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Digitized by the Internet Archive
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http://archive.org/details/keytosuccessOOconw
^he UCey to Success
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 ex-
amines 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 manufac-
turer 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
FOREWORD
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 re-
port 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superseded, in the preparation of these pages by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
FOREWORD
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 inter-
esting. 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
^hese pages are taken from an autobiographical chapter in
Doctor Con well's previous book, Acres of Diamonds, published
by Harper & Brothers.
INTRODUCTION
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 corre-
spondent or lawyer, or as an editor, or as a preacher,
INTRODUCTION
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, per-
haps 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 con-
tinuous period of over twenty-seven years I de-
livered about two lectures in every three days,
yet I did not miss a single engagement. Some-
times 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 pre-
served 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
INTRODUCTION
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 Garret son 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 pro-
fessors, have done the real work. For that I can
INTRODUCTION
claim but little credit; and I mention the uni-
versity 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 be-
fore 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 popu-
larity?" 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 i, igi 3.
3—2
^he ZKey to Success
OBSERVATION :— EVERY
MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
OBSERVATION — THE KEY TO SUCCESS
YEARS ago we went up the Ganges River
in India. I was then a traveling corre-
spondent, 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 illus-
trated article upon the city, so that if you secure
OBSERVATION:—
the files you may find the account of that wonder-
ful dead city at Futtepore Sicree.
As we were being shown around those buildings
the old guide, full of Eastern lore, told us a tradi-
tion connected with the ancient history of that
place which has served me often as an illustra-
tion 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 tradi-
tional 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 won-
derful 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
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 fol-
low, the sun serves, the waters obey, and man-
kind love?"
They were only met with ridicule. At last, in
OBSERVATION:—
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 atrologer
lay. In his fright he arose to close the window
lest they should leap in where the moonlight en-
tered. While he stood by the window he saw the
dark outline of his host, the huntsman, descend-
ing 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
4
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 fol-
lowed 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 gath-
ered some leaves and sticks. He put them in the
5
OBSERVATION:—
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 sun-
light 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 be-
gan 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
6
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 em-
phasize this phrase. He said, "When I came
back here I noticed." This is the infallible secret
7
OBSERVATION:—
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
8
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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: "la 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 dis-
cussion 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."
9
OBSERVATION:—
Now I will put that into a phrase a little more
modern :
"Never refuse a nomination!"
When the huntsman heard that very wise de-
cision 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.
<Wbo the died
headers c^Cre
II
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 lead-
ing 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 aJ1 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
ii
3—3
OBSERVATION:—
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 ap-
prove 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 gov-
ernment. 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 under-
stand their business, and tell them to oversee
that work for him. In an intelligent country we
12
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 circum-
stances.
You are ruled by a few people, and I am look-
ing 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 Vic-
toria." Did Queen Victoria rule England? Dur-
ing 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.
13
OBSERVATION:—
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 remem-
ber what I am writing about it here. It is evi-
dence 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
14
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 trot ting-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 use-
ful 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 con-
tinually 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
2 i5
OBSERVATION:—
electricity which, if it were brought to a point,
might enbable 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 I"
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 light-
ning."
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
16
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
may suppose, and it is the greatly needed improve-
ment of this time, not so much for the purpose of
the war, as for peace.
The time has come when an old hen may be-
come 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
17
OBSERVATION:—
of them. I am studying the greater things in the
world."
" Won't you come into my study a minute, pro-
fessor, and let me examine you? You have ex-
amined the boys long enough, now let me examine
you."
Bring all you know of science and all the scien-
tific applications ever made, and all the instru-
ments 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 some-
thing 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.
18
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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
10
OBSERVATION:—
the hen. It reminds me of a current event in
Doctor Holmes's own life, though the biogra-
phies 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 inter-
ested in chickens.
Those two great poets went down to the poul-
try 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 at-
tention 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
20
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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.
21
OBSERVATION:—
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.
