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Title: Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 11 (of 14)
       Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen


Author: Elbert Hubbard



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LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE HOMES OF THE GREAT, VOLUME 11

Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen

by

ELBERT HUBBARD

Memorial Edition







New York
1916.




CONTENTS

  ROBERT OWEN
  JAMES OLIVER
  STEPHEN GIRARD
  MAYER A. ROTHSCHILD
  PHILIP D. ARMOUR
  JOHN J. ASTOR
  PETER COOPER
  ANDREW CARNEGIE
  GEORGE PEABODY
  A. T. STEWART
  H. H. ROGERS
  JAMES J. HILL



ROBERT OWEN


     I have always expended to the last shilling my surplus wealth in
     promoting this great and good cause of industrial betterment. The
     right-reverend prelate is greatly deceived when he says that I have
     squandered my wealth in profligacy and luxury. I have never
     expended a pound in either; all my habits are habits of temperance
     in all things, and I challenge the right-reverend prelate and all
     his abettors to prove the contrary, and I will give him and them
     the means of following me through every stage and month of my life.

                      --_Robert Owen, in Speech before the House of Lords_

[Illustration: ROBERT OWEN]


In Germany, the land of philosophy, when the savants sail into a sea of
doubt, some one sets up the cry, "Back to Kant!"

In America, when professed democracy grows ambitious and evolves a lust
for power, men say, "Back to Jefferson!"

In business, when employer forgets employee and both forget their better
manhood, we say, "Back to Robert Owen!"

We will not go back to Robert Owen: we will go on to Robert Owen, for
his philosophy is still in the vanguard.

Robert Owen was a businessman. His first intent was to attain a
practical success. He produced the article, and sold it at a profit.

In this operation of taking raw material and manufacturing it into forms
of use and beauty--from the time the seed was planted in the ground on
up to the consumer who purchased the finished fabric and wove it--Owen
believed that all should profit--all should be made happier by every
transaction.

That is to say, Robert Owen believed that a business transaction where
both sides do not make money is immoral.

There is a legal maxim still cited in the courts--"Caveat emptor"--let
the buyer beware.

For this maxim Robert Owen had no respect. He scorned the thought of
selling a man something the man did not want, or of selling an article
for anything except exactly what it was, or of exacting a price for it,
by hook or crook, beyond its value.

Robert Owen believed in himself, and in his product, and he believed in
the people. He was a democratic optimist. He had faith in the demos; and
the reason was that his estimate of the people was formed by seeing into
his own heart. He realized that he was a part of the people, and he knew
that he wanted nothing for himself which the world could not have on the
same terms. He looked into the calm depths of his own heart and saw that
he hated tyranny, pretense, vice, hypocrisy, extravagance and untruth.
He knew in the silence of his own soul that he loved harmony, health,
industry, reciprocity, truth and helpfulness. His desire was to benefit
mankind, and to help himself by helping others.

Therefore he concluded that, the source of all life being the same, he
was but a sample of the average man, and all men would, if not
intimidated and repressed, desire what he desired.

When physically depressed, through lack of diversified exercise, bad air
or wrong conditions, he realized that his mind was apt to be at war, not
only with its best self, but with any person who chanced to be near.
From this he argued that all departures in society were occasioned by
wrong physical conditions, and in order to get a full and free
expression of the Divine Mind, of which we are all reflectors or
mediums, our bodies must have a right environment.

To get this right environment became the chief business and study of his
life.

To think that a man who always considers "the other fellow" should be a
great success in a business way is to us more or less of a paradox.
"Keep your eye on Number One," we advise the youth intent on success.
"Take care of yourself," say the bucolic Solons when we start on a
little journey. And "Self-preservation is the first law of life," voice
the wise ones.

And yet we know that the man who thinks only of himself acquires the
distrust of the whole community. He sets in motion forces that work
against him, and has thereby created a handicap that blocks him at every
step.

Robert Owen was one of those quiet, wise men who win the confidence of
men, and thereby siphon to themselves all good things. That the
psychology of success should have been known to this man in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety, we might call miraculous, were it not for the fact that
the miraculous is always the natural.

Those were troublous times when Robert Owen entered trade. The French
Revolution was on, and its fires lit up the intellectual sky of the
whole world. The Colonies had been lost to England; it was a time of
tumult in Threadneedle Street; the armies of the world were lying on
their arms awaiting orders. And out of this great unrest emerged Robert
Owen, handsome, intelligent, honest, filled with a holy zeal to help
himself by helping humanity.

Robert Owen was born in the village of Newtown, Wales, in Seventeen
Hundred Seventy-one. After being away from his native village for many
years, he returned, as did Shakespeare and as have so many successful
men, and again made the place of his boyhood the home of his old age.
Owen died in the house in which he was born. His body was buried in the
same grave where sleeps the dust of his father and his mother. During
the eighty-seven years of his life he accomplished many things and
taught the world lessons which it has not yet memorized.

In point of time, Robert Owen seems to have been the world's first
Businessman. Private business was to him a public trust. He was a
creator, a builder, an economist, an educator, a humanitarian. He got
his education from his work, at his work, and strove throughout his long
life to make it possible for others to do the same.

He believed in the Divinity of Business. He anticipated Emerson by
saying, "Commerce consists in making things for people who need them,
and carrying them from where they are plentiful to where they are
wanted."

