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Acres of Diamonds by Russell Conwell onlineACRES OF DIAMONDSpage 12 of 22 | page 1 | Acres of Diamonds - home  If you had a store in Philadelphia would you answer me like that? If so, then you are conducting your business just as I carried on my father's business in Worthington, Massachusetts. You don't know where your neighbor came from when he moved to Philadelphia, and you don't care. If you had cared you would be a rich man now. If you had cared enough about him to take an interest in his affairs, to find out what he needed, you would have been rich. But you go through the world saying, ``No opportunity to get rich,'' and there is the fault right at your own door. But another young man gets up over there and says, ``I cannot take up the mercantile business.'' (While I am talking of trade it applies to every occupation.) ``Why can't you go into the mercantile business?'' ``Because I haven't any capital.'' Oh, the weak and dudish creature that can't see over its collar! It makes a person weak to see these little dudes standing around the corners and saying, ``Oh, if I had plenty of capital, how rich I would get.'' ``Young man, do you think you are going to get rich on capital?'' ``Certainly.'' Well, I say, ``Certainly not.'' If your mother has plenty of money, and she will set you up in business, you will ``set her up in business,'' supplying you with capital. The moment a young man or woman gets more money than he or she has grown to by practical experience, that moment he has gotten a curse. It is no help to a young man or woman to inherit money. It is no help to your children to leave them money, but if you leave them education, if you leave them Christian and noble character, if you leave them a wide circle of friends, if you leave them an honorable name, it is far better than that they should have money. It would be worse for them, worse for the nation, that they should have any money at all. Oh, young man, if you have inherited money, don't regard it as a help. It will curse you through your years, and deprive you of the very best things of human life. There is no class of people to be pitied so much as the inexperienced sons and daughters of the rich of our generation. I pity the rich man's son. He can never know the best things in life. One of the best things in our life is when a young man has earned his own living, and when he becomes engaged to some lovely young woman, and makes up his mind to have a home of his own. Then with that same love comes also that divine inspiration toward better things, and he begins to save his money. He begins to leave off his bad habits and put money in the bank. When he has a few hundred dollars he goes out in the suburbs to look for a home. He goes to the savings-bank, perhaps, for half of the value, and then goes for his wife, and when he takes his bride over the threshold of that door for the first time he says in words of eloquence my voice can never touch: ``I have earned this home myself. It is all mine, and I divide with thee.'' That is the grandest moment a human heart may ever know. But a rich man's son can never know that. He takes his bride into a finer mansion, it may be, but he is obliged to go all the way through it and say to his wife, ``My mother gave me that, my mother gave me that, and my mother gave me this,'' until his wife wishes she had married his mother. I pity the rich man's son. |