The first thing that the world should remember about the young man who is confronting it, asking his daily bread of it, is the inestimable value of the qualities of freshness, of innocence, of faith, of confidence, of high honesty, of Don Quixote courage which the young man brings to it.  These are qualities which in human character are worth all the wisdom of the market-place many million times multiplied.  They are the qualities which, in spite of itself, keep the world young and tolerable.

The young man comes to the world fresh from his mother’s knee.  The Lord’s Prayer is still in his mind; his mother taught it to him.  The glorious fable of Washington and the cherry-tree is still in his heart; his mother taught it to him.  A beautiful honor that makes him very foolish on the stock exchange and causes the shrewd ones to say, “He will know more after a while”—­the splendid honor that makes him throw over what the world calls “advantages”—­still glorifies his soul; his mother taught him that honor.  The confidence that God is just, and that success is surely his if he will but do right, still beautifies him like the rose-tinted clouds of morning; it is the influence of his mother’s teaching.

Let the world understand that these qualities with which the mother labors to endow her child, from the time the blessing of maternity is hers to the time the bright-eyed young fellow steps out from the old home, are more valuable to the world itself than all its gold-mines, all its scientific discoveries, all its electric railroads, all its games of politics, all its commerce.  “Il mondo va da se,” said a cynical Italian statesman—­“the world goes by itself.”  But it does not.

If the world were not each year renewed, refreshed, glorified by the magnificent honor and fine expectancies of its young men, it would soon become simply fiendish in its sordidness, selfishness, and baseness.  Let the world, then, preserve these fine qualities at which it too often idly sneers; not for the young man’s sake—­no, that is not to be expected—­but for its own sake.

Let the world turn to the Master and think of what he said:  “Except ye become as little children, ye shall not enter into the kingdom of heaven.”  I am pleading for the tolerance of what, by a certain class of men, are called impracticable business defects in youthful character, which in reality are the vital blood by which the world is kept morally alive.

The first attitude that the world ought really to take toward the young man is charity.  How parrot-like one is!  Charity!  “And now abideth faith, hope, charity, these three; but the greatest of these is charity.”  I defy any man who talks about the practical affairs of this life to get away from the Bible.

Let the world then have charity for the young man.  Let it realize that for the particular moment there is nothing conceivable so helpless as he.  He is just as helpless as, in time, he will become irresistible.  I have already earnestly advised every young man, as a practical matter, to do at least one thing each day not only free from any selfish motive, but from which no possible material benefit could come to himself.