Captains of Industry | Page 9

study.
After a while, he began to think that he might perhaps earn his
subsistence in part by his knowledge of languages, and thus save much
waste of time and vitality at the forge. He wrote a letter to William
Lincoln, of Worcester, who had aided and encouraged him; and in this
letter he gave a short history of his life, and asked whether he could not
find employment in translating some foreign work into English. Mr.
Lincoln was so much struck with his letter that he sent it to Edward
Everett, and he having occasion soon after to address a convention of
teachers, read it to his audience as a wonderful instance of the pursuit
of knowledge under difficulties. Mr. Everett prefaced it by saying that
such a resolute purpose of improvement against such obstacles excited
his admiration, and even his veneration.
"It is enough," he added, "to make one who has good opportunities for
education hang his head in shame."
All this, including the whole of the letter, was published in the
newspapers, with eulogistic comments, in which the student was
spoken of as the Learned Blacksmith. The bashful scholar was
overwhelmed with shame at finding himself suddenly famous.
However, it led to his entering upon public life. Lecturing was then
coming into vogue, and he was frequently invited to the platform.
Accordingly, he wrote a lecture, entitled "Application and Genius," in
which he endeavored to show that there is no such thing as genius, but
that all extraordinary attainments are the results of application. After
delivering this lecture sixty times in one season, he went back to his
forge at Worcester, mingling study with labor in the old way.
On sitting down to write a new lecture for the following season, on the
"Anatomy of the Earth," a certain impression was made upon his mind,
which changed the current of his life. Studying the globe, he was
impressed with the need that one nation has of other nations, and one
zone of another zone; the tropics producing what assuages life in the

northern latitudes, and northern lands furnishing the means of
mitigating tropical discomforts. He felt that the earth was made for
friendliness and coöperation, not for fierce competition and bloody
wars.
Under the influence of these feelings, his lecture became an eloquent
plea for peace, and to this object his after life was chiefly devoted. The
dispute with England upon the Oregon boundary induced him to go to
England, with the design of traveling on foot from village to village,
preaching peace, and exposing the horrors and folly of war. His
addresses attracting attention, he was invited to speak to larger bodies,
and, in short, he spent twenty years of his life as a lecturer upon peace,
organizing Peace Congresses, advocating low uniform rates of ocean
postage, and spreading abroad among the people of Europe the feeling
which issued, at length, in the arbitration of the dispute between the
United States and Great Britain; an event which posterity will, perhaps,
consider the most important of this century. He heard Victor Hugo say
at the Paris Congress of 1850:--
"A day will come when a cannon will be exhibited in public museums,
just as an instrument of torture is now, and people will be amazed that
such a thing could ever have been."
If he had sympathetic hearers, he produced upon them extraordinary
effects. Nathaniel P. Rogers, one of the heroes of the Anti-slavery
agitation, chanced to hear him in Boston in 1845 on his favorite subject
of Peace. He wrote soon after:--
"I had been introduced to Elihu Burritt the day before, and was much
interested in his original appearance, and desirous of knowing him
further. I had not formed the highest opinion of his liberality. But on
entering the hall my friends and I soon forgot everything but the
speaker. The dim-lit hall, the handful audience, the contrast of both
with the illuminated chapel and ocean multitude assembled overhead,
bespeak painfully the estimation in which the great cause of peace is
held in Christendom. I wish all Christendom could have heard Elihu
Burritt's speech. One unbroken, unabated stream it was of profound and
lofty and original eloquence. I felt riveted to my seat till he finished it.

There was no oratory about it, in the ordinary sense of that word; no
graces of elocution. It was mighty thoughts radiating off from his
heated mind like the sparkles from the glowing steel on his own anvil,
getting on as they come out what clothing of language they might, and
thus having on the most appropriate and expressive imaginable. Not a
waste word, nor a wanting one. And he stood and delivered himself in a
simplicity and earnestness of attitude and gesture belonging to his
manly and now honored