Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in college, acquires more information that will be “useful” to him in his practical career.  But the college man who has not thrown away his college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman.

Nobody contends that a college adds an ounce of brain power.  But if college opportunities are not wasted, such mind as the student does have is developed up to the highest possible point of efficiency.  The college man who has not scorned his work will understand any given situation a great deal quicker than his brother who, with equal ability, has not had the training of the university.

A man who has been instructed in boxing is more than a match for a stronger and braver man unskilled in what is called the “manly art.”  That is your college and non-college man over again with muscle substituted for brain.

Five years ago I saw the soldiers of Japan going through the most careful training.  They were taught how to march, how to charge, how to do everything.  I shall never forget the bayonet exercises which an officer and myself chanced upon.  They were conducted with all the ferocity of a real fight; no point was neglected.

With all their fatalism and the utter fearlessness thereof, the Japanese could not have bested the Russians if to their courage and devotion they had not added years of painstaking drill, which an American soldier would have considered an unnecessary hardship.  Very well.  A college education is precisely that kind of a preparation for the warfare of life.

But mind you, these Japanese soldiers and their officers were in earnest.  They meant to show the world that, small as they are in stature and recent as their adoption of modern methods has been, they nevertheless would try to be the highest type of soldier that ever marched to a battle-field.  If you go to college, young man, you have got to be in earnest, too.  You have got to say to yourself, “I am going to make more out of what is in me than any man with like ability ever did before.”  You cannot dawdle—­remember that.

Imagine every day, and every hour of every day, that you are in the real world and in the real conflicts thereof, instead of in college with its practise conflicts, and handle yourself precisely as you would if your whole career depended upon each task set for you.  If you mean to go to college for the principal purpose of idling around, wearing a small cap and good clothes, and being the adoration of your mother and your sisters on your vacation, you had a good deal better be at work at some gainful occupation.  College is not helping you if that is what you are doing.  It is hurting you.

Go to college, therefore, say I; but go to college for business.  Those drill years are the most important ones of your life.