than has the student who has given a good account of himself. The bright student in school and college does not have a monopoly on success; he simply has considerably more than an even chance with the other fellows to make good.
I have followed pretty carefully the record of fellows whom I knew in school and college twenty-five or thirty years ago. There are a few who did well scholastically who have done little in the positions which they have since held. In most cases, however, it is not difficult to understand why; they had alert minds without self-reliance or initiative. There are some, also, whose scholastic record was little to their credit, who are now leaders in the business or the profession which they have taken up. Here, too, the explanation is not hard to find. They had conceit and self-reliance; they were good judges of human nature, and their independence and personal magnetism outweighed their lack of ability to think and reason logically. On the whole, however, I can say that in more than ninety per cent of the cases of the fellows I have known in school and college, the success of these men could be very accurately measured by the grades which they received while they were in the high school or college. It is as sensible to claim that character is worthless, because it is possible to show that a crook occasionally gets by with his crookedness, as it is to claim that grades neither indicate a boy's success in school nor his probable progress later in life. The facts prove otherwise.
