This general superintendent, under whose orders more than ten thousand men daily performed their complex and delicately adjusted functions, is fifty-five years of age.  Now listen to this, you who cannot go to college:  This man started thirty-eight years ago as a freight-handler in Chicago at one dollar per day for this same railroad company, which was then a comparatively small and obscure line.  Ah! but you say, “That was thirty-eight years ago.”  Yes, and that is the trouble with you, is it not?  You want to start in as superintendent of a great system or the head of a mighty business, do you not?  Very well—­get that out of your head.  It cannot—­it ought not—­to be done.

If you are willing to work as hard as this man worked, as hard as President Scott of the Pennsylvania System worked; if you are willing to stay right by your job, year in, year out, through the weary decades, instead of changing every thirty minutes; if you are willing to wait as long as they; if you are willing to plant the seed of success in the soil of good hard work, and then water it with good hard work, and attend its growth with good hard work, and wait its flowering and fruitage with patience, its flowering and fruitage will come.  Doubt it not.

For, mark you, this man at the time he told me that his System was looking all over the United States for a young man capable of being his assistant, had seven high-grade college men on his hands at that very moment.  He would have been more than delighted to have taken any one of them.

Also, he would have taken a man who had not seen a college just as quickly if he could have found such a one who knew enough about operating a railroad, and had the qualities of leadership, the gift of organizing ability.  It did not matter to this superintendent whether the assistant he sought had been to college or not, whether he was rich or poor.

He cared no more about that than he cared whether the man for whom this place was seeking was a blond or a brunette.  The only question that he was asking was, “Where is the man who is equal to the job?”

And that, my young friend, is the question which all industry is asking in every field of human effort; that is the question your Fate is putting to you who are anxious to do big work, “Are you equal to the job?” If you are not, then be honest enough to step out of the contest.  Be honest enough not to envy the other young men who are equal to the job.

Yes, be honest enough to applaud the man who is equal to the job and who goes bravely to his task.  Don’t find fault with him.  Don’t swear that “There is no chance for a young man any more.”  That’s not true, you know.  And remember always that if you do all you are fitted for, you do as well as your abler brother, and better than he if you do your best and he does not.