Hard Time for the Poor Man.
The young man who has never earned his living for himself, no matter what his advantages of circumstances or training, is sure to make many mistakes through ignorance of hard, practical life. Not personally having the same needs as the man of the people, he doesn't know what to do or how to do it.
Young men who enjoy the advantages of special training and the opportunities that wealth gives may become especially qualified for public life; such opportunities and training are necessary to complete qualifications, but often they are not equal to them. That which may be had without effort is not often highly prized.
But all young men of ability, whether favored by fortunes or not, owe it both to themselves and to the nation to give attention to public affairs, to keep themselves in touch with things, to be in constant preparation for public life if the opportunity or necessity comes to them.
Everybody knows there is a large number of such young men in the great business and industrial centers who give no attention, or very little, to public affairs. The manufacturing, the commercial or financial operations, the contracting or transportation enterprises which they take up give them so much better financial returns than public life would yield that they lose sight altogether of the government, upon whose proper conduct their success in their various callings and enterprises depends—upon which, in fact, the very chance to enter these callings and carry on those enterprises rests, and whose demoralization would wipe out everybody's chances in life.
Now, we can't prevent the evolution of such conditions in this or any other civilized country. But these people, thus completely absorbed in their callings and enterprises, whose standpoint of self-interest now prevents them from giving attention to public affairs, will surely be forced more and more to broaden their culture—thorough knowledge of public affairs is as necessary to truly broad culture as any other sort of knowledge—as well as their patriotism.