The stability of credit becomes the watchword of high finance.  Thus the great money master will not believe that periods of depression are of necessity ruinous.  It is true that no great profits will be made in such years of depression.  But the lean years will not last for ever.  Industry during the period of deflation goes through a process like that of an over-fat man taking a Turkish bath.  The extravagances are eliminated, new invention and energy spring up to meet the call of necessity, and when the boom years come again it finds industry, like a highly trained athlete, ready to pour out the goods and pay the wages.  Economic methods are nurtured by depression.

But when all has been said and done, the sceptic may still question us.  Is the capacity to make money something to be desired and striven for, something worth having in the character, some proof of ability in the mind?  The answer is “Yes.”

Money which is striven for brings with it the real qualities in life.  Here are the counters which mark character and brains.  The money brain is, in the modern world, the supreme brain.  Why?  Because that which the greatest number of men strive for will produce the fiercest competition of intellect.  Politics are for the few; they are a game, a fancy, or an inheritance.  Leaving out the man of genius who flares out, perhaps, once or twice in a century, the amount of ability which enables a man to cut a very respectable figure in a Cabinet is extraordinarily low, compared with that demanded in the world of industry and finance.  The politician will never believe this, but it is so.

The battles of the market-place are real duels, on which realities of life and death and fortune or poverty and even of fame depend.  Here men fight with a precipice behind them, not a pension of L2,000 a year.  The young men who go down into that press must win their spurs by no man’s favour.  But youth can triumph; it has the resolution when the mind is still plastic to gain that judgment which experience gives.

My advice to the young men of to-day is simply this:  Money is nothing but the fruit of resolution and intellect applied to the affairs of the world.  To an unshakable resolution fortune will oppose no bar.

VI

EDUCATION

A great number of letters have reached me from young men who seem to think that the road to success is barred to them owing to defects in their education.  To them I would send this message: 

    Never believe that success cannot come your way because you have
    not been educated in the orthodox and regular fashion.

The nineteenth century made a god of education, and its eminent men placed learning as the foremost influence in life.

I am bold enough to dissent, if by education is meant a course of study imposed from without.  Indeed, such a course may be a hindrance rather than a help to a man entering on a business career.  No young man on the verge of life ought to be in the least discouraged by the fact that he is not stamped with the hall mark of Oxford or Cambridge.