Verily I say unto you that each and every one of you may be a Count of Monte Christo, and some day exclaim, "The World is mine!"
The world was made for you, that I know. That you were made for the world goes without saying.
Therefore hear me and believe me. If you desire wealth it can be yours. If you desire fame it can be yours.
But you cannot get something for nothing. You must pay for everything worth having. You must pay the price set upon it, and in the coin of the realm.
The coin of the realm is industry—just that. Industry and only industry. Nothing but industry.
BY THE SIDE OF THE HIGHWAY TO MICHIGAN: THE ELECTRIC FREIGHT TRAIN.
Poor immigrant, who thinks it would be grand to be a Count of Monte Christo, or, to bring it nearer home, a John D. Rockefeller or an Andrew Carnegie, and who thinks that honest labour will take him there! Even were American success a thing worth striving for it is not won by that means. It is a game of halma. It's not the man who moves all his pieces out one square at a time who wins, but the sagacious player who knows both to plan in advance and to hop over others when the opportunity arises.
But the good American young man, "the greatest asset of the town," believes this gospel, and he gives his body and mind to the great machine, and fills the gap between two otherwise disconnected mechanisms. If he has been brought up "well," he just fits the gap and is standard size. He feels in his soul every throb of the engines, and registers in his integuments every rhythm and rhyme of the great, accurate, definite, circulating, oscillating machine. He behaves like a machine in his leisure hours. He even dances like a mechanical contrivance. On none of the occasions when the Fatherland requires his sober human judgment can he stand as a man. He seems spoilt for the true citizenship. What he does understand is the improvement, adjustment, and significance of machinery, and he can look intelligently at America the Great Machine. Perhaps this is his function whilst America is realising the dream of materialism and progress. But America would take care of itself if the American were all right. I could not but have that opinion as I left the cities and walked through the rich country, the new world, as yet scarcely visibly shopsoiled by commercialism.