There was the story of Richard Arkwright, the great mechanician. _He_ was never at school in his life--never forced to do ridiculous sums, to spell correctly, to parse, to drill, to sing! His biographer said that the only education he ever received he gave himself--that he was fifty years of age when he set to work to learn grammar and to improve his hand-writing. He did not waste the precious hours of his youth over such things. When he was a boy he was apprenticed to a barber, and when he set up in business for himself he occupied an underground cellar and put up his sign--"Come to the subterraneous barber; he shaves for a penny." This caused brisk competition, and a general reduction in barber's prices. Yet not to be beaten, Arkwright altered his sign to "A clean shave for a halfpenny." Then he turned his attention to wig-making, and from that to machine-making. And years and years passed. Years filled with patient labour, privations, obstacles, and at last _Success_! "Eighteen years after he had constructed his first machine he rose to such estimation in Derbyshire that he was appointed High Sheriff of the county, and shortly afterwards George III conferred upon him the honour of knighthood." So said the book.
Shakespeare, he read, was the son of a butcher and grazier; Sir Cloudesley Shovel, the great admiral, a cobbler's son; Stephenson was an engine-fireman; Turner, the great painter, came from a barber's shop.
Life after life he had turned over of men who had risen from the ranks and gotten for themselves fame and riches. So that at last he came to regard humble birth and poverty as the necessary foundations of ultimate success. He noticed that his heroes all worked hard and patiently; were all brave and sternly self-disciplined, plodding onwards past every obstacle and hardship. But he forgot to notice that they all made the _best of that sphere of life into which they were born_.
He had quite decided to be a self-made man. That was simple enough. The question that troubled him was what sort of a self-made man to be! A Newton? A Shakespeare? A Stephenson? A Turner? An Arkwright?
The wide choice worried and perplexed him. It was pitiful to his thinking that he could, try and strive as he might, only be _one_.