Chapter IV: Preface (4)

Stevenson, who invented the steam-engine, was not a college man. He was the son of a fireman in one of the English collieries. As a boy, he was himself a laborer in the mines. Undoubtedly the greatest engineer America has yet produced was Captain Eades, whose fame was world wide; yet this Indiana boy, who constructed the jetties of the Mississippi, built the ship railroad across the Isthmus of Panama and other like wonders, never had a day's instruction in any higher institution of learning than the common schools of Dearborn County. Ericsson, who invented the _Monitor_, and whose creative genius revolutionized naval warfare, was a Swedish immigrant. Robert Fulton, who invented the steamboat, never went to college.

And take literature: John Bunyan was not only uneducated, but actually ignorant. If Milton went to college, I repeat that Shakespeare had no other alma mater than the university of human nature, and that Robert Burns was not a college man. Our own Washington Irving never saw the inside of any higher institution of learning. I have already noted that the author of "Thanatopsis" went to college for only a single year.

Among the writers, Lew Wallace, soldier, diplomat, and author, was self-educated. John Stuart Mill, who is distinguished as a philosopher, is innocent of a college training. James Whitcomb Riley, our American Burns, is not a "college man." Hugh Miller, the Scotchman, whose fame as a geologist is known to all the world of science, did not go to college.

Take statesmanship. Henry Clay wrested his education from books, experience, and downright hard thinking; and we Americans still like to tell of the immortal Lincoln poring over the pages of his few and hard-won volumes before the glare of the wood-fire on the hearth, or the uncertain light of the tallow dip. Benjamin Franklin got his education in a print-shop.

In American productive industry, the most conspicuous name, undoubtedly, is that of Andrew Carnegie; yet this great ironmaster, and master of gold as well, who has written as vigorously as he has wrought, was a Scotch immigrant. George Peabody, the philanthropist, never was inside a college as a student. He was a clerk when he was eleven years old.

At least three of the most astonishing though legitimate business successes which have been made in the last decade in New York were made by men not yet forty-five years old, none of whom had any other education than our common schools. I am not sure, but I will hazard the guess that a majority of the great business men of Chicago never saw a college.

These illustrations occur to the mind as I write, and without special selection. Doubtless, the entire space of this paper might be occupied by nothing more than the names of men who have blessed the race and become historic successes in every possible department of human industry, none of whom ever saw the inside of either college or university.

But all of these do not prove that you ought not to go to college if you can. Certainly you ought to go to college if it is possible. But the lives of these men do prove that no matter how hard the conditions that you think surround you, success is yours in spite of them, _if you are willing to pay the price of success_--if you are willing to work and wait; if you are willing to be patient, to keep sweet, to maintain fresh and strong your faith in God, your fellow men, and in yourself.

The life of any one of the men whom I have mentioned is not only an inspiration but an instruction to you who, like these men, cannot go to college. Consider, for example, how Samuel B. Raymond established the New York _Times_. He wrote his own editorials; he did his own reporting; he set his own type; he distributed his own papers. That was the beginning.

One of the most successful merchants that I know opened a little store in the midst of large and pretentious mercantile establishments. He bought his own goods; he was his own clerk; he swept and dusted his own storeroom, and polished his own show-cases. He was up at five in the morning, and he worked to twelve and one at night, and then slept on the counter. That was less than thirty years ago. To-day he is at the head of the largest department store in one of the considerable cities of this country, _and he owns his store_.

This is an illustration so common that every country town, as well as London, Paris, and New York, can show examples like it. And, mark you, most of these men were weighted down with responsibilities as great as yours can possibly be, and hindered by obstacles as numerous and difficult as those which you have confronting you.

Yet they succeeded brilliantly. The world rewarded them as richly as any graduate of any university who went to his life's work from the very head of his class. For you know this, don't you, that the world hands down success to any man who pays the price. Very well, the price is not a college education. The price is effectiveness, and the college is valuable only as it helps you to be effective.

Here is a true picture of our earthly work and its rewards: Behind a counter stands the salesman, Fortune, with just but merciless scales. On the shelves this Merchant of Destiny has both failure and success, in measure large and small. Every man steps up to this counter and purchases what he receives and receives what he purchases. And when he buys success he pays for it in the crimson coin of his life's blood.

This is a sinister illustration, I know, but it is the truth, and the truth is what you are after, is it not? You can do about what you will within the compass of your abilities; but you accomplish all your achievings with heart-beats. This is a rule which has no exceptions, and applies with equal force to the man who goes to college and to him who cannot go. What is that that some poet says about the successful man:

"... Who while others slept
Was climbing upward through the night."

