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The Key to Success
Observation:--The Key to Success
Who the Real Leaders Are
Mastering Natural Forces
Whom Mankind Shall Love
Need of Orators
Woman's Influence
_By_ RUSSELL H. CONWELL
VOLUME 3
NATIONAL
EXTENSION UNIVERSITY
597 Fifth Avenue, New York
OBSERVATION--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
Copyright, 1917, by Harper & Brothers
Printed in the United States of America
FOREWORD
People are thinking, but they can think much more. The housewife is
thinking about the chemical changes caused by heat in meats, vegetables,
and liquids. The sailor thinks about the gold in sea-water, the soldier
thinks of smokeless powder and muffled guns; the puddler meditates on
iron squeezers and electric furnaces; the farmer admires Luther
Burbank's magical combinations in plant life; the school-girl examines
the composition of her pencil and analyses the writing-paper; the
teacher studies psychology at first hand; the preacher understands more
of the life that now is; the merchant and manufacturer give more
attention to the demand. Yes, we are all thinking. But we are still
thinking too far away; even the prism through which we see the stars is
near the eyes. The dentist is thinking too much about other people's
teeth.
This book is sent out to induce people to look at their own eyes, to
pick up the gold in their laps, to study anatomy under the tutorship of
their own hearts. One could accumulate great wisdom and secure fortunes
by studying his own finger-nails. This lesson seems the very easiest to
learn, and for that reason is the most difficult.
The lecture, "The Silver Crown," which the author has been giving in
various forms for fifty years, is herein printed from a stenographic
report of one address on this general subject. It will not be found all
together, as a lecture, for this book is an attempt to give further
suggestion on the many different ways in which the subject has been
treated, just as the lecture has varied in its illustrations from time
to time. The lecture was addressed to the ear. This truth, which
amplifies the lecture, is addressed to the eye.
I have been greatly assisted, and sometimes superseded, in the
preparation of these pages by Prof. James F. Willis, of Philadelphia.
Bless him!
My hope is by this means to reach a larger audience even than that which
has heard some of the things herein so many times in the last forty-five
years. We do not hope to give or sell anything to the reader. He has
enough already. But many starve with bread in their mouths. They spit it
out and weep for food. Humans are a strange collection. But they can be
induced to think much more accurately and far more efficiently. This
book is sent out as an aid to closer observation and more efficient
living.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
_September 1917._
RUSSELL H. CONWELL[1]
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 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."
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.
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.
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.
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, have 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 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
Forty-sixth 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.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
SOUTH WORTHINGTON, MASSACHUSETTS,
_September 1, 1913_.
* * * * *
[Footnote 1: These pages are taken from an autobiographical chapter in
Doctor Conwell's previous book, _Acres of Diamonds_, published by Harper
& Brothers.]
OBSERVATION:--EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
I
OBSERVATION--THE KEY TO SUCCESS
Years ago we went up the Ganges River in India. I was then a traveling
correspondent, and we visited Argra, the sacred city of northern India,
going thence to the Taj Mahal. Then we hired an ox team to take us
across country twenty-two miles to visit the summer home of Ackba, the
great Mogul of India. That is a wonderful, but dead city.
I have never been sorry that I traversed that country. What I saw and
heard furnished me with a story which I have never seen in print.
_Harper's Magazine_ recently published an illustrated article upon the
city, so that if you secure the files you may find the account of that
wonderful dead city at Futtepore Sicree.
As we were being shown around those buildings the old guide, full of
Eastern lore, told us a tradition connected with the ancient history of
that place which has served me often as an illustration of the practical
ideas I desire to advance. I wrote it down in the "hen tracks" of
short-hand which are now difficult to decipher. But I remember well the
story.
He said that there was a beautiful palace on that spot before the great
Mogul purchased it. That previous palace was the scene of the
traditional story. In the palace there was a throne-room, and at the
head of that room there was a raised platform, and upon the platform was
placed the throne of burnished gold. Beside the throne was a pedestal
upon which rested the wonderful Crown of Silver, which the emperor wore
when his word was to be actual law. At other times he was no more than
an ordinary citizen. But when he assumed that crown, which was made of
silver because silver was then worth much more than gold, his command
was as absolute as the law of the Medes and Persians.
The guide said that when the old king who had ruled that country for
many years died he was without heirs, leaving no person to claim that
throne or to wear that Crown of Silver. The people, believing in the
divine right of kings, were unwilling to accept any person to rule who
was not born in the royal line. They wasted twelve years in searching
for some successor, some relative of the late king. At last the people
sank into anarchy, business ceased, famine overspread the land, and the
afflicted people called upon the astrologers--their priests--to find a
king.
The astrologers, who then worshiped the stars, met in that throne-room
and, consulting their curious charts, asked of the stars:
"Where shall we find a successor to our king?"
The stars made to them this reply:
"Look up and down your country, and when you find _a man whom the
animals follow, the sun serves, the waters obey, and mankind love_, you
need not ask who his ancestors were. This man will be one of the royal
line entitled to the throne of gold and the Crown of Silver."
The astrologers dispersed and began to ask of the people:
"Have you seen a man whom the animals follow, the sun serves, the waters
obey, and mankind love?"
They were only met with ridicule. At last, in his travels, one gray old
astrologer found his way into the depths of the Himalaya Mountains. He
was overtaken by a December storm and sought shelter in a huntsman's
cottage on the side of a mountain.
That night, as he lay awake, weeping for his suffering and dying people,
he suddenly heard the howl of a wild beast down the valley. He listened
as it drew nearer. He detected "the purr of the hyena, the hiss of the
tiger, and the howl of the wolf." In a moment or two those wild animals
sniffed at the log walls within which the astrologer lay. In his fright
he arose to close the window lest they should leap in where the
moonlight entered. While he stood by the window he saw the dark outline
of his host, the huntsman, descending the ladder from the loft to the
floor. The astrologer saw the huntsman approach the door as though he
were about to open it and go out. The astrologer leaped forward, and
said:
"Don't open that door! There are tigers, panthers, hyenas, and wolves
out there."
The huntsman replied:
"Lie down, my friend, in peace. These are acquaintances of mine."
He flung open the door and in walked tiger, panther, hyena, and wolf.
Going to the corner of his hut, the huntsman took down from a cord,
stretched across the corner, the dried weeds which he had gathered the
fall before because he _had noticed_ that those weeds were antidotes for
poisoned wild animals. Those poisoned animals had sniffed the antidote
from afar and gathered at his door. When he opened that door they
followed him to the corner of the hut, in peace with one another because
of their common distress. He fed each one the antidote for which it
came, and each one licked his hand with thanks and turned harmlessly out
the door. Then the huntsman closed the door after the last one, and went
to his rest as though nothing remarkable had happened.
This is the fabulous tradition as it was told me.
When the old astrologer lay down on his rug after the animals were gone,
he said to himself, "The animals follow him," and then he caught upon
the message of the stars and said, "It may be this huntsman is the
king," but on second thought he said, "Oh no; he is not a king. How
would he look on a throne of gold and wearing a Crown of Silver--that
ignorant, horny-handed man of the mountains? He is not the king."
The next morning it was cold and they desired a fire, and the huntsman
went outside and gathered some leaves and sticks. He put them in the
center of the hut upon the ground floor. He then drew aside a curtain
which hid a crystal set in the roof, which he had placed there because
he _had noticed_ that the crystal brought the sunlight to a focused
point upon the floor. Then the astrologer saw, as that spot of light
approached the leaves and sticks with the rising of the sun, the sticks
began to crackle. Then the leaves began to curl, little spirals of smoke
arose, and a flame flashed forth. As the astrologer looked on that
rising flame, he said to himself:
"The sun has lit his fire! The sun serves him; and the animals followed
him last night; after all, it may be that he is the king."
But on second thought he said to himself again: "Oh, he is not the king;
for how would I look with all my inherited nobility, with all my wealth,
cultivation, and education, as an ordinary citizen of a kingdom of which
this ignorant fellow was a king? It is far more likely to be me."
A little later the astrologer desired water to drink, and he applied to
the huntsman, and the huntsman said, "There is a spring down in the
valley where I drink."
So down to the spring went the astrologer. But the wind swept down and
roiled the shallow water so that he could not drink, and he went back
and complained of that muddy water. The huntsman said:
"Is that spring rebellious? I will teach it a lesson."
Going to another corner of his hut, he took down a vial of oil which he
himself had collected, and, going down to the spring with the vial of
oil, he dropped the oil upon the waters. Of course, the surface of the
spring became placid beauty. As the astrologer dipped his glittering
bowl into the flashing stream and partook of its cooling draught, he
felt within him the testimony, "This is the king, for the waters obey
him!" But again he hesitated and said, "I hope he is not the king."