^Mastering
Statural forces
III
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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. Pro-
fessor 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 sav-
age. 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 do-
mestic 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 estab-
lishing schools of domestic science for the purpose
23
OBSERVATION:—
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 cur-
tains and there plies her needle upon some deli-
cate piece of embroidery, and commits the won-
derful 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 civili-
zation must cease.
24
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 rail-
way 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
25
3—4
OBSERVATION:—
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 ex-
travagant expression. As I am writing this a com-
pany 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 put-
ting 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
26
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 great-
est 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 learn-
ing 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 Recom-
27
OBSERVATION:—
mends." 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 ex-
pect to be a successful man! That young man
28
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 locomo-
tive alone — waiting for the snow to be shoveled
off the track which had rolled down the moun-
tain. 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 !"
29
OBSERVATION:—
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
30
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 milk-
men? 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.
3
H&hom ^Mankind
Shall SBove
IV
OBSERVATION:-
T
IV
WHOM MANKIND SHALL LOVE
HE 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
32
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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 protesta-
tion 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 aggre-
gate 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
33
OBSERVATION:—
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
34
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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: "Cer-
tainly! 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.
35
OBSERVATION:—
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 edu-
cated 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 over-
turn the fact, although wrong study may confuse
the mind.
When a man comes to me, with his higher educa-
tion, 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
36
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
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.
There is a great need for artists. There never
was such a need in the progress of Christian
civilization as there is now for great painters.
All these walls ought to be covered with magnif-
icent paintings teaching some great divine truth,
and every school-house, yes, every barn, ought
to have some picture upon it that will instruct
and inspire. All our children seek to go to the
moving pictures, and that shows what an agency
there is in pictures for the instruction of man-
kind. We need artists by the thousands. It
is not a surprise to me that a New York man is
getting a salary of $35,000 a year for moving-
picture work because "he notices something
other people have not seen." It is no surprise
that a great store in that city pays an advertising
37
OBSERVATION:—
man $21,000 a year salary. He can see what the
rest of the public does not see.
We need great artists, hundreds of them. Where
are you going to find them? You will say ''at
the art school, in the National Gallery in London,
or at the Louvre in Paris, or in Rome." Well,
it may be that you will. But it is an unfortunate
thing for your theory that one of the greatest
painters in America painted with a cat's tail. It
is another enlightening thing that the man who
received the highest prize at the World's Fair in
Chicago for a landscape painting never took
"a lesson" in color or drawing in his life.
But that doesn't argue against lessons nor
against schools or universities. Don't misunder-
stand me in this. I am only making emphatic
my special subject.
He took the highest prize and never went to an
art school in his life. If he had attended school
the teacher might have tried to show him some-
thing and thus weakened his mind. The teacher
in a school who shows a child anything that that
child could work out for himself is a curse to that
child. It is an awful calamity for a child to
be under the control of a too kind-hearted teacher
who will show him everything.
One of the greatest artists was Charlotte
38
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
Bronte. She was a wonderful little woman, and
I like little women. Did you ever read Long-
fellow's poem on "Little Women"? It always
reminds me so much of Charlotte Bronte. One
day he showed me the poem, and I asked him why
he did not print it in his book, and he replied, "I
don't think it is worth while." Since his death
they have given it first rank, and I will quote one
verse :
As within a little rose we find the richest dyes,
As in a little grain of gold much price and value lies,
And as from a little balsam much odor doth arise,
So in a little woman there's a gleam of paradise.
Charlotte Bronte was one of those wonderful,
wiry, beautiful little cultivated combinations of
divine femininity which no man can describe. She
had a younger brother on her hands, and when a
young woman has a younger brother on her hands
if she has a beau, she has her hands full. This
younger brother was dull of brains, clumsy of
finger and unfitted to be an artist. But his sister was
determined he should be a painter, and took him to
the shore, to the village and the woods, and said,
"Notice everything, and notice it closely." Final-
ly, he did secure a second prize. Then his little
sister threw her arms about her brother's neck and
3—5
OBSERVATION:—
kissed him, and thanked him for getting that prize.
