument in the legal tender cases is a model-it is Euclid stated in terms of the law. Webster's arguments you will study, of course. Blackstone is one of the clearest writers who ever illustrated the great science to which you and I are devoted. Perhaps as great a logician as ever lived was the Apostle Paul; read him as a master of logical utterance.

Never be ponderous; never be florid. At the same time, never be dry. Be clear; be pointed; be luminous. I remember having heard both sides of a case argued before an eminent Federal Judge. One of the lawyers made a long, turgid, "profound"-and musty-argument; proceeding like a draft-horse from mile-post to mile-post, until the alert mind of the judge was almost frantic with impatience.

The lawyer on the other side is one of the most eminent members of our profession. He is as lithe as a panther, physically and mentally, sharp as a serpent's tooth, as lucid as the atmosphere on a cloudless day, and yet as suggestive as a hickory-wood fire in the old home fireplace on a wintry night. He paced the floor in impatience while Mr. Turgidity blew the clouds of dust from precedent after precedent.

When it came his time to reply, he did so with a clearness and wealth of expression, an appropriateness of illustration, and a simplicity of reasoning that made one feel that the other man had committed an impertinence in presenting his side at all. Of course he won his case.

Respect yourself. A man may lose his money, his reputation-may even lose everything; and yet he has not lost everything if he retains his self-respect. Be a gentleman at the outset of your career and forever. Do not move among men like a beggar for favors. Do not wear poor clothes. Apparel yourself like a gentleman.

No client worth having respects you for advertising your poverty. Do not fear that your community will not know that you are poor. They know it, and sympathize with you. But every one of our race likes to see a man "game." Therefore, dress well. Bear yourself like a man who has prosperous potentialities if not prosperous assets.

Keep your office in as perfect condition as yourself. Remember that it is your workshop. Put all your extra money into books. There is no adornment of an office equal to a library, just as there is no adornment of a mechanic's shop equal to his tools. You know what you think of a doctor when you find his office equipped with the latest appliances.

Do not permit your office to be a loafing place, even for your fellow lawyers. You cannot afford to cultivate professional courtesy at the expense of the discipline of your office. It is nothing to your client that your friends find your society so charming that they seek the felicity of your conversation even in your office. Or, rather, it is something to your client-he wants his case won and he thinks that will take all your time. And so it will.

Be very careful of the places you frequent. Remember that Pericles was never seen except upon the street leading to the Senate House. Don't imitate anybody-be yourself. Still, if you must have the stimulus of imitation, pick out a man like Pericles for your model.

Depend upon yourself; do not call into council another attorney. This is a point on which most lawyers will disagree with me. Nevertheless, if you are not competent to handle your case, you have done wrong to open an independent office. If you call in another attorney, every probability is that you will suggest all the solutions yourself and in reality win the case; but your old and distinguished associate will get all the credit. But you need all the credit for work which you really do.

See well to your evidence before you go into the trial of a cause. Be very cautious on cross-examination. It is the most powerful but most delicate and dangerous instrument known to the surgery of the law. Do not bluster, "bull-doze," or browbeat a witness; there is nothing in it. You only make the jury sympathize with the person abused. Remember that an American loves nothing so much as fair play. When on a jury, he is apt to regard you and the witness as adversaries, you the stronger and with immense advantage.

Ask few questions on cross-examination. Employ the Socratic method always. Ask only those questions the logical conclusion of which is irresistible, and stop there. Don't press the conclusion on the witness. It is your province to show that in your argument.

A timid witness, whom you know to be telling the truth, may often be confused by cross-examination and made to make a false statement; but this you have no right, as an honorable attorney, to make him do. A just judge ought to stop you if you try it. To confuse a witness whom you know to be telling the truth is not skill; it is a trick, and a very miserable trick, whose performance requires neither real ability nor learning.

Think what a tremendous intellectual effort the properly conducted lawsuit is. You must know your case; you must know your evidence; you must know each witness as a person and each item of his testimony; you must know the law applicable to your general proposition, and the general law upon its various ramifications; you must study the witnesses of the other side; and, almost more important than any of these, you must study that wonderful combination of intellect, prejudice, and passion called the jury.