The next day they went up into the mountains, and there was a dam
holding back, up a valley, a great reservoir of water. The astrologer
said, "Why is there a dam here with no mill?" And the huntsman said: "A
few years ago I was down on the plains, and the people were dying for
want of water. My heart's sympathies went out for the suffering and
dying humanity, and when I came back here _I noticed_...."
I may as well stop here in this story and emphasize this phrase. He
said, "When I came back here _I noticed_." This is the infallible
secret of success. I wish you to be happy; I wish you to be mighty
forces of God and man; I wish you to have fine homes and fine libraries
and money invested, and here is the only open road to them. By this road
only have men who have won great success traveled.
The huntsman said: "When I came back here _I noticed_ a boulder hanging
on the side of the mountain. _I noticed_ it could be easily dislodged,
and _I noticed_ that it would form an excellent anchorage in the narrow
valley for a dam. _I noticed_ that a small dam here would hold back a
large body of water in the mountain. I let the boulder fall, filled in
for the dam, and gathered the water. Now every hot summer's day I come
out and dig away a little more of the dam, and thus keep the water
running in the river through the hot season. Then, when the fall comes
on, I fill up the dam again and gather the waters for the next year's
supply."
When the astrologer heard that he turned to the huntsman and said:
"Do mankind down on the plains know that you are their benefactor?"
"Oh yes," said he; "they found it out. I was down there a little while
ago, selling the skins I had taken in the winter, and they came around
me, kissed me, embraced me, and fairly mobbed me with their
demonstrations of gratitude. I will never go down on the plains again."
When the astrologer heard that _mankind loved him_, all four conditions
were filled. He fell upon his knees, took the horny hand of the
huntsman, looked up into his scarred face, and said:
"Thou art a king born in the royal line. The stars did tell us that when
we found a man whom the animals followed, the sun served, the waters
obeyed, and mankind loved, he would be the heir entitled to the throne,
and thou art the man!"
But the huntsman said: "I a king! Oh, I am not a king! My grandfather
was a farmer!"
The astrologer said: "Don't talk about your grandfather. That has
nothing to do with it. The stars told us thou art the man."
The huntsman replied: "How could I rule a nation, knowing nothing about
law? I never studied law!"
Then the astrologer cut short the whole discussion with a theological
dictum quoted from the ancient sacred books, which I will give in a very
literal translation:
"Let not him whom the stars ordain to rule dare disobey their divine
decree."
Now I will put that into a phrase a little more modern:
"Never refuse a nomination!"
When the huntsman heard that very wise decision he consented to be led
down to the Juna Valley and to the beautiful palace. There they clothed
him in purple. Then, amid the acclaim of happy and hopeful people, they
placed upon his brow that badge of kingly authority--the Silver Crown.
For forty years after that, so the old guide said to us, he ruled the
nation and brought it to a peace and prosperity such as it had never
known before and has never enjoyed since.
That wonderful tradition, so full of illustrative force, has remained
with me all the subsequent years. When I look for a man to do any great
work, I seek one having these four characteristics. If he has not all
four he must have some of them, or else he is good for little in modern
civilization.
II
WHO THE REAL LEADERS ARE
Among all of you who read this book I am looking for the kings and
queens. I am looking for the successful men and women of the future. No
matter how old you may be, you yet have life before you. I am looking
for the leading men and women, and I will find them with these four
tests. I cannot fail; it is infallible.
Some men, intensely American, will say:
"Oh, we don't have any kings or queens in this country."
Did you ever observe that America is ruled by the least number of people
of any nation known on earth? And that same small number will rule it
when we add all the women, as we soon shall, to the voting population.
America is ruled by a very few kings and queens. The reason why we are
ruled by so few is because our people are generally intelligent. "Oh,"
you will ask, "do you mean the political boss rule?" Yes. That is not a
good word to use, because it is misleading. America is ruled by bosses,
anyhow, and it will be so long as we are a free people. We do not
approve of certain phases of boss rule, and so don't misunderstand me
when I state that a very few persons govern the American people. In my
home city, Philadelphia, for instance, nearly two millions of people are
ruled by four or five men. It will always be so. Everything depends on
whether those four or five men are fitted for the place of leaders or
not. If they are wise men and good men, then that is the best kind of
government. There is no doubt about it. If all the eighty or ninety
millions of people in the United States were compelled to vote on every
little thing that was done by the Government, you would be a long time
getting around to any reform.
