Part 8 (2/2)

”I am greatly troubled,” said to me the general superintendent of one of the most extensive railroad systems in the world as we rode from Des Moines, Iowa, to Chicago. ”I am greatly troubled,” said he, ”to find an a.s.sistant superintendent. There are now under me seven young engineers, every man a graduate of a college; four of them with uncommon ability, and all of them relatives of men heavily interested in this network of railroads. But not one of them will do. Three nights ago all of them happened to meet in Chicago. While there all of them went out to have what they called 'a good time' together--drinking, etc.

”That, in itself, is enough to blacklist every man for the position of my a.s.sistant and my successor. This road will not entrust its operating management to a man who wilfully makes himself less than his best every day and every night. Besides this, each of them has some defect. One is brilliant, but not steady; another is steady, but not resourceful--not inventive--and so forth and so on. We are looking all over the United States for the young man who has the ability, character, health, and habits which my a.s.sistant must have.”

This general superintendent, under whose orders more than ten thousand men daily performed their complex and delicately adjusted functions, is fifty-five years of age. Now listen to this, you who cannot go to college: This man started thirty-eight years ago as a freight-handler in Chicago at one dollar per day for this same railroad company, which was then a comparatively small and obscure line. Ah! but you say, ”That was thirty-eight years ago.” Yes, and that is the trouble with you, is it not? You want to _start in_ as superintendent of a great system or the head of a mighty business, do you not? Very well--get that out of your head. It cannot--it ought not--to be done.

If you are willing to work as hard as this man worked, as hard as President Scott of the Pennsylvania System worked; if you are willing to stay right by your job, year in, year out, through the weary decades, instead of changing every thirty minutes; if you are willing to wait as long as they; if you are willing to plant the seed of success in the soil of good hard work, and then water it with good hard work, and attend its growth with good hard work, and wait its flowering and fruitage with patience, its flowering and fruitage will come. Doubt it not.

For, mark you, this man at the time he told me that his System was looking all over the United States for a young man capable of being his a.s.sistant, had seven high-grade college men on his hands at that very moment. He would have been more than delighted to have taken any one of them.

Also, he would have taken a man who had not seen a college just as quickly if he could have found such a one who knew enough about operating a railroad, and had the qualities of leaders.h.i.+p, the gift of organizing ability. It did not matter to this superintendent whether the a.s.sistant he sought had been to college or not, whether he was rich or poor.

He cared no more about that than he cared whether the man for whom this place was seeking was a blond or a brunette. The only question that he was asking was, ”Where is the man who is equal to the job?”

And that, my young friend, is the question which all industry is asking in every field of human effort; that is the question your Fate is putting to you who are anxious to do big work, ”Are you equal to the job?” If you are not, then be honest enough to step out of the contest. Be honest enough not to envy the other young men who are equal to the job.

Yes, be honest enough to applaud the man who is equal to the job and who goes bravely to his task. Don't find fault with him. Don't swear that ”There is no chance for a young man any more.” That's not true, you know. And remember always that if you do all you are fitted for, you do as well as your abler brother, and better than he if you do your best and he does not.

A young man whom fortune had kept from college, but who is too stout-hearted to let that discourage him, said to me the other day: ”I don't think that a college education confers, or the absence of it prevents, success. But I do think that where there are two men of equal health, ability, and character, that one will be chosen who has been to college, and to this extent the college man has a better chance.” This is true for the ordinary man--the man who is willing to put forth no more than the ordinary effort.

But you who read--you are willing to put forth extraordinary effort, are you not? You are willing to show these favored sons of cap and gown that you will run as fast and as far as they, with all their training, will you not? You are willing--yes, and determined, to use every extra hour which your college brother, _thinking he has the advantage of you_, will probably waste.

Very well. If you do, biography (that most inspiring of all literature) demonstrates that your reward will be as rich as the college man's reward. Yes, richer, for the gold which your refinery purges from the dross of your disadvantages will be doubly refined by the fires of your intenser effort.

In 1847 two men were born who have blessed mankind with productive work which, rich as are now its benefits to the race, will create a new wealth of human helpfulness with each succeeding year as long as time endures. Both these men have lived, almost to a day, the same number of years; both of them are still alive; both of them have labored in neighboring sections of the same field. They are alike, too, in character, almost duplicates in ability. Here, then, is material for a perfect comparison.

Mark, now, the parallel. One of them was a college man, the son of a noted educator and himself a professor in the University of Boston. He used the gifts which G.o.d gave him for that purpose, and as long as the transmission of human speech continues among men, the name of Alexander Graham Bell will be rightly honored by all the world.

The other of these men could no more have gone to college than he could have crossed the Atlantic on a sheet of paper. You who read this never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy.

Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was and is. But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used himself?

At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway.

That didn't satisfy him. The mystery of the telegraph (and what is more mysterious?) constantly called him. The click of the instrument was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.

And so Thomas A. Edison, without a dollar or a friend, set himself to work to master the telegraph and to explore the mysteries behind it.

Result: the duplex telegraph and the developments from that; the phonograph, the incandescent electric light, and those numerous inventions which, one after another, have confounded the bigotry and ignorance of the world.

Edison and Bell, Bell and Edison, one a college man and the other a laborer without the gates, unlike in preparation but similar in character, devotion, and ability, and equal winners of honor and reward at the hands of a just if doubting world.

Of course I might go on all day with ill.u.s.trations like this. History is brilliant with the names of those who have wrought gloriously without a college training. These men, too, have succeeded in every possible line of work. They are among the living, too, as well as among those whose earthly careers have ended.

The men who never went to college have not only built great railroads, but also have written immortal words; not only have they been great editors, but also they have created vast industries, and piled mountain high their golden fortunes; not only have they made epoch-making discoveries in science, but they have set down in words of music a poetry whose truth and sweetness makes n.o.bler human character and finer the life's work of all who read those sentences of light.

Among the fathers who established this Government, the greatest never went to college. Hamilton was not a college man. Was.h.i.+ngton, to this day the first of Americans, never even attended school after he was sixteen years old. Of the great founders of modern journalism--the four extraordinary men whom their profession to this day refers to as the great journalists--only one was a college graduate--Raymond, who established the New York _Times_. Charles A. Dana, who made the New York _Sun_ the most quoted newspaper of his generation, was not a college graduate. William Cullen Bryant, who gave to the New York _Evening Post_ a peculiar distinction and preeminence, went to college only one year.

Samuel Bowles, who founded the Springfield _Republican_ and made its influence felt for righteousness throughout the Nation, attended a private inst.i.tution for a while. James Gordon Bennett, the editor whose resourceful mind sent Stanley to the heart of African jungles to find Livingstone, was never a college student.

Horace Greeley, that amazing mind and character, who created the New York _Tribune_, and who, through it, for many years exercised more power over public opinion than any other single influence in the Republic, never went to college; and Greeley's famous saying, ”Of all horned cattle, deliver me from the college graduate,” remained for a quarter of a century a standing maxim in the editorial rooms of all the big newspapers of the country.

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