was kept burning. We accept his gift with the very acme of nonchalance and
with little or no feeling of gratitude. Perhaps he would not have it
otherwise. We do not know. But certain it is that his marvelous
achievement has made life more agreeable to millions of people and he must
be conscious of this fact. At some time in his life he must have achieved
a sense of responsibility to his fellows and this worthy sentiment must
have become the guiding principle in all his labors. If some teacher
fostered in him this sense of responsibility, she did a piece of work for
the world that can never be measured in terms of salary. She did not teach
arithmetic, or grammar, or geography. She taught Edison. And one of the
big results of her teaching was his attainment of this sense of
responsibility which far overtops all the arithmetic and history that he
ever learned. The man who carried the message to Garcia is another fitting
illustration of this same principle. In executing his commission he
overcame difficulties that would have seemed insurmountable to a less
intrepid man. He kept his eye on the goal and endured almost unspeakable
hardships in pressing forward toward this goal. Somehow and somewhere in
his life he had learned the meaning of responsibility and so felt that he
must not fail. The world came to know him as a hero because he was a hero
at heart and his heroic achievement had its origin in the training that
led him to feel a sense of responsibility.




CHAPTER ELEVEN

LOYALTY