"Humph! Why do you call that a fault?"
"Waal, it's this way. I reckon that messenger will steal your money and won't return."
"But suppose he does?"
"Then I'll have to scratch your name out and put his in its place; but I feel in my bones that yer the man that'll be at fault."
[QUESTIONS FOR YOUNG MEN.]
ON GOING TO COLLEGE.
One of the professors of Harvard University once said, in a lecture, that many young men made a great mistake in going to college; that a university was for students, and for students only; and that if a boy were not of a studious turn of mind it was more than likely that he would waste his time for four years that could be put to better advantage in some mercantile business.
The time for such ideas has gone into history with other ideas of a similar nature, such as the buying and selling of slaves, and the pride noblemen used to feel in not being able to read or write. A college education is quite different from acquiring knowledge at a college. For instance, you may be attending a preparatory school at this moment, and are considering what courses of study you will pursue in order to obtain a "college education." What do you find at Harvard? There are some two hundred different courses to choose from, and by choosing sixteen or seventeen, and taking four or four and a half a year, at the end of four years you will, if the examinations are passed satisfactorily, obtain a degree of A. B., which in the common phrase signifies that you have obtained an education. And yet you have studied only sixteen or seventeen out of the two hundred preliminary courses that lead up to a real education. In fact, when these four years are done you have only just begun! And therefore the actual study covered amounts to little.
What has been accomplished, however, is the study and practice of how to learn, and how to go to work to get an education. You have learned how to start on any subject, whether it be the selling and buying of leather and tin goods, or the teaching of boys' schools, or the science of biology. Little information has been acquired, but you have at least learned how to attack any subject.