So do not let the fact that you cannot go to college excuse yourself to yourself for being a failure. Do not say, "I have no chance because I am not a college man," and blame the world for its injustice. What Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself. No whimper should come from a masculine throat.

A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not to succeed--and he will not succeed. Indeed, how do you know that these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character. Certainly that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your normal level. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is our pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.

"What do you raise on these shaly hills?" I asked one time of that ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut. "Manhood," answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive ability, and dauntless courage.

The very effort required to live in these ungenerous surroundings, the absolute necessity to make every blow tell, to preserve every fragment of value; the perpetual exercise of the inventive faculty, thus making the intellect more productive by the continuous and creative use of it--all these develop those powers of mind and heart which through all history have distinguished the inhabitants of such countries as Switzerland and New England. "And so," said Connecticut's great senator, "these rocky hills produce manhood."

Apply this to your own circumstance, you who cannot go to college because you must "support the family," or have inherited a debt which your honor compels you to pay, or any one of those unhappy conditions which fortune has laid on your young shoulders.

Most men with wealth, friends, and influence accept them as a matter of course. Not many young men who are happily situated at the beginning, employ the opportunities which are at their hand. They don't understand their value. Having "influence" to help them, they usually rely on this artificial aid--seldom upon themselves. Having friends, they depend upon these allies rather than upon the ordered, drilled, disciplined troops of their own powers and capabilities. Having money, they do not see as vividly the necessity of toiling to make more.

"What's the use of my working; father did enough of that for our family," wittily said one of these young men. Having the training of the best universities very much as they have their food and clothing, these men are too apt to be blind to the greater skill this equipment gives them, and thus to neglect the using of it.

And so, young man--you who cannot go to college, you who are without friends and "influence"--your brother born with a silver spoon in his mouth, and trained by tutors, finished by professors, and clothed with all the "advantages," has not such a great start of you after all. For you are without friends to begin with. You have not inherited comrades and kindred hearts. You have inherited aloneness and solitude.

Very well, you must depend on yourself, then. If you have the right kind of stuff in you, you will make every ohm of your force do something for you. You will see to it that there is no wasted energy. You will economize every instant of your time, for you will understand, in the wise language of the common people, that "time is money"; and that is something, mind you, which the heir of wealth with whom you are competing does not understand at all. You know what an advantage your competitor, who is a college man, has of you; and this knowledge of yours, coupled with your college competitor's possible lack of it, turns his advantage over you into your advantage over him.

It is like a man who has a dozen shots for his rifle against another who has a hundred. The first will make every shot bring down his game, because he knows he _must_ make every shot tell; he cannot waste a cartridge. But he of abundant ammunition fires without certain aim, and so wastes his treasure of shells until for the actual purposes of fruitful marksmanship he has not as many cartridges left as the man who started with fewer. Also his aim is not so accurate.

Or use an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of crops, differential fertilizing, and the like, would have been laughed at by the farmer, heedless in the richness of his acres.

But the German farmer on his sandy soil could take no such risks. Every vestige of fertility that skill, science, and economy could win from the reluctant German field was secured. The German farmer had to woo his land like a lover. And so the unyielding fields of Germany returned richer harvests thirty years ago than a like area of the prodigally vital silt of the Mississippi Valley.

So what you have got to do, young man who cannot go to college, is to develop yourself with the most vigorous care. Take your reading, for example. Choose your books with an eye single to their helpfulness. Let all your reading be for the strengthening of your understanding, the increase of your knowledge.

Your more fortunate competitor who has gone to college will, perhaps, not be doing this. He will probably be "resting his mind" with an ephemeral novel or the discursive hop-skip-and-jump reading of current periodicals. Thus he will day by day be weakening his strength, diminishing his resources. At the very same time you, by the other method, will hourly be adding to your powers, daily accumulating useful material.

And when you read, make what you read yours. Think about it. Absorb it. Make it a part of your mental being. Far more important than this, make every thought you read in books, every fact which the author furnishes you, the seed for new thoughts of your own. Remember that no fact in the universe stands by itself, but that every fact is related to every other fact. Trace out the connection of truth with truth, and you will soon confront that most amazing and important of all truths, the correlation of all force, all thought, all matter.

And thus, too will your mind acquire a trained and systematic strength which is the chief purpose of all the training which college and university give. For, mind you, the principal purpose of going to college is not to acquire knowledge. That is only secondary. The chief reason for a college education is the making of a trained mind and the building of a sound character.

