Living the Radiant Life: A Personal Narrative

by George Wharton James

He replied, "Well, sometimes I think we are making progress, and then again I think we are not, but the only way we can achieve is by keeping everlastingly at it, and when I can't work, I set my men to work on it, and we are slowly getting results."

And so Mr. Edison every once in awhile astounds the world with some marvelous achievement. People suppose he stumbles on it—that he discovers it in a moment, and perhaps he does, but that moment was made possible by the thousands upon thousands of moments that were as steps he had taken leading up to the place where the vision burst upon him. Do you see the thought? It is the Insistence of the Human Will that compels achievement. It is the man that never lets up that gains the reward.

Fifty years ago a man named Judah set out to survey a railroad across the great Sierra Nevada range of mountains, that vast barrier that seems to separate California from the rest of the world. The people practically said, "You are a fool to think of such a thing," but he calmly replied: "I know I can put a road through; I am going to try it anyhow." So he began to climb those mountain heights. He threaded the passes one by one. He took his men and they worked day after day, week after week, month after month, upon what seemed to be an impossibility.

What was the result? He kept at it until he achieved. He made his plans and made them so well that he ultimately succeeded in convincing the House of Representatives and the United States Senate that such a railroad was possible.

Then four men, Huntington, Crocker, Stanford, and Hopkins, determined to build the road that he had surveyed. Again the pessimists said: "It is impossible; you will never raise the money to build a railroad over the Sierra Nevadas." But the four men worked away, and little by little got the money. As they built they were harassed on every hand. Labor troubles in those days were terrible. The President of the company said, "I don't know what we are going to do." Crocker, the man who had undertaken to see after the actual building of the road, said: "I know what I am going to do; I am going to get help to build that railroad somewhere." And so he sent a man to China to secure a lot of Chinese laborers. These were brought to this country, and the result was that with those Chinamen, in defiance of the President of his company, who had said that Chinamen should not be employed, Crocker built the railroad. And now you can cross the Sierra Nevada range without a thought of care because of the dominant, insistent will of that man and his associates.

The fact of the matter is, if you are going to achieve anything in life you will have to be "drivers"—you will have to keep at it until you succeed. You will have to be a slave driver, and you yourself will be the slave, willingly, gladly, joyously, of your own purpose. Do you want to be a slave to your own purpose? Do you want to do the things that you have willed to do? Some of us get the idea that bondage—to be bound to anything—is always an unpleasant thing. Not at all! Bind yourself to a high and noble purpose. Make yourself a slave to it in the sense of conscientiously sticking to it. Now drive yourself, and compel yourself to go ahead and do that which you have determined to do.

When I think of the old pioneers who walked and rode across this country to reach California; when I think of the many dangers, difficulties, and hardships that faced those men; when I see that they were living illustrations of this thought I am trying to bring out—I wish I had only time and space to give a definite account, instead of a mere synopsis of the kind of things they had to endure. They were surrounded by hostile Indians; again and again their lives were in jeopardy. Now and then they came to great sloughs and marshes, and their wagons and animals were bogged. They had to find their way across the dangerous quicksands; hard storms came and they had whirlwinds and floods to contend with. Now and again they found themselves in the heart of canyons, where there was no apparent way out; yet they went on, and on, until they either died or reached the land for which they had started!

A party of eighty set out to cross the great Sierra Nevada range, and the difficulties they encountered can best be imagined when I tell you that forty of them died on the way. The difficulties that beset the forty that were left made it all but impossible for them to get out. One of them told me about the terrible hardships they suffered. She said, "I remember, distinctly, when the time came for us to get away, my dear mother taking up the baby, and leaving me behind with the other baby. She said, 'Now, Virginia, you stay right here!' She then went on with the baby, and, after struggling step by step, in such a way that it would break your heart to think of it, for about twenty paces, she put down the baby and came back for the other baby and myself." And so, step by step, step by step, that woman with her three little children, started on that awful journey of scores of miles through deep snow. Fortunately help came to her assistance and she finally achieved. She reached California, though one would have thought it absolutely impossible. There was the tremendous insistence of the human will.

Let us say "I will!" and then insist upon doing the things we have said we will do.

I remember when I was a boy hearing some one recite something that I thought was very foolish. A little piece of "poetry" it was called. It was as follows: