It is impossible to use words sufficiently emphatic in urging the study of history. You cannot get too much history in college and out of it. Sir William Hamilton was right—­history is the study of studies.  The man who occupies the chair of history in any college ought to be not only an able man, he ought to be a great man.  If ever you find such a professor, make yourself agreeable to him, absorb him, possess yourself of him.

This final word:  Mingle with your fellow students.  Talk with people, with real people; those who are living real lives, doing real things under normal and natural conditions.  Do all this in order that you may keep human; for you must not get the habit of keeping to your room and believing that all wisdom is confined to books.  It is not.  All wisdom is not confined to any one place.  Some of it is in books, and some of it is in trees and the earth and the stars.

But so far as you are concerned most of it is in human touch with your fellows; for it is men with whom you must work.  It is men who are to employ you.  It is men whom in your turn you are to employ.  It is the world of men which in the end you are to serve.  And it is that you may serve it well that you are going to college at all, is it not?

Be one of these men, therefore; and be sure that while you are being one of them, you are one indeed.  Be a man in college and out, and clear down to the end.  Be a man—­that is the sum of all counsel.

2.  The Young Man who Cannot Go

But what of the young man who stands without the college gates?  What of him upon whom Fate has locked the doors of this arsenal of power and life’s equipment?  “Why does not some one give counsel and encouragement to the boy who, for any one of a thousand reasons, cannot take four years or four months from his life of continuous toil in order to go to college?” asked a young man full of the vitality of purpose, but to whom even the education of our high schools was an absolute impossibility.

After all, for most of our eighty millions, the college is practically beyond their reach.  Even among those young men who have the nerve, ability, and ambition to “work their way through college,” there are tens of thousands who cannot do even that, no matter if they were willing for four years to toil at sawbuck, live on gruel, and dress in overalls and hickory shirt.

I have in mind now a spirited young American of this class whose father died when his son was still a boy, and on whose shoulders, therefore, fell the duty of “supporting mother” and helping the girls, even before his young manhood had begun.  For that young man, college or university might just as well be Jupiter, or Saturn, or Arcturus.

Very well.  What of this young man?  What of the myriads of young Americans like him?  What hope does our complex industrial civilization, which every day grows more intense, hold out to these children of hard circumstances, whose muscles daily strain at the windlasses of necessary duty?