These suggestions as to reading apply to everything else: to men, business, society, life. Because you must compete with the college men, you cannot be careless with books--in the selection of books, or in the use of them. For the same reason, you cannot be indifferent with men and your relationship with them. If other men are loose and inaccurate in reading the character of their fellows, most certainly you cannot be.

If the men who have battalions of friends to start with become negligent of their associations, welcoming all fish that come to their net, and frogs, too, you dare not take the risk of a dissolute companionship, or any other companionship that will weaken the daily discipline of yourself, or lower you in the esteem of the people.

Thus you become a careful student of human nature. And never forget that he who has mastered this, the most abstruse of sciences, has a better equipment for practical success than all the abstract learning from the days of Socrates till now could give him.

Conscious from day to day of your limited resources, and understanding by the severe tuition of your daily life that the world now demands effectiveness, you will nurture your physical and nervous powers where the rich young man with a college training is apt to waste his. He may smoke, but you dare not. You cannot afford it, for one thing.

For another thing, it is a long race that you are running before you reach the point from which your fellow runner starts; so you have got to save your wind. You need all your nerve. You have got to keep "clean to the bone," as Jack London expresses it.

You have got to take thought of the morrow. You have got to do all those things which your employer, and all observers of you, will, consciously or unconsciously, approve; and refrain from doing anything that your employer, or his wife, or the world, or anybody who is watching you, will disapprove of, even subconsciously.

Thus your profound understanding that effectiveness is what counts will cut out every questionable habit, every association of idleness and sloth. No social club for you; that institution is for the man of dollars and of Greek. No evenings with gay parties for you; you must use those precious hours for reading, planning, sleep.

You cannot dally with brilliant indirectness; you must make every man and woman understand that you are goldenly sincere, forcefully earnest, earnestly honest, high of intention, sound of purpose, direct of method. Out of all these you will finally wring everything which the college is designed to give: skilled intellect, mind equipped with systematized knowledge, simple, earnest, upright character.

And to crown it all, you will discover in this hard discipline of your faculties and of your soul a happiness whose steady felicity is unknown to the lounger of the club or the frequenter of the ballroom. For remember this--you who in your heart cherish a secret envy of those other young men whom you believe, by reason of family, wealth, or any favorable circumstance, are getting more of the joy of living than you get--remember this, that this world knows only one higher degree of happiness than that which comes from discipline, only one pleasure nobler than the pleasure of achieving.

Let me close with two illustrations within my own personal observation. In one of the most charming inland cities of the United States, or of the world, for that matter, I met some fifteen years ago a young man of German parentage. His father was poor. The son simply _had_ to help support the family by his daily work. He never got nearer college than in his dreams.

He knew something of printing, and was employed by a vigorous new house at an humble salary. By processes such as I have analyzed above, he made himself the best man in technical work in the firm's employ. The next step was to demonstrate his ability as a manager and financier as well as a skilled workman. There was a nut to crack, was it not? But see, now, how simply he broke the shell of that problem.

With some other sound young men of like quality, he established a building and loan association, one of those banks of the people which flourished in those days. He had no capital behind him. His acquaintance was small. Never mind, he made acquaintances among people of his own class. So did his fellow directors. Those common people from which this young man sprang furnished from their earnings the necessary money.

The little institution was conducted with all our American dash, with all his German caution. Of course it prospered. How could it help prospering? While other building and loan associations undertook alluring but hazardous experiments, this little concern rejected them with all the calm and haughty disfavor of the most conservative old bank.

After a while people began to take notice of this small institution. Its depositors were satisfied, its customers pleased. One day the attorney of this association, also a young man, called his fellow directors together, and resigned, upon the ground that he thought the movement of gold abroad and other financial phenomena indicated a panic within the next two or three years.

Did this dismay the young German-American? Not much. "This is just what I am looking for," said he. "I have been able to manage this institution in prosperous times; now if I can only have a chance to close it up so that no man loses a dollar, when big banks around me are falling, I will accomplish all I have started to accomplish."

Sure enough, the panic of 1893 arrived, and the young man's opportunity came. Bank after bank went down; old institutions whose venerable names had been their sufficient guarantee collapsed in a day. Most building and loan associations, taking advantage of certain provisions of the law, and of their charters, refused to pay their depositors on demand. The men and women who had put their money in found that they could not "withdraw" for some time, and then only at a loss.

But not so with the model experiment of my young friend, by which he proposed to demonstrate his ability to organize, manage, and support a difficult business, and to properly handle complex financial questions. He closed his institution up amid the appreciation and praise of everybody who knew about it.

