○  russell conwell : acres of diamonds  ○

o right to do that. you cannot trust a man with your money who cannot take care of his own. you cannot trust a man in your family that is not true to his wife. you cannot trust a man in the world that does not begin with his own heart, his won character, and his own life. it would have been my duty to have furnished a jack-knife to the third, man or to the second, and to have sold it to him and actually profited myself. i have no more right to sell goods without making a profit on them than i have to overcharge him dishonestly beyond what they are worth. but i should so sell each bill of goods that the person to whom i sell shall make as much as i make.

to live and let live is the principle of the gospel, and the principle of every-day common sense. oh, young man, hear me; live as you go along. do not wait until you have reached my years before you begin to enjoy anything of this life. if i had the millions back, of fifty cents of it, which i have tried to earn in these years, it would not do me anything like the good that it does me now in this almost sacred presence to-night. oh, yes, i am paid over and over a hundredfold to-night for dividing as i have tried to do in some measure as i went along through the years. i ought not to speak that way, it sounds egotistic, but i am old enough now to be excused for that. i should have helped my fellow-men, which i have tried to do, and everyone should try to do, and get the happiness of it. the man who goes home with the sense that he has stolen a dollar that day, that he has robbed a man of what was his honest due, is not going home to sweet rest. he arises tired in the morning, and goes with an unclean conscience to his work the next day. he is not a successful man at all, although he may have laid up millions. but the man who has gone through life dividing always with is fellow-men, making and demanding his own rights and his own profits, and giving to every other man his rights and profits, lives every day, and

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