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
collar-button 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 cotton-gin 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 to-morrow 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 mowing-machine, 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's length
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 every-day, 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 to-night, 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.