ACRES OF DIAMONDS

ACRES
OF DIAMONDS
BY
RUSSELL H. CONWELL
FOUNDER OF TEMPLE UNIVERSITY
PHILADELPHIA
_HIS LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS
BY
ROBERT SHACKLETON_
With an Autobiographical Note
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
CONTENTS
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
HIS LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS
I. THE STORY OF THE SWORD
II. THE BEGINNING AT OLD LEXINGTON
III. STORY OF THE FIFTY-SEVEN CENTS
IV. HIS POWER AS ORATOR AND PREACHER
V. GIFT FOR INSPIRING OTHERS
VI. MILLIONS OF HEARERS
VII. HOW A UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED
VIII. HIS SPLENDID EFFICIENCY
IX. THE STORY OF ``ACRES OF DIAMONDS''
FIFTY YEARS ON THE LECTURE PLATFORM
AN APPRECIATION
THOUGH Russell H. Conwell's Acres of Diamonds
have been spread all over the United States,
time and care have made them more valuable,
and now that they have been reset in black and
white by their discoverer, they are to be laid in the
hands of a multitude for their enrichment.
In the same case with these gems there is a
fascinating story of the Master Jeweler's life-work
which splendidly illustrates the ultimate unit of
power by showing what one man can do in one
day and what one life is worth to the world.
As his neighbor and intimate friend in
Philadelphia for thirty years, I am free to say that
Russell H. Conwell's tall, manly figure stands
out in the state of Pennsylvania as its first citizen
and ``The Big Brother'' of its seven millions of
people.
From the beginning of his career he has been a
credible witness in the Court of Public Works to
the truth of the strong language of the New
Testament Parable where it says, ``If ye have
faith as a grain of mustard-seed, ye shall say unto
this mountain, `Remove hence to yonder place,'
AND IT SHALL REMOVE AND NOTHING SHALL BE
IMPOSSIBLE UNTO YOU.
As a student, schoolmaster, lawyer, preacher,
organizer, thinker and writer, lecturer, educator,
diplomat, and leader of men, he has made his
mark on his city and state and the times in which
he has lived. A man dies, but his good work lives.
His ideas, ideals, and enthusiasms have inspired
tens of thousands of lives. A book full of the
energetics of a master workman is just what every
young man cares for.
1915.
{signature}
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
_Friends_.--This lecture has been delivered under these
circumstances: I visit a town or city, and try to arrive there
early
enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the keeper of the
hotel,
the principal of the schools, and the ministers of some of the
churches, and then go into some of the factories and stores, and
talk with the people, and get into sympathy with the local
conditions of that town or city and see what has been their
history,
what opportunities they had, and what they had failed to do--
and every town fails to do something--and then go to the lecture
and talk to those people about the subjects which applied to
their locality. ``Acres of Diamonds''--the idea--has
continuously
been precisely the same. The idea is that in this country
of ours every man has the opportunity to make more of himself
than he does in his own environment, with his own skill, with
his own energy, and with his own friends.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
ACRES OF DIAMONDS
[1]
This is the most recent and complete form of the lecture.
It happened to be delivered in Philadelphia, Dr. Conwell's
home city. When he says ``right here in Philadelphia,'' he means
the home city, town, or village of every reader of this book,
just
as he would use the name of it if delivering the lecture there,
instead of doing it through the pages which follow.
WHEN going down the Tigris and Euphrates
rivers many years ago with a party of
English travelers I found myself under the direction
of an old Arab guide whom we hired up at
Bagdad, and I have often thought how that guide
resembled our barbers in certain mental
characteristics. He thought that it was not only his
duty to guide us down those rivers, and do what he
was paid for doing, but also to entertain us with
stories curious and weird, ancient and modern,
strange and familiar. Many of them I have forgotten,
and I am glad I have, but there is one I
shall never forget.
The old guide was leading my camel by its
halter along the banks of those ancient rivers, and
he told me story after story until I grew weary
of his story-telling and ceased to listen. I have
never been irritated with that guide when he
lost his temper as I ceased listening. But I
remember that he took off his Turkish cap and
swung it in a circle to get my attention. I could
see it through the corner of my eye, but I determined
not to look straight at him for fear he would
tell another story. But although I am not a
woman, I did finally look, and as soon as I did he
went right into another story.
Said he, ``I will tell you a story now which I
reserve for my particular friends.'' When he
emphasized the words ``particular friends,'' I
listened, and I have ever been glad I did. I really
feel devoutly thankful, that there are 1,674 young
men who have been carried through college by
this lecture who are also glad that I did listen.
The old guide told me that there once lived not
far from the River Indus an ancient Persian by
the name of Ali Hafed. He said that Ali Hafed
owned a very large farm, that he had orchards,
grain-fields, and gardens; that he had money at
interest, and was a wealthy and contented man.
He was contented because he was wealthy, and
wealthy because he was contented. One day
there visited that old Persian farmer one of these
ancient Buddhist priests, one of the wise men of
the East. He sat down by the fire and told the
old farmer how this world of ours was made.
He said that this world was once a mere bank of
fog, and that the Almighty thrust His finger into
this bank of fog, and began slowly to move His
finger around, increasing the speed until at last
He whirled this bank of fog into a solid ball of
fire. Then it went rolling through the universe,
burning its way through other banks of fog, and
condensed the moisture without, until it fell in
floods of rain upon its hot surface, and cooled
the outward crust. Then the internal fires bursting
outward through the crust threw up the mountains
and hills, the valleys, the plains and prairies
of this wonderful world of ours. If this internal
molten mass came bursting out and cooled very
quickly it became granite; less quickly copper,
less quickly silver, less quickly gold, and, after
gold, diamonds were made.
Said the old priest, ``A diamond is a congealed
drop of sunlight.'' Now that is literally scientifically
true, that a diamond is an actual deposit
of carbon from the sun. The old priest told Ali
Hafed that if he had one diamond the size of
his thumb he could purchase the county, and if
he had a mine of diamonds he could place his
children upon thrones through the influence of
their great wealth.
Ali Hafed heard all about diamonds, how much
they were worth, and went to his bed that night
a poor man. He had not lost anything, but he
was poor because he was discontented, and
discontented because he feared he was poor. He
said, ``I want a mine of diamonds,'' and he lay
awake all night.
Early in the morning he sought out the priest.
I know by experience that a priest is very cross
when awakened early in the morning, and when
he shook that old priest out of his dreams, Ali
Hafed said to him:
``Will you tell me where I can find diamonds?''
``Diamonds! What do you want with diamonds?''
``Why, I wish to be immensely rich.''
``Well, then, go along and find them. That is
all you have to do; go and find them, and then
you have them.'' ``But I don't know where to
go.'' ``Well, if you will find a river that runs
through white sands, between high mountains,
in those white sands you will always find
diamonds.'' ``I don't believe there is any such
river.'' ``Oh yes, there are plenty of them. All
you have to do is to go and find them, and then
you have them.'' Said Ali Hafed, ``I will go.''
So he sold his farm, collected his money, left
his family in charge of a neighbor, and away he
went in search of diamonds. He began his search,
very properly to my mind, at the Mountains of
the Moon. Afterward he came around into Palestine,
then wandered on into Europe, and at last
when his money was all spent and he was in
rags, wretchedness, and poverty, he stood on the
shore of that bay at Barcelona, in Spain, when
a great tidal wave came rolling in between the
pillars of Hercules, and the poor, afflicted,
suffering, dying man could not resist the awful
temptation to cast himself into that incoming tide, and
he sank beneath its foaming crest, never to rise
in this life again.
When that old guide had told me that awfully
sad story he stopped the camel I was riding on
and went back to fix the baggage that was coming
off another camel, and I had an opportunity to
muse over his story while he was gone. I remember
saying to myself, ``Why did he reserve that
story for his `particular friends'?'' There seemed
to be no beginning, no middle, no end, nothing
to it. That was the first story I had ever heard
told in my life, and would be the first one I ever
read, in which the hero was killed in the first
chapter. I had but one chapter of that story,
and the hero was dead.
When the guide came back and took up the
halter of my camel, he went right ahead with the
story, into the second chapter, just as though
there had been no break. The man who purchased
Ali Hafed's farm one day led his camel
into the garden to drink, and as that camel put
its nose into the shallow water of that garden
brook, Ali Hafed's successor noticed a curious
flash of light from the white sands of the stream.
He pulled out a black stone having an eye of light
reflecting all the hues of the rainbow. He took
the pebble into the house and put it on the mantel
which covers the central fires, and forgot all about
it.
A few days later this same old priest came in
to visit Ali Hafed's successor, and the moment
he opened that drawing-room door he saw that
flash of light on the mantel, and he rushed up
to it, and shouted: ``Here is a diamond! Has Ali
Hafed returned?'' ``Oh no, Ali Hafed has not
returned, and that is not a diamond. That is
nothing but a stone we found right out here in our
own garden.'' ``But,'' said the priest, ``I tell you
I know a diamond when I see it. I know positively
that is a diamond.''
Then together they rushed out into that old
garden and stirred up the white sands with their
fingers, and lo! there came up other more beautiful
and valuable gems than the first. ``Thus,''
said the guide to me, and, friends, it is historically
true, ``was discovered the diamond-mine of
Golconda, the most magnificent diamond-mine in
all the history of mankind, excelling the Kimberly
itself. The Kohinoor, and the Orloff of the crown
jewels of England and Russia, the largest on earth,
came from that mine.''
When that old Arab guide told me the second
chapter of his story, he then took off his Turkish
cap and swung it around in the air again to get
my attention to the moral. Those Arab guides
have morals to their stories, although they are
not always moral. As he swung his hat, he said
to me, ``Had Ali Hafed remained at home and dug
in his own cellar, or underneath his own wheatfields,
or in his own garden, instead of wretchedness,
starvation, and death by suicide in a strange
land, he would have had `acres of diamonds.'
For every acre of that old farm, yes, every
shovelful, afterward revealed gems which since have
decorated the crowns of monarchs.''
When he had added the moral to his story I
saw why he reserved it for ``his particular friends.''
But I did not tell him I could see it. It was that
mean old Arab's way of going around a thing
like a lawyer, to say indirectly what he did not
dare say directly, that ``in his private opinion
there was a certain young man then traveling down
the Tigris River that might better be at home in
America.'' I did not tell him I could see that,
but I told him his story reminded me of one, and
I told it to him quick, and I think I will tell it to
you.
I told him of a man out in California in 1847
who owned a ranch. He heard they had discovered
gold in southern California, and so with a passion
for gold he sold his ranch to Colonel Sutter, and
away he went, never to come back. Colonel
Sutter put a mill upon a stream that ran through
that ranch, and one day his little girl brought
some wet sand from the raceway into their home
and sifted it through her fingers before the fire,
and in that falling sand a visitor saw the first
shining scales of real gold that were ever discovered
in California. The man who had owned that
ranch wanted gold, and he could have secured it
for the mere taking. Indeed, thirty-eight millions
of dollars has been taken out of a very few acres
since then. About eight years ago I delivered
this lecture in a city that stands on that farm,
and they told me that a one-third owner for years
and years had been getting one hundred and
twenty dollars in gold every fifteen minutes,
sleeping or waking, without taxation. You and
I would enjoy an income like that--if we didn't
have to pay an income tax.
But a better illustration really than that
occurred here in our own Pennsylvania. If there
is anything I enjoy above another on the platform,
it is to get one of these German audiences
in Pennsylvania before me, and fire that at them,
and I enjoy it to-night. There was a man living
in Pennsylvania, not unlike some Pennsylvanians
you have seen, who owned a farm, and he did
with that farm just what I should do with a
farm if I owned one in Pennsylvania--he sold it.
But before he sold it he decided to secure employment
collecting coal-oil for his cousin, who was
in the business in Canada, where they first
discovered oil on this continent. They dipped it
from the running streams at that early time.
So this Pennsylvania farmer wrote to his cousin
asking for employment. You see, friends, this
farmer was not altogether a foolish man. No,
he was not. He did not leave his farm until he
had something else to do. _*Of all the simpletons
the stars shine on I don't know of a worse one than
the man who leaves one job before he has gotten
another_. That has especial reference to my
profession, and has no reference whatever to a man
seeking a divorce. When he wrote to his cousin
for employment, his cousin replied, ``I cannot
engage you because you know nothing about the
oil business.''
Well, then the old farmer said, ``I will know,''
and with most commendable zeal (characteristic
of the students of Temple University) he set
himself at the study of the whole subject. He
began away back at the second day of God's
creation when this world was covered thick and
deep with that rich vegetation which since has
turned to the primitive beds of coal. He studied
the subject until he found that the drainings really
of those rich beds of coal furnished the coal-oil
that was worth pumping, and then he found how
it came up with the living springs. He studied
until he knew what it looked like, smelled like,
tasted like, and how to refine it. Now said he
in his letter to his cousin, ``I understand the oil
business.'' His cousin answered, ``All right,
come on.''
So he sold his farm, according to the county
record, for $833 (even money, ``no cents''). He
had scarcely gone from that place before the man
who purchased the spot went out to arrange for
the watering of the cattle. He found the previous
owner had gone out years before and put a plank
across the brook back of the barn, edgewise into
the surface of the water just a few inches. The
purpose of that plank at that sharp angle across
the brook was to throw over to the other bank a
dreadful-looking scum through which the cattle
would not put their noses. But with that plank
there to throw it all over to one side, the cattle
would drink below, and thus that man who had
gone to Canada had been himself damming back
for twenty-three years a flood of coal-oil which the
state geologists of Pennsylvania declared to us
ten years later was even then worth a hundred
millions of dollars to our state, and four years ago
our geologist declared the discovery to be worth
to our state a thousand millions of dollars. The
man who owned that territory on which the city
of Titusville now stands, and those Pleasantville
valleys, had studied the subject from the second
day of God's creation clear down to the present
time. He studied it until he knew all about it,
and yet he is said to have sold the whole of it
for $833, and again I say, ``no sense.''
But I need another illustration. I found it in
Massachusetts, and I am sorry I did because that
is the state I came from. This young man in
Massachusetts furnishes just another phase of my
thought. He went to Yale College and studied
mines and mining, and became such an adept as
a mining engineer that he was employed by the
authorities of the university to train students who
were behind their classes. During his senior year
he earned $15 a week for doing that work. When
he graduated they raised his pay from $15 to $45
a week, and offered him a professorship, and as
soon as they did he went right home to his mother.
_*If they had raised that boy's pay from $15 to $15.60
he would have stayed and been proud of the place,
but when they put it up to $45 at one leap, he said,
``Mother, I won't work for $45 a week. The idea
of a man with a brain like mine working for $45
a week!_ Let's go out in California and stake out
gold-mines and silver-mines, and be immensely rich.''
Said his mother, ``Now, Charlie, it is just as
well to be happy as it is to be rich.''
``Yes,'' said Charlie, ``but it is just as well to
be rich and happy, too.'' And they were both
right about it. As he was an only son and
she a widow, of course he had his way. They
always do.
They sold out in Massachusetts, and instead
of going to California they went to Wisconsin,
where he went into the employ of the Superior
Copper Mining Company at $15 a week again,
but with the proviso in his contract that he should
have an interest in any mines he should discover
for the company. I don't believe he ever discovered
a mine, and if I am looking in the face of any
stockholder of that copper company you wish
he had discovered something or other. I have
friends who are not here because they could not
afford a ticket, who did have stock in that company
at the time this young man was employed
there. This young man went out there, and I
have not heard a word from him. I don't know
what became of him, and I don't know whether
he found any mines or not, but I don't believe
he ever did.
But I do know the other end of the line. He
had scarcely gotten out of the old homestead before
the succeeding owner went out to dig potatoes.
The potatoes were already growing in the ground
when he bought the farm, and as the old farmer
was bringing in a basket of potatoes it hugged
very tight between the ends of the stone fence.
You know in Massachusetts our farms are nearly
all stone wall. There you are obliged to be very
economical of front gateways in order to have
some place to put the stone. When that basket
hugged so tight he set it down on the ground,
and then dragged on one side, and pulled on the
other side, and as he was dragging that basket
through this farmer noticed in the upper and
outer corner of that stone wall, right next the
gate, a block of native silver eight inches square.
That professor of mines, mining, and mineralogy
who knew so much about the subject that he
would not work for $45 a week, when he sold
that homestead in Massachusetts sat right on
that silver to make the bargain. He was born
on that homestead, was brought up there, and
had gone back and forth rubbing the stone with
his sleeve until it reflected his countenance, and
seemed to say, ``Here is a hundred thousand
dollars right down here just for the taking.''
But he would not take it. It was in a home in
Newburyport, Massachusetts, and there was no
silver there, all away off--well, I don't know where,
and he did not, but somewhere else, and he was
a professor of mineralogy.
My friends, that mistake is very universally
made, and why should we even smile at him. I
often wonder what has become of him. I do not
know at all, but I will tell you what I ``guess''
as a Yankee. I guess that he sits out there by his
fireside to-night with his friends gathered around
him, and he is saying to them something like this:
``Do you know that man Conwell who lives in
Philadelphia?'' ``Oh yes, I have heard of him.''
``Do you know that man Jones that lives in
Philadelphia?'' ``Yes, I have heard of him, too.''
Then he begins to laugh, and shakes his sides
and says to his friends, ``Well, they have done
just the same thing I did, precisely''--and that
spoils the whole joke, for you and I have done
the same thing he did, and while we sit here and
laugh at him he has a better right to sit out there
and laugh at us. I know I have made the same
mistakes, but, of course, that does not make any
difference, because we don't expect the same man
to preach and practise, too.
As I come here to-night and look around this
audience I am seeing again what through these
fifty years I have continually seen-men that are
making precisely that same mistake. I often wish
I could see the younger people, and would that the
Academy had been filled to-night with our highschool
scholars and our grammar-school scholars,
that I could have them to talk to. While I would
have preferred such an audience as that, because
they are most susceptible, as they have not grown
up into their prejudices as we have, they have
not gotten into any custom that they cannot
break, they have not met with any failures as
we have; and while I could perhaps do such an
audience as that more good than I can do grownup
people, yet I will do the best I can with the
material I have. I say to you that you have
``acres of diamonds'' in Philadelphia right where
you now live. ``Oh,'' but you will say, ``you
cannot know much about your city if you think
there are any `acres of diamonds' here.''
I was greatly interested in that account in the
newspaper of the young man who found that
diamond in North Carolina. It was one of the
purest diamonds that has ever been discovered,
and it has several predecessors near the same
locality. I went to a distinguished professor in
mineralogy and asked him where he thought those
diamonds came from. The professor secured the
map of the geologic formations of our continent,
and traced it. He said it went either through the
underlying carboniferous strata adapted for such
production, westward through Ohio and the
Mississippi, or in more probability came eastward
through Virginia and up the shore of the Atlantic
Ocean. It is a fact that the diamonds were there,
for they have been discovered and sold; and that
they were carried down there during the drift
period, from some northern locality. Now who
can say but some person going down with his
drill in Philadelphia will find some trace of a
diamond-mine yet down here? Oh, friends! you cannot
say that you are not over one of the greatest
diamond-mines in the world, for such a diamond
as that only comes from the most profitable mines
that are found on earth.
But it serves simply to illustrate my thought,
which I emphasize by saying if you do not have
the actual diamond-mines literally you have all
that they would be good for to you. Because
now that the Queen of England has given the
greatest compliment ever conferred upon American
woman for her attire because she did not appear
with any jewels at all at the late reception in
England, it has almost done away with the use
of diamonds anyhow. All you would care for
would be the few you would wear if you wish
to be modest, and the rest you would sell for
money.
Now then, I say again that the opportunity
to get rich, to attain unto great wealth, is here
in Philadelphia now, within the reach of almost
every man and woman who hears me speak tonight,
and I mean just what I say. I have not
come to this platform even under these circumstances
to recite something to you. I have come
to tell you what in God's sight I believe to be the
truth, and if the years of life have been of any
value to me in the attainment of common sense,
I know I am right; that the men and women sitting
here, who found it difficult perhaps to buy
a ticket to this lecture or gathering to-night, have
within their reach ``acres of diamonds,'' opportunities
to get largely wealthy. There never was
a place on earth more adapted than the city of
Philadelphia to-day, and never in the history of
the world did a poor man without capital have
such an opportunity to get rich quickly and
honestly as he has now in our city. I say it is the
truth, and I want you to accept it as such; for
if you think I have come to simply recite something,
then I would better not be here. I have no
time to waste in any such talk, but to say the
things I believe, and unless some of you get
richer for what I am saying to-night my time is
wasted.
I say that you ought to get rich, and it is your
duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren
say to me, ``Do you, a Christian minister, spend
your time going up and down the country advising
young people to get rich, to get money?'' ``Yes,
of course I do.'' They say, ``Isn't that awful!
Why don't you preach the gospel instead of
preaching about man's making money?'' ``Because
to make money honestly is to preach the
gospel.'' That is the reason. The men who get
rich may be the most honest men you find in the
community.
``Oh,'' but says some young man here to-night,
``I have been told all my life that if a person has
money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and
mean and contemptible. ``My friend, that is
the reason why you have none, because you have
that idea of people. The foundation of your faith
is altogether false. Let me say here clearly, and
say it briefly, though subject to discussion which
I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one
hundred of the rich men of America are honest.
That is why they are rich. That is why they are
trusted with money. That is why they carry on
great enterprises and find plenty of people to
work with them. It is because they are honest men.
Says another young man, ``I hear sometimes
of men that get millions of dollars dishonestly.''
Yes, of course you do, and so do I. But they are
so rare a thing in fact that the newspapers talk
about them all the time as a matter of news until
you get the idea that all the other rich men got
rich dishonestly.
My friend, you take and drive me--if you furnish
the auto--out into the suburbs of Philadelphia,
and introduce me to the people who own
their homes around this great city, those beautiful
homes with gardens and flowers, those magnificent
homes so lovely in their art, and I will introduce
you to the very best people in character as well as
in enterprise in our city, and you know I will.
A man is not really a true man until he owns his
own home, and they that own their homes are
made more honorable and honest and pure, and
true and economical and careful, by owning the home.
For a man to have money, even in large sums,
is not an inconsistent thing. We preach against
covetousness, and you know we do, in the pulpit,
and oftentimes preach against it so long and
use the terms about ``filthy lucre'' so extremely
that Christians get the idea that when we stand
in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man
to have money--until the collection-basket goes
around, and then we almost swear at the people
because they don't give more money. Oh, the
inconsistency of such doctrines as that!
Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably
ambitious to have it. You ought because you
can do more good with it than you could without
it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your
churches, money sends your missionaries, and
money pays your preachers, and you would not
have many of them, either, if you did not pay
them. I am always willing that my church should
raise my salary, because the church that pays the
largest salary always raises it the easiest. You
never knew an exception to it in your life. The
man who gets the largest salary can do the most
good with the power that is furnished to him.
Of course he can if his spirit be right to use it
for what it is given to him.
I say, then, you ought to have money. If
you can honestly attain unto riches in Philadelphia,
it is your Christian and godly duty to do so.
It is an awful mistake of these pious people to
think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious.
Some men say, ``Don't you sympathize with
the poor people?'' Of course I do, or else I would
not have been lecturing these years. I won't
give in but what I sympathize with the poor, but
the number of poor who are to be sympathized
with is very small. To sympathize with a man
whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help
him when God would still continue a just punishment,
is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we
do that more than we help those who are
deserving. While we should sympathize with God's
poor--that is, those who cannot help themselves--
let us remember there is not a poor person in the
United States who was not made poor by his own
shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one
else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let us
give in to that argument and pass that to one side.
A gentleman gets up back there, and says,
``Don't you think there are some things in this
world that are better than money?'' Of course I
do, but I am talking about money now. Of course
there are some things higher than money. Oh
yes, I know by the grave that has left me standing
alone that there are some things in this world
that are higher and sweeter and purer than
money. Well do I know there are some things
higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest
thing on God's earth, but fortunate the lover
who has plenty of money. Money is power,
money is force, money will do good as well as
harm. In the hands of good men and women it
could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.