When the time comes for you to address that jury you must thoroughly understand each man. This is not that you may influence him, or "play upon" him, or resort to any of the devices of the baser sort. It is that you may know how best to get the truth of your case to him. How to get your theory, your cause, before each juror should be your only concern.

Never try to be "eloquent." Never be funny. Wit may cause laughter, it never produces conviction. A joke may divert, it never persuades. It is unnecessary even to arouse a jury's sympathies. Forget everything except making the juror understand your case. The result will be that he will understand your case, and if he understands it, and it is a case you ought to win, his understanding of it means that you will win it.

Take at least one excellent legal periodical. There are four or five "law" magazines published in America, some of them very good indeed. Do not pay any attention to the digests of cases with which some of these periodicals burden their pages, except to see if there is a recent decision on some case you are trying. You cannot remember them, and the effort to do so will only confuse. But you will usually find in each number one serious and profitable article, and possibly more, on matters of real interest to the profession. Read such articles very carefully.

The methods of scientific scholarship are now invading the law, and many of these legal essays are superb pieces of work. Now and then you will find a monograph of monumental worth. Such is the remarkable introduction to Stephens' admirable work on "Pleading," to which I have already called your attention.

That author's demonstration of the value of forms, and his comparison of the Roman civil law with the English common law, is the most carefully thought out and learned piece of legal writing I can think of at this moment. It is as great as it is brief.

Take part in politics. I know that it is an ordinary saying that a lawyer should leave politics alone. It is not true. What right have you, a member of the great profession which, more than all other forces combined, has established and defended liberty, to withdraw yourself from active participation in the sacred function of self-government? You have no such right.

Of course you should not make politics your profession. That is fatal to your success in the profession of the law. It is one profession or the other, one love or the other. But take part in your party's primaries. Make yourself so wise and useful that you will be an indispensable party counselor. By all means be a "factor" in your party.

As you value life itself, do not permit yourself ever to be made a lobbyist under the guise of general employment by a corporation or any other interest concerned in legislation. It is no doubt proper for a lawyer to make a legal argument before a legislative committee in behalf of clients. Nevertheless, I advise you not to do it. It is the first step toward the disreputable form of lobbying. There is, of course, perfectly proper and even necessary lobbying. But then you are a lawyer, are you not?

We all know instances of brilliant lawyers and powerful men who have thus sold their birthrights for messes of pottage. No matter how much you need money, never accept a retainer or fee of any kind from any corporation, person, or "interest" which really does not want your active service, but in that manner is purchasing your silence.

Accept no employment except real, genuine employment for actual, tangible, and honest work. Money obtained from any other kind of employment is a loss to you in every way, even financially.

Think daily of the nobility and dignity of your profession. Remember the great men that have adorned it and established the pillars of its glory. They were gentlemen, men of learning, of breeding, of honor as delicate as a woman's blush. Be you such, or leave the profession.

Keep in mind the lords of the bar. Resolve each morning when you awake that, to the utmost of your efforts, you will strive to be one of them-in learning full and thorough, in courtesy delicate, in courage fearless, in character spotless, in all things and at all seasons the true knight of Justice.

Finally, preserve your health, preserve your health, preserve your health. Work, work, work. Cling to the loftiest ideals of your profession which your mind can conceive. Do these; keep up your nerve; never despair; and success is certain, distinction probable, and greatness possible, according to your natural abilities.

* * *

VIToC

PUBLIC SPEAKING

"And the common people heard him gladly," for "he taught them as one having authority." These sentences reveal the very heart of effective speaking. Considered from the human view-point alone, the Son of Mary was the prince of speakers. He alone has delivered a perfect address-the Sermon on the Mount.

The two other speeches that approach it are Paul's appeal to the Athenians on Mars Hill, and the speech of Abraham Lincoln at Gettysburg. These have no tricks, no devices, no tinsel gilt. They do not attempt to "split the ears of the groundlings," and yet they are addressed to the commonest of the world's common people.

Imagination, reason, and that peculiar human quality in speech which defies analysis as much as the perfume of the rose, but which touches the heart and reaches the mind, are blended in each of these utterances in perfect proportion.