In the mean time he had worked a little harder than ever for the firm that employed him. He took part in politics, too. His acquaintance grew slowly but steadily, and then with ever-increasing rapidity, as each new-made friend enthusiastically described him to others.

It soon got on the tongues of the people that even in his politics this young man didn't drink, smoke, nor swear. More marvelous than all, it was said that he was even religious. And the saying was true. During all these years when he had no time for anything else, he also had no time to stay away from Sunday-school and church. He had certain convictions and spoke them out.

He had no time for "society"; not a moment for parties; not an hour for the clubs. But he did have time for one girl, and for her he did not have time enough. All this was not so very long ago. To-day this young man is a member of the firm for which he began as a common workman, and which has since grown to be one of the largest concerns of its kind in the entire country. Successful banks have made him a director. On all hands his judgment is sought and taken by old and able men in business, politics, and finance.

And to crown all these achievings, he has builded him a home where all the righteous joys abound, and over which presides the "girl he went to see" in the hard days of his beginnings, when he had no time for "society" except that which he found in her presence. As he was then, so he is now--"clean to the bone," strong, upright, faithful, joyous in the unsullied happiness of the manly living of a manly life.

Very well, I tell you over again that this man did not go to college because he _could not_ go to college; that he had no opportunities, no friends, few acquaintances. But he did have right principles, good health, and an understanding that every drop of his blood must be wrought into a deed, every minute of his time compounded into power. And this young man is not yet forty years of age.

I will venture to say that his example can be repeated in every town in the United States, in every city of the Republic. Certainly I personally know of a score of such successes in my own home city. I personally know of many such examples in other States. You ask for the inspiration of example, young man who cannot go to college. Look around you--they are on every hand.

Can you not find them in your own town? Or, if you live on a farm, do you not see them in your own county? I personally know of country boys who started out as farm hands at sixteen dollars per month and board, who to-day own the farms on which they were employed, and yet who are not now much past middle life. They have done it by the simple rules that are as old as human industry.

Come, then, don't mope. Sleep eight hours. Then three hours for your meals, and a chance for your stomach to begin digesting them after you have eaten them. That makes eleven hours, and leaves you thirteen hours remaining. Take one of these for getting to and from your business. _Then work the other twelve._ Every highly successful man whom I know worked even longer during the years of his beginnings.

What, no recreation? say you. Certainly I say recreation, and I say pleasure, too. But remember that you have got to overcome the college man's advantage over you--and that can only be done by hard work. But what of that? For a young man like you, full of that boundless vigor of youth, what higher pleasure can there be than the doing of your work better than anybody else does the same kind of work?

And what finer happiness can there be than the certainty that such a life as that will make realities of your dreams? For sure it is that this is the road by which you can walk to unfailing success, even over the bodies of your rivals who, with greater "advantages" than yours, neglect them and fall upon the steep ascent up which, with harder muscles, steadier nerves, and stouter heart, you climb with ease, gaining strength with every step you take instead of losing power as you advance, as did your flabbier fibered competitor.

Now for the other illustration: Three years ago a certain young man came to me from New York, the son of a friend who occupied a Government position. He was studying law. He was "quivering" with ambition. But his lungs were getting weak. Would it be possible to get him a place on some ranch for six or eight months? Yes, it was possible. An acquaintance was glad to take him.

At the end of his time he returned, still "quivering" with ambition. He was going to make a lawyer, that's what he was going to make--the very best lawyer that ever mastered Blackstone. He already had a clerkship promised in one of the great legal establishments in the metropolis. This clerkship paid him enough to live on, and gave him the chance to do the very work which is necessary to the making of a lawyer.

Splendid thus far. But observe the next step. In about twelve months this young man came to me again. Would I help to get a certain man who held a Government position paying him $150 a month promoted? This last man's record was admirable; he deserved promotion on his own account. But why the interest of the would-be lawyer, who was "quivering" with ambition?

It developed that if the other fellow was promoted, this embryo Erskine could, with the aid of influential political friends, be appointed in his place. But why did he want this position? Well, answered the young man, it would enable him to take his law course at one of the law schools of the Capitol and get his degree, and all that sort of thing. Also, it would enable him to live at home with mother, would it not? Yes, that was a consideration, he admitted.

But did he think that that was as good a training for his profession, and would give him the chance of a business acquaintance while he was getting that training, as well as the clerkship in the New York office would? Perhaps not, but, after all, he didn't get very much salary in the New York law office. Why, how much did he get? Only twenty dollars a week.

But was not that enough to live on at a modest boarding-house, and get a room with bed, table, one chair, and a washstand, and buy him the necessary clothing? Oh, yes! of course he could scratch along on it, but it was hardly what a young man of his standing and family ought to have.

