ACRES OF DIAMONDS
Friends. — This lecture has been delivered under these
circumstances: I visit a town or city, and try to arrive there
early enough to see the postmaster, the barber, the keeper of the
hotel, the principal of the schools, and the ministers of some of
the churches, and then go into some of the factories and stores,
and talk with the people, and get into sympathy with the local
conditions of that town or city and see what has been their
history, what opportunities they had, and what they had failed to
do — and every town fails to do something — and then go to the
lecture and talk to those people about the subjects which applied
to their locality. “Acres of Diamonds” — the idea — has
continuously been precisely the same. The idea is that in this
country of ours every man has the opportunity to make more of
himself than he does in his own environment, with his own skill,
with his own energy, and with his own friends.
RUSSELL H. CONWELL.