To Return, Universities And Academies Are An Obstacle To The
Finding Of Doors In Later Life; Partly Because They Push
Their
young men too fast through doorways that the universities have
provided, and so discourage the habit of being on
The look-out for
others; and partly because they do not take pains enough to make
sure that their doors are bona fide ones. If, to change the
metaphor, an academy has taken a bad shilling, it is seldom very
scrupulous about trying to pass it on. It will stick to it that
the shilling is a good one as long as the police will let it. I
was very happy at Cambridge; when I left it I thought I never again
could be so happy anywhere else; I shall ever retain a most kindly
recollection both of Cambridge and of the school where I passed my
boyhood; but I feel, as I think most others must in middle life,
that I have spent as much of my maturer years in unlearning as in
learning.
The proper course is for a boy to begin the practical business of
life many years earlier than he now commonly does. He should begin
at the very bottom of a profession; if possible of one which his
family has pursued before him - for the professions will assuredly
one day become hereditary. The ideal railway director will have
begun at fourteen as a railway porter. He need not be a porter for
more than a week or ten days, any more than he need have been a
tadpole more than a short time; but he should take a turn in
practice, though briefly, at each of the lower branches in the
profession.
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