sent at
the services, and Dr. Conwell induced Oliver Wendell Holmes to read the
lines, and they were listened to amid profound silence, to their fine
ending.

Conwell, in spite of his widespread hold on millions of people, has
never won fame, recognition, general renown, compared with many men of
minor achievements. This seems like an impossibility. Yet it is not an
impossibility, but a fact. Great numbers of men of education and culture
are entirely ignorant of him and his work in the world--men, these, who
deem themselves in touch with world-affairs and with the ones who make
and move the world. It is inexplicable, this, except that never
was there a man more devoid of the faculty of self-exploitation,
self-advertising, than Russell Conwell. Nor, in the mere reading of
them, do his words appeal with anything like the force of the same
words uttered by himself, for always, with his spoken words, is his
personality. Those who have heard Russell Conwell, or have known him
personally, recognize the charm of the man and his immense forcefulness;
but there are many, and among them those who control publicity through
books and newspapers, who, though they ought to be the warmest in their
enthusiasm, have never felt drawn to hear him, and, if they know of him
at all, think of him as one who pleases in a simple way the commoner
folk, forgetting in their pride that every really great man pleases the
common ones, and that simplicity and directness are attributes of real
greatness.

But Russell Conwell has always won the admiration of the really great,
as well as of the humbler millions. It is only a supposedly cultured
class in between that is not thoroughly acquainted with what he has
done.

Perhaps, too, this is owing to his having cast in his lot with the city,
of all cities, which, consciously or unconsciously, looks most closely
to family and place of residence as criterions of merit--a city with
which it is almost impossible for a stranger to become affiliated--or
aphiladelphiated, as it might be expressed--and Philadelphia, in spite
of all that Dr. Conwell has done, has been under the thrall of the fact
that he went north of Market Street--that fatal fact understood by all
who know Philadelphia--and that he made no effort to make friends in
Rittenhouse Square. Such considerations seem absurd in this twentieth
century, but in Philadelphia they are still potent. Tens of thousands
of Philadelphians love him, and he is ho