That is just like a woman! I never could under-
stand a woman. Of all the mysterious things
that the Lord ever put together, a woman is the
most mysterious. Charlotte Bronte was like an
old lady I used to know up in my native town
who thanked her husband, with tears, for having
brought up a flock of sheep which she herself
fed every morning through the winter before he
was out of bed.
Finally, Charlotte Bronte's younger brother
became dissipated and died, and then her father
died, and when we ministers get to be old we
might as well die. She was left without means
of support. But when she told her friends, they
said: ''You have a college education, Charlotte.
Why don't you write something?" We now find
that the first thing she wrote was "Jane Eyre,"
the wonderful story for which she at last received
$38,000. Queen Victoria invited that humble
girl to her palace at Windsor because of her mar-
velous genius.
How came she to write a book like that?
Simply because she had noticed so closely, for
her brother's sake, that from the nib of her pen
flowed those beautiful descriptions as naturally as
the water ripples down the mountain-side. That
40
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
is always so. No man ever gives himself for oth-
ers' good in the right spirit without receiving
"a hundredfold more in this present time."
I will go one step farther with this thought.
We do need great painters, but we don't want
more painters like that man who painted the
Israelites coming out of Egypt, representing them
with muskets on their shoulders with U. S. on the
butts.
But more than artists we need great musicians.
There is an awful need of music. We have too
much noise, but very little real music. Did you
ever think how little you have ? Do you suppose
a true musician is simply a man who roars down
to low B and squeals to high C? What an awful
need there is of the music which refines the heart,
brightens the mind ; that brings glory and heaven
down to men. I have not the space here to ex-
pand upon that thought — the awful need of
humanity for real music. But we don't get it.
I do not know why it is. I am not able to explain.
But perhaps I can hint at what music is.
At Yale I had to earn my own living, and that
is why, for these forty-four years, I have been
lecturing exclusively to help young men secure
their college education. I arose at four o'clock and
worked in the New Haven House from four to
41
OBSERVATION:—
eight to get the "come backs" from the break-
fast table so that my brother and I could live.
Some days, however, I digged potatoes in the
afternoon, and taught music in the evening,
although the former was my proper occupation.
Sometimes my music scholars would invite me
in to play something to entertain their company,
and I noticed the louder I played the louder they
talked. I often said, "What a low standard of
musical culture there is in New Haven! But I
learned something after I left college. I learned
I was not a musician.
Had I been a musician they would have lis-
tened. That is the only test of real music. There
is no other.
If you sing and every one whispers, or you play
and every one talks, it is because you are not a
musician. I dare tell it to you here, when I would
not dare say it to you individually if we were
alone. There is no person on earth who gets so
many lies to the square inch as a person who drums
on a piano.
What is music ? Music may be wholly a personal
matter and be called music. I remember Major
Snow, of my native town, who used to listen to the
filing of the saw at the sawmill. How that did
screech and scratch until it hurt to our toes!
42
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
We asked the old major why he went down to the
mill Saturday, when he could go any other day.
He said: "Oh, boys, you do not understand it.
When I was young I worked in a sawmill and I
come down here to hear them file that saw. It
reminds me of the good old days. It is music to
me." He was "educated up" to that standard
where filing of a saw was music to him, and so
men may be educated in all manner of ways in so-
called music. But it is not the real music.
What is true music? I went to a beautiful
church in New York to exchange with the pastor,
and an officer of the church came down the aisle
as I walked in and said to me, "Sir, the choir
always opens the service." They did; they opened
it! I sat down on the pulpit sofa and waited an
embarrassingly long time for something to be done
up there. The choir roosted on a shelf over my
head. The soprano earned $4,000 a year, and I
was anxious to hear her. Soon I heard the rustle
of silk up there, and one or two little giggles.
