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The Boy the Father of the Man
I do not recall that there was anything remarkable about my boyhood.
My father was a merchant in a small town not very far from New York.
He was honest to the point of personal sacrifice, indulgent and with an easy tolerance of boyish mischief.
I grew up almost unreproved and very seldom punished.
Even as a child my life was in my own keeping.
I was free to work or to play.
The teachings of Poor Richard’s Almanac, if quoted in our house, were not enforced by authority.
There was a sweet, Quaker spirit of goodness in my father’s attitude towards his family.
When he departed the world at sixty he left his family the possession of his good name, a shining black “strong box” filled with the promissory notes of his neighbors, and a declining business ruined by the more energetic competition of a younger and more easily satisfied generation.
His estate did not pay his creditors, but his name is one of the few things that sings to me yet in the sterner life of a harder generation.
From my father I inherited a zeal for trade.
I had a passion for making money.
It was easy to me.
I was always swapping things, my pockets were filled with the spoils of trade like a pedlar’s pack.
Even then I disliked gambling.
I did not gamble even as boys do, but at the end of the marble season I had the choicest collection of alleys in the town.
My first business venture was a lemonade stand on a circus day.
I formed a partnership on equal terms with a neighbor boy.
He supplied the location, the equipment, the lemons and tended bar, and got half of the profits.
There were many other such ventures.
Finally I drifted into my father’s store, where I spent Saturdays and holidays when away from school.
I worked about the shop, in the office and on the delivery wagon.
But in each I failed in turn.
The men said I was lazy.
I can now see that I was.
I had no mind for the thing.
I never could get down to work on time, and a certain disorderliness marked all of my habits: Not but that I tried hard enough, but in every position I seemed marked for failure.
I was forever trying to get some one else to do my work for me, or else I forgot the most important matters.
There were certain rules of thumb to which my grandfather and maiden aunts were forever calling my attention, but the virtues of early rising, hard work and business thrift were not in me.
I knew that I was held up as a sort of ne’er-do-well.
How this hurt me in those early days!
I did not seem to be able to do the things other people set me at or to do them in their way.
I took these matters seriously, and I suffered because of them!
The things which were difficult to me then have remained impossible to me to this day.
I think I was about fourteen years old when I began to redeem myself.
I was then in the grammar school.
It was about this time that the New York dailies began to reach the smaller inland towns.
Early trains brought in the morning editions about seven o’clock, and the afternoon papers about four.
At that time they were very little read.
The local papers with their patent insides satisfied the local demands.
Everything I had turned my hand to in my father’s business had gone wrong, and in a sort of desperation I started out to work up a route for the delivery of metropolitan papers.
It occurred to my father that a distant relative of his, who had left the city some years before, was connected with a news agency in New York City which handled the papers, and the next time he went to New York he took me with him.
He thought he might give me some pointers.
We called upon his friend, and in some way or other, either by chance or design, he told me that if I would undertake to work up the town, he would arrange to let me have the exclusive right of selling the papers for a certain period.
This was arranged in some way with the railroads, who were identified with the news agency.
On my return I set resolutely to work to carry this out and soon had quite a route.
In the following month those boys who had been selling papers found their supply cut off.
They were not able to understand it, and I did not enlighten them.
Soon I had the other boys working for me, and in a short time was making what seemed to me to be a princely income, even though it were but a few dollars a week.
But my easy gains came near being my ruin.
My old habits of indolence got the better of me.
I hated to get up at dawn to meet the early train and make my deliveries, and on several occasions papers were carried past the station and the people complained about not getting them until afternoon.
I then employed two boys younger than myself to do this work for me.
There were any number eager for the job, and I think I paid competitive wages.
On Saturday afternoons I made collections and my father sent on the remittances to the news agency in New York.
My easy success was re-establishing my self-respect.
But at the same time my lazy habits were distressing my solicitous Puritan-minded aunts and relatives.
I violated all the rules of business and still succeeded.