Every economist should be a humanitarian; and every humanitarian should
be an economist. Charles Dickens, writing in Eighteen Hundred Sixty,
puts forth Scrooge, Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens
wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble
brothers--men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings
to poor widows, and coal and loaves of bread to families living in
rickety tenements. The Dickens idea of betterment was the priestly plan
of dole. Dickens did not know that indiscriminate almsgiving pauperizes
humanity, and never did he supply the world a glimpse of a man like
Robert Owen, whose charity was something more than palliation.

Robert Owen was born in decent poverty, of parents who knew the simple,
beautiful and necessary virtues of industry, sobriety and economy. Where
this son got his hunger for books and his restless desire for
achievement we do not know. He was a business genius, and from genius of
any kind no hovel is immune.

He was sent to London at the age of ten, to learn the saddler's trade;
at twelve he graduated from making wax-ends, blacking leather and
greasing harness and took a position as salesman in the same business.

From this he was induced to become a salesman for a haberdasher. He had
charm of manner--fluidity, sympathy and health. At seventeen he asked to
be paid a commission on sales instead of a salary, and on this basis he
saved a hundred pounds in a year.

At eighteen a customer told him of a wonderful invention--a machine
that was run by steam--for spinning cotton into yarn. Robert was
familiar with the old process of making woolen yarn on a spinning-wheel
by hand--his mother did it and had taught him and his brothers and
sisters how.

Cotton was just coming in, since the close of "George Washington's
Rebellion." Watt had watched his mother's teakettle to a good purpose.
Here were two big things destined to revolutionize trade: the use of
cotton in place of flax or wool, and steam-power instead of human
muscle. Robert Owen resigned his clerkship and invested all of his
earnings in three mule spinning-machines. Then he bought cotton on
credit.

He learned the business, and the first year made three hundred pounds.

Seeing an advertisement in the paper for an experienced superintendent
of a cotton mill, he followed his intuitions, hunted out the advertiser,
a Mr. Drinkwater, and asked for the place.

Mr. Drinkwater looked at the beardless stripling, smiled and explained
that he wanted a man, not a boy--a man who could take charge of a mill
at Manchester, employing five hundred hands.

Robert Owen stood his ground.

What would he work for?

Three hundred pounds a year.

Bosh! Boys of nineteen could be had for fifty pounds a year.

"But not boys like me," said Robert Owen, earnestly. Then he explained
to Mr. Drinkwater his position--that he had a little mill of his own and
had made three hundred pounds the first year. But he wanted to get into
a larger field with men of capital.

Mr. Drinkwater was interested. Looking up the facts he found them to be
exactly as stated. He hired the youth at his own price and also bought
all of young Mr. Owen's machinery and stock, raw and made up.

Robert Owen, aged nineteen, went at once to Manchester and took charge
of the mill. His business was to buy and install new machinery, hire all
help, fix wages, buy the raw material, and manufacture and sell the
product.

For six weeks he did not give a single order, hire a new man, nor
discharge an old one. He silently studied the situation. He worked with
the men--made friends with them, and recorded memoranda of his ideas. He
was the first one at the factory in the morning--the last to leave it at
night.

After six weeks he began to act.

The first year's profit was twenty per cent on the investment, against
five for the year before.

Drinkwater paid him four hundred pounds instead of three, and proposed
it should be five hundred for the next year. A contract was drawn up,
running for five years, giving Owen a salary, and also a percentage
after sales mounted above a certain sum.

Robert Owen was now twenty years of age. He was sole superintendent of
the mill. The owner lived at London and had been up just once--this
after Owen had been in his new position for three months. Drinkwater saw
various improvements made in the plant--the place was orderly, tidy,
cleanly, and the workers were not complaining, although Owen was
crowding out the work.

Owen was on friendly terms with his people, visiting them in their
homes. He had organized a day-school for the smaller children and a
night-school for the older ones who worked in the mills. His
friendliness, good-cheer and enthusiasm were contagious. The place was
prosperous.

       *       *       *       *       *

Just here let us make a digression and inspect the peculiar conditions
of the time.

It was a period of transition--the old was dying, the new was being
born. Both experiences were painful.

There was a rapid displacement of hand labor. One machine did the work
of ten or more persons. What were these people who were thrown out, to
do? Adjust themselves to the new conditions, you say. True, but many
could not. They starved, grew sick, ate their hearts out in useless
complaining.

Only a few years before, and the spinning of flax and wool was
exclusively a home industry. Every cottage had its spinning-wheel and
loom. There was a garden, a cow, a pig, poultry and fruits and flowers.
The whole household worked, and the wheel and loom were never idle while
it was light. The family worked in relays.

It was a very happy and prosperous time. Life was simple and natural.
There was constant labor, but it was diversified. The large flocks of
sheep, raised chiefly for wool, made mutton cheap. Everything was
home-made. People made things for themselves, and if they acquired a
superior skill they supplied their neighbors, or exchanged products with
them. As the manufacturing was done in the homes, there was no crowding
of population. The factory boarding-house and the tenement were yet to
come.

This was the condition up to Seventeen Hundred Seventy. From then until
Seventeen Hundred Ninety was the time of transition. By Seventeen
Hundred Ninety, mills were erected wherever there was water-power, and
the village artisans were moving to the towns to work in the mills.

For the young men and women it was an alluring life. The old way gave
them no time to themselves--there was the cow to milk, the pigs and
poultry to care for, or the garden making insistent demands. Now they
worked at certain hours for certain wages, and rested. Tenements took
the place of cottages, and the "public," with its smiling barkeep, was
always right at the corner.

Hargreaves, Arkwright, Watt and Eli Whitney had worked a revolution more
far-reaching than did Mirabeau, Danton, Robespierre and Marat.

