 | SELF-MADE MEN. Saratoga in 1901 |  |
SELF-MADE MEN.
One of those rich no-account fellows, whose father is a stockholder
in the Academy of Music, and who himself is a social and
financial parasite, to-day abused a man because he was a self-made
man. We are much too prone to over-estimate self-made
men, but many gentle youths under-estimate them. We admire
self-made men, but not comparatively—as every body admires
little George who plays the piano and sings here so nicely for a
little boy.—They are such great men to make themselves—and
then, as we pass by the brown stone front to look at the Irishman's
house, so we forget the Spooners, Everetts, the Humboldts
and Keplers, to look at the disjointed frames of such really great
the shoemaker. Now Mr. Greeley is a great man, but how much
greater would he have been if in boyhood he had studied in the
school with Everett, demonstrating the XXXVI. of Euclid, or reading
the philosophy of Aristotle, in the ancient Greek, instead of
cultivating his mind with clumsy symbols of tenant-house misery?
Why Horace Greeley would have shook the globe! What is the
sense of always talking about blood in horses and despising it
in man? I don't mean sham blood which runs to heraldry, coats of
arms with silly hog-Latin mottoes, crests of hippogriffs and
libbards and heraldic monograms, small clothes generally—but I
mean the man whose father and grand-father were square up and
down men, and who looked after the son, watered him with pure
water, fed him with good intellectual moral and material food,
washed him, rubbed him down and trained his muscles as old
John Harper trained his blooded horse Longfellow!
Old John has got his woods full of blooded horses, and he
knows the sire and dam of every one, and I'll bet he'll get more
racers in his drove of colts to run off with the Mommouth stakes
than you will find among a promiscuous drove of self-raised colts
which struggle up to mature horse-hood.
| SELF-MADE MEN. Saratoga in 1901 | |