the years before our kid goes to college that I’m worrying about now.  For I believe that we ought to teach a boy how to use his hands as well as his brain; that he ought to begin his history lessons in the present and work back to B.C. about the time he is ready to graduate; that he ought to know a good deal about the wheat belt before he begins loading up with the list of Patagonian products; that he ought to post up on Abraham Lincoln and Grover Cleveland and Thomas Edison first, and save Rameses Second to while away the long winter evenings after business hours, because old Rameses is embalmed and guaranteed to keep anyway; that if he’s inclined to be tonguey he ought to learn a living language or two, which he can talk when a Dutch buyer pretends he doesn’t understand English, before he tackles a dead one which in all probability he will only give decent interment in his memory.

Of course, it’s a fine thing to know all about the past and to have the date when the geese cackled in Rome down pat, but life is the present and the future.  The really valuable thing which we get from the past is experience, and a fellow can pick up a pretty fair working line of that along La Salle Street.  A boy’s education should begin with to-day, deal a little with to-morrow, and then go back to day before yesterday.  But when a fellow begins with the past, it’s apt to take him too long to catch up with the present.  A man can learn better most of the things that happened between A.D. 1492 and B.C. 5000 after he’s grown, for then he can sense their meaning and remember what’s worth knowing.  But you take the average boy who’s been loaded up with this sort of stuff, and dig into him, and his mind is simply a cemetery of useless dates from the tombstones of those tough and sporty old kings, with here and there the jaw-bone of an ass who made a living by killing every one in sight and unsettling business for honest men.  Some professors will tell you that it’s good training anyway to teach boys a lot of things they’re going to forget, but it’s been my experience that it’s the best training to teach them things they’ll remember.

I simply mention these matters in a general way.  I don’t want you to underestimate the value of any sort of knowledge, and I want you to appreciate the value of other work besides your own—­music and railroading, ground and lofty tumbling and banking, painting pictures and soap advertising; because if you’re not broad enough to do this you’re just as narrow as those fellows who are running the culture corner, and your mind will get so blame narrow it will overlap.