Here creeps in an item interesting to our friends who revel in syntax
and prosody. Any machine or apparatus for lifting has been called a
"jack" since the days of Shakespeare. The jack was the bearer of
bundles, a lifter, a puller, a worker. Any coarse bit of mechanism was
called a jack, and is yet. In most factories there are testing-jacks,
gearing-jacks, lifting-jacks. Falstaff tells of a jack-of-all-trades.
The jack was anything strong, patient and serviceable.

When Hargreaves, the Lancashire carpenter, invented his
spinning-machine, a village wit called it a "jenny." The machine was
fine, delicate, subtle, and as spinning was a woman's business anyway,
the new machine was parsed in the feminine gender.

Soon the new invention took on a heavier and stronger form, and its
persistency suggested to some other merry bucolic a new variation and it
was called a "mule." The word stuck, and the mule-spinner is with us
wherever cotton is spun.

The discovery that coal was valuable for fuel followed the invention of
the steam-engine.

When things are needed we dig down and find them, or reach up and secure
them. You could not run a steamship, except along a river with
well-wooded banks, any more than you could run an automobile with coal.

The dealing in coal, or "coals" as our English cousins still use the
word, began in Eighteen Hundred Nineteen. That was the year the first
steamship, the "Savannah," crossed the ocean. She ran from Savannah to
London. Her time was twenty-five days. She burned four hundred fifty
tons of coal, or about two-thirds of her entire carrying capacity.
Robert Fulton had been running his steamer "Clermont" on the Hudson in
Eighteen Hundred Seven, but there were wooding-stations every twenty
miles.

It was argued in the House of Commons that no steamship could ever cross
the Atlantic with steam, alone, as a propelling power. And even as it
was being mathematically proved, the whistle of the "Savannah" drowned
the voice of the orator.

But the "Savannah" also carried sail, and so the doubters still held the
floor. An iron boat with no sails that could cross the Atlantic in five
days was a miracle that no optimist had foreseen--much less, dared
prophesy.

The new conditions almost threatened to depopulate the rural districts.
Farmers forsook the soil. The uncertainty of a crop was replaced with
the certainty of a given wage. Children could tend the spinning-jennies
as well as men. There was a demand for child labor. Any poor man with a
big family counted himself rich. Many a man who could not find a job at
a man's wage quit work and was supported by his wife and children. To
rear a family became a paying enterprise.

Various mill-owners adopted children or took them under the apprentice
system, agreeing to teach them the trade. Girls and boys from orphan
asylums and workhouses were secured and held as practical slaves. They
were herded in sheep-sheds, where they slept on straw and were fed in
troughs. They were worked in two shifts, night and day, so the straw was
never really cold. They worked twelve hours, slept eight, and one hour
was allowed for meals. Their clothing was not removed except on
Saturday. Any alteration in the business life of a people is fraught
with great danger.

Recklessness, greed and brutality at such a time are rife.

Almost all workingmen of forty or over were out of work. Naturally,
employers hired only the young, the active, the athletic. These made
more money than they were used to making, so they spent it lavishly and
foolishly. It was a prosperous time, yet, strangely enough, prosperity
brought starvation to thousands. Family life in many instances was
destroyed, and thus were built those long rows of houses, all alike,
with no mark of individuality--no yard, no flowers, no gardens--that
still in places mar the landscape in factory towns.

Pretty girls went to the towns to work in the mills, and thus lost home
ties. Later they drifted to London. Drunkenness increased.

In Seventeen Hundred Ninety-six, there was formed the Manchester Board
of Health. Its intent was to guard the interests of factory-workers. Its
desire was to insure light, ventilation and sanitary conveniences for
the workers. Beyond this it did not seek to go.

The mill superintendents lifted a howl. They talked about interference,
and depriving the poor people of the right to labor. They declared it
was all a private matter between themselves and the workers--a matter of
contract.

Robert Owen, it seems, was the first factory superintendent to invite
inspection of his plant. He worked with the Board of Health, not against
it. He refused to employ children under ten years of age, and although
there was a tax on windows, he supplied plenty of light and also fresh
air. So great was the ignorance of the workers that they regarded the
Factory Laws as an infringement on their rights. The greed and foolish
fears of the mill-owners prompted them to put out the good old argument
that a man's children were his own, and that for the State to dictate to
him where they should work, when and how, was a species of tyranny. Work
was good for children! Let them run the streets? Never!

It is a curious thing to note that when Senator Albert J. Beveridge
endeavored to have a Federal Bill passed at Washington, in Nineteen
Hundred Seven, the arguments he had to meet and answer were those which
Robert Owen and Sir Robert Peel were obliged to answer in Seventeen
Hundred Ninety-five.

When a man who worked a hundred orphans fourteen hours a day, boys and
girls of from six to twelve, was accused of cruelty, he defended himself
by saying, "If I doesn't work 'em all the time 'cept when they sleep and
eat, they will learn to play, and then never work." This argument was
repeated by many fond parents as conclusive.

The stress of the times--having many machines in one building, all run
by one motor power, the necessity of buying raw material in quantities,
the expense of finding a market--all these combined to force the
invention of a very curious economic expediency. It was called a Joint
Stock Company. From a man and his wife and his children making things at
home, we get two or three men going into partnership and hiring a few
of their neighbors at day wages.

Then we get the system of "shareholding," with hundreds or thousands of
people as partners in a manufacturing enterprise which they never visit.

