The Young Man and the World - new book

Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill THE COLLEGE? 1. The Young Man who Goes Collis P. Huntington was a notable practical success. He was wise with the hard wisdom of the world, and he had the genius of the great captain for choosing men. No business general ever selected his lieutenants with more accurate judgment. His opinion on men and affairs was always worth while. And he thought young men who meant to do anything except in the learned professions wasted time by going to college. So when, searching for my final answer to the question this moment being asked by so many young Americans, " Shall I go to college," I answer in the affirmative, I do so admitting that a negative answer has been given by men whose opinions are entitled to the greatest possible respect. I admit, too, that nearly every city?yes, almost every town?contains conspicuous illustrations of men who learned how to " get there " by attending the school of hard knocks.Certainly some of the most distinguished business careers in New York have been made by young men who never saw a college. You find the same thing in every town. I have a man in mind whose performances in business have been as solid as they are astonishing. Twenty years ago he was a streetcar conductor; to-day he controls large properties in which he is himself a heavy owner; and a dozen graduates of the high-class universities of Europe and America beg the crums that fall from the table of his affairs. In his Phi Beta Kappa Address Wendell Phillips cleverly argues that the reformers of the world, and most of those whose memories are the beloved and cherished treasures of the race, were men whose vitality had not been reduced by college training, and whose kinship with the people and oneness with the soil had not been divorced by the artificial refinement of a ...