? What
of him upon whom Fate has locked the doors of this arsenal of power
and life's equipment? "Why does not some one give counsel and
encouragement to the boy who, for any one of a thousand reasons,
cannot take four years or four months from his life of continuous toil
in order to go to college?" asked a young man full of the vitality of
purpose, but to whom even the education of our high schools was an
absolute impossibility.

After all, for most of our eighty millions, the college is practically
beyond their reach. Even among those young men who have the nerve,
ability, and ambition to "work their way through college," there are
tens of thousands who cannot do even that, no matter if they were
willing for four years to toil at sawbuck, live on gruel, and dress in
overalls and hickory shirt.

I have in mind now a spirited young American of this class whose
father died when his son was still a boy, and on whose shoulders,
therefore, fell the duty of "supporting mother" and helping the girls,
even before his young manhood had begun. For that young man, college
or university might just as well be Jupiter, or Saturn, or Arcturus.

Very well. What of this young man? What of the myriads of young
Americans like him? What hope does our complex industrial
civilization, which every day grows more intense, hold out to these
children of hard circumstances, whose muscles daily strain at the
windlasses of necessary duty?

I repeat the question, and multiply the forms in which I put it. It is
so pressingly important. It concerns the most abundant and valuable
material with which free institutions work--the neglected man, he whom
fortune overlooks. It is a strange weakness of human nature that makes
everybody interested in the man at the top, and nobody interested in
the man at the bottom. Yet it is the man at the bottom upon whom our
Republican institutions are established. It is the man at the bottom
whom Science tells us will, by the irresistible processes of nature,
produce the highest types after a while.

The young Bonaparte proved himself a very wizard of human nature when
he exclaimed: "Every soldier of France carries a marshal's baton in
his knapsack." And did not the Master, with a wisdom wholly divine,
choose as the seed-bearers of our faith throughout the world the
neglected men? Only one of the apostles was what we would term to-day
a "college man"--St. Luke, the physician. What said the Teacher, "The
stone whic