The people who owned the shares were the ones who owned the tools. Very
naturally, they wanted and expected dividends for the use of the tools.
That was all they wanted--dividends. The manager of the mill held his
position only through his ability to make the venture bring returns. The
people who owned the shares or the tools, never saw the people who used
the tools. A great gulf lay between them. For the wrongs and injustices
visited upon the workers no one person was to blame. The fault was
shifted. Everybody justified himself. And then came the saying,
"Corporations have no souls."

Robert Owen was manager of a mill, yet he saw the misery, the ignorance
and the mental indifference that resulted from the factory system. He,
too, must produce dividends, but the desire of his heart was also to
mitigate the lot of the workers.

Books were written by good men picturing the evils of the factory
system. Comparisons were made between the old and the new, in which the
hideousness of the new was etched in biting phrase. Some tried to turn
the dial backward and revive the cottage industries, as did Ruskin a
little later. "A Dream of John Ball" was anticipated, and many sighed
for "the good old times."

But among the many philosophers and philanthropists who wrestled with
the problem, Robert Owen seems to have stood alone in the belief that
success lay in going on, and not in turning back. He set himself to
making the new condition tolerable and prophesied a day when out of the
smoke and din of strife would emerge a condition that would make for
health, happiness and prosperity such as this tired old world never has
seen. Robert Owen was England's first Socialist.

Very naturally he was called a dreamer. Some called him an infidel and
the enemy of society.

Very many now call him a seer and a prophet.

       *       *       *       *       *

In Robert Owen's day cotton yarn was packaged and sold in five-pound
bundles. These packages were made up in hanks of a given number of
yards. One hundred twenty counts to a package was fixed upon as "par,"
or "standard count." If the thread was very fine, of course more hanks
were required to make up the five pounds. The price ranged up or down,
below or above the one-hundred-twenty mark. That is, if a package
contained two hundred forty hanks, its value was just double what it
would have been if merely standard.

Robert Owen knew fabrics before he began to spin.

First, he was a salesman. Second, he made the things he could sell.

The one supremely difficult thing in business is salesmanship. Goods can
be manufactured on formula, but it takes a man to sell. He who can sell
is a success--others may be.

The only men who succeed in dictating the policy of the house are those
in the Sales Department--that is, those who are on the side of income,
not of expense.

The man with a "secret process" of manufacture always imparts his
secret, sooner or later; but the salesman does not impart his secret,
because he can't. It is not transferable. It is a matter of personality.
Not only does the salesman have to know his goods, but he must know the
buyer--he must know humanity.

And humanity was the raw stock in which Robert Owen dealt. Robert Owen
never tried to increase his sales by decreasing his price. His product
was always higher than standard. "Anybody can cut prices," he said, "but
it takes brains to make a better article." He focused on fineness.

And soon buyers were coming to him. A finer article meant a finer trade.
And now, on each package of yarn that Owen sent out, he placed a label
that read thus, "This package was made under the supervision of Robert
Owen." Thus his name gradually became a synonym for quality.

Among other curious ideas held by Owen was that to make finer goods you
must have a finer quality of workman. To produce this finer type of
person now became his dream.

Mr. Drinkwater smiled at the idea and emphasized "dividends."

Now Mr. Drinkwater had a son-in-law who looked in on things once a
month, signed his voucher and went away fox-hunting. He thought he was
helping run the mill. This man grew jealous of the young manager and
suggested that Drinkwater increase the boy's pay and buy off the
percentage clause in the contract, so as to keep the youngster from
getting megalocephalia.

Drinkwater asked Owen what he would take for the contract, and Owen
handed it to him and said, "Nothing." It gave him a chance to get out
into a larger field. Drinkwater never thought of the value of that
little Robert Owen label. No wise employer should ever allow a thing
like that.

Owen had won both name and fame among the merchants, and he now engaged
with several mills to superintend their output and sell their goods with
his label on each package. In other words, he was a Manufacturers'
Broker. From a five-hundred-pound-a-year man he had grown to be worth
two thousand pounds a year.

No mill owned him. He was free--he was making money. The dream of human
betterment was still in his heart.

On one of his trips to Glasgow to sell goods, he met a daughter of David
Dale, a mill-owner who was in active competition with him. Dale made a
fine yarn, too.

The girl had heard of Owen: they met as enemies--a very good way to
begin an acquaintance. It was Nature's old, old game of stamen, pistil
and pollen, that fertilizes the world of business, betterment and
beauty. They quarreled.

"You are the man who puts your name on the package?"

"Yes."

"And yet you own no mill!"

"True--but----"

"Never mind. You certainly are proud of your name."

"I am--wouldn't you be?"

"Not of yours."

Then they stared at each other in defiance. To relieve the tension, Mr.
Owen proposed a stroll. They took a walk through the park and discovered
that they both were interested in Social Reform. David Dale owned the
mills at New Lanark--a most picturesque site. He was trying to carry on
a big business, so as to make money and help the workers. He was doing
neither, because his investment in the plant had consumed too much of
his working capital.

They discussed the issue until eleven forty-five by the clock.

The girl knew business and knew Society. The latter she had no use for.

The next day they met again, and quite accidentally found themselves
engaged, neither of 'em knew how.

It was very embarrassing! How could they break the news to Papa Dale?

They devised a way. It was this: Robert Owen was to go and offer to buy
Mr. Dale's mills.

Owen went over to Lanark and called on Mr. Dale, and told him he wanted
to buy his business. Mr. Dale looked at the boy, and smiled. Owen was
twenty-seven, but appeared twenty, being beardless, slight and
fair-haired.

