e. The politician
will never believe this, but it is so.

The battles of the market-place are real duels, on which realities of
life and death and fortune or poverty and even of fame depend. Here men
fight with a precipice behind them, not a pension of L2,000 a year. The
young men who go down into that press must win their spurs by no man's
favour. But youth can triumph; it has the resolution when the mind is
still plastic to gain that judgment which experience gives.

My advice to the young men of to-day is simply this: Money is nothing
but the fruit of resolution and intellect applied to the affairs of the
world. To an unshakable resolution fortune will oppose no bar.

VI

EDUCATION

A great number of letters have reached me from young men who seem to
think that the road to success is barred to them owing to defects in
their education. To them I would send this message:

Never believe that success cannot come your way because you have
not been educated in the orthodox and regular fashion.

The nineteenth century made a god of education, and its eminent men
placed learning as the foremost influence in life.

I am bold enough to dissent, if by education is meant a course of study
imposed from without. Indeed, such a course may be a hindrance rather
than a help to a man entering on a business career. No young man on the
verge of life ought to be in the least discouraged by the fact that he
is not stamped with the hall mark of Oxford or Cambridge.

Possibly, indeed, he has escaped a grave danger; for if, in the
impressionable period of youth, attention is given to one kind of
knowledge, it may very likely be withdrawn from another. A life of
sheltered study does not allow a boy to learn the hard facts of the
world--and business is concerned with reality. The truth is that
education is the fruit of temperament, not success the fruit of
education. What a man draws into himself by his own natural volition is
what counts, because it becomes a living part of himself. I will make
one exception in my own case--the Shorter Catechism, which was acquired
by compulsion and yet remains with me.

My own education was of a most rudimentary description. It will be
difficult for the modern English mind to grasp the parish of Newcastle,
New Brunswick, in the 'eighties--sparse patches of cultivation
surrounded by the virgin forest and broken by the rush of an immense
river. For half the year the land is in the i