Then the soprano began. She struck the lowest
note her cultivated voice could possibly touch,
and then she began to wind, or rather, cork-
screw, her way up and up and up, out of sight —
and she stayed up there. Then the second bass
began and wound his way down, down, down —
43
OBSERVATION:—
down to the Hades of sound — and he stayed down
there.
Now, was that music? Was it worship? Why,
if I had stood in that sacred place and positively
sworn at the people it would not have been
greater sacrilege than that exhibition up on that
shelf! Do you think the living God Is to be wor-
shiped by a high-flying, pyrotechnic, trapeze
performance in acoustics? Neither worship nor
music was there. Music does not consist of a
high-flying circus trapeze performance in acous-
tics.
What is music? Music is such a combination of
sound as moves the heart to holier emotions, quick-
ens the brain to brighter thoughts, and moves the
whole man on to nobler deeds. That is music.
Nothing else is music. You can only find out
whether you are a musician or not by taking
notice, while you sing, whether you hold the
attention of the people, and whether you influence
their memory and their after character.
c&he 3Veed of
Orators
V
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
NEED OF ORATORS
WE need great orators. The need is some-
thing alarming. I am often called to lecture
at the Chautauquas and the lyceums, and the
committees often urge me to recommend some
man or woman who will fill a place on the public
platform. They offer marvelous rewards for those
who will do that well. There are no men or
women alive, not one known in our land to-
day, who could be called a great orator. When I
began to lecture, fifty-eight years ago, there were
Henry Ward Beecher, Wendell Phillips, George
William Curtis, Edward Everett, the greatest
orator of his day — and John B. Gough. I esteem
it a great honor to have been induced by Mr.
Gough to go on the lecture platform. They are all
gone, and no successors have appeared.
Liberty and oratory have ever gone together,
and always will, hence the need of oratory is
especially pressing now.
45
OBSERVATION:—
Why don't we have orators? The editors say
" because the newspaper has come in and goes
into every home, and a man on Sunday will read a
better sermon in his newspaper than ever was
delivered, and will save paying the minister and
having trouble with the choir." Now, that time
will never come. You will never get along with-
out real orators, no matter how many newspapers
you may have. I respect the press. I have had
something to do with its work in my lifetime.
I have worked upon and owned a daily news-
paper. But I must say that there is something,
after all, in the shake of a living man's finger,
something in the flash of his eye, something in the
stamp of his foot, but vastly more in his mesmeric
power, which no cold type will ever express ! You
never can fully express the living man in cold lead.
Why don't we have great orators? I don't
think the newspapers are in the way. But other
people say to me. "It is the injurious effect of
the modern school of elocution, which is now
called 'the school of oratory."' It has only been
a few years since all these elocutionary schools
changed their names to "schools of oratory" and
consequently damaged the prospect of our country.
The school of elocution may not be a school of
oratory at all. It may be a hindrance to oratory;
46
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
it depends on what the teaching is. There is a
wide difference between elocution and real ora-
tory. Elocution is an art of expression, which
every teacher has, and he teaches his own art.
But oratory is the great science of successful
speech. The man who gets what he pleads for
is an orator, no matter how he calls. If you call
a dog and he comes, that is oratory. If he runs
away, that is elocution !
Why don't we have greater orators? These
schools of elocution remind me of an incident
which occurred about seventeen years ago. I
don't believe I will hurt any one's feelings now
by mentioning it. The professor of elocution was
sick one day, and the boys came after me. They
wanted me to come because the teacher was away,
and I resolved to go and entertain that class and let
it pass for a recitation. Professors often do that.
When I came into the class-room, I said to the boy
on the front seat: ''What was the last lesson you
had in elocution?" One of the boys said:
"Peter Piper, pickle-picker, picked six pecks of pickled
peppers ;
If Peter Piper, pickle-picker, picked six pecks of
pickled peppers,
Where are the six pecks of pickled peppers which
Peter Piper picked?"
