for _you_. Patiently hold on through the
sternest discipline you can stand, until the course is completed. It
will not be fatal to your success if you do not go; but you will be
better prepared to meet the world if you do go. I do not mean that
your mind will be stored with much more knowledge that will be useful
to you if you go through college than if you do not go through
college.

Probably the man who keeps at work at the business he is going to
follow through life, during the years when other men are studying in
college, acquires more information that will be "useful" to him in his
practical career. But the college man who has not thrown away his
college life comes from the training of his alma mater with a mind as
highly disciplined as are the wrist and eye of the skilled swordsman.

Nobody contends that a college adds an ounce of brain power. But if
college opportunities are not wasted, such mind as the student does
have is developed up to the highest possible point of efficiency. The
college man who has not scorned his work will understand any given
situation a great deal quicker than his brother who, with equal
ability, has not had the training of the university.

A man who has been instructed in boxing is more than a match for a
stronger and braver man unskilled in what is called the "manly art."
That is your college and non-college man over again with muscle
substituted for brain.

Five years ago I saw the soldiers of Japan going through the most
careful training. They were taught how to march, how to charge, how to
do everything. I shall never forget the bayonet exercises which an
officer and myself chanced upon. They were conducted with all the
ferocity of a real fight; no point was neglected.

With all their fatalism and the utter fearlessness thereof, the
Japanese could not have bested the Russians if to their courage and
devotion they had not added years of painstaking drill, which an
American soldier would have considered an unnecessary hardship. Very
well. A college education is precisely that kind of a preparation for
the warfare of life.

But mind you, these Japanese soldiers and their officers were in
earnest. They meant to show the world that, small as they are in
stature and recent as their adoption of modern methods has been, they
nevertheless would try to be the highest type of soldier that ever
marched to a battle-field. If you go to college, young man, you have
got to be in earnest, t