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Excerpt from From Mill Boy to Minister: An Intimate Account of the Life of the Rt. Honourable J. R. Clynes, M P
But gravely do I doubt the truth of this idea. Very gravely, indeed, do I doubt that the lust to win greatness for what its achievement might mean to oneself invariably satisfies the hunger it creates. Though the biographers may give us instances of politicians and plutocrats, authors and artists who have won their way to lasting fame with no other incentive than this will for personal achievement, the number of such as these must be insignificant when it is compared with the thousands of little big men this merely personal ideal evolves. The momentary Mayors and the emptier Aldermen the self-made small capitalists whose selfish aims accentuate the cruelty and meanness of their masterships; the cheap and vain publicists seeking only the aggrandizement of self in all they do; the petty pastors and the Hyde Park preachers: these are but a few of the tin-god failures of the Will to-win.
The story I have to give is sweet and clean of this idea. It is the story of a man who achieved greatness unawares. It is the story of a man who sought knowledge not because its possession was to raise him above his fellows.
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