An intelligent farmer would build a house. Will he, as a farmer, go to
work and cut out that lumber himself, plane it himself, shape it
himself? Will he be the architect of the house, drive all the nails, put
on the shingles, and build the chimney himself? If he is an intelligent
man he will hire a carpenter, an architect, and a mason who understand
their business, and tell them to oversee that work for him. In an
intelligent country we can hire men who understand statesmanship, law,
social economics, who love justice. We hire them as skilled people to do
what we are not able to do. Why should all the people be all the time
meddling with something they don't understand? They employ people who do
understand it, and consequently, in a free nation a few specially fitted
people will ever be allowed to guide. They will be the people who know
better than we know what to do under difficult or important
circumstances.
You are ruled by a few people, and I am looking for these few people
among my readers. There are some women in this country who now have more
influence than any known statesman, and their names are hardly mentioned
in the newspapers. I remember once, in the days of Queen Victoria,
asking a college class, "Who rules England?" Of course, they said,
"Queen Victoria." Did Queen Victoria rule England? During her nominal
reign England was the freest land on the face of the earth, and America
not half as free if you go to the extremes of comparison. She was only a
figurehead, and she would not even express an opinion on the Boer War.
It was all left to the statesmen, who had really been selected by the
Parliament to rule. They were the real rulers.
I am looking for the real kings, not the nominal ones, and I shall find
the successful men and women of the future by the four tests mentioned
in the old tradition of the Silver Crown. The first one is:
"Animals will follow them."
If a dog or cat tags your heels to-morrow remember what I am writing
about it here. It is evidence of kingship or queenship. If you don't
have a cat or dog or an ox or a horse to love you, then I pity you. I
pity the animal the most, but you are also a subject of sympathy. Is
there no lower animal that loves to hear your footstep, whines after
your heels, or wags the tail or shakes the head at your door? Is there
no cat that loves to see you come in when the house has been vacant? Is
there no faithful dog that rises and barks with joy when he hears your
key in the door? If you have none it is time you had one, because one of
the important pathways to great success is along the line of what animal
life can give to us of instruction and encouragement.
The time has come when a dog ought to be worth at least a thousand
dollars. The time has come when a horse that now trots a mile in 2:05 or
2:06 ought to trot a mile in fifty-five seconds. That is scientifically
possible. Now, where are your deacons and your elders and your class
leaders that you haven't a horse in your city that will trot a mile in
fifty-five seconds?
"Oh," says some good, pious brother, "I don't pay any attention to
trotting-horses! I am too religious to spend time over them."
Is that so? Who made the trotting-horse? Who used the most picturesque
language on the face of the earth, in the Book of Job, to describe him?
Did you ever own a trotting-horse? Did you ever see a beautiful animal
so well fed, so well cared for, trembling on that line with his mane
shaking, his eyes flashing, his nostrils distended, and all his being
alert for the leap? And did you hear the shot and see him go? If you did
and didn't love him, you ought to be turned out of the church.
The time has come when a horse may be as useful as a university.
At Yale University, one day, I heard a professor of science tell those
boys that a horse has within its body so much galvanic or electric force
continually generated by the activities of life, that if that
electricity could be concentrated and held to a certain point, a horse
could stand still and run a forty-horse power electric engine. He went
further than that and said that a man has within his living body
sufficient continually generated electricity which, if it were brought
to a point, might enable him to stand still and run a ten-horsepower
electric engine. I went out of that class-room with a sense of triumph,
thinking:
"There is going to be use, after all, for the loafers who stand on the
corners and smoke!"
In Europe, some years ago, a sewing-machine was invented on which a lady
put her bare feet, and her electric forces started the machine. This
power does not yet run the machine strong enough to force the needle for
real sewing. The only question is to get more of the electricity of that
lady through the machine and secure the greater power. Then if a young
man wants a valuable wife he must marry one "full of lightning."
The time is very near at hand when all the motive power of the world may
be furnished by animal life. When they get one step further the greatest
airships will go up and take with them a lap dog. The airship will
require no coal, no oil, but just the electric force of that lap dog;
and if they carry up enough to feed that dog he will furnish the power
to run the motors. The great high seas of the air will be filled with
machines run by lap dogs or the electricity of the aviator himself. It
is not so far away as many of you may suppose, and it is the greatly
needed improvement of this time, not so much for the purpose of the war,
as for peace.
