Yours of Feby 11th reached me this morning. I wrote you by last steamer’s mail.

I am very glad to hear that you are so far convalescent from your accident.

I wrote to Ally soon after receiving his letter asking my advice, giving what I thought to be decisive reasons why he should not begin at twenty one to learn a new trade and give up all the advantages of his education so far. If I must express my candid judgment, it is most strongly against any and each of the propositions you say he has before [him.] I don’t think they are anything but cloaks under which he hides from himself a truant disposition—just as I did. He prefers anything but a regular, fixed business. He prefers to be a boy for some time longer and not to weigh himself down with the responsibilities or the clear and definite anticipations of the responsibilities of a man. The clock speculation in which it is proposed that he should be a passenger; the travels in Portugal under the convenient office of a small consul’s small secretary, and the vague idea of doing something in the Scientific way, after a year or two with a lot of good fellows at New Haven, with boat-clubs on the bay and vacation excursions in the immediate back-ground, are all mere disguises of a respectable Bohemianism.

As to the business to come from the Scientific training of three or four years, nothing is more unlikely than that he would be able to find anything to do of a continuous character by which he could support himself or meet the duties to society which every man ought to have before him, in ten years. I know a gentleman who began the series of studies which he proposes to begin at 21, when he was 15; he had the best Cambridge training, then spent six years at the best schools in Europe; he is extraordinarily well fitted by natural temperament, being a very hard and very cautious student. His relatives are people of the largest influence in the East. He came to California at the invitation of a relative, who is wealthy & occupies the most respectable official position in the State; he has the friendship & confidence of the leading capitalists, he has been living here five years in the height of the California prosperity, living closely at a Boarding house, & is not yet able to support the ordinary expenses of a family living in the quietest style. I know another case substantially the same in all particulars—a gentleman who began the study at Yale when I was there, who has in many respects been very fortunate, who has gained a high reputation, written several books, but who lately told me that he was not yet able to support his family by his [328]

earnings. King, Gardner and Hyde, graduated several years since with high honors from the Yale School, having previously passed through the Troy School. The most they aim at is to pay their expenses, and they have not succeeded in doing that. They all three gave their entire services last year and worked day and night exceedingly hard, for their board. Two of them are now out of employment, the other has made an engagement to go to Siberia for three years on wages less than an ordinary bookkeeper or a good mechanic gets to stay comfortably at home. I know several other cases of similar import. But these are the more fortunate men. They began early; they have had nothing else in view, their minds [329]have had a complete training to their business. Ally, whatever his natural qualifications for a student or mathematician, has been diseducating his faculties for such a business. He could not follow the thread of a scientific investigation or work upon an algebraic problem for a single hour, without great mental fatigue. He could not fix in his mind by a week’s hard application the first hundred of ten thousand abstract facts & formulas which to successfully follow anyone of the professions to which the training of the scientific school would fit him, he must have all at his finger’s ends.

I have the greatest respect for Scientific men and set the greatest value upon Scientific training. I would sacrifice a great deal to it; & would not very strongly protest against a man’s deliberately accepting poverty & celibacy out of devotion to Science as most men, not very rich from the start, do who are successful as Scientific men. But that is not the case with Ally. He has never shown any extraordinary love for or aptness for Science. It is not that he loves science; it is that he hates a steady employment, and he turns to Science as a means of putting off the day when he must be his own master and assume the responsibilities of a man, by engaging in business on his own account or taking the preliminary steps to do so. To go into the scientific school; to go to Portugal, or as a non-descript in a specialty of commerce, he begins at the beginning of a road which leads no way in particular and which as he cannot look far ahead in it does not look tiresome; he goes back four or five years, and thus holds on to his boy’s play of castle-building.

But, it is true, he may have a real idiosyncratic inaptness for a mercantile life—a peculiar personal dislike to it. It does not seem to me that he has shown it. On the contrary he has seemed to be quite naturally at home in it. But it may be so, and so much so that he ought not to try to conquer his repugnance to it. If it is so, then he should not look to any new business in which four or five years of hard study and acquisition of facts; acquisition of facts, and training of the mind to comprehend and combine and apply them, is the necessary foundation of an apprenticeship—for in a business point of view, after several years’ study, he will only have arrived at that basis of mere preparatory education for his new business that he had for his present business when he entered Collins’ store. The scientific school is but the alphabet & multiplication table. Either Law or Medicine would be the easier business to acquire; but I should prefer some mechanical employment as that of a ship-carpenter or a machinist—business in which a large amount of Scientific knowledge and study can be used with great advantage and pleasure, but in which a strong basis of preliminary study is but little more essential—provided a man has the wisdom & tact to make use of the scientific acquirements of others—than in a merchant’s business.

Ally has the difficulty which seems to me to belong to all your [330]descendants—of an unusual slowness or feebleness in the development of his natural propensities & faculties. He does not know his own mind, and grows irregularly. He needs a mental and moral tonic, and to be freed from whatever is weakening to manly sedateness or steady vigor of character. He should on this account not allow himself to associate with persons younger than himself, but make himself the companion if possible, and if not the companion, then the apprentice or attendant of men older than himself—older in habits as well as years. I don’t mean that he should not play, of course, for all men of every age should, but that he should look upward & not backward in the associations of his amusements as well as his work. It is better for him now, to be a confidential servant of men, than a leader of boys. I should not say this to most boys at his age, but I know the family weakness at his age.

I have urged the side of the question which I thought he was most likely to fail to properly appreciate—as to the Scientific school.

It may be after a fair consideration of it, it will still seem best to go ahead—that he has a scientific bent, which it is best to yield to. Then the question is, what is the best course to pursue in view of the half dozen years lost, (lost—as far as the scientific end in view, merely is concerned) in which he should have been laying the foundation? I say by all means spend a year in studying Latin and mathematics, before beginning the special studies. At least a year. It will save time & expense in the necessary subsequent study. Then as to the particular profession, I think manufacturing Chemistry will be a much better business than Civil Engineering or Metallurgy. An imperfect education would go further in it. If nothing better offers after a few years study, skill in compounding of drugs would be easily acquired and this is a steady large business, in which the demand for men of superior education can never fail—whereas in Engineering or Mining or Metallurgy not one well-qualified man in a hundred finds steady employment and almost all pass intervals of the most depressing anxiety in which the temptation to use dishonorable means of obtaining a livlihood are I fear in the majority of cases not wholly resistable. I have seen a great deal of misery of this kind, and I don’t want Ally to condemn himself to it. I know scores of men, better educated as Engineers than Ally can hope to be in ten years, who suffer more for want of employment than any good mechanic ever needs to in this country. Such men can almost always relieve themselves from immediate distress, by lending themselves to some swindling speculation. Once having done so, and the fact being recognized, they are ruined. Of such wrecks I have seen many and they are the most miserable men I know. For all that I would not advise against a boy’s following an inclination to be an Engineer or Metallurgist, under favorable circumstances, (such as Ally would enjoy,) if he [331]began at fifteen—but I would advise no man to begin to study for such business at twenty.