Acres of Diamonds: Our Every-day Opportunities
When you say a woman doesn’t 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? Mrs. General Greene 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 to-morrow and ask
your children they would say, “Elias Howe.”
He was in the Civil War with me, and often in my tent, and I often heard
him say that he worked fourteen years to get up that sewing-machine.
But his wife made up her mind one day that they would starve to death
if there wasn’t something or other invented pretty soon, and 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 that invented the mower and
the reaper? According to Mr. McCormick’s confidential communication, 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 that when she pulled
the wire one way it closed them, and when she pulled the wire the
other way it opened them, and there she had the principle of the
mowing-machine. If you look at a mowing-machine, you will see 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 trolleys
possible; if a woman can invent, as Mr. Carnegie said, the great iron
squeezers that laid the foundation of all the steel millions of 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. The really great man is a plain,
straightforward, every-day, common-sense man. You would not dream that
he was a great inventor if you did not see something he had actually
done. His neighbors do not regard him so great. You never see anything
great over your back fence. You say there is no greatness among your
neighbors. It is all away off somewhere else. Their greatness is ever
so simple, so plain, so earnest, so practical, that the neighbors and
friends never recognize it.
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 to-morrow, 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 and
motioned for me. I went up to that anteroom, and the secretary said:
“That is the President’s door right over there. Just rap 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 another door to 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.” I
have no faith in a man who doesn’t know enough to be afraid when he is
being shot at. I never was so afraid when the shells came around us at
Antietam as I was when I went into 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 that 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. He said: “I am 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 twenty 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 going
to win out now. 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 Tad and I are going out to Springfield, Illinois. I
have bought a farm out there and I don’t care if I again earn only
twenty-five cents a day. Tad 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 everyday, 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 is 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 now is 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 tied 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
Manayunk, 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 her harbor.” Why do many other cities of the United States
get ahead of Philadelphia now? There is 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 is the city of
Philadelphia. If we are 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 is 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 only
could get that spirit out among our people, that we can do things in
Philadelphia and do them well!
Arise, ye 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 was never an opportunity greater. Let us talk up our own
city.
But there are two other young men here to-night, and that is all I will
venture to say, because it is too late. One over there gets up and says,
“There is going to be a great man in Philadelphia, but never was one.”