The time has come when an old hen may become a great instructor of the
world. I would rather send my child to an old hen than to any professor
I ever saw in my life. That old biddy which scratches around your door,
or who cackles beside your fence, or picks off your flowers, knows more
of some things than any scientific professor on the face of the earth. I
wish I knew what that old hen does. But there are some professors who
pretend to have a wonderful intellect, who say:
"I graduated from Leipsic or from Oxford or Harvard, and I have no time
to observe a hen."
No time to notice a hen? My friend, did you ever try to talk with her?
"No, I did not; she has no language."
Didn't you ever hear her call the chickens and see them come? Didn't you
ever hear her scold the rooster, and see him go? Well, a hen does have a
real language, and it is time you scientific professors understood what
that old biddy says.
"Oh, but," says the professor, "I have no time to spend with a hen! They
are around the place all the time, but I never take any special notice
of them. I am studying the greater things in the world."
"Won't you come into my study a minute, professor, and let me examine
you? You have examined the boys long enough, now let me examine you.
"Bring all you know of science and all the scientific applications ever
made, and all the instruments that are ever used, bring all that the
world has ever discovered of chemistry. Come, and take in your hand a
dove's egg, just the egg. Now, professor, will you tell the person who
is reading this book where, in this egg, is now the beating heart of the
future bird? Can you tell where it is?"
"Oh no, I cannot tell that. I can tell you the chemistry of the egg."
"No, I am not looking for that. I am looking for the design in the egg.
I am looking for something more divinely mysterious than anything of
chemistry. Now, professor, will you tell me where in that egg is the
bony frame that next will appear?"
"No, I cannot tell you that."
"Where is the sheening bosom, and where the wings that shall welcome the
sun in its coming?"
"No man can tell that," says the professor.
The professor is quite right. It cannot yet be told. Yet, in that egg is
the greatest scientific problem with which the world has ever
grappled--the beginning of life and the God-given design. In that egg is
the secret of life. Professor, tell me where this life begins. The
professor says, "No man can answer questions like that."
Then, until we can answer, we must take off our hats every time we meet
a setting hen. For that old biddy knows by instinct more about it than
any one of us. She knows directly, through her instinctive nature from
God, something about the beginnings of life that we cannot understand
yet.
The last time I saw Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes, the grand poet of
Massachusetts, he asked me to go out in his back yard and see his
chickens. He told me they would answer to their names. But it turned out
that they were like our children, and would not show off before company.
But I haven't any doubt those little chickens still with the hen did
answer to their individual names when she alone called them. I am sure
that great man understood the hen and chickens as fully as Darwin did
the doves.
It was a wonderful thing for science that men like Holmes and Darwin
could learn so much from the hen. It reminds me of a current event in
Doctor Holmes's own life, though the biographies do not seem to have
taken notice of it. He and Mr. Longfellow were very intimate friends.
They were ever joking each other like two boys, always at play whenever
they met. One day, it is said, Doctor Holmes asked Mr. Longfellow to go
down to Bridgewater, in Massachusetts, to a poultry show. He went; he
was greatly interested in chickens.
Those two great poets went down to the poultry show, and as they walked
up the middle passageway between the exhibits of hens and chickens they
came to a large poster on which was a picture of a rooster. He had his
wings spread and mouth open, making a speech to a lot of little
chickens. It was such a unique picture that Mr. Longfellow called Doctor
Holmes's attention to it, and said:
"There, you love chickens, you understand them. What do you suppose a
rooster does say when he makes a speech to chickens like that?"
They went on, and Doctor Holmes was studying over it. Finally he turned
around and said, "Go on, I will catch up with you." He went back to that
poster, got up on a chair, took the tacks out of the top, turned in the
advertisement at the top, above the picture, and then took his pencil
and drew a line from the bill of the rooster that was making that speech
up to the top. There he wrote what he thought that rooster was saying to
those chickens. They say that he did not make a single correction in it,
of line or word. He then went after Mr. Longfellow and brought the great
poet back to see the poster. He had written these words, in imitation of
Longfellow's "Psalm of Life":
Life is real, life is earnest!
And the shell is not its pen;
Egg thou art, and egg remainest,
Was not spoken of the hen,
Art is long, and Time is fleeting,
Be our bills then sharpened well,
And not like muffled drums be beating,
On the inside of the shell.
