 Part 1 of Acres of Diamonds. When going down the Tigris and Euphrates River many, many years ago, with my party of English travelers, I found myself under the direction of an old Arab guide whom we hired up at Baghdad, and I have often thought how that guide resembled our barbers in certain mental characteristics. He thought that it was not only his duty to guide us down those rivers and do what he was paid for doing, but also to entertain us with stories curious and weird, ancient and modern, strange and familiar. Many of them I have forgotten, and I am glad that I have, but there is one I shall never forget. The old guide was leading my camel by its halter along the banks of those ancient rivers, and he told me story after story until I grew weary of his storytelling and ceased to listen. I have never been irritated with that guide, when he lost his temper as I ceased listening, but I remember that he took off his Turkish cap and swung it in a circle to get my attention. I could see it through the corner of my eye, but I determined not to look straight at him for fear he would tell another story. But although I am not a woman, I did finally look, and as soon as I did, he went right into another story. Said he, I will tell you a story now which I reserve for my particular friends. When he emphasized the words particular friends I listened. I have ever been glad I did. I really feel devoutly thankful that there are 1,674 young men who have been carried through college by this lecture, who are also glad that I did listen. The old guide told me that there once lived not far from the River Indus, an ancient Persian, by the name of Ali Hafed. He said that Ali Hafed owned a very large farm, that he had orchids, grainfields and gardens, that he had money of interest, and was a wealthy and contented man. He was contented because he was wealthy, and wealthy because he was contented. One day there visited that old Persian farmer, one of those ancient Buddhist priests, one of the wise men of the East. He sat down by the fire, and told the old farmer how this world of ours was made. He said that the world was once a mere bank of fog, and that the Almighty thrust his finger into the bank of fog, and began slowly to move his finger around, increasing the speed until at last he whirled this bank of fog into a solid ball of fire. Then it went rolling through the universe, burning its way through other banks of fogs, and condensed the moisture without. Until it fell in fields of rain upon its hot surface, and cooled the outward crust. Then the internal fires bursting outward through the crust threw up the mountains and hills, the valleys, the plains, and prairies of this wonderful world of ours. If this internal molten mass came bursting down and cooled very quickly, it became granite. Less quickly copper, less quickly silver, less quickly gold, and after gold diamonds were made. Said the old priest, a diamond is a congealed drop of sunlight. Now that is literally scientifically true, that a diamond is an actual deposit of carbon from the sun. The old priest told Ali HaFed that if he had one diamond the size of his thumb he could purchase the country. And if he had a mine of diamonds, he could place his children upon thrones through the influence of their great wealth. Ali HaFed heard all about diamonds, how much they were worth, and went to his bed that night a poor man. He had not lost everything, but he was poor because he was discontented and discontented because he feared he was poor, he said. I want a mine of diamonds, and he lay awake all night. Early in the morning he sought out the priest, I know by experience that a priest is very cross when awakened early in the morning, and when he shook that old priest out of his dreams Ali HaFed said to him, Will you tell me where I can find diamonds? Diamonds what do you want with diamonds? Why I want to be immensely rich. Well then go along and find them. That is all you have to do. Go and find them and you will then have them. I don't know where to go. Well if you will find a river that runs through white sands between high mountains in those white sands you will always find diamonds. I don't believe there is any such river. Oh yes there are plenty of them. All you have to do is go and find them. And then you have them, said Ali HaFed. I will go. So he sold his farm, collected his money, left his family in charge of a neighbor, and away he went in search of diamonds. He began his search very promptly, to my mind, in the mountains of the moon. Afterwards he came around into Palestine, then wandered on into Europe, and at last when his money was all spent and he was in rags, wretchedness and poverty, he stood on the shore of that bay at Barcelona in Spain when a great tidal wave came rolling in between the pillars of Hercules, and the poor afflicted, suffering, dying man could not resist the awful temptation to cast himself into the incoming tide, and he sank beneath its foaming crest never to rise in this life again. When that old guide had told me that awfully sad story he stopped the camel I was riding on and went back to fix the baggage that was coming off another camel. And I had the opportunity to muse over his story while he was gone. I remember saying to myself, why did he reserve that story for his particular friends? There seemed to be no beginning, no middle, and no end, nothing to it. That was the first story I had ever heard told in my life, and it would be the first one I ever read in which the hero was killed in the first chapter. I had but one chapter of the story and the hero was dead. When the guide came back and took up the halter of my camel he went right ahead with the story into the second chapter, just as though there had been no break. The man who purchased Ali HaFed's farm one day led his camel into the garden to drink. And as that camel put its nose into the shallow water of that garden brook, Ali HaFed's successor noticed a curious flash of light from the white sands of the stream. He pulled out a black stone, having an eye of light reflecting all of the hues of the rainbow. He took the pebble into the house and put it on the mantel which covers the central fires and forgot all about it. A few days later this same old priest came in to visit Ali HaFed's successor. And the moment he opened that drawing room door he saw that flash of light on the mantel and he rushed up to it and shouted, Here is a diamond. Has Ali HaFed returned? Oh no, Ali HaFed has not returned. And that is not a diamond. That is nothing but a stone we found right here in our own garden. But said the priest, I tell you, I know a diamond when I see it. I know positively that is a diamond. Then together they rushed out into that old garden and stirred up the white sands with their fingers and low. Here came up other more beautiful and valuable gems than the first. Thus said the guide to us and friends, it is historically true, was discovered the diamond mine Galconia, the most magnificent diamond mine of all in the history of mankind, excelling the Kimberley itself, Kuhnur and the Orloff of the crown jewels of England and Russia. The largest on earth came from that mine. When that old Arab guide told me the second chapter of the story, he then took off his Turkish cap and swung it around in the air again to get my attention to the moral. Those Arab guides have morals to their stories, although they are not always moral. As he swung his hat he said to me, Had Ali HaFed remained at home and dug in his own cellar or underneath his own wheat fields or in his own gardens instead of wretchedness, starvation, and death by suicide in a strange land, he would have had acres of diamonds. For every acre of that old farm, yes, every shovel full afterward, revealed gems which since have decorated the crowns of monarchs. When he had added the moral to this story I saw why it was reserved for his particular friends. But I did not tell him I could see it. It was that mean old Arab's way of going around a thing like a lawyer, to say indirectly what he did not dare say directly, that in his private opinion there was a certain young man then traveling down the Tigris River that might be better at home in America. I did not tell him I could see that. But I told him his story reminded me of one. And I told it to him quick. I think I will tell it to you. I told him of a man out in California in 1847 who owned a ranch. He heard they had discovered gold in Southern California, so with a passion for gold he sold his ranch to Colonel Sutter. And away he went never to come back. Colonel Sutter put a mill upon a stream that ran through that ranch. And one day his little girl brought some wet sand from the raceway into their home and sifted it through her fingers before the fire. And in that falling sand a visitor saw the first shining scales of real gold that were ever discovered in California. The man who had owned that ranch wanted gold, and he could have secured it with the mere taking. Indeed, thirty-eight million dollars has been taken out of that very few acres since then. About eight years ago I delivered this lecture in a city that stands on that farm, and they told me that a one-third owner for years and years had been getting one hundred and twenty thousand dollars in gold every fifteen minutes sleeping or waking without taxation. You and I would enjoy an income like that if we didn't have to pay an income tax. But a better illustration, really, than that occurred here in our own Pennsylvania. If there is anything I enjoy above another on the platform, it is to get one of these German audiences in Pennsylvania before me and fire that at them. And I enjoy it tonight. There was a man living in Pennsylvania, not unlike some Pennsylvanians you have seen, who owned a farm, and he did with that farm just what I should do with a farm if I owned one in Pennsylvania. He sold it. But before he sold it he decided to secure employment, collecting coal oil for his cousin, who was in the business in Canada, where they first discovered oil on this continent. They dipped it from the running streams at that early time, so this Pennsylvania farmer rode to his cousin asking for employment. You see, friends, this farmer was not altogether a foolish man. No, he was not. He did not leave his farm until he had something else to do. Of all of the simpletons the stars shine on, I don't know of a worse one than the man who leaves one job before he has gotten another. It has a special reference to my profession, and has no reference whatever to a man seeking a divorce. When he rode to his cousin for employment, his cousin replied, I cannot engage you in business because you know nothing about the oil business. Well then the farmer said, I will know, and with most considerable zeal characteristic of the students of Temple University. He sat himself at the study of the whole subject. He began a way back at the second day of God's creation when the world was covered thick and deep with that rich vegetation which has since turned into primitive beds of coal. He studied the subject until he found that the draining's really of those rich beds of coal furnished the coal oil that was worth pumping, and then he found out how it came up with the living springs. He studied until he knew what it looked like, smelled like, tasted like, how to refine it. Now he said in his letter to this cousin, I understand the oil business. The cousin answered, all right, come on. So he sold his farm, according to the county record, for $833. Even money, no sense. He had scarcely gone from that place before the man who had purchased the spot went out to arrange for the watering of the cattle. He found the previous owner had gone out years before and put a plank across the brook, back of the barn, edgewise, into the surface of the water just a few inches. The purpose of the plank, at that sharp angle across the brook, was to throw over to the other bank a dreadful-looking scum, through which the cattle would not put their noses. But with that plank there to throw it all over to one side the cattle would drink below, and thus the man who had gone to Canada had himself been damning back for twenty-three years a flood of coal oil which the state geologist of Pennsylvania declared to us ten years later was even then worth a hundred million dollars to our state. And four years ago our geologist declared the discovery to be worth to our state a thousand million dollars. The man who owned that territory on which the city of Titusville now stands, and those pleasant-filled valleys had studied the subject from the second day of God's creation clear down to the present time. He studied it until he knew all about it, and yet he has said to have sold the whole of it for eight hundred and thirty-three dollars. Again and again I say no sense. But I need another illustration. I found it in Massachusetts. And I am sorry I did, because that is the state I come from. This young man in Massachusetts furnished just another phase of my thought. He went to Yale College and studied mines and mining, and became such an adept as a mining engineer that he was employed by the authorities of the university to train students who were behind in their classes. During his senior year he earned fifteen dollars a week for doing that work. When he graduated they raised his pay from fifteen to forty-five dollars a week, and offered him a professorship. And as soon as they did he went right home to his mother. If they had raised that boy's pay from fifteen to fifteen-sixty he would have stayed and been proud of the place. But when they put it at forty-five dollars in one leap he said, Mother, I won't work for forty-five dollars a week. The idea of a man with a brain like mine working for forty-five dollars a week. Let's go out to California and stake out gold mines and silver mines and be immensely rich. Said his mother, now Charlie, it is just as well to be happy as it is to be rich. Yes, said Charlie, but it is just as well to be rich and happy too. And they both went right about it. As he was an only son and she was a widow, of course he had his way, they always do. They sold out in Massachusetts and instead of going to California they went to Wisconsin, where he went into the employ of the superior copper mining company at fifteen dollars a week again. But with the proviso in his contract that he should have an interest in any mines he should discover for the company. I don't believe he ever discovered a mine, and if I am looking in the face of any stockholder of that copper company you wish he had discovered something or other. I have friends who are not here because they could not afford a ticket, who have stock in that company at the time this young man was employed there. This young man went out there and I have not heard a word from him. I don't know what became of him and I don't know whether he found any mines or not, but I do not believe he ever did. But I do know the other end of the line. He had scarcely gotten out of the old homestead before the succeeding owner went out to dig potatoes. The potatoes were already growing in the ground when he bought the farm, and as the old farmer was bringing in a basket of potatoes it hugged very tight between the ends of the stone fence. You know in Massachusetts our farms are nearly all stone wall. They are obliged to be very economical in front gateways in order to have some place to put that stone. When that basket hugged so tight he set it down on the ground and dragged on one side and pulled on the other. And as he was dragging the basket through this farmer noticed in the upper and outer corner of the stone wall right next to the gate a block of native silver eight inches square that Professor of Mines, Mining, and Minerology knew so much about the subject that he would not work for forty-five dollars a week when he sold that homestead in Massachusetts, sat right on that silver to make the bargain. He was born on that homestead, was brought up there, and had gone back and forth rubbing the stone with his sleeve until it reflected his countenance, and seemed to say, here is a hundred thousand dollars right down here just for the taking, but he would not take it. It was in a home in Newburyport, Massachusetts, and there was no silver there, all way off. Well, I don't know where, and he did not, but anywhere else, and he was a Professor of Minerology. My friends, that mistake is very universally made. And why should we even smile at them? I often wonder what has become of him. I do not know at all. But I will tell you that I guess, as a Yankee, that he sits out there by his fireside tonight with his friends gathered around him, and he is saying to them something like, do you know that man Conwell who lives in Philadelphia, oh yes, I have heard of him, do you know that man Jones who lives in Philadelphia, yes, I have heard of him, too, and then he begins to laugh and shakes his sides and says to his friends, well they have done just the same thing I did precisely. And that spoils the whole joke, for you and I have done the same thing he did, and a while we sit here and laugh at him, he has a better right to sit out there and laugh at us. I know I have made the same mistake, but of course, that does not make any difference, because we don't expect the same man to preach and practice, too. As I come here tonight, I look around this audience and I am seeing again what through these 50 years I have continually seen men that are making precisely that same mistake. I often wish I could see the younger people, and that the academy had been filled tonight with our high school scholars and our grammar school scholars, that I could have them to talk to, while I would have preferred such an audience as that, because they are the most susceptible. As they have not grown up into their prejudices as we have, they have not gotten into any custom that they cannot break. They have not met with any failures as we have. And while I could perhaps do such an audience as that more good than I can do grown up people, yet I will do my best I can with the material I have. I say to you that you have acres of diamonds in Philadelphia right where you now live. Oh, but you will say you cannot know much about our city if you think there are any acres of diamonds here. I was greatly interested in that account in the newspaper of a young man who found that diamond in North Carolina. It was one of the purest diamonds that has ever been discovered, and it has several predecessors near the same locality. I went to a distinguished professor in mineralogy and asked him where he thought those diamonds came from. The professor secured a map of the geologic formations of our continent and traced it. He said it either went through the underlying carboniferous strata adapted for such production westward through Ohio and the Mississippi, or in more probability came eastward through Virginia and up the shore of the Atlantic Ocean. It is a fact that diamonds were there where they have been discovered and sold, and they were carried down there during the drift period from some northern locality. Now who can say but some person going down with his drill in Philadelphia will find some trace of a diamond mine yet down here. Oh, friends, you cannot say that you are not over one of the greatest diamond mines in the world for such a diamond as that only comes from the most profitable mines that are found on Earth. Part 2 of Acres of Diamonds This LibriVox recording is in the public domain. Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell. Part 2. But it serves simply to illustrate my thought, which I emphasize by saying, if you do not have the actual diamond mines literally, you have all that they would be good for you, because now that Queen of England has given the greatest compliment ever to be conferred upon American women for her attire, because she did not appear with any jewels at all at the late reception in England, it is almost done away with the use of diamonds anyhow. All you would care for would be the few you would wear if you wish to be modest and the rest you would sell for money. Now then I say again that the opportunity to get rich, to attain into great wealth, is here in Philadelphia now within the reach of almost every man and woman who hears me tonight. I mean just what I say. I have not come to this platform, even under these circumstances, to recite something to you. I have come to tell you what in God's sights I believe to be true, and if the years of life have been of any value to me in the attainment of common sense, I know I am right, that the men and women sitting here who found it difficult perhaps to buy a ticket to this lecture or gathering tonight have within reach acres of diamonds. Opportunities to get largely wealthy. There never was a place on earth more adapted than the city of Philadelphia today, and never in the history of the world did the poor man without capital have such an opportunity to get rich quickly and honestly, as he has now in our city. I say this is the truth, and I want you to accept it as such, for if you think I have come to simply recite something, then I would better not be here. I have no time to waste with any such talk, but to say things I believe, and unless some of you get richer for what I am saying tonight my time is wasted. I say to you, you ought to get rich. It is your duty to get rich. How many of my pious brethren say to me, do you, a Christian minister, spend your time going up and down the country advising young people to get rich to get money? Yes, of course I do, they say. Isn't that awful? Why don't you preach the gospel instead of preaching about man's making money? Because to make money honestly is to preach the gospel. That is the reason, and men who get rich may be the most honest men you will find in the community. Oh, but says some young man here tonight, I have been told all my life that if a person has money he is very dishonest and dishonorable and mean and contemptible. My friend, that is the reason why you have none. Because you have that idea that people, the foundation of your faith, is altogether false. Let me say here clearly and let me say it briefly. No subject to discussion, which I have not time for here, ninety-eight out of one hundred of the rich men of America are honest. That is why they are rich. That is why they are trusted with money. That is why they carry on great enterprises and find plenty of people to work with them. It is because they are honest men. Says another young man, I hear sometimes of men that get millions of dollars dishonestly. Yes, of course you do, and so do I, but they are the rare thing, in fact, that the newspapers talk about them all the time as a matter of news until you get the idea that all of the other rich men got rich dishonestly. My friend, you take and drive me, if you furnish the auto out to the suburbs of Philadelphia and introduce me to the people who own their homes around this great city. These beautiful homes with gardens and flowers, these magnificent homes so lovely in their art. And I will introduce you to the very best people in character, as well as an enterprise in our city. And you know I will. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, and true and economical and careful by owning the home. For a man to have money, even in large sums, is an inconsistent thing. We preach against covetousness, and you know we do in the pulpit, and oftentimes preach against it so long that we use the term about filthy lucre, so extremely that Christians get the idea that when we stand in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man to have money until the collection basket goes around, and then we almost swear at the people because they don't give more money, or the inconsistency of such doctrines as that. Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you can without it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, money pays your preachers, and you would not have them either if you did not pay them. I am always willing that a church should raise my salary because the church that pays the largest salary always raises it the easiest. You never know an exception to that in your life. The man who gets the largest salary can do the most good with the power that is furnished to him. Of course he can if his spirit is right to use it for what it is given to him. I say then, you ought to have money. If you can honestly attain your riches in Philadelphia, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake of those pious people who think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious. Some men say, don't you sympathize with the poor people? Of course I do, or else I would not have been lecturing these years. I won't give in, but what I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with are very small. To sympathize with a man who God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment is to do wrong. No doubt about it. And we do more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God's poor, that is, those who cannot help themselves, let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or the shortcomings of someone else. It is all wrong to be poor. Let us give in to the argument and pass that to one side. A gentleman gets up back here and says, don't you think there are some things in this world that are better than money? Of course I do, but I am talking about money now. Of course there are some things higher than money. Oh yes, I know, by the grave that has left me standing above, that there are some things in this world that are higher and sweeter and purer than money. Well, I do know there are some things higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God's earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is force. Money will do good as well as harm in the hands of good men and women it could accomplish and it has accomplished good. I hate to leave that behind me. I heard a man get up in a prayer meeting in our city and thank the Lord for he was one of God's poor. Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that. He earns all the money that comes into this house and he smokes a part of it on the veranda. I don't want to say any more of the Lord's poor of that kind and I don't believe the Lord does and yet there is some people who think in order to be pious you must be awfully poor and awfully dirty. That does not follow at all. While we sympathize with the poor let us not teach a doctrine like that. Yet the age is prejudice against advising a Christian man or as a Jew would say a godly man from attaining unto wealth. The prejudice is so universal and the years are far enough back I think for me to safely mention that years ago at Temple University there was a young man in a theological school who thought he was the only pious student in that department. He came into my office one evening and sat down by my desk and told me Mr. President I think it is my duty, sir, to come in and labor with you. What has happened now? said he. I heard you say at the academy that the pier school commencement that you thought it was an honorable ambition for a young man to desire to have wealth and that you thought it made him temperate, made him anxious to have a good name and made him industrious. You spoke about man's ambition to have money helping to make him a good man. Sir, I have come to you to tell you the holy Bible says that money is the root of all evil. I told him I had never seen it in the Bible and advised him to go out to the chapel and get the Bible and show me the place. So out he went for a Bible and as soon as he stocked into my office with the Bible open with all the bigoted pride of a narrow sectarian or of one who founds his Christianity on some misinterpretation of scripture he flung the Bible down on my desk and fairly squealed into my ear. There it is, Mr. President, you can read it for yourself. I said to him, well, young man, you will learn when you get a little older that you cannot trust another denomination to read the Bible for you. You belong to another denomination. You are taught in a theological school, however, that emphasizes the exogenous. Now you will take that Bible and read it yourself and give it the proper emphasis to it. He took the Bible and proudly read, The love of money is the root of all evil. Then he had it right and when one does quote a right from the same old book he quotes the absolute truth. I have lived through fifty years of the mightiest battle that old book has ever thought and I have lived to see its banners flying free for never in the history of this world did the great minds of earth so universally agree that the Bible is true, all true, as they do at this very hour. So I say that when he quoted right, of course he quoted the absolute truth. The love of money is the root of all evil. He who tries to attain unto it too quickly or dishonestly will fail into the many snares, no doubt about that. The love of money, what is that? It is making an idol of money, an idolry, pure and simple, everywhere has condemned by the holy scriptures and by man's common sense. The man that worships the dollar instead of thinking of its purposes for which it ought to be used, the man who idolizes simply money, the miser that horses money in the cellar or hides it in a stocking or refuses to invest it where it will do the world good. That man who hugs the dollar until the eagle squeals in him the root of all evil. I think I will leave that behind now and answer the question of nearly all of you who are asking, is there an opportunity to get rich in Philadelphia? Well now, how simple a thing it is to see where it is. The instant you see where it is, it is yours. Some old gentleman gets up there in back and says, Mr. Conwell, have you lived in Philadelphia for 41 years and you don't know that the time has gone when you can make anything in this city? No, I don't think it is. Yes it is, I have tried it. What business are you in? I kept a store here for 20 years and never made over a thousand dollars in the whole 20 years. Well then you can measure the good you have been to this city by what the city has paid you, because a man can judge you very well with what he is worth by what he receives. That is, in what he is to the world at this time, if you have not made over a thousand dollars in 20 years in Philadelphia, it would have been better for Philadelphia if they kicked you out of the city 19 years and 9 months ago. A man has no right to keep a store in Philadelphia 20 years and not make at least $5,000 even though it be a corner grocery uptown you say. You cannot make $5,000 in a store now? Oh my friends, if you will just take only 4 blocks around you and find out what the people want and what you ought to supply and set them down with your pencil and figure up the profits you would make if you did supply them, you would very soon see it. There is wealth right here within the sound of your voice. Then someone says you don't know anything about business a preacher never knows a thing about business. Well then I will have to prove to you I am an expert. I don't like to do this but I have to do it because my testimony will not be taken if I am not an expert. My father kept a country store and if there is any place under the stars where a man gets all sorts of experience in every kind of mercantile transactions it is the country store. I am not proud of my experience but sometimes when my father was away he would leave me in charge of the store though fortunately not very often. But this did occur many times friends a man would come into the store and say do you keep jackknives? No we don't keep jackknives so and I went off whistling a tune. What did I care about that man anyhow and then another farmer would come in and say do you keep jackknives? No we don't keep jackknives. Then I went away and whistled another tune then a third man came right up to the door and said do you keep jackknives? No. Why everyone around here is asking for jackknives do you suppose we are keeping the store to supply the whole neighborhood with jackknives? Do you carry on this store like that in Philadelphia? The difficult was I had not learned that the foundation of godliness and the foundation of principle of success in business are both the same precisely. When a man says I cannot carry my religion into business he advertises himself either as being an imbecile in business or on the road to bankruptcy or a thief one of the three sure he will fail within a very few years he certainly will if he doesn't carry his religion into business if I had been carrying on my father's store on a Christian plan godly plan I would have had a jackknife for the third man when he called for it then I would have actually done him a kindness and I would have received reward myself which would have been my duty to take. There are some overpious Christian people who think if they take a profit on anything you sell you are an unrighteous man on the contrary you would be a criminal to sell goods for less than they cost you have no right to do that you cannot trust a man with your money who cannot take care of his own you cannot trust a man in your family you cannot true to his own wife you cannot trust a man in the world who does not begin with his own heart his own character and his own life it would have been my duty to have furnished a jackknife to the third man or the second and to have sold at him and actually profited myself I would have no more right to sell goods without making a profit on them then I would have to overcharge him dishonestly beyond what they are worth but I should so sell a bill of goods that the person to whom I sell shall make as much as possible to live and let live is the principle of the gospel and the principle of everyday common sense oh young man hear me live as you go along do not wait until you have reached my years before you begin to enjoy anything in this life if I had the millions back or fifty cents of it it would not do me anything like the good it does me now in this almost sacred presence tonight oh yes I am paid over a hundred fold tonight for dividing as I have tried to do in some measure as I went along through the years I ought not speak that way it sounds agnostic but I am old enough now to be excused for that I should have helped my fellow man which I have tried to do and everyone should try and do and go get the happiness of it the man who goes home with a sense that he has stolen a dollar that day that he has robbed a man of what is his honest do is not going to sweet rest he arises tired in the morning and goes with an unclean conscience to his work the next day he is not a successful man at all although he may have laid up millions the man who has gone through life dividing always with his fellow man making and demanding his own rights and his own profits and giving away every other man his rights and profit lives every day but not only that but the royal road to great wealth the history of the thousands of millionaires shows that to be the case the man over there who said he could not make anything in the store in Philadelphia would you respond to your store tomorrow and say do you know neighbor A who lives one square away at house number 1240 oh yes I have met him he deals here at the corner store where did he come from I don't know how many does he have in his family I don't know what ticket does he vote I don't know what church does he go to I don't know and I don't care why are you asking all of these questions for if I had a store in Philadelphia if so then you are conducting your business just as I carried on my father's business in Worthington, Massachusetts you don't know where your neighbor come from when he moved to Philadelphia and you don't care if you had cared you would be a rich man now if you had cared enough about him to take an interest in his affairs to find out what he needed you would have been rich but now you go through the world saying no opportunity to get rich it's the fault right at your own door but another young man gets up over there and says I cannot take up the mercantile business while I am talking of trade it applies to every occupation why can't you go into the mercantile business because I haven't any capital oh the weakened dutish creature that can't see over its collar it makes a person weak to see those little dudes standing around in the corners and saying oh if I had plenty of capital how rich I would get young man do you think you are going to get rich on capital certainly well I say certainly not your mother has plenty of money and she will set you up in business you will set her up in business supplying you with capital the moment the young man or woman gets more money then he or she has grown to by practical experience the moment he has gotten a curse young man or woman to inherit money it is no help to your children to leave them money but if you leave them education if you leave them Christian and noble character if you leave them a wide circle of friends if you leave them an honorable name it is far better than they should have money it would be worse for them worse for the nation that they should have money at all oh young man if you have inherited money you through your years and deprived you of the very best things of human life there is no class of people to be pitied so much as the inexperienced sons and daughters of the rich of our generation I pity the rich man's son he can never know the best things in life one of the best things in life is when a young man has earned his own living and when he becomes engaged to some lovely young woman and makes up his mind to have a home of his own then with that same love comes that divine inspiration toward better things he begins to save money he begins to leave off his bad habits and put money in the bank when he has a few hundred dollars he goes out to the suburbs to look for a home he goes to the savings bank perhaps for half the value and he goes to his wife and takes the bride over the threshold the limits of eloquence my voice can never touch I have earned this home myself it is all mine and I divide with thee that is the grandest moment a human heart may ever know End of part 2 part 3 of Acres of Diamonds this Librivox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part 3 The rich man's son can never know that. He takes his bride into a finer mansion. It may be. But he has obliged to go all the way through it and say to his wife, My mother gave me that, my mother gave me that, and my mother gave me this, until his wife wishes he had married his mother. I pity the rich man's son. The statistics of Massachusetts showed that not one rich man's son out of seventeen ever dies rich. I pity the rich man's sons, unless they have the good sense of the elder band are built, which sometimes happens. He went to his father and said, Did you earn all your money? I did, my son. I began to work on a ferry boat for twenty-five cents a day. Then, said his son, I will have none of your money. And he, too, tried to get employment on a ferry boat that Saturday night. He could not get one there. But he did get a place for three dollars a week. Of course, if a rich man's son will do that, he will get the discipline of a poor boy. That is worth more than the university education of any man. He would then be able to take care of the millions of his father. But as a rule, the rich man will not let their sons do the very thing that made them great. As a rule, the rich man will not allow his son to work. And his mother, why, she would think it was a social disgrace if a poor weak little, lily-fingered, sissy sort of a boy, had to earn his living with honest toil. I have no pity for such rich men's sons. I remember one at Niagara Falls. I think I remember one a great deal nearer. I think there are gentlemen present who were at a great banquet, and I beg pardon of his friends. At a banquet here in Philadelphia, there sat Besineby, a kind-hearted young man. And he said, Mr. Conwell, you have been sick for two or three years. When you go out, take my limousine, and it will take you up to your house on Broad Street. I thanked him very much, and perhaps I ought not mention the incident in this way. But I follow the facts. I got on the seat with the driver of the limousine outside, and when we were going up I asked the driver, how much did this limousine cost? Six thousand eight hundred, and he had to pay the duty on it. Well I said, does the owner of this machine ever drive it himself? At that the chauffeur laughed so heartily that he lost control of his machine. He was so surprised at the question that he ran up on the sidewalk, and around the corner lamppost, out onto the street again. And when he got out onto the street, he laughed till the whole machine trembled. He said, he drive this machine? Oh, he would be lucky if he knew enough to get out when we get there. I must tell you about a rich man's son at Niagara Falls. I came in from the lecture to the hotel, and as I approached the desk there stood a millionaire's son from New York. He was an indiscernible specimen of anthropologic potency. He had a skullcap on one side of his head with a gold tassel in the top of it, and a gold-headed cane under his arm with more in it than in his head. It was a very difficult thing to describe that man. He wore an eyeglass that he could not see through patent leather boots that he could not walk in and pants that he could not sit down in, dressed like a grasshopper. This human cricket came up to the clerk's desk just as I entered, adjust his unseeing eyeglass, and spake in this wise to the clerk. You see, he thought it was hinglish, you know, to lisp. There will I have your kindness to supply me thumb-paper and thumb-envelope? The clerk measured that man quick and pulled out the envelopes and paper out of a drawer, threw them across the counter toward the young man, and then turned away to his book. You should have seen that young man when those envelopes came across the counter. He swelled like a gobbler turkey, adjusted his unseeing eyeglass, and yelled, Come right back here, and now there. Will you order a thervent to take that paper and envelopes to your desk? Oh, the poor, miserable, contemptible American monkey. He could not carry paper and envelopes twenty feet. I suppose he could not get his arms down to it. I have no pity for such travesties upon human nature. If you have not capital, young man, I am glad of it. What you need is common sense, not copper sense. The best thing I can do is to illustrate by actual facts well known to all of you. A.T. Stewart, a poor boy in New York, had one dollar and fifty cents to begin life on. He lost eighty-seven and a half cents of that on his very first venture. How fortunate that young man who loses the first time he gambles. That boy said, I will never gamble again in business, and he never did. How can you lose eighty-seven and a half cents? You probably all know the story, how he lost it, because he bought some needles, threads, and buttons to sell, which people did not want. And had left him on his hands, a dead loss. Said the boy, I will not lose any more money in that way. Then he went around, first to the doors, and asked the people what they did want. Then, when he had found what they wanted, he invested his sixty-two and a half cents to supply a known demand. Study it wherever you choose, in business, in your profession, in your housekeeping. Whatever your life, that one thing is the secret of success. You must first know the demand. You must first know what people need. And then invest yourself where it is most needed. A.T. Went on that principle, until he was worth what amounted afterward to forty millions of dollars, owning the very store in which Mr. Wanamaker carries on his great work in New York. This fortune was made by his losing something, which taught him the great lesson that he must only invest himself or his money in something that people need. When will you salesmen learn that? When will you manufacturers learn that you must know the changing needs of humanity, if you would succeed in life? Apply yourselves, all you Christian people, as manufacturers or merchants or workmen, to supply that human need. That is a great principle, as broad as humanity and as deep as the scripture itself. The best illustration I have ever heard was of John Jacob Astor. You know that he made his money of the Astor family. And 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 men here tonight will say, well, they could make that fortune in New York, but they could not do it in Philadelphia. My friends, did you ever read that wonderful book of Raius? His memory is sweet to us because of his recent death. Herein 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 107 millionaires, only seven made their money in New York. Out of the 107 millionaires worth $10 million in real estate, then 67 of them made their money in towns of less than 3500 inhabitants. The richest men in this country today, if you read the real estate values, has never moved away from the town of 3500 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 a park in the shade. What was John Jacob Astor doing out there, and in partnership with people who had failed on their own hands? He had the most important, and in 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 in 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 not gaze on her. Then he studied her bonnet, and by the time she was out of sight he knew the shape of the frame, the color of the trimmings, the cracklings of the feather. I sometimes tried to describe a bonnet, but not always. I would not try and describe a modern bonnet. Where is the man that can describe one? This aggression of all sorts of driftwood stuck in the back of the head, on the side of the neck, like a rooster, with only one tail and 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 described 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 the show window, uptown, with lots of hats and bonnets to drive people away, and then sit on the back stairs and ball, because people went to Wanamakers to trade. He did not have a hat or 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 it had been a foundation of the greatest store in New York. In that line there still exists one of three stores. Its fortune was made by John Jacob Astor, after they failed in business, not by giving them any more money, but by finding out what ladies liked for bonnets before they wasted any material in making them up. I tell you, if a man could foresee the millenery business, he could foresee anything under heaven. I suppose I were to go up through the audience tonight and ask you, in this great manufacturing city, if there were any opportunities to get rich in manufacturing. Oh yes, some young men 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 men, the history of the breaking up of 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 not get rich by 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 men. 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, and you have gotten more knowledge of the fortune than any amount of capital can give you. There was a young 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 out 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 wash shed, a doll's carriage, a little doll's umbrella, and went on with a list of things that it would take 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 a man can be the richest man in Old Massachusetts, and I think it is the truth. And that man is worth hundred millions of dollars today. He has been only thirty-four years making it, on that one principle, that one must judge what his own children like at other people's children would like in their homes, too. To judge the human heart by one's self, by one's wife, or one's children, it is the royal row to success in manufacturing. Oh, but you say he didn't have any capital? Yes, a penknife, but I don't know what he had paid for it. I spoke thus to an audience in New Britain, Connecticut, and the lady four-seat 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'm going to get up something better than that to put on collars, her husband said, but after what Conwell said to-night, you see there is a need for 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 ever 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 dollars because you are here tonight. But that is not my fault. It is yours. I say that sincerely. What is the use of my talking if people never do it when I advise them to do? When her husband ridiculed her, she made up her mind that she would make a better collar button. Even 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 that button simply pushes together, and when you unbutton it, you simply pull it apart. It is the button to which I refer, in which she invented. She afterward invented several other buttons, and then invested in more. And then she 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 enough money left now to buy a foreign duke. Or count, or some other such title, that is at the latest quotations. Now what sort of 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 so near 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 might better include the man, that newspaper could never appear if a woman had not invented something. Friends think, ye women think, 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 just follow this almost infallible direction. When you say a woman does not 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? His general green 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 tomorrow and ask your children, they would say, Elias, how? He was in the Civil War with me, and often in my tent I often heard him say that he worked fourteen years to get up that sewing machine, but his wife made up her mind that one day they would starve to death if there wasn't something or other invented pretty soon. 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 who invented the mower and the reaper? According to Mr. McCormick's confidential communications 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 when she pulled the wire one way it closed down and when she pulled the wire the other way it opened. Then and there she had the principle of the mowing machine. If you look at the mowing machine you will see that 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 trolley's possible. If a woman can invent, as Mr. Carnegie said, the great iron squeezers that laid the foundation of all the steel millions in 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. A really great man is a plain straightforward everyday common-sense man. You would not dream that he was a great inventor if you did not see something that he had actually done. His neighbors do not regard him as so great. You never see anything great over your back fence. You say there is no greatness among your neighbors. It is all a way off somewhere else. Their greatness is so ever-simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and friends would never recognize it. End of Part 3. Part 4 of Acres of Diamonds This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org. Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell, Part 4. 