The Opportunities for Youth

Dominion, Volume 31, Issue 154, 26 March 1938, Page 1 (Supplement)

The Opportunities for Youth

IR EDWARD BEATTY, President of the Canadian Pacific Railway, is Salso Chancellor of McGill University, Canada. In a recent address to the undergraduates of Queen’s University, reported in “Queen’s Quarterly,” Sir Edward said “There are those to-day who try to impress upon the youth of this and other countries that their lot falls in a hard place. The. impression has been created—and we all realise how widespread it has become—that the youth of our times face greater difficulties and lesser opportunities than those which presented themselves to those of us who graduated from the universities a generation ago. “It would be utterly impossible to deny that, in a certain limited an narrow sense, this is true. There can be no question that the young man or woman trained to a profession found it easier some years ago than is now the case to choose an occupation, and to become established. It is even possibly true that the rewards of success for the average professional worker in his earlier years were more promising some years ago than is now the case. “Success, however —even material success —cannot be measured by such simple standards. Even material success is a matter of comparison, and the mere fact that his father could, in the same or another profession, find more ready employment and easier progress, economically speaking, can scarcely be evidence that the. graduate of to-day faces a genuinely smaller prospect of success.

“There is, for example, the question of the level from which we start. There are few students of this or any other university in Canada who are not starting from a slightly higher level, in the economic sense, than did their fathers? The human race must be regarded as not a mere succession of generations, but as a whole with a life of the whole, and the success of any individual in such an organism must be measured in relation to the progress of the organism as a whole. “To put my meaning in simple words, the young graduate of to-day might feel discouraged at his prospects of acquiring great wealth, but his father, a generation ago, probably regarded a comfortable competence as the object of an almost hopeless ambition. The world has improved its standards, and it is

impossible to make a simple economic comparison between the earnings of the next generation and those of the generation which preceded them.

“In yet another way we start from different levels. . . No longer can any man enquire whether he is his brother’s keeper. He is. That fact is so rooted in our modern thought that our social and economic system is necessarily based upon it. A necessary corollary of it is that he who seeks material success to-day must remember that, whether he wills it or not, that success will no longer be his personal appanage as once it might have been. It must be shared with those less fortunate than himself

“Material success, however, dies with the man or woman who gains it. That is not a pious platitude intended to inspire contentment where contentment should not exist. It is a fundamental fact. The names of those whom every school child could name as among the great of the human race are not a catalogue of millionaires or magnates. They are the names of those who have given the world great service. They are the names of those who have sought something more than mere possession.

“The world which faces us to-day is far more complex than that which faced our fathers —far more complex than faced those of my own generation. After building a marvellous structure of society and production, we have seen it shaken to its foundations. We have seen portions of it actually crumble. Surely, in such a world there is more need of service, more need of effort, more need of wisdom, than in the perhaps happier world of three or four decades ago.

“Surely in such a world there is no reason for despair because the opportunities for success are alleged not to exist.

“May I make a personal confession? May I say that not I myself nor any man of my own generation whom I know really believes that the world 1 is too hard for youth? There is not one of us who would not welcome the miracle which would enable us to return to youth and start again. Would this be so, were it true that the years ahead are too hard? Indeed, I know but few men of my own generation who do not believe in all honesty that the opportunities which face young men to-day are greater than those which faced their fathers.”