But, above all, each of these model speeches which the world has thus far produced teaches. They instruct. And, in doing this, they assert. The men who spoke them did not weaken them by suggesting a doubt of what they said. This is common to all great speeches.

Not one immortal utterance can be produced which contains such expressions as, "I may be wrong," or, "In my humble opinion," or, "In my judgment." The great speakers, in their highest moments, have always been so charged with aggressive conviction that they have announced their conclusions as ultimate truths. They have spoken as persons "having authority," and therefore "the common people have heard them gladly."

All of this means that the two indispensable requisites of speaking are, first, to have something to say, and, second, to say it as though you mean it. Of course one cannot have something really to say-a lesson to teach, a message to deliver-every fifteen minutes. Very well, then; until one does have something to say, let one hold one's peace.

Carlyle's idea is correct. He thought that no man has the right to speak until what he has to say is so ripe with meaning, and the season for his saying it is so compelling, that what he says will result in a deed-a thing accomplished now or afterwhile. In the prophetic old Scotchman's iron philosophy there was no room for anything but deeds.

If such instruction is needed; if a great movement requires the forming and constructive word to interpret it and give it direction; if a movement in a wrong direction needs halting and turning to its proper course; if a cause needs pleading; if a law needs interpretation; if anything really needs to be said-the occasion for the orator, in the large sense of that word, has arrived. Therefore when he speaks "the common people will hear him gladly"; they will hear him because he teaches, and does it "as one having authority."

Whenever a speaker fails to make his audience forget voice, gesture, and even the speaker himself; whenever he fails to make the listeners conscious only of the living truth he utters, he has failed in his speech itself, which then has no other reason for having been delivered than a play or any other form of entertainment.

Very few of the great orators have had loud voices, or, if they did have them, they did not employ them. I am told that Wendell Phillips always spoke in a conversational tone, and yet he was able to make an audience of many thousands hear distinctly; and Phillips was one of the greatest speakers America has produced.

It is probable that no man ever lived who had a more sensuous effect upon his hearers than Ingersoll. In a literal and a physical sense he charmed them. I never heard him talk in a loud voice. There was no "bell-like" quality. It was not an "organ-like" voice.

The greatest feat of modern speech, in its immediate effect, was Henry Ward Beecher's speech to the Liverpool mob. A gentleman who heard that speech told me that, notwithstanding the pandemonium that reigned around him, Beecher did not shout, nor speak at the top of his voice, a single time during that terrible four hours.

It is true that ?schines spoke of Demosthenes' delivery of his "Oration on the Crown" as having the ferocity of a wild beast. I do not see how that can be, however, because Demosthenes selected Is?us as his teacher for the reason that Is?us was "business-like" in method.

This, however, is common to the voices of nearly all great speakers; they have a peculiar power of penetration that carries them much farther than the shout and halloo of the loudest-voiced person. They have, too, a singularly touching and tender quality, which, in a sensuous way, captivates and holds the hearers. James Whitcomb Riley has this quality in his voice when reciting. Edwin Booth had it. All great actors have it. Every true orator has it. It touches you strangely, thrills you, affects you much as music does.

It is a remarkable thing that there is neither wit nor humor in any of the immortal speeches that have fallen from the lips of man. To find a joke in Webster would be an offense. The only things which Ingersoll wrote that will live are his oration at his brother's grave and his famous "The Past Rises before Me like a Dream." But in neither of these productions of this genius of jesters is there a single trace of wit.

There is not a funny sally in all Burke's speeches. Lincoln's Gettysburg address, his first and second inaugurals, his speech beginning the Douglas campaign, and his Cooper Union address in New York, are perhaps the only utterances of his that will endure.

Yet this greatest of story-tellers since ?sop did not deface one of these great deliverances with story or any form of humor.

The reason for this is found in the whole tendency of human thought and feeling-in the whole melancholy history of the race-where tears and grief, the hard seriousness of life and the terrible and speedy certainty of our common fate of suffering and of death, make somber the master-cord of existence. And the great orator must reflect the deeper soul of his hearers.