I hate to leave that behind me. I heard a
man get up in a prayer-meeting in our city and
thank the Lord he was ``one of God's poor.''
Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that?
She earns all the money that comes into that
house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda.
I don't want to see any more of the Lord's poor
of that kind, and I don't believe the Lord does.
And yet there are some people who think in order
to be pious you must be awfully poor and awfully
dirty. That does not follow at all. While we
sympathize with the poor, let us not teach a doctrine
like that.
Yet the age is prejudiced against advising a
Christian man (or, as a Jew would say, a godly
man) from attaining unto wealth. The prejudice
is so universal and the years are far enough back,
I think, for me to safely mention that years ago
up at Temple University there was a young man
in our theological school who thought he was the
only pious student in that department. He came
into my office one evening and sat down by my
desk, and said to me: ``Mr. President, I think it
is my duty sir, to come in and labor with you.''
``What has happened now?'' Said he, ``I heard
you say at the Academy, at the Peirce School
commencement, that you thought it was an honorable
ambition for a young man to desire to have
wealth, and that you thought it made him temperate,
made him anxious to have a good name, and
made him industrious. You spoke about man's
ambition to have money helping to make him a
good man. Sir, I have come to tell you the Holy
Bible says that `money is the root of all evil.' ''
I told him I had never seen it in the Bible,
and advised him to go out into the chapel and get
the Bible, and show me the place. So out he went
for the Bible, and soon he stalked into my office
with the Bible open, with all the bigoted pride
of the narrow sectarian, or of one who founds his
Christianity on some misinterpretation of Scripture.
He flung the Bible down on my desk, and
fairly squealed into my ear: ``There it is, Mr.
President; you can read it for yourself.'' I said
to him: ``Well, young man, you will learn when
you get a little older that you cannot trust another
denomination to read the Bible for you. You belong
to another denomination. You are taught in
the theological school, however, that emphasis is
exegesis. Now, will you take that Bible and read
it yourself, and give the proper emphasis to it?''
He took the Bible, and proudly read, `` `The
love of money is the root of all evil.' ''
Then he had it right, and when one does quote
aright from that same old Book he quotes the
absolute truth. I have lived through fifty years
of the mightiest battle that old Book has ever
fought, and I have lived to see its banners flying
free; for never in the history of this world did
the great minds of earth so universally agree
that the Bible is true--all true--as they do at
this very hour.
So I say that when he quoted right, of course
he quoted the absolute truth. ``The love of
money is the root of all evil.'' He who tries to
attain unto it too quickly, or dishonestly, will
fall into many snares, no doubt about that. The
love of money. What is that? It is making an
idol of money, and idolatry pure and simple
everywhere is condemned by the Holy Scriptures and
by man's common sense. The man that worships
the dollar instead of thinking of the purposes for
which it ought to be used, the man who idolizes
simply money, the miser that hordes his money
in the cellar, or hides it in his stocking, or refuses
to invest it where it will do the world good, that
man who hugs the dollar until the eagle squeals
has in him the root of all evil.
I think I will leave that behind me now and
answer the question of nearly all of you who are
asking, ``Is there opportunity to get rich in
Philadelphia?'' Well, now, how simple a thing it is
to see where it is, and the instant you see where
it is it is yours. Some old gentleman gets up back
there and says, ``Mr. Conwell, have you lived in
Philadelphia for thirty-one years and don't know
that the time has gone by when you can make
anything in this city?'' ``No, I don't think it is.''
``Yes, it is; I have tried it.'' ``What business
are you in?'' ``I kept a store here for twenty
years, and never made over a thousand dollars
in the whole twenty years.''
``Well, then, you can measure the good you
have been to this city by what this city has paid
you, because a man can judge very well what he
is worth by what he receives; that is, in what he
is to the world at this time. If you have not made
over a thousand dollars in twenty years in Philadelphia,
it would have been better for Philadelphia
if they had kicked you out of the city nineteen
years and nine months ago. A man has no right
to keep a store in Philadelphia twenty years and
not make at least five hundred thousand dollars
even though it be a corner grocery up-town.'
You say, ``You cannot make five thousand dollars
in a store now.'' Oh, my friends, if you will
just take only four blocks around you, and find
out what the people want and what you ought
to supply and set them down with your pencil
and figure up the profits you would make if you
did supply them, you would very soon see it.
There is wealth right within the sound of your
voice.
Some one says: ``You don't know anything
about business. A preacher never knows a thing
about business.'' Well, then, I will have to prove
that I am an expert. I don't like to do this, but
I have to do it because my testimony will not be
taken if I am not an expert. My father kept a
country store, and if there is any place under the
stars where a man gets all sorts of experience in
every kind of mercantile transactions, it is in the
country store. I am not proud of my experience,
but sometimes when my father was away he would
leave me in charge of the store, though fortunately
for him that was not very often. But this did
occur many times, friends: A man would come
in the store, and say to me, ``Do you keep jack
knives?'' ``No, we don't keep jack-knives,'' and
I went off whistling a tune. What did I care
about that man, anyhow? Then another farmer
would come in and say, ``Do you keep jack
knives?'' ``No, we don't keep jack-knives.''
Then I went away and whistled another tune.
Then a third man came right in the same door and
said, ``Do you keep jack-knives?'' ``No. Why
is every one around here asking for jack-knives?
Do you suppose we are keeping this store to supply
the whole neighborhood with jack-knives?''
Do you carry on your store like that in Philadelphia?
The difficulty was I had not then learned
that the foundation of godliness and the foundation
principle of success in business are both the
same precisely. The man who says, ``I cannot
carry my religion into business'' advertises himself
either as being an imbecile in business, or on the
road to bankruptcy, or a thief, one of the three,
sure. He will fail within a very few years. He
certainly will if he doesn't carry his religion into
business. If I had been carrying on my father's
store on a Christian plan, godly plan, I would
have had a jack-knife for the third man when
he called for it. Then I would have actually done
him a kindness, and I would have received a
reward myself, which it would have been my
duty to take.
There are some over-pious Christian people who
think if you take any profit on anything you sell
that you are an unrighteous man. On the contrary,
you would be a criminal to sell goods for
less than they cost. You have no right to do
that. You cannot trust a man with your money
who cannot take care of his own. You cannot
trust a man in your family that is not true to his
own wife. You cannot trust a man in the world
that does not begin with his own heart, his own
character, and his own life. It would have been
my duty to have furnished a jack-knife to the
third man, or the second, and to have sold it to
him and actually profited myself. I have no more
right to sell goods without making a profit on
them than I have to overcharge him dishonestly
beyond what they are worth. But I should so
sell each bill of goods that the person to whom
I sell shall make as much as I make.
To live and let live is the principle of the
gospel, and the principle of every-day common
sense. Oh, young man, hear me; live as you go
along. Do not wait until you have reached my
years before you begin to enjoy anything of this
life. If I had the millions back, or fifty cents of
it, which I have tried to earn in these years, it
would not do me anything like the good that it
does me now in this almost sacred presence tonight.
Oh, yes, I am paid over and over a hundredfold
to-night for dividing as I have tried to
do in some measure as I went along through the
years. I ought not speak that way, it sounds
egotistic, but I am old enough now to be excused for
that. I should have helped my fellow-men, which
I have tried to do, and every one should try to do,
and get the happiness of it. The man who goes
home with the sense that he has stolen a dollar
that day, that he has robbed a man of what was his
honest due, is not going to sweet rest. He arises
tired in the morning, and goes with an unclean
conscience to his work the next day. He is not a
successful man at all, although he may have
laid up millions. But the man who has gone
through life dividing always with his fellow-men,
making and demanding his own rights and his
own profits, and giving to every other man his
rights and profits, lives every day, and not only
that, but it is the royal road to great wealth.
The history of the thousands of millionaires shows
that to be the case.
The man over there who said he could not make
anything in a store in Philadelphia has been
carrying on his store on the wrong principle.
Suppose I go into your store to-morrow morning and
ask, ``Do you know neighbor A, who lives one
square away, at house No. 1240?'' ``Oh yes,
I have met him. He deals here at the corner
store.'' ``Where did he come from?'' ``I don't
know.'' ``How many does he have in his family?''
``I don't know.'' ``What ticket does he vote?''
``I don't know.'' ``What church does he go to?''
``I don't know, and don't care. What are you
asking all these questions for?''
If you had a store in Philadelphia would you
answer me like that? If so, then you are
conducting your business just as I carried on my
father's business in Worthington, Massachusetts.
You don't know where your neighbor came from
when he moved to Philadelphia, and you don't
care. If you had cared you would be a rich man
now. If you had cared enough about him to take
an interest in his affairs, to find out what he needed,
you would have been rich. But you go through
the world saying, ``No opportunity to get rich,''
and there is the fault right at your own door.
But another young man gets up over there
and says, ``I cannot take up the mercantile
business.'' (While I am talking of trade it applies
to every occupation.) ``Why can't you go into
the mercantile business?'' ``Because I haven't
any capital.'' Oh, the weak and dudish creature
that can't see over its collar! It makes a person
weak to see these little dudes standing around
the corners and saying, ``Oh, if I had plenty of
capital, how rich I would get.'' ``Young man,
do you think you are going to get rich on capital?''
``Certainly.'' Well, I say, ``Certainly not.'' If
your mother has plenty of money, and she will
set you up in business, you will ``set her up in
business,'' supplying you with capital.
The moment a young man or woman gets more
money than he or she has grown to by practical
experience, that moment he has gotten a curse.
It is no help to a young man or woman to inherit
money. It is no help to your children to leave
them money, but if you leave them education,
if you leave them Christian and noble character,
if you leave them a wide circle of friends, if you
leave them an honorable name, it is far better
than that they should have money. It would be
worse for them, worse for the nation, that they
should have any money at all. Oh, young man, if
you have inherited money, don't regard it as a
help. It will curse you through your years, and
deprive you of the very best things of human
life. There is no class of people to be pitied so
much as the inexperienced sons and daughters of
the rich of our generation. I pity the rich man's
son. He can never know the best things in life.
One of the best things in our life is when a
young man has earned his own living, and when
he becomes engaged to some lovely young woman,
and makes up his mind to have a home of his
own. Then with that same love comes also that
divine inspiration toward better things, and he
begins to save his money. He begins to leave off
his bad habits and put money in the bank. When
he has a few hundred dollars he goes out in the
suburbs to look for a home. He goes to the
savings-bank, perhaps, for half of the value, and
then goes for his wife, and when he takes his bride
over the threshold of that door for the first time
he says in words of eloquence my voice can never
touch: ``I have earned this home myself. It
is all mine, and I divide with thee.'' That is
the grandest moment a human heart may ever
know.
But a rich man's son can never know that.
He takes his bride into a finer mansion, it may be,
but he is obliged to go all the way through it
and say to his wife, ``My mother gave me that,
my mother gave me that, and my mother gave
me this,'' until his wife wishes she had married
his mother. I pity the rich man's son.
The statistics of Massachusetts showed that
not one rich man's son out of seventeen ever dies
rich. I pity the rich man's sons unless they have
the good sense of the elder Vanderbilt, which
sometimes happens. He went to his father and said,
``Did you earn all your money?'' ``I did, my son.
I began to work on a ferry-boat for twenty-five
cents a day.'' ``Then,'' said his son, ``I will have
none of your money,'' and he, too, tried to get
employment on a ferry-boat that Saturday night.
He could not get one there, but he did get a place
for three dollars a week. Of course, if a rich man's
son will do that, he will get the discipline of a poor
boy that is worth more than a university education
to any man. He would then be able to take care
of the millions of his father. But as a rule the
rich men will not let their sons do the very thing
that made them great. As a rule, the rich man
will not allow his son to work--and his mother!
Why, she would think it was a social disgrace
if her poor, weak, little lily-fingered, sissy sort of
a boy had to earn his living with honest toil. I
have no pity for such rich men's sons.
I remember one at Niagara Falls. I think
I remember one a great deal nearer. I think
there are gentlemen present who were at a great
banquet, and I beg pardon of his friends. At a
banquet here in Philadelphia there sat beside me
a kind-hearted young man, and he said, ``Mr.
Conwell, you have been sick for two or three years.
When you go out, take my limousine, and it will
take you up to your house on Broad Street.''
I thanked him very much, and perhaps I ought
not to mention the incident in this way, but I
follow the facts. I got on to the seat with the
driver of that limousine, outside, and when we
were going up I asked the driver, ``How much
did this limousine cost?'' ``Six thousand eight
hundred, and he had to pay the duty on it.''
``Well,'' I said, ``does the owner of this machine
ever drive it himself?'' At that the chauffeur
laughed so heartily that he lost control of his
machine. He was so surprised at the question that
he ran up on the sidewalk, and around a corner
lamp-post out into the street again. And when he
got out into the street he laughed till the whole
machine trembled. He said: ``He drive this machine!
Oh, he would be lucky if he knew enough to get out
when we get there.''
I must tell you about a rich man's son at
Niagara Falls. I came in from the lecture to the
hotel, and as I approached the desk of the clerk
there stood a millionaire's son from New York.
He was an indescribable specimen of anthropologic
potency. He had a skull-cap on one side
of his head, with a gold tassel in the top of it, and
a gold-headed cane under his arm with more in
it than in his head. It is a very difficult thing
to describe that young man. He wore an eyeglass
that he could not see through, patentleather
boots that he could not walk in, and pants
that he could not sit down in--dressed like a
grasshopper. This human cricket came up to the
clerk's desk just as I entered, adjusted his
unseeing eye-glass, and spake in this wise to the clerk.
You see, he thought it was ``Hinglish, you know,''
to lisp. ``Thir, will you have the kindness to
supply me with thome papah and enwelophs!''
The hotel clerk measured that man quick, and
he pulled the envelopes and paper out of a drawer,
threw them across the counter toward the young
man, and then turned away to his books. You
should have seen that young man when those
envelopes came across that counter. He swelled
up like a gobbler turkey, adjusted his unseeing eyeglass,
and yelled: ``Come right back here. Now
thir, will you order a thervant to take that papah
and enwelophs to yondah dethk.'' Oh, the poor,
miserable, contemptible American monkey! He
could not carry paper and envelopes twenty feet.
I suppose he could not get his arms down to do
it. I have no pity for such travesties upon human
nature. If you have not capital, young man, I
am glad of it. What you need is common sense,
not copper cents.
The best thing I can do is to illustrate by actual
facts well-known to you all. A. T. Stewart, a
poor boy in New York, had $1.50 to begin life on.
He lost 87 <1/2> cents of that on the very first venture.
How fortunate that young man who loses the
first time he gambles. That boy said, ``I will
never gamble again in business,'' and he never
did. How came he to lose 87 <1/2> cents? You
probably all know the story how he lost it--because
he bought some needles, threads, and buttons to
sell which people did not want, and had them left
on his hands, a dead loss. Said the boy, ``I will
not lose any more money in that way.'' Then he
went around first to the doors and asked the people
what they did want. Then when he had found
out what they wanted he invested his 62 <1/2>
cents to supply a known demand. Study it wherever
you choose--in business, in your profession,
in your housekeeping, whatever your life, that
one thing is the secret of success. You must
first know the demand. You must first know
what people need, and then invest yourself where
you are most needed. A. T. Stewart went on
that principle until he was worth what amounted
afterward to forty millions of dollars, owning
the very store in which Mr. Wanamaker carries
on his great work in New York. His fortune was
made by his losing something, which taught him
the great lesson that he must only invest himself
or his money in something that people need.
When will you salesmen learn it? When will
you manufacturers learn that you must know the
changing needs of humanity if you would succeed
in life? Apply yourselves, all you Christian people,
as manufacturers or merchants or workmen
to supply that human need. It is a great principle
as broad as humanity and as deep as the Scripture
itself.
The best illustration I ever heard was of John
Jacob Astor. You know that he made the money
of the Astor family when he lived in New York.
He came across the sea in debt for his fare. But
that poor boy with nothing in his pocket made the
fortune of the Astor family on one principle.
Some young man here to-night will say, ``Well
they could make those fortunes over in New York
but they could not do it in Philadelphia!'' My
friends, did you ever read that wonderful book of
Riis (his memory is sweet to us because of his
recent death), wherein is given his statistical
account of the records taken in 1889 of 107
millionaires of New York. If you read the account
you will see that out of the 107 millionaires only
seven made their money in New York. Out
of the 107 millionaires worth ten million dollars
in real estate then, 67 of them made their money
in towns of less than 3,500 inhabitants. The
richest man in this country to-day, if you read
the real-estate values, has never moved away from
a town of 3,500 inhabitants. It makes not so
much difference where you are as who you are.
But if you cannot get rich in Philadelphia you
certainly cannot do it in New York.
Now John Jacob Astor illustrated what can
be done anywhere. He had a mortgage once on
a millinery-store, and they could not sell bonnets
enough to pay the interest on his money. So
he foreclosed that mortgage, took possession of
the store, and went into partnership with the very
same people, in the same store, with the same
capital. He did not give them a dollar of capital.
They had to sell goods to get any money. Then
he left them alone in the store just as they had
been before, and he went out and sat down on
a bench in the park in the shade. What was
John Jacob Astor doing out there, and in partnership
with people who had failed on his own hands?
He had the most important and, to my mind, the
most pleasant part of that partnership on his
hands. For as John Jacob Astor sat on that bench
he was watching the ladies as they went by;
and where is the man who would not get rich at
that business? As he sat on the bench if a lady
passed him with her shoulders back and head
up, and looked straight to the front, as if she
did not care if all the world did gaze on her, then
he studied her bonnet, and by the time it was
out of sight he knew the shape of the frame, the
color of the trimmings, and the crinklings in the
feather. I sometimes try to describe a bonnet,
but not always. I would not try to describe a
modern bonnet. Where is the man that could
describe one? This aggregation of all sorts of
driftwood stuck on the back of the head, or the
side of the neck, like a rooster with only one tail
feather left. But in John Jacob Astor's day there
was some art about the millinery business, and
he went to the millinery-store and said to them:
``Now put into the show-window just such a
bonnet as I describe to you, because I have already
seen a lady who likes such a bonnet. Don't make
up any more until I come back.'' Then he went
out and sat down again, and another lady passed
him of a different form, of different complexion,
with a different shape and color of bonnet. ``Now,''
said he, ``put such a bonnet as that in the show
window.'' He did not fill his show-window up
town with a lot of hats and bonnets to drive
people away, and then sit on the back stairs and
bawl because people went to Wanamaker's to
trade. He did not have a hat or a bonnet in that
show-window but what some lady liked before
it was made up. The tide of custom began immediately
to turn in, and that has been the foundation
of the greatest store in New York in that line,
and still exists as one of three stores. Its fortune
was made by John Jacob Astor after they had
failed in business, not by giving them any more
money, but by finding out what the ladies liked
for bonnets before they wasted any material in
making them up. I tell you if a man could foresee
the millinery business he could foresee anything
under heaven!
Suppose I were to go through this audience
to-night and ask you in this great manufacturing
city if there are not opportunities to get rich in
manufacturing. ``Oh yes,'' some young man says,
``there are opportunities here still if you build
with some trust and if you have two or three
millions of dollars to begin with as capital.''
Young man, the history of the breaking up of the
trusts by that attack upon ``big business'' is only
illustrating what is now the opportunity of the
smaller man. The time never came in the history
of the world when you could get rich so quickly
manufacturing without capital as you can now.
But you will say, ``You cannot do anything
of the kind. You cannot start without capital.''
Young man, let me illustrate for a moment. I
must do it. It is my duty to every young man and
woman, because we are all going into business
very soon on the same plan. Young man, remember
if you know what people need you have
gotten more knowledge of a fortune than any
amount of capital can give you.
There was a poor man out of work living in
Hingham, Massachusetts. He lounged around the
house until one day his wife told him to get out
and work, and, as he lived in Massachusetts, he
obeyed his wife. He went out and sat down on
the shore of the bay, and whittled a soaked
shingle into a wooden chain. His children that
evening quarreled over it, and he whittled a
second one to keep peace. While he was whittling
the second one a neighbor came in and said:
``Why don't you whittle toys and sell them? You
could make money at that.'' ``Oh,'' he said, ``I
would not know what to make.'' ``Why don't
you ask your own children right here in your
own house what to make?'' ``What is the use
of trying that?'' said the carpenter. ``My children
are different from other people's children.''
(I used to see people like that when I taught
school.) But he acted upon the hint, and the
next morning when Mary came down the stairway,
he asked, ``What do you want for a toy?''
She began to tell him she would like a doll's bed,
a doll's washstand, a doll's carriage, a little doll's
umbrella, and went on with a list of things that
would take him a lifetime to supply. So, consulting
his own children, in his own house, he took
the firewood, for he had no money to buy lumber,
and whittled those strong, unpainted Hingham
toys that were for so many years known all over
the world. That man began to make those toys
for his own children, and then made copies and
sold them through the boot-and-shoe store next
door. He began to make a little money, and then
a little more, and Mr. Lawson, in his _Frenzied
Finance_ says that man is the richest man in old
Massachusetts, and I think it is the truth. And
that man is worth a hundred millions of dollars
to-day, and has been only thirty-four years making
it on that one principle--that one must judge
that what his own children like at home other
people's children would like in their homes, too;
to judge the human heart by oneself, by one's
wife or by one's children. It is the royal road to
success in manufacturing. ``Oh,'' but you say,
``didn't he have any capital?'' Yes, a penknife,
but I don't know that he had paid for that.
I spoke thus to an audience in New Britain,
Connecticut, and a lady four seats back went home
and tried to take off her collar, and the collarbutton
stuck in the buttonhole. She threw it
out and said, ``I am going to get up something
better than that to put on collars.'' Her husband
said: ``After what Conwell said to-night, you see
there is a need of an improved collar-fastener that
is easier to handle. There is a human need;
there is a great fortune. Now, then, get up a
collar-button and get rich.'' He made fun of her,
and consequently made fun of me, and that is
one of the saddest things which comes over me
like a deep cloud of midnight sometimes--although
I have worked so hard for more than half a century,
yet how little I have ever really done.
Notwithstanding the greatness and the handsomeness
of your compliment to-night, I do not
believe there is one in ten of you that is going to
make a million of dollars because you are here
to-night; but it is not my fault, it is yours. I
say that sincerely. What is the use of my talking
if people never do what I advise them to do?
When her husband ridiculed her, she made up her
mind she would make a better collar-button, and
when a woman makes up her mind ``she will,''
and does not say anything about it, she does it.
It was that New England woman who invented
the snap button which you can find anywhere
now. It was first a collar-button with a spring
cap attached to the outer side. Any of you who
wear modern waterproofs know the button that
simply pushes together, and when you unbutton
it you simply pull it apart. That is the button
to which I refer, and which she invented. She
afterward invented several other buttons, and
then invested in more, and then was taken into
partnership with great factories. Now that woman
goes over the sea every summer in her private
steamship--yes, and takes her husband with her!
If her husband were to die, she would have money
enough left now to buy a foreign duke or count
or some such title as that at the latest quotations.
Now what is my lesson in that incident? It
is this: I told her then, though I did not know
her, what I now say to you, ``Your wealth is too
near to you. You are looking right over it'';
and she had to look over it because it was right
under her chin.
I have read in the newspaper that a woman
never invented anything. Well, that newspaper
ought to begin again. Of course, I do not refer
to gossip--I refer to machines--and if I did I
might better include the men. That newspaper
could never appear if women had not invented
something. Friends, think. Ye women, think!
You say you cannot make a fortune because you
are in some laundry, or running a sewing-machine,
it may be, or walking before some loom, and yet
you can be a millionaire if you will but follow
this almost infallible direction.
When you say a woman doesn't invent anything,
I ask, Who invented the Jacquard loom that wove
every stitch you wear? Mrs. Jacquard. The
printer's roller, the printing-press, were invented
by farmers' wives. Who invented the cotton-gin
of the South that enriched our country so amazingly?
Mrs. General Greene invented the cottongin
and showed the idea to Mr. Whitney, and he,
like a man, seized it. Who was it that invented
the sewing-machine? If I would go to school tomorrow
and ask your children they would say,
``Elias Howe.''
