HE CAN WHO THINKS HE CAN, AN IRON WILL & PUSHING TO THE FRONT. Orison Swett Marden
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began to plan a restored city greater and grander than the old. It was in dreams that the projectors of the great transcontinental railroads first saw teeming cities and vast business enterprises where the more “practical” men, without imagination, saw only the great American desert, vast alkali plains, sage grass, and impassable mountains. The dreams of men like Collis P. Huntington and Leland Stanford bound together the East and the West with bands of steel, made the two oceans neighbors, reclaimed the desert, and built cities where before only desolation reigned.
It was the persistency and grit of dreamers that triumphed over the congressmen without imagination who advised importing dromedaries to carry the mails across the great American desert; because they said it was ridiculous, a foolish waste of money, to build a railroad to the Pacific Ocean, as there was nothing there to support a population.
It was such dreamers as those who saw the great metropolis of Chicago in a straggling Indian village; who saw Omaha, Kansas City, Denver, Salt Lake City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco many years before they arrived, that made their existence possible.
It was such dreamers as Marshall Field, Joseph Leiter, and Potter Palmer, who saw in the ashes of the burned Chicago a new and glorified city, infinitely greater and grander than the old.
Take the dreamers out of the world's history, and who would care to read it? Our dreamers! They are the advance guard of humanity; the toilers who, with bent back and sweating brow, cut smooth roads over which man marches forward from generation to generation.
Most of the things which make life worth living, which have emancipated man from drudgery and lifted him above commonness and ugliness—the great amenities of life—we owe to our dreamers.
The present is but the sum total of the dreams of the ages that have gone before,—the dreams of the past made real. Our great ocean liners, our marvelous tunnels, our magnificent bridges, our schools, our universities, our hospitals, our libraries, our cosmopolitan cities, with their vast facilities, comforts, and treasures of art, are all the result of somebody’s dreams.
We hear a great deal of talk about the impracticality of dreamers, of people whose heads are among the stars while their feet are on the earth; but where would civilization be to-day but for the dreamers? We should still be riding in the stage-coach or tramping across continents. We should still cross the ocean in sailing ships, and our letters would be carried across continents by the pony express.
“It cannot be done,” cries the man without imagination. “It can be done, it shall be done,” cries the dreamer; and he persists in his dreams through all sorts of privations, even to the point of starvation, if necessary, until his visions, his inventions, his discoveries, his ideas for the betterment of the race, are made practical realities.
What a picture the dreamer Columbus presented as he went about exposed to continual scoffs and indignities, characterized as an adventurer, the very children taught to regard him as a madman and pointing to their foreheads as he passed! He dreamed of a world beyond the seas, and, in spite of unspeakable obstacles, his vision became a glorious reality.
It was the men who, a quarter of a century ahead of their contemporaries, saw the marvelous Hoe press in the hand-press that made modem journalism possible. Without these , dreamers our printing would still be done by hand. It was the men who were denounced as visionaries who practically annihilated space, and enabled us to converse and transact business with people thousands of miles away as though they were in the same building with us.
How many matter-of-fact, unimaginative men, who see only through practical eyes, would it take to replace in civilization an Edison, a Bell, or a Marconi?
The very practical people tell us that the imagination is all well enough in artists, musicians, and poets, but that it has little place in the great world of realities. Yet all leaders of men have been dreamers. Our great captains of industry, our merchant princes, have had powerful, prophetic imaginations. They had faith in the vast commercial possibilities of our people. If it had not been for our dreamers, the American population would still be hugging the Atlantic coast.
The most practical people in the world are those who can look far into the future and see the civilization yet to be; who can see the coming man emancipated from the narrowing, hampering fetters, limitations, and superstitions of the present day; who have the ability to foresee things to come with the power to make them realities. The dreamers have ever been those who have achieved the seemingly impossible.
Our public parks, our art galleries, our great institutions are dotted with monuments and statues which the world has built to its dreamers,—those who saw visions of better things, better days for the human race.
What horrible experiences men and women have gone through in prisons and dungeons for their dreams; dreams which were destined to lift the world from savagery and emancipate man from drudgery.
The very dreams for which Galileo and other great scientists were imprisoned and persecuted were recognized as science only a few generations later. Galileo's dream gave us a new heaven and a new earth. The dreams of Confucius, of Buddha, of Socrates, have become realities in millions of human lives. Christ Himself was denounced as a dreamer, but His whole life was a prophecy, a dream of the coming man, the coming civilization. He saw beyond the burlesque of the man God intended, beyond the deformed, weak, deficient, imperfect man heredity had made, to the perfect man, the ideal man, the image of divinity.
Our visions do not mock us. They are evidences of what is to be, the foreglimpses of possible realities. The castle in the air always precedes the castle on the earth.
George Stephenson, the poor miner, dreamed of a locomotive engine that would revolutionize the traffic of the world. While working in the coal pits for sixpence a day, or patching the clothes and mending the boots of his fellow-workmen to earn a little money to attend a night school, and at the same time supporting his blind father, he continued to dream. People called him crazy. “His roaring engine will set the houses on fire with its sparks,” everybody cried. “Smoke will pollute the air”; “carriage makers and coachmen will starve for want of work.” See this dreamer in the House of Commons, when members of Parliament were cross-questioning him. “What,” said one member, “can be more palpably absurd and ridiculous than the prospect held out of locomotives traveling twice as fast as horses? We should as soon expect the people of Woolwich to suffer themselves to be fired off upon one of Congreve’s rockets, as to trust themselves to the mercy of such a machine, going at such a rate. We trust that Parliament will, in all the railways it may grant, limit the speed to eight or nine miles an hour, which is as great as can be ventured upon.” But, in spite of calumny, ridicule, and opposition, this “crazy visionary” toiled on for fifteen years for the realization of his vision.
On the fourth of August, 1907, New York celebrated the centennial of the dream of Robert Fulton. See the crowd of curious scoffers at the wharves of the Hudson River at noon on Friday, August 4, 1807, to witness the results of what they thought the most ridiculous idea which ever entered a human brain; to witness what they believed would be a most humiliating failure of the dreams of a “crank” who proposed to take a party of people up the river to Albany in a steam vessel named the “Clermont”! “Did anybody ever hear of such an absurd idea as navigating against the current of the Hudson River without sail?” scornfully said the scoffing wiseacres. Many of them thought that the man who had fooled away his time and money on the “Clermont” was little better than an idiot, and that he ought to be in an insane asylum. But the “Clermont” did sail up the Hudson, and Fulton was hailed as a benefactor of the human race.
What does the world not owe to Morse, who gave it its first telegraph? When the inventor asked for an appropriation of a few thousand dollars for the first experimental line from Washington to Baltimore, he was sneered at by congressmen. After discouragements which would have disheartened most men, this experimental line was completed, and some congressmen were waiting for the message which they did not believe would ever come, when one of them asked the inventor how large a package he expected to be able to send over the wire. But very quickly the message did come, and derision was changed to praise.
The dream of Cyrus W. Field, which tied two continents together by the ocean cable, was denounced