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JAMES J. HILL By Andbbw Thomas Weaver ONE of the strangest fallacies to which the hnman mind persistently clings is that there can be nothing unusual or worthy of admiration in one 's immediate surround- ings. The extraordinary, the wonderful, the great seem to exist in other ages and to have a peculiar faculty of inhabit- ing places and climes far from the particular locality in which we live. Great men may have lived in the centuries gone, dauntless warriors may have won memorable victorieSi fear- less discoverers may have lifted the curtain on new conti- nents, wonderful writers may have produced a classic litera- ture ; all this may have been accomplished in other lands and in other centuries, but to-day we have no Alexander the Great, we have no Columbus, we have no Shakespeare, and we live in a world of ordinary mortals while genius has returned to the gods. In the study of the lives of great men we often realize the truth of the saying, that to be great is to be misunderstood. Barely indeed has a nation or a people yielded the proper tribute of recognition to the men whose names the age and generation have handed on as their richest legacy to all eter- nity. To the appreciation of true values, perspective is in- dispensable. Distance not only lends enchantment, but indeed it would almost seem that distance alone can give true com- prehension of the worth of men and institutions. It is with a profound conviction that all the great men are not dead; that there are now living, men whose names are being re- corded on the imperishable scroll of fame, that we here at- tempt to set down a story of the life and achievements of a man who has made his mark in the history of this nation, a man who has indeed made the desert to blossom with roses, and has caused a thousand spears of wheat to grow where none had flourished before. To be great may be to be mis- understood, but to be great is not necessarily to be dead.