Life — June 14, 1906 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

“While there rs Life there's Hope. VOL. XLVI Ju 14, 1906. 17 West Turety-Fiest Street, New York ad [15 4 tediftic Vary a young particu- interesting that the men who are graduating from the col- leges this year are about to enter. A good many of them \ who will study professions have three or four years of student- hood before them still, but with all of them commencement day is a point of depar- tureand the beginning of a new relation to society. It is many years since gradu- ating classes have stepped out into a world so agitated by the signs and im- pulses of change as these classes of 1906. The baccalaureate preachers have a better than the usual opportunity to give them wise counsel because, though the venerable injunction, Be Virtuous if you would be Happy, is not more true than usual, impressive illustrations of its truth abound this June a good deal more than is common, The new graduates in this country have struck a time of great commercial prosperity, but a time also of much searching of the spirit and wide- spread impatience with that sort of mis- conduct which has its motive in cupidity. Very soon they will be diffused in the mass of their fellows, and happily so, but for the moment they form a group, thirty or forty thousand strong, of more or less educated youths who are about to be men. They should count them- selves fortunate in that,of all the several groups the size of theirs that could be assembled in the country from the youths of their age, their own is, on the whole, the one that may be expected to be least tempted to those forms of misconduct that are based on cupidity. It has been pointed out, and with a good deal of truth, that the man who spends three or four impressionable years between nineteen and twenty-two in a college ‘decreases, if he docs not absolutely forfeit, his chances of becom- ing grosslyrich. Unless he is moulded to money-making while he is still plastic, his energies can hardly be centred on -LIFE- that quest with the exclusiveness that is necessary to the highest success in it. Part of the time he will think of some. thing else than business and getting ahead of the other fellow, and some chances of fiscal profit will be sure to escape his diverted mind. THAT being so, young brethren, count it as gain. important that most of you will do well to devote the chief part of your energies for the next ten years in learning how to do it, and a large part of your energies for two or three decades after that in putting into practice what you have learned. And a good living, as a rule, is much. more satisfactory than a poor one; there is no doubt about that; though men will often, and wisely, choose a small income earned by work they like, in preference to a bigger one earned less agreeably. So get a good living if you can (unless you are quite sure that there is something else that you prefer to it) but get it honestly and lawfully, and try hard to fit yourselves to give honest value in goods or service in return. And remember that though it is indeed im- portant to make a living and, if con venient, a good one, that is not, after all, the object of life but only one of its inci- , as has been said, a con- siderable tumult going on in this world that is waiting for you, the whole cause of which is that too many persons have attached too much importance to getting money. Much too many persons have tried to get all the money they possibly could, without enough regard to whether or not they gave value in re- tum, without enough regard to whether they broke the law or not, and without enough regard to what ruin or distress they brought upon any one else. Partly asa result of that sort of effort, carried on on an enormous scale in times of great prosperity, there have come to passin this country a great collection of enormous fortunes, and a Serious and widespread demoralization of the standards of busi- To make a living is so * ness honor and integrity. In the last twelvemonth one disgusting exposure of infatuated cupidity has followed another, winding up within a month with the revelation of the nasty methods of the great meat packers, and the disclosure that the Pennsylvania Railroad, having trained its young men for years past to secret violations of the anti-rebate law, has reaped the natural consequence of that sort of education by developing a large body of servants who have cheated not only in the service of the road, but for their own personal profit. The result of all these exposures and revela- tions has been to bring the great fortunes of the country and those who possess them into something more nearly like contempt than has been felt for large masses of money within our memory, and to Stimulate effort to check the rapacity of some of the money getters, compel them to respect the law and constrain them to yield service in some degree pro- portionate to their gains. KE thought early, therefore, young brethren, to make yourselves hon- stly worth your salt in this agitating world, and to be content with what you can honestly acquire. There is no use of telling you not to bother your heads about money, because you will have to bother your heads about it unless some one has saved you that labor by laying up some money for you to use, But it makes a lot of difference how you get the money you get, and if you don’t benefit both your- selves and society in the getting of it, you will miss most of the value of that exercise. The consumption of the luxuries of life, from polo-ponies up to automobiles, houses and yachts, is exceedingly con- spicuous in these days. Do not be de- mented with the mania of owning things of that sort, or think that you cannot have due fun without possessing them. They come in handy sometimes, and are good enough to have if one can afford them, but the important satisfactions of life consist not in the abundance of such things, but mostly in various forms of service. That may sound to you like cant, but it is true, and you will find it so. comicbooks.com