The youth said he could get all the money that was needed. They sparred
for a time--neither side naming figures. It being about noontime, Mr.
Dale asked young Mr. Owen to go over to his house to lunch. Mr. Dale
was a widower, but his daughter kept the house. Mr. Dale introduced Mr.
Owen to Miss Dale.

The young folks played their parts with a coolness that would have
delighted John Drew, and would have been suspicious to anybody but a
fussy old mill-owner.

Finally as the crumbs were being brushed from the rich man's table, Mr.
Dale fixed on the sum of sixty thousand pounds for his property.

Owen was satisfied and named as terms three thousand pounds and interest
each year for twenty years, touching the young lady's toe with his own
under the table.

Mr. Dale agreed. Mr. Owen had the money to make the first payment. The
papers were drawn up. The deal was closed--all but the difficult part.
This was done by rushing the enemy in his library, after a good meal.
"It keeps the business in the family, you see," said the girl on her
knees, pouting prettily.

The point was gained, and when Robert Owen, a few weeks later, came to
New Lanark to take possession of the property, he did as much for the
girl. So they were married and lived happily ever afterward.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Owen took up his work at New Lanark with all the enthusiasm that
hope, youth and love could bring to bear.

Mr. Dale had carried the flag as far to the front as he thought it could
be safely carried--that is to say, as far as he was able to carry it.

Owen had his work cut out for him. The workers were mostly Lowland
Scotch and spoke in an almost different language from Owen. They looked
upon him with suspicion. The place had been sold, and they had gone with
it--how were they to be treated? Were wages to be lowered and hours
extended? Probably.

Pilfering had been reduced to a system, and to get the start of the
soft-hearted owner was considered smart.

Mr. Dale had tried to have a school, and to this end had hired an
elderly Irishman, who gave hard lessons and a taste of the birch to
children who had exhausted themselves in the mills and had no zest for
learning. Mr. Dale had taken on more than two hundred pauper children
from the workhouses and these were a sore trial to him.

Owen's first move was to reduce the working-hours from twelve to ten
hours. Indeed, he was the first mill-owner to adopt the ten-hour plan.
He improved the sanitary arrangements, put in shower-baths and took a
personal interest in the diet of his little wards, often dining with
them.

A special school-building was erected at a cost of thirty thousand
dollars. This was both a day and a night school. It also took children
of one year old and over, in order to relieve mothers who worked in the
mills. The "little mothers," often only four or five years old, took
care of babies a year old and younger, all day.

Owen instructed his teachers never to scold or to punish by inflicting
physical pain. His was the first school in Christendom to abolish the
rod.

His plan anticipated the Kindergarten and the Creche. He called mothers'
meetings, and tried to show the uselessness of scolding and beating,
because to do these things was really to teach the children to do them.
He abolished the sale of strong drink in New Lanark. Model houses were
erected, gardens planted, and prizes given for the raising of flowers.

In order not to pauperize his people, Owen had them pay a slight tuition
for the care of the children, and there was a small tax levied to buy
flower-seeds. In the school-building was a dance-hall and an auditorium.

At one time the supply of raw cotton was cut off for four months. During
this time Owen paid his people full wages, insisted that they should
all, old and young, go to school for two hours a day, and also work two
hours a day at tree-planting, grading and gardening. During this period
of idleness he paid out seven thousand pounds in wages. This was done to
keep the workmen from wandering away.

It need not be imagined that Owen did not have other cares besides
those of social betterment. Much of the machinery in the mills was worn
and becoming obsolete. To replace this he borrowed a hundred thousand
dollars. Then he reorganized his business as a stock company and sold
shares to several London merchants with whom he dealt. He interested
Jeremy Bentham, the great jurist and humanitarian, and Bentham proved
his faith by buying stock in the New Lanark Company.

Joseph Lancaster, the Quaker, a mill-owner and philanthropist, did the
same.

Owen paid a dividend of five per cent on his shares. A surplus was also
set aside to pay dividends in case of a setback, but beyond this the
money was invested in bettering the environment of his people.

New Lanark had been running fourteen years under Owen's management. It
had attracted the attention of the civilized world. The Grand Duke
Nicholas, afterwards the Czar, spent a month with Owen studying his
methods. The Dukes of Kent, Sussex, Bedford and Portland; the Archbishop
of Canterbury; the Bishops of London, Peterborough and Carlisle; the
Marquis of Huntly; Lords Grosvenor, Carnarvon, Granville, Westmoreland,
Shaftesbury and Manners; General Sir Thomas Dyce and General Brown;
Ricardo, De Crespigny, Wilberforce, Joseph Butterworth and Sir Francis
Baring--all visited New Lanark. Writers, preachers, doctors, in fact
almost every man of intellect and worth in the Kingdom, knew of Robert
Owen and his wonderful work at New Lanark. Sir Robert Peel had been to
New Lanark and had gone back home and issued an official bulletin
inviting mill-owners to study and pattern after the system.

The House of Commons asked Owen to appear and explain his plan for
abolishing poverty from the Kingdom. He was invited to lecture in many
cities. He issued a general call to all mill-owners in the Kingdom to
co-operate with him in banishing ignorance and poverty.

But to a great degree Owen worked alone and New Lanark was a curiosity.
Most mill towns had long rows of dingy tenements, all alike, guiltless
of paint, with not a flower bed or tree to mitigate the unloveliness of
the scene. Down there in the dirt and squalor lived the working-folks;
while away up on the hillside, surrounded by a vast park, with stables,
kennels and conservatories, resided the owner.

