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, naïvely, 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-of-fact--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 skim-ming 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 nation-wide 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.