○  russell conwell : acres of diamonds  ○

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 the 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. 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 i

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