CHAPTER III

THE HUNGER FOR SELF-EDUCATION

With school-days ended, the question of self-education became an
absorbing thought with Edward Bok. He had mastered a schoolboy's
English, but six years of public-school education was hardly a basis on
which to build the work of a lifetime. He saw each day in his duties
as office boy some of the foremost men of the time. It was the period
of William H. Vanderbilt's ascendancy in Western Union control; and the
railroad millionnaire and his companions were objects of great interest
to the young office boy. Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas A. Edison
were also constant visitors to the department. He knew that some of
these men, too, had been deprived of the advantage of collegiate
training, and yet they had risen to the top. But how? The boy decided
to read about these men and others, and find out. He could not,
however, afford the separate biographies, so he went to the libraries
to find a compendium that would authoritatively tell him of all
successful men. He found it in Appleton's _Encyclopaedia_, and,
determining to have only the best, he saved his luncheon money, walked
instead of riding the five miles to his Brooklyn home, and, after a
period of saving, had his reward in the first purchase from his own
earnings: a set of the _Encyclopaedia_. He now read about all the
successful men, and was encouraged to find that in many cases their
beginnings had been as modest as his own, and their opportunities of
education as limited.

One day it occurred to him to test the accuracy of the biographies he
was reading. James A. Garfield was then spoken of for the presidency;