Owen lived with his people. And the one hundred fifty acres that made up
the village of New Lanark contained a happy, healthy and prosperous
population of about two thousand people.

There was neither pauperism nor disease, neither gamblers nor drunkards.
All worked and all went to school.

It was an object-lesson of thrift and beauty.

Visitors came from all over Europe--often hundreds a day.

Why could not this example be extended indefinitely so that hundreds of
such villages should grow instead of only one? There could, there can
and there will be, but the people must evolve their own ideal
environment and not have to have it supplied for them.

By Owen's strength of purpose he kept the village ideal, but he failed
to evolve an ideal people. All around were unideal surroundings, and the
people came and went. Strong drink was to be had only a few miles away.
To have an ideal village, it must be located in an ideal country.

Owen called on the clergy to unite with him in bringing about an ideal
material environment. He said that good water, sewerage and trees and
flowers worked a better spiritual condition. They replied by calling him
a materialist. He admitted that he worked for a material good. His
followers added to his troubles by comparing his work with that of the
clergy round about, where vice, poverty and strong drink grouped
themselves about a steeple upon which was a cross of gold to which labor
was nailed--a simile to be used later by a great orator, with profit.

Owen was a Unitarian, with a Quaker bias. Any clergyman was welcome to
come to New Lanark--it was a free platform. A few preachers accepted the
invitation, with the intent to convert Robert Owen to their particular
cause. New Lanark was pointed out all over England as a godless town.
The bishops issued a general address to all rectors and curates warning
them against "any system of morals that does away with God and His Son,
Jesus Christ, fixing its salvation on flowerbeds and ragged schools."

New Lanark was making money because it was producing goods the world
wanted. But its workers were tabu in respectable society, and priestly
hands were held aloft in pretended horror whenever the name of Robert
Owen, or the word "Socialism," was used.

Owen refused to employ child labor, and issued a book directing the
attention of society to this deadly traffic in human beings. The
parents, the clergy and the other mill-owners combined against him, and
he was denounced by press and pulpit.

He began to look around for a better environment for an ideal community.
His gaze was turned toward America.

       *       *       *       *       *

Robert Owen's plan for abolishing vice and poverty was simply to set the
people to work under ideal conditions, and then allow them time enough
for recreation and mental exercise, so that thrift might follow farming.
In reply to the argument that the workman should evolve his own standard
of life, independent of his employer, Owen said that the mill with its
vast aggregation of hands was an artificial condition. The invention,
ingenuity and enterprise that evolved the mill were exceptional. The
operators for the most part lacked this constructive genius, the proof
of which lay in the very fact that they were operators.

To take advantage of their limitations, disrupt their natural and
accustomed mode of life, and then throw the blame back upon them for not
evolving a new and better environment, was neither reasonable nor right.

The same constructive genius that built the mill and operated it should
be actively interested in the welfare of the people who worked in the
mill.

To this end there should be an ideal village adjacent to every great
mill. This village should afford at least half an acre of ground for
every family. In the way of economy, one building should house a
thousand people. It should be built in the form of a parallelogram and
contain co-operative kitchens, dining-rooms, libraries, art-galleries
and gymnasia. It should be, in fact, a great University, not unlike the
great collection of schools at Oxford or Cambridge. All would be
workers--all would be students.

The villages should be under the general supervision of the government,
in order to secure stability and permanency. If the mill management
failed, the government should continue the business, because even if the
government lost money in the venture, at times, this was better than
always to be building jails, prisons, insane asylums, almshouses and
hospitals.

In sections where there were no mills or factories, the government would
construct both mills and villages, to the intent that idleness and
ignorance might be without excuse. To this end Owen would ask all
landowners, or holders of estates of a thousand acres or more, to set
apart one-tenth of their land for ideal villages and co-operative mills
to be managed by the government.

As proof that his plans were feasible, Owen pointed to New Lanark and
invited investigation.

Among others who answered the invitation was Henry Hase, cashier of the
Bank of England. Hase reported that New Lanark had the look of a place
that had taken a century to evolve, and in his mind the nation could not
do better than to follow the example of Owen. He then added, "If the
clergy, nobility and mill-owners will adopt the general scientific
method proposed by Mr. Owen for the abolition of poverty, ignorance and
crime, it will be the greatest step of progress ever seen in the history
of the world."

In proposing that the clergy, nobility and mill-owners should unite for
the good of mankind, Mr. Hase was not guilty of subtle humor or ironical
suggestion. He was an honest and sincere man who had been exposed to the
contagious enthusiasm of Mr. Owen.

Owen was fifty-seven years of age, practical man that he was, before he
realized that the clergy, the nobility and the rich mill-owners had
already entered into an unconscious pact to let mankind go to
Gehenna--just so long as the honors, emoluments and dividends were
preserved. That is to say, the solicitation of the Church is not and
never has been for the welfare of the people; it is for the welfare of
the Church for which churchmen fight. All persecution turns on this
point.

If the stability of the Church is threatened, the Churchmen awake and
cry, "To Arms!" In this respect the Church, the nobility and vested
capital have everything in common--they want perpetuity and security.
They seek safety. All of the big joint-stock companies had in their
directorates members of the nobility and the clergy. The bishops held
vast estates--they were Lords.

Robert Owen did not represent either the Church or the nobility. He was
a very exceptional and unique product; he was a workingman who had
become a philanthropic capitalist. He was a lover of humanity, filled
with a holy zeal to better the condition of the laborer.

