Influence


Alice Freeman Palmer, the second president of Wellesley College, was happiest when she was doing most for others.

When she left the college in 1887, she gave herself so unweariedly to her self-imposed task of lightening the burdens of the unfortunate that her husband, a Harvard professor expostulated. He thought she should give her time and strength to writing books that would make her still more famous.

"You are building no monument," he said. "When you are gone, people will ask who you are and no one will be able to say."

"Well why should they?" was the answer. "I am trying to make people happier and wiser. Books don't help much toward that. It is people that count. You want to put yourself into people; they touch other people; these, others still, and so you go on working forever."

John T. Faris --- Sumitted by Matt Price --- West Virginia


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