It takes a heap o' livin' in a house t' make it home, A heap o' sun an' shadder, an' ye sometimes have t' roam Afore ye really 'preciate the things y… - Edgar Guest

No man is greater than his will;
No gods to him will lend a hand!
Upon his courage and his skill
The record of his life must stand.
What honors shall befall to him,
What he shall claim of fame or pelf,
Depend not on the favoring whim
Of fortune's god, but on himself.

I did not stop to ask the lad his little tale to tell,
There was no need of that because I knew the story well - "She never gave a chance to me!" that sentence held it all.
A hundred times I'd lived the scene in days when I was small,
A broken rule, a teacher vexed, hot rage where calm belonged,
A guilty judgment blindly made - a youngster sadly wronged.<p>I still can see that little chap upon his homeward way,
"She never gave a chance to me," I still can hear him say,
And so I write this verse for him, and all the girls and boys
Who shall their tutors now and then disturb with needless noise.
Be fair, you teachers of our land, in every circumstance;
Don't let some little fellow say he never had a chance.

Changin' laws an' legislatures ain't, as fur as I can see,
Goin' to make this world much better, unless somehow we can
Find a way to make a better an' a finer sort o' man.
The trouble ain't with statutes or with systems—not at all;
It's with humans jus' like we [are] an' their petty ways an' small.
We could stop our writin' law-books an' our regulatin' rules
If a better sort of manhood was the product of our schools.
For the things that we air needin' isn't writin' from a pen
Or bigger guns to shoot with, but a bigger type of men.