he has gone into has been very successful, because he has not touched anything unless he could see through to the end and knew how he would come out (even taking into consideration possible shrinkage, accident, and loss). In this way, although he has never made any very brilliant strides or “lucky hits,” and has not gone up by leaps and bounds, he has never had to undo what he has done, and has always kept in a sure position. He has gained the confidence not only of men in his profession, but also of capitalists and men of wealth, who have entrusted large sums to him because he has always kept his head level, and himself free from entanglements. People know that their business and their capital will be safe in his hands. Through steady growth and persistent pushing of practical certainties, he has not only become a millionaire, but a broad, progressive, comprehensive man of affairs.
Develop your judgment early and exercise your caution until it becomes reliable. Your judgment is your best friend; your common sense is your great life partner, given you for guidance and to protect your interests. Depend upon these three great friends—sound judgment, caution, and common sense—and you will not be flung about at the mercy of adverse winds.
Chapter V.
What The World Owes To Dreamers
ONCE when Emerson was in the company of men of affairs, who had been discussing railroads, stocks, and other business matters for some time, he said, “Gentlemen, now let us discuss real things for a while.”
Emerson was called “the dreamer of dreams,” because he had the prophetic vision that saw the world to be, the higher civilization to come. Tens of thousands of men and women stand to-day where he then stood almost alone.
Edison is a dreamer because he sees people half a century hence using and enjoying inventions, discoveries, and facilities which make the most advanced utilities of to-day seem very antiquated. His mind’s eye sees as curiosities in museums, fifty years hence, those mechanisms and devices which now seem so marvelous to us. Dreamers in this sense are true prophets. They see the civilization that will be, long before it arrives.
As it was the dreamers of ’49 who built the old San Francisco and made it the greatest port on the Western coast; so after the recent great earthquake and fire, when the city lay in ashes and three hundred thousand people were homeless, it was the dreamers of to-day who saw the new city in the ashes where others saw only desolation, and who, with indomitable grit, and the unconquerable American will that characterized the pioneers of a half-century before, began to plan a restored city greater and grander than the old. It was in dreams that the projectors of the great transcontinental railroads first saw teeming cities and vast business enterprises where the more “practical” men, without imagination, saw only the great American desert, vast alkali plains, sage grass, and impassable mountains. The dreams of men like Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford bound together the East and the West with bands of steel, made the two oceans neighbors, reclaimed the desert, and built cities where before only desolation reigned.
It was the persistency and grit of dreamers that triumphed over the congressmen without imagination who advised importing dromedaries to carry the mails across the great American desert; because they said it was ridiculous, a foolish waste of money, to build a railroad to the Pacific Ocean, as there was nothing there to support a population.
It was such dreamers as those who saw the great metropolis of Chicago in a straggling Indian village; who saw Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco many years before they arrived, that made their existence possible.
It was such dreamers as Marshall Field, Joseph Leiter, and Potter Palmer, who saw in the ashes of the burned Chicago a new and glorified city, infinitely greater and grander than the old.
Take the dreamers out of the world's history, and who would care to read it? Our dreamers! They are the advance guard of humanity; the toilers who, with bent back and sweating brow, cut smooth roads over which man marches forward from generation to generation.
Most of the things which make life worth living, which have emancipated man from drudgery and lifted him above commonness and ugliness—the great amenities of life—we owe to our dreamers.
The present is but the sum total of the dreams of the ages that have gone before,—the dreams of the past made real. Our great ocean liners, our marvelous tunnels, our magnificent bridges, our schools, our universities, our hospitals, our libraries, our cosmopolitan cities, with their vast facilities, comforts, and treasures of art, are all the result of somebody’s dreams.
We hear a great deal of talk about the impracticality of dreamers, of people whose heads are among the stars while their feet are on the earth; but where would civilization be to-day but for the dreamers? We should still be riding in the stage-coach or tramping across continents. We should still cross the ocean in sailing ships, and our letters would be carried across continents by the pony express.
“It cannot be done,” cries the man without imagination. “It can be done, it shall be done,” cries the dreamer; and he persists in his dreams through all sorts of privations, even to the point of starvation, if necessary, until his visions, his inventions, his discoveries, his ideas for the betterment of the race, are made practical realities.
What a picture the dreamer Columbus presented as he went about exposed to continual scoffs and indignities, characterized as an adventurer, the very children taught to regard him as a madman and pointing to their foreheads as he passed! He dreamed of a world beyond the seas, and, in spite of unspeakable obstacles, his vision became a glorious reality.
It was the men who, a quarter of a century ahead of their contemporaries, saw the marvelous Hoe press in the hand-press that made modem journalism possible. Without these , dreamers our printing would still be done by hand. It was the men who were denounced as visionaries who practically annihilated space, and enabled us to converse and transact business with people thousands of miles away as though they were in the same building with us.
How many matter-of-fact, unimaginative men, who see only through practical eyes, would it take to replace in civilization an Edison, a Bell, or a Marconi?
The very practical people tell us that the imagination is all well enough in artists, musicians, and poets, but that it has little place in the great world of realities. Yet all leaders of men have been dreamers. Our great captains of industry, our merchant princes, have had powerful, prophetic imaginations. They had faith in the vast commercial possibilities of our people. If it had not been for our dreamers, the American population would still be hugging the Atlantic coast.
The most practical people in the world are those who can look far into the future and see the civilization yet to be; who can see the coming man emancipated from the narrowing, hampering fetters, limitations, and superstitions of the present day; who have the ability to foresee things to come with the power to make them realities. The dreamers have ever been those who have achieved the seemingly impossible.
Our public parks, our art galleries, our great institutions are dotted with monuments and statues which the world has built to its dreamers,—those who saw visions of better things, better days for the human race.
What horrible experiences men and women have gone through in prisons and dungeons for their dreams; dreams which were destined to lift the world from savagery and emancipate man from drudgery.
The very dreams for which Galileo and other great scientists were imprisoned and persecuted were recognized as science only a few generations later. Galileo's dream gave us a new heaven and a new earth.