Such habits, they thought, were flying in the face of Providence.
They did not conform to those steady-going ideas of attention to business that were held up as the secret of success.
And yet, as I now look back on them, I can see that for some reason or other the same rules of business brought one after another of the men whom I knew into the insolvency court.
So I loafed and fished and made my weekly collections, and succeeded in spite of the predictions of my relatives.
For so long as I had an exclusive contract with the news agency, which evidently had a similar one with the railroads, I could do as I pleased.
No one else could secure the papers and hence no one could either cut the price or improve the service.
I was free from the fear of competition, and so long as I served the people sufficiently well to prevent any serious complaint from being carried to New York, I was secure.
I dimly appreciated the situation even then.
And partly by chance, partly by design, I have pursued the same policy in my business ever since.
I kept out of competitive business, that is, business which anyone could do or in which there was any risk.
And if I did enter some competitive business, I tied it up with something else so as to make a monopoly out of it.
Years later I did this with some coal mines, and thus controlled the entire market.
And the principle underlying my first boyish business venture has been the secret of all my subsequent success.
This was true of the gas and street railway business; it was true of the coal mining and steam railroad undertakings.
In the financing of the immense business ventures which were placed on the market in 1899 and rooo the same policy was followed.
Opportunities were offered me to go into the combination of many industries, such as baking and furniture manufacture, machine shop and pipe consolidations, brick-making and sewer pipe companies.
Some of them have been a success, but the majority failed.
Others there were, like coal mining and iron ore, gas, electric lighting and street railways that I knew were safe.
For they could not be duplicated.
They were natural monopolies.
And while many of my friends who went into these trusts against my advice lost the plants they had spent their lives in upbuilding, the consolidations which I carried through, those which were “bottomed on the land,” have all made big money.
For labor can always build factories, plants and machine shops, but all the labor in the world will not duplicate a coal or an iron mine, and nothing short of an exodus of all the peeps could destroy the value of a city franchise.
Those days of my boyhood still stand out in my mind.
Never since have I enjoyed such unquestioned pre-eminence as I did in the days when all the boys at School Number III begged for the privilege of employment and treated me as a young captain of industry.
For I always had dimes where they had pennies.
I always had candy where they had none.
And better still, I always had excuses to explain my absence from school, while they labored over the things we all hated.
In the summer vacations I employed a number of boys to canvass the town.
They went to the stores and homes of the people.
I began to handle magazines and periodicals as well as the metropolitan
dailies.
Those who already subscribed directly willingly gave me their orders because of the earlier delivery.
In time, I rented a small news stand.
I was selling about a thousand papers a day and about a hundred magazines a month.
This was a fabulous income for me.
From it I realized from $50.00 to $75.00 a week.
My expenses were less than half this sum, and I felt as rich as a prince.
The wonder is that it did not ruin me.
But I kept my head, saved some money, and liked the position of importance sufficiently well to give it proper attention.
From time to time the news agency extended the contract and continued it for several years, when a change being made in methods, I was ruthlessly succeeded by an older man, who became the agent of the company.
While this seemed a cruel blow to me, it was, in reality, the greatest piece of good fortune.
Had I been left undisturbed I should in all probability have lived on in easy comfort in a community which had already reached its growth, and finished my days along with my school fellows, the majority of whom are still to be found there clerking in the stores, driving delivery wagons, or working as laborers.
I had just completed the high school course (largely by the grace of the teachers) when the agency was taken from me.
But at this time I was earning more than many men out of their business.
I made a struggle to continue the news agency, despite the action of the railroad.
I endeavored to secure my papers and publications directly | from the publishers.
But by some arrangement which existed between the railway and the news agency it was impossible to do this, and I soon relinquished the idea and concluded to enter college.
Up to this time my work at school had given no promise of academic interests or professional ambitions.
Everybody said I was Capable enough, but too lazy.
As a matter of fact, as I now look back upon it, I had no interest in education.
