CHAPTER VII.
HOW POOR BOYS AND GIRLS GO TO COLLEGE "Can I afford to go to college ?" asks many an American youth who has hardly a dollar to his name and who knows that a college course means years of sacrifice and struggle.
It seems a great hardship, indeed, for a young man with an ambition to do something in the world to be compelled to pay his own way through school and college by hard work.

But history shows us that the men who have led in the van of human progress have been, as a rule, self-educated, self-made.
The average boy of to-day who wishes to obtain a liberal education has a better chance by a hundredfold than had Daniel Webster or James A.
Garfield.

There is scarcely one in good health who reads these lines but can be assured that if he will he may.

Here, as elsewhere, the will can usually make the way, and never before was there so many avenues of resource open to the strong will, the inflexible purpose, as there are to-day--at this hour and this moment.
"Of the five thousand persons--students,--directly connected with Harvard University," writes a graduate, "five hundred are students entirely or almost entirely dependent upon their own resources.

They are not a poverty-stricken lot, however, for half of them make an income above the average allowance of boys in smaller colleges.