       *       *       *       *       *

The mills at New Lanark were making money, but the shareholders in
London were not satisfied with their dividends. They considered Owen's
plans for educating the workingman chimerical. In one respect they knew
that Owen was sane: he could take the raw stock and produce the quality
of goods that had a market value. He had trained up a valuable and
skilled force of foremen and workers. Things were prosperous and would
be much more so if Owen would only cease dreaming dreams and devote
himself to the commercial end of the game.

If he would not do this, then he must buy their stock or sell them a
controlling interest of his own.

He chose the latter.

In Eighteen Hundred Twenty-five, when he was fifty-five years old, he
sailed for America. He gave lectures in New York, Boston, Philadelphia
and Washington on his new order of economics. He was listened to with
profound attention. At Washington he was the guest of the President, and
on invitation addressed a joint session of the Senate and the House,
setting forth his arguments for Socialism.

The Moravians at Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, had founded their colony as
early as Seventeen Hundred Twenty. The Zoarites, the Economites, the
Separatists, the Shakers and the Rappites had been in existence and
maintained successful communities for a score of years.

Robert Owen visited these various colonies and saw that they were all
prosperous. There was neither sickness, vice, poverty, drunkenness nor
disease to be found among them. He became more and more convinced that
the demands of an advancing civilization would certainly be co-operative
in nature. Chance might unhorse the individual, but with a community the
element of chance was eliminated. He laid it down as a maxim, evolved
from his study, observation and experience, that the community that
exists for three years is a success. That no industrial community had
ever endured for three years, save as it was founded on a religious
concept, was a fact that he overlooked. Also, he failed to see that the
second generation of communists did not coalesce, and as a result that
thirty-three years was the age limit for even a successful community;
and that, if it still survived, it was because it was reorganized under
a strong and dominant leadership.

Communists or Socialists are of two classes: those who wish to give and
those who wish to get. When fifty-one per cent of the people in a
community are filled with a desire to give, Socialism will be a success.

Perhaps the most successful social experiment in America was the Oneida
Community, but next to this was the Harmonyites, founded by George Rapp.
The Harmonyites founded Harmony, Indiana, in Eighteen Hundred Fourteen.
They moved from Pennsylvania and had been located at their present site
for eleven years. They owned thirty thousand acres of splendid land at
the junction of the Wabash and Ohio Rivers. They had built more than a
hundred houses, and had barns, stores, a church, a hall, a sawmill, a
hotel and a woolen-factory.

Now when Owen went to Pittsburgh, he floated down the Ohio to Cincinnati
and then on to Harmony. He was graciously received and was delighted
with all he saw and heard.

Owen saw the success of the woolen-mill, and declared that to bring
cotton up by steamboat from the South would be easy. He would found
cotton-mills, and here New Lanark should bloom again, only on an
increased scale.

Would the Rappites sell?

Yes; they wanted to move back to Pennsylvania, where there were other
groups of similar faith.

Their place, they figured, was worth two hundred fifty thousand dollars.
Owen made an offer of one hundred fifty thousand dollars, which to his
surprise was quietly accepted. It was a quick deal.

The Rappites moved out, and the Owenites moved in.

Just across the Ohio River they founded the town of Owensboro.

Then Owen went back to England and sent over about three hundred of his
people, including his own son, Robert Dale Owen.

Robert Owen had large interests in England, and New Harmony on the
banks of the Wabash was incidental. Robert Dale Owen was then
twenty-five years old. He was a philosopher, not an economist, and since
the place lacked a business head, dissensions arose. Let some one else
tell how quickly a community can evaporate when it lacks the cement of
religious oneness:

     For the first few weeks, all entered into the new system with a
     will. Service was the order of the day. Men who seldom or never
     before labored with their hands devoted themselves to agriculture
     and the mechanical arts with a zeal which was at least commendable,
     though not always well directed. Ministers of the gospel guided the
     plow and called swine to their corn instead of sinners to
     repentance, and let patience have her perfect work over an unruly
     yoke of oxen. Merchants exchanged the yardstick for the rake or
     pitchfork; and all appeared to labor cheerfully for the common
     weal. Among the women there was even more apparent self-sacrifice.
     Those who had seldom seen the inside of their own kitchens went
     into that of the common eating-house (formerly a hotel) and made
     themselves useful among pots and kettles. Refined young ladies who
     had been waited upon all their lives took turns in waiting upon
     others at the table. And several times a week all parties who
     chose, mingled in the social dance in the great dining-hall.

     But notwithstanding the apparent heartiness and cordiality of this
     auspicious opening, it was in the social atmosphere of the
     Community that the first cloud arose. Self-love was a spirit which
     could not be exorcised. It whispered to the lowly maidens, whose
     former position in society had cultivated the spirit of meekness,
     "Thou art as good as the formerly rich and fortunate; insist upon
     your equality." It reminded the former favorites of society of
     their lost superiority, and despite all rules tinctured their words
     and actions with "airs" and conceit. Similar thoughts and feelings
     soon arose among the men; and though not so soon exhibited they
     were none the less deep and strong. Suffice it to say, that at the
     end of three months--three months!--the leading minds in the
     Community were compelled to acknowledge to one another that the
     social life of the Community could not be bounded by a single
     circle. They therefore acquiesced, though reluctantly, to its
     division into many. But they still hoped, and many of them no doubt
     believed, that though social equality was a failure, community of
     property was not. Whether the law of mine and thine is natural or
     incidental in human character, it soon began to develop its sway.
     The industrious, the skilful and the strong saw the product of
     their labor enjoyed by the indolent, the unskilled and the
     improvident; and self-love rose against benevolence. A band of
     musicians thought their brassy harmony was as necessary to the
     common happiness as bread and meat, and declined to enter the
     harvest-field or the workshop. A lecturer upon natural science
     insisted upon talking while others worked. Mechanics, whose single
     day's labor brought two dollars into the common stock, insisted
     that they should in justice work only half as long as the
     agriculturist, whose day's work brought but one.