So all the immortal things are serious, even sad.

It is so with speech-I mean the speech that affects the convictions and understanding of men. I am excluding now that form of speech which belongs to the same class, though not of so high an order, as the theatrical exhibition.

Excepting only Lincoln, the Middle West has produced no greater man than Oliver P. Morton; and few men in our history have had greater power upon an audience both in the immediate and permanent effect of his speeches than did Indiana's great Senator. It is related of him that while a very young man he made a speech so rich in humor and scintillant of wit that it attracted the attention of the whole commonwealth.

Morton, however, was not pleased or flattered. He was alarmed. He feared that what he knew to be his weighty abilities would be held lightly by his fellow citizens. From that time on this Cromwell of the forum never "told a story" or attempted to amuse his hearers in any way.

Of course, if your mental armory is naturally heavily stocked with the various forms of fun, you are not to be blamed for employing the weapons with which Nature has equipped you and which Nature has peculiarly fitted you to use-although Morton deliberately let them rust. But, generally speaking, it is a distinct descent from the high plane of your address to excite the laughter of your audience. When you do so, you confess that you are not able to hold the attention of your hearers by the sustained and unbroken strength of your argument. You admit that you are either so dull in your thought or indifferent in your convictions that you know you are wearying your auditors and must rest them by some mental diversion.

Where there is an earnestness of thought (and earnestness is only another name for seriousness) there will always be the same quality in manner-an impressiveness in bearing and delivery. This is inconsistent with merriment of delivery, which robs speech of a certain weight and intrinsic worth. It is also inconsistent with the voice of storm and the hurricane manner.

And men in deadly earnest do not talk loudly. It has been my fortune to see men angry and aroused to the point of killing; they were intense, but quiet. I have also seen that bravado and drunken boisterousness which thought it imitated, and meant to imitate, genuine rage; it was always strident and violent, never dangerous, never sincere. The same thing is true in speech.

There have only been two or three roarers in effective oratory-Mirabeau, by all accounts (though anything can be forgiven a man who can make such speeches as the great Frenchman made), and Demosthenes, if ?schines is to be believed, which I think he is not to be in this particular. He was only excusing his own defeat, and he had to attribute it to delivery. (I think any unprejudiced mind will agree that ?schines made the better argument.) All the other great speakers have, even in their most intense passages, and in situations where life and death were involved, been comparatively quiet so far as mere volume of sound is concerned.

I remember, as if it were yesterday, the first great speaker I ever heard. It was Robert G. Ingersoll, delivering a lecture in Des Moines, Iowa, in 1884. He had an audience which would have inspired eloquence in almost any breast. He came on the stage alone, and was very carefully, even elegantly attired, to the smallest item of his grooming.

His address was in manuscript, and imperfectly committed to memory. He laid it down on a little table at the back of the stage (returning to it occasionally to refresh his memory), and then, in a very natural and matter-of-fact way, walked to the footlights, and, looking the audience frankly in the eyes, began without an instant's hesitation, and in a voice precisely as if he were talking to a friend.

But he was as dramatic at his climaxes as Edwin Booth ever was in Hamlet. His face paled, or seemed to pale; his hands clinched with a desperate energy, and the whole attitude of the man was that of one in awful wrath. Yet his voice was not raised above the common current of the evening's address-if anything, it was lower. While the mature mind cannot endure Ingersoll's rhetoric, it must be acknowledged that his manner of delivery (except when his levity made him coarse) was nearly equal to that of Wendell Phillips. Still, in his intense passages Ingersoll was almost fiercely earnest. And Plutarch tells us that Cicero's friends feared he would kill himself by bursting a blood-vessel, with such intense energy did he speak.

Both of these men had that instinctive taste of the great speaker which Shakespeare has described better than any one else in literature, when he makes Hamlet tell the players not to "mouth it, as many of your players do, I had as lief the town-crier spoke my lines. Nor do not saw the air too much-your hand thus: but use all gently: for in the very torrent, tempest, and (as I may say) the whirlwind of passion, you must acquire and beget a temperance, that may give it smoothness. O, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious, periwig pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings; who, for the most part, are capable of nothing but inexplicable dumb shows and noise: I could have such a fellow whipped for o'erdoing Termagant; it out-herods Herod: pray you, avoid it."

