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