Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

Pierrepont's mother has just left him at Harvard with a warning not to over-study. His father's first letter opens with the opposite worry: be sure not to under-study.

That sets the tone. John Graham, who never had his son's advantages, is not a self-made man sneering at college. He is paying for it, and when the education is passed around he wants the boy to reach right out and take a big helping.

His reason is pure merchant's logic. Education, he writes, is the only thing lying around loose in this world, the one thing a fellow can have as much of as he's willing to haul away. "Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost."

Graham knows there is more than one road to the same lesson. Some men learn the value of truth by doing business with liars, and some by going to Sunday School. Some get their education from newspapers and libraries, some from professors and parchments.

He doesn't much care which road, and he explains why in the language of his trade. You can cure a ham in dry salt or in sweet pickle and get good eating either way, "provided you started in with a sound ham." If you didn't, the ham-tryer will strike the sour spot around the bone.

So the order is fixed: character first, education second. No amount of sugar and fancy pickle helps a fellow who isn't sound and sweet at the core.

In Graham's ham comparison, what is the "sour spot around the bone"?

• A gap in learning that a better college could fill
• A flaw of character that no curing can cover up✓Correct answer
• The useless polish of an expensive education
• A lack of money to pay for finer schooling

The ham was sound or sour before it ever met the pickle. Curing, whether dry salt or sweet pickle, streets or Harvard, only works on a sound core, which is why Graham puts character ahead of education.

Having said that character comes first, Graham refuses to lecture about it, and he tells a story against himself to explain why.

As a boy he was willing enough to join the church, until old Doc Hoover asked him right out loud in Sunday School whether he wanted to be saved, then waylaid him after the service to pray over him. It scared him off for five years. "Of course I wanted to be saved, but I didn't want to be saved quite so publicly."

A young fellow with the right stuff in him, Graham says, preaches to himself harder than anyone else can. He doesn't need right and wrong labeled for him. He needs a habit: use a little conscience as a tryer. Probe the thing that looks sweet on the skin, and see whether a sour smell comes up from around the bone.

Then comes a line that sounds odd from a father paying Harvard's bills. There are two parts to a college education, Graham says: the part you get in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part you get outside it, from the boys.

The second, he insists, is the really important one. "For the first can only make you a scholar, while the second can make you a man."

That is also why he can be easy about grades in a way that surprises people. He wants Pierrepont to be a good scholar, but he wants him to be a good clean man more. If the boy graduates with a sound conscience, his father won't care so much about a few holes in his Latin.

Graham tells his son that what he learns from the other boys, outside the classroom, matters more than what the professors teach him.

True✓Correct answer

True, and he means it. The professors can only make a scholar, while the boys can make a man. That is exactly why Graham keeps such a close eye on what his son does outside class.