Most American boys of my age were taught both by their surroundings and by their studies certain principles which were very valuable from the standpoint of National interest, and certain others which were very much the reverse.

The political economists were not especially to blame for this; it was the general attitude of the writers who wrote for us of that generation.

Take my beloved _Our Young Folks_, the magazine of which I have already spoken, and which taught me much more than any of my text-books.

Everything in this magazine instilled the individual virtues, and the necessity of character as the chief factor in any man's success--a teaching in which I now believe as sincerely as ever, for all the laws that the wit of man can devise will never make a man a worthy citizen unless he has within himself the right stuff, unless he has self-reliance, energy, courage, the power of insisting on his own rights and the sympathy that makes him regardful of the rights of others.

All this individual morality I was taught by the books I read at home and the books I studied at Harvard.