But I had sufficient money to carry me along in comfort through the greater part of the course in a small inland college, and I was not in the habit of worrying over difficulties until they came.
At college I was equally easy-going and without definite purpose.
I joined the fraternity which had most of the good fellows in it, and loafed a fair share of the time, although I did manage to keep along with my class.
This was not a very difficult thing, at that time, when the idea of the authorities seemed to be that a boy had to spend four years somehow, and he might as well spend them at college as anywhere else.
I also took a hand in college politics, was interested in college journalism, received some honors at the hands of the students, and graduated four years after I entered, about the middle of my class.
I am inclined to smile when I think of some of the things I then studied.
I had to take all the Greek and Latin in the course, and in addition a term or two of a score of other studies of which I cannot now enumerate even the titles.
I was interested in political economy, but when I take down my John Stuart Mill and see what he says about wealth, value, cost, labor, - etc., and compare his photograph of society with the society which actually exists, I feel it could not be recognized as the same thing by any one living in it.
If medicine, surgery, architecture, law, bookkeeping or any other science as taught, bore the same resemblance to the real thing that political economy does to life, men had better go some place else for an education than to college.
Possibly the universities are teaching different things today than they did then.
Certainly the Robinson Crusoe-like description of organized society as it then appeared in the text books on political economy did not give a man much of an equipment for the solution of its problems.
But my business instincts were as acute at college as they had been at home.
At the end of the second year I found my funds running low and realized that I must either quit college or increase my income.
I could hope for nothing from my father, who was slowly being involved by the fiercer competition of business and the burdens of a large family.
I hit upon two expedients.
I went to the President of the college and told him my situation, and asked whether the faculty would permit me to use an unoccupied room as a book shop.
Having secured this consent, I went to New York and canvassed the publishers for the exclusive sale of text books.
As there was no book store of any proportions in the college town, I finally secured this privilege, and on the opening of the new year equipped my store room with text books, stationery and students’ supplies, which I placed in the hands of a student more needy than I was myself.
I carried this on during the balance of my course, despite the protests of the book houses in the town, who were cut off from this their principal source of revenue.
And it yielded me a revenue adequate for all my needs, which were rather more than the simple life of the college demanded.
But before the end of that year I planned another stroke.
I had noticed that the railway entering the town owned all the land approaches to the station.
They were able to exclude any one from their use or give it to any one whom they desired.
With this in mind, I approached the station master and finally agreed to give him a certain sum of money every month if he ‘would grant me the exclusive privilege of coming on the railway premises with hacks and transfer wagons.
He took this up with the higher officials and finally secured their consent.
With this assurance I purchased several carriages and an express wagon, and when the rule went into effect my drivers were the only ones who could approach within a thousand feet of the station.
Naturally I got all the traffic.
My business boomed.
The other drivers protested and stormed.
When they went to the station master he said he would report their complaints, but the only satisfaction they ever got was an assurance that the officials had the matter under advisement.
In a short time I had a monopoly of the business.
The privilege which the railway gave me made it impossible for any one else to compete, and at the end of a few months’ time I was able to buy out such wagons and carriages as I needed, while the other men, one after another, went out of business.
At the close of my college year I was several thousand dollars to the good, but as undecided as ever as to my career.
I had no liking for teaching or medicine, and while other members of the class were preparing for their future work I found myself drifting as before.
Upon graduation I was as much at sea as ever, and returned home to find my father in declining health and my family in need of my assistance.
For lack of something better to do, I registered for the study of law in my uncle’s office, and went through a tedious and laborious course in Blackstone, Coke, and some other old dignitaries whose names I have since forgotten, and at the end of two years’ time, passed my examinations and was admitted to the bar with about the same formality and with little more difficulty than had I been seeking admission to the church.
I knew a great deal about the feudal system, about fines and recoveries, estates tail and the rule in Shelley’s case, but had I been confronted with a legal proposition I should have been as much at sea as with a problem in higher calculus.
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