Word: life
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Dates: during 1870-1879
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...culture. Let either be wanting, and your fine gentleman is an elegant adventurer, or a boorish millionnaire of the class which the experiences of our last war have led us to call shoddy. Neither of these characters is either admirable or respectable; and before any man determines that his life shall be that of a gentleman of leisure, he should assure himself that he is in every way capable of maintaining the position to which he proposes to lay claim...
...extent, and meeting on terms, perforce equal, hundreds of people whom his self-respect and pride will permit him to regard with nothing but contempt. The degradation involved in a peaceful struggle for dollars and cents with your fellow-man is, however, hardly equal to the humiliation of a life-long squabble with your butcher and your tailor, and of a constant sense of your inability to meet the demands of those importunate tradesmen; and before you determine that you are too good to work, you will do well to assure yourself that you are provided with means enough...
...possible, however, that your expectations, or your natural advantages, or both, may assure you of ample means for life; that you can, without a preliminary struggle for fortune, become the independent gentleman of your dreams. But, if this be, you must not imagine that your duty to society is at an end. The privilege of an independent gentleman is, not to disregard and hold himself aloof from the affairs of his fellow-men, but to mingle in them in the way which his tastes and acquirements lead him to choose. In literature, in politics, in science...
...bread-making, - he may be far more useful to the world than if his tastes and inclinations were fettered by business. But he must never be idle. Noblesse oblige. He must constantly exert himself to maintain with dignity the position to which he lays claim; and in his whole life he must show to the world the fallacy of the popular notion that all that is needed to make an American a gentleman is a little knowledge of wine, a little knowledge of women, a little knowledge of song, and a very thorough knowledge of athletic exercises...
...friend in life's morning, fair Harvard, our love...