ntal discipline called "a college education," that this does not
excuse you from doing great work in the world. Do not whine, and
declare that you could have done so much better if you had "only had
a chance to go to college." You can be a success if you will, college
or no college. At least three of those famous masters of business
which Chicago, the commercial capital of the continent, has given to
the world, and whose legitimate operations in tangible merchandizing
are so vast that they are almost weird, had no college education, and
very little education of any kind.

I think, indeed, that very few of America's kings of trade ever
attended college. There are the masters of railroad management, too.
Few of them have been college men, although the college man is now
appearing among them--witness President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania
System, a real Napoleon of railroading, who, I hear, is a graduate of
the German universities and of American polytechnic schools.

Burns did not go to college. Neither did Shakespeare.

Some of our greatest lawyers "read law" in the unrefined but honest
and strengthening environment of the old-time law office. Lincoln was
not a college man; neither was Washington. So do not excuse yourself
to your family and the world upon the ground that you never had a
college education. That is not the reason why you fail.

You can succeed--I repeat it--college or no college; all you have to
do in the latter case is to put on a little more steam. And remember
that some of the world's sages of the practical have closed their
life's wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is
a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind.

You see, I am trying to take into account every possible view of this
weighty question; for I know how desperate a matter it is to hundreds
of thousands of my young countrymen. I know how earnestly they are
searching for an answer; how hard it will be for hosts of them to obey
an affirmative answer; how intense is the desire of the great majority
of young Americans to decide this question wisely. For most of them
have no time to lose, little money to spend and none to waste, no
energy to spare, and yet are inspired with high resolve to make the
best and most of life. And I know how devoutly they pray that, in
deciding, they may choose the better part.

Still, with all this in mind, my advice is this: Go to college. Go to
the best possible college