As Rochefoucauld says, "However brilliant an action may be, it ought not to pass for great when it is not the result of great design." Some men became famous--apparently great--by accident, or because of circumstances, but that is not greatness. I once became the manager of a dinner in honor of Mr. Bryan, and, like Byron, woke up one morning to find myself famous--think of it!--famous for getting up a dinner. But such fame is meteoric and has but a mushroom existence. Fielding says somewhere that Greatness is like a laced coat from Monmouth Street, which fortune lends us for a day to wear and tomorrow puts it on another's back; but he did not mean Greatness, but Fame, or Popularity, Greatness is not greatness if it is not lasting. If we cannot tell what greatness is, we can tell what it is not. The greatness of a man must be judged from the viewpoint of his own time, and we must make due allowance for his weaknesses and blunders; for was not Napoleon a believer in astrology, and could not any school-child today correct Aristotle in natural history and physiology? With this thought in mind we shall not have so much difficulty in singling out the great men of history. "Nature never sends a great man into the planet, without confiding the secret to another soul" (Emerson), and we soon discover them, but not often in their own time--it requires the perspective of history to get them in focus. Great men are the models of nations. As Longfellow says, "they stand like solitary towers in the City of God, and secret passages running deep beneath external nature give their thoughts intercourse with higher intelligence, which strengthens and consoles them, and of which the laborers on the surface do not even dream." * * * * * "Corporations are great engines for the promotion of the public convenience, and for the development of public wealth, and, so long as they are conducted for the purposes for which organized, they are a public benefit; but if allowed to engage, without supervision, in subjects of enterprise foreign to their charters, or if permitted unrestrainedly to control and monopolize the avenues to that industry in which they are engaged, they become a public menace; against which public policy and statutes design protection." _Leslie V. Lorillard, et al._--110 N. Y. 533. _The Martyrdom of Genius_