e truly great: sincerity and courage and singleness of purpose.

It is not without a certain awe that we contemplate these men--men like
ourselves, let us always remember, but, in many ways, how different! Not
different in that they were infallible or above temptation; not
different in that they never made mistakes; but different in that they
each of them possessed an inward vision of the true and the eternal,
while most of us grope blindly amid the false and trivial. What that
vision was, and with what high faith and complete devotion they followed
it, we shall see in the story of their lives.

This is the basic difference between great men and little ones--the
little ones are concerned solely with to-day; the great ones think only
of the future. They have gained that largeness of vision and of
understanding which perceives the pettiness of everyday affairs and
which disregards them for greater things. They live in the world,
indeed, but in a world modified and colored by the divine ferment within
them. There are some who claim that America has never produced a genius
of the first order, or, at most, but two; however that may be, she has
produced, as has no other country, men with great hearts and seeing eyes
and devoted souls who have spent themselves for their country and their
race.

One hears, sometimes, a grumbler complaining of the defects of a
republic; yet, certainly, in these United States, the republican form of
government, established with no little fear and uncertainty by the
Fathers, has, with all its defects, received triumphant vindication.
Nowhere more triumphant than in the men it has produced, the story of
whose lives is the story of its history.

There are two kinds of greatness--greatness of deed and greatness of
thought. The first kind is shown in the lives of such men as Columbus
and Washington and Farragut, who translated thought into action and who
_did_ great things. The second kind is the greatness of authors and
artists and scientists, who write great books, or paint great pictures
or make great discoveries, and this sort of greatness will be considered
in a future volume; for all there has been room for in this one is the
story of the lives of America's great "men of action." And even of them,
only a sketch in broad outline has been possible in space so limited;
but this little book is merely a guide-post, as it were, pointing toward
the road leading to the city where these great men dwel