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.
2. The Young Man who Cannot Go
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.