ely broke down and the chairman apologized for
his failure. Sir James Graham and Mr. Disraeli failed and were
derided at first, and only succeeded by dint of great labor and
application. At one time Sir James Graham had almost given up public
speaking in despair. He said to his friend Sir Francis Baring: "I
have tried it every way--extempore, from notes, and committing it
all to memory--and I can't do it. I don't know why it is, but I am
afraid I shall never succeed." Yet by dint of perseverance, Graham,
like Disraeli, lived to become one of the most effective and
impressive of parliamentary speakers.

In every field of effort success has only come after many trials.
Morse with his telegraph and Howe with his sewing machine lived in
poverty and met with many disappointments before the world came to
appreciate the value of their great inventions.

It can be said with truth that these great men could have avoided
much of their trouble if they had had the necessary experience. But
particularly in the two cases cited before, the inventions were new
to the world and it needed that the world should have the experience
of their utility as well as the inventors.

Science also has had its martyrs, who have fought their way to light
through difficulty, persecution and suffering. We need not refer to
the cases of Bruno, Galileo and others, persecuted because of the
supposed heterodoxy of their views. But there have been other
unfortunates among men of science, whose genius has been unable to
save them from the fury of their enemies. Thus Bailly, the
celebrated French astronomer (who had been mayor of Paris) and
Lavoisier, the great chemist, were both guillotined in the first
French Revolution. When the latter, after being sentenced to death
by the Commune, asked for a few days' respite to enable him to
ascertain the result of some experiments he had made during his
confinement, the tribunal refused his appeal, and ordered him for
immediate execution, one of the judges saying that "the Republic has
no need of philosophers." In England also, about the same time, Dr.
Priestley, the father of modern chemistry, had his house burned over
his head and his library destroyed, amidst the shouts of "No
philosophers!" and he fled from his native country to lay his bones
in a foreign land.

Courageous men have often turned enforced solitude to account in
executing works of great pith and moment. It is in solitude that the
passion for spi