Oh! it didn't enable him to get out into society, was that it? Well, yes, he must admit there was something in that. Washington had social advantages, to be sure, and $150 a month would enable him to have some of that life which a young man was entitled to and at the very same time be getting his legal education. _Well!_ That young man did _not_ get what he wanted.

That young man had the wrong notion of life. Of course, no man would do anything for him. Until he changed his point of view utterly, success was absolutely impossible for him. What that young man needed was the experience of going back to New York and having to apply for position after position until his shoe soles wore out, and he felt the pangs of hunger. He needed iron in his blood, that is what he needed. All the colleges in the world would not enable that man to do anything worth doing until he mastered the sound principles of living and of working.

Right before him in New York was an illustration of this. One of the most notable successes at the bar which that city or this country has witnessed in the last fifteen years has been made by a young man who had neither college education, money, nor friends. He was, I am told, a stenographer in one of New York's great legal establishments. But that young man had done precisely what I have been pounding at over and over again in this paper. Very well. To-day he is one among half a dozen of the most notable lawyers in the greatest city of the greatest nation in the world.

It is all in the using of what you have. Let me repeat again what I have said in a previous paper--the inscription which Doc Peets inscribed on the headboard of Jack King, whose previousness furnished "Wolfville" with its first funeral:

"JACK KING, DECEASED.
Life ain't the holding of a good hand,
But
The playing of a poor hand well."

And this is nothing more than our frontier statement of the parable of the talents. After all, it is not what we have, but what we make out of what we have that counts in this world of work. And, what's more, that is the only thing that ought to count.

IV

THE NEW HOME

Your father made the old home. Prove yourself worthy of him by making the new home. He built the roof-tree which sheltered you. Build you a roof-tree that may in its turn shelter others. What abnormal egotism the attitude of him who says, "This planet, and all the uncounted centuries of the past, were made for _me_ and nobody else, and I will live accordingly. I will go it alone."

"I wish John had not married so young," said a woman of wealth, fashion, and brilliant talents in speaking of her son. "Why, how old was he?" asked her friend. "Twenty-five," said she; "he ought to have waited ten years longer." "I think not," was the response of the world-wise man with whom she was conversing. "If he got a good wife he was in great luck that he did not wait longer." "No," persisted the mother, "he ought to have taken more time 'to look around.' These early marriages interfere with a young man's career."

This fragment of a real conversation, which is typical of numberless others like it, reveals the false and shallow philosophy which, if it becomes our code of national living, will make the lives of our young people abnormal and our twentieth century civilization artificial and neurotic. Even now too many people are thinking about a "career." Mothers are talking about "careers" for their sons. Young men are dreaming of their "careers."

It is assumed that a young man can "carve out his career" if his attention is not distracted and his powers are not diminished by a wife and children whom he must feed, clothe, and consider. The icy selfishness of this hypothesis of life ought to be enough to reject it without argument. Who is any man, that he should have a "career"? and what does a "career" amount to, anyway? What is it for? Fame? Surely not, because

"Imperious Cæsar dead and turned to clay,
Might stop a hole to keep the wind away,"

says Shakespeare. And Shakespeare ought to know; he is not quite three centuries dead, and even now the world is sadly confused as to whether he wrote Shakespeare. "Career!" Let your "career" grow out of the right living of your life--not the living of your life grow out of your "career." "Don't get the cart before the horse."

Is it to accomplish some good thing for humanity that you want this "career," which is to keep you single until you are too old to be interesting? Very well. Just what is it that you expect to do with these self-centered and single years during which you intend so to help the race? If you cannot tell, you are "down and out" on that score.

And, besides, you will find that the enormous majority of men who by their service have uplifted or enriched humanity have been men enough to lead the natural life. They have been men who have founded homes. And how can you better benefit mankind than by founding a home among your fellow men, a pure, normal, sweet, and beautiful home?

That would be getting down to business. That would be doing something definite, something "you can put your finger on." It would be "getting down to earth," as the saying is. You would be "benefiting humanity" sure enough and in real earnest by taking care of some actual human being among this great indefinite mass called mankind. The making of a home is the beginning of human usefulness.

The Boers were a splendid type of the human animal. It took all the power of the greatest empire on earth to crush a handful of them; and even then Great Britain was able to subdue them only at astonishing loss of men and money, and irreparable impairment of prestige. They were glorious fighting men, these Boers. The blood that flowed in their veins was unadulterated Dutch--the only unconquered blood in history; for you will remember that even Cæsar could not overcome them, and, with the genius of the statesman-soldier that he was, he made terms with them.

