Acres of Diamonds: Our Every-day Opportunities
I told him of a man out in California in 1847 who owned a ranch. He
heard they had discovered gold in southern California, and 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
for the mere taking. Indeed, thirty-eight millions of dollars has
been taken out of a 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 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 to-night. 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 wrote 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 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_.
That has especial reference to my profession, and has no reference
whatever to a man seeking a divorce. When he wrote to his cousin for
employment, his cousin replied, “I cannot engage you because you know
nothing about the oil business.”
Well, then the old farmer said, “I will know,” and with most commendable
zeal (characteristic of the students of Temple University) he set
himself at the study of the whole subject. He began away back at the
second day of God’s creation when this world was covered thick and deep
with that rich vegetation which since has turned to the primitive beds
of coal. He studied the subject until he found that the drainings
really of those rich beds of coal furnished the coal-oil that was worth
pumping, and then he found how it came up with the living springs. He
studied until he knew what it looked like, smelled like, tasted like,
and how to refine it. Now said he in his letter to his cousin, “I
understand the oil business.” His cousin answered, “All right, come on.”
So he sold his farm, according to the county record, for $833 (even
money, “no cents”). He had scarcely gone from that place before the
man who 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 that 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 that man who had gone to Canada had
been himself damming back for twenty-three years a flood of coal-oil
which the state geologists of Pennsylvania declared to us ten years
later was even then worth a hundred millions of dollars to our state,
and four years ago our geologist declared the discovery to be worth
to our state a thousand millions of dollars. The man who owned that
territory on which the city of Titusville now stands, and those
Pleasantville 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 is said to have sold the whole of it for
$833, 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 came from. This young man in
Massachusetts furnishes 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 their classes. During his
senior year he earned $15 a week for doing that work. When he
graduated they raised his pay from $15 to $45 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 $15 to $15.60 he would have
stayed and been proud of the place, but when they put it up to $45 at
one leap, he said, “Mother, I won’t work for $45 a week. The idea of
a man with a brain like mine working for $45 a week!_ Let’s go out in
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 were both right about it. As he was an only son and she 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 $15 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 did 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 don’t
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. There you are obliged
to be very economical of front gateways in order to have some place to
put the stone. When that basket hugged so tight he set it down on the
ground, and then dragged on one side, and pulled on the other side, and
as he was dragging that basket through this farmer noticed in the upper
and outer corner of that stone wall, right next the gate, a block of
native silver eight inches square. That professor of mines, mining, and
mineralogy who knew so much about the subject that he would not work for
$45 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 away off--well, I don’t know where, and
he did not, but somewhere else, and he was a professor of mineralogy.
My friends, that mistake is very universally made, and why should we
even smile at him. I often wonder what has become of him. I do not know
at all, but I will tell you what I “guess” as a Yankee. I guess that he
sits out there by his fireside to-night with his friends gathered around
him, and he is saying to them something like this: “Do you know that man
Conwell who lives in Philadelphia?” “Oh yes, I have heard of him.” “Do
you know that man Jones that lives in Philadelphia?” “Yes, I have heard
of him, too.”
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 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 mistakes, but, of
course, that does not make any difference, because we don’t expect the
same man to preach and practise, too.
As I come here to-night and look around this audience I am seeing again
what through these fifty years I have continually seen-men that are
making precisely that same mistake. I often wish I could see the younger
people, and would that the Academy had been filled to-night 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 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 the 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
your city if you think there are any ‘acres of diamonds’ here.”
I was greatly interested in that account in the newspaper of the 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 the map of the geologic formations of our continent,
and traced it. He said it went either 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 the
diamonds were there, for they have been discovered and sold; and that
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.
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 to you. Because now that the Queen of
England has given the greatest compliment ever conferred upon American
woman for her attire because she did not appear with any jewels at all
at the late reception in England, it has 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 unto