eel that progress is finished,
so far as individual effort _by them_ is concerned. They feel that
_for them_ there is nothing but to eat, sleep, laugh, grieve and go to
their graves. They feel that _for them_ there is no such thing as
leaving behind them a monument of their own constructive effort. Talk
to most young men in college or school, and you will find this
feeling, like a pathetic minor chord, running through their highest
and most daring boasts.

Is not our college training responsible for some of this melancholy
negativeness of life? However it happens, the truth is that too few
young men come out of our great universities with the greater part of
the boldness of youth left in them. Somehow or other those fine, and,
if you will, absurd enthusiasms which nobody but young men and
geniuses are blessed with, have been educated out of the graduate. How
many seniors in our historic American universities would not have
sneered John Bunyan out of existence, or have told the young and
unripe Bonaparte how presumptuous he was to think of fighting the
trained generals of Europe?

"Yes," says a certain type of young man, "all the great things have
been done. Nothing is left for me but the commonplaces." This is not
true.

The great things have not all been done; scarcely have they been
commenced. "There is more before us than there is behind us," said my
old forest "guide," wise with the wisdom of the woods and their
thoughtful silences. And the purpose of this paper is to point out the
infinite number of practical possibilities immediately at hand; to
awaken each young man who reads these words to some one of the million
voices which from all the fields of human endeavor is calling him; and
so, by showing him things to do, make him a doer of things, if he
will.

Let us take the law--that entrancing subject which exercises such an
empire over the minds of most young men. Our own constitutional law
is only a part of that universal body of jurisprudence with which all
real lawyers must deal. Very well; we have only begun the discussion
and settlement of our great constitutional questions. Marshall and
Hamilton, it is true, when they formulated the doctrine of implied
powers, seemed to unlock the door of all constitutional difficulties,
leaving nothing for future lawyers and jurists to do but to find their
way through the channels and passages thus opened.

But it was only one great field to which they laid down the