amples just cited. These men
were geniuses, and they are not to be imitated except as their methods
may be applicable to the common man. This paper is for common men--for
people like ourselves. There _are_ geniuses; but their high-wrought
lives, tornado activity, and methods of lightning are not for us. All
the world's real leaders, whether in the fields of thought or action,
whether in the council-chamber of the statesman, on the battle-field
of the warrior, in the study of the writer, or in the laboratory of
the scientist--all have been men of genius. No mediocre man ever was a
great leader in the historic sense.

With our habit of looking at to-day as though it were eternity, we
consider men "leaders," and use the adjectives "great," "splendid,"
etc., as applied to them, when historically these men will hardly be
discernible.

But all the figures large enough to fill history's perspective always
have been and always will be geniuses--men in whom the energy, the
thought, the imagination, the power of hundreds of men are
concentrated. Let us not deceive ourselves, and reap misery and
disappointment by thinking that we can, by any effort, equal them.
Alexander, Caesar, Richelieu, Napoleon, Bismarck, Washington, Darwin,
Goethe, Shakespeare, Lincoln, Pasteur, Edison, Plato, Rhodes, Ito,
Diaz, Peter the Great--we cannot explain these phenomena of human
intellect and character except by the word genius.

All our toil and patience and everything cannot seat us in the high
places of these princes of Nature. "Who, by taking thought, can add a
cubit to his stature?" (The Bible again, you see; we cannot get away
from the Bible.)

But these men never knew that they were geniuses. They would have
known it undoubtedly if they had stopped to think about it. But they
were too busy with their task. A genius never thinks about his powers,
any more than an eagle is concerned about the method of his royal
flight from the mountain crag. But for us, of the common mass of men,
only those methods of genius are applicable which are within our
reach. Mostly for us are the slow and toilsome--the sure, if
gradual--processes of patient labor and infinite pains.

So do not let the thought that you are a genius abide with you for a
moment--the main traveled roads for us ordinary mortals! The beaten
paths are not so far wrong, after all; and at their end is certain,
even perhaps distinguished, if not startling and historic, success.

And, be