In the world's broad field of battle,
In the great barnyard of life,
Be not like those lazy cattle!
Be a rooster in the strife!
Lives of roosters all remind us,
We can make our lives sublime,
And when roasted, leave behind us
Hen tracks on the sands of time.
Hen tracks that perhaps another
Chicken drooping in the rain,
Some forlorn and hen-pecked brother,
When he sees, shall crow again.
Animal life can do much for us if we will but study it, take notice of
it daily in our homes, in the streets, wherever we are.
III
MASTERING NATURAL FORCES
It has been demonstrated by science that the mentality and disposition
of all kinds of animal life are greatly affected by what they eat.
Professor Virchow, of Germany, took two little kittens and fed them on
different foods, but kept them in the same environment. After three
months he went in and put out his finger at one of those little kittens,
and it stuck up its back and spit and scratched and drew the blood. It
was savage. He put out his finger to the other kitten, fed on the other
food, and it rubbed against his finger and purred with all the
loveliness of domestic peace. What was the difference between the
kittens? Nothing in the world but what they ate.
Now I can understand why some men swear and some women scratch. It is
what they eat.
The universities of the world are now establishing schools of domestic
science for the purpose of training people to understand the chemistry
of digestion and the chemistry of cooking. Oh, there is an awful need of
better cooks! Yet the fashionable aristocratic American lady thinks it
is altogether beneath her dignity to cook a pie or pudding, or boil
potatoes. How short sighted that is! The need of better cooks is great.
How many a man fails in business because his wife is a poor cook. How
many a student is marked down because of the bad biscuit in the
boarding-house. Oh yes, and how many a grave in yonder cemetery would be
empty still if there had been a good cook in that house.
I have grappled with an awful subject now--the need of better cooks. A
man can't even be pious with the dyspepsia. The American lady, so
called, who sits in the parlor amid the lace curtains and there plies
her needle upon some delicate piece of embroidery, and commits the
wonderful chemistry of the kitchen to the care of some girl who doesn't
know the difference between a frying-pan and a horse-rake, is not fit to
be called an American lady. Any fool could sit amid the curtains, but it
takes a giant mind to handle the chemistry of the kitchen. If women
forsake that throne of power, men must take it, or our civilization must
cease.
But I will not follow this thought into the thousands of discoveries
animals suggest, because, in this wonderful tradition, the real king was
not only followed by animals, but "the sun served him, and the waters
obeyed him." Now I can combine those two thoughts for illustration,
using the wonderful locomotive which draws our railway trains. The
locomotive has within it the coal, which is the carbon of the sun. Thus
the sun serves man by heating the water; and there is the water changing
to steam and driving the piston-rods over the land, obeying man.
We need so much to travel faster than we do now. I saw a man not long
ago who said he did not like to travel a mile a minute in a railway
train. If you don't go faster than a mile a minute ten years from now
you will feel like that old lady who got in a slow train with a little
girl. The conductor came through and asked for a ticket for the little
girl, and the old lady said:
"She is too young to pay her fare."
"No," said the conductor. "A great girl like that must pay her fare."
"Well," the mother replied, "she was young enough to go for nothing when
we got in this train."
You will feel like that if you don't travel faster than a mile a minute
ten years from now. The time is soon coming when, in order to go from
Philadelphia to San Francisco, you will get in the end of a pipe or on a
wire, and about as quick as you can say "that" you will be in San
Francisco. Is that an extravagant expression? The time draws nigh when
you won't say that is an extravagant expression. As I am writing this a
company to lay that long-contemplated pneumatic tube from New York to
Boston is being formed. They have been fighting in the courts over the
right to lay it. When they finish it you can put a hundredweight of
goods in the New York end of it, and it will possibly land in Boston in
one minute and fifty-eight seconds. Now, then, what is to hinder making
a little larger pipe and putting a man in and sending him in one minute
and fifty-eight seconds? The only reason why you cannot send them with
that lightning speed is for the same reason, perhaps, that the Irishman
gave when he fell from a tall building and they asked, "Didn't the fall
hurt you?" "No, it was not the falling that hurt me, it was the stopping
so quick." That is all the difficulty there is in using now those
pneumatic tubes for human travel.
We need those inventions now. We are soon going to find the inventors.
Will you find them graduating from some university, or from some great
scientific school at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or Berlin? It may be. I
would not say, while presiding over a university myself, that you would
not find such people there. Perhaps you will.
But come back in history with me a little way and let us see where these
men and women are to be found. Go into northern England, and go down a
coal shaft underground two miles, and there is a young man picking away
at a vein of coal a foot and a half thick. His hair sticks out through
his hat, his face is besmirched, his fingers are covered with soot. Yet
he is digging away and whistling. Is he a king? One of the greatest the
world has ever seen. Queen Victoria, introducing her son, who has since
been king, to that young man, said to him:
"I introduce you, my son, to England's greatest man."
What! This poor miner, who has never been to school but a few months in
his life? While he had not been to a day school, he had been learning
all the time in the university of experience, in the world's great
university--_every-day observation_. When such a man graduates he gets
the highest possible degree--D.N.R.--"Don't Need Recommends." Let us go
in the mine and ask the miner his name.
"Young man, what is your name?"
"Stevenson."
The inventor of the locomotive itself! Oh, where are thy kings, oh, men?
They may be in the mine, on the mountain, in the hovel or the palace,
wherever a man notices what other people have not seen. Wherever a man
observes in his every-day work what other people have not noticed, there
will be found the king.
Are any of my readers milkmen? Are you discouraged when the brooks
freeze up in the winter? Now, there was a milkman in West Virginia, not
many years ago, who went to the train every morning with the milk from
the farm, and while they were putting the milk in the car he studied the
locomotive standing in the station.
"What do you know about a locomotive?"
"Oh, I don't know anything about it."
Is that so? You have seen and ridden after them all your lifetime, and
you have seen them standing in the station, you have looked at the
immense structure with some respect, but you don't know anything about
it--and then you expect to be a successful man! That young man became
interested in the locomotive, and while he stood around there he watched
it, measured it, asked the engineer questions about it. One day the
engineer, seeing he was interested, took him down to the switch and
showed him how to put on the steam, and how to shut it off, and how to
reverse the engine, ring the bell, operate the whistle, and all about
it, and he was delighted. He went home and made draftings in the
evenings of the locomotive.
Two years after that the same train ran on the siding and the engineer
and fireman went into a house to get their breakfast, leaving the
locomotive alone--waiting for the snow to be shoveled off the track
which had rolled down the mountain. While they were absent a valve of
the engine accidentally opened. It started the piston, and the engine
began to draw out the train on to the main track, and then it began to
go down the fearful grade at full speed. The brakeman went out on the
rear platform, caught hold of the wheel brake in order to slow down the
train. When he saw the engineer and fireman at the top of the hill
swinging their arms as though something awful had happened, the brakeman
shouted:
"There is the engineer and fireman, both of them, up there. We will all
be killed!"
The people fainted and screamed, and the cry went to the second car, and
then to the baggage car, and that milkman was there. He ran to the
side-door to leap, but saw that it would be certain death. Then, with
the help of the baggage-man he clambered over the tender, reached the
engineer's place, and felt around for the lever in the smoke. When he
discovered it he pressed it home. Then reversed the engine. It was a
wonder those cylinder heads held. But with an awful crack the driving
wheels stopped on the track, shot fire through the snow as they began to
roll back against the ongoing train, the momentum still pushing it on.
It shook the train until every pane of glass was broken. When it came to
a stop the passengers climbed out to ascertain who stopped the train.
They discovered that this young man had done it, and saved their lives,
and they thanked him with tears.
A stockholder in the railroad company, an old man nearly eighty years of
age, was on the train. He went into the stockholders' meeting that night
and told the story of his narrow escape on that train. Since then that
milkman has been one of the richest railroad owners in the world.
What do you suppose has become of the other milkmen who went at the same
time to the same place and sat on the edge of the platform and swung
their feet? What has become of them?
Ask the winds that sweep down from the Alleghany mountains--where are
the other milkmen? The winds will answer, "They are going to the pump
there still."
It was ever the same. Wherever you look, success in any branch of
achievement depends upon this ability to get one's education every day
as one goes along from the events that are around us now. The king is
found wherever a person notices that which other men do not see.
IV
WHOM MANKIND SHALL LOVE
The great scientific men--and we need more--often are not given the full
credit that is due them because they have not "graduated" from
somewhere. It seems to me there is a feeling in these later days for
creating an aristocracy among the men who have graduated from some rich
university. But that does not determine a man's life. It may be a
foolish tyranny for a little while, but nevertheless every man and woman
must finally take the place where he and she are best fitted to be, and
do the things that he and she can do best, and the things about which he
and she really know. Where they graduated, or when, will not long count
in the race of practical life.
