dered by Citizens of
Philadelphia in Acknowledgment of Work as Public Benefactor.

Chapter XXXVI.--The Path That Has Been Blazed. Problems That Need
Solving. The Need of Men Able to Solve Them.

Acres of Diamonds.

Personal Glimpses of Celebrated Men and Women.

[Illustration: MARTIN CONWELL]

CHAPTER I

ANCESTRY

John Conwell, the English Ancestor who fought for the Preservation of
the English Language. Martin Conwell of Maryland. A Runaway Marriage.
The Parents of Russell Conwell.

When the Norman-French overran England and threatened to sweep from
out the island the English language, many time-honored English
customs, and all that those loyal early Britons held dear, a doughty
Englishman, John Conwell, took up cudgels in their defence. Long and
bitter was the struggle he waged to preserve the English language.
Insidious and steady were the encroachments of the Norman-French
tongue. The storm centre was the Castle school, for John Conwell
realized that the language of the child of to-day is the language of
the man of to-morrow. Right royal was the battle, for it was in those
old feudal days of strong feeling and bitter, bloody partisanship. But
this plucky Briton stood to his guns until he won. Norman-French was
beaten back, English was taught in the schools, and preserved in the
speech of that day.

It was a tale that was told his children and his children's children.
It was a tradition that grew into their blood--the story of
perseverance, the story of a fight against oppression and injustice.
"Blood" is after all but family traditions and family ideals, and this
fighting ancestor handed down to his descendants an inheritance of
greater worth than royal lineage or feudal castle. The centuries
rolled away, a new world was discovered, and the progressive,
energetic Conwell family were not to be held back when adventure
beckoned. Two members of it came to America. Courage of a high
order, enthusiasm, faith, must they have had, or the call to cross
a perilous, pathless ocean, to brave unknown dangers in a new world
would have found no response in their hearts. They settled in Maryland
and into this fighting pioneer blood entered that strange magic
influence of the South, which makes for romance, for imagination, for
the poetic and ideal in temperament.

[Illustration: MIRANDA CONWELL]

Of this family came Martin Conwell, of Baltimore, hot-blooded, proud,
who in 1810, visiting a college chum in we