But these Boers were a good deal more than mere fighting animals; they were perhaps the most religious people on earth. If they were mighty creatures physically, they were also exalted beings spiritually. They knew how to pray as well as to fight. They made their living, too, and asked no favors. Also they builded them a state. It was a fine thing in the English to acknowledge the high qualities of these African Dutchmen, after the war with them was over.

It is said that there was not an unmarried man above twenty-one years of age among them. Very generally the same thing was true of "The Fathers" who founded this republic. Indeed, all great constructive periods and peoples have lived in harmony with the laws of Nature. It has been the races of marrying men that have made the heroic epochs in human history. The point is that the man who is not enough of a man to make a home, need not be counted. He is a "negligible quantity," as the scientists put it.

So if your arm is not strong enough to protect a wife, and your shoulders are not broad enough to carry aloft your children in a sort of grand gladness, you are really not worth while. For it will take a man with veins and arteries swollen with masculine blood pumped by a great, big, strong heart, working as easily and joyfully as a Corliss engine; with thews of steel wire and step as light as a tiger's and masterful as an old-time warrior's; with brain so fertile and vision so clear that he fears not the future, and knows that what to weaker ones seem dangers are in reality nothing but shadows--it will take this kind of a man to make any "career" that is going to be made.

Very well. Such a man will be searching for his mate and finding her, planning a home and building it before he is twenty-five; and the man who does not, is either too weak or too selfish to do it. In either case you need not fear him. "He will never set the world afire."

I am assuming that you are man enough to be a man--not a mere machine of selfishness on the one hand, or an anemic imitation of masculinity on the other hand. I am assuming that you think--and, what is more important, feel--that Nature knows what she is about; that "God is not mocked"; and that therefore you propose to live in harmony with universal law.

Therefore, I am assuming that you have established, or will establish, the new home in place of the old home. I am assuming that you will do this before there is a gray hair in your head or a wrinkle under your eye. These new homes which young Americans are building will be the sources of all the power and righteousness of this Republic to-morrow, just as the lack of them will be the source of such weakness as our future develops.

Within these new homes which young Americans are to build, the altar must be raised again on which the sacred fire of American ideals must be kept burning, just as it was kept burning in the old homes which these young Americans have left. And precisely to the extent that these new homes are not erected will American ideals pale, and finally perish.

It is a question, you see, which travels quite to the horizon of our vision and beyond it, and which searches the very heart of our national purity and power. No wonder that Bismarck considered the perpetuation of the German home, with its elemental and joyous productivity, as the source of all imperial puissance on the one hand, and the purpose and end of all statesmanship on the other hand.

It would be far better for America if our public men were more interested in these simple, vital, elemental matters than in "great problems of statesmanship," many of which, on analysis, are found to be imaginary and supposititious. Yes, and it would be better for the country if our literary men would describe the healthful life of the Nation's plain people, than tell unsavory stories of artificial careers and abnormal affections, and all that sort of thing.

They would sell more books, too. I never yet heard that anybody got tired of "The Cotter's Saturday Night." I think it quite likely that the Book of Ruth will outlast all the short stories that will be written during the present decade. Yes, decidedly, our public men, and our writers, too, ought to "get down to earth." There is where the people live. The people walk upon the brown soil and the green grass. They dwell beneath the apple-blossoms. How fine a thing it is that our American President is preaching the doctrine of the American home so forcefully that he impresses the Nation and the world with these basic truths of living and of life.

It is a good deal more important that the institution of the American home shall not decay, than that the Panama Canal be built or our foreign trade increase. So, in considering the young man and the new home, we are dealing with an immediate and permanent and an absolutely vital question, not only from the view-point of the young man himself, but from that of the Nation as well.

Of course nobody means that young men should hurl themselves into matrimony. The fact that it is advisable for you to learn to swim does not mean that you should jump into the first stream you come to, with your clothes and shoes on. Undoubtedly you ought first to get "settled"; that is, you ought to prepare for what you are going to do in life and begin the doing of it. Don't take this step while you are in college. If you mean to be a lawyer, you ought to get your legal education and open your office; if a business man, you should "get started"; if an artizan, you should acquire your trade, etc. But it is inadvisable to wait longer.

It is not necessary for you to "build up a practise" in the profession, or make a lot of money in business, or secure unusual wages as a skilled laborer. Begin at the beginning, and live your lives together, win your successes together, share your hardships together, and let your fortune, good or ill, be of your joint making. It will help you, too, in a business way.