He was in the Civil War with me, and often in
my tent, and I often heard him say that he worked
fourteen years to get up that sewing-machine.
But his wife made up her mind one day that they
would starve to death if there wasn't something
or other invented pretty soon, and so in two hours
she invented the sewing-machine. Of course he
took out the patent in his name. Men always do
that. Who was it that invented the mower and
the reaper? According to Mr. McCormick's
confidential communication, so recently published, it
was a West Virginia woman, who, after his father
and he had failed altogether in making a reaper
and gave it up, took a lot of shears and nailed
them together on the edge of a board, with one
shaft of each pair loose, and then wired them so
that when she pulled the wire one way it closed
them, and when she pulled the wire the other
way it opened them, and there she had the principle
of the mowing-machine. If you look at a
mowing-machine, you will see it is nothing but
a lot of shears. If a woman can invent a mowingmachine,
if a woman can invent a Jacquard loom,
if a woman can invent a cotton-gin, if a woman can
invent a trolley switch--as she did and made the
trolleys possible; if a woman can invent, as Mr.
Carnegie said, the great iron squeezers that laid
the foundation of all the steel millions of the
United States, ``we men'' can invent anything
under the stars! I say that for the encouragement
of the men.
Who are the great inventors of the world?
Again this lesson comes before us. The great
inventor sits next to you, or you are the person
yourself. ``Oh,'' but you will say, ``I have never
invented anything in my life.'' Neither did the
great inventors until they discovered one great
secret. Do you think it is a man with a head like a
bushel measure or a man like a stroke of lightning?
It is neither. The really great man is a plain,
straightforward, every-day, common-sense man.
You would not dream that he was a great inventor
if you did not see something he had actually done.
His neighbors do not regard him so great. You
never see anything great over your back fence.
You say there is no greatness among your neighbors.
It is all away off somewhere else. Their
greatness is ever so simple, so plain, so earnest,
so practical, that the neighbors and friends never
recognize it.
True greatness is often unrecognized. That is
sure. You do not know anything about the
greatest men and women. I went out to write
the life of General Garfield, and a neighbor, knowing
I was in a hurry, and as there was a great
crowd around the front door, took me around to
General Garfield's back door and shouted, ``Jim!
Jim!'' And very soon ``Jim'' came to the door
and let me in, and I wrote the biography of one
of the grandest men of the nation, and yet he
was just the same old ``Jim'' to his neighbor.
If you know a great man in Philadelphia and you
should meet him to-morrow, you would say,
``How are you, Sam?'' or ``Good morning, Jim.''
Of course you would. That is just what you would
do.
One of my soldiers in the Civil War had been
sentenced to death, and I went up to the White
House in Washington--sent there for the first
time in my life to see the President. I went
into the waiting-room and sat down with a lot
of others on the benches, and the secretary asked
one after another to tell him what they wanted.
After the secretary had been through the line,
he went in, and then came back to the door and
motioned for me. I went up to that anteroom,
and the secretary said: ``That is the President's
door right over there. Just rap on it and go
right in.'' I never was so taken aback, friends,
in all my life, never. The secretary himself made
it worse for me, because he had told me how to
go in and then went out another door to the
left and shut that. There I was, in the hallway
by myself before the President of the United
States of America's door. I had been on fields of
battle, where the shells did sometimes shriek and
the bullets did sometimes hit me, but I always
wanted to run. I have no sympathy with the
old man who says, ``I would just as soon march
up to the cannon's mouth as eat my dinner.''
I have no faith in a man who doesn't know enough
to be afraid when he is being shot at. I never
was so afraid when the shells came around us
at Antietam as I was when I went into that room
that day; but I finally mustered the courage--
I don't know how I ever did--and at arm'slength
tapped on the door. The man inside did
not help me at all, but yelled out, ``Come in and
sit down!''
Well, I went in and sat down on the edge of a
chair, and wished I were in Europe, and the man
at the table did not look up. He was one of the
world's greatest men, and was made great by one
single rule. Oh, that all the young people of
Philadelphia were before me now and I could say
just this one thing, and that they would remember
it. I would give a lifetime for the effect it would
have on our city and on civilization. Abraham
Lincoln's principle for greatness can be adopted
by nearly all. This was his rule: Whatsoever he
had to do at all, he put his whole mind into it and
held it all there until that was all done. That
makes men great almost anywhere. He stuck to
those papers at that table and did not look up
at me, and I sat there trembling. Finally, when
he had put the string around his papers, he pushed
them over to one side and looked over to me, and
a smile came over his worn face. He said: ``I
am a very busy man and have only a few minutes
to spare. Now tell me in the fewest words what it
is you want.'' I began to tell him, and mentioned
the case, and he said: ``I have heard all about
it and you do not need to say any more. Mr.
Stanton was talking to me only a few days ago
about that. You can go to the hotel and rest
assured that the President never did sign an order
to shoot a boy under twenty years of age, and
never will. You can say that to his mother anyhow.''
Then he said to me, ``How is it going in the
field?'' I said, ``We sometimes get discouraged.''
And he said: ``It is all right. We are going to
win out now. We are getting very near the light.
No man ought to wish to be President of the
United States, and I will be glad when I get
through; then Tad and I are going out to Springfield,
Illinois. I have bought a farm out there
and I don't care if I again earn only twenty-five
cents a day. Tad has a mule team, and we are
going to plant onions.''
Then he asked me, ``Were you brought up on a
farm?'' I said, ``Yes; in the Berkshire Hills of
Massachusetts.'' He then threw his leg over the
corner of the big chair and said, ``I have heard
many a time, ever since I was young, that up
there in those hills you have to sharpen the noses
of the sheep in order to get down to the grass
between the rocks.'' He was so familiar, so everyday,
so farmer-like, that I felt right at home with
him at once.
He then took hold of another roll of paper, and
looked up at me and said, ``Good morning.'' I
took the hint then and got up and went out.
After I had gotten out I could not realize I had
seen the President of the United States at all.
But a few days later, when still in the city, I saw
the crowd pass through the East Room by the
coffin of Abraham Lincoln, and when I looked
at the upturned face of the murdered President
I felt then that the man I had seen such a short
time before, who, so simple a man, so plain a
man, was one of the greatest men that God ever
raised up to lead a nation on to ultimate liberty.
Yet he was only ``Old Abe'' to his neighbors.
When they had the second funeral, I was invited
among others, and went out to see that same
coffin put back in the tomb at Springfield. Around
the tomb stood Lincoln's old neighbors, to whom
he was just ``Old Abe.'' Of course that is all they
would say.
Did you ever see a man who struts around
altogether too large to notice an ordinary working
mechanic? Do you think he is great? He is
nothing but a puffed-up balloon, held down by
his big feet. There is no greatness there.
Who are the great men and women? My
attention was called the other day to the history
of a very little thing that made the fortune of a
very poor man. It was an awful thing, and yet
because of that experience he--not a great inventor
or genius--invented the pin that now is called
the safety-pin, and out of that safety-pin made
the fortune of one of the great aristocratic families
of this nation.
A poor man in Massachusetts who had worked
in the nail-works was injured at thirty-eight, and
he could earn but little money. He was employed
in the office to rub out the marks on the bills
made by pencil memorandums, and he used a
rubber until his hand grew tired. He then tied a
piece of rubber on the end of a stick and worked
it like a plane. His little girl came and said,
``Why, you have a patent, haven't you?'' The
father said afterward, ``My daughter told me
when I took that stick and put the rubber on
the end that there was a patent, and that was the
first thought of that.'' He went to Boston and
applied for his patent, and every one of you that
has a rubber-tipped pencil in your pocket is now
paying tribute to the millionaire. No capital,
not a penny did he invest in it. All was income,
all the way up into the millions.
But let me hasten to one other greater thought.
``Show me the great men and women who live
in Philadelphia.'' A gentleman over there will
get up and say: ``We don't have any great men
in Philadelphia. They don't live here. They live
away off in Rome or St. Petersburg or London or
Manayunk, or anywhere else but here in our
town.'' I have come now to the apex of my
thought. I have come now to the heart of the
whole matter and to the center of my struggle:
Why isn't Philadelphia a greater city in its
greater wealth? Why does New York excel
Philadelphia? People say, ``Because of her harbor.''
Why do many other cities of the United States
get ahead of Philadelphia now? There is only
one answer, and that is because our own people
talk down their own city. If there ever was a
community on earth that has to be forced ahead,
it is the city of Philadelphia. If we are to have a
boulevard, talk it down; if we are going to have
better schools, talk them down; if you wish to
have wise legislation, talk it down; talk all the
proposed improvements down. That is the only
great wrong that I can lay at the feet of the
magnificent Philadelphia that has been so universally
kind to me. I say it is time we turn around in our
city and begin to talk up the things that are in
our city, and begin to set them before the world
as the people of Chicago, New York, St. Louis,
and San Francisco do. Oh, if we only could get
that spirit out among our people, that we can do
things in Philadelphia and do them well!
Arise, ye millions of Philadelphians, trust in
God and man, and believe in the great opportunities
that are right here not over in New York
or Boston, but here--for business, for everything
that is worth living for on earth. There was
never an opportunity greater. Let us talk up
our own city.
But there are two other young men here tonight,
and that is all I will venture to say, because
it is too late. One over there gets up and says,
``There is going to be a great man in Philadelphia,
but never was one.'' ``Oh, is that so? When are
you going to be great?'' ``When I am elected to
some political office.'' Young man, won't you
learn a lesson in the primer of politics that it is
a _prima facie_ evidence of littleness to hold office
under our form of government? Great men get
into office sometimes, but what this country needs
is men that will do what we tell them to do.
This nation--where the people rule--is governed
by the people, for the people, and so long as it is,
then the office-holder is but the servant of the
people, and the Bible says the servant cannot be
greater than the master. The Bible says, ``He
that is sent cannot be greater than Him who sent
Him.'' The people rule, or should rule, and if
they do, we do not need the greater men in office.
If the great men in America took our offices, we
would change to an empire in the next ten years.
I know of a great many young women, now
that woman's suffrage is coming, who say, ``I
am going to be President of the United States
some day.'' I believe in woman's suffrage, and
there is no doubt but what it is coming, and I
am getting out of the way, anyhow. I may want
an office by and by myself; but if the ambition
for an office influences the women in their desire
to vote, I want to say right here what I say to the
young men, that if you only get the privilege of
casting one vote, you don't get anything that is
worth while. Unless you can control more than
one vote, you will be unknown, and your influence
so dissipated as practically not to be felt. This
country is not run by votes. Do you think it is?
It is governed by influence. It is governed by
the ambitions and the enterprises which control
votes. The young woman that thinks she is going
to vote for the sake of holding an office is making
an awful blunder.
That other young man gets up and says, ``There
are going to be great men in this country and in
Philadelphia.'' ``Is that so? When?'' ``When
there comes a great war, when we get into difficulty
through watchful waiting in Mexico; when we
get into war with England over some frivolous
deed, or with Japan or China or New Jersey or
some distant country. Then I will march up to
the cannon's mouth; I will sweep up among the
glistening bayonets; I will leap into the arena and
tear down the flag and bear it away in triumph.
I will come home with stars on my shoulder, and
hold every office in the gift of the nation, and I
will be great.'' No, you won't. You think you
are going to be made great by an office, but
remember that if you are not great before you
get the office, you won't be great when you secure
it. It will only be a burlesque in that shape.
We had a Peace Jubilee here after the Spanish
War. Out West they don't believe this, because
they said, ``Philadelphia would not have heard
of any Spanish War until fifty years hence.''
Some of you saw the procession go up Broad
Street. I was away, but the family wrote to me
that the tally-ho coach with Lieutenant Hobson
upon it stopped right at the front door and the
people shouted, ``Hurrah for Hobson!'' and if I
had been there I would have yelled too, because
he deserves much more of his country than he
has ever received. But suppose I go into school
and say, ``Who sunk the _Merrimac_ at Santiago?''
and if the boys answer me, ``Hobson,'' they will
tell me seven-eighths of a lie. There were seven
other heroes on that steamer, and they, by virtue
of their position, were continually exposed to the
Spanish fire, while Hobson, as an officer, might
reasonably be behind the smoke-stack. You have
gathered in this house your most intelligent people,
and yet, perhaps, not one here can name the other
seven men.
We ought not to so teach history. We ought to
teach that, however humble a man's station may
be, if he does his full duty in that place he is
just as much entitled to the American people's
honor as is the king upon his throne. But we do
not so teach. We are now teaching everywhere
that the generals do all the fighting.
I remember that, after the war, I went down
to see General Robert E. Lee, that magnificent
Christian gentleman of whom both North and
South are now proud as one of our great Americans.
The general told me about his servant, ``Rastus,''
who was an enlisted colored soldier. He called
him in one day to make fun of him, and said,
``Rastus, I hear that all the rest of your company
are killed, and why are you not killed?'' Rastus
winked at him and said, `` 'Cause when there is
any fightin' goin' on I stay back with the generals.''
I remember another illustration. I would leave
it out but for the fact that when you go to the
library to read this lecture, you will find this has
been printed in it for twenty-five years. I shut
my eyes--shut them close--and lo! I see the faces
of my youth. Yes, they sometimes say to me,
``Your hair is not white; you are working night
and day without seeming ever to stop; you can't
be old.'' But when I shut my eyes, like any other
man of my years, oh, then come trooping back
the faces of the loved and lost of long ago, and
I know, whatever men may say, it is evening-time.
I shut my eyes now and look back to my native
town in Massachusetts, and I see the cattle-show
ground on the mountain-top; I can see the horsesheds
there. I can see the Congregational church;
see the town hall and mountaineers' cottages;
see a great assembly of people turning out, dressed
resplendently, and I can see flags flying and
handkerchiefs waving and hear bands playing. I can
see that company of soldiers that had re-enlisted
marching up on that cattle-show ground. I was
but a boy, but I was captain of that company
and puffed out with pride. A cambric needle
would have burst me all to pieces. Then I thought
it was the greatest event that ever came to man
on earth. If you have ever thought you would
like to be a king or queen, you go and be received
by the mayor.
The bands played, and all the people turned
out to receive us. I marched up that Common
so proud at the head of my troops, and we turned
down into the town hall. Then they seated my
soldiers down the center aisle and I sat down on
the front seat. A great assembly of people a
hundred or two--came in to fill the town hall,
so that they stood up all around. Then the town
officers came in and formed a half-circle. The
mayor of the town sat in the middle of the
platform. He was a man who had never held office
before; but he was a good man, and his friends
have told me that I might use this without giving
them offense. He was a good man, but he thought
an office made a man great. He came up and took
his seat, adjusted his powerful spectacles, and
looked around, when he suddenly spied me sitting
there on the front seat. He came right forward
on the platform and invited me up to sit with the
town officers. No town officer ever took any
notice of me before I went to war, except to advise
the teacher to thrash me, and now I was invited
up on the stand with the town officers. Oh my!
the town mayor was then the emperor, the king
of our day and our time. As I came up on the
platform they gave me a chair about this far, I
would say, from the front.
When I had got seated, the chairman of
the Selectmen arose and came forward to the
table, and we all supposed he would introduce
the Congregational minister, who was the only
orator in town, and that he would give the oration
to the returning soldiers. But, friends, you should
have seen the surprise which ran over the audience
when they discovered that the old fellow
was going to deliver that speech himself. He had
never made a speech in his life, but he fell into
the same error that hundreds of other men have
fallen into. It seems so strange that a man won't
learn he must speak his piece as a boy if he intends
to be an orator when he is grown, but he
seems to think all he has to do is to hold an office
to be a great orator.
So he came up to the front, and brought with
him a speech which he had learned by heart
walking up and down the pasture, where he had
frightened the cattle. He brought the manuscript
with him and spread it out on the table so as to
be sure he might see it. He adjusted his spectacles
and leaned over it for a moment and marched
back on that platform, and then came forward
like this--tramp, tramp, tramp. He must have
studied the subject a great deal, when you come
to think of it, because he assumed an ``elocutionary''
attitude. He rested heavily upon his
left heel, threw back his shoulders, slightly
advanced the right foot, opened the organs of speech,
and advanced his right foot at an angle of fortyfive.
As he stood in that elocutionary attitude,
friends, this is just the way that speech went.
Some people say to me, ``Don't you exaggerate?''
That would be impossible. But I am here for
the lesson and not for the story, and this is the
way it went:
``Fellow-citizens--'' As soon as he heard his
voice his fingers began to go like that, his knees
began to shake, and then he trembled all over.
He choked and swallowed and came around to
the table to look at the manuscript. Then he
gathered himself up with clenched fists and came
back: ``Fellow-citizens, we are Fellow-citizens,
we are--we are--we are--we are--we are--we are
very happy--we are very happy--we are very
happy. We are very happy to welcome back to
their native town these soldiers who have fought
and bled--and come back again to their native
town. We are especially--we are especially--we
are especially. We are especially pleased to see
with us to-day this young hero'' (that meant
me)--``this young hero who in imagination''
(friends, remember he said that; if he had not
said ``in imagination'' I would not be egotistic
enough to refer to it at all)--``this young hero
who in imagination we have seen leading--we
have seen leading--leading. We have seen leading
his troops on to the deadly breach. We have
seen his shining--we have seen his shining--his
shining--his shining sword--flashing. Flashing in
the sunlight, as he shouted to his troops, `Come
on'!''
Oh dear, dear, dear! how little that good man
knew about war. If he had known anything
about war at all he ought to have known what
any of my G. A. R. comrades here to-night will
tell you is true, that it is next to a crime for an
officer of infantry ever in time of danger to go
ahead of his men. ``I, with my shining sword
flashing in the sunlight, shouting to my troops,
`Come on'!'' I never did it. Do you suppose
I would get in front of my men to be shot in front
by the enemy and in the back by my own men?
That is no place for an officer. The place for the
officer in actual battle is behind the line. How
often, as a staff officer, I rode down the line, when
our men were suddenly called to the line of battle,
and the Rebel yells were coming out of the woods,
and shouted: ``Officers to the rear! Officers to
the rear!'' Then every officer gets behind the line
of private soldiers, and the higher the officer's
rank the farther behind he goes. Not because
he is any the less brave, but because the laws of
war require that. And yet he shouted, ``I, with
my shining sword--'' In that house there sat
the company of my soldiers who had carried that
boy across the Carolina rivers that he might not
wet his feet. Some of them had gone far out to
get a pig or a chicken. Some of them had gone
to death under the shell-swept pines in the
mountains of Tennessee, yet in the good man's speech
they were scarcely known. He did refer to them,
but only incidentally. The hero of the hour was
this boy. Did the nation owe him anything?
No, nothing then and nothing now. Why was he
the hero? Simply because that man fell into that
same human error--that this boy was great because
he was an officer and these were only private
soldiers.
Oh, I learned the lesson then that I will never
forget so long as the tongue of the bell of time
continues to swing for me. Greatness consists
not in the holding of some future office, but really
consists in doing great deeds with little means
and the accomplishment of vast purposes from
the private ranks of life. To be great at all one
must be great here, now, in Philadelphia. He
who can give to this city better streets and better
sidewalks, better schools and more colleges, more
happiness and more civilization, more of God, he
will be great anywhere. Let every man or woman
here, if you never hear me again, remember this,
that if you wish to be great at all, you must begin
where you are and what you are, in Philadelphia,
now. He that can give to his city any blessing, he
who can be a good citizen while he lives here, he
that can make better homes, he that can be a
blessing whether he works in the shop or sits
behind the counter or keeps house, whatever be his
life, he who would be great anywhere must first
be great in his own Philadelphia.
HIS LIFE AND ACHIEVEMENTS
BY
ROBERT SHACKLETON
THE STORY OF THE SWORD[2]
[2] _Dr, Conwell was living, and actively at work,
when these pages were written. It is, therefore,
a much truer picture of his personality than
anything written in the past tense_.
I SHALL write of a remarkable man, an interesting
man, a man of power, of initiative, of
will, of persistence; a man who plans vastly and
who realizes his plans; a man who not only does
things himself, but who, even more important than
that, is the constant inspiration of others. I shall
write of Russell H. Conwell.
As a farmer's boy he was the leader of the boys
of the rocky region that was his home; as a schoolteacher
he won devotion; as a newspaper correspondent
he gained fame; as a soldier in the Civil
War he rose to important rank; as a lawyer he
developed a large practice; as an author he wrote
books that reached a mighty total of sales. He
left the law for the ministry and is the active head
of a great church that he raised from nothingness.
He is the most popular lecturer in the world and
yearly speaks to many thousands. He is, so to
speak, the discoverer of ``Acres of Diamonds,''
through which thousands of men and women have
achieved success out of failure. He is the head
of two hospitals, one of them founded by himself,
that have cared for a host of patients, both the
poor and the rich, irrespective of race or creed.
He is the founder and head of a university that
has already had tens of thousands of students.
His home is in Philadelphia; but he is known in
every corner of every state in the Union, and
everywhere he has hosts of friends. All of his life
he has helped and inspired others.
Quite by chance, and only yesterday, literally
yesterday and by chance, and with no thought at
the moment of Conwell although he had been
much in my mind for some time past, I picked up
a thin little book of description by William Dean
Howells, and, turning the pages of a chapter on
Lexington, old Lexington of the Revolution,
written, so Howells had set down, in 1882, I
noticed, after he had written of the town itself,
and of the long-past fight there, and of the presentday
aspect, that he mentioned the church life
of the place and remarked on the striking
advances made by the Baptists, who had lately, as
he expressed it, been reconstituted out of very
perishing fragments and made strong and flourishing,
under the ministrations of a lay preacher,
formerly a colonel in the Union army. And it
was only a few days before I chanced upon this
description that Dr. Conwell, the former colonel
and former lay preacher, had told me of his
experiences in that little old Revolutionary town.
Howells went on to say that, so he was told,
the colonel's success was principally due to his
making the church attractive to young people.
Howells says no more of him; apparently he did
not go to hear him; and one wonders if he has
ever associated that lay preacher of Lexington
with the famous Russell H. Conwell of these recent
years!
``Attractive to young people.'' Yes, one can
recognize that to-day, just as it was recognized
in Lexington. And it may be added that he at
the same time attracts older people, too! In this,
indeed, lies his power. He makes his church
interesting, his sermons interesting, his lectures
interesting. He is himself interesting! Because of
his being interesting, he gains attention. The
attention gained, he inspires.
Biography is more than dates. Dates, after all,
are but mile-stones along the road of life. And
the most important fact of Conwell's life is that
he lived to be eighty-two, working sixteen hours
every day for the good of his fellow-men. He was
born on February 15, 1843--born of poor parents,
in a low-roofed cottage in the eastern Berkshires,
in Massachusetts.
``I was born in this room,'' he said to me,
simply, as we sat together recently[3] in front of the
old fireplace in the principal room of the little
cottage; for he has bought back the rocky farm
of his father, and has retained and restored the
little old home. ``I was born in this room. It
was bedroom and kitchen. It was poverty.'' And
his voice sank with a kind of grimness into silence.
[3] _This interview took place at the old Conwell farm in the
summer of 1915_.
Then he spoke a little of the struggles of those
long-past years; and we went out on the porch,
as the evening shadows fell, and looked out over
the valley and stream and hills of his youth, and
he told of his grandmother, and of a young
Marylander who had come to the region on a visit;
it was a tale of the impetuous love of those two,
of rash marriage, of the interference of parents,
of the fierce rivalry of another suitor, of an attack
on the Marylander's life, of passionate hastiness,
of unforgivable words, of separation, of lifelong
sorrow. ``Why does grandmother cry so often?''
he remembers asking when he was a little boy.
And he was told that it was for the husband of
her youth.
We went back into the little house, and he
showed me the room in which he first saw John
Brown. ``I came down early one morning, and
saw a huge, hairy man sprawled upon the bed
there--and I was frightened,'' he says.
But John Brown did not long frighten him!
