success in the business world. No college on earth
ever made a business man. The knowledge acquired in college has fitted
thousands of men for professional success, but it has also unfitted
other thousands for a practical business career. A college training is
never wasted, although I have seen again and again five-thousand-dollar
educations spent on five-hundred-dollar men. Where a young man can
bring a college education to the requirements of a practical business
knowledge, it is an advantage. But before our American colleges become
an absolute factor in the business capacities of men their methods of
study and learning will have to be radically changed. I have had
associated with me both kinds of young men, collegiate and
non-collegiate, and I must say that those who had a better knowledge of
the practical part of life have been those who never saw the inside of
a college and whose feet never stepped upon a campus. College-bred men,
and men who never had college advantages, have succeeded in about equal
ratios. The men occupying the most important commercial positions in
New York to-day are self-made, whose only education has come to them
from contact with that greatest college of all, the business world. Far
be it from me to depreciate the value of a college education. I believe
in its advantages too firmly. But no young man need feel hampered
because of the lack of it. If business qualities are in him they will
come to the surface. It is not the college education; it is the young
man. Without its possession as great and honorable successes have been
made as with it. Men are not accepted in the business world upon their
collegiate diplomas, nor on the knowledge these imply.

* * * * *

There are a great many young men in business to-day who grow impatient.
They are in a position for a certain time; they are satisfactory to
their employers, and then, because they are not promoted, they grow
restless. These young men generally overlook a point or two. In the
first place, they overlook the very important point that between the
years of twenty and twenty-five a young man acquires rather than
achieves. It is the learning period of life, the experience-gaining
time. Knowledge that is worth anything does not come to us until we are
past twenty-five. The mind, before that age, is incapable of forming
wise judgment. The great art of accurate decision in business matters
is not acquired in a f