nglish boy came into my office. He wanted to attend the evening
classes at our university to learn oratory.

"Why don't you go into the law?" I asked him.

"I'm too poor! I haven't a chance!" he replied, shaking his head sadly.

I turned on him sharply. "Of course you haven't a chance," I exclaimed,
"if you don't make up your mind to it!"

The next night he knocked at my door again. His face was radiant and
there was a light of determination in his eyes.

"I have decided to become a lawyer," he said, and I knew from the ring
of his voice that he meant it.

Many times after he became mayor of Philadelphia he must have looked
back on that decision as the turning-point in his life.

I am thinking of a young Connecticut farm lad who was given up by his
teachers as too weak-minded to learn. He left school when he was seven
years old and toiled on his father's farm until he was twenty-one. Then
something turned his mind toward the origin and development of the
animal kingdom. He began to read works on zoology, and, in order to
enlarge his capacity for understanding, went back to school and picked
up where he left off fourteen years before. Somebody said to him, "You
can get to the top _if you will_!"

He grasped the hope and nurtured it, until at last it completely
possessed him. He entered college at twenty-eight and worked his way
through with the assistance that we were able to furnish him. To-day he
is a respected professor of zoology in an Ohio college.

Such illustrations I could multiply indefinitely. Of all the boys whom I
have tried to help through college I cannot think of a single one who
has failed for any other reason than ill health. But of course I have
never helped any one who was not first helping himself. As soon as a man
determines the goal toward which he is marching, he is in a strategic
position to see and seize everything that will contribute toward that
end.

Whenever a young man tells me that if he "had his way" he would be a
lawyer, or an engineer, or what not, I always reply:

"You can be what you will, provided that it is something the world will
be demanding ten years hence."

This brings to my mind a certain stipulation which the ambition of youth
must recognize. You must invest yourself or your money in a _known
demand_. You must select an occupation that is fitted to your own
special genius and to some actual want of the people. Choose as early as
possible what your life-work will