s German.
For example, you can go all through _commercial_ Russia without a
guide if you speak German. You can get along in any port of the
Orient if you speak German. So you can if you speak English, it is
true. And think of how many millions of excellent people in our own
country are still German-speaking (although our German citizens are so
splendidly patriotic that they acquire English just as soon as they
possibly can).

But the point is, that your usefulness in every direction will be
increased by a knowledge of the languages. The other things that you
study in college you will largely forget, anyhow; and, besides, you
study them principally for the mental discipline in them. But if you
get a language, and get it correctly, thoroughly, you can find enough
use for it to keep brushed up on it. And of course you can read it all
the time, whether you have a chance to talk it or not.

It is impossible to use words sufficiently emphatic in urging the
study of history. _You cannot get too much history in college and out
of it._ Sir William Hamilton was right--history is the study of
studies. The man who occupies the chair of history in any college
ought to be not only an able man, he ought to be a great man. If ever
you find such a professor, make yourself agreeable to him, absorb him,
possess yourself of him.

This final word: Mingle with your fellow students. Talk with people,
with real people; those who are living real lives, doing real things
under normal and natural conditions. Do all this in order that you may
keep human; for you must not get the habit of keeping to your room and
believing that all wisdom is confined to books. It is not. All wisdom
is not confined to any one place. Some of it is in books, and some of
it is in trees and the earth and the stars.

But so far as _you_ are concerned most of it is in human touch with
your fellows; for it is _men_ with whom you must work. It is _men_ who
are to employ you. It is _men_ whom in your turn you are to employ. It
is the world of _men_ which in the end you are to serve. And it is
that you may serve it well that you are going to college at all, is it
not?

Be _one_ of these _men_, therefore; and be sure that while you are
being one of them, you are one indeed. Be a man in college and out,
and clear down to the end. Be a man--that is the sum of all counsel.

_2. The Young Man who Cannot Go_

But what of the young man who stands without the college gates