For he was much at their house after that, and was
so friendly with Russell and his brother that there
was no chance for awe; and it gives a curious sidelight
on the character of the stern abolitionist
that he actually, with infinite patience, taught the
old horse of the Conwells to go home alone with
the wagon after leaving the boys at school, a mile
or more away, and at school-closing time to trot
gently off for them without a driver when merely
faced in that direction and told to go! Conwell
remembers how John Brown, in training it, used
patiently to walk beside the horse, and control
its going and its turnings, until it was quite ready
to go and turn entirely by itself.
The Conwell house was a station on the
Underground Railway, and Russell Conwell remembers,
when a lad, seeing the escaping slaves that
his father had driven across country and temporarily
hidden. ``Those were heroic days,'' he says,
quietly. ``And once in a while my father let me
go with him. They were wonderful night drives--
the cowering slaves, the darkness of the road,
the caution and the silence and dread of it all.''
This underground route, he remembers, was from
Philadelphia to New Haven, thence to Springfield,
where Conwell's father would take his charge,
and onward to Bellows Falls and Canada.
Conwell tells, too, of meeting Frederick
Douglass, the colored orator, in that little cottage in
the hills. `` `I never saw my father,' Douglass said
one day--his father was a white man--`and I
remember little of my mother except that once
she tried to keep an overseer from whipping me,
and the lash cut across her own face, and her
blood fell over me.'
``When John Brown was captured,'' Conwell
went on, ``my father tried to sell this place to
get a little money to send to help his defense.
But he couldn't sell it, and on the day of the execution
we knelt solemnly here, from eleven to twelve,
just praying, praying in silence for the passing
soul of John Brown. And as we prayed we knew
that others were also praying, for a church-bell
tolled during that entire hour, and its awesome
boom went sadly sounding over these hills.''
Conwell believes that his real life dates from a
happening of the time of the Civil War--a happening
that still looms vivid and intense before
him, and which undoubtedly did deepen and
strengthen his strong and deep nature. Yet the
real Conwell was always essentially the same.
Neighborhood tradition still tells of his bravery
as a boy and a youth, of his reckless coasting, his
skill as a swimmer and his saving of lives, his
strength and endurance, his plunging out into the
darkness of a wild winter night to save a neighbor's
cattle. His soldiers came home with tales
of his devotion to them, and of how he shared
his rations and his blankets and bravely risked his
life; of how he crept off into a swamp, at imminent
peril, to rescue one of his men lost or mired
there. The present Conwell was always Conwell;
in fact, he may be traced through his ancestry, too,
for in him are the sturdy virtues, the bravery, the
grim determination, the practicality, of his father;
and romanticism, that comes from his grandmother;
and the dreamy qualities of his mother,
who, practical and hardworking New England
woman that she was, was at the same time influenced
by an almost startling mysticism.
And Conwell himself is a dreamer: first of all
he is a dreamer; it is the most important fact
in regard to him! It is because he is a dreamer
and visualizes his dreams that he can plan the
great things that to other men would seem
impossibilities; and then his intensely practical
side his intense efficiency, his power, his skill,
his patience, his fine earnestness, his mastery
over others, develop his dreams into realities.
He dreams dreams and sees visions--but his
visions are never visionary and his dreams
become facts.
The rocky hills which meant a dogged struggle
for very existence, the fugitive slaves, John Brown
--what a school for youth! And the literal school
was a tiny one-room school-house where young
Conwell came under the care of a teacher who
realized the boy's unusual capabilities and was
able to give him broad and unusual help. Then
a wise country preacher also recognized the
unusual, and urged the parents to give still more
education, whereupon supreme effort was made
and young Russell was sent to Wilbraham Academy.
He likes to tell of his life there, and of the
hardships, of which he makes light; and of the
joy with which week-end pies and cakes were
received from home!
He tells of how he went out on the roads selling
books from house to house, and of how eagerly
he devoured the contents of the sample books that
he carried. ``They were a foundation of learning
for me,'' he says, soberly. ``And they gave me a
broad idea of the world.''
He went to Yale in 1860, but the outbreak of
the war interfered with college, and he enlisted in
1861. But he was only eighteen, and his father
objected, and he went back to Yale. But next
year he again enlisted, and men of his Berkshire
neighborhood, likewise enlisting, insisted that he
be their captain; and Governor Andrews, appealed
to, consented to commission the nineteen-yearold
youth who was so evidently a natural leader;
and the men gave freely of their scant money to
get for him a sword, all gay and splendid with
gilt, and upon the sword was the declaration in
stately Latin that, ``True friendship is eternal.''
And with that sword is associated the most
vivid, the most momentous experience of Russell
Conwell's life.
That sword hangs at the head of Conwell's
bed in his home in Philadelphia. Man of peace
that he is, and minister of peace, that symbol of
war has for over half a century been of infinite
importance to him.
He told me the story as we stood together before
that sword. And as he told the story, speaking
with quiet repression, but seeing it all and living
it all just as vividly as if it had occurred but
yesterday, ``That sword has meant so much to me,''
he murmured; and then he began the tale:
``A boy up there in the Berkshires, a neighbor's
son, was John Ring; I call him a boy, for we all
called him a boy, and we looked upon him as a
boy, for he was under-sized and under-developed--
so much so that he could not enlist.
``But for some reason he was devoted to me,
and he not only wanted to enlist, but he also
wanted to be in the artillery company of which I
was captain; and I could only take him along as
my servant. I didn't want a servant, but it was
the only way to take poor little Johnnie Ring.
``Johnnie was deeply religious, and would read
the Bible every evening before turning in. In
those days I was an atheist, or at least thought I
was, and I used to laugh at Ring, and after a while
he took to reading the Bible outside the tent on
account of my laughing at him! But he did not
stop reading it, and his faithfulness to me remained
unchanged.
``The scabbard of the sword was too glittering
for the regulations''--the ghost of a smile hovered
on Conwell's lips--``and I could not wear it, and
could only wear a plain one for service and keep
this hanging in my tent on the tent-pole. John
Ring used to handle it adoringly, and kept it
polished to brilliancy.--It's dull enough these
many years,'' he added, somberly. ``To Ring
it represented not only his captain, but the very
glory and pomp of war.
``One day the Confederates suddenly stormed
our position near New Berne and swept through
the camp, driving our entire force before them;
and all, including my company, retreated hurriedly
across the river, setting fire to a long wooden
bridge as we went over. It soon blazed up furiously,
making a barrier that the Confederates
could not pass.
``But, unknown to everybody, and unnoticed,
John Ring had dashed back to my tent. I think
he was able to make his way back because he just
looked like a mere boy; but however that was, he
got past the Confederates into my tent and took
down, from where it was hanging on the tentpole,
my bright, gold-scabbarded sword.
``John Ring seized the sword that had long been
so precious to him. He dodged here and there,
and actually managed to gain the bridge just as it
was beginning to blaze. He started across. The
flames were every moment getting fiercer, the
smoke denser, and now and then, as he crawled
and staggered on, he leaned for a few seconds far
over the edge of the bridge in an effort to get air.
Both sides saw him; both sides watched his
terrible progress, even while firing was fiercely
kept up from each side of the river. And then
a Confederate officer--he was one of General
Pickett's officers--ran to the water's edge
and waved a white handkerchief and the firing
ceased.
`` `Tell that boy to come back here!' he cried.
`Tell him to come back here and we will let him
go free!'
``He called this out just as Ring was about to
enter upon the worst part of the bridge--the covered
part, where there were top and bottom and
sides of blazing wood. The roar of the flames
was so close to Ring that he could not hear the
calls from either side of the river, and he pushed
desperately on and disappeared in the covered
part.
``There was dead silence except for the crackling
of the fire. Not a man cried out. All waited in
hopeless expectancy. And then came a mighty
yell from Northerner and Southerner alike, for
Johnnie came crawling out of the end of the covered
way--he had actually passed through that
frightful place--and his clothes were ablaze, and
he toppled over and fell into shallow water; and
in a few moments he was dragged out, unconscious,
and hurried to a hospital.
``He lingered for a day or so, still unconscious,
and then came to himself and smiled a little as
he found that the sword for which he had given
his life had been left beside him. He took it in
his arms. He hugged it to his breast. He gave
a few words of final message for me. And that
was all.''
Conwell's voice had gone thrillingly low as he
neared the end, for it was all so very, very vivid to
him, and his eyes had grown tender and his lips
more strong and firm. And he fell silent, thinking
of that long-ago happening, and though he looked
down upon the thronging traffic of Broad Street,
it was clear that he did not see it, and that if
the rumbling hubbub of sound meant anything to
him it was the rumbling of the guns of the distant
past. When he spoke again it was with a still
tenser tone of feeling.
``When I stood beside the body of John Ring
and realized that he had died for love of me, I
made a vow that has formed my life. I vowed
that from that moment I would live not only my
own life, but that I would also live the life of John
Ring. And from that moment I have worked sixteen
hours every day--eight for John Ring's work
and eight hours for my own.''
A curious note had come into his voice, as of
one who had run the race and neared the goal,
fought the good fight and neared the end.
``Every morning when I rise I look at this sword,
or if I am away from home I think of the sword,
and vow anew that another day shall see sixteen
hours of work from me.'' And when one comes
to know Russell Conwell one realizes that never
did a man work more hard and constantly,
``It was through John Ring and his giving his
life through devotion to me that I became a
Christian,'' he went on. ``This did not come
about immediately, but it came before the war
was over, and it came through faithful Johnnie
Ring.''
There is a little lonely cemetery in the
Berkshires, a tiny burying-ground on a wind-swept
hill, a few miles from Conwell's old home. In
this isolated burying-ground bushes and vines and
grass grow in profusion, and a few trees cast a
gentle shade; and tree-clad hills go billowing off
for miles and miles in wild and lonely beauty.
And in that lonely little graveyard I found the
plain stone that marks the resting-place of John
Ring.
II
THE BEGINNING AT OLD LEXINGTON
IT is not because he is a minister that Russell
Conwell is such a force in the world. He
went into the ministry because he was sincerely
and profoundly a Christian, and because he felt
that as a minister he could do more good in the
world than in any other capacity. But being a
minister is but an incident, so to speak. The
important thing is not that he is a minister, but that
he is himself!
Recently I heard a New-Yorker, the head of
a great corporation, say: ``I believe that Russell
Conwell is doing more good in the world than any
man who has lived since Jesus Christ.'' And
he said this in serious and unexaggerated earnest.
Yet Conwell did not get readily into his lifework.
He might have seemed almost a failure
until he was well on toward forty, for although he
kept making successes they were not permanent
successes, and he did not settle himself into a
definite line. He restlessly went westward to
make his home, and then restlessly returned to
the East. After the war was over he was a lawyer,
he was a lecturer, he was an editor, he went around
the world as a correspondent, he wrote books.
He kept making money, and kept losing it; he lost
it through fire, through investments, through aiding
his friends. It is probable that the unsettledness
of the years following the war was due to the
unsettling effect of the war itself, which thus, in
its influence, broke into his mature life after
breaking into his years at Yale. But however that
may be, those seething, changing, stirring years
were years of vital importance to him, for in the
myriad experiences of that time he was building
the foundation of the Conwell that was to come.
Abroad he met the notables of the earth. At
home he made hosts of friends and loyal admirers.
It is worth while noting that as a lawyer he
would never take a case, either civil or criminal,
that he considered wrong. It was basic with him
that he could not and would not fight on what
he thought was the wrong side. Only when his
client was right would he go ahead!
Yet he laughs, his quiet, infectious, characteristic
laugh, as he tells of how once he was deceived,
for he defended a man, charged with stealing a
watch, who was so obviously innocent that he
took the case in a blaze of indignation and had
the young fellow proudly exonerated. The next
day the wrongly accused one came to his office
and shamefacedly took out the watch that he
had been charged with stealing. ``I want you to
send it to the man I took it from,'' he said. And
he told with a sort of shamefaced pride of how
he had got a good old deacon to give, in all
sincerity, the evidence that exculpated him. ``And,
say, Mr. Conwell--I want to thank you for
getting me off--and I hope you'll excuse my
deceiving you--and--I won't be any worse for not
going to jail.'' And Conwell likes to remember
that thereafter the young man lived up to the
pride of exoneration; and, though Conwell does
not say it or think it, one knows that it was the
Conwell influence that inspired to honesty--for
always he is an inspirer.
Conwell even kept certain hours for consultation
with those too poor to pay any fee; and at
one time, while still an active lawyer, he was
guardian for over sixty children! The man has
always been a marvel, and always one is coming
upon such romantic facts as these.
That is a curious thing about him--how much
there is of romance in his life! Worshiped to the
end by John Ring; left for dead all night at
Kenesaw Mountain; calmly singing ``Nearer, my
God, to Thee,'' to quiet the passengers on a
supposedly sinking ship; saving lives even when a
boy; never disappointing a single audience of the
thousands of audiences he has arranged to address
during all his years of lecturing! He himself takes
a little pride in this last point, and it is characteristic
of him that he has actually forgotten that
just once he did fail to appear: he has quite
forgotten that one evening, on his way to a lecture,
he stopped a runaway horse to save two
women's lives, and went in consequence to a hospital
instead of to the platform! And it is typical
of him to forget that sort of thing.
The emotional temperament of Conwell has always
made him responsive to the great, the striking,
the patriotic. He was deeply influenced by
knowing John Brown, and his brief memories of
Lincoln are intense, though he saw him but three
times in all.
The first time he saw Lincoln was on the night
when the future President delivered the address,
which afterward became so famous, in Cooper
Union, New York. The name of Lincoln was then
scarcely known, and it was by mere chance that
young Conwell happened to be in New York on
that day. But being there, and learning that
Abraham Lincoln from the West was going to
make an address, he went to hear him.
He tells how uncouthly Lincoln was dressed,
even with one trousers-leg higher than the other,
and of how awkward he was, and of how poorly,
at first, he spoke and with what apparent
embarrassment. The chairman of the meeting got
Lincoln a glass of water, and Conwell thought
that it was from a personal desire to help him and
keep him from breaking down. But he loves to
tell how Lincoln became a changed man as he
spoke; how he seemed to feel ashamed of his brief
embarrassment and, pulling himself together and
putting aside the written speech which he had
prepared, spoke freely and powerfully, with splendid
conviction, as only a born orator speaks. To
Conwell it was a tremendous experience.
The second time he saw Lincoln was when
he went to Washington to plead for the life of one
of his men who had been condemned to death
for sleeping on post. He was still but a captain
(his promotion to a colonelcy was still to come),
a youth, and was awed by going into the presence
of the man he worshiped. And his voice trembles
a little, even now, as he tells of how pleasantly
Lincoln looked up from his desk, and how cheerfully
he asked his business with him, and of how
absorbedly Lincoln then listened to his tale,
although, so it appeared, he already knew of the
main outline.
``It will be all right,'' said Lincoln, when
Conwell finished. But Conwell was still frightened.
He feared that in the multiplicity of public matters
this mere matter of the life of a mountain
boy, a private soldier, might be forgotten till too
late. ``It is almost the time set--'' he faltered.
And Conwell's voice almost breaks, man of emotion
that he is, as he tells of how Lincoln said,
with stern gravity: ``Go and telegraph that soldier's
mother that Abraham Lincoln never signed
a warrant to shoot a boy under twenty, and never
will.'' That was the one and only time that he
spoke with Lincoln, and it remains an indelible
impression.
The third time he saw Lincoln was when, as
officer of the day, he stood for hours beside the
dead body of the President as it lay in state in
Washington. In those hours, as he stood rigidly
as the throng went shuffling sorrowfully through,
an immense impression came to Colonel Conwell
of the work and worth of the man who there lay
dead, and that impression has never departed.
John Brown, Abraham Lincoln, old Revolutionary
Lexington--how Conwell's life is associated
with famous men and places!--and it was
actually at Lexington that he made the crucial
decision as to the course of his life! And it seems
to me that it was, although quite unconsciously,
because of the very fact that it was Lexington that
Conwell was influenced to decide and to act as
he did. Had it been in some other kind of place,
some merely ordinary place, some quite usual
place, he might not have taken the important
step. But it was Lexington, it was brave old
Lexington, inspiring Lexington; and he was
inspired by it, for the man who himself inspires
nobly is always the one who is himself open to
noble inspiration. Lexington inspired him.
``When I was a lawyer in Boston and almost
thirty-seven years old,'' he told me, thinking
slowly back into the years, ``I was consulted by
a woman who asked my advice in regard to
disposing of a little church in Lexington whose
congregation had become unable to support it. I
went out and looked at the place, and I told her
how the property could be sold. But it seemed a
pity to me that the little church should be given
up. However, I advised a meeting of the church
members, and I attended the meeting. I put the
case to them--it was only a handful of men and
women--and there was silence for a little. Then
an old man rose and, in a quavering voice, said
the matter was quite clear; that there evidently
was nothing to do but to sell, and that he would
agree with the others in the necessity; but as
the church had been his church home from boyhood,
so he quavered and quivered on, he begged
that they would excuse him from actually taking
part in disposing of it; and in a deep silence he
went haltingly from the room.
``The men and the women looked at one another,
still silent, sadly impressed, but not knowing
what to do. And I said to them: `Why not start
over again, and go on with the church, after all!' ''
Typical Conwellism, that! First, the impulse
to help those who need helping, then the inspiration
and leadership.
`` `But the building is entirely too tumbledown
to use,' said one of the men, sadly; and I
knew he was right, for I had examined it; but I
said:
`` `Let us meet there to-morrow morning and
get to work on that building ourselves and put
it in shape for a service next Sunday.'
``It made them seem so pleased and encouraged,
and so confident that a new possibility was
opening that I never doubted that each one of
those present, and many friends besides, would
be at the building in the morning. I was there
early with a hammer and ax and crowbar that I
had secured, ready to go to work--but no one else
showed up!''
He has a rueful appreciation of the humor of
it, as he pictured the scene; and one knows also
that, in that little town of Lexington, where
Americans had so bravely faced the impossible,
Russell Conwell also braced himself to face the
impossible. A pettier man would instantly have
given up the entire matter when those who were
most interested failed to respond, but one of the
strongest features in Conwell's character is his
ability to draw even doubters and weaklings into
line, his ability to stir even those who have
given up.
``I looked over that building,'' he goes on,
whimsically, ``and I saw that repair really seemed
out of the question. Nothing but a new church
would do! So I took the ax that I had brought
with me and began chopping the place down.
In a little while a man, not one of the church
members, came along, and he watched me for a
time and said, `What are you going to do there?'
``And I instantly replied, `Tear down this old
building and build a new church here!'
``He looked at me. `But the people won't
do that,' he said.
`` `Yes, they will,' I said, cheerfully, keeping at
my work. Whereupon he watched me a few minutes
longer and said:
`` `Well, you can put me down for one hundred
dollars for the new building. Come up to my
livery-stable and get it this evening.'
`` `All right; I'll surely be there,' I replied.
``In a little while another man came along and
stopped and looked, and he rather gibed at the
idea of a new church, and when I told him of the
livery-stable man contributing one hundred dollars,
he said, `But you haven't got the money yet!'
`` `No,' I said; `but I am going to get it to-night.'
`` `You'll never get it,' he said. `He's not that
sort of a man. He's not even a church man!'
``But I just went quietly on with the work,
without answering, and after quite a while he
left; but he called back, as he went off, `Well, if
he does give you that hundred dollars, come to
me and I'll give you another hundred.' ''
Conwell smiles in genial reminiscence and without
any apparent sense that he is telling of a great
personal triumph, and goes on:
``Those two men both paid the money, and of
course the church people themselves, who at first
had not quite understood that I could be in earnest,
joined in and helped, with work and money,
and as, while the new church was building, it was
peculiarly important to get and keep the congregation
together, and as they had ceased to have
a minister of their own, I used to run out from
Boston and preach for them, in a room we hired.
``And it was there in Lexington, in 1879, that
I determined to become a minister. I had a good
law practice, but I determined to give it up. For
many years I had felt more or less of a call to
the ministry, and here at length was the definite
time to begin.
``Week by week I preached there''--how
strange, now, to think of William Dean Howells
and the colonel-preacher!--``and after a while
the church was completed, and in that very
church, there in Lexington, I was ordained a
minister.''
A marvelous thing, all this, even without
considering the marvelous heights that Conwell has
since attained--a marvelous thing, an achievement
of positive romance! That little church
stood for American bravery and initiative and
self-sacrifice and romanticism in a way that well
befitted good old Lexington.
To leave a large and overflowing law practice
and take up the ministry at a salary of six hundred
dollars a year seemed to the relatives of Conwell's
wife the extreme of foolishness, and they did not
hesitate so to express themselves. Naturally
enough, they did not have Conwell's vision. Yet
he himself was fair enough to realize and to admit
that there was a good deal of fairness in their
objections; and so he said to the congregation
that, although he was quite ready to come for
the six hundred dollars a year, he expected them
to double his salary as soon as he doubled the
church membership. This seemed to them a
good deal like a joke, but they answered in perfect
earnestness that they would be quite willing to
do the doubling as soon as he did the doubling,
and in less than a year the salary was doubled
accordingly.
I asked him if he had found it hard to give up
the lucrative law for a poor ministry, and his
reply gave a delightful impression of his capacity
for humorous insight into human nature, for he
said, with a genial twinkle:
``Oh yes, it was a wrench; but there is a sort
of romance of self-sacrifice, you know. I rather
suppose the old-time martyrs rather enjoyed themselves
in being martyrs!''
Conwell did not stay very long in Lexington.
A struggling little church in Philadelphia heard
of what he was doing, and so an old deacon went
up to see and hear him, and an invitation was
given; and as the Lexington church seemed to
be prosperously on its feet, and the needs of the
Philadelphia body keenly appealed to Conwell's
imagination, a change was made, and at a salary
of eight hundred dollars a year he went, in 1882,
to the little struggling Philadelphia congregation,
and of that congregation he is still pastor--only,
it ceased to be a struggling congregation a great
many years ago! And long ago it began paying
him more thousands every year than at first it
gave him hundreds.
Dreamer as Conwell always is in connection
with his immense practicality, and moved as he
is by the spiritual influences of life, it is more than
likely that not only did Philadelphia's need appeal,
but also the fact that Philadelphia, as a city,
meant much to him, for, coming North, wounded
from a battle-field of the Civil War, it was in
Philadelphia that he was cared for until his health
and strength were recovered. Thus it came that
Philadelphia had early become dear to him.
And here is an excellent example of how dreaming
great dreams may go hand-in-hand with winning
superb results. For that little struggling
congregation now owns and occupies a great
new church building that seats more people than
any other Protestant church in America--and
Dr. Conwell fills it!
III
STORY OF THE FIFTY-SEVEN CENTS
AT every point in Conwell's life one sees that
he wins through his wonderful personal influence
on old and young. Every step forward,
every triumph achieved, comes not alone from
his own enthusiasm, but because of his putting
that enthusiasm into others. And when I learned
how it came about that the present church buildings
were begun, it was another of those marvelous
tales of fact that are stranger than any imagination
could make them. And yet the tale was so
simple and sweet and sad and unpretending.
When Dr. Conwell first assumed charge of the
little congregation that led him to Philadelphia
it was really a little church both in its numbers
and in the size of the building that it occupied,
but it quickly became so popular under his
leadership that the church services and Sundayschool
services were alike so crowded that there
was no room for all who came, and always there
were people turned from the doors.
One afternoon a little girl, who had eagerly
wished to go, turned back from the Sunday-school
door, crying bitterly because they had told her
that there was no more room. But a tall, blackhaired
man met her and noticed her tears and,
stopping, asked why it was that she was crying,
and she sobbingly replied that it was because
they could not let her into the Sunday-school.
``I lifted her to my shoulder,'' says Dr. Conwell,
in telling of this; for after hearing the story
elsewhere I asked him to tell it to me himself,
for it seemed almost too strange to be true.
``I lifted her to my shoulder''--and one realizes
the pretty scene it must have made for the little
girl to go through the crowd of people, drying
her tears and riding proudly on the shoulders of
the kindly, tall, dark man! ``I said to her that
I would take her in, and I did so, and I said to
her that we should some day have a room big
enough for all who should come. And when she
went home she told her parents--I only learned
this afterward--that she was going to save money
to help build the larger church and Sunday-school
that Dr. Conwell wanted! Her parents pleasantly
humored her in the idea and let her run errands
and do little tasks to earn pennies, and she began
dropping the pennies into her bank.
