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.