4 47
OBSERVATION:—
That is "lip exercise" in elocution. I said to
that young man, "I will not teach elocution.
But I wish you would come up and deliver that
to this class just as you would to an audience."
The boy came up and put his toes together, and
his hands by his side, for he had not reached
the study of gesture. He yelled very rapidly and
loudly :
"Peter Piper, pickle-picker, picked six pecks of pickled
peppers ;
If Peter Piper, piping, picked six pecks of pickled
peppers,
Where are the pecks of pickled peppers which Peter
Piper picked?"
It was elocution, but it was not oratory. I had
trouble in getting up another boy, but I finally did.
He thought that oratory consisted entirely in
elocutionary "inflections," so he delivered it:
"Peter Piper picked six pecks of pickled peppers;
If Peter piping picked a peck of pickled peppers,
Where's the peck of pickled peppers Peter Piper
picked?"
(With marked raising and lowering of the voice.)
It sounded like an old rooster in the barn in the
morning. But being elocution, it was not oratory.
48
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
But the most illustrative and most absurd speech
I ever heard was by a visitor in that class that day.
He was sitting over near the aisle, and one of
the students came and whispered to me: "That
young man has graduated from an Eastern school
of elocution, and he is going to act the heavy parts
in tragedy upon the stage. He is a great elocution-
ist, and won't you get him to recite something to
the class?" I fell into the trap, and went down to
the young man, and said: "I understand you are
an elocutionist. Will you come up and recite
something for the class ?"
As soon as he looked up at me I saw by his eyes
there was something the matter with his head. I
do not know just what, but things have happened
since that make it no unkindness to refer to him
the way I do. I said: "Please come up and re-
cite something," and he replied: "Shall I recite
the same thing the young men have been re-
citing?" I said, "You don't need to do that;
take anything." He left his gold-headed cane —
the best part of him — on the floor, and then he
came up to the platform and leaned on the table
and said to me: "Shall I recite the same thing
the young men have been reciting?" I said:
"You can if you wish. You are perfectly free to
take anything you choose. The professor is away,
49
OBSERVATION:—
anyhow. When the cat is away the mice will
play."
Then he began to prepare himself for that reci-
tation. I never saw such behavior in my life.
He pulled up his sleeves, brushed back his hair,
shook himself, moved the table away forward,
and I slid far back by the door and left the plat-
form open, for I didn't know what he was going
to do next. Then he gave the selection :
'* Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled pepper-r-rs;
If Peter Piper, piping piper, picked a peck of pickled
pepper-r-r-rs,
Where's the peck of pickled pepper-r-r-rs Peter Piper
pickle-picker-r-r picked ?"
He rolled in a flutter the letter "r" in each line.
That class looked up with awe, and applauded
until he repeated it. It was still elocution, but
it was not oratory. He thought that oratory con-
sisted of rolling the "rV and rolling himself.
That is not oratory.
Where do they learn oratory ? They learn it in
the old-fashioned school-house, from that old hen
at the kitchen door, in some back office, in some
hall, or some church where young men or women
get together and debate, saying naturally the
things they mean, and then take notice of the
So
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
effects of what they debate upon, the conviction
or after action of those who listen. That is the
place to observe. You must take notice if you
are to be a great orator.
The greatest orator of the future will be a
woman. It has not been two months since the
management of a women's Chautauqua said,
"We could give $40,000 a year to any woman who
will be a natural woman on the platform." They
would make money at $40,000 a year if they
hired a woman who would be a real woman. The
trouble is that when women get on the platform
they try to sing bass or try to speak as a man
speaks. And there is such a need for women
orators now! I get provoked about it when I
think. Why isn't there a great woman orator
like Mrs. Livermore now when she is needed so
much ?
