mes - 1918 Author:Associated Press Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: MELVILLE E. STONE A BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH By John Palmer Gavit WHEN Melville Elijah Stone comes to write his autobiography he may well take the title for it... more » from the famous words of Eneas to Dido, "All of which I saw." Nor would he be greatly overstraining the allusion were he to add the rest of it, "And a great part of which I was." If there is an American, living or dead, who during the seventy years since, on August 22, 1848, "M. E. S." first opened his eyes upon this eventful world, or during any other threescore years and ten, saw and participated in more of such great doings as constitute "high spots" in history, or who in such a space of time knew personally, not to say intimately, a greater number of the men whose names bulk large in national and world affairs, I do not know his name. The seventy years since 1848 have included vital times and happenings in the world; the speed of human progress has accelerated in geometric ratio; the entire industrial and economic fabric of society has been changed by the rise and diffusion of mechanical invention and the factory system; transoceanic traffic and cable communication have all but abolished distance between the nations; and now, at the closing of the period, a vast movement toward international democracy is culminating in the greatest and bloodiest of international wars. Any man who lived through such a period, with eyes open and mind alert, would witness enough tosatisfy the most insatiable "lust of seeing things." Add to an unusual equipment of eyes and mind the responsibility for operating during a quarter-century a worldwide organization of trained observers, and a globe- surrounding system of high-speed communication, with constantly multiplying opportunities to meet face to face the commanding figures of the men...« less