for more than fifty years. It is a message the
accuracy of which has been affirmed and reaffirmed in thousands of lives
whose progress I have been privileged to watch. And the message is this:
Your future stands before you like a block of unwrought marble. You can
work it into what you will. Neither heredity, nor environment, nor any
obstacles superimposed by man can keep you from marching straight
through to success, provided you are guided by a firm, driving
determination and have normal health and intelligence.

Determination is the battery that commands every road of life. It is the
armor against which the missiles of adversity rattle harmlessly. If
there is one thing I have tried peculiarly to do through these years it
is to indent in the minds of the youth of America the living fact that
when they give WILL the reins and say "DRIVE" they are headed toward the
heights.

The institution out of which Temple University, of Philadelphia, grew
was founded thirty years ago expressly to furnish opportunities for
higher education to poor boys and girls who are willing to work for it.
I have seen ninety thousand students enter its doors. A very large
percentage of these came to Philadelphia without money, but firmly
determined to get an education. I have never known one of them to go
back defeated. Determination has the properties of a powerful acid; all
shackles melt before it.

Conversely, lack of will power is the readiest weapon in the arsenal of
failure. The most hopeless proposition in the world is the fellow who
thinks that success is a door through which he will sometime stumble if
he roams around long enough. Some men seem to expect ravens to feed
them, the cruse of oil to remain inexhaustible, the fish to come right
up over the side of the boat at meal-time. They believe that life is a
series of miracles. They loaf about and trust in their lucky star, and
boldly declare that the world owes them a living.

As a matter of fact the world owes a man nothing that he does not earn.
In this life a man gets about what he is worth, and he must render an
equivalent for what is given him. There is no such thing as inactive
success.

My mind is running back over the stories of thousands of boys and girls
I have known and known about, who have faced every sort of a handicap
and have won out solely by will and perseverance in working with all the
power that God had given them. It is now nearly thirty years since a
young E