Pushing to the Front

by Orison Swett Marden

Never before was a practical substitute for a college education at home made so cheap, so easy, and so attractive. Knowledge of all kinds is placed before us in a most attractive and interesting manner. The best of the literature of the world is found to-day in thousands of American homes where fifty years ago it could only have been obtained by the rich.

What a shame it is that under such conditions as these an American should grow up ignorant, should be uneducated in the midst of such marvelous opportunities for self-improvement! Indeed, most of the best literature in every line to-day appears in the current periodicals, in the form of short articles. Many of our greatest writers spend a vast amount of time in the drudgery of travel and investigation in gathering material for these articles, and the magazine publishers pay thousands of dollars for what a reader can get for ten or fifteen cents. Thus the reader secures for a trifle in periodicals or books the results of months and often years of hard work and investigation of our greatest writers.

A New York millionaire,—a prince among merchants,—took me over his palatial residence on Fifth Avenue, every room of which was a triumph of the architect's, of the decorator's, and of the upholsterer's art. I was told that the decorations of a single sleeping-room had cost ten thousand dollars. On the walls were paintings secured at fabulous prices, and about the rooms were pieces of massive and costly furniture, and draperies representing a small fortune, and carpets on which it seemed almost sacrilege to tread covered the floors. But there was scarcely a book in the house. He had expended a fortune for physical pleasures, comforts, luxury, and display. It was pitiful to think of the physical surfeit and mental starvation of the children of such a home as that. When I went out, he told me that he came to the city a poor boy, with all his worldly possessions done up in a little red bandana. "I am a millionaire," he said, "but I want to tell you that I would give half I have to-day for a decent education."

Many a rich man has confessed to confidential friends and his own heart that he would give much of his wealth,—all, if necessary,—to see his son a manly man, free from the habits which abundance has formed and fostered till they have culminated in sin and degradation and perhaps crime; and has realized that, in all his ample provision, he has failed to provide that which might have saved his son and himself from loss and torture,—good books.

There is a wealth within the reach of the poorest mechanic and day-laborer in this country that kings in olden times could not possess, and that is the wealth of a well-read, cultured mind. In this newspaper age, this age of cheap books and periodicals, there is no excuse for ignorance, for a coarse, untrained mind. To-day no one is so handicapped, if he have health and the use of his faculties, that he can not possess himself of wealth that will enrich his whole life, and enable him to converse and mingle with the most cultured people. No one is so poor but that it is possible for him to lay hold of that which will broaden his mind, which will inform and improve him, and lift him out of the brute stage of existence into their god-like realm of knowledge.

"No entertainment is so cheap as reading," says Mary Wortley Montague; "nor any pleasure so lasting." Good books elevate the character, purify the taste, take the attractiveness out of low pleasures, and lift us upon a higher plane of thinking and living.

"A great part of what the British spend on books," says Sir John Lubbock, "they save in prisons and police."

It seems like a miracle that the poorest boy can converse freely with the greatest philosophers and scientists, statesmen, warriors, authors of all time with little expense, that the inmates of the humblest cabin may follow the stories of the nations, the epochs of history, the story of liberty, the romance of the world, and the course of human progress.

Have you just been to a well educated sharp-sighted employer to find work? You did not need to be at any trouble to tell him the names of the books you have read, because they have left their indelible mark upon your face and your speech. Your pinched, starved vocabulary, your lack of polish, your slang expressions, tell him of the trash you have given your precious time to. He knows that you have not rightly systemized your hours. He knows that thousands of young men and women whose lives are crowded to overflowing with routine work and duties, manage to find time to keep posted on what is going on in the world, and for systematic, useful reading.

Carlyle said that a collection of books is a university. What a pity that the thousands of ambitious, energetic men and women who missed their opportunities for an education at the school age, and feel crippled by their loss, fail to catch the significance of this, fail to realize the tremendous cumulative possibilities of that great life-improver that admirable substitute for a college or university education—reading.