at
Cassius exclaimed to Brutus is exactly applicable to you:

"The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

So do not whine as to your hard fate; do not go to pitying yourself.
No whimper should come from a masculine throat.

A man who does either of these things thereby proves that he ought not
to succeed--and he will not succeed. Indeed, how do you know that
these fires of misfortune through which you are passing are not heat
designed by Fate to temper the steel of your real character. Certainly
that ought to be true if you have the stuff in you. And if you have
not the stuff in you, Yale, Harvard, Princeton, Cambridge, Oxford, and
all the universities of Germany cannot lift you an inch above your
normal level. "You cannot make a silk purse out of a sow's ear" is our
pithy and brutally truthful folk-saying.

"What do you raise on these shaly hills?" I asked one time of that
ideal American statesman, Senator Orville H. Platt, of Connecticut.
"Manhood," answered this great New Englander, and then he went on to
point out the seemingly contradictory facts that a poor soil
universally produces stern and upright character, solid and productive
ability, and dauntless courage.

The very effort required to live in these ungenerous surroundings, the
absolute necessity to make every blow tell, to preserve every fragment
of value; the perpetual exercise of the inventive faculty, thus making
the intellect more productive by the continuous and creative use of
it--all these develop those powers of mind and heart which through all
history have distinguished the inhabitants of such countries as
Switzerland and New England. "And so," said Connecticut's great
senator, "these rocky hills produce manhood."

Apply this to your own circumstance, you who cannot go to college
because you must "support the family," or have inherited a debt which
your honor compels you to pay, or any one of those unhappy conditions
which fortune has laid on your young shoulders.

Most men with wealth, friends, and influence accept them as a matter
of course. Not many young men who are happily situated at the
beginning, employ the opportunities which are at their hand. They
don't understand their value. Having "influence" to help them, they
usually rely on this artificial aid--seldom upon themselves. Having
friends, they depend upon these allies rather than upon the ordered,
drilled, disciplined troops