When I was a very young boy I saw a fist-fight which impressed me as powerfully as any lesson I ever learned at school. An overtall and powerful man, about forty years old, had become angry at a medium-sized but very compact man of about the same age. As his passion increased his violence grew, until finally he was shouting his denunciations. The little man stood quietly alert.

Finally, with a great volume of sound, the big man rushed upon the little one with arms swinging in the air, and I looked with interest and curiosity to see the smaller man either run or be demolished. He did neither. His fists were raised quickly but intensely before him, and when the big man was almost upon him, it seemed to me that his right hand did not shoot out farther than ten or twelve inches; but it did shoot out, and the result was as if the big man had been shot, sure enough.

He fell like a slaughtered ox, but rose and came on again, only again to be knocked down. This continued for three or four times, for the giant was "game"; but finally he was "thrashed to a standstill," as the expression has it.

It was a great lesson in life and a great lesson in speaking, which is only a phase of life. The victor came to the point. He did not dissipate his energies. It is so in the manner of speaking. The greatest contrast to the perfect method of Ingersoll which I ever beheld in a man of equal eminence was in the delivery of a lecture by Joseph Cook.

He came on the stage with ostentatious impressiveness. He sat some time before he was introduced, seeming vast and overpowering-a very Matterhorn of consequence. After introduction he stood with one hand thrust in the breast of his tightly buttoned frock coat, and looked tremendously all over the audience for perhaps an entire minute. Everybody was awed; he looked so great. We all said to ourselves, "What a mighty man this is!"

And when that effect had been produced upon us, the first and great point of effectiveness had been destroyed: the speaker had made us think about himself, his manner, his appearance, his personality. All the evening we had to wade through that slough, trying to follow his thought. And this reminds me of a saying of one of the most astute politicians and most capable public men of recent development:

"The surest sign that a man is not great is that he strives to look great."

I think that the best speech I ever heard for obedience to the rules of art was an address of about ten minutes by a young Salvation Army officer on the streets of Chicago. I listened with amazement. He was perhaps twenty-three years of age, with delicate, clear-cut features, sensitive mouth, and marvelously intelligent eyes. I was just passing the group as he stepped into the circle that always surrounds these noisy but sincere enthusiasts.

He took off his cap, and in a low, perfectly natural, and very sweet voice, speaking exactly as though he were having a conversation with his most confidential friend, he began: "You will admit, my friends, that human happiness is the problem of human life." And from this striking sentence he went on to another equally moving, showing, of course, that happiness could not be secured by traveling any of the usual roads, but only the straight and narrow path which the Master has marked out.

It was as simple as it was sincere. And it was as conversational as it was quiet. Before he had finished, his audience had gathered into itself every pedestrian who passed during his discourse-business man, professional man, working man, or what not.

The fight above described suggests the key to the matter as well as the manner of speaking. The American audience properly demands, above everything else, that the speaker get to the point. Our lives are so rapid; the telephone, telegraph, and all the instantaneous agencies of our neurotically swift civilization have made us so quick in seeing through propositions; a hundred years of universal education have produced a mentality so electric in its rapidity, that effective oratory has been revolutionized within a decade.

Burke would not be tolerated now. It is doubtful, even, if Webster would. The public has already tired of the lilt of Ingersoll's redundant rhetoric, pleasing as was its music. The effective speech to-day is a statement of conclusions.

The listeners, with a celerity inconceivable, sum up the argument on either side of the proposition you announce, and accept or reject it by a process of unconscious mental cerebration.

The most successful speech of to-day would be one of Emerson's essays rearranged in logical order-if such a thing were possible. Therefore, in matter, the statement is the form of address now most effective. Recall the opinion of Senator McDonald-the greatest natural lawyer I ever knew-that the best argument in a case always is the statement of the case.

