I stood and looked at the five or six hotels now standing there waiting to be torn down for us, and —— told me that the seventeen parcels of land in the block that he had labored on forty-seven people to get them to make up their minds to put their lots together, were worth only a million and a half of dollars, either to them or to anybody else, while they were making up their minds to let their lots be put together. And now that he had got their minds made up for them and had got all these foolish, distracted seventeen parcels of land together into one, the land instead of being worth one million and a half dollars, was appraised by —— the other day as worth four and a half million dollars.
The same is true of the hundred thousand men of practical imagination scattered in five thousand cities, twiddling on the fate of a nation alone.
The same thing is going to happen to the value of the men that has happened to the separate lumps of sand and clay they called real estate in New York.
What can I manage to accomplish alone in trying to get to Chicago to-morrow morning?
All I could do alone would be to walk.
As it is, I stand in line a minute at a window in the Grand Central Station, make a little arrangement with several hundred thousand men and with a slip of paper I move to Chicago while I go to sleep.
This power for each man of a hundred thousand men is what I am offering in this little book to the nine hundred and ninety thousand others.
What will we do, what ideas will we carry out?
Get one hundred thousand picked men together and what can they not do, what ideas can they not carry out?
What is hard, what is priceless, is getting the men and getting the men together. Everybody who has ever done anything knows this.