a year.” This artist knew how the great struggle against thwarting difficulties brings out power, and how hard it is to develop a strong, manly fiber in the sunshine of wealth.
How many young immigrants have come to this country uneducated, ignorant of our language, friendless and penniless, and yet have risen to positions of distinction and wealth, putting to shame tens of thousands of native-born youths who possessed every advantage of wealth, education, and opportunity, but who have never been heard from!
I have in mind a young man of this class who came to this country a comparatively short time ago, but who has already risen to a very important position wholly unaided. He is a remarkable example of a self-educated self-trained, self-disciplined man; and, in the persistent process of his development he has evolved a very strong, positive, aggressive character. He has brought out his latent powers and strengthened his weaker faculties. He has pruned out of his mentality and habits those things which would embarrass and hinder his progress, and has gained such a strong momentum that there seems to be scarcely any limits to what he is likely to become. His is an inspiring example of the possibilities of manhood in America, one which explodes all excuses of the poor boy and girl who think they have absolutely no chance to get up in the world.
I am no advocate of the blessings of poverty, considered as a finality. Poverty is of no value except as a vantage ground for a starting point. It is only good as is the apparatus in the gymnasium—to develop the man. In itself it is a curse—slavery—but it is the great thing to get away from; and it is the getting away from it—if honestly and conscientiously done—that calls out the man, that develops the human giant.
We did not always see, at the time, that what we got incidentally on the way up from poverty was infinitely better and more precious than the thing we were aiming for—a living, a competence; that the development of a strong man in the mighty struggle with necessity was a thousand times more valuable than the living, the money, or the property gained.
Grover Cleveland, who was once a poor clerk at a salary of fifty dollars a year, in speaking of poverty as a developer, says: “There is surely no development of mental traits, and no stimulation of the forces of true manhood so thorough and so imperiously effective as those produced by the combination of well-regulated ambition with the healthful rigors of poverty.”
It is the student who has to struggle hardest to obtain an education that gets the most discipline and good out of it. Boys who are “born scholars,” and who only need to read a lesson over to know it and to be able to pass an examination upon it, do not derive half so much from their college course as do those who have to fight hard for everything they get. It is not, as a rule, the youth who has a regular income and every want supplied by indulgent parents who makes the most of his opportunities at college, but the one who has to work his way through, who has to toil in college and out to make his expenses, or else go without an education.
What would the average youth do if he were not compelled by necessity to work—if he were not obliged to exert himself in order to get the thing he wants? If he already has all he wants, why should he struggle for more? Not one in ten thousand would go through the struggle with poverty—the wrestling with necessity—just to produce character and make himself a stronger man, but he would do it for selfish reasons—to satisfy his ambition and get that which he longs for for himself and those he loves.
“I’m not wasting my sympathy on the children of the poor,” says U. S. Senator J. P. Dolliver, once a poor boy himself. “What little sympathy I have I will give to the children of the rich. If you have one hundred thousand dollars, and give it to a boy to start him out in life, he doesn’t start. I suggest keeping that hundred thousand and that boy apart; it will be better for the boy. The cabin where Abraham Lincoln was born did not shelter the childhood of a king, but something better than a king—a man.”
The boy who is conscious that he has a fortune awaiting him says to himself, “What is the use of getting up early in the morning and working one’s life out? I have money enough coming to me to take care of me as long as I live.” So he turns over and takes another nap, while the boy who has nothing in the world but his own self to depend upon feels the spur of necessity forcing him out of bed in the morning. He knows there is no other way open for him but the way of struggle. He has nobody to lean on—nobody to help him. He knows that it is a question either of being a nobody or getting up and hustling for dear life.
Thus, shrewd Nature, in making man get that which he wants most by the way of necessity, brings about her great ends of civilization and character-development of the race. The money, the property, the position are small things in comparison with the man she is after.
What price will Nature not pay for a man? She will put him through the hardest school of discipline, and train him for years in the great university of experience, in order to perfect her work. The mere money or property the man gets on the way is only incidental. Nature is after the man. She does not care a fig for the money, in comparison; but she will pay any price for a human giant.
Pushing To The Front
CHAPTER I THE MAN AND THE OPPORTUNITY
CHAPTER III BOYS WITH NO CHANCE
CHAPTER V OPPORTUNITIES WHERE YOU ARE
CHAPTER VI POSSIBILITIES IN SPARE MOMENTS
CHAPTER VII HOW POOR BOYS AND GIRLS GO TO COLLEGE
CHAPTER VIII YOUR OPPORTUNITY CONFRONTS YOU—WHAT WILL YOU DO WITH IT?
CHAPTER IX ROUND BOYS IN SQUARE HOLES
CHAPTER XI CHOOSING A VOCATION
CHAPTER XII CONCENTRATED ENERGY
CHAPTER XIII THE TRIUMPHS OF ENTHUSIASM.