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 tomorrow, 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 in motion from me. I went up to that anti-room and the Secretary said, that is the President's door right over there. Just wrap 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 the other door on 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. And I have no faith in a man who doesn't know enough to be afraid when he's being shot at. I never was so afraid when the shells came around us at Antietam as I was when I went to 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 the 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 and he said, I'm 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 20 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 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 Tatt and I are going out to Springfield, Illinois. I have bought a farm out there and I do not care if I again earn only 25 cents a day. Tatt 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 was 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 is now 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 tired 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 many 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 our harbor. Why do many other cities of the United States get ahead of Philadelphia now? There's 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's the city of Philadelphia. If we were 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's 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 could only get that spirit out among our people that we can do things in Philadelphia and do them well. A rise 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 never was an opportunity greater. Let us talk up our own city. But there are two other young men here tonight and that is all I will venture to say because it is too late. One over there gets up and says there's going to be a great man in Philadelphia but never was one. Oh is that so? When are you going to be great? What I'm elected to some political office. Young man won't you learn a lesson in the permer of politics that is a prima facie evidence of littleness to hold office under our form of government. Great men get into office sometimes but this country needs 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 them 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 10 years. I know of a great many young women now that women's suffrage is coming who say I'm going to be president of the United States some day. I believe in women's suffrage and there is no doubt of what it is coming and I'm 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's worthwhile unless you can control more than one vote you will be unknown and your influence so dissipated it's 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 ambitious 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 other country then I will march up to the cannons 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 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 50 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 for Lieutenant Hobson stopped right in front of the door and people shouted rah for Hobson and if I had been there I would have yelled too because he deserves much more of his country than he's ever received but suppose I go into school and say who sunk the Merrimack at Santiago and if the boys answer me Hobson they will tell me 7 eighths of a lie there were 7 other heroes on that steamer and they by virtue of their position were continually exposed to Spanish fire while Hobson as an officer might reasonably be behind the smokestack you have gathered in this house your most intelligent people and yet perhaps even here could name the other 7 men we ought not to so teach history we ought to teach that however humble a man's station may be if he does his full duty in that place he is just as much entitled to the American people's honor as is the king upon his throne but we do not so teach we are now teaching everywhere that the generals do all the fighting I remember that after the war I went down to see General Robert E. Lee that magnificent Christian gentleman of whom both north and south are now proud as one of our great Americans the general told me about his servant Rastus who was an enlisted colored soldier he called him in one day to make fun of him and said Rastus I hear that all the rest of your company are killed and why are you not killed Rastus winked at him and said because when there's any fighting going on I stay back with the generals I remember another illustration I would leave it out but for the fact that when you go to the library to read this lecture you will find this has been printed in it for 25 years I shut my eyes shut them close and lo I see the faces of my youth yes sometimes they say to me your hair is not white you're working night and day without seeming ever to stop you can't be old but when I shut my eyes like any other man of my years I will then come tripping back the faces of the loved and lost a long ago and I know whatever they say it is evening time I shut my eyes now and look back to my native town in Massachusetts and I see the cattle show ground on the mountain top and I can see the horse sheds there I can see the congregational church see the town hall and the mountaineer's cottages see a great assembly of people turning out dressed resplendently and I can see flags flying and hear bands playing I can see that company of soldiers that had reenlisted marching up on that cattle show ground I was but a boy but I was captain of that company and puffed out with pride the cambrick needle would have burst me all the pieces then I thought it was the greatest event that ever came to man on earth if you have ever thought you would like to be a king or queen you go and be received by the mayor the bands played and the people turned out to receive us I marched up by commons so proud at the head of my troops and we turned down into the town hall then they seated my soldiers down the center aisle and I sat down on the front seat a great assembly of people a hundred or two came in to fill the town hall so that they stood up all around then the town officers came in and formed a half circle the mayor of the town sat in the middle of the platform he was a man who had never held office before but he was a good man and his friends have told me that I might use this without giving them offense he was a good man but he fought and office made a man great he came up, took his seat adjusted his powerful spectacles and looked around when he suddenly spied me sitting there on the front seat he came right forward on the platform and invited me up to sit with the town officers no town officer ever took any notice of me before I went to war except to advise the teacher to thrash me and now I was invited up on the stand with the town officers oh my, the town mayor was then the emperor the king of our day and our time as I came up on the platform they gave me a chair about this far I would say from the front when I had got seated the chairman of the selectman rose and came forward to the table and we all supposed he would introduce the congregational minister it was the only orator in town and that he would give the oration to the returning soldiers and friends you should have seen the surprise which ran over the audience when they discovered that the old fellow was going to deliver that speech himself he had never made a speech in his life but he fell into the same error that hundreds of other men have fallen into it seems so strange that a man won't learn he must speak his pieces oh boy if he intends to be an orator when he is grown all he has to do is hold an office to be a great orator so he came up to the front and brought with him a speech which he had learned by heart walking up and down the pasture where he had frightened the cattle he brought the manuscript with him read it out on the table so as to be sure he might see it he adjusted his spectacles and leaned over it for a moment and marched back on the platform and then came forward like this he must have studied the subject a great deal when you come to think of it because he assumed an elocutionary attitude he rested heavily on his left heel through back his shoulders slightly advanced the right foot opened the organs of speech and advanced his right foot at an angle of 45 as he stood in that elocutionary attitude friends this is the way that speech went now some people say to me don't you exaggerate that would be impossible but I am here for the lesson and not for the story and this is the way it went fellow citizens as soon as he heard his voice his fingers began to go like that his knees began to shake and then he trembled all over he choked swallowed and came around to the table to look at the manuscript then he gathered himself up with clenched fists and came back fellow citizens fellow citizens we are we are we are we are we are we are very happy we are very happy we are very happy we are very happy to welcome back to their native town these soldiers who have fought and bled and come back again to their native town we are especially we are especially we are especially we are especially pleased to see with us today this young hero that met me this young hero who in imagination friends remember he said that if he had not said in imagination I would not be egotistic enough to refer to it at all this young hero who in imagination we have seen leading leading we have seen leading his troops onto the deadly breach we have seen his shining we have seen his shining his shining his shining sword flashing flashing in the sunlight as he shouted to his troops come on oh dear dear how little that good man knew about war if he had known anything about war at all he ought to have known what any of my GAR comrades here tonight will tell you is true that it is next to a crime for an officer of infantry ever in time of danger to go ahead of his men I with my shining sword flashing in the sunlight shouting to my troops come on I never did it you suppose I would get in front of my men to be shot in front by the enemy and in the back by my own men that is no place for an officer the place of the officer in actual battle is behind the line how often as a staff officer I wrote down the line when our men were suddenly called to the line of battle and the rebel yells were coming out of the woods and shouted officers to the rear officers to the rear then every officer gets behind the line of private soldiers and the higher the officers ranked the farther behind he goes not because he is any the less brave but because the laws of war that and yet he shouted I with my shining sword in that house there sent the company of my soldiers would carry that boy across the Carolina rivers that he might not wet his feet some of them had gone far out to get a pig or a chicken some of them had gone to death under the shell swept pines in the mountains of Tennessee yet in the good man's speech they were scarcely known he did refer to them but only incidentally the hero of the hour was this boy did the nation owe him anything no nothing then nothing now why was he the hero simply because that man fell into the same human error that this boy was great because he was an officer and these were only private soldiers I learned the lesson then that I will never forget so long as the tongue of the bell of time continues to swing for me greatness consists not in the holding of some future office but really consists in doing great deeds with little means and the accomplishment of vast purposes from the private ranks of life be great at all one must be great here now in Philadelphia he who can give to this city better streets and better sidewalks better schools and more colleges more happiness and more civilization more of God he will be great anywhere let every man or woman hear if you never hear me again remember this that if you wish to be great at all you must begin where you are and what you are in Philadelphia now he that can give to his city any blessing he who can be a good citizen while he lives here he that can make better homes he that can be a blessing whether he works in the shop or sits behind the counter or keeps house whatever be his life anywhere must first be great in his own Philadelphia End of Part 4 Part 5 of Acres of Diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell Part 5 His Life and Achievements by Robert Shackleton 1. The Story of the Sword I shall write of a remarkable man an interesting man a man of power of initiative of will of persistence a man who plans vastly and who realizes his plans a man who not only does things for himself but who ever more important than that is the constant inspiration of others I shall write of Russell H. Conwell as a farmer's boy he was the leader of the boys of the rocky region that was his home as a schoolteacher he won devotion as a newspaper correspondent he gained fame as a soldier in the Civil War he rose to important rank as a lawyer he developed a large practice as an author he wrote books that reached a mighty total of sales he left the law for the ministry and is the active head of a great church he is the most popular lecturer in the world and yearly speaks to many thousands he is, so to speak the discoverer of acres of diamonds through which thousands of men and women have achieved success out of failure he is the head of two hospitals one of them founded by himself that have cared for a host of patients both the poor and the rich irrespective of race or creed he is the founder and head of a university that has already had tens of thousands of students his home is in Philadelphia but he is known in every corner of every state of the union and everywhere he has host of friends all his life he has helped and inspired others quite by chance and only yesterday literally yesterday and by chance and with no thought of the moment of Conwell although he had been much in my mind for some time past I picked up a thin little book of description by William Dean Howells and turning the pages of a chapter on Lexington old Lexington of the revolution written so Howells had set down in 1882 I noticed after he had written of the town and itself and of the long fight there and of the present day aspect that he mentioned the church life of the place and remarked on the striking advances made by the Baptist who had lately as he expressed it been reconstituted out of very perishing fragments and made strong and flourishing under the ministrations of a lay preacher formerly a colonel in the union army and it was only a few days before this description that Dr. Conwell the former colonel and former lay preacher had told me of his experiences in that little old revolutionary town Howells went on to say that so he was told the colonel's success was principally due to his making the church attractive to young people Howells says no more of him apparently he did not go out to hear him and one wonders if he had ever associated that lay preacher of Lexington with the famous Russell H. Conwell of these recent years attractive to young people yes one can recognize that today just as it was recognized in Lexington and it may be added that he at the same time attracts older people too in this indeed lies his power he makes his church interesting his sermons interesting he is himself interesting because of his being interesting he gains attention the attention gained he inspires biography is more than dates dates after all are but milestones along the real road of life and the most important fact from Conwell's life is that he lived to be 82 working 16 hour days every day for a good of his fellow man he was born on February 15th, 1843 born of poor parents in a low roofed cottage in the eastern Berkshires in Massachusetts I was born in this room he said to me simply as we sat together recently in front of the old fireplace in the principal room of the little cottage for he has bought back the rocky farm of his father and has retained and restored the little old home I was born in this room it was bedroom and kitchen and his voice sank with the kind of grimness into silence then he spoke a little of the struggles of those long past years and we went out to the porch as the evening shadow fell he looked out over the valley and streamed and hills of his youth and he told of his grandmother and of a young Marylander who had come to the region on a visit was the tale of the impetuous love of those two of rash marriage of the interference of parents of the fierce rivalry of another suitor of an attack on the Marylander's life of passionate hastiness and unforgivable words of separation of lifelong sorrow why does grandmother cry so often he remembers asking when he was a little boy and he was told it was for the husband of her youth we went back into the little house in which he first saw John Brown I came down early one morning and saw a huge hairy man sprawled upon the bed there and I was frightened he says but John Brown did not long threaten him he was much at their home after that and was so friendly with Russell and his brother that there was no chance for awe and it gives a curious sidelight on the character of the stern abolitionist that he actually with infinite patience taught the old horse of the Conwells to go home along with the wagon after leaving the boys at school a mile or more away and at school closing time to trot gently off for them without a driver when merely faced in that direction and told to go Conwell remembers how John Brown in training it used patiently to walk besides the horse in control it's going and turning until it was quite ready to go and turn by itself the Conwell House was a station on the Underground Railroad and Russell Conwell remembers when a lad seeing the escaping slaves that his father had driven across the country and temporarily hidden those were heroic days he says quietly and once in a while my father let me go with him they were wonderful night drives the cowering slaves the darkness of the road the silence and dread of it all this underground road he remembers was from Philadelphia to New Haven thence to Springfield where Conwell's father would take his charge and onward the bellows falls and Canada Conwell tells to a meeting Frederick Douglass the colored orator in that little cottage on the hills I never saw my father Douglass said one day his father was a white man and I remember little of my mother except that once she tried to keep an overseer from whipping me and the lash cut across her own face and her blood fell over me when John Brown was captured Conwell went on my father tried to sell this place to get a little money to send to help his defense but he couldn't sell it and on the day of the execution we now solemnly hear from 11 to 12 just praying praying in silence for the passing soul of John Brown and as we prayed we knew that others were praying for the church bell told during that entire hour and its awesome boom went sadly sounding over these hills Conwell believes that his real life dates from a happening of the time of the Civil War a happening that still looms vivid and intense before him of which undoubtedly did deepen and strengthen his strong and deep nature but the real Conwell was always essentially the same neighborhood tradition still tells of his bravery as a boy and a youth of reckless coasting his skill as a swimmer and saving of lives his strength and endurance his plunging out into the darkness of wild winter night to save a neighbor's cattle his soldiers came home with tales of his devotion to them and how he shared his rations and his blankets and the deadly risk his life of how he crept off into a swamp at intimate peril to rescue one of the men lost or mired there the present Conwell was always Conwell in fact he may be traced through his ancestry too for in him there are sturdy virtues the bravery the grim determination the practicality of his father and romanticism that comes from his grandmother and the dreamy qualities of his mother who practical and hardworking New England woman that she was was the same time influenced by an almost startling mysticism and Conwell himself is a dreamer first of all he is a dreamer it is the most important fact in regard to him it is because he is a dreamer and visualizes his dreams that he can plan the great things that to other men would seem impossibilities and then his intensely practical side his intense efficiency his power his skill his patience his fine earnestness his mastery over others develop his dreams into reality he dreams dreams and sees visions but his visions are never visionary and his dreams become fact the rocky hills which meant a dog had struggle for very existence the fugitive slaves John Brown the school for youth and that literal school was a tiny one room school house where young Conwell came under the care of a teacher who realized the boy's unusual capabilities and was able to give him broad and unusual help then a wise country preacher also recognized the unusual and urged the parents to give still more education whereupon supreme effort was made a young Russell was sent to Wilbraham Academy he likes to tell of his life there and of the hardships of which he makes light and of the joy with which weekend pies and cakes were received from home he tells of how he went out on the road selling books from house to house and how eagerly he devoured the contents of the sample books that he carried they were the foundation of learning for me he says soberly he was the idea of the world he went to Yale in 1860 but the outbreak of the war interfered with college and he enlisted in 1861 but he was only 18 and his father objected and he went back to Yale but next year he again enlisted and the men of his Brookshire neighborhood likewise enlisting insisted that he be their captain and Governor Andrews appealed to consented to commission the old youth who was so evidently a natural leader and the man gave freely of their scant money to get for him a sword all gay and splendid with guilt upon the sword was the declaration in stately Latin that true friendship is eternal and with that sword is associated the most vivid and momentous experience of Russell Conwell's life the sword hangs at the head of Conwell's bed in Philadelphia man of peace that he is minister of peace that symbol of war has for over half a century been of infinite importance to him he told me the story as we stood together before that sword and he has told the story speaking with quiet repression but seeing it all and living it all just as vividly as if it occurred but yesterday that sword has meant so much to me that he was so murmured and then he began to tell a boy up there in the Berkshires a neighbor's son was John Ring I call him a boy for we all called him a boy and we looked upon him as a boy he was undersized and underdeveloped so much that he could not enlist but for some reason he was devoted to me and he not only wanted to enlist but he wanted to be in the artillery company of which I was captain of my servant I didn't want a servant but it is the only way I could take along poor little Johnny Ring Johnny was deeply religious and would read the Bible every evening before turning in in those days I was an atheist or at least thought I was and I used to laugh at Ring and after a while he took to reading the Bible outside the tent on account of my laughing at him but he could not stop reading it my faithfulness to me remained unchanged the scabbard of the sword was too glistening for the regulations the ghost of the smile hovered on Conwell's lips and I could not wear it I could only wear a plain one for service and keep this hanging in my tin on a tent pole John Ring used to handle it adoringly and kept it polished to brilliancy it's dull enough these many years he added somberly the ring it represented not only his captain but the very glory and pomp of war one day the Confederates suddenly stormed our position near New Bern and swept through the camp driving our entire force before them and all including my company retreated hurriedly across the river setting fire to a long wooden bridge as we went over as soon as it blazed up furiously making a barrier that the Confederates could pass but unknown to everybody and unnoticed John Ring had dashed back to my tent I think he was able to make his way back because he looked like a mere boy but however that was he got past the Confederates into my tent and took down from where it was hanging on the tent pole my bright gold-scabbarded sword John Ring seized the sword that had been so long precious to him he dodged here and there and actually managed to gain the bridge just as it was beginning to blaze he started across the flames where every moment getting fiercer the smoke denser and now and then as he crawled and staggered on he leaned for a few seconds far over the edge of that bridge in an effort to get air both sides saw him and both sides watched his terrible progress even while firing was fiercely kept up on the other side of the river and then a Confederate officer he was one of General Pickett's officers ran to the water's edge and waved a white-hanger-chief and the firing ceased tell that boy to come back here, he cried tell him to come back here and I will let him go free he called out just as Ring was about to enter upon the worst part of the bridge the covered part where there were top and bottom and sides of blazing wood the roar of the flame was so close to Ring that he could not hear the calls from either side of the river and he pushed desperately on and disappeared into the cover part there was dead silence except for the crackling of the fire not a man cried out all waited in hopeless expectancy and then came a mighty yell from Northerner and Southerner alike for Johnny came crawling out of the end of the covered way he had actually passed through that frightful place and his clothes were blazed and he toppled over and fell into the shallow water and a few minutes later he was dragged out unconscious and hurried to a hospital he lingered for a day or two still unconscious and then came to himself and smiled a little and found that the sword for which he had given his life had been left beside him he took it in his arms he hugged it to his breast and gave a few words of the final message to me and that was all Conwell's voice had gone thrillingly low as he neared the end he was also very very vivid to him and his eyes had grown tender and his lips more strong and firm and he fell silent thinking of that long ago happening and though he looked down upon the thronging traffic of Broad Street it was clear that he did not see it and that if the rumbling hubbub of sound meant anything to him it was the rumbling of the guns of the distant past when we spoke again it was with a still tenser tone I stood besides the body of John Ring and realized that he had died for the love of me I made a vow that has formed my life I vowed that from that moment I would live not only my own life but I would also live the life of John Ring and from that moment I have worked sixteen hours every day ate for John Ring's work and ate for my own a curious note had come into his voice as one of who had run into the race the whole fought the good fight and neared the end every morning when I rise I look at this sword or if I'm away from home I think of the sword and vow anew that another day she'll see sixteen hours of work from me and when one comes to know Russell Conwell one knows that never did a man work so hard and consistently it was though John Ring and his giving of his life through devotion to me that I became a Christian not immediately but it came before the war was over and it came through the faithful Johnny Ring there was a little lonely cemetery in the Berkshires a tiny burying ground on a windswept hill a few miles from Conwell's old home in this isolated burying ground bushes and vines and grass growing perfusion and a few trees cast a gentle