I will venture to say that his example can be repeated in every town in the United States, in every city of the Republic.  Certainly I personally know of a score of such successes in my own home city.  I personally know of many such examples in other States.  You ask for the inspiration of example, young man who cannot go to college.  Look around you—­they are on every hand.

Can you not find them in your own town?  Or, if you live on a farm, do you not see them in your own county?  I personally know of country boys who started out as farm hands at sixteen dollars per month and board, who to-day own the farms on which they were employed, and yet who are not now much past middle life.  They have done it by the simple rules that are as old as human industry.

Come, then, don’t mope.  Sleep eight hours.  Then three hours for your meals, and a chance for your stomach to begin digesting them after you have eaten them.  That makes eleven hours, and leaves you thirteen hours remaining.  Take one of these for getting to and from your business. Then work the other twelve. Every highly successful man whom I know worked even longer during the years of his beginnings.

What, no recreation? say you.  Certainly I say recreation, and I say pleasure, too.  But remember that you have got to overcome the college man’s advantage over you—­and that can only be done by hard work.  But what of that?  For a young man like you, full of that boundless vigor of youth, what higher pleasure can there be than the doing of your work better than anybody else does the same kind of work?

And what finer happiness can there be than the certainty that such a life as that will make realities of your dreams?  For sure it is that this is the road by which you can walk to unfailing success, even over the bodies of your rivals who, with greater “advantages” than yours, neglect them and fall upon the steep ascent up which, with harder muscles, steadier nerves, and stouter heart, you climb with ease, gaining strength with every step you take instead of losing power as you advance, as did your flabbier fibered competitor.

Now for the other illustration:  Three years ago a certain young man came to me from New York, the son of a friend who occupied a Government position.  He was studying law.  He was “quivering” with ambition.  But his lungs were getting weak.  Would it be possible to get him a place on some ranch for six or eight months?  Yes, it was possible.  An acquaintance was glad to take him.

At the end of his time he returned, still “quivering” with ambition.  He was going to make a lawyer, that’s what he was going to make—­the very best lawyer that ever mastered Blackstone.  He already had a clerkship promised in one of the great legal establishments in the metropolis.  This clerkship paid him enough to live on, and gave him the chance to do the very work which is necessary to the making of a lawyer.