``She was a lovable little thing--but in only a
few weeks after that she was taken suddenly ill
and died; and at the funeral her father told me,
quietly, of how his little girl had been saving money
for a building-fund. And there, at the funeral,
he handed me what she had saved--just fiftyseven
cents in pennies.''
Dr. Conwell does not say how deeply he was
moved; he is, after all, a man of very few words
as to his own emotions. But a deep tenderness
had crept into his voice.
``At a meeting of the church trustees I told of
this gift of fifty-seven cents--the first gift toward
the proposed building-fund of the new church that
was some time to exist. For until then the matter
had barely been spoken of, as a new church building
had been simply a possibility for the future.
``The trustees seemed much impressed, and it
turned out that they were far more impressed
than I could possibly have hoped, for in a few
days one of them came to me and said that he
thought it would be an excellent idea to buy a
lot on Broad Street--the very lot on which the
building now stands.'' It was characteristic of
Dr. Conwell that he did not point out, what every
one who knows him would understand, that it was
his own inspiration put into the trustees which
resulted in this quick and definite move on the
part of one of them. ``I talked the matter over
with the owner of the property, and told him of
the beginning of the fund, the story of the little
girl. The man was not one of our church, nor
in fact, was he a church-goer at all, but he listened
attentively to the tale of the fifty-seven cents
and simply said he was quite ready to go ahead
and sell us that piece of land for ten thousand
dollars, taking--and the unexpectedness of this
deeply touched me taking a first payment of just
fifty-seven cents and letting the entire balance
stand on a five-per-cent. mortgage!
``And it seemed to me that it would be the
right thing to accept this unexpectedly liberal
proposition, and I went over the entire matter
on that basis with the trustees and some of the
other members, and all the people were soon
talking of having a new church. But it was not
done in that way, after all, for, fine though that
way would have been, there was to be one still
finer.
``Not long after my talk with the man who
owned the land, and his surprisingly good-hearted
proposition, an exchange was arranged for me one
evening with a Mount Holly church, and my wife
went with me. We came back late, and it was
cold and wet and miserable, but as we approached
our home we saw that it was all lighted from
top to bottom, and it was clear that it was full
of people. I said to my wife that they seemed to
be having a better time than we had had, and we
went in, curious to know what it was all about.
And it turned out that our absence had been
intentionally arranged, and that the church people
had gathered at our home to meet us on our return.
And I was utterly amazed, for the spokesman
told me that the entire ten thousand dollars
had been raised and that the land for the church
that I wanted was free of debt. And all had come
so quickly and directly from that dear little girl's
fifty-seven cents.''
Doesn't it seem like a fairy tale! But then this
man has all his life been making fairy tales into
realities. He inspired the child. He inspired the
trustees. He inspired the owner of the land. He
inspired the people.
The building of the great church--the Temple
Baptist Church, as it is termed--was a great
undertaking for the congregation; even though
it had been swiftly growing from the day of Dr.
Conwell's taking charge of it, it was something
far ahead of what, except in the eyes of an enthusiast,
they could possibly complete and pay for
and support. Nor was it an easy task.
Ground was broken for the building in 1889,
in 1891 it was opened for worship, and then
came years of raising money to clear it. But it
was long ago placed completely out of debt, and
with only a single large subscription--one of ten
thousand dollars--for the church is not in a
wealthy neighborhood, nor is the congregation
made up of the great and rich.
The church is built of stone, and its interior
is a great amphitheater. Special attention has
been given to fresh air and light; there is nothing
of the dim, religious light that goes with medieval
churchliness. Behind the pulpit are tiers of seats
for the great chorus choir. There is a large organ.
The building is peculiarly adapted for hearing
and seeing, and if it is not, strictly speaking,
beautiful in itself, it is beautiful when it is filled
with encircling rows of men and women.
Man of feeling that he is, and one who
appreciates the importance of symbols, Dr. Conwell
had a heart of olive-wood built into the front of the
pulpit, for the wood was from an olive-tree in the
Garden of Gethsemane. And the amber-colored
tiles in the inner walls of the church bear, under
the glaze, the names of thousands of his people;
for every one, young or old, who helped in the
building, even to the giving of a single dollar, has
his name inscribed there. For Dr. Conwell wished
to show that it is not only the house of the Lord,
but also, in a keenly personal sense, the house of
those who built it.
The church has a possible seating capacity of
4,200, although only 3,135 chairs have been put
in it, for it has been the desire not to crowd the
space needlessly. There is also a great room for
the Sunday-school, and extensive rooms for the
young men's association, the young women's
association, and for a kitchen, for executive offices,
for meeting-places for church officers and boards
and committees. It is a spacious and practical
and complete church home, and the people feel
at home there.
``You see again,'' said Dr. Conwell, musingly,
``the advantage of aiming at big things. That
building represents $109,000 above ground. It
is free from debt. Had we built a small church, it
would now be heavily mortgaged.''
IV
HIS POWER AS ORATOR AND PREACHER
EVEN as a young man Conwell won local fame
as an orator. At the outbreak of the Civil
War he began making patriotic speeches that
gained enlistments. After going to the front he
was sent back home for a time, on furlough, to
make more speeches to draw more recruits, for his
speeches were so persuasive, so powerful, so full
of homely and patriotic feeling, that the men who
heard them thronged into the ranks. And as a
preacher he uses persuasion, power, simple and
homely eloquence, to draw men to the ranks of
Christianity.
He is an orator born, and has developed this
inborn power by the hardest of study and thought
and practice. He is one of those rare men who
always seize and hold the attention. When he
speaks, men listen. It is quality, temperament,
control--the word is immaterial, but the fact is
very material indeed.
Some quarter of a century ago Conwell published
a little book for students on the study and practice
of oratory. That ``clear-cut articulation is the
charm of eloquence'' is one of his insisted-upon
statements, and it well illustrates the lifelong
practice of the man himself, for every word as
he talks can be heard in every part of a large building,
yet always he speaks without apparent effort.
He avoids ``elocution.'' His voice is soft-pitched
and never breaks, even now when he is over
seventy, because, so he explains it, he always
speaks in his natural voice. There is never a
straining after effect.
``A speaker must possess a large-hearted regard
for the welfare of his audience,'' he writes, and
here again we see Conwell explaining Conwellism.
``Enthusiasm invites enthusiasm,'' is another of his
points of importance; and one understands that
it is by deliberate purpose, and not by chance,
that he tries with such tremendous effort to put
enthusiasm into his hearers with every sermon
and every lecture that he delivers.
``It is easy to raise a laugh, but dangerous, for
it is the greatest test of an orator's control of his
audience to be able to land them again on the
solid earth of sober thinking.'' I have known
him at the very end of a sermon have a ripple of
laughter sweep freely over the entire congregation,
and then in a moment he has every individual
under his control, listening soberly to his words.
He never fears to use humor, and it is always
very simple and obvious and effective. With him
even a very simple pun may be used, not only without
taking away from the strength of what he is
saying, but with a vivid increase of impressiveness.
And when he says something funny it is
in such a delightful and confidential way, with
such a genial, quiet, infectious humorousness, that
his audience is captivated. And they never think
that he is telling something funny of his own;
it seems, such is the skill of the man, that he is
just letting them know of something humorous
that they are to enjoy with him.
``Be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear,''
he writes; and with delightfully terse common
sense, he says, ``Use illustrations that illustrate''--
and never did an orator live up to this injunction
more than does Conwell himself. Nothing is more
surprising, nothing is more interesting, than the
way in which he makes use as illustrations of the
impressions and incidents of his long and varied
life, and, whatever it is, it has direct and instant
bearing on the progress of his discourse. He will
refer to something that he heard a child say in a
train yesterday; in a few minutes he will speak
of something that he saw or some one whom he
met last month, or last year, or ten years ago--
in Ohio, in California, in London, in Paris, in
New York, in Bombay; and each memory, each
illustration, is a hammer with which he drives
home a truth.
The vast number of places he has visited and
people he has met, the infinite variety of things his
observant eyes have seen, give him his ceaseless
flow of illustrations, and his memory and his
skill make admirable use of them. It is seldom
that he uses an illustration from what he has
read; everything is, characteristically, his own.
Henry M. Stanley, who knew him well, referred
to him as ``that double-sighted Yankee,'' who
could ``see at a glance all there is and all there
ever was.''
And never was there a man who so supplements
with personal reminiscence the place or the person
that has figured in the illustration. When
he illustrates with the story of the discovery of
California gold at Sutter's he almost parenthetically
remarks, ``I delivered this lecture on that
very spot a few years ago; that is, in the town
that arose on that very spot.'' And when he
illustrates by the story of the invention of the
sewing-machine, he adds: ``I suppose that if any
of you were asked who was the inventor of the
sewing-machine, you would say that it was Elias
Howe. But that would be a mistake. I was
with Elias Howe in the Civil War, and he often
used to tell me how he had tried for fourteen years
to invent the sewing-machine and that then his
wife, feeling that something really had to be done,
invented it in a couple of hours.'' Listening to
him, you begin to feel in touch with everybody
and everything, and in a friendly and intimate
way.
Always, whether in the pulpit or on the platform,
as in private conversation, there is an absolute
simplicity about the man and his words; a
simplicity, an earnestness, a complete honesty. And
when he sets down, in his book on oratory, ``A
man has no right to use words carelessly,'' he
stands for that respect for word-craftsmanship
that every successful speaker or writer must feel.
``Be intensely in earnest,'' he writes; and in
writing this he sets down a prime principle not
only of his oratory, but of his life.
A young minister told me that Dr. Conwell
once said to him, with deep feeling, ``Always
remember, as you preach, that you are striving to
save at least one soul with every sermon.'' And
to one of his close friends Dr. Conwell said, in
one of his self-revealing conversations:
``I feel, whenever I preach, that there is always
one person in the congregation to whom, in all
probability, I shall never preach again, and
therefore I feel that I must exert my utmost power
in that last chance.'' And in this, even if this were
all, one sees why each of his sermons is so
impressive, and why his energy never lags. Always,
with him, is the feeling that he is in the world to
do all the good he can possibly do; not a moment,
not an opportunity, must be lost.
The moment he rises and steps to the front
of his pulpit he has the attention of every one in
the building, and this attention he closely holds
till he is through. Yet it is never by a striking
effort that attention is gained, except in so far
that his utter simplicity is striking. ``I want
to preach so simply that you will not think it
preaching, but just that you are listening to a
friend,'' I remember his saying, one Sunday morning,
as he began his sermon; and then he went on
just as simply as such homely, kindly, friendly
words promised. And how effectively!
He believes that everything should be so put
as to be understood by all, and this belief he
applies not only to his preaching, but to the
reading of the Bible, whose descriptions he not only
visualizes to himself, but makes vividly clear to his
hearers; and this often makes for fascination in
result.
For example, he is reading the tenth chapter of
I Samuel, and begins, `` `Thou shalt meet a company
of prophets.' ''
`` `Singers,' it should be translated,'' he puts in,
lifting his eyes from the page and looking out over
his people. Then he goes on, taking this change as
a matter of course, `` `Thou shalt meet a company
of singers coming down from the high place--' ''
Whereupon he again interrupts himself, and
in an irresistible explanatory aside, which instantly
raises the desired picture in the mind of every
one, he says: ``That means, from the little old
church on the hill, you know.'' And how plain
and clear and real and interesting--most of all,
interesting--it is from this moment! Another
man would have left it that prophets were coming
down from a high place, which would not have
seemed at all alive or natural, and here, suddenly,
Conwell has flashed his picture of the singers
coming down from the little old church on the
hill! There is magic in doing that sort of thing.
And he goes on, now reading: `` `Thou shalt
meet a company of singers coming down from
the little old church on the hill, with a psaltery,
and a tabret, and a pipe, and a harp, and they
shall sing.' ''
Music is one of Conwell's strongest aids. He
sings himself; sings as if he likes to sing, and often
finds himself leading the singing--usually so,
indeed, at the prayer-meetings, and often, in
effect, at the church services.
I remember at one church service that the
choir-leader was standing in front of the massed
choir ostensibly leading the singing, but that
Conwell himself, standing at the rear of the
pulpit platform, with his eyes on his hymn-book,
silently swaying a little with the music and
unconsciously beating time as he swayed, was just
as unconsciously the real leader, for it was he
whom the congregation were watching and with
him that they were keeping time! He never
suspected it; he was merely thinking along with
the music; and there was such a look of
contagious happiness on his face as made every one
in the building similarly happy. For he possesses
a mysterious faculty of imbuing others with his
own happiness.
Not only singers, but the modern equivalent
of psaltery and tabret and cymbals, all have their
place in Dr. Conwell's scheme of church service;
for there may be a piano, and there may even be
a trombone, and there is a great organ to help
the voices, and at times there are chiming bells.
His musical taste seems to tend toward the
thunderous--or perhaps it is only that he knows
there are times when people like to hear the
thunderous and are moved by it.
And how the choir themselves like it! They
occupy a great curving space behind the pulpit,
and put their hearts into song. And as the
congregation disperse and the choir filter down,
sometimes they are still singing and some of them
continue to sing as they go slowly out toward the
doors. They are happy--Conwell himself is
happy--all the congregation are happy. He makes
everybody feel happy in coming to church; he
makes the church attractive just as Howells was
so long ago told that he did in Lexington.
And there is something more than happiness;
there is a sense of ease, of comfort, of general joy,
that is quite unmistakable. There is nothing of
stiffness or constraint. And with it all there is
full reverence. It is no wonder that he is
accustomed to fill every seat of the great building.
His gestures are usually very simple. Now and
then, when he works up to emphasis, he strikes
one fist in the palm of the other hand. When he
is through you do not remember that he has made
any gestures at all, but the sound of his voice
remains with you, and the look of his wonderful
eyes. And though he is past the threescore years
and ten, he looks out over his people with eyes that
still have the veritable look of youth.
Like all great men, he not only does big things,
but keeps in touch with myriad details. When
his assistant, announcing the funeral of an old
member, hesitates about the street and number
and says that they can be found in the telephone
directory, Dr. Conwell's deep voice breaks quietly
in with, ``Such a number [giving it], Dauphin
Street''--quietly, and in a low tone, yet every
one in the church hears distinctly every syllable
of that low voice.
His fund of personal anecdote, or personal
reminiscence, is constant and illustrative in his
preaching, just as it is when he lectures, and the
reminiscences sweep through many years, and at times
are really startling in the vivid and homelike
pictures they present of the famous folk of the
past that he knew.
One Sunday evening he made an almost casual
reference to the time when he first met Garfield,
then a candidate for the Presidency. ``I asked
Major McKinley, whom I had met in Washington,
and whose home was in northern Ohio, as was
that of Mr. Garfield, to go with me to Mr.
Garfield's home and introduce me. When we got
there, a neighbor had to find him. `Jim! Jim!'
he called. You see, Garfield was just plain Jim
to his old neighbors. It's hard to recognize a
hero over your back fence!'' He paused a moment
for the appreciative ripple to subside, and
went on:
``We three talked there together''--what a
rare talking that must have been-McKinley,
Garfield, and Conwell--``we talked together, and
after a while we got to the subject of hymns, and
those two great men both told me how deeply
they loved the old hymn, `The Old-Time Religion.'
Garfield especially loved it, so he told
us, because the good old man who brought him
up as a boy and to whom he owed such gratitude,
used to sing it at the pasture bars outside of the
boy's window every morning, and young Jim
knew, whenever he heard that old tune, that it
meant it was time for him to get up. He said
that he had heard the best concerts and the finest
operas in the world, but had never heard anything
he loved as he still loved `The Old-Time Religion.'
I forget what reason there was for McKinley's
especially liking it, but he, as did Garfield, liked
it immensely.''
What followed was a striking example of Conwell's
intentness on losing no chance to fix an
impression on his hearers' minds, and at the same
time it was a really astonishing proof of his power
to move and sway. For a new expression came
over his face, and he said, as if the idea had only
at that moment occurred to him--as it most
probably had--``I think it's in our hymnal!''
And in a moment he announced the number,
and the great organ struck up, and every person
in the great church every man, woman, and child
--joined in the swinging rhythm of verse after
verse, as if they could never tire, of ``The Old-
Time Religion.'' It is a simple melody--barely
more than a single line of almost monotone
music:
_It was good enough for mother and it's good enough for me!
It was good on the fiery furnace and it's good enough for me!_
Thus it went on, with never-wearying iteration,
and each time with the refrain, more and more
rhythmic and swaying:
_The old-time religion,
The old-time religion,
The old-time religion--
It's good enough for me!_
That it was good for the Hebrew children, that
it was good for Paul and Silas, that it will help
you when you're dying, that it will show the way
to heaven--all these and still other lines were
sung, with a sort of wailing softness, a curious
monotone, a depth of earnestness. And the man
who had worked this miracle of control by evoking
out of the past his memory of a meeting with two
of the vanished great ones of the earth, stood
before his people, leading them, singing with them,
his eyes aglow with an inward light. His magic
had suddenly set them into the spirit of the old
camp-meeting days, the days of pioneering and
hardship, when religion meant so much to everybody,
and even those who knew nothing of such
things felt them, even if but vaguely. Every
heart was moved and touched, and that old tune
will sing in the memory of all who thus heard it
and sung it as long as they live.
V
GIFT FOR INSPIRING OTHERS
THE constant earnestness of Conwell, his desire
to let no chance slip by of helping a fellowman,
puts often into his voice, when he preaches,
a note of eagerness, of anxiety. But when he
prays, when he turns to God, his manner undergoes
a subtle and unconscious change. A load
has slipped off his shoulders and has been assumed
by a higher power. Into his bearing, dignified
though it was, there comes an unconscious
increase of the dignity. Into his voice, firm as it
was before, there comes a deeper note of firmness.
He is apt to fling his arms widespread as he prays,
in a fine gesture that he never uses at other times,
and he looks upward with the dignity of a man
who, talking to a higher being, is proud of being
a friend and confidant. One does not need to be
a Christian to appreciate the beauty and fineness
of Conwell's prayers.
He is likely at any time to do the unexpected,
and he is so great a man and has such control
that whatever he does seems to everybody a perfectly
natural thing. His sincerity is so evident,
and whatever he does is done so simply and naturally,
that it is just a matter of course.
I remember, during one church service, while
the singing was going on, that he suddenly rose
from his chair and, kneeling beside it, on the open
pulpit, with his back to the congregation, remained
in that posture for several minutes. No one
thought it strange. I was likely enough the only
one who noticed it. His people are used to his
sincerities. And this time it was merely that he
had a few words to say quietly to God and turned
aside for a few moments to say them.
His earnestness of belief in prayer makes him
a firm believer in answers to prayer, and, in fact,
to what may be termed the direct interposition of
Providence. Doubtless the mystic strain inherited
from his mother has also much to do with this.
He has a typically homely way of expressing it
by one of his favorite maxims, one that he loves
to repeat encouragingly to friends who are in
difficulties themselves or who know of the difficulties
that are his; and this heartening maxim is,
``Trust in God and do the next thing.''
At one time in the early days of his church
work in Philadelphia a payment of a thousand
dollars was absolutely needed to prevent a lawsuit
in regard to a debt for the church organ.
In fact, it was worse than a debt; it was a note
signed by himself personally, that had become
due--he was always ready to assume personal
liability for debts of his church--and failure to
meet the note would mean a measure of disgrace
as well as marked church discouragement.
He had tried all the sources that seemed open
to him, but in vain. He could not openly appeal
to the church members, in this case, for it was
in the early days of his pastorate, and his zeal
for the organ, his desire and determination to
have it, as a necessary part of church equipment,
had outrun the judgment of some of his best
friends, including that of the deacon who had
gone to Massachusetts for him. They had urged a
delay till other expenses were met, and he had
acted against their advice.
He had tried such friends as he could, and he
had tried prayer. But there was no sign of aid,
whether supernatural or natural.
And then, literally on the very day on which
the holder of the note was to begin proceedings
against him, a check for precisely the needed one
thousand dollars came to him, by mail, from a
man in the West--a man who was a total stranger
to him. It turned out that the man's sister,
who was one of the Temple membership, had
written to her brother of Dr. Conwell's work.
She knew nothing of any special need for money,
knew nothing whatever of any note or of the
demand for a thousand dollars; she merely
outlined to her brother what Dr. Conwell was
accomplishing, and with such enthusiasm that the
brother at once sent the opportune check.
At a later time the sum of ten thousand dollars
was importunately needed. It was due, payment
had been promised. It was for some of the
construction work of the Temple University
buildings. The last day had come, and Conwell and
the very few who knew of the emergency were
in the depths of gloom. It was too large a sum to
ask the church people to make up, for they were
not rich and they had already been giving splendidly,
of their slender means, for the church and
then for the university. There was no rich man
to turn to; the men famous for enormous charitable
gifts have never let themselves be interested
in any of the work of Russell Conwell. It would
be unkind and gratuitous to suggest that it has
been because their names could not be personally
attached, or because the work is of an unpretentious
kind among unpretentious people; it need
merely be said that neither they nor their agents
have cared to aid, except that one of the very
richest, whose name is the most distinguished in
the entire world as a giver, did once, in response to
a strong personal application, give thirty-five
hundred dollars, this being the extent of the
association of the wealthy with any of the varied
Conwell work.
So when it was absolutely necessary to have
ten thousand dollars the possibilities of money
had been exhausted, whether from congregation
or individuals.
Russell Conwell, in spite of his superb optimism,
is also a man of deep depressions, and this is
because of the very fire and fervor of his nature, for
always in such a nature there is a balancing. He
believes in success; success must come!--success
is in itself almost a religion with him--success
for himself and for all the world who will try for
it! But there are times when he is sad and doubtful
over some particular possibility. And he intensely
believes in prayer--faith can move mountains;
but always he believes that it is better
not to wait for the mountains thus to be moved,
but to go right out and get to work at moving
them. And once in a while there comes a time
when the mountain looms too threatening, even
after the bravest efforts and the deepest trust.
Such a time had come--the ten-thousand-dollar
debt was a looming mountain that he had tried
in vain to move. He could still pray, and he did,
but it was one of the times when he could only
think that something had gone wrong.
The dean of the university, who has been
closely in touch with all his work for many years,
told me of how, in a discouragement which was
the more notable through contrast with his usual
unfailing courage, he left the executive offices
for his home, a couple of blocks away
``He went away with everything looking dark
before him. It was Christmas-time, but the very
fact of its being Christmas only added to his
depression--Christmas was such an unnatural
time for unhappiness! But in a few minutes he
came flying back, radiant, overjoyed, sparkling
with happiness, waving a slip of paper in his hand
which was a check for precisely ten thousand
dollars! For he had just drawn it out of an
envelope handed to him, as he reached home, by
the mail-carrier.
``And it had come so strangely and so naturally!
For the check was from a woman who was profoundly
interested in his work, and who had sent
the check knowing that in a general way it was
needed, but without the least idea that there
was any immediate need. That was eight or nine
years ago, but although the donor was told at
the time that Dr. Conwell and all of us were
most grateful for the gift, it was not until very
recently that she was told how opportune it was.
And the change it made in Dr. Conwell! He is
a great man for maxims, and all of us who are
associated with him know that one of his favorites
is that `It will all come out right some time!'
And of course we had a rare opportunity to tell
him that he ought never to be discouraged. And
it is so seldom that he is!''
When the big new church was building the
members of the church were vaguely disturbed by
noticing, when the structure reached the second
story, that at that height, on the side toward the
vacant and unbought land adjoining, there were
several doors built that opened literally into
nothing but space!
When asked about these doors and their purpose,
Dr. Conwell would make some casual reply,
generally to the effect that they might be excellent
as fire-escapes. To no one, for quite a while, did he
broach even a hint of the great plan that was
seething in his mind, which was that the buildings
of a university were some day to stand on that
land immediately adjoining the church!
