The Young Man and the World

by Albert J. Beveridge

And that is a good work, too—yet fruitless, for the immensities of the universe will never be measured, nor the mysteries of the skies be solved, nor the stars give up their secrets. Most of us are on some quest which requires the very infinitesimalities of patience, quests that are grand and quests that are foolish, searchings that are useful and explorations that are frivolous.

But the noblest of all prospecting is for strength and high purpose and thoroughbred quality among the young manhood of our Nation. For any one who helps some young man to make his life righteously successful has enriched humanity more than he who reveals a Klondike to the uses and the greed of the clans of trade.

Yes; and he or she who, in the search for strong minds and pure hearts among young men, discovers to the world a great man has in that achievement wrought immortality for himself and herself, while rendering to mankind a service like that of a Columbus or a Pasteur. For Columbus discovered a new continent; but what of the man or woman who while looking through all the immaturities of his youth "discovers" a Columbus.

Thus would I direct the divining keenness of our men of affairs, so swift and sure to detect advantages in business, to the young men who wait at their outer gates for recognition and service. I would invite the world, whose hearing is so sensitive to the material things of commerce, to the exalted and eternal subject of human characters and human destinies as they are developing daily, hourly, all about us. In a word, I ask the ear of the world for its young men.

I read in some sermon—I think it was by Myron Reed—that the most pathetic thing in life is that a man of either thought or action must spend two-thirds of his time getting a hearing. "During this time," said the preacher, "the man of thought speaks his immortal word; the man of action does his immortal deed; all the time the World is refusing to listen or to heed; but finally, when the fires of genius have burned low, when the great thoughts have been uttered and the great works wrought, then it is willing to give ear and eye to the necessarily feebler acts and thoughts of the great man's later days."

It refuses to come near the fire when in full glow; it comes and puts its hands into the ashes after the flame has died out and the ashes themselves are growing cold. Do we not find ourselves worshiping echoes and ghosts in the persons of men who once wrought splendidly, and denying the real forces of the present hour until they compel recognition by their overwhelmingness; and then, having exhausted themselves, become in their turn ghosts and echoes.

It is all right to honor those who have done big things and are "living on their reputations"; but it is all wrong to deny to those young men who are doing and will do big things, now and in the future, full and glad recognition of their power and possibilities.

The first thing that the world should remember about the young man who is confronting it, asking his daily bread of it, is the inestimable value of the qualities of freshness, of innocence, of faith, of confidence, of high honesty, of Don Quixote courage which the young man brings to it. These are qualities which in human character are worth all the wisdom of the market-place many million times multiplied. They are the qualities which, in spite of itself, keep the world young and tolerable.

The young man comes to the world fresh from his mother's knee. The Lord's Prayer is still in his mind; his mother taught it to him. The glorious fable of Washington and the cherry-tree is still in his heart; his mother taught it to him. A beautiful honor that makes him very foolish on the stock exchange and causes the shrewd ones to say, "He will know more after a while"—the splendid honor that makes him throw over what the world calls "advantages"—still glorifies his soul; his mother taught him that honor. The confidence that God is just, and that success is surely his if he will but do right, still beautifies him like the rose-tinted clouds of morning; it is the influence of his mother's teaching.

Let the world understand that these qualities with which the mother labors to endow her child, from the time the blessing of maternity is hers to the time the bright-eyed young fellow steps out from the old home, are more valuable to the world itself than all its gold-mines, all its scientific discoveries, all its electric railroads, all its games of politics, all its commerce. "Il mondo va da sé," said a cynical Italian statesman—"the world goes by itself." But it does not.