The first step to greatness is to be honest.—Johnson.

All great men are partially inspired.—Cicero.

All great men come out of the middle classes.—Emerson.

No really great man ever thought himself so.—Hazlitt.

The world knows nothing of its greatest men.—H. Taylor.

What millions died that Caesar might be great!—Campbell.

The great are only great because we carry them on our shoulders: when we throw them off they sprawl on the ground.—Montandre.

It is not in the nature of great men to be exclusive and arrogant.—Beecher.

None think the great unhappy but the great.—Young.

There is but one method, and that is hard labor.—Sydney Smith.

No man has come to true greatness who has not felt in some degree that his life belongs to his race, and that God gives him for mankind.—Phillips Brooks.

What is genius? Is it merely the ability to master details, as somebody has said, or is it the result of some natural endowments, faculties, or aptitudes for a particular thing? That it is some uncommon power of intellect, all admit; but whether it is a general or a specific power, is much disputed. Doctor Johnson's notion was that genius is nothing more or less than great general powers of mind, capable of being turned any way, or in any direction, and that "a man who has vigor may walk to the East just as well as to the West." Emerson held quite the contrary view, for he says that a man is born to some one thing, and that he is "like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea." And again, in Representative Men, "Each man is, by secret liking, connected with some district of nature, whose agent and interpreter he is, as Linnaeus, of plants; Huber, of bees; Fries, of lichens; Van Mons, of pears; Dalton, of atomic forms; Euclid, of lines; Newton, of fluxions." On the other hand, versatility of genius is not uncommon, for was not Leonardo da Vinci master of all the arts? did not Lord Brougham excel in everything, until they said of him "Science is his forte, omniscience his foible"? and was not our own Franklin equally famous for his several accomplishments? Nevertheless, it is quite certain that most of the great men of history, in art, arms or letters, displayed genius in only one line; yet this does not signify that they could not have displayed equal genius in one or more other lines. Perhaps the case could be stated thus: (1) A genius is a man of uncommon power of intellect; (2) Every man has a natural bent for some one line of effort; (3) A genius is apt to follow his natural bent, and thus excel in only one line; (4) A genius may also excel in one or more other lines, circumstances and environment leading him away from his natural inclinations.

What is greatness? Who were the greatest men of history? Who are the great and the greatest men of the time? These are questions on every tongue, yet who may say the answer? Seneca, Bacon, Carlyle, Goethe, Emerson, Colton and other philosophers have written volumes without answering any of these questions, and nobody yet has been able to give answers satisfactory to all. There are four kinds of greatness: village greatness, provincial greatness, world greatness and era greatness, for we know that a man may be great in his village, mediocre in his province, county, state or country, a nonentity in the world, and a nobody in the era following that in which he lived. A few men are accepted as great during their lifetimes, a few of these are accepted as great outside their own colonies, and only a very few of these survive their own eras. While it is true that a man is seldom a hero in his own home, and that greatness is seen to better advantage from a distance, yet some greatness is so weak that it dies before it is fullgrown. Greatness is often divided into two kinds,—greatness of men of action, and greatness of men of thought; yet this is an improper division, since all great men are men of action, and are always endowed with a force which may be called pneumatic energy.

Bismarck once said that a really great man is known by three signs—generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, moderation in success; but Brougham insists that "the true test of a great man is his having been in advance of his age." Schopenhauer, in estimating the greatness of great men, applies the inverted law of the physical, which stands for the intellectual and spiritual nature, the former being lessened by distance, the latter increased. But these views do not help us much in our effort to find what is greatness. When Sir William Jones was asked who was the greatest man, he answered, "The best: and if I am required to say who is the best, I reply he that deserved most of his fellow-creatures." Is this a correct test?—what fellow-creatures?—creatures of his own time, or of all time?—who is to judge what is best for them,—they or I?—and who is to say whether he is deserving or not, and deserving of what? Dempsey is a great fighter; Raphael was a great painter; Socrates a great philosopher; Hannibal a great general; Beecher a great preacher; Columbus a great discoverer; Browning a great poet; Gibbon a great historian; Lincoln a great agitator; Dana a great editor; Steinitz a great chess-player; and so on,—perhaps the greatest of their time, but would they be numbered among the greatest men? Is a great shoemaker a great man? Yet he is very deserving of his fellow-creatures, and he may be the greatest of his kind. Is a great hangman as great as a great divine, and is the greatest clown to be numbered among the greatest men of history?

