Kansas University Weekly.
9
same rank when enters he college. If any of you have come here with such an expectation, please don't mention it. You will find the college is bigger than the high school and its standard higher and its competition broader. Keep your thoughts to yourself and wait till you are weighed, then you will take your proper place, and if you must come down do it gracefully. It is not always pleasant to be brought to our level. But like grand mother's catnip tea, "it is good for you." When you have found your level you have a standard from which to reckon progress. You never can reckon progress correctly till you have found your level.
Passing from the student's capital, let us consider the student's purpose. A man's capital is the material with which he works. His purpose is the energy he applies to his work. The capital is important, but the purpose is more important. Many a man with no capital but his hands and his brain, has accumulated a fortune. Many a man who was the heir of "untold gold," has become a pauper and a vagabond on the earth. It is the same with the gifts that constitute the basis of manhood. They are the measure of a man's capacity. A man cannot be what God intended him not to be. But he can fail to be what God intended him for. He can fritter away what was intended for practical service, or he can pervert to evil what was intended for good. The student can increase his capital or he can waste it. He can neglect the gift that is in him or he can improve it. I do not underrate the endowments of God when I say that more depends on you than on your endowments. I do no dishonor God when I say that any man may frustrate the plan of God in his own life. We do not discredit divine grace when we say that any man may "frustrate the grace of God."
People have a great admiration for what they call self-made men. But there is a sense in which no man can be self made; and there is a sense in which every man must be self made. In the definition of some a self-made man is one who has come to eminence without the benefit of schools. They refer to Horace Greeley
acquiring culture as he worked on the printer's case; to Roger Sherman, who studied mathematics and read law as he sat on the shoe bench; to Elihu Burritt, who acquired the elements of a half dozen languages as he worked at the blacksmith's forge; or to Abraham Lincoln, who laid the foundation for his later success as he pushed the flat boat down the river. None of these ever saw the inside of a college until they were invited to come in and instruct college bred men. Others very properly enlarge the application of the term. They ask why was not Garfield a self-made man as really as Horace Greeley? It is true he had the advantage of the best schools and the best teachers he could obtain. But he put himself in these schools of his own choice and he worked his way through academy and college by his own energy. Why was it any less his own work because he sought the best tools he could find? It was his own indomitable purpose which undertook the work and held him to it. He was none the less self-made, because he had the wisdom to make himself that way. And even if a man be born to wealth, he must be self-made, if he be made at all. Wealth may send a boy to school, but wealth cannot make a scholar of him. Wealth can buy a boy books, but it cannot make a well informed man of him. The best schools cannot confer scholarship on indolence, nor can the best teachers give culture to indifference. The diploma of a University is not like a brand of flour, guaranteeing a certain degree of fineness. It simply testifies that the subject has been through the curriculum, as the wheat has been through the mill. But in this case something in the material determines the character of the product. Schools do not make scholars, as churches do not make saints. Schools help men to become scholars, as churches help men to become saints. But the best schools sometimes send out the biggest dunces. No patent of pedagogue or priest can give scholarship without labor, or holiness without sacrifice. On the other hand from the poorest schools good scholars have gone out and from under