to obtain education,
training, and experience. There is much evidence in favor of choosing
either horn of the dilemma. A most successful manufacturer called upon us
recently. We told him that, with proper training, he would have been even
more successful and far better satisfied in the legal profession. "I know
you are right," he said. "I have always regretted that circumstances
prevented my taking a law course as a young man. However, I have an
extensive law library, do practically all the legal work for my firm, and
am often consulted on obscure legal points relative to the manufacturing
business by lawyers of some renown."

Abraham Lincoln, the farmhand and flatboatman, began the study of grammar
at twenty-two and of law still later. Elihu Burritt, "The Learned
Blacksmith," who lectured in both England and America, taught himself
languages and sciences while working eleven hours a day at the forge.

We enjoy the acquaintance of a woman physician of considerable prominence
who did not enter medical college until she was more than fifty years of
age. Henry George was a printer who studied economics after he was
twenty-seven years old. Frederick Douglass was a slave until he was
twenty-one, yet secured a liberal education, so that he became a noted
speaker and writer. The following from "Up from Slavery,"[3] by the late
Booker T. Washington, shows what can be done by even a poor black boy,
without money or influence, to win an education:

[Footnote 3: Doubleday, Page & Company, Garden City, New York.]

BOOKER T. WASHINGTON'S STORY

I determined when quite a small child that, if I accomplished nothing else
in life, I would in some way get enough education to enable me to read
common books and newspapers. Soon after we got settled in some manner in
our new cabin in West Virginia, I induced my mother to get hold of a book
for me. How or where she got it I do not know, but in some way she
procured an old copy of 'Webster's Blue-back Spelling-book,' which
contained the alphabet, followed by such meaningless words as 'ab,' 'ba,'
'ca,' and 'da.' I began at once to devour this book, and I think that it
was the first one I ever had in my hands. I had learned from somebody that
the way to begin to read was to learn the alphabet, so I tried in all the
ways I could think of to learn it--all, of course, without a teacher, for
I could find no one to teach me. At that time there was not a single
member of my race anywhere near us