Again, in selecting the great men, should there not be some limit in number and some method of declaring different degrees of greatness, because otherwise the man who wrote "Home, Sweet Home" might find a place alongside Shakespeare. Again, should a conqueror be classed among the great? Still again, are philosophers like Schopenhauer, Ibsen, Bernard Shaw and Nietzsche to be numbered among the great, when most people say that their philosophy is wrong, destructive and immoral? No wonder, then, that nobody has yet been able to give a satisfactory definition of Greatness. Alexander accomplished wonders: he conquered the then known world and wept for other worlds to conquer; but perhaps he was not so deserving of his fellows as some poor shoemaker. And take Napoleon: he made all Europe run blood; yet he certainly did much good; are we to balance his account and determine if the good outweighed the bad? Dante and Milton are always numbered among the greatest men, yet some do say that these great poets did more harm than good by perpetuating the false doctrines of Hell and Paradise. Was Robespierre a great man?—no one questions that great good came from the French Revolution, yet who will urge a monument to Robespierre, the personification of that Revolution? His intentions were good, however bad may have been the method, but so were Cromwell's regardless of his fanaticism; yet public opinion curses the one and crowns the other. Some men seem to accomplish world-wonders without effort, while others struggle against tremendous odds: of the two, the latter, of course, are the greater, because, as Bryant says, "Difficulty is a nurse of greatness—a harsh nurse, who rocks her foster children roughly, but rocks them into strength. The mind, grappling with great aims and wrestling with mighty impediments, grows by a certain necessity to the stature of greatness." Some say that greatness is founded in human sympathy, and that the man who shows the biggest heart plus the greatest ability to do, is the greatest man. Others say that greatness consists in reforming the world along religious lines, and still others maintain that greatness is merely righteousness—"He is not great, who is no greatly good" (Shakespeare). Was Caesar great? Remember Campbell's line,—"What millions died that Caesar might be great." Beecher was doubtless right when he said, "Greatness lies not in being strong, but in the right use of strength," but men may differ as to what is the right use, for, suppose he uses it to defend his people against some other people, and for a cause which he believes in, as did Robert E. Lee? He thought he was right, many others thought he was right, and he displayed qualities truly great, yet Beecher would say that Lee was not a great man. No great man ever yet lived who was conceded so to be by everybody. We see many who are great, in a sense, and many that are good; but we seldom see a man who is both great and good; and, according to Franklin, a great man must be both. Leonardo da Vinci was great at many things,—"master of all the arts," and as virtuous as most men, yet many people place Caesar and Alexander in the list of great men and leave da Vinci out. Perhaps Colton was right when he said, "Subtract from the great men all that he owes to opportunity, all that he owes to chance, and all that he has gained by the wisdom of his friends and the folly of his enemies, and the giant will often be seen to be a pigmy." Shall we class Joan of Arc among the great? She was the victim of an illusion and she accomplished that which was bound to come. Shall we nominate Diogenes? He was what would now be called a tramp and lived in a tub. Shall we give Socrates a niche? He was also something of a tramp, and we may never know how much he really said of the many wise things which Plato attributed to him. Shall we declare Washington and Jefferson great, and not Tom Paine, when the latter knew more than the other two together, and gave them most of their ideas? No, we don't do that, because they say that Paine's religious views were bad. Shall Theodore Roosevelt go on the list? Shall we put Martin Luther on, and not Voltaire? And how about poor John Brown?—he did not accomplish much but he tried mighty hard and died in the attempt. Shall Booker T. Washington's name not go on the immortal list just because he is black? If not, how about Confucius who was yellow? Shall Jesus' name be written on the scroll and not Buddha's or Mohammed's? The fact is that it is next to impossible to name a complete list of the great men of history,—to say nothing of the greatest men. One of the toughest problems I ever attempted to solve was once given me by a young student, who asked me to write down the names of the twenty-five greatest men. I spent many evenings on it, and the answer was published in many newspapers. The chief difficulty came in the attempt to limit the list to just twenty-five—it is easy to make a list of about twenty-five, or about fifty, or about ten.

As I remember it, the list was as follows:

This list is not yet satisfactory. It should contain John Fiske, who knew everything, Herbert Spencer, Darwin, Kant, Descartes, Emerson, Washington,—but hold! there is no end. Ten years from now I shall make another list and it will probably contain a new name, perhaps Roosevelt, Wilson, Bryan, Foch.

As Rochefoucauld says, "However brilliant an action may be, it ought not to pass for great when it is not the result of great design." Some men became famous—apparently great—by accident, or because of circumstances, but that is not greatness. I once became the manager of a dinner in honor of Mr. Bryan, and, like Byron, woke up one morning to find myself famous—think of it!—famous for getting up a dinner. But such fame is meteoric and has but a mushroom existence. Fielding says somewhere that Greatness is like a laced coat from Monmouth Street, which fortune lends us for a day to wear and tomorrow puts it on another's back; but he did not mean Greatness, but Fame, or Popularity, Greatness is not greatness if it is not lasting. If we cannot tell what greatness is, we can tell what it is not. The greatness of a man must be judged from the viewpoint of his own time, and we must make due allowance for his weaknesses and blunders; for was not Napoleon a believer in astrology, and could not any school-child today correct Aristotle in natural history and physiology? With this thought in mind we shall not have so much difficulty in singling out the great men of history. "Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul" (Emerson), and we soon discover them, but not often in their own time—it requires the perspective of history to get them in focus. Great men are the models of nations. As Longfellow says, "they stand like solitary towers in the City of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligence, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream."

"Corporations are great engines for the promotion of the public convenience, and for the development of public wealth, and, so long as they are conducted for the purposes for which organized, they are a public benefit; but if allowed to engage, without supervision, in subjects of enterprise foreign to their charters, or if permitted unrestrainedly to control and monopolize the avenues to that industry in which they are engaged, they become a public menace; against which public policy and statutes design protection."

Leslie V. Lorillard, et al.—110 N. Y. 533.