shade and the tree-clad hills go a billowing off for miles and miles in wild beauty and in that lovely little graveyard I found a plain stone that marks the resting place of John Ring end of part five part six of Acres of Diamonds this Librivox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part six two the beginning at old Lexington it was not because he was a minister that Russell Conwell is such a force in the world he went into the ministry because he was sincerely and profoundly a Christian and because he felt that as a minister he could do more good in the world than in any other capacity but being a minister is but an incident so to speak the important thing is not that he is a minister but that he is himself recently I heard in New Yorker the head of a great corporation say I believe that Russell Conwell is doing more good in this world than any man who has lived since Jesus Christ and he said this in a serious and unexaggerated earnest yet Conwell did not readily get into his life work he might have seemed almost a failure until he was well on toward 40 for although he kept making successes they were not permanent successes and he did not settle himself into a definite line he restlessly went westward to make his home and then restlessly returned to the east after the war was over he was a lawyer he was a lecturer he was an editor he went around the world as a correspondent he wrote books he kept making money and kept losing it he lost it through fire through investments through aiding his friends and the years following the war was due to the unsettling effect of the war itself which thus in its influence broke into his mature life after breaking into his years at Yale but however this may be those seething, changing, stirring years were years of vital importance to him for in the myriad experiences of that time he was building the foundation of the Conwell that was to come the symbols of the earth at home he made hosts of friends and loyal admirers it was worth noting that as a lawyer he would never take a case either civil or criminal that he considered wrong it was basic with him that he could not and would not fight if he thought he was on the wrong side only when his client was right would he go ahead yet he laughs his quiet infectious characteristic laugh was deceived for he defended a man's charged with stealing a watch who was so obviously innocent that he took the case in a blaze of indignation and had the fellow proudly exonerated the next day the wrongly accused one came to his office and shamelessly took out the watch which he had been charged with stealing I went to send it to the man I took it from he said and he told with a sort of shame-faced pride deacon to give in all sincerity the evidence which sculpted him and say Mr. Conwell I want to thank you for getting me off I hope you'll excuse my deceiving you and I won't be any worse for not going to jail and Conwell likes to remember that thereafter the young man lived up the pride of exoneration and though Conwell does not say it or think it one knows that it was the Conwell influence that inspired to honesty for always he is the inspirer Conwell even kept certain hours for consultation with those too poor to pay any fee and at one time while still an active lawyer he was guardian for over sixty children the man has always been a marvel and always won to come upon such romantic facts as these that it was the curious thing about him how much there was confidence in his life worship to the end by John Ring left for dead all night at Kenneshawn Mountain calmly singing nearer my god to thee to quiet the passengers on a supposedly sinking ship saving lives even when a boy never disappointing a single audience of thousands of audiences he has arranged to address during all his years of lecturing he himself takes little pride and is a characteristic of him that he has actually forgotten that just once he did fail to appear he was quite forgotten that one evening on his way to a lecture he stopped a runaway horse to save two women's lives and went in consequence to the hospital instead of the platform and it was typical of him to forget that sort of thing the emotional temperament of Conwell has always made him responsive to the great the striking patriotic he was deeply influenced by knowing John Brown and his brief memories of Lincoln are intense though he saw him but three times in all the first time he saw Lincoln was on the night when the future president delivered his address which afterwards became so famous in Cooper Union, New York the name of Lincoln was then scarcely known and it was by mere chance that young Conwell happened to be in New York on that day being there and learning that Abraham Lincoln from the west was going to make an address he went to hear him he tells how uncouthly Lincoln was dressed even with one trouser's leg higher than the other and of how awkward he was and of how poorly at first he spoke and with what apparent embarrassment the chairman of the meeting got Lincoln a glass of water and Conwell thought it was from the personal desire to help him and keep him from breaking down how Lincoln became a change man as he spoke how he seemed to feel ashamed of his brief embarrassment and pulling himself together and putting aside the written speech which he had prepared spoke freely and powerfully with splendid conviction as only a born orator speaks to Conwell it was a tremendous experience the second time he saw Lincoln was when he went to Washington to plead for the life of one of his men who had been condemned to death for sleeping on post he was still a captain his promotion to the Colonel was still to come a youth and was awed by going into the presence of a man he worshipped and his voice trembles a little even now as he tells how pleasantly Lincoln looked up from his desk and how cheerfully he asked his business with him and how absorbedly Lincoln then listened to his tale so it appeared he already knew how to outline it will be all right said Lincoln when Conwell finished but Conwell was still frightened he feared that in the municipality of public matters this mere matter of the life of the mountain boy a private soldier might be forgotten till too late it's almost the time set he faltered and Conwell's voice almost breaks man of emotion that he is to tell how Lincoln said he never signed a warrant to shoot a boy under 20 and never will that was the one and only time that he spoke with Lincoln and it remains an indelible impression the third time he saw Lincoln was when as officer of the day he stood for hours besides the dead body of the president as it lay in state in Washington in those hours he stood rigidly as the throng when shuffling sorrowfully through an immense impression came to Colonel Conwell of the work and worth of the man who lay there dead and that impression has never departed John Brown Abraham Lincoln old revolutionary Lexington how Conwell's life is associated with famous men in places and it was actually at Lexington that he made the critical decision as to the course of his life and it seems to me that it was although quite unconsciously because of the very fact that it was Lexington that Conwell was influenced to decide and to act as he did had it been some other kind of place some merely ordinary place some quite usual place he might not have taken that important step but it was Lexington it was brave old Lexington inspiring Lexington and he was inspired by it for the man himself inspires nobly is always the one who upon himself is open to noble inspiration Lexington inspired him when I was a lawyer in Boston and almost 37 years old he told me thinking slowly back into the years I was consulted by a woman who asked my advice in regards to disposing of a little church in Lexington whose congregation had become unable to support it I went out and looked at the place and told her how the property could be sold but it seemed a pity to me that the church should be given up however I advised meeting of church members and I attended the meeting I put the case to them was only a handful of men and women and there was silence for a little then a little old man rose in a quivering voice said the matter was quite clear that there evidently was nothing to do but sell and he would agree with the others in the necessity but as the church had been his church home from boyhood so he quivered and quivered on he begged that they would excuse him from actually taking it and disposing of it and in a deep silence he went haltingly out of the room the men and women looked at one another still silent sadly impressed but not knowing what to do and I said to them why not start over again and go on with the church after all typical conwellion that first the impulse to help those who needs helping then the inspiration and leadership but the building is entirely too tumbled down to I said one of the men sadly and I knew it was right for I had examined it but I said let us meet tomorrow morning and get to work on building ourselves and put it in shape for the service next Sunday it made them seem pleased and encouraged and so confident that a new possibility was opening that I never doubted that each one of those presence and many friends besides would be at the building in the morning I was there early with a hammer and axe and crowbar and secured ready to go to work but no one else showed up he has a rueful appreciation of the humor of it as he pictured the scene and one knows also that in that little town of Lexington where Americans had so bravely faced the impossible Russell Conwell also braced himself to face the impossible a pettier man would have instantly given up the entire matter when those who were most interested failed to respond but one of the strongest features in the Conwell character is his ability to draw even doubters and weaklings into line his ability to stir even those who have given up I looked over that building he goes unwinsically and I saw that repair really seemed out of the question nothing but a new church would do so I took the axe that I had brought with me and began chopping the place down and a little while a man not one of the people who watched me for a time and said what are you going to do there I instantly replied tear down this old building and build a new church here he looked at me but the people won't do that he said yes they will I said cheerfully keeping at my work where upon he watched me a few minutes longer and said well you can put me down for $100 for the new building come up to my livery stable and get it this evening all right I'll surely be there I replied a little while another man came along and stopped and looked and he rather jibbed at the idea of a new church and when I told him of the livery stable man contributing $100 he said but you haven't got the money yet no I said but I'm going to get it tonight you'll never get it he said he's not that sort of a man he's not even a church man but I just went quietly on with the work without answering and after a while he left but he called back as he went off well if he does give you that $100 come to me and I'll give you another hundred Conwell smiles in genial reminiscence and without any apparent sense that he is telling of a great personal triumph and goes on those two men both paid the money and of course the church people themselves who at first not quite understood that I could be an earnest and joined in and helped with work and money and while building it was particularly important to get and to keep the congregation together as they had ceased to have a minister of their own I used to run out from Boston and preach for them in a room we hired and it was there in Lexington in 1879 that I determined to become a minister I had had a good law practice but I determined to give it up for many years I had felt more or less the call to ministry and here at length was the definite time to begin I preached there how strange now to think of William Dean Howells and the Colonel Preacher and after a while the church was completed and in that very church there in Lexington I was ordained a minister a marvelous thing all this even without considering the marvelous heights that Conwell has since attained a marvelous thing an achievement of positive romance that little church stood for American bravery and initiative and self sacrifice and romanticism in a way that well befitted good old Lexington to leave a large and overflowing law practice and take up the ministry at a salary of $600 a year seemed to the relatives of Conwell's wife the extreme of foolishness and they did not hesitate to express themselves naturally enough they did not have Conwell's vision yet he himself was fair enough to realize and to admit there was a good deal of fairness in their objections and so he said to the congregation that he was quite ready to come for $600 a year he expected them to double his salary as soon as he doubled the church membership that seemed to them a good deal like a joke but they answered in perfect earnestness that they would be quite willing to do the doubling as soon as he did the doubling and in less than a year his salary was doubled accordingly I asked him if he found it hard to give up the lucrative law of ministry and his reply gave a delightful impression of his capacity for humorous insight into human nature for he said with a genial twinkle oh yes it was a wrench but there was sort of a romance of self-sacrifice you know I rather suppose the old time martyrs rather enjoyed themselves in being martyrs Conwell did not stay very long in Lexington a struggling little church in Philadelphia heard what he was doing he went up to see and hear him and an invitation was given and as the Lexington church seemed so prosperously on its feet and the needs of the Philadelphia body keenly appealed to Conwell's imagination a change was made and a salary of $800 a year he went in 1882 to a little struggling Philadelphia congregation and of the congregation he is still pastor only it ceased to be a struggling congregation a great many years ago and long ago it began paying him more thousands every year than it first gave him hundreds dreamer as Conwell is in conjunction with his immense practicality and moved as he is by the spiritual influences of life it is more than likely that not only did Philadelphia's need appeal but also the fact that Philadelphia as a city meant so much to him coming north wounded from the battlefield of the civil war it was Philadelphia that he has cared for until his health and strength recovered thus it came that Philadelphia had early become dear to him and here is an excellent example of how dreaming great dreams may go hand in hand with winning superb results for that little struggling congregation now owns and occupies a great new church building that seats more people than any other Protestant church in America and Dr. Conwell fills it story of the 57 cents at every point in Conwell's life one sees that he wins through his wonderful personal influence on old and young every step forward every triumph achieved comes not alone from his own enthusiasm but because of his putting that enthusiasm into others and when I learned how it came that the present church buildings were begun was another one of those marvelous tales of fact that are stranger than any imagination could make them and yet the tale was so simple and sweet and sad and unpretending when Dr. Conwell first assumed charge of that little congregation that led him to Philadelphia was really a little church both in its numbers and in the size of the building it occupied but it quickly became so popular under his leadership that the church services and Sunday school services were alike so crowded that there was no room for all who came and always there were people turned from the doors one afternoon a little girl who would eagerly wish to go turned back from the Sunday school door crying bitterly because they had told her that there was no more room but a tall black haired man and noticed her tears and stopping ask why she was crying and sobbingly she replied that it was because they could not let her into Sunday school I lifted her to my shoulder says Dr. Conwell and telling of this and after hearing the story elsewhere I asked him to tell it to me himself for it seemed almost too strange to be true I lifted her to my shoulder and one realizes the pretty scene it must have made for the little girl to go through the crowd of people crying her tears and writing proudly upon the shoulders of this kindly tall dark man I said to her that I would like to take her in a room big enough for all who came I said to her that I would take her in and I did so and I said to her that we should someday have a room big enough for all who should come and when she went home she told her parents I only learned this afterwards that she was going to save money to help build the larger church and Sunday school that Dr. Conwell wanted her parents pleasantly humored her in the idea and let her run errands and do little tasks to earn pennies and she began dropping pennies into her bank she was a lovable little thing but in only a few weeks after that she had taken suddenly ill and died and at the funeral her father told me quietly of how his little girl had been saving money for a building fund and there at the funeral handed me what she had saved just fifty-seven cents in pennies Dr. Conwell does not say how deeply he was moved after this after all a man of very few words as to his own emotions but a deep tenderness had swept into his voice at the meeting of the church trustees I told of this gift of fifty-seven cents this first gift toward the proposed building fund of the new church that was some time to exist for until then the matter had barely been spoken of as the new church building had simply been a possibility for the future the trustees seemed much impressed and it turned out that they were far more impressed than I possibly could have hoped for in a few days one of them came to me and said that he thought it would be an excellent idea to buy a lot on Broad Street the very lot in which the building now stands it was characteristic of Dr. Conwell that he did not point out what everyone would understand that it was his own inspiration to put into the trustees which resulted in this quick and definite move on the part of one of them I talked the matter over with the owner of the property and told him of the beginning of the fund the story of the little girl the man was not one of our church nor in fact was he a churchgoer at all but he enlisted intimately to the tale of the fifty-seven cents and simply said he was quite ready to go ahead and sell us that piece of land for ten thousand dollars and the effectiveness of this deeply touched me taking the first payment of just fifty-seven cents and letting the entire building stand on a five percent mortgage and it seemed to me that it would be the right thing to accept this unexpectedly liberal proposition and I went over the entire matter on that basis with the trustees and some of the other members and all of the people would soon be talking of having a new church but it was not done in that way after all for fine though that way would have been there was one still finer not long after my talk with the man who owned the land his surprisingly good-hearted proposition an exchange was arranged for me one evening with a Mount Holly church and my wife went with me we came back late and it was cold and wet and miserable but as we approached our home it was all lighted from top to bottom and there it was clear that it was full of people I said to my wife that they seemed to be having a better time than we had had and we went in curious to know what this was all about and as it turned out in our absence which had been intentionally arranged that the church people had gathered in our home to meet us on our return and we were utterly amazed for the spokesman told me that the numbers had been raised and that the land for the church that I wanted was free of debt and all had come so quickly and directly from this dear little girl's fifty-seven cents didn't it seem like a fairy tale but then this man has all his life been making fairy tales into realities he inspired the child he inspired the trustees he inspired the owner of the land he inspired the people he inspired the church as it is termed was a great undertaking for the congregation even though it had been swiftly growing from the day of Dr. Conwell's taking charge of it it was something far ahead of what except for the eyes of the enthusiast that they could possibly complete and pay for and support nor was it an easy task ground was broken for the building in 1889 in 1891 then came years of raising money to clear it but it was long ago placed completely out of debt and with only a single large subscription one of ten thousand dollars for the church is not in a wealthy neighborhood nor is the congregation made up of the great and rich the church had built a stone and its interior is a great amphitheater special attention has been given to the fresh air and light and more religious light that goes on with medieval churchliness behind the pulpit are tears of seats for the great chorus choir there is a large organ the building is peculiarly adapted for hearing and seeing and if it is not strictly speaking beautiful in itself it is beautiful when it is filled with encircling rows of men and women men are feeling that is and one who appreciates the importance of symbols Dr. Conwell had a heart of olive wood built into the front of the pulpit for the wood was from the olive tree in the garden of Gethsemane and the amber-colored tiles in the inner wall of the church bear under their glaze the names of thousands of his people everyone young and old who helped the building even to the giving of a single dollar has his name inscribed there for Dr. Conwell wished to show that it is not only the house of the Lord but also in a keenly personal sense the house of those who build it the church has a possible seating capacity of 4200 although only 3135 chairs have been put into it for it is the desire not to crowd the space needlessly there is also a great room for Sunday school and extensive rooms for the young men's association the young women's association and for a kitchen for executive offices for meeting places for church officers and boards and committees it is a spacious and practical and complete church home and many people feel at home there you see again said Dr. Conwell musingly the advantage of aiming at big things that building represents $109,000 above ground it is free from debt and we build a small church it would now be heavily mortgaged end of part 6 part 7 of Acres of Diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part 7 4 his power as orator and preacher even as a young man Conwell won local fame as an orator at the outbreak of the Civil War he began making patriotic speeches that gained enlistments after going to the front he was sent back home for a time on furlough to make more speeches and draw more recruits for his speeches were so persuasive so powerful so full of homely and patriotic feeling that the men who heard them thronged into the ranks and as a preacher he uses persuasion power simple and homely eloquence to draw men to the ranks of Christianity he is an orator born and he has developed this inborn power by the hardest of study and thought and practice he is one of those rare men who always sees and hold the attention when he speaks men listen it is quality temperament control the word is immaterial but the fact is very material indeed some quarter of a century ago Conwell published a little book for students on the study and practice of oratory that clear cut articulation is the charm of eloquence is one of his insisted upon statements and it well illustrates his lifelong practice of the man himself for every word as he talks can be heard in every part of a large building yet he always speaks without apparent effort he avoids elocution his voice is soft pit and never breaks even now when he is over 70 because as he explains it he always speaks in his natural voice there is never a straining after effect a speaker must possess a large hearted regard for the welfare of his audience he writes and here again we see Conwell explaining Conwellism enthusiasm invites enthusiasm is another of his points of importance and one understands that it is by deliberate purpose and not by chance that he tries with such tremendous effort to put enthusiasm into the hearers with every sermon and every lecture that he delivers it is easy to raise a laugh but dangerous for it is the greatest test of an order's control of his audience to be able to land them again on solid earth of sober thinking I have known him at the very end of a sermon to have a ripple of laughter sweep over congregation and then in a moment he has every individual under his control listening soberly to his words he never fears to use humor and it is always very simple and obvious and effective with him even a very simple pun may be used not only without taking away from the strength of what he is saying but with a vivid increase of impressiveness and when he says something funny in a delightful and confidential way with such a genial quiet infectious humorousness that his audience is captivated and they never think that he is telling something funny of his own it seems such is the skill of the man that he is just letting them know of something humorous that they can enjoy it with him be absolutely truthful and scrupulously clear he writes and with delightful terse common sense he says use illustrations that illustrate and never did an orator live up to this injunction more than does Conwell himself nothing is more surprising nothing is more interesting than the way in which he makes use of illustrations of the impressions and incidences of his long and varied life and whatever it is it has direct and instant bearing upon the progress of his discourse he will refer to something that he heard a child say in a train yesterday and it's he will speak of something that he saw or someone whom he met last month or last year or ten years ago in Ohio in California in London in Paris in New York in Bombay in each memory each illustration is a hammer with which he drives home a truth the vast number of places he has visited and people he has met the infinite variety of things his observant eyes have seen give him his ceaseless flow of illustrations and his memory and his skill make admirable use of them it is seldom that he uses an illustration from what he has read everything is characteristically his own Henry M. Stanley who knew him well referred to him as that double-sided Yankee who could see at a glance all that there is and all there ever was and never was there a man who supplements with personal reminiscence the place or the person that has figured in the illustration when he illustrates with a story of the discovery of California gold at Sutter's he almost parenthetically remarks I delivered this lecture on that very spot a few years ago that is in the town that arose on that very spot and when he illustrates by the story of the invention of the sewing machine he adds I suppose that if any of you were asked who was the inventor of the sewing machine you would say that it is Elias Howe I was with Elias Howe in the Civil War and he often used to tell me how he had tried for 14 years to invent the sewing machine and then his wife feeling that something really had to be done invented it in a couple hours listening to him you begin to feel in touch with everybody and everything and in a friendly and intimate way always whether in the pulpit or on the platform as in private conversation there is an absolute simplicity about the man a simplicity in earnestness a complete honesty and when he sits down in his book on oratory no man has the right to use words carelessly he stands for that respect for word craftsmanship that every successful speaker or writer must feel be intensely in earnest he writes and in writing this he sets down a prime principle not only of his oratory but of his life a young minister told me that Dr. Conwell said to him with deep feeling always remember as you preach that you are striving to save at least one soul with every sermon and to one of his close friends Dr. Conwell said in one of his self revealing conversations I feel whenever I preach that there is always one person in the congregation to whom in all probability I shall never preach again and therefore I feel that I must exert my utmost power in that last chance and in this even if this were all one sees why each sermon is so impressive and why his energy never lags always with him is the feeling that he is in this world to do all the good he possibly can do not a moment not an opportunity must be lost the moment he rises and steps in front of his pulpit he has the attention of everyone in the building and this attention he closely holds till he is through yet it is never by a striking effort that attention is gained except in so far that his utter simplicity is striking I want to preach so simply that you will not think of it as preaching but you will think of it as listening to a friend I remember him saying one Sunday morning as he began his sermon and then he went on just as such homely kindly friendly words promised and how efficiently he believes that everything should be put as to be understood by all and this belief applies not only to his preaching but to the reading of the Bible whose description he not only visualizes to himself but makes vividly clear to his hearers and often makes fascination in result for example he is reading the 10th chapter of 1 Samuel he begins thou shall meet the company of prophets singers it should be translated as lifting his eyes from the page and looking out over his people then he goes on taking this change as a matter of course thou shall meet a company of singers coming down from the high place whereupon he again interrupts himself and in irresistible explanatory aside which instantly raises the desired picture in the mind of everyone he says that means from the little old church on the hill you know plain and clear and real and interesting most of all interesting it is from this moment another man would have left it at the prophets coming down from the high place which would not have seemed at all alive or natural and here suddenly Conwell has flashed his picture of the singers coming down from the little old church on the hill there is a magic in doing that sort of thing and he goes on reading thou shall meet a company of singers coming down from the little old church on the hill with a sultry and a tibret and a pipe and a harp and they shall sing music is one of Conwell's strongest aids he sings himself he sings as if he likes to sing and often finds himself leading the singing usually so indeed at the prayer meetings and often in effect at the church services I remember at one church service that the choir leader was standing in front of the mass choir ostensibly leading but Conwell himself standing at the rear of the pulpit platform with his eyes on the hymn books silently swaying a little from the music and unconsciously beating time as he swayed it was just as unconsciously the real leader for it was he whom the congregation was watching and with them they were keeping time he never suspected it he was merely thinking along with the music and there was such a look of contagious happiness on his face as everyone as he made everyone in the building similarly happy for he possesses a mysterious faculty in imbuing others with his own happiness not only singers but the modern equivalent of sultry and tibret and cymbals all have their place in Dr. Conwell's scheme of a church service for there may be a piano and there may even be a trombone and there is a giant organ to help the voices and at times there are chiming bells his musical taste seems to tend toward the thunderous or perhaps that is how he knows that there are times when people like to hear thunderous and are moved by it and how the choir themselves like it they occupy a great curbing space behind the pulpit and put their hearts into song and as the congregation disperses and the choir filters down sometimes they are still singing and some of them continue to sing as they go slowly out toward the doors they are happy Conwell himself is happy all the congregation is happy he makes everybody feel happy in coming to church he makes the church attractive just as Howells was so long ago told that he did in Lexington and there is something more than happiness there is a sense of ease of comfort of general joy that is quite unmistakable there is nothing of stiffness or constraint and with it all there is full reverence it is no wonder that he is accustomed to fill every seat of that great building his gestures are usually very simple now and then when he works up to an emphasis he strikes one fist in the palm of the other hand when he is through you do not remember that he has made any gestures at all but the sound of his voice remains with you and the look of his wonderful eyes and though he has passed the three score years and ten he looks over his people with eyes that still have the very look of youth like all great men he not only does big things but keeps in touch with myriad details when his assistants announcing the funeral of an old member hesitates about the street and number and says that they can be found in the telephone directory Dr. Conwell's voice breaks quietly in with such a number giving it doff and street quietly and in a low tone yet everyone in the church hears distinctively every syllable of that low voice his fund of personal anecdote or personal reminiscence is constant and illustrative of his preaching just as it is when he lectures and the reminiscence sweep through many years and at times are really startling in the vivid and home like pictures they present of the famous folk of the past that he knew one Sunday evening with almost casual reference to the one time he first met Garfield then a candidate for the presidency I asked Major McKinley who I had met in Washington and whose home was in Northern Ohio as was that of Mr. Garfield to go with me to Mr. Garfield's home and introduce me when we got there a neighbor had to find him Jim Jim he called you see Garfield was just plain old Jim to his neighbors it's hard to recognize a hero over your back friends just a moment for the appreciative ripple to subside and went on we three talked together what a rare talking it must have been McKinley Garfield and Conwell we talked together and after a while we got to the subject of hymns and those two great men both told me of how deeply they loved the old hymn the old time religion Garfield especially loved it so he told us who brought him up as a boy and to whom he owed such gratitude used to sing it at the pasture bars outside of the boy's window every morning and young Jim knew whenever he heard that old tune that it meant it was time for him to get up he said that he had heard the best concerts and the finest operas in the world but had never heard anything he loved as he still loved the old time religion I forgot what a reason there was for McKinley's especially liking it but he as Garfield liked it immensely what followed was a striking example of Conwell's intentness on losing no chance to fix an impression in the hearer's mind and at the same time it was really an astounding proof of his power to move and sway for a new expression came over his face and he said as if the idea had only at that moment occurred to him as it most probably had I think it's in our hymnal and in a moment he announced the number and the great organ struck and every person in the great church every man woman and child joined in the swinging rhythm of verse after verse as they could never tire of the old time religion it is a simple melody more than a single line of almost monotone music it was good enough for mother and it's good enough for me it was good enough on the fiery furnace best it went on with never worrying iteration each time with the refrain more and more rhythmic and swaying the old time religion the old time religion it's good enough for me that it was good enough for the Hebrew children that it was good enough for Paul and Silas that it will help you when you're dying and it will show you the way to heaven all these and still other lines were sung with a sort of wailing softness monotone a depth of earnestness and the man who had worked this miracle of control by evoking out of the past his memory of a meeting with two of the vanished great ones of the earth stood before his people leading them singing with them his eyes aglow with an inward light his magic and suddenly set them upon the spirit of the old camp meeting days the days of pioneering and hardship when religion met so much to everybody and even those who knew nothing of such things felt them even if but vaguely every heart was moved and touched and every old tune will sing in the memory of all who heard it and sung it as long as they live End of Part 7 Part 8 of Acres of Diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds of Conwell Part 8 The constant earnestness of Conwell his desires to let no chance slip by of helping a fellow man puts often into his voice when he preaches a note of eagerness, of anxiety but when he prays when he turns to God his manner undergoes a subtle and unconscious change a lotus slipped off his shoulders has been assumed by a higher power into his bearing dignified though it was there comes an unconscious increase of the dignity into his voice, firm as it were before there comes a deeper note of firmness he is apt to fling his arms widespread as he prays in a fine gesture that he never uses at other times and he looks upward with the dignity of a man a higher being is proud of being friend and confidant one does not need to be a Christian to appreciate the beauty and fineness of Conwell's prayers he is likely at any time to do the unexpected and he is so great a man and he has such control that whatever he does seems to everybody a perfectly natural thing his sincerity is so evident and whatever he does is done so simply and naturally and it is just a matter of course I remember during one church service while the singing was going on that he suddenly rose from his chair and kneeling beside it on the open pulpit with his back to the congregation remained in that posture for several minutes no one thought it strange I was likely enough the only one who noticed it his people are used to his sincerities and at the time it was merely that he had a few words to say quietly to God and turned aside for a few moments to say them his earnestness of belief in prayer makes him a firm believer in the answers to prayer and in fact to what may be termed the direct interposition of providence doubtness, the mystic strain inherited from his mother also has much to do with this he has a typically homely way of expressing it by one of his favorite maxims one that he loves to repeat encouragingly to friends who are in difficulties themselves or who know of the difficulties that are his and this hardening maxim is trust in God and do the next thing at one time in the early days of his church work in Philadelphia a payment of a thousand dollars was absolutely needed to prevent a lawsuit in regard to a debt for the church organ it was worse than a debt it was a note signed by himself personally that had become due he was always ready to assume personal responsibilities for debts of his church and failure to meet the note would meet a measure of disgrace as well as marked church discouragement he had tried all the sources that seemed open to him but in vain he could not openly appeal to the church members in this case in the early days of his pastorate and his zeal for the organ his desire for determination to have it as a necessary part of the church equipment had outrun the judgment of some of his best friends including that of the deacon who had gone to Massachusetts for him they had urged a delay till other expenses were met and he had acted against their advice he had tried such friends as he could and he had tried prayer but there was no sign of aid whether supernatural or natural and again literally on the very day which the holder of the note was to begin proceedings against him a check precisely for the needed $1,000 came to him by mail from a man in the west a man who was a total stranger to him it turned out that the man's sister who was one of the temple membership of Dr. Conwell's work she knew nothing of any special need for money knew nothing whatever of any note or of the demand for $1,000 she merely outlined to her brother what Dr. Conwell was accomplishing and with such enthusiasm that the brother at once sent the opportune check at a later time the sum of $10,000 was importantly needed and with such enthusiasm that the payment had been promised it was for some of the construction work of the temple university buildings the last day had come and Conwell and the very few who knew of the emergencies were in the depth of gloom it was too large a sum to ask the church people to make up for they were not rich and they had already been giving splendidly of their slender means for the church to turn to the men famous for enormous charitable gifts have never let themselves be interested in any of the work of Russell Conwell it would be unkind and gratuitous to suggest that it is because their names could not be personally attached or because the work of an unprecantious kind among unprecantious people it need merely be said that neither they nor their agents have carried to aid except that one of the very riches whose name is the most distinguished in the entire world as a giver did once in response to a strong personal application give $3,500 this being the extent of the association of the wealthy that any of the varied Conwell work so when it absolutely necessary to have $10,000 the possibilities of money had been exhausted either from congregation or individuals Russell Conwell in spite of his superb optimism is also a man of deep depressions and this is because of the very fire and fervor of his nature for always in such a nature there is a balancing he believes in success success must come success in itself almost a religion with him success for himself there are times when he is sad and doubtful over some particular possibilities and he immensely believes in prayer faith can move mountains but always he believes that is better not to wait for the mountains thus to be moved but to go right out and get to work at moving them and once in a while there comes a time when the mountain looms too threatening even after the bravest efforts in the deepest trust the time has come the $10,000 debt was a looming mountain that he tried in vain to move he could still pray and he did but it was one of the times when he could only think that something had gone wrong the dean of the university who has been closely in touch with all of his work for many years told me of how in a discouragement which was more notable with his usual unfailing courage he left the executive offices for his home a couple of blocks away he went away with everything looking dark before him it was Christmas time but the very fact it being Christmas only added to his depression Christmas was such an unnatural time for unhappiness but in a few minutes he came flying back radiant overjoyed sparkling with happiness which was a check for precisely $10,000 for it had just been drawn out of an envelope handed to him as he reached home by the mail carrier and it has come so strangely and so naturally for the check was from a woman who was profoundly interested in his work and who had sent the check knowing that in a general way it was needed but without the least idea that there was any immediate need that was eight or nine years ago although the donor was told of the time that Dr. Conwell and all of us were most grateful for the gift it was not until very recently that she was told of how opportunity was and the change it made in Dr. Conwell for he is a great man for maxims and all of us who are associated with him know that one of his favorites is that it will all come out right sometime and of course we had a rare opportunity to tell him that he ought never be discouraged for it is seldom that he is when the big new church building the members of the church were vaguely disturbed by noticing when the structure reached the second story that at its height on one side toward the vacant and undoubt land adjoining there were several doors built that opened literally into nothing but space when asked about those doors and their purpose Dr. Conwell would make some casual reply generally to the effect that they might be excellent as fire escapes to no one for quite a while did he broach even a hint of the greatest plan that was something on his mind which was that the buildings of the university someday would stand on the land immediately joining the church and at that time the university the temple university as it is now called was not even a college although it was probably called a college Conwell had organized it and it consisted of a number of classes and teachers meeting in highly inadequate orders in too little houses but the imagination of Conwell early pictured great new buildings with accommodations for thousands at the time the dream was realized the imagination became a fact and now those second floor doors actually open from the temple church into the temple university you see he always thinks big he dreams big dreams and wins big success all his life he has talked and preached success and it is very real and a very practical belief with him that it is just as easy to do a large thing as a small one and in fact a little easier and so he naturally does not see why one should be satisfied with the small things in life if your rooms are big then fill them he likes to say the same effort that wins small success would rightly directed have won a great success think big things and then do them most favorite of all maxims with this man of maxims is let patients have their perfect work over and over he loves to say it and his friends laugh about his love for it and he knows that they will do and laughs about it himself I tire them all he says for they hear me say it every day but he says it every day because it means so much to him it stands in his mind as a constant warning against anger and impatience or overhaste false to which his impetuous temperament is prone though few have ever seen him either angry or impatient or hasty so well does he exercise self-control those who have long known him to me that they have never heard him censure anyone that his forbearance and kindness are wonderful he is a sensitive man beneath this composure he has suffered and keenly when he has been unjustly attacked he feels pain of that sort for a long time too for even the passing of the years does not entirely dead in it when I have been hurt or when I have talked with annoying colleagues I have tried to let patients have their perfect work for those very people who have patients with them may after word be of help and he went on to talk a little of his early years in Philadelphia and he said with sadness that it had pained him to meet with opposition and it had even come from ministers of his own denomination for he had been so misunderstood and misjudged but he added the momentary somberness feeling even his bitter enemies had been won over with patients I could understand a good deal of what he meant for one of the Baptist ministers of Philadelphia had said to me with some shame that at first he actually used to be the case that when Dr. Conwell would enter one of the regular ministers meeting all would hold a loop not a single one stepping forward to meet or greet him and it was through our jealousy of his success said the minister vehemently he has come to this city a stranger and is one instant popularity and we couldn't stand it so we pounced upon things that he did that were all together unimportant the rest of us were so jealous of his winning throngs that we wouldn't see the good in him and it hurt Dr. Conwell so much that for ten years he did not come to our conferences but all this was changed long ago and the minister is so welcomed as he is and I don't believe that there has ever been a single time since he started coming again that he has not been asked to say something to us we got over our jealousy long ago and we all love him nor is it only that the clergyman of his own denomination admire him not long ago such having been Dr. Conwell's triumph in the city of his adoption that the rector of the most church in Philadelphia voluntarily paid lofty tribute to his aims and ability his work and his personal worth he is an inspiration to his brothers in the ministry of Jesus Christ so this Episcopalian Lector wrote for he is a friend of all that is good and a foe that is all of evil a strength to the weak a comforter to the sorrowing a man of God and a friend of his and reverence is him or his character and his deeds Dr. Conwell did some beautiful and unusual things in his church instituted some beautiful and unusual customs and one can see how narrow and hasty criticism charged him long ago with sensationalism charges long since forgotten except through the hurt still felt by Dr. Conwell himself they used to charge me as if it were possible for me to make a circus of the church and his tone was one that grieved amusement after all these years but he was original and he was popular and therefore there were misunderstandings and jealousy his Easter services for example years ago became widely talked of and eagerly anticipated because each sermon would be wrought around some fine symbol and he would hold in his hand in the pulpit of Robin's egg or a white dove or a stem of lilies or whatever he had chosen as this particular symbol for the particular sermon and that symbol would give him the central thought of his discourse accented as it would be by the actual symbol of self in view of the congregation the cross lighted by electricity to shine down over the baptismal pool the little stream of water cascading gently down the steps of the pool to bring the baptismal right the flowers floating in the pool and his gift of one of them to each of the baptized as he or she left the water all things did seem long ago so unconventional yet his own people recognized the beauty and poetry of them and thousands of Bibles in Philadelphia have a baptismal rose from Dr. Conwell pressed within the pages his constant individuality of mind freshness alertness brilliancy warmth sympathy endear him to the congregation and when he returns from an absence they bubble with effervescence over him as if he were some brilliant new preacher who had just come to them he has always new to them were it not that he possesses some unremarkable quality of charm he would long ago have become so to speak an old story but instead of that he is to them always a new story entertaining and delightful story after all these years that it is not only that they still throng to hear him either preach or lecture though that himself would be noticeable but it is the delightful and delighted spirit with which they do it just the other evening I heard him lecture in his own church and just after his return from an absence and every face being happily up to him to welcome him back home he had just returned from an absence so intently to his every word as if he had never been heard before and when the lecture was over a large bouquet of flowers was handed up to him and someone embarrassly said a few words about its being because he was home again it was all that he had just returned from an absence of months and he had just been away five and a half days end of part 8 part 9 of Acres of Diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain Acres of Diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part 9 6. Millions of hearers that Conwell is not primarily a minister that he is a minister because he is a sincere Christian but that he is first of all an oboe ban a man who loves his fellow man and is more and more apparent as the scope of his life work is recognized one almost comes to think of his pastorate of a great church is even a minor matter besides the combined importance of his educational work his lecture work, his hospital work his work in general as a helper to those who need help for my own part I should say that he is like some of the old time prophets to attend to in addition to the matters of religion the power, the ruggedness, the physical and mental strength the positive grandeur of the man all these are like the general conceptions of the big old testament prophets the suggestion is given only because it is often recurred and therefore with the feeling that there is something more fanciful than the comparison and yet after all the comparison there is one important particular for none of the prophets seems to have had a sense of humor it is perhaps better and more accurate to describe him as the last of the old school of American philosophers the last of those sturdy bodied high thinking achieving men who in the old days did their best to set American humanity on the right path such men as Emerson Alcott, Gull, Wendell Phillips Garrison Rod Taylor, Beecher men who Conwell knew and admired in the long ago and all of whom have long since passed away and Conwell in his going up and down the country inspiring his thousands and thousands is the survivor of that old time group who used to travel about dispensing wit and wisdom and philosophy and courage to the crowded benches of country lyceums and the chairs of school houses and town halls or the larger and more pretentious gathering places of the city Conwell himself is amused to remember that he wanted to talk in public from his boyhood and that very early he began to yield to his inborn impulse he laughs when he remembers the variety of country fairs and school commencements and anniversary and even sewing circles where he tried his youthful powers and all for experience alone in the first few years except for possibly such a thing as a ham or a jackknife the first money that he ever received for speaking was so he remembers wit glee 75 cents and even that was not for the talk but for horse hire but at the same time there is more than amusement in recalling those experiences for he knows that they were invaluable to him as training and for over half a century he has affectionately remembered John B. Go who in the height of his own power and success saw resolution and possibilities in the ardent young hill man and actually did him the kindness and the honor of introducing him to an audience in one of the Massachusetts towns and it was really a great kindness and a great honor from a man who had won his fame to a young man who was just beginning his oratorical career Conwell's lecturing had been considering everything the most important work of his life for by it he has come into close touch with so many millions literally millions of people I ask him once if he had any idea how many he had talked to in the course of his career and he tried to estimate how many thousands of times he had lectured and the average attendance for each but destined when he saw that it ran into the millions of hearers what a marvel and such a fact of millions of hearers I ask the same question of his private secretary and found that no one ever kept any sort of record but as careful an estimate as could be made gave a conservative result at fully eight million hearers of his lectures and adding the number to whom he has preached who have been over five million there is a total of well over thirteen million who have listened to Russell Conwell's voice and this staggering total is the figure was done cautiously and was based upon the facts that as he now addresses an average of forty five hundred in his Sunday services an average would be higher if it were not for his sermons in the vacation time are usually delivered in little churches when at home at the temple he addresses three meetings every Sunday and that he lectures throughout the entire course of each year including sick nights a year lecturing during vacation time what a power is wielded by a man who is held over thirteen million people under the spell of his voice probably no other man who has ever lived has had such a total of hearers and the total is steadily mounting for he is a man who has never known the meaning of rest I think it is almost certain that Dr. Conwell has never spoken to anyone of what to me is the finest point of his lecture work and that is that he still goes gladly and for small fees to the small towns that are never visited by other men of great reputation he knows that it is the little places the out of way places the submerged places that most need the pleasure and a stimulus and he still goes out men of well over seventy that he is to tiny towns in distant states he lists of the discomforts of traveling of the poor little hotels that seldom have visitors of the often times hopeless cooking and the uncleanness of the hardship and the discomforts of the unventilated and overheated or underheated halls he does not think of claiming the relaxation earned by a lifetime of labor or if he ever does the thought of the sword of John Ring restores instantly to his fevered earnestness how he does it how he can possibly keep up is one of the greatest marvels of all I have before me a list of his engagements for the summer weeks of the year 1915 and I shall set it down because it will specifically show far more clearly than the general statements of the kind of work he does the list is the itinerary of his vacation vacation lecturing every evening but Sunday and on Sunday preaching in the town where he happens to be June 24th Ackley, Iowa July 11th Minnesota 25th Waterloo, Iowa 12th Pipestone, Minnesota 26th Decora, Iowa 13th Howard in Iowa 27th Walken, Iowa 14th Canton, South Dakota 28th Red Wing, Minnesota 15th Cherokee, Iowa 29th Red River Falls, Wisconsin 16th Pocahontas, Iowa 30th Northfield, Minnesota 17th Glidden, Iowa July 1st Faribault, Minnesota 18th Boone, Iowa 2nd Spring Valley, Minnesota 19th Dexter, Iowa 3rd Blue Earth, Minnesota 20th Indonola, Iowa 4th Fairmont, Minnesota 21st Croydon, Iowa 5th Lake Crystal, Minnesota 22nd Essex, Iowa 6th Redwood Falls 23rd Sydney, Minnesota 24th Falls City, Nebraska 7th Wilmer, Minnesota 25th Hiawatha, Kansas 8th Dawson, Minnesota 26th Frankfort, Kansas 9th Redfield, South Dakota 27th Greenleaf, Kansas 10th Huron, South Dakota 28th Osborne, Kansas July 29th Stockton, Kansas August 14th Honesdale, Pennsylvania 30th Phillipsburg, Kansas 15th Honesdale, Pennsylvania 31st Mankato, Kansas 16th Carbondale, Pennsylvania In route to the next date on 17th Los Angeles, Pennsylvania 18th Tocanic, Pennsylvania August 3rd, Westfield, Pennsylvania 19th Nanocoat, Pennsylvania 4th, Galston, Pennsylvania 20th Straussburg, Pennsylvania 5th, Fort Allegheny, Pennsylvania 21st, Newton, New Jersey 6th, Wellsville, New York 22nd Newton, New Jersey 7th, Bath, New York 23rd, Hackettstown, New Jersey 7th, Bath, New York 23rd, Hackettstown, New Jersey 8th, Bath, New York 24th, New Hope, Pennsylvania 9th, Penyan, New York 25th, Doyleston, Pennsylvania 10th, Athens, New York 26th, Phoenixville, Pennsylvania 11th, Oswego, New York 27th, New York New York, New York Oceago, New York 27th, Kennett, Pennsylvania 12th, Patchecu, Long Island, New York 28th, Oxford, Pennsylvania 13th, Fort Jarvis, New York 28th, Oxford, Pennsylvania Preach on Sunday All these hardships all this traveling and lecture which would test the endurance of the youngest and strongest and man of over 70 assumes without receiving a particle of personal game receiving a particle of personal gain, for every dollar he makes by it is given away in helping those who need helping. That Dr. Conwell is immensely modest is one of the curious features of his character. He sincerely believes that to write his life would be in the main just to tell what people have done for him. He knows and admits that he works unwarredly, but in profound sincerity he ascribes to success of his plans of those who have seconded and assisted him. It is just the way that he looks upon every phase of his life, when he is reminded of the devotion of his old soldiers. He remembers that only with a sort of pleased wonder that they gave the devotion to him and quite forgets that they loved him because he was always ready to sacrifice, ease or risk his own life for them. He depreciates praise. If anyone likes him, the liking need not be shown in words, but in helping along a good work. That his church has succeeded has been because of the devotion of the people, that the university have succeeded, is because of the splendid work of the teachers and pupils, that the hospitals have done so much has been because of the noble services of physicians and nurses. To him as he himself expresses it, realizing that success has come to his plans, it seems as if the realities are but dreams. He is astonished by his own success. He thinks mainly of his own shortcomings. God and man have never been very patient with me. His depression is at times profound, when he compares the actual results with what he would like them to be. For always he hopes to have soaring far in advance of achievement, that is, the hitch your chariot to a star idea. His modesty goes hand in hand with kindness, and I have seen him let himself be introduced in his own church to his congregation when he is going to deliver a lecture there. Just because a formal pupil of the university who is present, Conwell know, is ambitious to say something inside the temple walls. And this seemed to be the only opportunity. I have noticed when he travels that the face of the news boys brighten as he buys a paper from him, that the porter is all happiness, the conductor and breakman are devotedly anxious to be of age, everywhere the man wins love. He loves humanity, and humanity responds to the love. He has always won the affection of those who knew him. Bayard Taylor is one of the many. He and Bayard Taylor loved each other for a long acquaintance and fellow experience as worldwide travelers. Back in the years when comparatively few Americans visited the Nile or the Orient or even Europe. When Taylor died there was a memorial service in Boston at which Conwell was asked to preside, and as he wished for something more than addresses, he went to Longfellow and asked him to write and read a poem for the occasion. Longfellow had not thought of writing anything, and he was too ill to be present at services. But there was always doing something contagiously inspiring about Russell Conwell when he wishes something to be done. The poet promised he could do what he could, and he wrote and sent the beautiful lines beginning, dead he lie among his books. The peace of God was in his books. Many men of letters, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, were present at the service, and Dr. Conwell induced Oliver Wendell Holmes to read the lines. When they were listened to amid profound silence to the fine ending, Conwell in spite of his widespread hold on millions of people has never won fame recognition or general renown, compared with many men of minor achievements. This seems like an impossibility, yet it is not an impossibility but a fact. Great numbers of men of education and culture are entirely ignorant of him and his work in the world. Men these who deem themselves in touch with world affairs and with the ones who make and move the world. It is inexplicable this, except that never was there a man more devoid of the faculty of self-exploitation, self-advertising than Russell Conwell, nor is there a mere reading of him. Do his words appeal with anything like the force of the same words uttered by himself? For always with his spoken words is his personality. Those who have heard Russell Conwell or have known him personally recognize the charm of the man and his immense forcefulness, but there were many among them, those who control publicity through books and newspaper, who thought they ought to be in the warmest in their enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him. And if they know him at all, think of him as one who pleases in a simple way the commoner folk for getting in their pride that every really great man pleases the common ones and that simplicity and directness are attributes of real greatness. But Russell Conwell has always won the admiration of the really great, as well as the humbler millions. It is only a supposedly cultured class in between that has not thoroughly acquainted with what he has done. Perhaps, too, this is owing to his having cast in his lot with the city of all cities, which, consciously or unconsciously, looks most closely to family and place of resident as criterion of merit, a city in which it is almost impossible for a stranger to become affiliated or a Philadelphia-tized, as might be expressed, and Philadelphia, in spite of all that Conwell has done, has been under the thrall of the fact that he went north of Market Street, that fatal fact understood by all who know Philadelphia, and that he made no efforts to make friends in written-house square. Such considerations seem absurd in this twentieth century, but in Philadelphia there are still potent tens of thousands of Philadelphians love him, and he is honored by its greatest men. But there is a class of the pseudo-cultured who do not know him or appreciate him, and it needs also to be understood that outside of his own beloved temple, he would prefer to go to a little church or a little hall, and to speak to the forgotten people in the hopes of encouraging and inspiring them and filling them with a hopeful glow, rather than speak to the rich and comfortable. His dearest hope, is one of the few who are close to him, told me, is that no one shall come into his life without being benefited, that he does not say this publicly, nor does it for a moment believe that such a hope could be fully realized, but it is very dear to his heart, and no man spurred by such a hope, and thus bending all his thoughts toward the poor and hard-working, the unsuccessful, is in a way to win honor from the scribes, for we have scribes now that are quite as much when they were classed with the Pharisees. And it is not the first time in the world history that scribes have failed to give their recognition to one whose work is not among the great and wealthy, that Conwell himself has seldom taken any part whatever in politics except as good citizen standing for good government, that as he expresses it he has never held any political office except for he was once on a school committee, and he also does not identify himself with the so-called movements that from time to time catch public attention, but aims only to be consistently at the quiet betterment of mankind, may be mentioned as additional reasons why his name and fame have not been steadily blazoned. He knows and will admit that he works hard and all of his life has worked hard. Things keep turning my ways because I am on the job as he whimsically expressed it one day, but that is about all so it seems to him, and he sincerely believes that his life in itself has been without interest, that it has been an essentially commonplace life with nothing of the interesting or eventful to tell. So frankly surprised that there was even a desire to write about him, he really has no idea of how fascinating are the things that he has done. His entire life has been of positive interest from the variety of things accomplished and the unexpectedness of which he has accomplished them. Never for example was there such an organizer. In fact organization and leadership have always been as the breath of life to him. As a youth he organized debating societies, and before the war a local military company. While on Garrison duty in the Civil War he organized what was believed to have been the first free school for colored children in the South. One day Minneapolis happened to be spoken of and Conwell happened to remember that he organized when he was a lawyer in that city what would become the first YMCA branch there and he even started a newspaper and it was a natural that the organizing instinct as the years advanced should lead him to greater and greater things such as his church with the numerous association form within itself therefore his influence in the university the organizing of the university being itself an achievement of positive romance a life without interest why when I happen to ask one day how many presidents he had known since Lincoln he replied quite casually that he had written the lives of most of them in their own homes and by this he meant either personally or in collaboration with the American biographer Abbott the many sideness of Conwell is one of the things that is always fascinating after you have got the feeling that he is peculiarly a man of today lecturing on today's possibilities to the people of today you happen once again some fact that he has attracted the attention of the London times through a lecture on Italian history at Cambridge in England or that on the evening of the day on which he was admitted to practice in the Supreme Court of the United States he gave a lecture in Washington on the curriculum of the prophets in ancient Israel the man's life is a succession of delightful surprises an odd trait of his character is his love for fire he could have easily been a veritable fire worshiper instead of an orthodox Christian he has always loved to blaze and he says reminiscently for there is no single thing he was punished so much for as a child as building bonfires and after securing possession as he did in the middle age of a house where he was born and of the great acreage around he had most of the enjoyable times of his life tearing down old buildings that needed to be destroyed and heaping up fallen trees and rubbish and piling in great heaps of wood and setting the great piles of blaze you see it is one of those secrets of his strength he has never lost the capacity for fiery enthusiasm always to in these later years he is showing his strength and enthusiasm in a positively noble way he has for years been a keen sufferer from rheumatism and neuritis but he is has never permitted it to interfere with his work or plans he makes little of his suffering and when he slowly makes his way bent and twisted downstairs he does not want to be noticed I'm all right he will say if anyone offers to help and at such a time comes his nearest approach to impatience he wants his suffering ignored strength has always been to him so precious a belonging he will not relinquish it while he lives I'm all right and he makes himself believe that he's all right even though the pain becomes so severe as to demand massage and he will still even when suffering talk calmly or write his letters or attend to whatever matters come before him it is the Spartan boy hiding the pain from the knowing fox and he has never let pain interfere with his presence on the pulpit or the platform he has once in a while gone to a meeting on crutches and then by the force of will be inspired by what he is about to do stood there before his audience and congregation a man full of strength and fire and life end of part nine part ten of acres of diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain acres of diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part ten seven how a university was founded the story of the foundation and rise of temple university is an extraordinary story it is not only extraordinary but inspiring it is not only inspiring but full of romance for the university came out of nothing nothing but the need of a young man and the fact that he told the need to one who throughout his life felt the impulse to help anyone in need and has always obeyed the impulse I asked Dr. Conwell at his home in the Berkshires to tell me himself just how the university began and he said it began because it was needed and succeeded of the loyal work of the teachers and when I ask for details he was silent for a while looking off into the brooding twilight as it lie over the waters and the trees and the hills and then he said it was all so simple it came about so naturally one evening after a service a young man of the congregation came to me and I saw that he was disturbed about something I had him sit down by me and knew that in the few moments he would tell me what was troubling him Dr. Conwell he said abruptly I earn but little money and I see no immediate chance of earning more I have to support not only myself but my mother it leaves me nothing at all yet my longing is to be a minister it is my one ambition in life is there anything that I can do any man I said to him with the proper determination and ambition can study sufficiently at night to win his desire I have tried to think so said he but I have not been able to see anything clearly I want to study and I am ready to give every spare minute to it but I don't know how to get at it I thought a few minutes and I looked at him he was strong in his desire and in his ambition to fulfill it strong enough physically and mentally for work of the body and of the mind and he needed something more than generalizations of sympathy come to me one evening a week and I will begin teaching you myself I said and at least you will in that way make a beginning and I named the evening his face brightened and he eagerly said that he would come and left me but in a little while he came hurrying back and said may I bring a friend with me he said I told him to bring as many as he wanted to for more than one would be an advantage and when the evening came there were six friends with him and that first evening I began to teach them the foundations of Latin he stopped as if the story were over he was looking out thoughtfully over the waning light and I knew that his mind was busy in those days of the beginning of the institution he so loves and whose continued success means so much to him in a little while he went on that was the beginning of it and there was little more to tell by the third evening the number of pupils had increased to forty others joined in helping me and a room was higher than a little house than a second house from a few students and teachers we became a college after a while our buildings went up on broad street alongside the temple church and after another while we became a university from the first our aim I notice how quickly it had become our instead of my our aim was to give an education to those who were unable to get it through the usual channels and so that was really all there was to it that was typical of Russell Conwell to tell a brevity of what he has done to point out the beginnings of something and quite omit to elaborate as to the results and that when we come to know him as precisely what he means you to understand that it is the beginning of anything that is important and that if the thing is but earnestly begun and you set it on the right way it may just as easily develop the big results as little results but his story was very far from being all there was to it he'd quite omitted to state the extraordinary fact that beginning with those seven pupils coming to his library in the evening in 1884 the temple university has numbered up to the commencement time in 1950 88,821 students nearly 100,000 students and in the lifetime of the founder really the magnitude of such a work cannot be exaggerated nor the vast importance of it when it is considered that most of those 88,000 students would not have received their education had it not been for temple university and it all came from the instant response of Russell Conwell to the immediate need presented by a young man without money and there was something else I wanted to say said Dr Conwell unexpectedly I want to say more fully than a mere casual word how nobly the work was taken up by volunteer helpers professors from the University of Pennsylvania and teachers from the public schools and other local institutions gave freely of what time they could until the new venture was firmly on its way I honor those who came so devotedly to help and it should be remembered that in those early days the need was even greater than it would now appear for there were no night schools or manual training schools since then the city of Philadelphia has gone into such work and as fast as it is taken up certain branches the temple university has put its energy into the branches just higher and there seems no lessening of the need for it he added ponderingly no there is certainly no lessing of the need for it the figures of the annual catalog would alone show that as early as 1887 just three years after the beginning the temple college as it was for the first time called issued its first catalog which set forth the stirring words that the intent of its foundation was to provide such instruction as shall best be adopted to the higher education of those who are compelled to labor at their trade while engaged in study cultivated taste for higher education and the most useful branches of learning awaken the character of young laboring men and women a determined ambition to be useful to their fellow man the college the university as it is in time came to be early broadened its scope but it was from the first continued to aim at the needs of those unable to secure education without such hope as through its methods it affords was chartered in 1888 at which time its numbers reached almost 600 and it has ever had such a constant flood of applicants it is demonstrated as dr. Conwell put it that those who work for a living have time for study and he thought he does not himself add this has given the opportunity he feels a special pride to the features by which lectures and resuscitations are held at practically any hour which best suits the convenience of the students if any 10 students join in a request for any hour from nine in the morning until 10 at night a class is arranged for them to meet that request this involves the necessity for a much larger number of professors and teachers than otherwise would be necessary but it is deemed a slight consideration in comparison with the immense good done by the meeting of the need of workers also president Conwell for of course he is the president of the university is proud of the fact that the privilege of graduation depends entirely upon knowledge gained that graduation does not depend on having listened to any set number of lectures or upon having attended for so many terms or years if a student can do four years work in two years or three years he is encouraged to do it if he cannot do it in four he can have no diploma obviously there is no place at temple university for students who care for only a few years of leisured ease it is a place for workers and not of all of those who merely wish to be able to boast that they attended a university the students have come largely from among the railroad clerk bank clerks bookkeepers teachers preachers mechanics salesmen drug clerks city and united states government employees widows nurses housekeepers breakman firemen engineers motormen conductors and shophands it was when the college became strong enough and sufficiently advanced in scholarship and standing and brought enough in scope to win the name of university that this title was officially granted to it by the state of pennsylvania in 1907 and now its educational plan includes three distinct school systems first it offers a high school education to the student who has to quit school after leaving the grammar school second it offers a full college education with the branches taught at long established high-grade colleges to the student who has quit on leaving the high school third it offers further scientific or professional education to the college graduate who must go to work immediately on quitting college but who wishes to take up some of the course such as law medicine or engineering out of last year's enrollment of 3654 it is interesting to notice that the law claimed 141 theology 182 medicine pharmacy and dentistry combined 357 civil engineering 37 also that the teacher's college with normal courses on such subjects as household arts and science kindergarten work and physical education took 174 and still more interesting in a way to see that 269 students were enrolled for the technical and vocational courses such as cooking and dress making millenry manual crafts school gardening and storytelling there were 511 in high school work in 243 in elementary education there were 79 studying music and 68 studying to be trained nurses there were 606 in the college of liberal arts and sciences and the department of commercial education there were 987 for it is a university that offers both scholarship and practicality temple university is not in the least a charitable institution its fees are low and its hours are for the convenience of the students themselves but it is a place of absolute independence it is indeed a place of far greater independence so one of the professors pointed out then are the great universities which receive millions and millions of money in private gifts and endowment temple university in its early years was solely in need of money and often there were thrills of expectancy when some man of mighty wealth seemed on the point of giving but not a single one ever did and now the temple likes to feel that it is glad of it the temple to quote in its own words is an institution for strong men and women who can labor with both mind and body and the management is proud to be able to say that although great numbers have come from distant places not one of the many thousands ever failed to find an opportunity to support himself even in the early days when money was needed for the necessary buildings the buildings of which conwell drained and left the secondary doors in his church the university college as it was then called at one devotion from those who knew that it was a place where neither time nor money was wasted and where idleness was a crime and in the donations for the work were many such items as four hundred dollars from factory workers who gave fifty cents each or two thousand dollars from policemen who gave a dollar each within two to three years past the state of pennsylvania has begun giving in a large sum annually and this state aid is public recognition of the temple university as an institute of high public value the state money invested in the brains and hearts of the ambitious so eager is dr conwell to place the opportunity of education before everyone that even his servants must go to school he is not one of those who can see needs that are far away but not those that are right at home his belief in education and in the highest attainable education is profound and it is not only on account of his abstract pleasure and value of education but its power of increasing the actual earning power and thus making a worker of more value to both himself and the community many a man and women while continuing to work for some firmer factory has taken temple technical courses and thus fitted himself or herself for the advanced position with the same employer the temple has known of many such who have won prominent advancement and it knows of teachers while continuing to teach have fitted themselves through the temple courses for professorships and it knows of many a case of the rise of the temple student that reads like an arabian knights fancy of advance from bookkeeper to editor from office boy to bank president from kitchen made to school principal from street cleaner to mayor the temple university helps them that helps themselves president conwell told me personally of one case that especially interest him because it seemed to exhibit in a special degree the temple possibilities and it particularly interest me because it also showed in high degree the methods and personalities of dr conwell himself one day a young woman came to him and said she had earned only three dollars a week and she desired very much to make more can you tell me how to do it she said he liked her ambition and her directness but there was something he felt doubtful about and that was that she looked too expensive for three dollars a week now dr conwell is a man you would never suspect of giving a thought to the hat of a man or woman but as a matter of fact there is very little that he does not see but though that hat seemed too expensive for three dollars a week dr conwell is not a man who makes snap judgments harshly and in particular he would be the last man to turn away hastily one who sought him out for help he never felt nor could possibly urge upon anyone contentment with the humble lot he stands for advancement he has no sympathy with that dictum of the smug that has come to us from a nation tight bound for centuries by its gentry and aristocracy about being contented with the position in which God has placed you for he points out that the bible itself holds up advancement and success as things desirable and as the young woman before him it developed through discreet inquiry filed by frank discussion of her case that she had made the expensive looking hat herself whereupon not only did all of the doubtfulness and hesitation vanish but he saw at once that she could better herself he knew that a woman who could make a hat like that herself could make hats for other people and so go into millinery as a business he advised oh if only I could she exclaimed but I know that I don't know enough take the millinery course in temple university he responded she had not even heard of such a course and when he went on to explain that she could take it and at the same time continue at her present work until the course was concluded she was positively ecstatic it was also unexpected this opening of the view of a new and broader life she was an unusual woman concluded dr conwell and she worked with enthusiasm and tirelessness she graduated went to an upstate city that seemed to offer a good field opened a millinery establishment there and with her own name above the door became prestigious was only a few years ago and recently I had a letter from her telling me last year she netted a clear profit of three thousand six hundred dollars I remember a man himself of distinguished position saying of dr conwell it was difficult to speak in tempered language of what he has achieved and that just expresses it the temptation is to consistently use superlatives for superlatives fit and of course he has succeeded for himself and succeeded marbly in his rise from the rocky hill farm but he has done so vastly more than inspiring such hosts of others to succeed a dreamer of dreams a seer of visions and what realizations have come and it interested me profoundly not long ago when dr conwell talking of the university unexpectedly remarked that he would like to see such institutions scattered throughout every state in the union he carried on its light expense to the students and at ours to suit all sorts of working men and women he added after a pause and then abruptly I should like to see the possibility of higher education offered to everyone in the united states who works for a living there was something superb in this very imagining of such a nationwide system but I did not ask whether or not he had planned any details of such an effort I knew that thus far it might only be one of his dreams but I also knew that his dreams had a way of becoming realities I had a fleeting glimpse of his soaring vision it was amazing to find a man of more than three score and ten thus dreaming of more worlds to conquer and I thought what could the world have accomplished if methuselah had been a conwell or far better what wonders what could have been accomplished if conwell could have been a methuselah he has all his life been a great traveler he is a man who sees vividly and who can describe vividly yet often his letters even from places of the most profound interest are mostly concerned with affairs back home it is not that he does not feel and feel intensely the interest of what he is visiting but that his tremendous earnestness keeps him always concerned about his work at home there could be no stronger example than what I noticed in the letter he wrote from Jerusalem I am in Jerusalem and here at Gethsemane and at the tomb of Christ reading thus far one expects that any man and especially a minister is sure to say something regarding the associations of the place and the effect of those associations on his mind but conwell is always the man who is different and here at Gethsemane and at the tomb of Christ I pray especially for the temple university that is conwellian that he founded a hospital a work in itself great enough for even a great life but it is among the most striking incidents of his career and it came about through perfect naturalness for he came to know through his pastoral work and through his growing acquaintance with the needs of the city that there was a vast amount of suffering and wretchedness and anguish because of the inability of the existing hospitals to care for all who needed care there was so much sickness and suffering to be alleviated there were so many deaths that could be prevented so he decided to start another hospital and like everything with him the beginning was small that cannot too strongly be set down as a way of this phenomenally successful organizer most men would have to wait and to look big beginning could be made and so would most likely never make a beginning at all but conwell's way is to dream of the future business but be ready to begin it once no matter how small or insignificant the beginning may seem to others two rented rooms one nurse one patient that was the humble beginning in 1891 of what has developed into the great samaritan hospital in a year there was an entire house fitted up with wards and operating room now it occupies several buildings including and joining the first one and a great new structure is planned but even if it is it has 170 beds is fitted with all modern hospital appliances and has a large staff of physicians and the number of surgical operations performed there is very large it is open to sufferers of any race or creed and the poor are never refused admission the rule being the treatment is free for those who cannot pay but that such as can afford it shall pay according to their needs and the hospital has a kindly feature that endears it to patients and their relatives alike and that is that by dr conwell's personal order that it is not only the usual weekday hours for visiting but also one evening a week and one sunday afternoon for otherwise as he says many would be unable to come as they could not get away from their work little over eight years ago another hospital was taken in charge the garrison not founded by conwell this one but acquired and promptly expanded in its usefulness both the samaritan and the garrison are part of temple university the samaritan hospital has treated since its foundation up to the middle of 1915 29 301 patients the garrison and its shorter life 5923 including dispensary cases as well as house patients the two hospitals alone under the headship of president conwell have handled over 400 000 cases how conwell can possibly meet the multi-fairest designs upon his time is in itself a miracle he is the head of a great church he is the head of university he is the head of the hospitals he is the head of everything with which he is associated and he is not only not only but actively the head end of part 10 part 11 of acres of diamonds this libervox recording is in the public domain acres of diamonds by wrestle h conwell part 11 eight his splendid efficiency conwell has a few strong and efficient executive helpers who have long been associated with him men and women who know his ideas and ideals were devoted to him and who do their utmost to relieve him and of course there is very much that thus is done for him but even as it is he is so overshadowing a man there is really no other word that all work with him look to him for advice and guidance the professors and the students the doctors and the nurses the church officers the sunday school teachers the members of his congregation and he has never been too busy to see anyone who really wishes to see him he can attend to a vast intricacy of detail and answer myriad personal questions and doubts and keep the great institutions splendidly going by thorough systemization of time and by watching every minute he has several secretaries for special work besides his private secretary his correspondence is very great often he dictates to his secretary as he travels on the train even in the few days for which he can run back to the berkshires work is awaiting for him work follows him and after knowing of this one is positively amazed that he is able to give to his countrywide lectures the time and traveling that they inexorably demand only a man of immense strength of the greatest stamina a variable superman could possibly do it and at time one quite forgets noticing the multiplicity of his occupations and that he prepares two sermons and two talks on sunday here is his usual sunday schedule when at home he rises at seven and studies until breakfast which at eight thirty then he studies until nine forty five when he leads a men's meeting at which he is likely also to play the organ and lead the singing at ten thirty is the principal's church service at which he preaches and at the clothes of which he shakes hands with hundreds he dines at one after which he takes fifteen minutes rest and then reads and at three o'clock he addresses in a talk that is like another sermon a large class of men not the same men as the morning he is also sure to look in the regular session of the sunday school home again where he studies and reads until supper time at seven thirty is the evening service at which he again preaches and after which he shakes hand of several hundred more and talks personally in his study with any who are in need to talk with him he is usually home by ten thirty i spoke of it one evening of having been a strenuous day and he responded with a cheerfully whimsical smile three sermons and shook hands with nine hundred that evening as the service close he had said to the congregation i shall be here for an hour we always have a pleasant time together after service if you're acquainted with me come up and shake hands if you're strangers just a slight of a pauses come up and let us make an acquaintance that will last for eternity i remember how simply and easily this was said in his clear deep voice and how impressive and important it seemed and with what unexpectedness it came come and make an acquaintance that will last for eternity and there was a serenity about his way of saying this which would make strangers think just as he meant them to think he had nothing whatever to do but to talk with them even his own congregation have most of them little conception of how busy a man he is and how precious is his time one evening last june to take an evening of which i happened to know he got home from a journey of two hundred miles at six o'clock and after dinner and a slight rest went to the church prayer meeting which he led in his usual vigorous way at such meetings playing the organ and leading the singing as well as praying and talking and after the prayer meeting he went to two dinners in succession both of them important dinners in connection with the close of the university year and at both dinners he spoke at the second dinner he was notified of the sudden illness of a member of his congregation and instantly hurried to the man's home and thence to the hospital to which he had been removed and there he remained at the man's bedside and in consultation with the positions until one in the morning next morning he was up at seven and again at work this one thing i do is his private maxim of efficiency and a literalist might point out that he does not one thing only but a thousand things not getting conwell's meaning which is whatever the thing may be which he is doing he lets himself think of nothing else until it is done dr conwell has a profound love for the country and particularly the country of his own youth he loves the wind that comes sweeping over the hills he loves the wide stretching views from the heights and the forest intimacies of the nestled nooks he loves the rippling streams he loves the wildflowers that nestle in seclusion and unexpectedly paint some mountain meadow with the light he loves the very touch of the earth he loves the great bear rocks he writes verses at times at least he has written lines for a few old tunes and it is interested me greatly to chance upon some lines of that picture heaven in terms of the Berkshires the wide stretching valleys in colors so fade less where trees are all deathless and flowers are bloom that is heaven in the eyes of the new england hill man not golden pavement and ivory palaces but valleys and trees and flowers and a wide sweep of the open few things please him more than to go for example blackberry and he has a knack of never scratching his face or fingers when doing so and he finds blackbearing wherever he goes whether he goes alone or with friends an extraordinary good time for planning something he wishes to do or working out the thought of a sermon and fishing is even better for in fishing he finds immense recreation and restfulness and at the time a further opportunity to think and plan as a small boy he wished that he could throw a dam across the trout brook that runs near the little conwell home and as he never gives up he finally realized that ambition although it was after half a century and now he has a big pond three quarters of a mile long by half a mile wide lying in front of the house down a slope from it a pond stocked with splendid pickerel he likes to float about restfully on the pond thinking or fishing or both and on that pond he showed me how to catch pickerel even under the blaze of sunlight he is a trout fisher also for it is a trout stream that feeds this pond and goes dashing away from it through the wilderness and for miles adjoining his place a fishing club of wealthy men bought up the rights to this trout stream and they approached him with a liberal offer but he declined it I remembered what good times I had when I was a boy fishing up and down the stream and I couldn't think of keeping my boys of the pleasant day from such a pleasure so they may still come down and fish for trout here as he walked one day besides the brook he suddenly said did you ever notice that every brook has its own song I should know the song of this brook anywhere it would seem as if he loved his rugged native country because it is rugged even more than because it is native himself so rugged so hardy so endearing the strength of the hills is his also always in his very appearance you see something of the ruggedness of hills a ruggedness a sincerity a plainness that mark alike his character in his books and always one realizes the strength of the man even when his voice as it usually is is low and one increasingly realizes the strength when on the lecture platformer in the pulpit or in conversation he flashes vividly into fire a big boned man he is a sturdy frame tall man with broad shoulders and strong hands his hair is a deep chestnut brown that at first seems black in his early manhood he was superb in looks as his pictures show but anxiety and the work and the constant flight of years with physical pain have settled into his face into lines of sadness and almost of severity which instantly vanishes when he speaks his face is illuminated by marvelous eyes he is a lonely man the wife of his early years died long long ago before success had come and she was deeply mourned for she had loyally helped him through a time which held much struggle and hardship he married again but this wife was his loyal helpmate for many years in a time of special stress when a defalsification of sixty five thousand dollars threatened to crush temple college just when it was getting on his feet for both temple church and temple college had in those early days buoyantly assumed heavy indebtedness he raised every dollar he could by selling or mortgaging his own possessions and in this his wife as he lovingly remembers most cordially stood behind him although she knew that if anything should happen to him the financial sacrifice would leave her penniless she died after years of companionship his children married and made homes of their own he is a lonely man yet it is not unhappy for the tremendous demands of his tremendous work leave him little time for sadness or retrospect at times the realization comes that he is getting old that friends and comrades have been passing away leaving him an old man with younger friends and helpers but such realization only makes him work with an earnestness still more intense knowing that the night cometh when no man shall work deeply religious though he is he does not force religion into conversation on ordinary subjects or upon people who may not be interested in it with him it is action and good works with faith and belief that count except when talk is the natural of affitting the necessary thing when addressing either one individual or thousands he speaks with superb effectiveness his sermons are it may almost literally be said parable after parable although he himself would be the last man to say this for it would sound as if he claimed to model after the greatest of all examples his own way of putting it and he uses stories frequently because people are more impressed by illustrations than by argument another where whether in the pulpit or out of it is his simple and home like human and unaffected if he happens to see someone in the congregation to which he speaks he may just leave the pulpit and walk down the aisle while the choir is singing and quietly say a few words and return in the early days of his ministry if he heard of a poor family and immediate need of food he would be quite likely to gather a basket of provisions and go personally and offer this assistance and such other as he might find necessary when he reached the place as he became known he ceased from this direct and open method of charity for he knew that impulsiveness would be taken for intentional display but he has never ceased to be ready to help on the instant that he knows help is needed delay and lengthy investigation are avoided by him when he can be certain that something immediate is required and the extent of his quiet charity is amazing with no family for which to save money and no care to put away money for himself he thinks only of money as an instrument for helpfulness I never heard a friend criticize him except for two great open handedness I was strongly impressed after coming to know him that he possessed many of the qualities that made for the success of the old time district leaders of New York City and I mentioned this to him and at once he responded that he had himself met big Tim the longtime leader of the Sullivan's and I told him at his house big Tim having gone to Philadelphia to aid some henchmen in trouble and having promptly sought the aid of Dr. Conwell and it was characteristic of Conwell that he saw what so many never saw the most striking characteristic for that Tammany leader for big Tim's Sullivan was so kind hearted Conwell appreciated the man's political unscrupulousness as well as he did his enemies but he saw also what made this underlying power his kind heartedness except that Sullivan could be supremely unscrupulous and that Conwell supremely scrupulous there were marked similarities in these masters over men and Conwell possesses a Sullivan possessed a wonderful memory for faces and names naturally Russell Conwell stands steadily and strongly for good citizenship but he never talks boastful Americanism he seldomly speaks in so many words of either Americanism or good citizenship but he consistently and silently keeps the American flag as the symbol of good citizenship before his people an American flag is prominent in his church and an American flag is seen in his home a beautiful American flag is up in his Berkshire place and surmounts a lofty tower where when he is a boy there stood a mighty tree at the top of which was an eagle's nest which was given the name for the home for he terms it the eagle's nest remembering a long story that I had read of his climbing to the top of that tree I thought that it was well nigh an impossible feat and securing the nest by great perseverance and daring I ask him if the story were a true one oh I've heard something about it somebody said something watched me or something of the kind but I don't remember anything about it myself any friend of his was sure to say something after a while about his determination and insistence ongoing ahead with anything on which he has really set his heart one of the very important things on which he insisted in spite of very great opposition and especially in opposition from the other church of his denominations where this was a many years ago when there was much more narrowness in church and sex than there is at present was the regard to doing away with close communion he determined on an open communion and his way of putting it once decided upon was my friends it is not for me to invite you to the table of the Lord the table of the Lord is open if you feel that you could come to the table it is