SUCCESS AT YOUR DOORSTEPS: What You Can Do With Your Will Power, The Key to Success, Acres of Diamonds, Praying for Money & Every Man His Own University. Russell Conwell
San Francisco. Is that an extravagant expression? The time draws nigh when you won't say that is an extravagant expression. As I am writing this a company to lay that long-contemplated pneumatic tube from New York to Boston is being formed. They have been fighting in the courts over the right to lay it. When they finish it you can put a hundredweight of goods in the New York end of it, and it will possibly land in Boston in one minute and fifty-eight seconds. Now, then, what is to hinder making a little larger pipe and putting a man in and sending him in one minute and fifty-eight seconds? The only reason why you cannot send them with that lightning speed is for the same reason, perhaps, that the Irishman gave when he fell from a tall building and they asked, "Didn't the fall hurt you?" "No, it was not the falling that hurt me, it was the stopping so quick." That is all the difficulty there is in using now those pneumatic tubes for human travel.
We need those inventions now. We are soon going to find the inventors. Will you find them graduating from some university, or from some great scientific school at Harvard, Yale, Oxford, or Berlin? It may be. I would not say, while presiding over a university myself, that you would not find such people there. Perhaps you will.
But come back in history with me a little way and let us see where these men and women are to be found. Go into northern England, and go down a coal shaft underground two miles, and there is a young man picking away at a vein of coal a foot and a half thick. His hair sticks out through his hat, his face is besmirched, his fingers are covered with soot. Yet he is digging away and whistling. Is he a king? One of the greatest the world has ever seen. Queen Victoria, introducing her son, who has since been king, to that young man, said to him:
"I introduce you, my son, to England's greatest man."
What! This poor miner, who has never been to school but a few months in his life? While he had not been to a day school, he had been learning all the time in the university of experience, in the world's great university—every-day observation. When such a man graduates he gets the highest possible degree—D.N.R.—"Don't Need Recommends." Let us go in the mine and ask the miner his name.
"Young man, what is your name?"
"Stevenson."
The inventor of the locomotive itself! Oh, where are thy kings, oh, men? They may be in the mine, on the mountain, in the hovel or the palace, wherever a man notices what other people have not seen. Wherever a man observes in his every-day work what other people have not noticed, there will be found the king.
Are any of my readers milkmen? Are you discouraged when the brooks freeze up in the winter? Now, there was a milkman in West Virginia, not many years ago, who went to the train every morning with the milk from the farm, and while they were putting the milk in the car he studied the locomotive standing in the station.
"What do you know about a locomotive?"
"Oh, I don't know anything about it."
Is that so? You have seen and ridden after them all your lifetime, and you have seen them standing in the station, you have looked at the immense structure with some respect, but you don't know anything about it—and then you expect to be a successful man! That young man became interested in the locomotive, and while he stood around there he watched it, measured it, asked the engineer questions about it. One day the engineer, seeing he was interested, took him down to the switch and showed him how to put on the steam, and how to shut it off, and how to reverse the engine, ring the bell, operate the whistle, and all about it, and he was delighted. He went home and made draftings in the evenings of the locomotive.
Two years after that the same train ran on the siding and the engineer and fireman went into a house to get their breakfast, leaving the locomotive alone—waiting for the snow to be shoveled off the track which had rolled down the mountain. While they were absent a valve of the engine accidentally opened. It started the piston, and the engine began to draw out the train on to the main track, and then it began to go down the fearful grade at full speed. The brakeman went out on the rear platform, caught hold of the wheel brake in order to slow down the train. When he saw the engineer and fireman at the top of the hill swinging their arms as though something awful had happened, the brakeman shouted:
"There is the engineer and fireman, both of them, up there. We will all be killed!"
The people fainted and screamed, and the cry went to the second car, and then to the baggage car, and that milkman was there. He ran to the side-door to leap, but saw that it would be certain death. Then, with the help of the baggage-man he clambered over the tender, reached the engineer's place, and felt around for the lever in the smoke. When he discovered it he pressed it home. Then reversed the engine. It was a wonder those cylinder heads held. But with an awful crack the driving wheels stopped on the track, shot fire through the snow as they began to roll back against the ongoing train, the momentum still pushing it on. It shook the train until every pane of glass was broken. When it came to a stop the passengers climbed out to ascertain who stopped the train. They discovered that this young man had done it, and saved their lives, and they thanked him with tears.
A stockholder in the railroad company, an old man nearly eighty years of age, was on the train. He went into the stockholders' meeting that night and told the story of his narrow escape on that train. Since then that milkman has been one of the richest railroad owners in the world.
What do you suppose has become of the other milkmen who went at the same time to the same place and sat on the edge of the platform and swung their feet? What has become of them?
Ask the winds that sweep down from the Alleghany mountains—where are the other milkmen? The winds will answer, "They are going to the pump there still."
It was ever the same. Wherever you look, success in any branch of achievement depends upon this ability to get one's education every day as one goes along from the events that are around us now. The king is found wherever a person notices that which other men do not see.
Chapter IV. Whom Mankind Shall Love
The great scientific men—and we need more—often are not given the full credit that is due them because they have not "graduated" from somewhere. It seems to me there is a feeling in these later days for creating an aristocracy among the men who have graduated from some rich university. But that does not determine a man's life. It may be a foolish tyranny for a little while, but nevertheless every man and woman must finally take the place where he and she are best fitted to be, and do the things that he and she can do best, and the things about which he and she really know. Where they graduated, or when, will not long count in the race of practical life.
We need great scientific men now more than we ever needed them before. Where are you going to find them? We won't find them where that scientific man came from who invented an improvement upon the cuckoo clock. His clock, instead of saying, "Cuckoo, cuckoo, cuckoo," when it struck the hour, said, "I love you! I love you! I love you!" That man left the clock at home with his wife nights while he was around at the club, thinking that would be sufficient protestation of his love. Yet any man knows you cannot make love by machinery. That was only a so-called scientific idea.
I read not long ago that a great scientific man said that "love and worship are only the aggregate results of physical causes." That is not true. Love and worship are something beyond physical causes. Educated men ought to know better than to say anything like that.
There are many valuable things that every man knows until he has unlearned them in a university.
There is danger that a man will get so much education that he won't know anything of real value because his useless education has driven the useful out of his mind. It is like a dog I owned when a boy. He was a very good fox dog. One day I thought I would show him off before the boys. We let the fox out at the barn door, which was open just far enough for the dog to see the fox start. Then he began whining and yelping to get out. I ran out and dropped some red pepper where the dog was likely to follow the fox over the hill. Then I went back and opened the door. The dog rushed out after the fox, but soon began to take in the red