Thirdly, it means a chance to do one’s job—one’s own job—and to do it to the limit of one’s capacity. This is the foundation on which both recognition and self-respect must be built. “Blessed is the man,” says Carlyle, “who has found his work; let him seek no other blessedness.” Because a man is freer in America to pass from one calling to another, from one class to another, from one region to another; because here people are willing to be shown what he can do; the chances are greater than elsewhere that he will find the task and circumstances which fit him best and let him count for most. If you read through these nine lives, you will see that what each of these men was really after, and what each found more fully here than in the old world, was not wealth or power or pleasure of the senses, but the chance to do the biggest job of which he was capable. Three of them, indeed, did gather great wealth, but it was either a by-product of the main achievement of their lives, or the instrument of that achievement. The vision that inspired James J. Hill was not a colossal fortune, but the opening up and populating of a great territory with farmers leading large, wholesome, and prosperous lives. Two of the nine were artists, who neither asked nor received great financial rewards, but who found here the chance to create beauty and to form taste, and in seizing this chance they found their supreme satisfaction. Of these nine men I have known only one, Augustus Saint-Gaudens; but none could have illustrated better the spirit in which work has to be done if it is to yield its greatest reward. What struck me in watching Saint-Gaudens work was his absolute indifference to what a statue would cost him in pains or in time, or to what it would bring him in money, and his complete absorption in making it as nearly perfect as he could. He did not “count the mortal years it takes to mould the immortal forms.” He would work for hours on the modeling of an inch of surface, seeking for an exactness of result imperceptible to the lay bystander. He would never be hurried—and he found America willing to wait. The same spirit worked in Ericsson in his inventions, in Carl Schurz in his unceasing quest for political justice, in Riis in his cleaning up of New York City. Some of these men were not outstanding intellects, but each cared intensely about his job, and to each America gave his chance.