In form, the sentences should be short; in language, the words should be as largely as possible Anglo-Saxon. These are the words of the people you address, therefore they are most influential with them. Also, therefore, your best method of getting Anglo-Saxon is to mingle with and talk with the common people. The next best method is to read the Bible, the King James translation of which is undoubtedly the purest fountain of English that flows in all the world of our literature.

What nonsense the repeated statement that public speaking has had its day, that the newspaper has taken its place, and all the rest of that kind of talk. Public speaking will never decline until men cease to have ears to hear. How hard it is to read a speech; how delightful to listen!

Speaking is Nature's choicest method of instruction.

It begins with mother to child; it continues with teacher to pupil; it continues still in lecturer or professor to his student (for the universities are all going back to the old oral method of instruction); and it still continues in all the forms of effective human communication.

The newspapers are a marvelous influence, but they are not everything, and they do not supply everything. For example, it is commonly supposed that they, absolutely and exclusively, mold and control public opinion. But they do not. When all has been said, the most powerful public opinion, after all, is that from-mouth-to-mouth public opinion-that living, moving opinion-which spreads from neighbor to neighbor, and has fused into it the vitality of the personality of nearly every man-yes, and woman; don't forget that-in the whole community.

And the philosophy which underlies this is what makes public speaking immortal. The Master understood this very well, and that is why He chose to speak by word of mouth rather than by writing epistles. The Saviour never wrote a single epistle-no, not even a single word. He spoke His message.

Think of a gospel announced to the world in cold type! Absurd, is it not? It may be repeated in that form, but its initial power must come from the spoken word and vital personality of its author. But Christ's addresses were not "extemporaneous." All His life He had been preparing His few sermons-lessons.

The great speakers to whom I have listened have confirmed certain conclusions upon the subject of speaking at which I arrived while in college. It seemed to me that the college method of speaking was wrong because it was irrational-that the studied gestures, the "cultivated" voice, the staccato impressiveness, were all artificial devices to attract the attention of an audience to these things, instead of to the thought of the address.

Analysis of the problem convinced me that an audience is only a larger person-a great collective individuality-and therefore that whatever, in manner and matter, will please, persuade, and convince a person, will have the same effect upon an audience. Hence one readily deduces that a simple, quiet, but direct, earnest address; a straightforward, unartificial honest manner, without tricks of oratory, is the most effective method of lodging truth in the minds of one's hearers.

Any affectation, any mannerism, detracts from the thought because it calls the attention of the listener to the mannerism or affectation, when his whole attention should be monopolized by the thought. Read Herbert Spencer on the "Philosophy of Style," and apply his reasoning to the delivery of an address, and you have the rationale of the art of speaking, as well as of speech, put with that wonderful thinker's unerringness.

The method commonly employed in preparing speeches is incorrect. That method is, to read all the books one can get on the subject, take all the opinions that can be procured, make exhaustive notes, and then write the speech.

Such a speech is nothing but a compilation. It is merely an arrangement of second-hand thoughts and observations and of other people's ideas. It never has the power of living and original thinking.

The true way is to take the elements of the problem in hand, and, without consulting a book or an opinion, reason out from these very elements of the problem itself your solution of it, and then prepare your speech.

After this, read, read, read-read comprehensively, omnivorously, in order to see whether your solution was not exploded a hundred years ago-aye, a thousand-and, if it was not, to fortify and make accurate your own thought. Read Matthew Arnold on "Literature and Dogma," and you will discover why it is necessary for you to read exhaustively on any subject about which you would think or write or speak.

But, as you value your independence of mind-yes, even your vigor of mind-do not read other men's opinions upon the subject before you have clearly thought out your own conclusions from the premises of the elemental facts.

As to style, seek only to be clear. Nothing else is important. Never try to be elegant or striking.

Consider the method of the Saviour in His addresses to the people. Next to Him, those perfect specimens of the art of putting things are the speeches and epistles of St. Paul. I know of nothing in literature so clear, convincing, and logical.

The words of the Master astonish one with their absolute unity with all the rules of effective address.

Especially His method of driving home a truth by repeating it, and that, too, in exactly the same words, is noticeable and very effective. He did not fear that He would be tiresome; He was concerned only in being clear. Take the following examples-Matthew vii: