Acres of Diamonds: Russell H. Conwell (Docent Page)

Acres of Diamonds: The Multi-Million-Dollar Speech of Russell Conwell

A New England education in the nineteenth century meant that a young man could climb as far as he wanted – and Russell Herman Conwell, son of farmers in western Massachusetts, went all the way to Yale University. But like many other young men in 1862, he left school to enlist in the Union Army for the American Civil War. After the war he studied law and worked as an attorney, journalist, and lecturer, as well as writing campaign biographies of Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, and James A. Garfield. He would eventually become a Baptist minister, called in 1882 to the Grace Baptist Church of Philadelphia. By then he was already a gifted public speaker – but the best was yet to come.

Russell Conwell began to lecture publicly in 1863, while the war was still being fought. He spoke of battles and of life and death. After the war, giving a talk for reunion of the Forty-Sixth Massachusetts Regiment where he had been captain, he provided the first version of what became his “Acres of Diamonds” speech. A set of parables and tales drawn from life, the speech asserted that anyone could become rich – and that the process begins with seeing the riches in your own home town, on your own farm, in your own life.

Demand for the speech ballooned. Conwell gave it here in Athenaeum Hall, where working people and factory owners mingled. More than six thousand times, in America and around the world, he gave this popular lecture – and with it raised reportedly eight million dollars. He used his early lecture earnings as seed money for Temple College (now Temple University) and became its first president. Then he used the money for scholarships, as well as for growth of the university.

Like Henry Ward Beecher and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Conwell traveled for his lecture tours through the efforts of James Redpath, who founded a speaker’s bureau. Then one of Redpath’s employees, James Pond, branched off and formed another bureau, with speakers who included Henry Stanley, George Kennan, Bill Nye, James Whitcomb Riley, Thomas Nast, Mark Twain, Booker T. Washington, P. T. Barnum, George Washington Cable, Ellen Terry, Joseph Jefferson, and Henry Ward Beecher. Probably both of these lecture bureaus provided distinguished guests to St. Johnsbury.

The most controversial part of Russell Conwell’s “Acres of Diamonds” talk was its insistence that earning your way to wealth was consistent with the Gospels of the Christian Church. The portion of the lecture shown below shows how Conwell convinced his listeners by drawing from everyday family and community life.

For an unusual treat, you can actually listen to Conwell giving another part of this long talk – thanks to his living to 1925, into the era when sound recordings became common. At your home or library computer, listen in: http://historymatters.gmu.edu/d/5768
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From "Acres of Diamonds"


My friend, you take and drive me—if you furnish the auto—out into the suburbs of Philadelphia, and introduce me to the people who own their homes around this great city, those beautiful homes with gardens and flowers, those magnificent homes so lovely in their art, and I will introduce you to the very best people in character as well as in enterprise in our city, and you know I will. A man is not really a true man until he owns his own home, and they that own their homes are made more honorable and honest and pure, and true and economical and careful, by owning the home.


For a man to have money, even in large sums, is not an inconsistent thing. We preach against covetousness, and you know we do, in the pulpit, and oftentimes preach against it so long and use the terms about “filthy lucre” so extremely that Christians get the idea that when we stand in the pulpit we believe it is wicked for any man to have money—until the collection-basket goes around, and then we almost swear at the people because they don’t give more money. Oh, the inconsistency of such doctrines as that!



Money is power, and you ought to be reasonably ambitious to have it. You ought because you can do more good with it than you could without it. Money printed your Bible, money builds your churches, money sends your missionaries, and money pays your preachers, and you would not have many of them, either, if you did not pay them. I am always willing that my church should raise my salary, because the church that pays the largest salary always raises it the easiest. You never knew an exception to it in your life. The man who gets the largest salary can do the most good with the power that is furnished to him. Of course he can if his spirit be right to use it for what it is given to him.



I say, then, you ought to have money. If you can honestly attain unto riches in Philadelphia, it is your Christian and godly duty to do so. It is an awful mistake of these pious people to think you must be awfully poor in order to be pious.
Some men say, “Don’t you sympathize with the poor people?” Of course I do, or else I would not have been lecturing these years. I won’t give in but what I sympathize with the poor, but the number of poor who are to be sympathized with is very small. To sympathize with a man whom God has punished for his sins, thus to help him when God would still continue a just punishment, is to do wrong, no doubt about it, and we do that more than we help those who are deserving. While we should sympathize with God’s poor—that is, those who cannot help themselves—let us remember there is not a poor person in the United States who was not made poor by his own shortcomings, or by the shortcomings of some one else. It is all wrong to be poor, anyhow. Let us give in to that argument and pass that to one side.


A gentleman gets up back there, and says, “Don’t you think there are some things in this world that are better than money?” Of course I do, but I am talking about money now. Of course there are some things higher than money. Oh yes, I know by the grave that has left me standing alone that there are some things in this world that are higher and sweeter and purer than money. Well do I know there are some things higher and grander than gold. Love is the grandest thing on God’s earth, but fortunate the lover who has plenty of money. Money is power, money is force, money will do good as well as harm. In the hands of good men and women it could accomplish, and it has accomplished, good.


I hate to leave that behind me. I heard a man get up in a prayer-meeting in our city and thank the Lord he was “one of God’s poor.” Well, I wonder what his wife thinks about that? She earns all the money that comes into that house, and he smokes a part of that on the veranda. I don’t want to see any more of the Lord’s poor of that kind, and I don’t believe the Lord does. And yet there are some people who think in order to be pious you must be awfully poor and awfully dirty. That does not follow at all. While we sympathize with the poor, let us not teach a doctrine like that.