Even in the early days, when money was needed for the necessary buildings (the buildings of which Conwell dreamed when he left second-story doors in his church!), the university—college it was then called—had won devotion from those who knew that it was a place where neither time nor money was wasted, and where idleness was a crime, and in the donations for the work were many such items as four hundred dollars from factory-workers who gave fifty cents each, and two thousand dollars from policemen who gave a dollar each. Within two or three years past the State of Pennsylvania has begun giving it a large sum annually, and this state aid is public recognition of Temple University as an institution of high public value. The state money is invested in the brains and hearts of the ambitious.
So eager is Dr. Conwell to place the opportunity of education before every one, that even his servants must go to school! He is not one of those who can see needs that are far away but not those that are right at home. His belief in education, and in the highest attainable education, is profound, and it is not only on account of the abstract pleasure and value of education, but its power of increasing actual earning power and thus making a worker of more value to both himself and the community.
Many a man and many a woman, while continuing to work for some firm or factory, has taken Temple technical courses and thus fitted himself or herself for an advanced position with the same employer. The Temple knows of many such, who have thus won prominent advancement. And it knows of teachers who, while continuing to teach, have fitted themselves through the Temple courses for professorships. And it knows of many a case of the rise of a Temple student that reads like an Arabian Nights' fancy!—of advance from bookkeeper to editor, from office-boy to bank president, from kitchen maid to school principal, from street-cleaner to mayor! The Temple University helps them that help themselves.
President Conwell told me personally of one case that especially interested him because it seemed to exhibit, in especial degree, the Temple possibilities; and it particularly interested me because it also showed, in high degree, the methods and personality of Dr. Conwell himself.
One day a young woman came to him and said she earned only three dollars a week and that she desired very much to make more. "Can you tell me how to do it?" she said.
He liked her ambition and her directness, but there was something that he felt doubtful about, and that was that her hat looked too expensive for three dollars a week!
Now Dr. Conwell is a man whom you would never suspect of giving a thought to the hat of man or woman! But as a matter of fact there is very little that he does not see.
But though the hat seemed too expensive for three dollars a week, Dr. Conwell is not a man who makes snap-judgments harshly, and in particular he would be the last man to turn away hastily one who had sought him out for help. He never felt, nor could possibly urge upon any one, contentment with a humble lot; he stands for advancement; he has no sympathy with that dictum of the smug, that has come to us from a nation tight bound for centuries by its gentry and aristocracy, about being contented with the position in which God has placed you, for he points out that the Bible itself holds up advancement and success as things desirable.
And, as to the young woman before him, it developed, through discreet inquiry veiled by frank discussion of her case, that she had made the expensive-looking hat herself! Whereupon not only did all doubtfulness and hesitation vanish, but he saw at once how she could better herself. He knew that a woman who could make a hat like that for herself could make hats for other people, and so, "Go into millinery as a business," he advised.
"Oh—if I only could!" she exclaimed. "But I know that I don't know enough."