open to you and this is the form which he still uses for he not only never gives up but so his friends say he never forgets a thing upon which he has once decided and at times long after they suppose the matter has been entirely forgotten they suddenly find dr. Conwell bringing his original purpose to pass when I was told of this I remembered the Pickerel pond in the Berkshires if he really is set upon doing anything little or big adverse criticism does not disturb his serenity some years ago he began wearing a large diamond whose sides attracted much criticism and caustic comment he never said a word in defense he just kept wearing the diamond one day however after some years he took it off and people said he has listened to the criticism at last he smiled reminiscently as he told me about this and said a dear old deacon of my congregation gave me that diamond and I did not have the heart to hurt his feelings by refusing it it really bothered me to wear such a glaring big thing but because I did not want to hurt the old deacons feelings I kept wearing it until he was dead then I stopped wearing it the ambition of Russell Conwell is to continue working and working until the very last moment of his life in work he forgets the sadness his loneliness his age and he has said to me one day I will die in harness end of part 11 part 12 of acres of diamonds this LibriVox recording is in the public domain acres of diamonds by Russell H. Conwell part 12 nine the story of acres of diamonds considering everything the most remarkable thing in Russell Conwell's remarkable life is his lecture acres of diamonds that is the lecture itself the number of times he has delivered it what a source of inspiration it has been to the myriads the money that has been made and is making and still more the purpose for which he directs the money in the circumstances surrounding acres of diamonds in its tremendous success in the attitude of mine revealed by the lecture itself and by what Dr. Conwell does with it it is illuminative of his character his aims his ability the lecture is vibrant with his energy it flashes with his hopefulness it is his enthusiasm it is packed full of his intensity it stands for the possibilities of success in everyone he has delivered it over five thousand times the demand for it never diminishes the success grows nevertheless there is a time in Russell Conwell's youth of which it was a pain for him to think he told me of it one evening and his voice sank lower and lower as he went far back into the past it was of his days at Yale that he spoke for they were days of suffering for he had not money for Yale and in working for more he endeared bitter humiliation it was not that the work was hard for Russell Conwell has always been ready for hard work it was not that there were privations and difficulties for he has always found difficulties only things to overcome and endeared privations with cheerful fortitude but it was the humiliations that he met the personal humiliations that after more than half a century make him suffer in remembering yet one of those humiliations came a marvelous result I determined he says that whatever I could do to make the way easier at college for other young men working their way I would do and so many years ago he began to devote every dollar he made from acres of diamonds to this definite purpose he has what may be termed a waiting list on that list are very few cases he has looked into personally infinitely busy man that he is he cannot do extensive personal investigation a large proportion of his names come to him from college presidents who know of students in their own college in need of such a helping hand every night he said when I ask him to tell me about it when my lecture is over and the check is in my hand I sit down in my room in the hotel what a lonely picture too I sit down in my room in the hotel and subtract from the total sum received my actual expenses for that place and make out a check for the difference and send it to some young man on my list and I always send with the check a letter of advice and helpfulness expressing my hope that it will come to be of some service to him and telling him that he is to feel under no obligation except to his lord I feel strongly and I try to make every young man feel that there must be no sense of obligation to me personally and I tell them that I am hoping to leave behind me man who will do more work than I have done don't think that I put in too much advice he added with a smile for I only try to let them know that a friend is trying to help them his face lighted as he spoke there is such a fascination in it he exclaimed it's just like a gamble and as soon as I have sent the letter and crossed a name off my list I am aiming for the next one and after a pause he added I do not attempt to send any young man enough for all of his expenses but I want to save them from bitterness and each check will help and to he is concluded naively in the vernacular I don't want them to lie down on me he told me that he made it clear that he did not wish to get returns or reports from this branch of his life work for it would take a great deal of time and watching and thinking and in reading and writing of letters but it is mainly he went on that I do not wish to hold over their heads a sense of obligation when I suggested that this was surely an example of bread cast upon the waters that could not return he was silent for a little and then said thoughtfully as one gets on in years there is satisfaction in doing a thing for the sake of doing it the bread returns in the sense of effort made on a recent trip through minnesota he was positively upset so his secretary told me though being recognized on a train by a young man who he had helped through acres of diamonds and who finding that this was really dr. Conwell eagerly brought his wife to join him in the most fervent thanks for his assistance both the husband and wife were so emotionally overcome that it quite overcame dr. Conwell himself the lecture to quote the noble words of dr. Conwell himself is designed to help every person of either sex who cherishes the high resolve of sustaining a career of usefulness and honor it is the lecture of helpfulness and it is a lecture when given with Conwell's voice and face and manner that is full of fascination and yet it is so simple it is packed full of inspiration of suggestion of aid he alters it to meet the local circumstances of the thousands of different places in which he delivers it but the base remains the same and even those to whom it is an old story will go and hear it time after time it amuses him to say that he knows individuals who have listened to it twenty times he begins with a story told to Conwell by an old Arab as the two journey toward Nineveh and as to listen you hear the actual voices and you see the sands of the deserts and the waving palms the lecture's voice is so easy so effortless it seems so ordinary in matter of fact yet the entire scene is instantly vital and alive instantly the man in his audience under a sort of spell eager to listen ready to be married or grave he has the faculty of control the vital quality that makes him the orator the same people who will go and hear this lecture over and over and that is the kind of tribute that Conwell likes I recently heard him deliberate in his own church where it would naturally be thought to be an old story and were presumably only a few of the faithful would go but it was quite clear that all of his church are the faithful for it was a large audience that came to listen to him hardly a seat in the great auditorium was vacant and it should be added that although it was in his own church it was not a free lecture where a thong might be expected but each one paid a liberal sum for a seat and having paid of admission is always a practical test of the sincerity of desire to hear and the people were swept along by the current as if the lecturer and lecture were of novel interest the lecture itself is good to read but it is only when it is illuminated by Conwell's vivid personality that one understands how it influences in the actual delivery on that particular evening he decided to give the lecture in the same form as when it was first delivered many years ago without any of the alterations that have come with time and changing localities and as he went on with the audience rippling and bubbling with laughter as usual he never doubt that he was giving it as he had given it in the years before and yet so up to date and alive must be necessarily be in spite of the definite effort to set himself back every once in a while he was coming out with illustrations from such distinctively recent things as the automobile the last time I heard him was the five thousand one hundred and twenty fourth time for the lecture doesn't it seem incredible five thousand one hundred twenty four times I noticed that he was to deliver it in a little out of the way place difficult for any considerable number to get to and I wonder just how much of an audience would gather and how they would be impressed so I went over from there I was a few miles away the road was dark and I pictured a small audience but when I got there I found the church building in which the he was to deliver the lecture had a seating capacity of eight hundred and thirty and that precisely eight hundred and thirty were already seated there and that there was a fringe of others standing behind many had come from miles away yet the lecture had scarcely if at all been advertised and people said to one another aren't you going to hear Dr. Conwell and the word had thus been passed along I remember how fascinating it was to watch that audience for they responded so keenly and with such heartfelt pleasure throughout the entire lecture and not only were they immensely pleased and amused and interested and to achieve that is at a crossroads church was in itself a triumph to be proud of but they knew that every listener was given an impulse toward doing something for himself and for others and then at least some of them the impulse would materialize into acts over and over one realize what a power such a man wields and what an unselfishness for far on as years as he is and suffering pain he does not chop down his lecture to a definite length he does not talk for just an hour or go on grudgingly for an hour and a half he sees that the people are fascinated and inspired and he forgets pain nor is time forgets that the night is late and that he has a long journey to go to get home he keeps on generously for two hours and everyone there wishes it were for always he talks with ease and sympathy there are generally composure humor simple and a homely jests yet never does the audience forget that he is every moment in tremendous earnest they bubble with responsive laughter or a silent and riveted attention a stir can be seen to sweep over the audience of earnestness or surprise or amusement or resolve when he is grave and sober or for vid the people feel that he is himself a for vidley earnest man when he is telling something humorous there is on his part an almost repressed chuckle a genial appreciation of the fun of it and not in the least as if you were laughing in his own humor but as if he and his hearers were laughing together at something which they were all humorously cognizant myriad successes in life have come through the direct inspiration of this single lecture for one hears of so many that there must be vastly more that are never told a few of the most recent were told to me by Dr. Conwell himself one being of a farmer's boy who walked along a great distance to hear him on the way home so the boy now a man has written him he thought over and over of what he could do to advance himself and before he reached home he learned that a teacher was wanted in a certain country school he knew that he did not know enough to teach but was sure he could learn so we bravely asked for the place and something in his earnestness made him win a temporary appointment there upon he worked and studied so hard and so devoutly while he daily taught that within a few months he was regularly employed there and now says Conwell abruptly with his characteristic skimming over the intermediate details between the important beginning of a thing and the satisfactory end and now that young man is one of our college presidents and very recently a lady came to Dr. Conwell the wife of an exceptionally prominent man who was earning a large salary and she told him that her husband was so unselfishly generous with money that they often were almost in straits and she said that they had bought a little farm on a country place paying only a few hundred dollars for it and that she said to herself laughingly after hearing the lectures there are no acres of diamonds in this place but she went on to tell him that he had found a spring of exceptionally fine water there although in buying they had scarcely known of the spring at all and she had been so inspired by Conwell that she had the water analyzed and finding that it was remarkably pure had began to have it bottled and sold under a trade name a special spring water she is making money and she also sells pure ice from the pool cut in winter time all because of acres of diamonds several million dollars in all have been received by brussel Conwell as his proceeds from this single lecture such a fact is almost staggering and it is more staggering to realize what good is done in the world by this man who does not earn for himself but uses the money in immediate helpfulness and one can neither think nor write with moderation when it is further realized that far more good than can be done directly with money he does by uplifting and inspiring with his lecture always his heart is with the weary and the heavy laden always he stands for self-bitterment last year 1914 he and his work were given unique recognition for it was known by his friends that this particular lecture was approaching its five thousandth delivery and they planned a celebration of such an event in the history of the most popular lecture in the world dr. Conwell agreed to deliver it in the academy of music in philadelphia and the building was packed and the street outside were thonged the proceeds from all sources for that five thousand lecture were over nine thousand dollars the hold which Conwell has gained on the affections and respect of his home city was seen not only in the thousands who strove to hear him but in the prominent men who served on the local committee in charge of the celebration there was a national committee to and a nationwide love that he is one the nationwide appreciation of what he has done and is still doing was shown by the fact that among the names of the notables on this committee were those of nine governors of states the governor of pennsylvania was himself present to do russia conwell honor and he gave him a key emblematic of the freedom of the state the freedom of the state yes this man well over seventy has won it the freedom of the state the freedom of the nation for this man of helpfulness this marvelous exponent of the gospel of success has worked marvel for the freedom the betterment the liberation the advancement of the individual end of part twelve part thirteen of acres of diamonds this libra vox recording is in the public domain acres of diamonds by russell h conwell part thirteen fifty years on the lecture platform by russell h conwell an autobiography what an absurd request if all of the conditions were favorable the story of my public life could not be made interesting it does not seem possible that any will care to read so plain and uneventful a tale i see nothing in it for boasting nor much that could be helpful then i never saved a scrap of paper intentionally concerning my work to which i could refer not a book not a sermon not a lecture not a newspaper notice or account not a magazine article not one of the kind biographies written from time to time by noble friends have i ever kept as a souvenir although some of them may be in my library i have ever felt that the writers concerning my life were too generous and that my own work was too hastily done hence i have nothing upon which to base an autobiographical account except the recollections of which come to an overburdened mind my general view of half a century on the lecture platforms brings me to this precious and beautiful memories and fills my soul with devout gratitude for the blessings and kindness which have been given to me so far beyond my desserts so much more success has come to my hands than i ever expected so much more of good i have found than even youths while the streams included so much more effective have i been at my weakest endeavors than i ever planned or hoped that a biography written truthfully would be mostly an account of what men and women have done for me i have lived to see accomplished far more than my highest ambition included i have seen the enterprises i have undertaken rush by me pushed on by a thousand strong hands until they have left me so far behind them the realities are like dreams to me blessings on the loving hearts and noble minds who have been so willing to sacrifice for others good and to think only of what they could do and never of what they should get many of them have ascended into the shining lord and here i am in my age gazing up alone only waiting till the shadows are a little longer grown fifty years i was a young man not yet of age when i delivered my first platform lecture the civil war of 1861 to 65 drew on with all its passions patriotisms horrors and fears and i was studying law at late 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 savior it filled me with odd red and fear and i recoiled from the thought until i determined to fight against it with all my power so i sought for other professions and for decent excuses for being anything but a preacher yet while i was nervous and timid before the class in declination and dreaded to face any of the audience i felt in my soul a strange impulsion toward public speaking for which years made me miserable the war and the public meetings for recruiting soldiers furnished me an outlet for my suppressed sense of duty and my first lecture was on the lessons of history as applied to the campaigns against the confederacy that matchless temperance orator and loving friend john b go introduced me to the little audience in westfield massachusetts in 1862 what a foolish little school boy speech it must have been but mr goes 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 goes advice and sought practice by accepting almost every invitation i received to speak on any kind of subject there were many sad failures and tears but it was a restful compromise with my conscience concerning the ministry and it pleased my friends i addressed picnics sunday schools patriotic meetings funerals anniversaries commencements debates cattle shows and sewing circles without partiality and without price for the first five years the income was all experience then voluntary gifts began to come occasionally in the shape of a jackknife a ham a book and the first cash renumeration was from a farmer's club of 75 cents toward the horse hire it was a curious fact that one member of the club afterward moved to salt lake city and was a member of the committee at the mormon tabernacle in 1862 which when i was a correspondent on a journey around the world employed me to lecture on men of the mountains in the mormon tabernacle at a fee of five hundred dollars while i was gaining practice in the first years of platform work i had the good fortune to have profitable employment as a soldier or as a correspondent or lawyer or as an editor or as a preacher which enabled me to pay my own expenses and it is seldomly in the 50 years that i have ever taken a fee for my personal use in the last 36 years i have dedicated solemnly all of my lecture income to benevolent enterprises if i am antiquated enough for an autobiography perhaps i may be aged enough to avoid the criticism of being an egoist when i state that some years i have delivered one lecture acres of diamonds over 200 times each year at an average income of about $150 for each lecture it was a remarkable good fortune which came to me as a lecturer when mr. james redpath organized the first lecture bureau ever established mr. redpath was the biographer of john brown of harper's fairy renown and as mr. brown had long been a friend of my father's i found employment while a student on vacation in selling that life of john brown that acquaintance with mr. redpath was maintained until mr. redpath's death to general charles h taylor with whom i was employed for a time as a reporter for the boston daily traveler i was indebted for the many acts of self-sacrificing friendship which softened my soul as i recall them he did me the greatest kindness when he suggested my name to mr. redpath as one who could fill in the vacancies in the smaller towns where the great lights could not always be secured what a glorious galaxy of great names that original list of redpath lecturers contained henry ward beecher john b go senator charles sumner theodore tilton wendell phillips mrs. mary a livermore bayard taylor ralph waldo emerson and many of the great preacher's musicians and writers of that remarkable era even dr. holmes john wittier henry w longfellow john lathrop motley george william curtis and general bernside were persuaded to appear one or more times although they refused to receive any pay i cannot forget how ashamed i felt when my name appeared in the shadow of such names and how sure i was that every acquaintance was ridiculing behind my back mr. bayard taylor however wrote me from the tribune office a kind note saying he was glad to see me on the road to great usefulness governor claflin of massachusetts took the time to send me a note of congratulations general benjamin f butler however advised me to stick to the last and be a good lawyer the work of lecturing was always a task and a duty i did not feel now that i ever sought to be an entertainer i am sure i would have been an utter failure but for the feeling that i must preach some gospel truth in my lectures and at least that much toward the ever persistent call of god when i entered the ministry 1879 i had become so associated with the lecture platform in america and england that i could not feel justified in abandoning such a great field of usefulness the experiences of all of our successful lectures are probably nearly alike the way is not always smooth but the hard roads the poor hotels the late trains the cold halls the hot church auditoriums the over kindness of hospitable committees the broken hours of sleep or annoyances one soon forgets and the host of intelligent faces the messages of thanks and the efforts of the earnings on the lives of young college men can never cease the daily joy god bless them all often i have been asked if i did not in 50 years of travel in all sorts of conveyance meet with accidents it is a marvel to me that no such event ever brought me harm in a continuous period over 27 years i delivered about two lectures in every three days yet i did not miss a single engagement sometimes i had to hire a special train but i reached the town on time with only a rare exception and then i was but a few minutes late accidents have preceded and followed me on trains and boats and were sometimes in sight but i was preserved without injury through all the years in the johnstown flood region i saw a bridge go out behind our train i was once on a derelict steamer in the atlantic for 26 days and another time a man was killed in the birth of a sleeper i had left a half hour before often i have felt the train leave the track but no one was killed robbers have several times threatened my life but all came without loss to me god and man have never been patient with me 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 3 000 members for so many years contributed through its membership over sixty thousand dollars a year for the uplift of humanity has made a life of continual surprise while the samaritan hospitals amazing growth and the garrisons hospitals dispensaries have been so continually ministering to the sick and poor and have done such skillful work for the tens of thousands who ask for their help each year that i have been made happy while away lecturing by the feeling that each hour and minute they are faithfully doing good temple university which was founded only 27 years ago has already sent out into the higher income and nobler life nearly a hundred thousand young men and women who could not possibly have obtained an education in any other institution the faithful self-sacrificing faculty now numbering 253 professors have done the real work or i can claim but little credit and i mentioned the university here only to show that my 50 years on the lecture platform has necessarily been a sideline of work my best known lecture acres of diamonds was a mere accidental address first given before a reunion of my old comrades at the 56 massachusetts regiment which served in the civil war and 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 now as i have done almost 5000 times what is the secret of its popularity i could never explain to myself or others i simply know that i always attempts to enthuse myself on each occasion and 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 the hands which now holds this pen must in the natural course of events soon cease to gesture on the platform and it is a sincere and prayerful hope that this book will go on into the years increasing the good for the aid my brothers and sisters in the human family russell h conwell south worthingham massachusetts september 1st 1913 footnote one this is the most recent and complete form of the lecture it happened to be delivered in philadelphia dr conwell's home city when he says right here in philadelphia he means the home city town village of every reader of this book just as he would use the name of it when delivering the lecture there instead of going through the pages which follow footnote two dr conwell was living and actively at work when these pages were written it is therefore a much truer picture of his personality than anything written in the past tense footnote three this interview took place at the old conwell farm in the summer of 1915 end of part 13 end of acres of diamonds