“Yes; we can’t all be presidents of the United States. Any man is successful who does well what comes to his hand, and who works to improve himself so that he may do better. The man with the ideal, struggling to carry it out, is the successful man. Of course, there are all grades of ideals, and the man with the highest, given the proportionate energy, is the most successful. The world makes way for that kind of young man.”
“Do you consider that happiness in the successful man consists in reflecting over what he has done or what he may do?”
“I should say that it consists in both. No man who has accomplished a great deal could sit down and fold his hands. The enjoyment of life would be instantly gone if you removed the possibility of doing something. When through with his individual affairs, a man wants a wider field, and of course that can only be in public affairs. Whether the beginner believes it or not, he will find that he cannot drop interest in life at the end, whatever he may think about it in the beginning.”
“The aim of the young man of to-day should be, then—?”
“To do something worth doing, honestly. Get wealth, if it is gotten in the course of an honorable public service. I think, however, the best thing to get is the means of doing good, and then doing it.”
XIX
A Chance-Found Book the Turning Point in a United States Senator’s Career.
HE wasn’t much of a boy to look at, this Dolliver boy of ten, trudging off to school every morning in the West Virginia hamlet of Kingwood, where the mountains are so brown in winter and so green in summer. To the master of the little subscription school he was Jonathan Prentiss Dolliver; to the comrades of sport and study he was just plain “Prent,” a sturdy little chap, whose hair refused to stay combed, whose clothes showed the rough-and-tumble of play, whose love for the mountains far exceeded his love of arithmetic.
Somebody lost a copy of the “Congressional Record” about that time,—a bound volume, containing many speeches of senators and representatives. “Prent” found it. His boyish imagination was fired. Hour after hour he pored over its pages, committing to memory several of the passages in the speeches.