402 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY 



The elements of success are innate, their combination is complex ; with- 

 out them a man can not succeed, with or without a college course. A 

 college professor accustomed to study his students can make reasonable 

 forecast of their future by end of the sophomore year, if he know their 

 home surroundings. Mere success in college studies means nothing of 

 itself for the future; one valedictorian disappears at once after gradua- 

 tion while another quickly becomes a power for good or for evil. A 

 fellow with low grades throughout startles professors, whose work he 

 detested, by becoming a great man. 



Not every young man should be urged to go to college; entrance 

 may be the first step on the road to hopeless failure. The fact that a 

 man is willing to go to college, even the fact that he is willing to endure 

 hardship to secure an " education," is no reason of itself why he should 

 have the opportunity at another's expense. He may be very earnest, 

 but he may lack capacity, or he may have grown up amid surroundings 

 which have dwarfed or stiffened him so that he can not receive much 

 benefit. Such men or women should not waste their time in col- 

 lege. The writer makes this assertion feelingly, for a long proces- 

 sion of such failures passes before him, as he reviews his forty years of 

 college teaching. Earnestness is no evidence of capacity; willingness to 

 endure very serious inconvenience may be evidence only of willingness 

 to follow lines of least resistance. Four years of self-denial at college 

 may be far preferable to four years of hard work on the farm or in the 

 shop. One may remark, parenthetically, that a vast amount of sympa- 

 thy is wasted on men who work their way through college as though 

 they were a superior type of the race. No man deserves any special 

 credit for undergoing hardships in order to secure what he believes will 

 yield great returns. The gold-hunters of the Klondyke did that and 

 asked neither praise nor sympathy. The men who struggled to make 

 their way through college and who proved in after life that they made 

 that struggle with clear purpose for the future, ask no consideration 

 and challenge the world to accept them for what they are worth. But 

 our land is full of lawyers working as petty clerks, of physicians with- 

 out practise, of clergymen whom no one wishes. They are embittered 

 against the unappreciative world, which ignores the struggles they 

 made to secure an " education " and insists on taking them at its own 

 valuation. Had it not been for cheap tuition, college canvassers and 

 boards of aid, a very large proportion of these men would not have gone 

 to college and might have led a comfortable existence in some occupation 

 for which they were fitted. 



In all frankness, one must concede that the college of to-day does 

 not fit a man for anything — it does not even train him to do clear think- 

 ing for himself. In early days, the curriculum was utilitarian in the 

 severest sense of the term. Latin and Greek were learned as languages 



