A young man whom fortune had kept from college, but who is too stout-hearted to let that discourage him, said to me the other day:  “I don’t think that a college education confers, or the absence of it prevents, success.  But I do think that where there are two men of equal health, ability, and character, that one will be chosen who has been to college, and to this extent the college man has a better chance.”  This is true for the ordinary man—­the man who is willing to put forth no more than the ordinary effort.

But you who read—­you are willing to put forth extraordinary effort, are you not?  You are willing to show these favored sons of cap and gown that you will run as fast and as far as they, with all their training, will you not?  You are willing—­yes, and determined, to use every extra hour which your college brother, thinking he has the advantage of you, will probably waste.

Very well.  If you do, biography (that most inspiring of all literature) demonstrates that your reward will be as rich as the college man’s reward.  Yes, richer, for the gold which your refinery purges from the dross of your disadvantages will be doubly refined by the fires of your intenser effort.

In 1847 two men were born who have blessed mankind with productive work which, rich as are now its benefits to the race, will create a new wealth of human helpfulness with each succeeding year as long as time endures.  Both these men have lived, almost to a day, the same number of years; both of them are still alive; both of them have labored in neighboring sections of the same field.  They are alike, too, in character, almost duplicates in ability.  Here, then, is material for a perfect comparison.

Mark, now, the parallel.  One of them was a college man, the son of a noted educator and himself a professor in the University of Boston.  He used the gifts which God gave him for that purpose, and as long as the transmission of human speech continues among men, the name of Alexander Graham Bell will be rightly honored by all the world.

The other of these men could no more have gone to college than he could have crossed the Atlantic on a sheet of paper.  You who read this never had to work half so hard as this man worked when he was a boy.  Your patience will never be so taxed and tested as his patience was and is.  But who can say that your efforts and your persistence will not be as richly rewarded according to your ability as his ceaselessness has been repaid, if you will try as hard as he has tried, and use every ounce of yourself as effectively as he has used himself?

At twelve years of age he was a newsboy on the Grand Trunk Railway.  That didn’t satisfy him.  The mystery of the telegraph (and what is more mysterious?) constantly called him.  The click of the instrument was a voice from an unknown world speaking to him words far different from those recorded in the messages that instrument was transmitting.