Acres of Diamonds
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Russell H. Conwell >> Acres of Diamonds
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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 marvelously for
the freedom, the betterment, the liberation, the
advancement, of the individual.
FIFTY YEARS ON THE LECTURE
PLATFORM
BY
RUSSELL H. CONWELL
AN Autobiography! What an absurd request!
If all 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 even 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 which come to an
overburdened mind.
My general view of half a century on the
lecture platform brings to me precious and beautiful
memories, and fills my soul with devout gratitude
for the blessings and kindnesses which have
been given to me so far beyond my deserts.
So much more success has come to my hands
than I ever expected; so much more of good
have I found than even youth's wildest dream
included; so much more effective have been 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, and have seen the
enterprises I have undertaken rush by me, pushed
on by a thousand strong hands until they have
left me 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
Land, and here I am in mine 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 1861-65 drew on with all its
passions, patriotism, horrors, and fears, and I was
studying law at Yale University. I had from
childhood felt that I was ``called to the ministry.''
The earliest event of memory is the prayer of
my father at family prayers in the little old cottage
in the Hampshire highlands of the Berkshire
Hills, calling on God with a sobbing voice
to lead me into some special service for the
Saviour. It filled me with awe, dread, and fear, and
I recoiled from the thought, until I determined
to fight against it with all my power. So I sought
for other professions and for decent excuses for
being anything but a preacher.
Yet while I was nervous and timid before the
class in declamation and dreaded to face any
kind of an audience, I felt in my soul a strange
impulsion toward public speaking which for years
made me miserable. The war and the public
meetings for recruiting soldiers furnished an outlet
for my suppressed sense of duty, and my first
lecture was on the ``Lessons of History'' as
applied to the campaigns against the Confederacy.
That matchless temperance orator and loving
friend, John B. Gough, introduced me to the little
audience in Westfield, Massachusetts, in 1862.
What a foolish little school-boy speech it must
have been! But Mr. Gough's kind words of
praise, the bouquets and the applause, made me
feel that somehow the way to public oratory
would not be so hard as I had feared.
From that time I acted on Mr. Gough's advice
and ``sought practice'' by accepting almost every
invitation I received to speak on any kind of a
subject. 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 jack-knife, a ham, a book, and the
first cash remuneration was from a farmers' club,
of seventy-five cents toward the ``horse hire.''
It was a curious fact that one member of that
club afterward moved to Salt Lake City and was
a member of the committee at the Mormon
Tabernacle in 1872 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 has been seldom in the fifty years
that I have ever taken a fee for my personal use.
In the last thirty-six years I have dedicated
solemnly all the lecture income to benevolent
enterprises. If I am antiquated enough for an
autobiography, perhaps I may be aged enough to
avoid the criticism of being an egotist, when I
state that some years I delivered one lecture,
``Acres of Diamonds,'' over two hundred times
each year, at an average income of about one
hundred and fifty dollars for each lecture.
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 Ferry renown, and as Mr. Brown had
been long 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 reporter for
the Boston _Daily Traveler_, I was indebted for many
acts of self-sacrificing friendship which soften 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. Gough, Senator
Charles Sumner, Theodore Tilton, Wendell Phillips,
Mrs. Mary A. Livermore, Bayard Taylor,
Ralph Waldo Emerson, with many of the great
preachers, musicians, and writers of that remarkable
era. Even Dr. Holmes, John Whittier,
Henry W. Longfellow, John Lothrop Motley,
George William Curtis, and General Burnside
were persuaded to appear one or more times,
although they refused to receive pay. I cannot
forget how ashamed I felt when my name ap-
peared in the shadow of such names, and how
sure I was that every acquaintance was ridiculing
me behind my back. Mr. Bayard Taylor, however,
wrote me from the _Tribune_ office a kind note
saying that he was glad to see me ``on the road to
great usefulness.'' Governor Clafflin, of Massachusetts,
took the time to send me a note of congratulation.
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 do 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 do at
least that much toward that 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 so great a field of usefulness.
The experiences of all our successful lecturers
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 overkindness of hospitable
committees, and the broken hours of sleep are
annoyances one soon forgets; and the hosts of
intelligent faces, the messages of thanks, and the
effects of the earnings on the lives of young college
men can never cease to be a daily joy. God
bless them all.
Often have I been asked if I did not, in fifty
years of travel in all sorts of conveyances, meet
with accidents. It is a marvel to me that no such
event ever brought me harm. In a continuous
period of over twenty-seven 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
on the Atlantic for twenty-six days. At another
time a man was killed in the berth of a sleeper I
had left half an hour before. Often have I felt
the train leave the track, but no one was killed.
Robbers have several times threatened my life,
but all came out without loss to me. God and man
have ever 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 three thousand members, for so many
years contributed through its membership over
sixty thousand dollars a year for the uplift of
humanity, has made life a continual surprise; while
the Samaritan Hospital's amazing growth, and the
Garretson Hospital's dispensaries, have been so
continually ministering to the sick and poor, and
have done such skilful work for the tens of thousands
who ask for their help each year, that I
have been made happy while away lecturing by
the feeling that each hour and minute they were
faithfully doing good. Temple University, which
was founded only twenty-seven years ago, has
already sent out into a higher income and nobler
life nearly a hundred thousand young men and
women who could not probably have obtained an
education in any other institution. The faithful,
self-sacrificing faculty, now numbering two hundred
and fifty-three professors, have done the real
work. For that I can claim but little credit;
and I mention the University here only to show
that my ``fifty years on the lecture platform''
has necessarily been a side line of work.
My best-known lecture, ``Acres of Diamonds,''
was a mere accidental address, at first given
before a reunion of my old comrades of the Forty-
sixth Massachusetts Regiment, which served in
the Civil War and in which I was captain. I
had no thought of giving the address again, and
even after it began to be called for by lecture
committees I did not dream that I should live
to deliver it, as I now have done, almost five
thousand times. ``What is the secret of its
popularity?'' I could never explain to myself or others.
I simply know that I always attempt to enthuse
myself on each occasion with the idea that it is
a special opportunity to do good, and I interest
myself in each community and apply the general
principles with local illustrations.
The hand which now holds this pen must in
the natural course of events soon cease to gesture
on the platform, and it is a sincere, prayerful hope
that this book will go on into the years doing
increasing good for the aid of my brothers and
sisters in the human family.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.
South Worthington, Mass.,
September 1, 1913.
THE END
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