in millions of human lives. Christ Himself was denounced as a dreamer, but His whole life was a prophecy, a dream of the coming man, the coming civilization. He saw beyond the burlesque of the man God intended, beyond the deformed, weak, deficient, imperfect man heredity had made, to the perfect man, the ideal man, the image of divinity.
Our visions do not mock us. They are evidences of what is to be, the foreglimpses of possible realities. The castle in the air always precedes the castle on the earth.
George Stephenson, the poor miner, dreamed of a locomotive engine that would revolutionize the traffic of the world. While working in the coal pits for sixpence a day, or patching the clothes and mending the boots of his fellow-workmen to earn a little money to attend a night school, and at the same time supporting his blind father, he continued to dream. People called him crazy. “His roaring engine will set the houses on fire with its sparks,” everybody cried. “Smoke will pollute the air”; “carriage makers and coachmen will starve for want of work.” See this dreamer in the House of Commons, when members of Parliament were cross-questioning him. “What,” said one member, “can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as horses? We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s rockets, as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate. We trust that Parliament will, in all the railways it may grant, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which is as great as can be ventured upon.” But, in spite of calumny, ridicule, and opposition, this “crazy visionary” toiled on for fifteen years for the realization of his vision.
On the fourth of August, 1907, New York celebrated the centennial of the dream of Robert Fulton. See the crowd of curious scoffers at the wharves of the Hudson River at noon on Friday, August 4, 1807, to witness the results of what they thought the most ridiculous idea which ever entered a human brain; to witness what they believed would be a most humiliating failure of the dreams of a “crank” who proposed to take a party of people up the river to Albany in a steam vessel named the “Clermont”! “Did anybody ever hear of such an absurd idea as navigating against the current of the Hudson River without sail?” scornfully said the scoffing wiseacres. Many of them thought that the man who had fooled away his time and money on the “Clermont” was little better than an idiot, and that he ought to be in an insane asylum. But the “Clermont” did sail up the Hudson, and Fulton was hailed as a benefactor of the human race.
What does the world not owe to Morse, who gave it its first telegraph? When the inventor asked for an appropriation of a few thousand dollars for the first experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, he was sneered at by congressmen. After discouragements which would have disheartened most men, this experimental line was completed, and some congressmen were waiting for the message which they did not believe would ever come, when one of them asked the inventor how large a package he expected to be able to send over the wire. But very quickly the message did come, and derision was changed to praise.
The dream of Cyrus W. Field, which tied two continents together by the ocean cable, was denounced as worse than folly. How long would it take to get the world's day-by-day news but for such dreamers as Field?
When William Murdock, at the close of the eighteenth century, dreamed of lighting London by means of coal gas conveyed to buildings in pipes, even Sir Humphry Davy sneeringly asked, “Do you intend taking the dome of St. Paul's for a gasometer?" Sir Walter Scott, too, ridiculed the idea of lighting London by “smoke," but he lived to use this same smoke-dream to light his castle at Abbottsford. “What!" said the wise scientists, “a light without a wick? Impossible!"
How people laughed at die dreamer, Charles Goodyear, who struggled with hardships for eleven long years while trying to make india-rubber of practical use! See him in prison for debt, still dreaming, while pawning his clothes and his wife's jewelry to get a little money to keep his children from starving! Note his sublime courage and devotion to his vision even when without money to bury a dead child; while his five other children were near starvation, and his neighbors were denouncing him as insane!
Women called Elias Howe a fool and “crank" and condemned him for neglecting his family to dream of a machine which has proved a blessing to millions of their sex.
The great masters are always idealists, seers of visions. The sculptor is a dreamer who sees the statue in the rough block before he strikes a blow with his chisel. The artist sees a vision of the finished painting in all its perfection and beauty of coloring and form before he touches a brush to the canvas.
Every palace, every beautiful structure, is first the dream of the architect. It had no previous existence in reality. The building came out of his ideal before it was made real. Sir Christopher Wren saw Saint Paul’s Cathedral in all its magnificent beauty before the foundations were laid. It was his dream which revolutionized the architecture of London.
It was the dreaming Baron Haussmann who made Paris the most beautiful city in the world.
Think what we owe the beauty dreamers for making our homes and our parks so attractive! Yet there are thousands of practical men in New York to-day who, if they could have their way, would cut Central Park up into lots and cover it with business blocks.
The achievements of every successful man are but the realized visions of his youth, his dreams of bettering his condition, of enlarging his power.
Our homes are the dreams that began with lovers and their efforts to better their condition; the dreams of those who once lived in huts and in log cabins.
The modern luxurious railway train is the dream of those who rode in the old stagecoach.
Not more than a dozen years ago the horseless carriage, the manufacture of which now promises to make one of the largest businesses in the world, was considered by most people in the same light as is the airship to-day. But there has recently been an exhibition of these “dreams” in Madison Square Garden, New York, on a scale so vast in the suggestiveness of its possibilities as to stagger credulity.
Half a dozen years since, this invention was looked upon as a mere toy, a fad for a few millionaires. Twelve years ago there was not a single factory in America making cars for the market. Fourteen years ago there were only five horseless vehicles in this country, and they had been imported at extravagant prices. To-day there are over a hundred thousand in actual use. Instead of being toy for millionaires, the automobile is now being used in place of horses by thousands of people with ordinary incomes.
This dream is already helping us to solve the problem of crowded streets. It is proving a great educator, as well as a health giver, by tempting people into the country. The average man will ultimately, through its full realization, practically travel in his own private car. In fact this dream is becoming one of the greatest joys and blessings that has ever come to humanity.
It was the wonderful dream in steel of Carnegie, Schwab, and their associates, together with that of the elevator creator, that made the modern city with its sky-scrapers possible.
What do we not owe to our poet dreamers, who like Shakespeare, have taught us to see the uncommon in the common, the extraordinary in the ordinary?
The divinest heritage of man is the capacity to dream. It matters not how much we have to suffer to-day, if we believe there is a better to-morrow. Even “stone walls do not a prison make” to those who can dream. Who would rob the poor of this dreaming faculty, that takes the drudgery out of their dry, dreary occupations? Who would deprive them of the luxuries which they enjoy in their dreams of a better and brighter future, of a fuller education, of more comforts for those dear to them.
There is no medicine like hope, no incentive so great and no tonic so powerful as expectation of something better
