Well, then, do you imagine that you are going to have an easier time in your business or profession than the officers in our army and navy?  Don’t you believe it for a minute.  You are not going to have an easier time than they.  You are going to have a great deal harder time.  And by “hard time” I do not mean an unhappy time.  Unhappy time!  What greater joy can there be for a man than the sheer felicity of doing real work in the world?

While I am on this subject I might as well say another thing:  Do not think that you have got to smoke in order to be or look like a college man.  A pipe in the mouth of a youth does not make him look like a college man, or any other kind of man.  It merely makes him look absurd, that is all.  And if there is ever a time on earth when you do not need the stimulus of tobacco, it is while you are in college.

Tobacco is a wonderful vegetable.  It is, I believe, the only substance in the world which is at the same time a stimulant and a narcotic, a heart excitant and a nerve sedative.  Very well.  You are too young yet to need a heart stimulant, too young to need anything to quiet your nerves.

If at your tender age your nerves are so inflamed that they must be soothed, and if at the very sunrise of your life your heart is so feeble that it must be forced with any stimulant, you had better quit college.  College is no place for you if you are such a decadent; yes, and you will find the world a good deal harder place than college.

Cut out tobacco, therefore.  For a young fellow in college it is a ridiculous affectation—­nothing more.  Why?  Because you do not need tobacco; that is why.  At least you do not need it yet.  The time may come when you will find tobacco helpful, but it will not be until you have been a long while out of college.  As to whether tobacco is good for a man at any stage of life the doctors disagree, and “where doctors disagree, who shall decide?”

Ruskin says that no really immortal work has been done in the world since tobacco was introduced; but we know that this is not true.  I would not be understood as having a prejudice for or against the weed.  Whether a full-grown man shall use it or not is something for himself to decide.  Personally I liked it so well that I made up my mind a long time ago to give it up altogether.

But there is absolutely no excuse for a man young enough to still be in college to use it at all.  And it does not look right.  For a boy to use tobacco has something contemptible about it.  I will not argue whether this is justified or not.  That is the way most people feel about it.  Whether their feeling is a prejudice or not, there is no use of your needlessly offending their prejudice.  And this is to be taken into account.  For you want to succeed, do you not?  Very well.  You cannot mount a ladder of air; you must rise on the solid stepping-stones of the people’s deserved regard.