CHAPTER III. BIOGRAPHY. ABOUT the year 1725, in a wood near Hamelin, in Germany, a wild human being was described by some hunters. It was a boy, seemingly about fifteen years of age. He was naked, ran swiftly on his hands and feet, swung himself from tree to tree like a monkey, and devoured moss and grass. He was caught and brought to England, but he tore off the clothes that were put on him, and preferred to devour his food raw. He was placed by the King under the tuition of the great scholar and wit, Dr. Arbuthnot; but although he lived till he was seventy, he never learned to talk. This hapless solitary, known in literature as Peter the Wild Boy, is a striking instance of humanity sunk to the level of the brutes. Such would be the deplorable state of every one of us if left to ourselves; but God has arranged that we should be endowed with the gifts and graces of those who have gone before us. In the first place, we participate in the blessings of our relatives and friends. We are surrounded from infancy with soft hands, gentle voices, and smiling faces. We are mimetic creatures, and imitate naturally what we see and hear; and we unconsciously adopt the language, the manners, and the ideas of those around us. In this way we inherit the accumulated experience of our ancestors. But this is not all. God has not only arranged that we should inherit the accumulated wisdom of our ancestors, but He has arranged that we should inherit, if we choose, the accumulated wisdom of the whole human race. This is a startling statement, but is it true? How can we grasp the wide illimitable ocean of human ideas? We cannot come into contact with even a few thousands of individuals; and even if we could, the varied experience of the few thousands would utterly confound us. There is nothing so perplexing as a crowd of people all very much alike. The plan by which this can be done is simple. We have only to study the lives of great men, their biographies. A great man, owing to his wonderful powers of mind and heart, masters, to a certain extent, all the knowledge and resources of his own time. Whatever is peculiar and striking, is appropriated by him. He is the embodiment of his age, the model, the representative man. And his deeds and words are so remarkable and memorable, that they are recorded for the benefit of all time to come. In this way, when we master the lives of the great men of a country, we are virtually possessing ourselves of the excellence and wisdom of all the men of that country. They are the centres, the foci into which all the virtue of the land is gathered. This, then, is the use of great men. They are intended to collect the scattered wisdom of the people, to embody it in living human action and words, and to make it palpable to all. They are thus wonderful and necessary contrivances, ingeniously designed for our use by an all-bountiful God. Some of them, in the rude jostling of the world, may have been strained and injured; yet still they are all God's gifts, and intended for our benefit. And indeed, as a rule, mankind are not slow to use these gifts, or what are supposed to be these gifts. There are few characteristics more marked than mankind's propensity to follow leaders either real or imaginary. They have a very strong tendency to fall into herds or flocks, to drift along, led, if not through the intelligence, through the eye, or by the ear, or even by the nose. They have been most appropriately compared to sheep, ever ready to follow in a body some bell-wether. With their silly heads low down, and all turned in the same direction, on they trot after him, doing whatever he does. If a stick is held up before him, and he leaps over it, and the stick is then removed, it does not matter. They leap too. On they go, one after another, bounding through the air, and shaking their foolish tails in triumph as if they had surmounted a real barrier. We have now seen that great men are necessary, and that other men are designed to follow them. The most important question now is, How can we discover these great men? How can we distinguish between false greatness and real greatness? This, you will easily see, is a most important question, one of the most important that could be asked. On it depends the very destiny of the world. For what is history but a lamentable account of how nations and sections of nations have beer. misled to their ruin by false gods, false heroes, false prophets, conquerors, demagogues, and quacks? It is our duty, therefore, to inquire who are the false leaders and who are the true. Who are the sham great men, the tinsel heroes that delude the nations? It would be vain to try to enumerate them all. We can only refer to three kinds. In the first place, there are those who are called great simply because they have been successful in acquiring power over their fellow-creatures. Success is supposed to be greatness. The man may be the most barefaced trickster. He may have risen to his present position by conceit, by unblushing impudence, by lying, by pandering to the folly and superstition of the rabble. It does not matter. There he sits bedizened with the insignia of office, and all the tuft-hunters worship him and call him great. The most wonderful specimen of this kind of abnormal greatness was the first Napoleon. He was the most portentous, the most sublime sham ever developed by the ages. It was indeed marvellous that he, a man of humble rank, should spring by the sheer force of character into notice, should gain the command of the French armies, and should hurl them like one great fire-belching, thundering tornado, to and fro across the continent of Europe, till mighty kingdoms were devastated, and old thrones were overset, till he loomed large before the eyes of all men, and the whole world could think of nobody and talk of nobody but Napoleon. But after all he was not a great man. There was scarcely a spark of humanity in him. The being who could coolly sacrifice the lives of thousands and the happiness of millions, who could stop the trade and industry of the globe, merely that his vanity might be pampered, was not a man at all. Some would call him a demon. But we would compare him to an ogre. He was indeed like the ogre of the fairy tales. He was abnormally big. There was a dread solitariness about his manner of life. He laid waste vast tracts of country; and he grew and fattened upon the blood of human victims. The world ought to have done with such military ogres who make people their food. People should object to become their food. If they wish such diet, let them feed upon each other. Let them be shut up like the Kilkenny cats to devour each other, leaving nothing but their tails. The world would be well rid of them. "War's a game which, were their subjects wise, Kings would not play at." In the second place, there are those who are called great simply because they make a noise. Noise is mistaken for greatness. In these days of political meetings, social meetings, debating societies, those men are constantly lifting up their voices, and the daily newspaper catches their clamor, and prolongs it for one day more. Society, in the good old feudal times, when men helped themselves to everything, and freely knocked each other about the head, was compared to a bear-garden. The bear-garden has now become a barn-yard, where the cackling of the geese and the gabbling of the turkeycocks drown the cries of the more modest members of the com munity. You all know a man of this noisy type. A maggoty brain, a ready tongue, and an unspeakable belief in himself, constitute his whole stock-in-trade. With these he keeps society astir. He breaks out in different parts of the country, he meddles with everything, and he attends to everything but his own business. He fondly fancies that he is one of the heads of the people, but he is only one of the mouths. He |