'Woman's confluence
VI
3-6
OBSERVATION:—
VI
WOMAN S INFLUENCE'
IF women vote they will be of little account un-
less they are leaders. It is of no special ad-
vantage to the voter to ignorantly put a piece
of paper in a box. But it is of great account to
influence ten thousand votes. That is what
women must do if they are going to exercise their
right under suffrage — they must be the influence
behind the throne, not merely a voter.
When I was a boy in the district school a sub-
stitute teacher came in, and we all loved that little
woman. We would do anything she asked us to
do. One day that substitute teacher, who could
not get a first-class certificate, copied a verse of
a poem and asked me to read it:
If you cannot on the ocean
Sail among the swiftest fleet:
Rocking on the mighty billows,
Laughing at the storms you meet.
52
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
She asked me to read it once, and then she
turned the paper over and said, "Now, Russell,
repeat it." I said, "I have not learned it by
heart." Said she: "Don't learn it by heart. I
will try again." So she wrote the second verse:
If you are too weak to journey
Up the mountain steep and high.
Then she said to me, "Now, Russell, read it
through once, and notice carefully each word,
and don't look back at a word a second time."
I know not now why she demanded that; I have
looked in many books of psychology and in many
places to find out. I have no explanation of this,
and I ask you to think for me, for this is the fact.
I took the second verse and read it through as
she told me to do. Then she turned it over and
said, "Please repeat it." I said, "I cannot re-
peat it; I have not learned it by heart." She re-
plied : "Don't you say that again. Just shut your
eyes and make a mental effort to see those verses,
and then read it."
I shut my eyes and said, "Oh, it is all dark."
Then she seemed very much disturbed and said:
"Now, Russell, don't say that. Won't you try
to do what I ask you to do?"
I thought the little woman was going to cry,
53
OBSERVATION:—
so I said, "Yes, I will do the best I can." She
said, "Shut your eyes again and make a deter-
mined effort, with your eyes shut, to see that
poetry just as though it were right before you."
I shut my eyes and made that effort, and saw it
as distinctly as though I had held it before my
open eyes. So long as my eyes were shut I could
see the two verses, and I read it all through, word
for word, and I read it backward, word for word,
to the beginning.
I thought I had seen a ghost. I went home and
told my father what had happened, and he rushed
down from the pasture to the schoolhouse and
said to the teacher:
"If you indulge again in your foolish super-
stitions you will never teach in that schoolhouse
again."
It must have been uncomfortable for her, and
her secret went down to the grave with her, as far
as I know. Yet what would I not give if I could
place before the world now what that little girl
knew. All our educational institutions, for which
I have labored all these years, would be as noth-
ing compared with that one secret if I could give
it to you — that secret of being able to look upon
a scene and shut's one's eyes and bring it all back
again, study it in detail.
54
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
I have not had great personal power in that
line. But I have seen a man who would take a
column of the morning paper and read it down,
and hand me the paper and read it through with
his eyes shut and scarcely make a mistake. I do
not know that I ever saw any one who was in-
fallible, but rarely would he make a mistake.
Often he could tell me where the comma, semi-
colon, and other marks of punctuation were.
I do not believe there is a normal child who is
not mentally capable of that power when he has
a teacher who understands how to develop it.
That little teacher, who held only a second-class
certificate, knew more about pyschology than
many of the greatest men who preside over great
institutions.
In the Alps some years ago was Professor Slay-
ton, a native of Brighton, England. He was one
•of the nation's best botanists. His wife died and
he was left with a little child between five and six
years of age. They boarded at the Hotel Des
Alps, in the Chamouni Valley. One morning he
took his little girl up to the Mer-de-Glace, and
then he told her to run back to the hotel, saying
he would return to her in the evening.
She bid her father good-by and saw him go up
Mont Blanc into the forest, and she ran back.
