“...  Who while others slept
    Was climbing upward through the night.”

So do not let the fact that you cannot go to college excuse yourself to yourself for being a failure.  Do not say, “I have no chance because I am not a college man,” and blame the world for its injustice.  What Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you: 

    “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
    But in ourselves, that we are underlings.”

So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself.  No whimper should come from a masculine throat.

A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not to succeed—­and he will not succeed.  Indeed, how do you know that these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character.  Certainly that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you.  And if you have not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your normal level.  “You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” is our pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.

“What do you raise on these shaly hills?” I asked one time of that ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut.  “Manhood,” answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive ability, and dauntless courage.

The very effort required to live in these ungenerous surroundings, the absolute necessity to make every blow tell, to preserve every fragment of value; the perpetual exercise of the inventive faculty, thus making the intellect more productive by the continuous and creative use of it—­all these develop those powers of mind and heart which through all history have distinguished the inhabitants of such countries as Switzerland and New England.  “And so,” said Connecticut’s great senator, “these rocky hills produce manhood.”

Apply this to your own circumstance, you who cannot go to college because you must “support the family,” or have inherited a debt which your honor compels you to pay, or any one of those unhappy conditions which fortune has laid on your young shoulders.

Most men with wealth, friends, and influence accept them as a matter of course.  Not many young men who are happily situated at the beginning, employ the opportunities which are at their hand.  They don’t understand their value.  Having “influence” to help them, they usually rely on this artificial aid—­seldom upon themselves.  Having friends, they depend upon these allies rather than upon the ordered, drilled, disciplined troops of their own powers and capabilities.  Having money, they do not see as vividly the necessity of toiling to make more.

“What’s the use of my working; father did enough of that for our family,” wittily said one of these young men.  Having the training of the best universities very much as they have their food and clothing, these men are too apt to be blind to the greater skill this equipment gives them, and thus to neglect the using of it.