of their own powers and capabilities.
Having money, they do not see as vividly the necessity of toiling to
make more.

"What's the use of my working; father did enough of that for our
family," wittily said one of these young men. Having the training of
the best universities very much as they have their food and clothing,
these men are too apt to be blind to the greater skill this equipment
gives them, and thus to neglect the using of it.

And so, young man--you who cannot go to college, you who are without
friends and "influence"--your brother born with a silver spoon in his
mouth, and trained by tutors, finished by professors, and clothed with
all the "advantages," has not such a great start of you after all. For
you are without friends to begin with. You have not inherited comrades
and kindred hearts. You have inherited aloneness and solitude.

Very well, you must depend on yourself, then. If you have the right
kind of stuff in you, you will make every ohm of your force do
something for you. You will see to it that there is no wasted energy.
You will economize every instant of your time, for you will
understand, in the wise language of the common people, that "time is
money"; and that is something, mind you, which the heir of wealth with
whom you are competing does not understand at all. You know what an
advantage your competitor, who is a college man, has of you; and this
knowledge of yours, coupled with your college competitor's possible
lack of it, turns his advantage over you into your advantage over him.

It is like a man who has a dozen shots for his rifle against another
who has a hundred. The first will make every shot bring down his game,
because he knows he _must_ make every shot tell; he cannot waste a
cartridge. But he of abundant ammunition fires without certain aim,
and so wastes his treasure of shells until for the actual purposes of
fruitful marksmanship he has not as many cartridges left as the man
who started with fewer. Also his aim is not so accurate.

Or use an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a
boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the
farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was
the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and
crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of
crops, differential fertilizing, and the like, would have been laughed
at by the farmer, heedless in the r