You know what an
advantage your competitor, who is a college man, has of you; and this
knowledge of yours, coupled with your college competitor's possible
lack of it, turns his advantage over you into your advantage over him.
It is like a man who has a dozen shots for his rifle against another
who has a hundred. The first will make every shot bring down his game,
because he knows he _must_ make every shot tell; he cannot waste a
cartridge. But he of abundant ammunition fires without certain aim,
and so wastes his treasure of shells until for the actual purposes of
fruitful marksmanship he has not as many cartridges left as the man
who started with fewer. Also his aim is not so accurate.
Or use an illustration taken from the earth. I well remember when a
boy upon the fat alluvium of the Illinois prairie, how recklessly the
farmers then exhausted the resources of their fields. So opulent was
the black soil that little care was taken save to sow the seed and
crudely cultivate it; and the simple prudences, such as rotation of
crops, differential fertilizing, and the like, would have been laughed
at by the farmer, heedless in the richness of his acres.
But the German farmer on his sandy soil could take no such risks.
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