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 assistant, 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 leadership, the gift of
organizing ability. It did not matter to this superintendent whether
the assistant 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