I had at the time no idea of going into public life, and I never studied elocution or practiced debating.  This was a loss to me in one way.  In another way it was not.  Personally I have not the slightest sympathy with debating contests in which each side is arbitrarily assigned a given proposition and told to maintain it without the least reference to whether those maintaining it believe in it or not.  I know that under our system this is necessary for lawyers, but I emphatically disbelieve in it as regards general discussion of political, social, and industrial matters.  What we need is to turn out of our colleges young men with ardent convictions on the side of the right; not young men who can make a good argument for either right or wrong as their interest bids them.  The present method of carrying on debates on such subjects as “Our Colonial Policy,” or “The Need of a Navy,” or “The Proper Position of the Courts in Constitutional Questions,” encourages precisely the wrong attitude among those who take part in them.  There is no effort to instill sincerity and intensity of conviction.  On the contrary, the net result is to make the contestants feel that their convictions have nothing to do with their arguments.  I am sorry I did not study elocution in college; but I am exceedingly glad that I did not take part in the type of debate in which stress is laid, not upon getting a speaker to think rightly, but on getting him to talk glibly on the side to which he is assigned, without regard either to what his convictions are or to what they ought to be.

I was a reasonably good student in college, standing just within the first tenth of my class, if I remember rightly; although I am not sure whether this means the tenth of the whole number that entered or of those that graduated.  I was given a Phi Beta Kappa “key.”  My chief interests were scientific.  When I entered college, I was devoted to out-of-doors natural history, and my ambition was to be a scientific man of the Audubon, or Wilson, or Baird, or Coues type—­a man like Hart Merriam, or Frank Chapman, or Hornaday, to-day.  My father had from the earliest days instilled into me the knowledge that I was to work and to make my own way in the world, and I had always supposed that this meant that I must enter business.  But in my freshman year (he died when I was a sophomore) he told me that if I wished to become a scientific man I could do so.  He explained that I must be sure that I really intensely desired to do scientific work, because if I went into it I must make it a serious career; that he had made enough money to enable me to take up such a career and do non-remunerative work of value if I intended to do the very best work there was in me; but that I must not dream of taking it up as a dilettante.  He also gave me a piece of advice that I have always remembered, namely, that, if I was not going to earn money, I must even things up by not spending it.  As he expressed it, I had to keep the fraction constant, and if I was not able to increase the numerator, then I must reduce the denominator.  In other words, if I went into a scientific career, I must definitely abandon all thought of the enjoyment that could accompany a money-making career, and must find my pleasures elsewhere.