Be Patient With the Boys
By Elbert Hubbard
I HAVE a profound respect for boys. Grimy, ragged, tousled boys in the street often attract me strangely. A boy is a man in a cocoon,—you do not know what it is going to become,—his life is big with possibilities. He may make or unmake kings, change boundary lines between states, write books that will mold characters, or invent machines that will revolutionize the commerce of the world. Every man was a boy—it seems strange, but it is really so. Wouldn’t you like to turn Time backward, and see Abraham Lincoln at twelve, when he had never worn a pair of boots—the lank, lean, yellow, hungry boy, hungry for love, hungry for learning, tramping off through the woods for twenty miles to borrow a book, and spelling it out crouching before the glare of the burning logs. Distinctly and vividly I remember a squat, freckled boy who was born in the “Patch,” and used to pick up coal along railroad tracks in Buffalo. A few months ago I had a motion to make before the court of appeals at Rochester. That boy from the “Patch” was the judge who wrote the opinion granting my petition. Yesterday I rode horseback past a field where a boy was plowing. The lad’s hair stuck out through the top of his hat, one suspender held his trousers in place, his form was bony and awkward, his bare legs and arms were brown and scratched and brier-scarred. He turned his horses just as I passed by, and from under the flapping brim of his hat he cast a quick glance out of dark, half-bashful eyes, and modestly returned my salute. When his back was turned, I took off my hat and sent a God-bless-you down the furrow after him. Who knows? I may yet go to that boy to borrow money, or to hear him preach, or beg him to defend me in a lawsuit; or he may stand with pulse unmoved, bare of arm, in white apron, ready to do his duty, while the cone is placed over my face, and night and death come creeping into my veins. Be patient with the boys; you are dealing with soul-stuff. Destiny waits just around the corner. Be patient with the boys!—Elbert Hubbard, in the Philistine.