Remember, then, you who for any reason have not had those years of mental discipline called “a college education,” that this does not excuse you from doing great work in the world.  Do not whine, and declare that you could have done so much better if you had “only had a chance to go to college.”  You can be a success if you will, college or no college.  At least three of those famous masters of business which Chicago, the commercial capital of the continent, has given to the world, and whose legitimate operations in tangible merchandizing are so vast that they are almost weird, had no college education, and very little education of any kind.

I think, indeed, that very few of America’s kings of trade ever attended college.  There are the masters of railroad management, too.  Few of them have been college men, although the college man is now appearing among them—­witness President Cassatt, of the Pennsylvania System, a real Napoleon of railroading, who, I hear, is a graduate of the German universities and of American polytechnic schools.

Burns did not go to college.  Neither did Shakespeare.

Some of our greatest lawyers “read law” in the unrefined but honest and strengthening environment of the old-time law office.  Lincoln was not a college man; neither was Washington.  So do not excuse yourself to your family and the world upon the ground that you never had a college education.  That is not the reason why you fail.

You can succeed—­I repeat it—­college or no college; all you have to do in the latter case is to put on a little more steam.  And remember that some of the world’s sages of the practical have closed their life’s wisdom with the deliberate opinion that a college education is a waste of time, and an over-refinement of body and of mind.

You see, I am trying to take into account every possible view of this weighty question; for I know how desperate a matter it is to hundreds of thousands of my young countrymen.  I know how earnestly they are searching for an answer; how hard it will be for hosts of them to obey an affirmative answer; how intense is the desire of the great majority of young Americans to decide this question wisely.  For most of them have no time to lose, little money to spend and none to waste, no energy to spare, and yet are inspired with high resolve to make the best and most of life.  And I know how devoutly they pray that, in deciding, they may choose the better part.

Still, with all this in mind, my advice is this:  Go to college.  Go to the best possible college for you.  Patiently hold on through the sternest discipline you can stand, until the course is completed.  It will not be fatal to your success if you do not go; but you will be better prepared to meet the world if you do go.  I do not mean that your mind will be stored with much more knowledge that will be useful to you if you go through college than if you do not go through college.