At that time the university, the Temple University
as it is now called, was not even a college,
although it was probably called a college. Conwell
had organized it, and it consisted of a number
of classes and teachers, meeting in highly
inadequate quarters in two little houses. But the
imagination of Conwell early pictured great new
buildings with accommodations for thousands! In
time the dream was realized, the imagination
became a fact, and now those second-floor doors
actually open from the Temple Church into the
Temple University!
You see, he always thinks big! He dreams big
dreams and wins big success. All his life he has
talked and preached success, and it is a real and
very practical belief with him that it is just as
easy to do a large thing as a small one, and, in
fact, a little easier! And so he naturally does not
see why one should be satisfied with the small
things of life. ``If your rooms are big the people
will come and fill them,'' he likes to say. The
same effort that wins a small success would,
rightly directed, have won a great success. ``Think
big things and then do them!''
Most favorite of all maxims with this man of
maxims, is ``Let Patience have her perfect work.''
Over and over he loves to say it, and his friends
laugh about his love for it, and he knows that they
do and laughs about it himself. ``I tire them all,''
he says, ``for they hear me say it every day.''
But he says it every day because it means so
much to him. It stands, in his mind, as a constant
warning against anger or impatience or over-haste
--faults to which his impetuous temperament is
prone, though few have ever seen him either
angry or impatient or hasty, so well does he exercise
self-control. Those who have long known
him well have said to me that they have never
heard him censure any one; that his forbearance
and kindness are wonderful.
He is a sensitive man beneath his composure;
he has suffered, and keenly, when he has been
unjustly attacked; he feels pain of that sort for
a long time, too, for even the passing of years
does not entirely deaden it.
``When I have been hurt, or when I have talked
with annoying cranks, I have tried to let Patience
have her perfect work, for those very people, if
you have patience with them, may afterward be
of help.''
And he went on to talk a little of his early
years in Philadelphia, and he said, with sadness,
that it had pained him to meet with opposition,
and that it had even come from ministers of his
own denomination, for he had been so misunderstood
and misjudged; but, he added, the momentary
somberness lifting, even his bitter enemies
had been won over with patience.
I could understand a good deal of what he
meant, for one of the Baptist ministers of
Philadelphia had said to me, with some shame, that
at first it used actually to be the case that when
Dr. Conwell would enter one of the regular ministers'
meetings, all would hold aloof, not a single
one stepping forward to meet or greet him.
``And it was all through our jealousy of his
success,'' said the minister, vehemently. ``He
came to this city a stranger, and he won instant
popularity, and we couldn't stand it, and so we
pounced upon things that he did that were altogether
unimportant. The rest of us were so jealous
of his winning throngs that we couldn't see
the good in him. And it hurt Dr. Conwell so
much that for ten years he did not come to our
conferences. But all this was changed long ago.
Now no minister is so welcomed as he is, and I
don't believe that there ever has been a single
time since he started coming again that he hasn't
been asked to say something to us. We got over
our jealousy long ago and we all love him.''
Nor is it only that the clergymen of his own
denomination admire him, for not long ago,
such having been Dr. Conwell's triumph in the
city of his adoption, the rector of the most powerful
and aristocratic church in Philadelphia voluntarily
paid lofty tribute to his aims and ability,
his work and his personal worth. ``He is an
inspiration to his brothers in the ministry of Jesus
Christ,'' so this Episcopalian rector wrote. ``He
is a friend to all that is good, a foe to all that is
evil, a strength to the weak, a comforter to the
sorrowing, a man of God. These words come from
the heart of one who loves, honors, and reverences
him for his character and his deeds.''
Dr. Conwell did some beautiful and unusual
things in his church, instituted some beautiful and
unusual customs, and one can see how narrow and
hasty criticisms charged him, long ago, with
sensationalism--charges long since forgotten except
through the hurt still felt by Dr. Conwell himself.
``They used to charge me with making a circus
of the church--as if it were possible for me to
make a circus of the church!'' And his tone was
one of grieved amazement after all these years.
But he was original and he was popular, and
therefore there were misunderstanding and jealousy.
His Easter services, for example, years
ago, became widely talked of and eagerly
anticipated because each sermon would be wrought
around some fine symbol; and he would hold in
his hand, in the pulpit, the blue robin's egg, or
the white dove, or the stem of lilies, or whatever
he had chosen as the particular symbol for the
particular sermon, and that symbol would give
him the central thought for his discourse, accented
as it would be by the actual symbol itself in view
of the congregation. The cross lighted by electricity,
to shine down over the baptismal pool, the
little stream of water cascading gently down the
steps of the pool during the baptismal rite, the
roses floating in the pool and his gift of one of them
to each of the baptized as he or she left the water--
all such things did seem, long ago, so unconventional.
Yet his own people recognized the beauty
and poetry of them, and thousands of Bibles in
Philadelphia have a baptismal rose from Dr.
Conwell pressed within the pages.
His constant individuality of mind, his constant
freshness, alertness, brilliancy, warmth, sympathy,
endear him to his congregation, and when he
returns from an absence they bubble and effervesce
over him as if he were some brilliant new preacher
just come to them. He is always new to them.
Were it not that he possesses some remarkable
quality of charm he would long ago have become,
so to speak, an old story, but instead of that he
is to them an always new story, an always entertaining
and delightful story, after all these years.
It is not only that they still throng to hear
him either preach or lecture, though that itself
would be noticeable, but it is the delightful and
delighted spirit with which they do it. Just the
other evening I heard him lecture in his own
church, just after his return from an absence,
and every face beamed happily up at him to welcome
him back, and every one listened as intently
to his every word as if he had never been heard
there before; and when the lecture was over a
huge bouquet of flowers was handed up to him, and
some one embarrassedly said a few words about
its being because he was home again. It was
all as if he had just returned from an absence of
months--and he had been away just five and a
half days!
VI
MILLIONS OF HEARERS
THAT Conwell is not primarily a minister--
that he is a minister because he is a sincere
Christian, but that he is first of all an Abou Ben
Adhem, a man who loves his fellow-men, becomes
more and more apparent as the scope of his lifework
is recognized. One almost comes to think
that his pastorate of a great church is even a
minor matter beside the combined importance of
his educational work, his lecture work, his hospital
work, his work in general as a helper to those who
need help.
For my own part, I should say that he is like
some of the old-time prophets, the strong ones
who found a great deal to attend to in addition
to matters of religion. The power, the ruggedness,
the physical and mental strength, the positive
grandeur of the man--all these are like the general
conceptions of the big Old Testament prophets.
The suggestion is given only because it has
often recurred, and therefore with the feeling that
there is something more than fanciful in the comparison;
and yet, after all, the comparison fails
in one important particular, for none of the
prophets seems to have had a sense of humor!
It is perhaps better and more accurate to
describe him as the last of the old school of American
philosophers, the last of those sturdy-bodied, highthinking,
achieving men who, in the old days,
did their best to set American humanity in the
right path--such men as Emerson, Alcott, Gough,
Wendell Phillips, Garrison, Bayard Taylor,
Beecher; men whom Conwell knew and admired
in the long ago, and all of whom have long since
passed away.
And Conwell, in his going up and down the
country, inspiring his thousands and thousands,
is the survivor of that old-time group who used
to travel about, dispensing wit and wisdom and
philosophy and courage to the crowded benches
of country lyceums, and the chairs of school-houses
and town halls, or the larger and more pretentious
gathering-places of the cities.
Conwell himself is amused to remember that
he wanted to talk in public from his boyhood,
and that very early he began to yield to the
inborn impulse. He laughs as he remembers the
variety of country fairs and school commencements
and anniversaries and even sewing-circles
where he tried his youthful powers, and all for
experience alone, in the first few years, except
possibly for such a thing as a ham or a jack-knife!
The first money that he ever received for speaking
was, so he remembers with glee, seventy-five cents;
and even that was not for his talk, but for horse
hire! But at the same time there is more than
amusement in recalling these experiences, for he
knows that they were invaluable to him as training.
And for over half a century he has affectionately
remembered John B. Gough, who, in the
height of his own power and success, saw resolution
and possibilities in the ardent young hill-man,
and actually did him the kindness and the honor
of introducing him to an audience in one of the
Massachusetts towns; and it was really a great
kindness and a great honor, from a man who had
won his fame to a young man just beginning an
oratorical career.
Conwell's lecturing has been, considering
everything, the most important work of his life, for by
it he has come into close touch with so many
millions--literally millions!--of people.
I asked him once if he had any idea how
many he had talked to in the course of his career,
and he tried to estimate how many thousands
of times he had lectured, and the average attendance
for each, but desisted when he saw that it
ran into millions of hearers. What a marvel is
such a fact as that! Millions of hearers!
I asked the same question of his private secretary,
and found that no one had ever kept any sort
of record; but as careful an estimate as could be
made gave a conservative result of fully eight
million hearers for his lectures; and adding the
number to whom he has preached, who have been
over five million, there is a total of well over
thirteen million who have listened to Russell
Conwell's voice! And this staggering total is, if
anything, an underestimate. The figuring was done
cautiously and was based upon such facts as that
he now addresses an average of over forty-five
hundred at his Sunday services (an average that
would be higher were it not that his sermons in
vacation time are usually delivered in little
churches; when at home, at the Temple, he
addresses three meetings every Sunday), and that
he lectures throughout the entire course of each
year, including six nights a week of lecturing during
vacation-time. What a power is wielded by
a man who has held over thirteen million people
under the spell of his voice! Probably no other
man who ever lived had such a total of hearers.
And the total is steadily mounting, for he is a man
who has never known the meaning of rest.
I think it almost certain that Dr. Conwell has
never spoken to any one of what, to me, is the
finest point of his lecture-work, and that is that
he still goes gladly and for small fees to the small
towns that are never visited by other men of great
reputation. He knows that it is the little places,
the out-of-the-way places, the submerged places,
that most need a pleasure and a stimulus, and he
still goes out, man of well over seventy that he is,
to tiny towns in distant states, heedless of the
discomforts of traveling, of the poor little hotels
that seldom have visitors, of the oftentimes hopeless
cooking and the uncleanliness, of the hardships
and the discomforts, of the unventilated
and overheated or underheated halls. He does
not think of claiming the relaxation earned by a
lifetime of labor, or, if he ever does, the thought
of the sword of John Ring restores instantly his
fervid earnestness.
How he does it, how he can possibly keep it up,
is the greatest marvel of all. I have before me a
list of his engagements for the summer weeks of
this year, 1915, and I shall set it down because
it will specifically show, far more clearly than
general statements, the kind of work he does.
The list is the itinerary of his vacation. Vacation!
Lecturing every evening but Sunday, and on
Sundays preaching in the town where he happens
to be!
June 24 Ackley, Ia. July 11 *Brookings, S. D.
`` 25 Waterloo, Ia. `` 12 Pipestone, Minn.
`` 26 Decorah, Ia. `` 13 Hawarden, Ia.
`` 27 *Waukon, Ia. `` 14 Canton, S. D
`` 28 Red Wing, Minn. `` 15 Cherokee, Ia
`` 29 River Falls, Wis. `` 16 Pocahontas, Ia
`` 30 Northfield, Minn. `` 17 Glidden, Ia.
July 1 Faribault, Minn. `` 18 *Boone, Ia.
`` 2 Spring Valley, Minn. `` 19 Dexter, Ia.
`` 3 Blue Earth, Minn. `` 20 Indianola, Ia
`` 4 *Fairmount, Minn. `` 21 Corydon, Ia
`` 5 Lake Crystal, Minn. `` 22 Essex, Ia.
`` 6 Redwood Falls, `` 23 Sidney, Ia.
Minn. `` 24 Falls City, Nebr.
`` 7 Willmer, Minn. `` 25 *Hiawatha, Kan.
`` 8 Dawson, Minn. `` 26 Frankfort, Kan.
`` 9 Redfield, S. D. `` 27 Greenleaf, Kan.
`` 10 Huron, S. D. `` 28 Osborne, Kan.
July 29 Stockton, Kan. Aug. 14 Honesdale, Pa.
`` 30 Phillipsburg, Kan. `` 15 *Honesdale, Pa.
`` 31 Mankato, Kan. `` 16 Carbondale, Pa.
_En route to next date on_ `` 17 Montrose, Pa.
_circuit_. `` 18 Tunkhannock, Pa.
Aug. 3 Westfield, Pa. `` 19 Nanticoke, Pa.
`` 4 Galston, Pa. `` 20 Stroudsburg, Pa.
`` 5 Port Alleghany, Pa. `` 21 Newton, N. J.
`` 6 Wellsville, N. Y. `` 22 *Newton, N. J.
`` 7 Bath, N. Y. `` 23 Hackettstown, N. J.
`` 8 *Bath, N. Y. `` 24 New Hope, Pa.
`` 9 Penn Yan, N. Y. `` 25 Doylestown, Pa.
`` 10 Athens, N. Y. `` 26 Phnixville, Pa.
`` 11 Owego, N. Y. `` 27 Kennett, Pa.
`` 12 Patchogue, LI.,N.Y. `` 28 Oxford, Pa.
`` 13 Port Jervis, N. Y. `` 29 *Oxford, Pa.
* Preach on Sunday.
And all these hardships, all this traveling and
lecturing, which would test the endurance of the
youngest and strongest, this man of over seventy
assumes without receiving a particle of personal
gain, for every dollar that he makes by it is given
away in helping those who need helping.
That Dr. Conwell is intensely modest is one
of the curious features of his character. He sincerely
believes that to write his life would be,
in the main, just to tell what people have done
for him. He knows and admits that he works
unweariedly, but in profound sincerity he ascribes
the success of his plans to those who have seconded
and assisted him. It is in just this way that he
looks upon every phase of his life. When he is
reminded of the devotion of his old soldiers, he
remembers it only with a sort of pleased wonder
that they gave the devotion to him, and he quite
forgets that they loved him because he was always
ready to sacrifice ease or risk his own life for
them.
He deprecates praise; if any one likes him, the
liking need not be shown in words, but in helping
along a good work. That his church has succeeded
has been because of the devotion of the people;
that the university has succeeded is because of
the splendid work of the teachers and pupils; that
the hospitals have done so much has been because
of the noble services of physicians and nurses.
To him, as he himself expresses it, realizing that
success has come to his plans, it seems as if the
realities are but dreams. He is astonished by his
own success. He thinks mainly of his own
shortcomings. ``God and man have ever been very
patient with me.'' His depression is at times
profound when he compares the actual results
with what he would like them to be, for always
his hopes have gone soaring far in advance of
achievement. It is the ``Hitch your chariot to
a star'' idea.
His modesty goes hand-in-hand with kindliness,
and I have seen him let himself be introduced in
his own church to his congregation, when he is
going to deliver a lecture there, just because a
former pupil of the university was present who,
Conwell knew, was ambitious to say something
inside of the Temple walls, and this seemed to
be the only opportunity.
I have noticed, when he travels, that the face
of the newsboy brightens as he buys a paper from
him, that the porter is all happiness, that
conductor and brakeman are devotedly anxious to
be of aid. Everywhere the man wins love. He
loves humanity and humanity responds to the love.
He has always won the affection of those who
knew him, and Bayard Taylor was one of the
many; he and Bayard Taylor loved each other for
long acquaintance and fellow experiences as worldwide
travelers, back in the years when comparatively
few Americans visited the Nile and the
Orient, or even Europe.
When Taylor died there was a memorial service
in Boston at which Conwell was asked to preside,
and, as he wished for something more than
addresses, he went to Longfellow and asked him to
write and read a poem for the occasion. Longfellow
had not thought of writing anything, and
he was too ill to be present at the services, but,
there always being something contagiously
inspiring about Russell Conwell when he wishes
something to be done, the poet promised to do
what he could. And he wrote and sent the beautiful
lines beginning:
_Dead he lay among his books,
The peace of God was in his looks_.
Many men of letters, including Ralph Waldo
Emerson, were present at the services, and Dr.
Conwell induced Oliver Wendell Holmes to read
the lines, and they were listened to amid profound
silence, to their fine ending.
Conwell, in spite of his widespread hold on
millions of people, has never won fame, recognition,
general renown, compared with many men
of minor achievements. This seems like an
impossibility. Yet it is not an impossibility, but a
fact. Great numbers of men of education and
culture are entirely ignorant of him and his work
in the world--men, these, who deem themselves
in touch with world-affairs and with the ones who
make and move the world. It is inexplicable, this,
except that never was there a man more devoid
of the faculty of self-exploitation, self-advertising,
than Russell Conwell. Nor, in the mere reading
of them, do his words appeal with anything like
the force of the same words uttered by himself,
for always, with his spoken words, is his personality.
Those who have heard Russell Conwell, or
have known him personally, recognize the charm
of the man and his immense forcefulness; but
there are many, and among them those who control
publicity through books and newspapers,
who, though they ought to be the warmest in their
enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him,
and, if they know of him at all, think of him as
one who pleases in a simple way the commoner
folk, forgetting in their pride that every really
great man pleases the common ones, and that
simplicity and directness are attributes of real
greatness.
But Russell Conwell has always won the admiration
of the really great, as well as of the humbler
millions. It is only a supposedly cultured class
in between that is not thoroughly acquainted with
what he has done.
Perhaps, too, this is owing to his having cast
in his lot with the city, of all cities, which,
consciously or unconsciously, looks most closely to
family and place of residence as criterions of
merit--a city with which it is almost impossible
for a stranger to become affiliated--or aphiladelphiated,
as it might be expressed--and Philadelphia,
in spite of all that Dr. Conwell has
done, has been under the thrall of the fact that
he went north of Market Street--that fatal fact
understood by all who know Philadelphia--and
that he made no effort to make friends in Rittenhouse
Square. Such considerations seem absurd
in this twentieth century, but in Philadelphia
they are still potent. Tens of thousands of
Philadelphians love him, and he is honored by its
greatest men, but there is a class of the pseudocultured
who do not know him or appreciate him.
And it needs also to be understood that, outside of
his own beloved Temple, he would prefer to go
to a little church or a little hall and to speak to
the forgotten people, in the hope of encouraging
and inspiring them and filling them with hopeful
glow, rather than to speak to the rich and comfortable.
His dearest hope, so one of the few who are
close to him told me, is that no one shall come
into his life without being benefited. He does
not say this publicly, nor does he for a moment
believe that such a hope could be fully realized,
but it is very dear to his heart; and no man
spurred by such a hope, and thus bending all
his thoughts toward the poor, the hard-working,
the unsuccessful, is in a way to win honor from
the Scribes; for we have Scribes now quite as
much as when they were classed with Pharisees.
It is not the first time in the world's history that
Scribes have failed to give their recognition to
one whose work was not among the great and
wealthy.
That Conwell himself has seldom taken any
part whatever in politics except as a good citizen
standing for good government; that, as he
expresses it, he never held any political office except
that he was once on a school committee, and also
that he does not identify himself with the so-called
``movements'' that from time to time catch
public attention, but aims only and constantly
at the quiet betterment of mankind, may be
mentioned as additional reasons why his name and
fame have not been steadily blazoned.
He knows and will admit that he works hard
and has all his life worked hard. ``Things keep
turning my way because I'm on the job,'' as he
whimsically expressed it one day; but that is
about all, so it seems to him.
And he sincerely believes that his life has in
itself been without interest; that it has been an
essentially commonplace life with nothing of the
interesting or the eventful to tell. He is frankly
surprised that there has ever been the desire to
write about him. He really has no idea of how
fascinating are the things he has done. His entire
life has been of positive interest from the variety
of things accomplished and the unexpectedness
with which he has accomplished them.
Never, for example, was there such an organizer.
In fact, organization and leadership have
always been as the breath of life to him. As a
youth he organized debating societies and, before
the war, a local military company. While on
garrison duty in the Civil War he organized
what is believed to have been the first free school
for colored children in the South. One day
Minneapolis happened to be spoken of, and Conwell
happened to remember that he organized,
when he was a lawyer in that city, what became
the first Y.M.C.A. branch there. Once he even
started a newspaper. And it was natural that the
organizing instinct, as years advanced, should
lead him to greater and greater things, such as
his church, with the numerous associations formed
within itself through his influence, and the
university--the organizing of the university being
in itself an achievement of positive romance.
``A life without interest!'' Why, when I
happened to ask, one day, how many Presidents he
had known since Lincoln, he replied, quite casually,
that he had ``written the lives of most of them in
their own homes''; and by this he meant either
personally or in collaboration with the American
biographer Abbott.
The many-sidedness of Conwell is one of the
things that is always fascinating. After you have
quite got the feeling that he is peculiarly a man
of to-day, lecturing on to-day's possibilities to the
people of to-day, you happen upon some such
fact as that he attracted the attention of the
London _Times_ through a lecture on Italian history
at Cambridge in England; or that on the
evening of the day on which he was admitted to
practice in the Supreme Court of the United States
he gave a lecture in Washington on ``The Curriculum
of the Prophets in Ancient Israel.'' The
man's life is a succession of delightful surprises.
An odd trait of his character is his love for fire.
He could easily have been a veritable fireworshiper
instead of an orthodox Christian! He
has always loved a blaze, and he says reminiscently
that for no single thing was he punished
so much when he was a child as for building
bonfires. And after securing possession, as he did in
middle age, of the house where he was born and
of a great acreage around about, he had one of
the most enjoyable times of his life in tearing
down old buildings that needed to be destroyed
and in heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and in
piling great heaps of wood and setting the great
piles ablaze. You see, there is one of the secrets
of his strength--he has never lost the capacity for
fiery enthusiasm!
Always, too, in these later years he is showing his
strength and enthusiasm in a positively noble
way. He has for years been a keen sufferer from
rheumatism and neuritis, but he has never permitted
this to interfere with his work or plans.
He makes little of his sufferings, and when he
slowly makes his way, bent and twisted, downstairs,
he does not want to be noticed. ``I'm all
right,'' he will say if any one offers to help, and at
such a time comes his nearest approach to
impatience. He wants his suffering ignored.
Strength has always been to him so precious a
belonging that he will not relinquish it while he
lives. ``I'm all right!'' And he makes himself
believe that he is all right even though the pain
becomes so severe as to demand massage. And
he will still, even when suffering, talk calmly, or
write his letters, or attend to whatever matters
come before him. It is the Spartan boy hiding
the pain of the gnawing fox. And he never has
let pain interfere with his presence on the pulpit
or the platform. He has once in a while gone to
a meeting on crutches and then, by the force of
will, and inspired by what he is to do, has stood
before his audience or congregation, a man full of
strength and fire and life.
VII
HOW A UNIVERSITY WAS FOUNDED
THE story of the foundation and rise of
Temple University is an extraordinary story;
it is not only extraordinary, but inspiring; it is not
only inspiring, but full of romance.
For the university came out of nothing!--nothing
but the need of a young man and the fact that
he told the need to one who, throughout his life,
has felt the impulse to help any one in need
and has always obeyed the impulse.
I asked Dr. Conwell, up at his home in the
Berkshires, to tell me himself just how the
university began, and he said that it began because
it was needed and succeeded because of the loyal
work of the teachers. And when I asked for
details he was silent for a while, looking off into
the brooding twilight as it lay over the waters
and the trees and the hills, and then he said:
``It was all so simple; it all came about so
naturally. One evening, after a service, a young
man of the congregation came to me and I saw
that he was disturbed about something. I had
him sit down by me, and I knew that in a few
moments he would tell me what was troubling
him.
`` `Dr. Conwell,' he said, abruptly, `I earn but
little money, and I see no immediate chance of
earning more. I have to support not only myself,
but my mother. It leaves nothing at all. Yet my
longing is to be a minister. It is the one ambition
of my life. Is there anything that I can do?'
`` `Any man,' I said to him, `with the proper
determination and ambition can study sufficiently
at night to win his desire.'
`` `I have tried to think so,' said he, `but I
have not been able to see anything clearly. I
want to study, and am ready to give every spare
minute to it, but I don't know how to get at it.'
``I thought a few minutes, as I looked at him.
He was strong in his desire and in his ambition to
fulfil it--strong enough, physically and mentally,
for work of the body and of the mind--and he
needed something more than generalizations of
sympathy.
`` `Come to me one evening a week and I will
begin teaching you myself,' I said, `and at least
you will in that way make a beginning'; and I
named the evening.
