To the opportunity offered by health may be added the years lying in front of the young heart like a great estate, as yet unincumbered.  Powerful enthusiasms, too, are the inheritance of youth.  Noble feelings, fine aspirations then pass through the mind, as in May the perfumed winds from the South pass over the fields.  These motives beat upon the mind as steam upon the iron piston.  Workmen excavating at Pompeii threw up soil that had been covered for 1,800 years.  Exposed to the sun, young trees sprang up.  Without the force of light and heat and dew and rain these seeds were dormant or dead.  Thus each mind is a dead mind until the full warmth of great impulses quickens the dormant energies.  The hopes, the ambitions, the aspirations of youth all conspire to make this a most strategic period.  Then all the forces of life unite in a great gulf stream for bearing the soul up and sweeping it forward to new climes and richer shores.

Strategic the hour of prosperity.  Men discount the speech of poverty, but the rich man’s words weigh a ton each.  It has been said that the poor man’s dollar is just as good as the rich man’s only when both are anonymous, for the dollar with a million behind it will go further than the dollar with a thousand behind it.  This is a proverb:  “A bid from Rothschild electrifies the market.”  Each new achievement and success builds higher the tower of observation that lifts the great man into the presence of the nation.  All eyes are upon the prospered individual, all ears are alert to his whisper.  Prosperity’s voice is the voice of an oracle, all her words are winged.  Every successful venture in the world of commerce or statecraft quadruples influence over the nation’s youth.  This principle interprets the curiosity of the boy in store or bank, asking a thousand questions about his successful employer.  It explains why the eager aspirant for political influence searches all the journals for some word from Gladstone or Castelar or Bismarck.  A sentence from these great champions hath sufficed for reversing the policy of a government.  The memory of many triumphs lies back of the great leader’s words and lends them weight.

Success is an orator; it charms multitudes.  Full oft one who is a veritable genius for making homely truths beautiful has accomplished less for his age than some prosperous man whose few stumbling words have sufficed for shaping national policies and guiding his generation.  All the young are drawn into the wake of the successful.  Wealth fulfills the story of Orpheus, whose sweet voice made the very stones and trees follow after him.  Truly wealth is an evangelist, the almoner of bounty toward college and library and art gallery and liberty and religion.  But its chief use is in this:  It enables its possessor to repeat his industry, integrity and thrift in the children of a nation.  All youthful hearts do well to covet wealth, wisdom and leverage power!  But man should remember that the chief value of prosperity is in its capitalization of personality, and the rendering of others sensitive to example and precept.  Should man forget this, earth will hear no sadder cry than his when, closing the life career, he exclaims:  “While thy servant was busy here and there the opportune moment was gone.”