Many were the get-rich-quickers of a few months ago who plunged hither and thither in stocks and bonds and varied sorts of investments, utilizing their hard-earned cash or availing themselves of credit in the banks for money with which to make “100-fold” overnight.
The position of the average speculator of this sort is not very enviable today.
There is a form of riches that sticks and there is another form that comes with wings attached to it.
Many are those also who try to “arrive” in life and in experience without making the necessary investment. Thousands of young men are crowding into the professions today who ought to be in the freshman classes of some of the colleges. They have “graduated,” to be sure, after a fasion: they have some sort of certificate to show that they have been in college two, three or four years and are ready to be delivered to the world of work.
But they have not put into their college work the price of an education which is long, hard, tedious, time-taking toil. They took the short cut. They were in a hurry to get in their professions and get to making money and earning a name
. They have fund, in the day of an emergency, that they were not prepared for the severest jolts of experience. Not stronger anywhere than at their weakest point, they crashed because, forsooth, the strain came identically at their point of least resistance. They were not prepared. They were graduated, but not educated. They rushed through too quickly. They “arrived” in their occupations without the goods which the occupations demand of them.
It is always the part of wisdom to go to the long road in the accumulation of wealth, to lay up riches only in proportion as riches are earned by painful processes of laborious toil, to have one’s financial ration in direct swing with one’s earning capacity. It is equally the part of wisdom to take your time in every endeavor, to avoid that haste which makes waste and that hurry which spells ultimate hindrance.
The ambition to reach one’s goal in life is militant among men and altogether praiseworthy, but there is no virtue in merely reaching the goal without being prepared for the duties that must be faced there.
From the editorial page of The Charlotte News, Sunday morning, Aug. 7, 1921
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