rofessional study, go directly to the front. But
start a man amid every possible disadvantage, and pile in his way all
possible obstacles, and then if he take his position among those whose
path was smooth, he must have the elements of power. Henry Wilson was
great in the mastering and overcoming all disadvantageous circumstances.
He began at the bottom, and without any help fought his own way to the
top. If there ever was a man who had a right at the start to give up his
earthly existence as a failure, that man was Henry Wilson. Born of a
dissolute father, so that the son took another name in order to escape
the disgrace; never having a dollar of his own before he was twenty-one
years of age; toiling industriously in a shoemaker's shop, that he might
get the means of schooling and culture; then loaning his money to a man
who swamped it all and returned none of it; but still toiling on and up
until he came to the State Legislature, and on and up until he reached
the American Senate, and on and up till he became Vice-president. In all
this there ought to be great encouragement to those who wake up late in
life to find themselves unequipped. Henry Wilson did not begin his
education until most of our young men think they have finished theirs.
If you are twenty-five or thirty, or forty or fifty, it is not too late
to begin. Isaac Walton at ninety years of age wrote his valuable book;
Benjamin Franklin, almost an octogenarian, went into philosophic
discoveries; Fontenelle's mind blossomed even in the Winter of old age;
Arnauld made valuable translations at eighty years of age; Christopher
Wren added to the astronomical and religious knowledge of the world at
eighty-six years of age.

Do not let any one, in the light of Henry Wilson's career, be
discouraged. Rittenhouse conquered his poverty; John Milton overcame his
blindness; Robert Hall overleaped his sickness; and plane and hammer,
and adze and pickax, and crowbar and yardstick, and shoe-last have
routed many an army of opposition and oppression. Let every disheartened
man look at two pictures--Henry Wilson teaching fifteen hours a day at
five dollars a week to get his education, and Henry Wilson under the
admiring gaze of Christendom at the national capital. He was one of the
few men who maintained his integrity against violent temptations. The
tides of political life all set toward dissipation. The congressional
burying-ground at Washington holds the bones of many congre