Fifty years in Wall Street

by Henry Clews

While you are still young, I advise you to have an ideal. Make up your mind what you are best suited for, and strive with all that is in you to perfect yourself for the work of such a position or profession. While it is the almost universal desire to become rich, remember that there are other things in life more to be desired than great wealth. Whether amassed in Wall Street or elsewhere. Few of the great authors, scientists, professors, or inventors have been wealthy men, yet they were great public benefactors, and their names will live in the pages of history long after the very rich men of the world have been forgotten.

Learn well the history of your country. Study the science of Federal, State, and Municipal government. Study also finance and banking. Whether you go into Wall Street or not, it will be useful to you. Before you leave Yale, try to inform yourselves on all the subjects that will make you useful citizens, as well as competent, practical workers. School yourselves to be polite and courteous under trying circumstances. Politeness is one of the strongest allies one can have in his dealings with his fellow-men. It is not only so in my field of activity—Wall Street—but everywhere.

Read only good books. Libraries are now so plentiful that—even if you have not one of your own—good books are within the reach of all, and here at Yale you, of course, have an embarrassment of riches from the Greek and Latin classics to modern literature.

While you are improving your minds, take good care of your bodies. You are not yet too old for me to give you points. Exercise all you can in the open air. Cleanliness of body, and neatness of dress, even if you are not millionaires and your clothes are threadbare, will often be taken as a guarantee of good character. Be thrifty and economical, even if you cannot equal Russell Sage, and never get into debt, if you can help it.

Strive to learn to do some one thing, in the line of your studies, better than anyone else can do it, and you will have a specialty to recommend you to a chosen career. Whatever you attempt to do, do it with your whole soul—as Mr. Roosevelt, our strenuous and gifted President, says: “Buck hard and hit the center of the line.”

I have been much impressed with the manual training schools, which have recently been established in New York City. I wish that manual training could be added to the course in every school and college. Mr. Booker Washington has ably presented the plan in his Tuskegee Institution, where every man to get an education must learn a trade, and every man who learns a trade gets an education. It is a substantial personal asset for rich or poor.

Because you live in a city, do not think that the country is less attractive, and has no chance to grow like a town. The State of Texas alone could give to every man, woman, and child in the United States a full-sized building lot 20 × 100, and then, allowing for public highways, have over one-third of the area of the State left for the production of food supplies. The West, the Southwest, and the South, are yearning for newcomers. Horace Greeley used to say: “Go West, young man!” The emigrants from foreign shores will some day realize that there is a welcome ready for them outside of cities. Colonies will be formed and men of intelligence will be needed to rule and advise the newcomers; and those of you who can speak a foreign language will be well fitted for such a position. But you may aspire to the United States Senate, or to become Wall Street millionaires.

The natural resources of our country are constantly being developed, and men of brains and courage will be sought to lead the armies of workmen. Every man cannot be a captain of industry, but a man of pluck and education need not remain a private in the ranks very long. Still, avoid that vaulting ambition that overleaps itself and falls on the other side.

Whatever your calling may be, try to become your own master in your younger days. Nothing will give you so much self-reliance as the habit of relying on yourself. You may possibly fail at first, but great successes are often built on failures, if the one who fails will profit by the lesson. Bulwer Lytton tells us that in the bright lexicon of Youth, there is no such word as Fail.

When you graduate, do not imagine that your education is completed. Consider that you are just beginning to be able to learn, and that your College life has simply been a period of training to put you in condition for the real struggle for knowledge. Practice makes perfect in all the professions.