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PHILOSOPHY OF COMMON SENSE

I

How Great Things are Done

By ROBERT WATERS

READ the other day of a French preacher who, whenever

he appears in the pulpit of Notre Dame, draws all the élite of Paris to hear him; so fascinating, eloquent, and polished are his discourses. How comes he to acquire this power? He delivers but five or six sermons in the year, generally in the season of Lent, and then retires to his convent to spend the rest of the year in reading and study, and in preparing his halfdozen sermons for the next Lenten season.

A preacher may compose fifty sermons in the year; but then there will not be a masterpiece among them. Dr. Wayland took two years to compose his famous sermon on foreign missions; but then it is a masterpiece, worth a ton of ordinary sermons. I have heard of an eminent lawyer who, without any uncommon oratorical gifts, won nearly every case in which he was engaged; and on being asked how he did it, he replied, "I learn all that can be learned of each case before it comes into court."

After dictating an argument to Boswell, who was preparing to speak before a committee of the House of Commons, Dr. Johnson said very wisely to him: "This you must enlarge on, when speaking to the committee. You must not argue there as if you were arguing in the schools; close reasoning will not fix their attention; you must say the same thing over and over again in different words. If you say it but once, they miss it, in a moment of inattention. It is unjust, sir, to censure lawyers for multiplying words when they argue; it is often necessary for them to multiply words."

Perhaps the success of the great lawyers is largely owing to the same practice as that of the great preachers. The great aim of the latter is to make their point clear, and impress it on the minds of their hearers by every means in their power. "All great preachers," says Professor Tucker, "succeed by ceaseless reiteration, under constantly varying forms, of a few conceptions that have become supreme in their experience."

If I should be asked to give an example of a man of genius who, from want of steady application to work, failed to produce what might reasonably be expected of him, I should be at a loss, for a moment, which among many examples to choose. The name of Coleridge would probably come first to my mind; but disease and opium had much to do with his sad inactivity. He was a man of uncommon genius; everything he has written bears the stamp of genius; but his will-aye, that had nothing of the character of genius in it; his will was wretchedly weak, and this was the cause of all his trouble. He planned many things, but accomplished few. He would seldom even attempt to perform what he planned; yet in planning he was inexhaustible; boundless projects with very little performance. He was not, however, lacking in the will to talk, and his famous talks at Highgate had their effect on the crowds of young men who flocked to hear him, many of whom subsequently attained eminence. How often it happens that a man of the finest intellectual qualities has some fatal defect in his character which ruins him!

Perhaps no better example can be cited than that of a contemporary of his, Sir James Mackintosh, a man of brilliant talents, famous for one or two splendid speeches, one or two finished essays, and one or two masterly philosophic dissertations. How came this man to produce so little? I shall give the answer in his own words, merely premising that in his youth he had been allowed to do as he pleased, and had acquired an indolent habit of straying aimlessly from one subject to another. "No subsequent circumstance," he says, "could make up for that invaluable habit of vigorous and methodical industry which the indulgence and irregularity of my school life prevented me from acquiring, and of which I have painfully felt the want in

every part of my life." Sir James lived till near three score and ten; and yet, though a man of rare gifts, with a profound knowledge of art and literature, philosophy and politics, he left little more than a few "precious fragments," which simply prove what he might have done, had he possessed that "invaluable habit,” the want of which he so touchingly deplores.

I might give a dozen such examples; but it is not necessary. I have already shown that the finest genius in the world has done what it has done mainly by industry and patient thought: and I wish now to emphasize the fact that no habit is so valuable, no love of anything in the world so precious, as the love of labor, of constantly and regularly producing something useful. Not only does it conduce to success in life, but it is the purifier of character, the producer of sane thoughts and of a sweet, wholesome, contented mind. For "success is no success at all if it makes not a happy mind." A diligent workman, let him be ever so ignorant, is a far better man than the most cultivated idler. This is something that is never considered by those fathers and mothers who want their sons to be bank clerks and Wall Street merchants. Such positions, with little to do and much to get, are often the very express-roads to perdition. The one great mistake that General Grant made was getting in among the Wall Street sharks.

No man who values his character, no man who values the true welfare of his children, should engage or cause his children to engage in a business whose main object is to make money, not to earn it; to grow rich without labor; to rise on the ruin of others, and to steep the senses in the enjoyment of material wealth. "Wealth," says some one, "can never be conjured out of the crucible of political or commercial gambling. It must be hewed out of the forest, dug out of the earth, blasted out of the mine, pounded out on the anvil, wrought out of the machine shop, or worked out of the loom." That is why Austria is such a wretchedly poor, bankrupt country: one of its chief sources of revenue (and chief corruptions of the people) is its state lotteries, by which, though nothing is produced, everybody expects to get rich.

"Of all the work that produces results," said a late bishop

of Exeter, "nine-tenths must be drudgery. There is no work, from the highest to the lowest, that can be done by any man who is unwilling to make that sacrifice. Part of the very nobility of the devotion of the true workman to his work consists in the fact that he is not daunted by finding that drudgery must be done; and no man can really succeed in any walk of life without a good deal of what in ordinary English is called pluck."

"Ah," said a brave painter to Mr. Emerson, "if a man has failed, you will find he has dreamed instead of working. There is no way to success in our art but to take off your coat, grind paint, and work like a digger on the railroad, all day and every day."

This is the secret of the success of the Germans in this country; they are never afraid of drudgery; they will study and learn anything to succeed. While French merchants, for instance, never think of learning any language but their own, the Germans learn, when required, nearly every language of Europe. When the French do business with any foreign country, they write to that country in the language of France; but the Germans write in the language of the country with which they trade. The young merchants of Germany learn their business so thoroughly that they get into superior positions wherever they go. After a four years' course in a commercial school, they serve three years longer in business houses without pay. The Germans strive, in fact, after thorough equipment in all the professions. There are no quacks or halflings in Germany. Such people are not tolerated. The leading merchants of France have found this out by experience. When the writer was in Paris, in 1862, he found that most of the responsible positions in mercantile houses were filled by young Germans. For a young Frenchman has five hundred thoughts on love for one on any other subject. When the Parisians, at the outbreak of the late Franco-Prussian war, lost their heads and banished the Germans from their city, they sent away their most skillful workmen in all those fine and fancy articles for which they had become famous; and, after the war, the Parisians found that most of their trade had gone with the workmen to Vienna. They had killed the goose that laid the golden eggs.

The law of progress is by gradual steps. A great invention is usually the result of the labors of three or four men living at different periods; and had not the first done his part, the second would not have done his, nor the third completed it. Galvani gave the first intimation of the science which bears his name, galvanism; Volta showed that it was a source of power of incalculable importance; and Humphrey Davy, from the application of the galvanic energy to the composition and decomposition of various chemical substances, showed that the power called chemical affinity is identical with that called electricity, thus creating a new science called electro-chemistry; and thence he proceeded, in the same line of experiments, until he made his grand invention, the safety lamp. Torricelli invented the barometer; but he had no idea of the various uses to which it was to be applied. It was Pascal who showed that it might be used for measuring the height of any place to which it could be carried; and it was, I think, Priestley who showed its various uses in physical and mechanical researches. Napoleon sent Jacquard to study the models of machines in the Paris Museum of Inventions, and Jacquard found there the model of a machine which gave him the idea for constructing his wonderful carpet pattern-weaving loom. The marquis of Worcester made, in 1655, a machine which, by the expansive power of steam, raised water to the height of forty feet; then Thomas Newcomen, an ingenious mechanic, constructed, about half a century later, a kind of steam and atmospheric engine, which was used for working pumps; and half a century after this, James Watt, while still working as a mathematical instrument maker, hit upon the ingenious expedient, the missing link, which practically made the steam engine what it is, the greatest invention ever made. Thus the great inventors and discoverers had predecessors who had indicated or attempted something such as they achieved; thus were they, as Dr. Hedge calls them, a succession of great bridge builders-men who spanned the chasm between the beginning and the ending of great inventions and discoveries.

The same is doubtless true of the great creators in literature and art. There were epic poets, no doubt, before Homer,

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