It is worth eleven hundred dollars every day to know that one sentence,
You cannot get something for nothing. Life just begins to get juicy
when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad,
"Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I stop my subscription to that
paper. I simply will not take a paper with that ad in it, for I have
graduated from that class.
I will not grasp a fortune now. Try me, I dare you! Bring a fortune
right up on this platform and put it down there on the floor. I will
not grasp it. Come away, it is a coffee-pot!
Today when somebody offers me much more than the legal rate of interest
I know he is no friend of our family.
If he offers me a hundred per cent. I call for the police!
Today when I get a confidential letter that starts out, "You have been
selected—" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is
adjourned. I select the waste-basket. Here, get in there just as quick
as you can. I was selected!
O, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it early in life. The law of
compensation is never suspended. You only own what you earn. You can't
get something for nothing. If you do not learn it, you will have to be
"selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally
bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to receive a
thousand per cent. dividends," it means you have been selected to
receive this bunch of blisters because you look like the biggest sucker
on the local landscape.
The other night in a little town of perhaps a thousand, a banker took
me up into his office after the lecture in which I had related some of
the above experiences. "The audience laughed with you and thought it
very funny," said he. "I couldn't laugh. It was too pathetic. It was a
picture of what is going on in our own little community year after
year. I wish you could see what I have to see. I wish you could see the
thousands of hard-earned dollars that go out of our community every
year into just such wildcat enterprises as you described. The saddest
part of it is that the money nearly always goes out of the pockets of
the people who can least afford to lose it."
Absalom, wake up! This is bargain night for you. I paid eleven hundred
dollars to tell you this one thing, and you get it for a dollar or two.
This is no cheap lecture. It cost blood.
Learn that the gambler never owns his winnings. The man who accumulates
by sharp practices or by undue profits never owns it. Even the young
person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We only own
what we have rendered definite service to bound. The owning is in the
understanding of values.
This is true physically, mentally, morally. You only own what you have
earned and stored in your life, not merely in your pocket, stomach or
mind.
I often think if it takes me thirty-four years to begin to learn one
sentence, I see the need of an eternity.
To me that is one of the great arguments for eternal life—how slowly I
learn, and how much there is to learn. It will take an eternity!
