The Pacific commercial advertiser. [volume] (Honolulu, Hawaiian Islands) 1885-1921, 1904-06-20

read for the stories they tell. L care
nothing" he said, for the language
in which the Had came down to us,
SO long as I can read Homer's work
in English When 1 take a drink of
water 1 don't want to eat the lead
pipe that brought it to me-. Mr..
Greeley did not realize that the intel
iectuaI benefit of learning to read the
Had in the original was the object to
be sought; and that it would have done
more to clarity his English style, to
sharpen his thinking and give it true
direction, than any use he could pos
sib1y have made of even the best trans
lation.
GOING TO COLLEGE.
Right here let me say a word about
the general wisdom of going to college,
meaning by that the University. There
are a few men, most of them in Amer
lea, successful without college expert
ence, who say that one had better be-
gin his life work as soon as he gets
fair English education, saving for prac-
teal use in business the years that
college would take from him. Many
of these men are geniuses who are not
subject to ordinary rules, like you and
me, and who have some of the capacity,
of which Shakespeare had a great deal,
to find sermons in stones and books
in the running brooks. Shakespeare had
small Latin and less Greek, yet in the
learning of his time and especially in
the power to use what he learned, he
did not miss much that hard study gave
to lesser men and he gained much be-
sides which the schools could not teach.
In a way he had the training of two
universities, that of Nature, the great
est of all to those who can wrest away
its secrets; and that of the Mermaid
Tavern, whittier flocked the wits and
scholars and philosophers of the time
and where rested the travellers from
strange lands. Whatever they brought
of knowledge Shakespeare took as
mint takes rough gold and turned it
out in the currency of the realm with
the superscription of the king. But
the rules for men of genius are not the
rules for the multitude; but even the
geniuses might be made greater; as
Napoleon surely was, by the rigid train
ing of the schools. The majority of
self-made men regret, in their mature
lives, that they did not have University
| instruction-the formative influence of
high scholarship, the culture which is
| only to be found in the still air of de-
| lightful studies and by contact with
men of letters, the many-sidednesS
| which comes of varied research in the
| wide fields of thought. But you never
saw an educated man who regretted
| his four years in the University and
wished instead that he had chosen the
| sole naturalization of the counting
room or the machine shop or the rail-
| way office. Let US recall what Oliver
| Wendell Holmes said in the Autocrat
of the Breakfast Table, about the self
made man. 1t was this, and let me say
it applies mainly to those who are en-
tireIy self-made, without any of the
training of the schools
Are any of you younger people old
enough to remember that IriShman's
house on the marsh at Cambridgeport
which house he built from drain tc
chimney top with his own hands? II
took him a good many years to build il
and one could see that it was a little
out of plumb, and little wavy in
outline, and at a little queer and
uncertain in general aspect. A reg
ular hand could have built better
house; but it was a very good house
for a 'self-made' carpenters house, ant
| pSOpAS ptdlSSo II anu Sdtu now
ably well the Irishman had succeeded
They never thought of praising tn,
fine blocks of houses a little farther on
NEED OF COLLEGE MEN.
There is another thing I should like
to say about seIf-made men-wher
they want anything done and done
well, that they haven't time to dc
themselves they usually employ men O.
University breeding for the task TIL,
finger again points to Horace Greeley
who was wont. in his cynical mo.
ments, to compare college graduate!
with horned cattle; and yet when hi.
} paper, the New York Tribune. got too
large for his own handling, the only
men he could find to properly manag,
its departments We're from the chic
seats of learning-men like Georg,
Ripley, Charles \. Dana, Henry ]
Raymond, John Russell Young. Johr
Hay and Whitelaw Reid. every one o
them deeply grounded in the classics
Because Of his imperfect education Mr.
Greeley wel1-nigh wrecked the Tribun,
more than once but his colIege-breI
staff saved it for him. The first Amer
lean editor of today, Joseph Pulitzer
whose own diploma was Won in tn
hard school of adversely. has given o
his millions to build a college of journ
alism where young men may find tn,
higher eQuCa ton Of which he in, III,