``His face brightened and he eagerly said that
he would come, and left me; but in a little while
he came hurrying back again. `May I bring a
friend with me?' he said.
``I told him to bring as many as he wanted to,
for more than one would be an advantage, and
when the evening came there were six friends
with him. And that first evening I began to teach
them the foundations of Latin.''
He stopped as if the story was over. He was
looking out thoughtfully into the waning light,
and I knew that his mind was busy with those
days of the beginning of the institution he so
loves, and whose continued success means so much
to him. In a little while he went on:
``That was the beginning of it, and there is
little more to tell. By the third evening the
number of pupils had increased to forty; others
joined in helping me, and a room was hired; then
a little house, then a second house. From a few
students and teachers we became a college. After
a while our buildings went up on Broad Street
alongside the Temple Church, and after another
while we became a university. From the first
our aim''--(I noticed how quickly it had become
``our'' instead of ``my'')--``our aim was to give
education to those who were unable to get it
through the usual channels. And so that was
really all there was to it.''
That was typical of Russell Conwell--to tell
with brevity of what he has done, to point out the
beginnings of something, and quite omit to elaborate
as to the results. And that, when you come
to know him, is precisely what he means you to
understand--that it is the beginning of anything
that is important, and that if a thing is but
earnestly begun and set going in the right way
it may just as easily develop big results as little
results.
But his story was very far indeed from being
``all there was to it,'' for he had quite omitted
to state the extraordinary fact that, beginning
with those seven pupils, coming to his library on an
evening in 1884, the Temple University has
numbered, up to Commencement-time in 1915,
88,821 students! Nearly one hundred thousand
students, and in the lifetime of the founder!
Really, the magnitude of such a work cannot be
exaggerated, nor the vast importance of it when
it is considered that most of these eighty-eight
thousand students would not have received their
education had it not been for Temple University.
And it all came from the instant response of
Russell Conwell to the immediate need presented
by a young man without money!
``And there is something else I want to say,''
said Dr. Conwell, unexpectedly. ``I want to say,
more fully than a mere casual word, how nobly
the work was taken up by volunteer helpers;
professors from the University of Pennsylvania
and teachers from the public schools and other
local institutions gave freely of what time they
could until the new venture was firmly on its
way. I honor those who came so devotedly to
help. And it should be remembered that in those
early days the need was even greater than it would
now appear, for there were then no night schools
or manual-training schools. Since then the city
of Philadelphia has gone into such work, and as
fast as it has taken up certain branches the
Temple University has put its energy into the
branches just higher. And there seems no lessening
of the need of it,'' he added, ponderingly.
No; there is certainly no lessening of the need
of it! The figures of the annual catalogue would
alone show that.
As early as 1887, just three years after the
beginning, the Temple College, as it was by that
time called, issued its first catalogue, which set
forth with stirring words that the intent of its
founding was to:
``Provide such instruction as shall be best
adapted to the higher education of those who are
compelled to labor at their trade while engaged
in study.
``Cultivate a taste for the higher and most
useful branches of learning.
``Awaken in the character of young laboring
men and women a determined ambition to be
useful to their fellow-men.''
The college--the university as it in time came
to be--early broadened its scope, but it has from
the first continued to aim at the needs of those
unable to secure education without such help as,
through its methods, it affords.
It was chartered in 1888, at which time its
numbers had reached almost six hundred, and it
has ever since had a constant flood of applicants.
``It has demonstrated,'' as Dr. Conwell puts it,
``that those who work for a living have time for
study.'' And he, though he does not himself
add this, has given the opportunity.
He feels especial pride in the features by which
lectures and recitations are held at practically
any hour which best suits the convenience of the
students. If any ten students join in a request
for any hour from nine in the morning to ten
at night a class is arranged for them, to meet that
request! This involves the necessity for a much
larger number of professors and teachers than
would otherwise be necessary, but that is deemed
a slight consideration in comparison with the
immense good done by meeting the needs of workers.
Also President Conwell--for of course he is the
president of the university--is proud of the fact
that the privilege of graduation depends entirely
upon knowledge gained; that graduation does not
depend upon having listened to any set number
of lectures or upon having attended for so many
terms or years. If a student can do four years'
work in two years or in three he is encouraged
to do it, and if he cannot even do it in four he can
have no diploma.
Obviously, there is no place at Temple
University for students who care only for a few years
of leisured ease. It is a place for workers, and
not at all for those who merely wish to be able to
boast that they attended a university. The students
have come largely from among railroad
clerks, bank clerks, bookkeepers, teachers,
preachers, mechanics, salesmen, drug clerks, city and
United States government employees, widows,
nurses, housekeepers, brakemen, firemen, engineers,
motormen, conductors, and shop hands.
It was when the college became strong enough,
and sufficiently advanced in scholarship and
standing, and broad enough in scope, to win the
name of university that this title was officially
granted to it by the State of Pennsylvania, in
1907, and now its educational plan includes three
distinct school systems.
First: it offers a high-school education to the
student who has to quit school after leaving the
grammar-school.
Second: it offers a full college education, with
the branches taught in long-established highgrade
colleges, to the student who has to quit
on leaving the high-school.
Third: it offers further scientific or professional
education to the college graduate who must go
to work immediately on quitting college, but who
wishes to take up some such course as law or
medicine or engineering.
Out of last year's enrolment of 3,654 it is
interesting to notice that the law claimed 141;
theology, 182; medicine and pharmacy and dentistry
combined, 357; civil engineering, 37; also
that the teachers' college, with normal courses
on such subjects as household arts and science,
kindergarten work, and physical education, took
174; and still more interesting, in a way, to see
that 269 students were enrolled for the technical
and vocational courses, such as cooking and dressmaking,
millinery, manual crafts, school-gardening,
and story-telling. There were 511 in highschool
work, and 243 in elementary education.
There were 79 studying music, and 68 studying to
be trained nurses. There were 606 in the college
of liberal arts and sciences, and in the department
of commercial education there were 987--for it is
a university that offers both scholarship and practicality.
Temple University is not in the least a charitable
institution. Its fees are low, and its hours are
for the convenience of the students themselves,
but it is a place of absolute independence. It is,
indeed, a place of far greater independence, so one
of the professors pointed out, than are the great
universities which receive millions and millions
of money in private gifts and endowments.
Temple University in its early years was sorely
in need of money, and often there were thrills of
expectancy when some man of mighty wealth
seemed on the point of giving. But not a single
one ever did, and now the Temple likes to feel
that it is glad of it. The Temple, to quote its
own words, is ``An institution for strong men
and women who can labor with both mind and
body.''
And the management is proud to be able to
say that, although great numbers have come from
distant places, ``not one of the many thousands
ever failed to find an opportunity to support
himself.''
Even in the early days, when money was needed
for the necessary buildings (the buildings of which
Conwell dreamed when he left second-story doors
in his church!), the university--college it was then
called--had won devotion from those who knew
that it was a place where neither time nor money
was wasted, and where idleness was a crime, and in
the donations for the work were many such items
as four hundred dollars from factory-workers
who gave fifty cents each, and two thousand dollars
from policemen who gave a dollar each.
Within two or three years past the State of
Pennsylvania has begun giving it a large sum annually,
and this state aid is public recognition of Temple
University as an institution of high public value.
The state money is invested in the brains and
hearts of the ambitious.
So eager is Dr. Conwell to place the opportunity
of education before every one, that even his
servants must go to school! He is not one of those
who can see needs that are far away but not
those that are right at home. His belief in
education, and in the highest attainable education, is
profound, and it is not only on account of the
abstract pleasure and value of education, but its
power of increasing actual earning power and thus
making a worker of more value to both himself
and the community.
Many a man and many a woman, while continuing
to work for some firm or factory, has taken
Temple technical courses and thus fitted himself
or herself for an advanced position with the
same employer. The Temple knows of many
such, who have thus won prominent advancement.
And it knows of teachers who, while continuing
to teach, have fitted themselves through the Temple
courses for professorships. And it knows
of many a case of the rise of a Temple student
that reads like an Arabian Nights' fancy!--of
advance from bookkeeper to editor, from officeboy
to bank president, from kitchen maid to
school principal, from street-cleaner to mayor!
The Temple University helps them that help
themselves.
President Conwell told me personally of one
case that especially interested him because it
seemed to exhibit, in especial degree, the Temple
possibilities; and it particularly interested me
because it also showed, in high degree, the
methods and personality of Dr. Conwell himself.
One day a young woman came to him and
said she earned only three dollars a week and that
she desired very much to make more. ``Can you
tell me how to do it?'' she said.
He liked her ambition and her directness, but
there was something that he felt doubtful about,
and that was that her hat looked too expensive
for three dollars a week!
Now Dr. Conwell is a man whom you would
never suspect of giving a thought to the hat of
man or woman! But as a matter of fact there is
very little that he does not see.
But though the hat seemed too expensive for
three dollars a week, Dr. Conwell is not a man
who makes snap-judgments harshly, and in
particular he would be the last man to turn away
hastily one who had sought him out for help.
He never felt, nor could possibly urge upon any
one, contentment with a humble lot; he stands
for advancement; he has no sympathy with that
dictum of the smug, that has come to us from a
nation tight bound for centuries by its gentry and
aristocracy, about being contented with the position
in which God has placed you, for he points
out that the Bible itself holds up advancement
and success as things desirable.
And, as to the young woman before him, it
developed, through discreet inquiry veiled by
frank discussion of her case, that she had made
the expensive-looking hat herself! Whereupon
not only did all doubtfulness and hesitation vanish,
but he saw at once how she could better herself.
He knew that a woman who could make a hat
like that for herself could make hats for other
people, and so, ``Go into millinery as a business,''
he advised.
``Oh--if I only could!'' she exclaimed. ``But
I know that I don't know enough.''
``Take the millinery course in Temple University,''
he responded.
She had not even heard of such a course, and
when he went on to explain how she could take
it and at the same time continue at her present
work until the course was concluded, she was
positively ecstatic--it was all so unexpected, this
opening of the view of a new and broader life.
``She was an unusual woman,'' concluded Dr.
Conwell, ``and she worked with enthusiasm and
tirelessness. She graduated, went to an up-state
city that seemed to offer a good field, opened a
millinery establishment there, with her own name
above the door, and became prosperous. That
was only a few years ago. And recently I had a
letter from her, telling me that last year she
netted a clear profit of three thousand six hundred
dollars!''
I remember a man, himself of distinguished
position, saying of Dr. Conwell, ``It is difficult
to speak in tempered language of what he has
achieved.'' And that just expresses it; the
temptation is constantly to use superlatives--for
superlatives fit! Of course he has succeeded for
himself, and succeeded marvelously, in his rise
from the rocky hill farm, but he has done so vastly
more than that in inspiring such hosts of others
to succeed!
A dreamer of dreams and a seer of visions--
and what realizations have come! And it
interested me profoundly not long ago, when Dr.
Conwell, talking of the university, unexpectedly
remarked that he would like to see such institutions
scattered throughout every state in the
Union. ``All carried on at slight expense to the
students and at hours to suit all sorts of working
men and women,'' he added, after a pause; and
then, abruptly, ``I should like to see the possibility
of higher education offered to every one in
the United States who works for a living.''
There was something superb in the very imagining
of such a nation-wide system. But I did not
ask whether or not he had planned any details
for such an effort. I knew that thus far it might
only be one of his dreams--but I also knew that
his dreams had a way of becoming realities.
I had a fleeting glimpse of his soaring vision. It
was amazing to find a man of more than threescore
and ten thus dreaming of more worlds to
conquer. And I thought, what could the world
have accomplished if Methuselah had been a
Conwell!--or, far better, what wonders could be
accomplished if Conwell could but be a Methuselah!
He has all his life been a great traveler. He is
a man who sees vividly and who can describe
vividly. Yet often his letters, even from places of
the most profound interest, are mostly concerned
with affairs back home. It is not that he does
not feel, and feel intensely, the interest of what
he is visiting, but that his tremendous earnestness
keeps him always concerned about his work at
home. There could be no stronger example than
what I noticed in a letter he wrote from Jerusalem.
``I am in Jerusalem! And here at Gethsemane
and at the Tomb of Christ''--reading thus
far, one expects that any man, and especially a
minister, is sure to say something regarding the
associations of the place and the effect of these
associations on his mind; but Conwell is always
the man who is different--``And here at Gethsemane
and at the Tomb of Christ, I pray especially for
the Temple University.'' That is Conwellism!
That he founded a hospital--a work in itself
great enough for even a great life is but one
among the striking incidents of his career. And
it came about through perfect naturalness. For
he came to know, through his pastoral work and
through his growing acquaintance with the needs
of the city, that there was a vast amount of
suffering and wretchedness and anguish, because
of the inability of the existing hospitals to care
for all who needed care. There was so much
sickness and suffering to be alleviated, there were
so many deaths that could be prevented--and so
he decided to start another hospital.
And, like everything with him, the beginning
was small. That cannot too strongly be set down
as the way of this phenomenally successful
organizer. Most men would have to wait until a big
beginning could be made, and so would most likely
never make a beginning at all. But Conwell's
way is to dream of future bigness, but be ready to
begin at once, no matter how small or insignificant
the beginning may appear to others.
Two rented rooms, one nurse, one patient--this
was the humble beginning, in 1891, of what has
developed into the great Samaritan Hospital. In
a year there was an entire house, fitted up with
wards and operating-room. Now it occupies several
buildings, including and adjoining that first
one, and a great new structure is planned. But
even as it is, it has a hundred and seventy beds,
is fitted with all modern hospital appliances, and
has a large staff of physicians; and the number
of surgical operations performed there is very
large.
It is open to sufferers of any race or creed, and
the poor are never refused admission, the rule
being that treatment is free for those who cannot
pay, but that such as can afford it shall pay
according to their means.
And the hospital has a kindly feature that
endears it to patients and their relatives alike, and
that is that, by Dr. Conwell's personal order, there
are not only the usual week-day hours for visiting,
but also one evening a week and every Sunday
afternoon. ``For otherwise,'' as he says, ``many
would be unable to come because they could not
get away from their work.''
A little over eight years ago another hospital
was taken in charge, the Garretson--not founded
by Conwell, this one, but acquired, and promptly
expanded in its usefulness.
Both the Samaritan and the Garretson are part
of Temple University. The Samaritan Hospital
has treated, since its foundation, up to the middle
of 1915, 29,301 patients; the Garretson, in its
shorter life, 5,923. Including dispensary cases as
well as house patients, the two hospitals together,
under the headship of President Conwell, have
handled over 400,000 cases.
How Conwell can possibly meet the multifarious
demands upon his time is in itself a miracle.
He is the head of the great church; he is the head
of the university; he is the head of the hospitals;
he is the head of everything with which he is
associated! And he is not only nominally, but
very actively, the head!
VIII
HIS SPLENDID EFFICIENCY
CONWELL has a few strong and efficient executive
helpers who have long been associated
with him; men and women who know his ideas
and ideals, who are devoted to him, and who do
their utmost to relieve him; and of course there
is very much that is thus done for him; but even
as it is, he is so overshadowing a man (there is
really no other word) that all who work with him
look to him for advice and guidance the professors
and the students, the doctors and the nurses,
the church officers, the Sunday-school teachers,
the members of his congregation. And he is never
too busy to see any one who really wishes to see
him.
He can attend to a vast intricacy of detail, and
answer myriad personal questions and doubts,
and keep the great institutions splendidly going,
by thorough systematization of time, and by watching
every minute. He has several secretaries, for
special work, besides his private secretary. His
correspondence is very great. Often he dictates
to a secretary as he travels on the train. Even in
the few days for which he can run back to the
Berkshires, work is awaiting him. Work follows
him. And after knowing of this, one is positively
amazed that he is able to give to his country-wide
lectures the time and the traveling that they
inexorably demand. Only a man of immense
strength, of the greatest stamina, a veritable
superman, could possibly do it. And at times
one quite forgets, noticing the multiplicity of his
occupations, that he prepares two sermons and
two talks on Sunday!
Here is his usual Sunday schedule, when at
home. He rises at seven and studies until breakfast,
which is at eight-thirty. Then he studies until
nine-forty-five, when he leads a men's meeting
at which he is likely also to play the organ and
lead the singing. At ten-thirty is the principal
church service, at which he preaches, and at the
close of which he shakes hands with hundreds.
He dines at one, after which he takes fifteen
minutes' rest and then reads; and at three o'clock he
addresses, in a talk that is like another sermon,
a large class of men--not the same men as in the
morning. He is also sure to look in at the regular
session of the Sunday-school. Home again, where
he studies and reads until supper-time. At seventhirty
is the evening service, at which he again
preaches and after which he shakes hands with
several hundred more and talks personally, in his
study, with any who have need of talk with him.
He is usually home by ten-thirty. I spoke of it,
one evening, as having been a strenuous day, and
he responded, with a cheerfully whimsical smile:
``Three sermons and shook hands with nine
hundred.''
That evening, as the service closed, he had
said to the congregation: ``I shall be here for
an hour. We always have a pleasant time
together after service. If you are acquainted with
me, come up and shake hands. If you are strangers''--
just the slightest of pauses--``come up
and let us make an acquaintance that will last
for eternity.'' I remember how simply and easily
this was said, in his clear, deep voice, and how
impressive and important it seemed, and with
what unexpectedness it came. ``Come and make
an acquaintance that will last for eternity!''
And there was a serenity about his way of saying
this which would make strangers think--just as
he meant them to think--that he had nothing
whatever to do but to talk with them. Even
his own congregation have, most of them, little
conception of how busy a man he is and how
precious is his time.
One evening last June to take an evening of
which I happened to know--he got home from a
journey of two hundred miles at six o'clock, and
after dinner and a slight rest went to the church
prayer-meeting, which he led in his usual vigorous
way at such meetings, playing the organ and
leading the singing, as well as praying and talking.
After the prayer-meeting he went to two
dinners in succession, both of them important
dinners in connection with the close of the
university year, and at both dinners he spoke. At
the second dinner he was notified of the sudden
illness of a member of his congregation, and
instantly hurried to the man's home and thence
to the hospital to which he had been removed,
and there he remained at the man's bedside, or
in consultation with the physicians, until one in
the morning. Next morning he was up at seven
and again at work.
``This one thing I do,'' is his private maxim of
efficiency, and a literalist might point out that he
does not one thing only, but a thousand things,
not getting Conwell's meaning, which is that
whatever the thing may be which he is doing
he lets himself think of nothing else until it is
done.
Dr. Conwell has a profound love for the country
and particularly for the country of his own youth.
He loves the wind that comes sweeping over the
hills, he loves the wide-stretching views from the
heights and the forest intimacies of the nestled
nooks. He loves the rippling streams, he loves
the wild flowers that nestle in seclusion or that
unexpectedly paint some mountain meadow with
delight. He loves the very touch of the earth,
and he loves the great bare rocks.
He writes verses at times; at least he has written
lines for a few old tunes; and it interested me
greatly to chance upon some lines of his that
picture heaven in terms of the Berkshires:
_ The wide-stretching valleys in colors so fadeless,
Where trees are all deathless and flowers e'er bloom_.
That is heaven in the eyes of a New England
hill-man! Not golden pavement and ivory palaces,
but valleys and trees and flowers and the
wide sweep of the open.
Few things please him more than to go, for
example, blackberrying, and he has a knack of
never scratching his face or his fingers when doing
so. And he finds blackberrying, whether he goes
alone or with friends, an extraordinarily good
time for planning something he wishes to do or
working out the thought of a sermon. And fishing
is even better, for in fishing he finds immense
recreation and restfulness and at the same time
a further opportunity to think and plan.
As a small boy he wished that he could throw
a dam across the trout-brook that runs near the
little Conwell home, and--as he never gives up--
he finally realized the ambition, although it was
after half a century! And now he has a big pond,
three-quarters of a mile long by half a mile wide,
lying in front of the house, down a slope from it--
a pond stocked with splendid pickerel. He likes
to float about restfully on this pond, thinking
or fishing, or both. And on that pond he showed
me how to catch pickerel even under a blaze of
sunlight!
He is a trout-fisher, too, for it is a trout stream
that feeds this pond and goes dashing away from
it through the wilderness; and for miles adjoining
his place a fishing club of wealthy men bought
up the rights in this trout stream, and they
approached him with a liberal offer. But he declined
it. ``I remembered what good times I had when
I was a boy, fishing up and down that stream,
and I couldn't think of keeping the boys of the
present day from such a pleasure. So they may
still come and fish for trout here.''
As we walked one day beside this brook, he
suddenly said: ``Did you ever notice that every
brook has its own song? I should know the song
of this brook anywhere.''
It would seem as if he loved his rugged native
country because it is rugged even more than because
it is native! Himself so rugged, so hardy,
so enduring--the strength of the hills is his also.
Always, in his very appearance, you see something
of this ruggedness of the hills; a ruggedness,
a sincerity, a plainness, that mark alike his
character and his looks. And always one realizes
the strength of the man, even when his voice, as
it usually is, is low. And one increasingly realizes
the strength when, on the lecture platform or in
the pulpit or in conversation, he flashes vividly
into fire.
A big-boned man he is, sturdy-framed, a tall
man, with broad shoulders and strong hands.
His hair is a deep chestnut-brown that at first
sight seems black. In his early manhood he was
superb in looks, as his pictures show, but anxiety
and work and the constant flight of years, with
physical pain, have settled his face into lines of
sadness and almost of severity, which instantly
vanish when he speaks. And his face is illumined
by marvelous eyes.
He is a lonely man. The wife of his early years
died long, long ago, before success had come,
and she was deeply mourned, for she had loyally
helped him through a time that held much of
struggle and hardship. He married again; and
this wife was his loyal helpmate for many years.
In a time of special stress, when a defalcation of
sixty-five thousand dollars threatened to crush
Temple College just when it was getting on its
feet, for both Temple Church and Temple College
had in those early days buoyantly assumed
heavy indebtedness, he raised every dollar he
could by selling or mortgaging his own possessions,
and in this his wife, as he lovingly remembers,
most cordially stood beside him, although she
knew that if anything should happen to him the
financial sacrifice would leave her penniless. She
died after years of companionship; his children
married and made homes of their own; he is a
lonely man. Yet he is not unhappy, for the
tremendous demands of his tremendous work leave
him little time for sadness or retrospect. At times
the realization comes that he is getting old, that
friends and comrades have been passing away,
leaving him an old man with younger friends and
helpers. But such realization only makes him
work with an earnestness still more intense, knowing
that the night cometh when no man shall work.
Deeply religious though he is, he does not force
religion into conversation on ordinary subjects
or upon people who may not be interested in it.
With him, it is action and good works, with faith
and belief, that count, except when talk is the
natural, the fitting, the necessary thing; when
addressing either one individual or thousands, he
talks with superb effectiveness.
His sermons are, it may almost literally be
said, parable after parable; although he himself
would be the last man to say this, for it would
sound as if he claimed to model after the greatest
of all examples. His own way of putting it is
that he uses stories frequently because people are
more impressed by illustrations than by argument.
Always, whether in the pulpit or out of it, he
is simple and homelike, human and unaffected.
If he happens to see some one in the congregation
to whom he wishes to speak, he may just leave
his pulpit and walk down the aisle, while the
choir is singing, and quietly say a few words and
return.
In the early days of his ministry, if he heard
of a poor family in immediate need of food he
would be quite likely to gather a basket of
provisions and go personally, and offer this assistance
and such other as he might find necessary
when he reached the place. As he became known
he ceased from this direct and open method of
charity, for he knew that impulsiveness would be
taken for intentional display. But he has never
ceased to be ready to help on the instant that he
knows help is needed. Delay and lengthy
investigation are avoided by him when he can be
certain that something immediate is required.
And the extent of his quiet charity is amazing.
With no family for which to save money, and with
no care to put away money for himself, he thinks
only of money as an instrument for helpfulness.
I never heard a friend criticize him except for
too great open-handedness.
