be. Then you can be continually
equipping yourself by reading and observing to a purpose. There are many
things which the average boy or girl learns in school that could be
learned outside just as well.

Almost any man should be able to become wealthy in this land of opulent
opportunity. There are some people who think that to be pious they must
be very poor and very dirty. They are wrong. Not money, but the _love_
of money, is the root of all evil. Money in itself is a dynamic force
for helping humanity.

In my lectures I have borne heavily on the fact that we are all walking
over acres of diamonds and mines of gold. There are people who think
that their fortune lies in some far country. It is much more likely to
lie right in their own back yards or on their front door-step, hidden
from their unseeing eye. Most of our millionaires discovered their
fortunes by simply looking around them.

Recently I have been investigating the lives of four thousand and
forty-three American millionaires. All but twenty of them started life
as poor boys, and all but forty of them have contributed largely to
their communities, and divided fairly with their employees as they went
along. But, alas, not one rich man's son out of seventeen dies rich.

But if a man has dilly-dallied through a certain space of wasted years,
can he then develop the character--the motor force--to drive him to
success? Why, my friend, will power cannot only be developed, but it is
often dry powder which needs only a match. Very frequently I think of
the life of Abraham Lincoln--that wonderful man! and I am thankful that
I was permitted to meet him. Yet Abraham Lincoln developed the splendid
sinews of his will after he was twenty-one. Before that he was just a
roving, good-natured sort of a chap. Always have I regretted that I
failed to ask him what special circumstance broke the chrysalis of his
life and loosened the wings of his will.

Many years ago some of the students of Temple University held a meeting
in a building opposite the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel. As they were
leaving the building they noticed a foreigner selling peanuts on the
opposite curb. While buying peanuts they got to talking with the
fellow, and told him that any one could obtain an education if he was
willing to work for it. Eagerly the poor fellow drank up all the
information he could get. He enrolled at Temple University and worked
his way through, starting with the elementary studies.