The Young Man and the World

by Albert J. Beveridge

I secured for him an invitation to make some speeches in a neighboring State. He was delighted. He went, but returned wounded in spirit by the heedlessness of the State Committee and the indifference of the men of prominence who had refused to notice him. And yet the fine courage that dared take part in the great struggle just beginning was a quality which was more valuable to his party and to the world and to humanity, than all of the schemes of the men who rejected him.

It is this courage constantly injected into the veins of the world which, little by little, is lifting mankind up to a more and still more endurable estate. I shall never be able to perform a higher service than to light again, as I did, the fires of his confidence and young daring.

Let the world not suppose that by encouraging these great qualities of youth which it now heedlessly represses, and only too often kills, it will spoil the young man. The intrinsic difficulties of life are great enough to keep him within bounds, no matter how much encouragement he receives. The very nature of things, and the constitution of society as he comes to examine it in its concrete manifestations, will chasten his illusions.

The rarity of the air as he mounts upward in life will weight his wings at last. The limitations of Nature and of affairs will in themselves be all the chastisement he needs to correct abnormal hope, courage, faith, or honor—yes, even more than enough. Let the world, then—the men and women who have won their places in life—let them nourish the enthusiasms and the elemental "illusions" of youth wherever they see them.

After all, they are not illusions; they are the only true things in this universe. The houses that men construct will in time decay. The remorseless elements will rot the noblest trees down to the earth from which they grew. The laws that men make will lose their force and be succeeded by other statutes, equally temporary and futile. Reputations men build will vanish almost before they are made. Civilizations they erect will pass from their flowering into the seeds of future civilizations and be forgotten, too.

But the "illusions" with which the young man confronts the world at the beginning of his career are as everlasting as God's word: "Till heaven and earth pass, one jot or one little shall in no wise pass from the law, till all be fulfilled." The "illusions" of the young man—of the young American particularly—are the manifestations of that law, the eternal law of the eternal verities.

"The lyrical dream of the boy is the kingly truth.
The world is a vapor and only the Vision is real—
Yea, nothing can hold against hell but the Winged Ideal."

Let the world look to it, then, that the exalted qualities of youth which make it indiscreet, audacious, exhilarant—yes, and spotless, too—be not discouraged, repressed, destroyed; for these qualities are "the salt of the earth; but if the salt have lost its savor, wherewith shall it be salted? it is thenceforth good for nothing but to be cast out, and to be trodden under foot of men."

Speaking to the world of business and of society, I therefore plead for tolerance of all the fresh, clean, high, and splendid—absurd, if you will—"illusions" of the young man seeking his seat at the table where all men eat, and where all, at the end, must drink the same hemlock cup.

For if these "illusions" are destroyed and replaced with the wisdom of the serpent, Tennyson's "Locksley Hall" will, sure enough and in sad reality, be replaced by the "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After." Take the young man, then, by the hand, take him to your heart, and, instead of destroying, catch, if you can, some of the glory, the faith, the freshness, the "illusions" of his youth; remembering that Wordsworth uttered an ultimate note when he said: