The Young Man and the World

by Albert J. Beveridge

But all the figures large enough to fill history's perspective always have been and always will be geniuses—men in whom the energy, the thought, the imagination, the power of hundreds of men are concentrated. Let us not deceive ourselves, and reap misery and disappointment by thinking that we can, by any effort, equal them. Alexander, Cæsar, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Washington, Darwin, Goethe, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Pasteur, Edison, Plato, Rhodes, Ito, Diaz, Peter the Great—we cannot explain these phenomena of human intellect and character except by the word genius.

All our toil and patience and everything cannot seat us in the high places of these princes of Nature. "Who, by taking thought, can add a cubit to his stature?" (The Bible again, you see; we cannot get away from the Bible.)

But these men never knew that they were geniuses. They would have known it undoubtedly if they had stopped to think about it. But they were too busy with their task. A genius never thinks about his powers, any more than an eagle is concerned about the method of his royal flight from the mountain crag. But for us, of the common mass of men, only those methods of genius are applicable which are within our reach. Mostly for us are the slow and toilsome—the sure, if gradual—processes of patient labor and infinite pains.

So do not let the thought that you are a genius abide with you for a moment—the main traveled roads for us ordinary mortals! The beaten paths are not so far wrong, after all; and at their end is certain, even perhaps distinguished, if not startling and historic, success.

And, besides, epoch-makers are not needed until an epoch needs to be made.

Do not worry about greatness, therefore. If greatness is for you, God's call will surely come to you. If it does not—well, the archeologists uncovered Nippur the other day, with its palaces and courts and abodes of those who were great and mighty more than 2,500 years before Abraham.

So consider Nippur, and be patient and humble. I instanced Rhodes in naming some of the world's monarchs of mind and will. Very well! Yesterday all Christendom was ringing with his imperial work. He was developing a continent; establishing the reign of law, industry, and peace where savagery and the wilderness had held sway for a million years.

But it was yesterday that he did this. He is dead now. Already you have half forgotten him. You see we are living a century in a minute.

Besides, if Clotho has not spun greatness into your destiny, be sure that it does not matter. The reward of Cecil Rhodes was in the thing he did, and not in the memory which men have of it. The man who digs a well has precisely the same reward. The point is that you must do the deed for the deed's sake. Do not do it because the crowd will clap their hands. When present applause or ultimate fame become your chief purpose in life, what are you, after all? You are a play-actor—that is what you are. Put it from you. Be a man.

Yes, consider Nippur, and be a man. One lesson these ancient ruins teach—the nothingness of fame, and that the only things in life worth while are love and duty. I cannot think of any blessing so great to an ardent young American as to learn at the very threshold of his career of activities that duty and affection are the only things really whose value lasts and increases—the only things that pay increasing dividends.