I was asked the other day by one of those journals which love vast,
resounding themes with which to astonish their readers to write an
article on the most important man in the world. I declined, partly
because I was busy and partly because I was lazy, but chiefly because
I had not a ghost of a notion of the answer. Of course, it would
have been possible for me to have discussed the claims of this man
and that to pre-eminence, to have contrasted M. Poincaré with Mr.
Lloyd George, Mr. Bernard Shaw with Mr. Charlie Chaplin, M. Trotsky
with Signor Mussolini, Einstein with Rutherford, and so on; but I
should not have answered the question. No one can answer the
question. We can all guess; but one thing is pretty certain. We
shall all guess wrong. The most important man in the world is
somewhere, but he will not be known until he is dead, and we are all
dead with him; not until our posterity looks back upon this time and
says with one voice, "Behold, the man," as we to-day look back to the
great age of Elizabeth and say, "Lo! Shakespeare." No one said it
then, and no one thought it. Nearly two centuries had to pass before
the true magnitude of this peak became visible and even then it had
to be discovered by observers from afar, by the critics of a foreign
land and a foreign tongue.
Was there ever a period in history when the world knew where to look
for its chief of men? If ever it might have been expected to pick
him out with the certainty of being right it would have been when
Augustus Cæsar reigned at Rome over the whole known world. He was so
supreme that he seemed less a man than a god. But down in a little
province of his vast empire there was a Boy growing up who was
destined to change the whole face of the world and to outshine
Augustus as the sun outshines a rush-light. The magnificence of
Augustus and his empire is an empty memory of nineteen centuries ago,
but Christianity is still the mightiest force in the affairs of men.
Or suppose you had been living in the year 1506 in Valladolid, and
had asked yourself who was the most important man alive. You would
have said the Pope or the Emperor or Ferdinand, without knowing that
they were nothing compared with a poor old man who was dying in
poverty and neglect in a mean street of that famous city. He did not
know himself how vast a thing he had done and how his name would
outlive and outsoar those of kings and warriors, poets and statesmen.
He did not know that he had not simply found a new way to the East
Indies, but had discovered a New World, and that all the vast
continent of America would be the everlasting memorial of his life of
struggle and disappointment. One would like to think that the spirit
of Columbus "poised in the unapparent" has the satisfaction of
knowing what a resounding name he has left behind him.
Let us go on a few years. I will imagine that in 1530 I am asked,
not by an editor--for that breed had not then been invented--but by
some other curious inquirer, to direct him to the king of men then
living. I should probably have answered with some confidence. It
was the day of the Great Kings. I suppose three men of such
remarkable powers as Henry VIII., Charles V., and Francis I. never
reigned in Europe simultaneously. It was only a question of which
was the greatest to decide who was the most important man in the
world. I daresay I should have decided for Henry; but of course I
should have been wrong. The most important man in the world was a
person of whom I should not then have heard--a wandering scientist
born on the Vistula, Copernicus by name, into whose profound mind
there had come the most stupendous conception that ever thrilled the
thought of man. The earth was not, as had been supposed through all
the ages, the fixed centre of the universe around which the stars
moved in obedient subjection, but a little planet rushing with the
rest round its great over-lord, the sun. With that terrific
discovery, the whole conception of the cosmos was changed, the earth
became a speck of dust in the unthinkable vast, religion assumed new
meanings, and man fell from his proud pre-eminence as the lord of
creation. In its effects it was the most momentous thing that ever
happened in the secular history of man; but the point here is that if
you and I had been living then and had had Copernicus pointed out to
us in the street we should not have known that he was beyond all
comparison the most tremendous figure in the world.
Take another illustration. The end of the eighteenth century was a
time of great men. If we had guessed then who was the most important
man alive we should have been puzzled to decide between Pitt and
Burke, Johnson and Washington, Nelson and Napoleon, and a multitude
of others. None of us would have thought of looking for him in the
person of a certain gentle, unassuming instrument-maker who filled a
modest position in Glasgow University. Yet if the most important man
in the world is he who sets in motion the forces--whether of ideas or
physical powers--that most profoundly affect the life of men, then no
one living from, say, 1760 to 1800, was comparable with James Watt.
He inaugurated the Age of Steam. He released the greatest power that
the ingenuity of man has ever invented, and the train that thunders
through the land, and the ship that ploughs the sea, and the engine
that drives a thousand looms are among the prolific children of his
genius.
And so I repeat that I do not know who is the most important man in
the world. He may be a solitary thinker wrestling with some vast
conception that is destined to reshape all our thought. He may be
some unknown scientist from whose laboratory there will emerge one
day a power that will shake the heavens. He may be a prophet or a
teacher who will help us to solve the riddle of this unintelligible
world. He may be a discoverer or even a poet. I am sure he will not
be a soldier, and I don't think he will be a politician. These
people make a great noise in the world, but they rarely do anything
that matters to posterity. The most important man in the world is
probably making no noise at all. His noise will come late like the
sound of a great gun heard from afar. But it is a noise that will
echo down the ages.