Excerpt from The Life of Jesse W. Fell: Thesis Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts in History in the Graduate School of the University of Illinois, 1914

There are but few men in any generation of men who see their lives in relation to the accomplishment of that generation. Few realize, although all profess to believe, that appraisal of worth must be according to the proportion of a man's part in the advance of his day; and that all honors and distinctions fall away from men when they stand before that bar of years, to be judged in the stark light of truth as to character and service. All men acknowledge this to be truth, but the men are rare indeed who apply it to their own lives, and make it the basis of their individual schedule of values. Many men believe in the immortality of the soul, but few can conceive themselves in any scheme of time which transcends the limits of their own lifetime; or content themselves to labor with out reward, because they know that in the fullness of time all souls must find full conpensation.

In writing the story of a man whose part in the life of his time might in itself bring him some meed of remembrance, I am never theless most anxious that this rare quality of indifference to the little rewards that men might give, of steadfastness to ideals not generally held in his day, of faith in ultimate things, stand out as the true reason for his being brought as fully as possible before men. Here was a man who steadily ignored or refused honor and fame, who despised no quiet and unrecognized labor for a just cause, who was not turned aside from his steady aim by the pressure of circumstance; in short, whose belief in the future was interpreted in all the doings of his busy life. This is the sufficient reason for writing a life of Jesse W. Fell.

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