We need great scientific men now more than we ever needed them before.
Where are you going to find them? We won't find them where that
scientific man came from who invented an improvement upon the cuckoo
clock. His clock, instead of saying, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo," when it
struck the hour, said, "I love you! I love you! I love you!" That man
left the clock at home with his wife nights while he was around at the
club, thinking that would be sufficient protestation of his love. Yet
any man knows you cannot make love by machinery. That was only a
so-called scientific idea.
I read not long ago that a great scientific man said that "love and
worship are only the aggregate results of physical causes." That is not
true. Love and worship are something beyond physical causes. Educated
men ought to know better than to say anything like that.
There are many valuable things that every man knows until he has
unlearned them in a university.
There is danger that a man will get so much education that he won't know
anything of real value because his useless education has driven the
useful out of his mind. It is like a dog I owned when a boy. He was a
very good fox dog. One day I thought I would show him off before the
boys. We let the fox out at the barn door, which was open just far
enough for the dog to see the fox start. Then he began whining and
yelping to get out. I ran out and dropped some red pepper where the dog
was likely to follow the fox over the hill. Then I went back and opened
the door. The dog rushed out after the fox, but soon began to take in
the red pepper. Then he began to whine and yelp--and stopped, whirled
around, and, rushing down to the brook, put his nose under the water.
From the time he graduated from that pepper university he never would
follow a fox at all. He had added education in the wrong direction, and
so it is often with these scientific men.
Do you know that the humblest man, whatever his occupation, really knows
instinctively certain things better for not having been to school much?
It is so easy to bias the mind.
When the boy comes to learn geometry the teacher will say: "Two parallel
lines will never run together." The boy may look up and ask, "What is
the use of telling me that?" Every man knows that two parallel lines
will never run together. But how does he know it? It is born with him.
His natural instincts tell that to him. It is what we call "an axiom"--a
self-evident truth. It is above argument and beyond all possible
reasoning. We know that "two halves are equal to the whole"! You know
that when you cut an apple in half the two halves are equal to the
whole of it. You tell that to a geometry class, and they say: "I know
that. Everybody knows it." Of course everybody does, because it is a
natural scientific fact that you cannot reasonably question.
Ask a man, "Do you know that you exist?" He looks with astonishment and
says: "Certainly! Don't I know that I am? I know that I am here, that
this is me, that I am not Mrs. Smith or some one else?"
Of course you do. But how do you know it? By a God-given instinct that
came into the world with you.
No scientist or school on earth could disprove that, or prove it,
either. It is a self-evident fact. I know that I am an intelligent
personal identity, and that I dwell in this body in some mysterious way.
I know that is my hand, but what I possess is not me. I know by an
instinct infallible that I am a spiritual being, separate from this
material. You know that. No scientist can prove or disprove it. It is a
fact we all know. I know that I can never die, and you know it unless
you have gotten educated out of it. It is in your very life; it is a
part of your original instinct.
When some graduate of some great university shall come to you, young
man, and say, "I can prove to you that the Bible is not true," or, "I
can prove to you that your religion is false," you can say to him: "You
are nothing but an educated fool. Because the more you have studied the
less truth you seem to know."
It is only one's own personal self that can know his own religious
instincts. It is only himself that can know whether he is in spiritual
relation to God or not. No education on earth can overturn the fact,
although wrong study may confuse the mind.
When a man comes to me, with his higher education, to overturn religion,
it reminds me of what Artemus Ward said to that lordly graduate of
Oxford and Cambridge. This man told Ward that he was disgusted with his
shows. Artemus Ward asked him, "What do you know about these shows?" and
he said: "I know everything about them. I graduated from two
universities." Then Artemus Ward said, "You remind me of a farmer in
Maine who had a calf that stole the milk of two cows, and the more milk
he got the greater calf he was." Such is the effect sometimes of
education on religious life--the more mental education of some kind
which you get the less you may know about your natural religious
instincts.
There is a great need to-day, and prayers go up to heaven now for men
and women whom _mankind shall love_--love because they are great
benefactors; love because, while they are making money or gaining fame
or honor for themselves, they are blessing humanity all the way along. I
must not argue now. I will illustrate, because you can remember the
illustrations and you might forget an argument.