Page:Discipline and the Derelict (1921).pdf/105

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a pay check every month, it seems to a good many men, even though they do not stand in need of the money, inexcusable not to do something. Sometimes the man who needs the money least is most skillful and clever in earning it. I have in mind two young men who were adept at salesmanship but who were quite able to meet all their college expenses. They constantly endangered their college work through the unreasonable amount of time they put in in their business enterprises. Their father, who was a shrewd, close-fisted business man, was extremely proud of their earnings, never realizing that in spending so much of their time in making a few dollars they were detracting very materially from the efficiency of their education.

Most of the things which have been written of boys without education, like Lincoln, who ultimately became President of the United States, or of fellows with only fifty cents in their pocket who got through college on their nerve and made Phi Beta Kappa, are romantic, but quite misleading. These things have been done (there are the immortal Garfield, and Daniel Webster, of course), and they are still being done by men of unusual mental and physical equipment, but they are not easy to do, and they are not always desirable to do. The men who accomplished these things did so in spite of their handicaps and not because of them.

I have known many a man who paid in privation and sacrifice more than his college training was worth; for he was so engrossed and his time so occupied in the struggle for existence that he lost the greater part of what he should have obtained from