55
OBSERVATION:—
He did not return in the evening, and she sat
up all night and worried, and early in the morning
she ran out from the hotel and ran up the stream
to the path she had seen her father take. Then,
running across, she started climbing up the side
of the great snow-capped mountain. She came
suddenly to a place where the path ran around
along a projecting precipice, two hundred and
eighty feet in the perpendicular, around a promon-
tory of rock that set a few feet back. When she
came to that spot her feet slipped upon the snow
on the glare ice, and she slid down and down over
the edge so far that her fingers just caught in the
moss on the edge and one foot rested on about an
inch projection of the rock.
As she hung there she screamed, "Papa!" Her
father heard that cry. He was down in the valley
so far that he could not see her, but he could hear
her voice. He recognized it, and he felt there
was an awful need of him — "humanity called to
him." He ran across the valley and up the path.
On the way there was a tree near which he had
previously noticed there was an ax. He pulled
out the ax and ran on to a tree where he had
previously observed there was a rope which the
coal-burners had long used to let coal down from
the cliff. He clipped the rope with the ax,
56
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
threw away the ax, and, tying the rope around
him as he had noticed the guides do who take
travelers over the "sea of ice/' he ran on, until
suddenly he came to the spot where his little girl
had slipped. He could see the parting in her hair
twenty feet down, and all was glare ice between.
His heart must have stopped beating. But he
suddenly shouted :
" Papa's come. Hold on tight!"
She screamed, "I cannot hold on any longer!"
He turned and threatened her. Oh, ye parents,
whosoever you may be, you may save your own
son or daughter from a physical or moral death
by training them to obey when they are young.
Her fingers tightened again, and he threw the
rope around the butt of a tree he had noticed, and
let himself rapidly down over that ice. He tried
to get hold of his little child's hands, but they had
melted deep into the moss, and he let himself
down beside her and caught hold of her dress and
pulled her to him.
Both were hanging from the edge of the cliff,
and the end of the rope was in his hand, and his
hand on the ice. He tried to pull himself up,
but the rope would not give an inch, and then he
tried to push his little girl up, but with frozen
fingers she could not climb.
57
OBSERVATION:—
There they hung in the high Alps, alone ! Will
he fall on the jagged rocks and be crushed to
death? No, he will not fall, because he is a king.
He has used his every-day observation, though he
is a graduate of a university. He had noticed
something more — he had observed how the dogs
howl when they find perishing travelers. Those
St. Bernard dogs, whenever they find a dead body
or a man laying insensible, will always howl in
one peculiar way. Those dogs know more about
acoustics than an architect. How do they
know? God told them. When a dog utters that
cry it can be heard for miles and miles. The pro-
fessor imitated the call of the dog, and when it
rang down the valley the coal-burners heard it
and the wood-choppers heard it. They said:
"That is a dog, and a dog never howls like that
unless he has found a dying man." So, throwing
down their axes and guns, and running over the
snows toward the sound of the call, they suddenly
came to the spot. They caught hold of the rope
and one of them slid down rapidly and seized the
little girl's arm and passed her up, and then caught
hold of the professor's arm and lifted him, while
the others pulled upon the rope. Thus they
dragged him up. The professor fell on the snow-
drift and fainted dead away.
58 '
EVERY MAN HIS OWN UNIVERSITY
But he was a king. He heard humanity's cry,
and when he heard it he knew where the ax was.
He had used his every-day study in such a way
that he knew where the old rope was, and knew
how to tie it, and he knew how to call for help.
Whenever you find on earth a successful man or
woman you will always find it is a man or woman
who hears humanity's call, and who has so used
his every-day means of observation that he knows
where the weapons are with which to fight those
battles, or where the means are with which to
bring men relief.
I could not better put into your minds that
professor's feelings than by a quotation of an Eng-
lish phrase which he printed in English on his
scientific books, though the books were published
in French:
We live for those who love us,
For those who know us true;
For the heavens that bend above us,
For the good that we can do.
For the wrongs that lack resistance,
For each cause that needs assistance,
For the future in the distance,
For the good that we can do.
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