I was strongly impressed, after coming to know
him, that he possessed many of the qualities that
made for the success of the old-time district
leaders of New York City, and I mentioned this
to him, and he at once responded that he had
himself met ``Big Tim,'' the long-time leader of
the Sullivans, and had had him at his house, Big
Tim having gone to Philadelphia to aid some
henchman in trouble, and having promptly sought
the aid of Dr. Conwell. And it was characteristic
of Conwell that he saw, what so many never
saw, the most striking characteristic of that
Tammany leader. For, ``Big Tim Sullivan was
so kind-hearted!'' Conwell appreciated the man's
political unscrupulousness as well as did his
enemies, but he saw also what made his underlying
power--his kind-heartedness. Except that Sullivan
could be supremely unscrupulous, and that Conwell
is supremely scrupulous, there were marked
similarities in these masters over men; and
Conwell possesses, as Sullivan possessed, a
wonderful memory for faces and names.
Naturally, Russell Conwell stands steadily and
strongly for good citizenship. But he never talks
boastful Americanism. He seldom speaks in so
many words of either Americanism or good citizenship,
but he constantly and silently keeps the
American flag, as the symbol of good citizenship,
before his people. An American flag is prominent
in his church; an American flag is seen in his home;
a beautiful American flag is up at his Berkshire
place and surmounts a lofty tower where, when
he was a boy, there stood a mighty tree at the
top of which was an eagle's nest, which has given
him a name for his home, for he terms it ``The
Eagle's Nest.''
Remembering a long story that I had read of
his climbing to the top of that tree, though it
was a well-nigh impossible feat, and securing the
nest by great perseverance and daring, I asked
him if the story were a true one. ``Oh, I've heard
something about it; somebody said that somebody
watched me, or something of the kind. But
I don't remember anything about it myself.''
Any friend of his is sure to say something,
after a while, about his determination, his
insistence on going ahead with anything on which
he has really set his heart. One of the very
important things on which he insisted, in spite of
very great opposition, and especially an opposition
from the other churches of his denomination
(for this was a good many years ago, when
there was much more narrowness in churches
and sects than there is at present), was with
regard to doing away with close communion. He
determined on an open communion; and his way
of putting it, once decided upon, was: ``My
friends, it is not for me to invite you to the table
of the Lord. The table of the Lord is open. If
you feel that you can come to the table, it is open
to you.'' And this is the form which he still uses.
He not only never gives up, but, so his friends
say, he never forgets a thing upon which he has
once decided, and at times, long after they
supposed the matter has been entirely forgotten,
they suddenly find Dr. Conwell bringing his
original purpose to pass. When I was told of
this I remembered that pickerel-pond in the
Berkshires!
If he is really set upon doing anything, little
or big, adverse criticism does not disturb his
serenity. Some years ago he began wearing a
huge diamond, whose size attracted much criticism
and caustic comment. He never said a word
in defense; he just kept on wearing the diamond.
One day, however, after some years, he took it
off, and people said, ``He has listened to the
criticism at last!'' He smiled reminiscently as he
told me about this, and said: ``A dear old deacon
of my congregation gave me that diamond and I
did not like to hurt his feelings by refusing it.
It really bothered me to wear such a glaring big
thing, but because I didn't want to hurt the old
deacon's feelings I kept on wearing it until he
was dead. Then I stopped wearing it.''
The ambition of Russell Conwell is to continue
working and working until the very last moment
of his life. In work he forgets his sadness, his
loneliness, his age. And he said to me one day,
``I will die in harness.''
IX
THE STORY OF ACRES OF DIAMONDS
CONSIDERING everything, the most remarkable
thing in Russell Conwell's remarkable
life is his lecture, ``Acres of Diamonds.''
That is, the lecture itself, the number of times
he has delivered it, what a source of inspiration
it has been to myriads, the money that he has
made and is making, and, still more, the purpose
to which he directs the money. In the
circumstances surrounding ``Acres of Diamonds,'' in
its tremendous success, in the attitude of mind
revealed by the lecture itself and by what Dr.
Conwell does with it, it is illuminative of his
character, his aims, his ability.
The lecture is vibrant with his energy. It flashes
with his hopefulness. It is full of his enthusiasm.
It is packed full of his intensity. It stands for
the possibilities of success in every one. He has
delivered it over five thousand times. The
demand for it never diminishes. The success grows
never less.
There is a time in Russell Conwell's youth of
which it is pain for him to think. He told me of
it one evening, and his voice sank lower and
lower as he went far back into the past. It was
of his days at Yale that he spoke, for they were
days of suffering. For he had not money for
Yale, and in working for more he endured bitter
humiliation. It was not that the work was hard,
for Russell Conwell has always been ready for
hard work. It was not that there were privations
and difficulties, for he has always found difficulties
only things to overcome, and endured privations
with cheerful fortitude. But it was the
humiliations that he met--the personal humiliations
that after more than half a century make
him suffer in remembering them--yet out of those
humiliations came a marvelous result.
``I determined,'' he says, ``that whatever I
could do to make the way easier at college for
other young men working their way I would do.''
And so, many years ago, he began to devote
every dollar that he made from ``Acres of Diamonds''
to this definite purpose. He has what
may be termed a waiting-list. On that list are
very few cases he has looked into personally.
Infinitely busy man that he is, he cannot do
extensive personal investigation. A large proportion
of his names come to him from college presidents
who know of students in their own colleges
in need of such a helping hand.
``Every night,'' he said, when I asked him to
tell me about it, ``when my lecture is over and
the check is in my hand, I sit down in my room
in the hotel''--what a lonely picture, tool--``I
sit down in my room in the hotel and subtract
from the total sum received my actual expenses
for that place, and make out a check for the
difference and send it to some young man on my
list. And I always send with the check a letter
of advice and helpfulness, expressing my hope
that it will be of some service to him and telling
him that he is to feel under no obligation except
to his Lord. I feel strongly, and I try to make
every young man feel, that there must be no sense
of obligation to me personally. And I tell them
that I am hoping to leave behind me men who
will do more work than I have done. Don't
think that I put in too much advice,'' he added,
with a smile, ``for I only try to let them know
that a friend is trying to help them.''
His face lighted as he spoke. ``There is such a
fascination in it!'' he exclaimed. ``It is just like
a gamble! And as soon as I have sent the letter
and crossed a name off my list, I am aiming for
the next one!''
And after a pause he added: ``I do not attempt
to send any young man enough for all his
expenses. But I want to save him from bitterness,
and each check will help. And, too,'' he concluded,
navely, in the vernacular, ``I don't want
them to lay down on me!''
He told me that he made it clear that he did
not wish to get returns or reports from this
branch of his life-work, for it would take a great
deal of time in watching and thinking and in
the reading and writing of letters. ``But it is
mainly,'' he went on, ``that I do not wish to hold
over their heads the sense of obligation.''
When I suggested that this was surely an
example of bread cast upon the waters that could
not return, he was silent for a little and then said,
thoughtfully: ``As one gets on in years there is
satisfaction in doing a thing for the sake of doing
it. The bread returns in the sense of effort made.''
On a recent trip through Minnesota he was
positively upset, so his secretary told me, through
being recognized on a train by a young man who
had been helped through ``Acres of Diamonds,''
and who, finding that this was really Dr. Conwell,
eagerly brought his wife to join him in most
fervent thanks for his assistance. Both the
husband and his wife were so emotionally overcome
that it quite overcame Dr. Conwell himself.
The lecture, to quote the noble words of Dr.
Conwell himself, is designed to help ``every person,
of either sex, who cherishes the high resolve
of sustaining a career of usefulness and honor.''
It is a lecture of helpfulness. And it is a lecture,
when given with Conwell's voice and face and
manner, that is full of fascination. And yet it is
all so simple!
It is packed full of inspiration, of suggestion,
of aid. He alters it to meet the local circumstances
of the thousands of different places in
which he delivers it. But the base remains the
same. And even those to whom it is an old story
will go to hear him time after time. It amuses him
to say that he knows individuals who have listened
to it twenty times.
It begins with a story told to Conwell by an
old Arab as the two journeyed together toward
Nineveh, and, as you listen, you hear the actual
voices and you see the sands of the desert and the
waving palms. The lecturer's voice is so easy,
so effortless, it seems so ordinary and matter-offact--
yet the entire scene is instantly vital and
alive! Instantly the man has his audience under
a sort of spell, eager to listen, ready to be merry
or grave. He has the faculty of control, the vital
quality that makes the orator.
The same people will go to hear this lecture
over and over, and that is the kind of tribute
that Conwell likes. I recently heard him deliver
it in his own church, where it would naturally
be thought to be an old story, and where, presumably,
only a few of the faithful would go; but it
was quite clear that all of his church are the
faithful, for it was a large audience that came to
listen to him; hardly a seat in the great
auditorium was vacant. And it should be added
that, although it was in his own church, it was
not a free lecture, where a throng might be
expected, but that each one paid a liberal sum for
a seat--and the paying of admission is always a
practical test of the sincerity of desire to hear.
And the people were swept along by the current
as if lecturer and lecture were of novel interest.
The lecture in itself is good to read, but it is only
when it is illumined by Conwell's vivid personality
that one understands how it influences in
the actual delivery.
On that particular evening he had decided to
give the lecture in the same form as when he first
delivered it many years ago, without any of the
alterations that have come with time and changing
localities, and as he went on, with the audience
rippling and bubbling with laughter as usual,
he never doubted that he was giving it as he had
given it years before; and yet--so up-to-date and
alive must he necessarily be, in spite of a definitive
effort to set himself back--every once in a while
he was coming out with illustrations from such
distinctly recent things as the automobile!
The last time I heard him was the 5,124th time
for the lecture. Doesn't it seem incredible! 5,124
times' I noticed that he was to deliver it at a
little out-of-the-way place, difficult for any
considerable number to get to, and I wondered just
how much of an audience would gather and how
they would be impressed. So I went over from
there I was, a few miles away. The road was
dark and I pictured a small audience, but when
I got there I found the church building in which
he was to deliver the lecture had a seating
capacity of 830 and that precisely 830 people were
already seated there and that a fringe of others
were standing behind. Many had come from
miles away. Yet the lecture had scarcely, if at
all, been advertised. But people had said to one
another: ``Aren't you going to hear Dr. Conwell?''
And the word had thus been passed along.
I remember how fascinating it was to watch
that audience, for they responded so keenly and
with such heartfelt pleasure throughout the entire
lecture. And not only were they immensely
pleased and amused and interested--and to
achieve that at a crossroads church was in
itself a triumph to be proud of--but I knew that
every listener was given an impulse toward doing
something for himself and for others, and that
with at least some of them the impulse would
materialize in acts. Over and over one realizes
what a power such a man wields.
And what an unselfishness! For, far on in
years as he is, and suffering pain, he does not
chop down his lecture to a definite length; he
does not talk for just an hour or go on grudgingly
for an hour and a half. He sees that the people
are fascinated and inspired, and he forgets pain,
ignores time, forgets that the night is late and that
he has a long journey to go to get home, and
keeps on generously for two hours! And every
one wishes it were four.
Always he talks with ease and sympathy.
There are geniality, composure, humor, simple
and homely jests--yet never does the audience
forget that he is every moment in tremendous
earnest. They bubble with responsive laughter
or are silent in riveted attention. A stir can be
seen to sweep over an audience, of earnestness or
surprise or amusement or resolve. When he is
grave and sober or fervid the people feel that he
is himself a fervidly earnest man, and when he is
telling something humorous there is on his part
almost a repressed chuckle, a genial appreciation
of the fun of it, not in the least as if he were laughing
at his own humor, but as if he and his hearers
were laughing together at something of which they
were all humorously cognizant.
Myriad successes in life have come through the
direct inspiration of this single lecture. One hears
of so many that there must be vastly more that
are never told. A few of the most recent were
told me by Dr. Conwell himself, one being of
a farmer boy who walked a long distance to hear
him. On his way home, so the boy, now a man,
has written him, he thought over and over of
what he could do to advance himself, and before
he reached home he learned that a teacher was
wanted at a certain country school. He knew
he did not know enough to teach, but was sure he
could learn, so he bravely asked for the place.
And something in his earnestness made him win
a temporary appointment. Thereupon he worked
and studied so hard and so devotedly, while he
daily taught, that within a few months he was
regularly employed there. ``And now,'' says
Conwell, abruptly, with his characteristic skimming
over of the intermediate details between the
important beginning of a thing and the satisfactory
end, ``and now that young man is one of
our college presidents.''
And very recently a lady came to Dr. Conwell,
the wife of an exceptionally prominent man
who was earning a large salary, and she told him
that her husband was so unselfishly generous
with money that often they were almost in straits.
And she said they had bought a little farm as a
country place, paying only a few hundred dollars
for it, and that she had said to herself,
laughingly, after hearing the lecture, ``There are no
acres of diamonds on this place!'' But she also
went on to tell that she had found a spring of
exceptionally fine water there, although in buying
they had scarcely known of the spring at all;
and she had been so inspired by Conwell that she
had had the water analyzed and, finding that it
was remarkably pure, had begun to have it bottled
and sold under a trade name as special spring
water. And she is making money. And she also
sells pure ice from the pool, cut in winter-time
and all because of ``Acres of Diamonds''!
Several millions of dollars, in all, have been
received by Russell Conwell as the proceeds from
this single lecture. Such a fact is almost staggering--
and it is more staggering to realize what
good is done in the world by this man, who does
not earn for himself, but uses his money in
immediate helpfulness. And one can neither think
nor write with moderation when it is further
realized that far more good than can be done
directly with money he does by uplifting and
inspiring with this lecture. Always his heart is
with the weary and the heavy-laden. Always
he stands for self-betterment.
Last year, 1914, he and his work were given
unique recognition. For it was known by his
friends that this particular lecture was approaching
its five-thousandth delivery, and they planned
a celebration of such an event in the history of the
most popular lecture in the world. Dr. Conwell
agreed to deliver it in the Academy of Music, in
Philadelphia, and the building was packed and
the streets outside were thronged. The proceeds
from all sources for that five-thousandth lecture
were over nine thousand dollars.
The hold which Russell Conwell has gained on
the affections and respect of his home city was
seen not only in the thousands who strove to
hear him, but in the prominent men who served
on the local committee in charge of the celebration.
There was a national committee, too, and
the nation-wide love that he has won, the nationwide
appreciation of what he has done and is
still doing, was shown by the fact that among the
names of the notables on this committee were
those of nine governors of states. The Governor
of Pennsylvania was himself present to do Russell
Conwell honor, and he gave to him a key
emblematic of the Freedom of the State.
The ``Freedom of the State''--yes; this man,
well over seventy, has won it. The Freedom of
the State, the Freedom of the Nation--for this
man of helpfulness, this marvelous exponent of
the gospel of success, has worked marvelously for
the freedom, the betterment, the liberation, the
advancement, of the individual.
FIFTY YEARS ON THE LECTURE
PLATFORM
BY
RUSSELL H. CONWELL
AN Autobiography! What an absurd request!
If all the conditions were favorable, the story
of my public Life could not be made interesting.
It does not seem possible that any will care to
read so plain and uneventful a tale. I see nothing
in it for boasting, nor much that could be helpful.
Then I never saved a scrap of paper intentionally
concerning my work to which I could refer, not
a book, not a sermon, not a lecture, not a newspaper
notice or account, not a magazine article,
not one of the kind biographies written from time
to time by noble friends have I ever kept even as
a souvenir, although some of them may be in my
library. I have ever felt that the writers concerning
my life were too generous and that my own
work was too hastily done. Hence I have nothing
upon which to base an autobiographical account,
except the recollections which come to an
overburdened mind.
My general view of half a century on the
lecture platform brings to me precious and beautiful
memories, and fills my soul with devout gratitude
for the blessings and kindnesses which have
been given to me so far beyond my deserts.
So much more success has come to my hands
than I ever expected; so much more of good
have I found than even youth's wildest dream
included; so much more effective have been my
weakest endeavors than I ever planned or hoped--
that a biography written truthfully would be
mostly an account of what men and women have
done for me.
I have lived to see accomplished far more than
my highest ambition included, and have seen the
enterprises I have undertaken rush by me, pushed
on by a thousand strong hands until they have
left me far behind them. The realities are like
dreams to me. Blessings on the loving hearts and
noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice
for others' good and to think only of what
they could do, and never of what they should get!
Many of them have ascended into the Shining
Land, and here I am in mine age gazing up alone,
_Only waiting till the shadows
Are a little longer grown_.
Fifty years! I was a young man, not yet of
age, when I delivered my first platform lecture.
The Civil War of 1861-65 drew on with all its
passions, patriotism, horrors, and fears, and I was
studying law at Yale University. I had from
childhood felt that I was ``called to the ministry.''
The earliest event of memory is the prayer of
my father at family prayers in the little old cottage
in the Hampshire highlands of the Berkshire
Hills, calling on God with a sobbing voice
to lead me into some special service for the
Saviour. It filled me with awe, dread, and fear, and
I recoiled from the thought, until I determined
to fight against it with all my power. So I sought
for other professions and for decent excuses for
being anything but a preacher.
Yet while I was nervous and timid before the
class in declamation and dreaded to face any
kind of an audience, I felt in my soul a strange
impulsion toward public speaking which for years
made me miserable. The war and the public
meetings for recruiting soldiers furnished an outlet
for my suppressed sense of duty, and my first
lecture was on the ``Lessons of History'' as
applied to the campaigns against the Confederacy.
That matchless temperance orator and loving
friend, John B. Gough, introduced me to the little
audience in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1862.
What a foolish little school-boy speech it must
have been! But Mr. Gough's kind words of
praise, the bouquets and the applause, made me
feel that somehow the way to public oratory
would not be so hard as I had feared.
From that time I acted on Mr. Gough's advice
and ``sought practice'' by accepting almost every
invitation I received to speak on any kind of a
subject. There were many sad failures and tears,
but it was a restful compromise with my conscience
concerning the ministry, and it pleased my friends.
I addressed picnics, Sunday-schools, patriotic
meetings, funerals, anniversaries, commencements,
debates, cattle-shows, and sewing-circles without
partiality and without price. For the first five
years the income was all experience. Then
voluntary gifts began to come occasionally in the
shape of a jack-knife, a ham, a book, and the
first cash remuneration was from a farmers' club,
of seventy-five cents toward the ``horse hire.''
It was a curious fact that one member of that
club afterward moved to Salt Lake City and was
a member of the committee at the Mormon
Tabernacle in 1872 which, when I was a correspondent,
on a journey around the world, employed
me to lecture on ``Men of the Mountains'' in the
Mormon Tabernacle, at a fee of five hundred dollars.
While I was gaining practice in the first years
of platform work, I had the good fortune to have
profitable employment as a soldier, or as a
correspondent or lawyer, or as an editor or as a
preacher, which enabled me to pay my own expenses,
and it has been seldom in the fifty years
that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use.
In the last thirty-six years I have dedicated
solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent
enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an
autobiography, perhaps I may be aged enough to
avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when I
state that some years I delivered one lecture,
``Acres of Diamonds,'' over two hundred times
each year, at an average income of about one
hundred and fifty dollars for each lecture.
It was a remarkable good fortune which came
to me as a lecturer when Mr. James Redpath
organized the first lecture bureau ever established.
Mr. Redpath was the biographer of John Brown
of Harper's Ferry renown, and as Mr. Brown had
been long a friend of my father's I found employment,
while a student on vacation, in selling that
life of John Brown. That acquaintance with Mr.
Redpath was maintained until Mr. Redpath's
death. To General Charles H. Taylor, with
whom I was employed for a time as reporter for
the Boston _Daily Traveler_, I was indebted for many
acts of self-sacrificing friendship which soften my
soul as I recall them. He did me the greatest
kindness when he suggested my name to Mr.
Redpath as one who could ``fill in the vacancies
in the smaller towns'' where the ``great lights
could not always be secured.''
What a glorious galaxy of great names that
original list of Redpath lecturers contained!
Henry Ward Beecher, John B. Gough, Senator
Charles Sumner, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips,
Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Bayard Taylor,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, with many of the great
preachers, musicians, and writers of that remarkable
era. Even Dr. Holmes, John Whittier,
Henry W. Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley,
George William Curtis, and General Burnside
were persuaded to appear one or more times,
although they refused to receive pay. I cannot
forget how ashamed I felt when my name appeared
in the shadow of such names, and how
sure I was that every acquaintance was ridiculing
me behind my back. Mr. Bayard Taylor, however,
wrote me from the _Tribune_ office a kind note
saying that he was glad to see me ``on the road to
great usefulness.'' Governor Clafflin, of Massachusetts,
took the time to send me a note of congratulation.
General Benjamin F. Butler, however,
advised me to ``stick to the last'' and be a
good lawyer.
The work of lecturing was always a task and
a duty. I do not feel now that I ever sought to
be an entertainer. I am sure I would have been
an utter failure but for the feeling that I must
preach some gospel truth in my lectures and do at
least that much toward that ever-persistent ``call of
God.'' When I entered the ministry (1879) I had
become so associated with the lecture platform in
America and England that I could not feel justified
in abandoning so great a field of usefulness.
The experiences of all our successful lecturers
are probably nearly alike. The way is not always
smooth. But the hard roads, the poor hotels,
the late trains, the cold halls, the hot church
auditoriums, the overkindness of hospitable
committees, and the broken hours of sleep are
annoyances one soon forgets; and the hosts of
intelligent faces, the messages of thanks, and the
effects of the earnings on the lives of young college
men can never cease to be a daily joy. God
bless them all.
Often have I been asked if I did not, in fifty
years of travel in all sorts of conveyances, meet
with accidents. It is a marvel to me that no such
event ever brought me harm. In a continuous
period of over twenty-seven years I delivered
about two lectures in every three days, yet I did
not miss a single engagement. Sometimes I had
to hire a special train, but I reached the town on
time, with only a rare exception, and then I was
but a few minutes late. Accidents have preceded
and followed me on trains and boats, and
were sometimes in sight, but I was preserved
without injury through all the years. In the
Johnstown flood region I saw a bridge go out
behind our train. I was once on a derelict steamer
on the Atlantic for twenty-six days. At another
time a man was killed in the berth of a sleeper I
had left half an hour before. Often have I felt
the train leave the track, but no one was killed.
Robbers have several times threatened my life,
but all came out without loss to me. God and man
have ever been patient with me.
Yet this period of lecturing has been, after all,
a side issue. The Temple, and its church, in
Philadelphia, which, when its membership was
less than three thousand members, for so many
years contributed through its membership over
sixty thousand dollars a year for the uplift of
humanity, has made life a continual surprise; while
the Samaritan Hospital's amazing growth, and the
Garretson Hospital's dispensaries, have been so
continually ministering to the sick and poor, and
have done such skilful work for the tens of thousands
who ask for their help each year, that I
have been made happy while away lecturing by
the feeling that each hour and minute they were
faithfully doing good. Temple University, which
was founded only twenty-seven years ago, has
already sent out into a higher income and nobler
life nearly a hundred thousand young men and
women who could not probably have obtained an
education in any other institution. The faithful,
self-sacrificing faculty, now numbering two hundred
and fifty-three professors, have done the real
work. For that I can claim but little credit;
and I mention the University here only to show
that my ``fifty years on the lecture platform''
has necessarily been a side line of work.
My best-known lecture, ``Acres of Diamonds,''
was a mere accidental address, at first given
before a reunion of my old comrades of the Fortysixth
Massachusetts Regiment, which served in
the Civil War and in which I was captain. I
had no thought of giving the address again, and
even after it began to be called for by lecture
committees I did not dream that I should live
to deliver it, as I now have done, almost five
thousand times. ``What is the secret of its
popularity?'' I could never explain to myself or others.
I simply know that I always attempt to enthuse
myself on each occasion with the idea that it is
a special opportunity to do good, and I interest
myself in each community and apply the general
principles with local illustrations.
The hand which now holds this pen must in
the natural course of events soon cease to gesture
on the platform, and it is a sincere, prayerful hope
that this book will go on into the years doing
increasing good for the aid of my brothers and
sisters in the human family.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
South Worthington, Mass.,
September 1, 1913.
THE END

# posted by VV @ 3:57 AM 0 comments