True greatness is often unrecognized.That is sure.You do not know anything about the greatest men and women.I went out to write the life of General Garfield,and a neighbor,knowing I was in a hurry,and as there was a great crowd around the front door,took me around to General Garfield's back door and shouted,"Jim!Jim!"And very soon"Jim"came to the door and let me in,and I wrote the biography of one of the grandest men of the nation,and yet he was just the same old"Jim"to his neighbor.If you know a great man in Philadelphia and you should meet him to-morrow,you would say,"How are you,Sam?"or"Good morning,Jim."Of course you would.That is just what you would do.
One of my soldiers in the Civil War had been sentenced to death,and I went up to the White House in Washington-—sent there for the first time in my life to see the President.I went into the waiting-room and sat down with a lot of others on the benches,and the secretary asked one after another to tell him what they wanted.After the secretay had been through theline,he went in,and then came back to the door and motioned for me.I went up to that anteroom,and the secretary said："That is the President's door right over there.Just rap on it and go right in."I never was so taken aback,friends,in all my life,never.The secretary himself made it worse for me,because he had told me how to go in and then went out another door to the left and shut that.There I was,in the hallway by myself before the President of the United States of America's door.I had been on fields of battle,where the shells did sometimes shriek and the bullets did sometimes hit me,but I always wanted to run.I have no sympathy with the old man who says,"I would just as soon march up to the cannon's mouth as eat my dinner."I have no faith in a man who doesn't know enough to be afraid when he is being shot at.I never was so afraid when the shells came around us at Antietam as I was when I went into that room that day;but I finally mustered the courage-—I don't know how I ever did-—and at arm’s-length tapped on the door.The man inside did not help me at all,but yelled out,"Come in and sit down!"