Everybody else is, or was, situated nearly as you are, and there is a sort of fellow-feeling in the hearts of other men and women who once had to "hoe the same row" you are hoeing; and it is among these men and women you must win your success. It is largely through their favor and confidence that you will get on at all. If you are making a new home you are in harmony with the world about you, and the very earth itself exhales a vital and sustaining sympathy.

It is not at all necessary that you should be able to provide as good a house and the furnishings thereof as that from which your wife comes. Nobody expects you to be as successful in the very beginning of your life as her father was at the close of his. Least of all does she herself expect it. And even if this were possible, it is not from such continuous luxury that the best character is made. The absolute necessity to economize compels the ordinary young American couple to learn the value of things--the value of a dollar and the value of life.

They learn to "know how it comes," again to employ one of the wise sayings of the common people. And the numberless experiences of their first few years of comparative hardship are the very things necessary to bring out in them sweetness, self-sacrifice, and uplifting hardihood of character. In these sharp experiences, too, there is greatest happiness. How many hundreds of times have you heard men and women say of their early married years, "Those were the happiest days of my life."

As a matter of good business on the one hand, and of sheer felicity on the other hand, make the ideals of this new home of yours as high as you possibly can. Don't make them so high that neither you nor any other human being can live up to them, of course; but if you can put them a notch beyond those even of the exalted standard of the old home, by all means do it. Do it, that is, if you can live up to them.

It is remarkable what individual power grows out of clean living. It is profitable also. The mere business value of a reputation for a high quality of home life will be one of the best assets that you can accumulate. "They are attending strictly to business and will make their mark," said a wise old banker to a group of friends in discussing a fine type of young business man, and the equally fine type of the young American woman who was his wife.

I do not know whether that young man was borrowing money for his business from that particular bank or not, but I do know that he could borrow it if he wanted it. And one reason why his credit was established with the money-wise old financier was the ideal home life which he and his wife were leading.

For, mark you, they were not "living beyond their means." That was the first thing. That is one of the best rules you can follow. Who has not known of the premature withering of young business men and lawyers (yes, and sometimes men not so young, alas!) who have suddenly blossomed out with houses and clothes and horses, and a lot of other things which their business or practise ought not reasonably to stand.

On the other hand, do not begin your life as a miser. Do not let the new home proclaim by its barrenness that it is the abode of a poor young man asking sympathy and aid of his friends. "Yes, rent a piano, by all means. Do not economize on your wife and your home," advised an old Methodist preacher noted for his horse-sense. And he was right.

After all, what is the purpose and end of all your labor? If it is not that very home, I do not know what it is. Put on a little more steam, therefore, and earn enough extra to buy a picture. And get a good one while you are at it. It will not break you up to buy a really good etching. A fine "print" is infinitely better than a poor painting. Anything is better than a poor painting. If she has good taste, your wife will make the walls of that new home most attractive with an astonishingly small amount of money.

It is the new _home_ you and she are making, remember that. Very well; you cannot make it in a flat. "Apartments" cannot by any magic be converted into a home. For the purposes of a _home_, better a separate dwelling with dry-goods box for table and camp-stools for chairs than tapestried walls, mosaic floors, and all luxuriousness in those modern structures where human beings hive.

These buildings have their indispensable uses, but home-making is not one of them. "Apartments" are not cheaper for you and easier for her than a house to yourselves--no, not if you got the finest apartments for nothing, not even if you were paid to live in gilded rooms. For the making of a home is priceless. And that cannot be done in flats or hotels or other walled and roofed herding places. Every man would like to have a picture of "the house he was born in"; but who would choose a hotel for a birthplace? Boniface himself would not "admire" (to use one of our Westernisms) to have you select his hostelry for that purpose.

Of course you will spend all of your extra time at home. That is what home is for. Live in your home; do not merely eat and sleep there. It is not a boarding-house, remember that. Books are there, and music and a human sympathy and a marvelous care for you, under whose influence alone the soul of a young man grows into real grandeur, power, and beauty. And be sure that you let each day have its play-hour.

"I would not care to live," said one of the very ablest and most eminent members of the American Catholic priesthood--"I would not care to live," said he, "if I could not have my play-hour, music, and flowers. They are God's gifts and my necessity. Every young man who has a home commits a crime if he does not each day bring one hour of joy into his household."

The man who said that is not only brilliant and wise, but one of the most exalted souls it has ever been my fortune to know. And his words have good sense in them, have they not? Make that good sense yours, then. Make a play-hour each day for yourself and wife and children. I say children, for I assume, of course, that when you are making a new home you are making a _home_ indeed.

Very well. The absence of children is either unfortunate or immoral. A purposely childless marriage is no marriage at all; it is merely an arrangement. Robert Louis Stevenson calls it "a friendship recognized by the police." A house undisturbed and unglorified by the wailings and laughter of little ones is not a home--it is a habitation.

There is in children a certain immortality for you. Most of us believe in life after death; and that belief is a priceless possession of every human being who has it. But even the man who has not this faith beholds his own immortality in his children. "Why of course I am immortal," said a scientist who believed that death ends all. "Of course I am immortal," said he, "there goes my reincarnation"; and he pointed to his little son, glorious with the promise of an exhaustless vitality.

There is no doubt at all that association with infancy and youth puts back the clock of time for each of us. Besides all this, it is the natural life, and that is the only thing worth while. The "simple life" is all right, and the "strenuous life" excellent. The "artistic life" is charming, no doubt, and all the other kinds of "lives" have their places, I suppose. I am interested in all of them. But I am much more interested in the natural life. That alone is truthful. And, after all, only the truthful is important.

Get into the habit of happiness. It is positively amazing how you can turn every little incident into a sunbeam. And, mark you, it is quite as easy to take the other course. But what a coward a man is who releases in his home all the pent-up irritability and disappointment of the day.

There is no sense in it, either. It does not make you less black of spirit to fill your home with gloom. You ought not to do it, even from the view-point of good health. If you eat your meal in a sour silence which almost curdles the cream and scares your wife half to death, you do not and cannot digest your food. If you have had a hard day, say to yourself, "Well, that was a hard day. Now for some rest and some fun."

Get into the habit of being happy, I tell you. You can do it. Practise saying to yourself, when you waken in the morning, "Everything is all right," and keep on saying it. You will be surprised to find how nearly "all right" the mere saying of it at the beginning of the day will really make everything, after all. This is true of business as well as of the new home. Prophets of gloom are never popular, and ought not to be.

Then, too, a quiet cheeriness of heart makes you treat your fellow man better; and this is important in your dealings with other human male animals. They will make it unpleasant for you if you don't. But it is far more important in your new home than it is out in the world of men. That is what the new home is for--to exercise and multiply the beauties of character and conduct.

Returning again to the view-point of business wisdom, you cannot treat your wife too well, as a mere matter of policy--though you will never treat her well, nor anybody else, from that low motive. I am merely calling the attention of your commercial mind to the fact that there are actually dollars and cents in a reputation for chivalrous bearing in your new home.

You know yourself how you feel toward a man of whom everybody says, "He is good to his wife." Everybody wants to help that kind of a fellow. If he is a strong man, his community glories in his strength and increases it by their admiration and support. If he is not a strong man, everybody wishes that he were, and tries in a thousand ways, which a general kindly disposition toward him suggests, to supply his deficiencies.

And this is no jug-handled rule either. The same thing is true of the wife. When her acquaintances declare of any woman, "She is lovely in her home," they have placed upon her brow the crown of their ultimate tribute and regard. It depends upon both, of course, whether these domestic beatitudes will exist in the new home.

Undoubtedly, however, it depends upon the young man more than the young woman. He is a _man_--and that is everything. And being a man, he should have a large and kindly forbearance, a sort of soothing strength and calming serenity. And to all this the rule of smile and cheeriness is helpful, if not essential.

When I was a boy in the logging-camps, I read in some stray newspaper an article about the influence which the pleasant countenance exercises over groups of men. The idea was that men work willingly under the control of a strong man who is strong enough to carry in his daily look the suggestion of a smile. It worked splendidly. It has never been satisfactorily explained why it is next to impossible for a man "to be down on his luck" if he will only keep the corners of his mouth turned up. Perhaps it is the mental effort of forcing this mechanism of a smile which brings a really happy state of mind.

Whatever the cause, it is literally true that you cannot look blackly on the world and your own fortunes if the lines of your face are ascending instead of drooping. This muscular state of your countenance is connected in some strange way with that mysterious thing called the mind; for you will find, if you try it, that a sort of serenity of soul comes to you, and a strong confidence that "everything will come out right in the end." When we Americans are older we shall pay more attention to these things.

The Japanese neglect none of these deep psychological truths in warfare. It is said that they are taught to smile in action, and especially when they charge. Doubtless this report is true. It has at bottom the same reason that music in battle has. What could be more terrifying than the approach of an enemy determined on your death, and who looks upon your execution as so pleasant and easy a thing that he smiles about it or who regards his own possible extinction as no unhappy consummation?