     Of course, for a while, these jealousies were concealed, but soon
     they began to be expressed. It was useless to remind all parties
     that the common labor of all ministered to the prosperity of the
     Community. Individual happiness was the law of Nature and it could
     not be obliterated. And before a single year had passed, this law
     had scattered the members of that society which had come together
     so earnestly and under such favorable circumstances, and driven
     them back into the selfish world from which they came.

     The writer of this sketch has since heard the history of that
     eventful year reviewed with honesty and earnestness by the best men
     and most intelligent parties of that unfortunate social experiment.
     They admitted the favorable circumstances which surrounded its
     commencement; the intelligence, devotion and earnestness which were
     brought to the cause by its projectors, and its final total
     failure. And they rested ever after in the belief that man, though
     disposed to philanthropy, is essentially selfish, and a community
     of social equality and common property is an impossibility.

       *       *       *       *       *

The loss of two hundred thousand dollars did not dampen the ardor of
Robert Owen. He paid up the debts of New Harmony, had the property
surveyed and subdivided, and then deeded it to his children and
immediate relatives and a few of the "staunch friends who have such a
lavish and unwise faith in my wisdom"--to use his own expression.

To give work to the unemployed of England now became his immediate
solicitation. He was sixty years old when he inaugurated his first
co-operative store, which in fact is the parent of our modern
Department-Store.

In this store he proposed to buy any useful article or product which any
man might make or produce, figuring on cost of the raw material and
sixpence an hour for labor. This labor was to be paid for in Labor
Script, receivable in payment for anything the man might want to buy.
Here we get the Labor Exchange. Owen proposed that the Government should
set delinquent men to work, instead of sending them to prison. Any man
who would work, no matter what he had done, should be made free. The
Government would then pay the man in Labor-Exchange Script. Of course,
if the Government guaranteed the script, it was real money; otherwise,
it was wildcat money, subject to fluctuation and depreciation. Very
naturally, the Government refused to guarantee this script, or to invest
in the co-operative stores. To make the script valuable, it had to be
issued in the form of a note, redeemable in gold at a certain time.

The stores were started, and many idle men found work in building mills
and starting various industries. Three years passed, and some of the
script became due. It was found to be largely held by saloonkeepers who
had accepted it at half-price. Efforts had been constantly made to hurt
Owen's standing and depreciate the market value of this currency.

The Labor Exchange that had issued the script was a corporation, and
Robert Owen was not individually liable, but he stepped into the breach
and paid every penny out of his own purse, saying, "No man shall ever
say that he lost money by following my plans."

Next he founded the co-operative village of Harmony or Queenswood. The
same general plan that he had followed at New Lanark was here carried
out, save that he endeavored to have the mill owned by the workers
instead of by outside capital.

Through his very able leadership, this new venture continued for ten
years and was indeed a school and a workshop. The workers had gardens,
flowers, books. There were debates, classes, and much intellectual
exercise that struck sparks from heads that were once punk. John Tyndall
was one of the teachers and also a worker in this mill. Let the fact
stand out that Owen discovered Tyndall--a great, divinely human
nautilus--and sent him sailing down the tides of Time.

At eighty years of age, Owen appeared before the House of Commons and
read a paper which he had spent a year in preparing, "The Abolition of
Poverty and Crime." He held the Government responsible for both, and
said that until the ruling class took up the reform idea and quit their
policy of palliation, society would wander in the wilderness. To gain
the Promised Land we must all move together in a government "of the
people, by the people and for the people." He was listened to with
profound respect and a vote of thanks tendered him; but his speech never
reached the public printer.

Robert Dale Owen became a naturalized citizen of the United States, and
for several years was a member of Congress, and at the time of the death
of his father was our minister to Italy, having been appointed by
President Pierce.

He was in England at the time of the passing of Robert Owen, and
announced the fact to the family at New Harmony, Indiana, in the
following letter:

     Newtown, Wales, November 17th, 1858.

     It is all over. Our dear father passed away this morning, at a
     quarter before seven, as quietly and gently as if he had been
     falling asleep. There was not the least struggle, not the
     contraction of a limb or a muscle, not an expression of pain on his
     face. His breathing stopped so gradually that, even as I held his
     hand, I could scarcely tell the moment when he no longer lived. His
     last words, distinctly pronounced about twenty minutes before his
     death, were: "Relief has come."




JAMES OLIVER


     The sluggard will not plow by reason of the cold; therefore shall
     he beg in harvest.

                                               --_Proverbs xx: 4_


     You benefit yourself only as you benefit humanity.

                                               --_James Oliver_

[Illustration: JAMES OLIVER]


James Oliver was born in Roxburyshire, Scotland, August the
Twenty-eighth, Eighteen Hundred Twenty-three. He died March the Second,
Nineteen Hundred Eight. He was the youngest of a brood of eight--six
boys and two girls.

He was "the last run of shad," to use the phrase of Theodore Parker, who
had a similar honor. Just why the youngest should eclipse the rest, as
occasionally happens, is explained by Doctor Tilden on the hypothesis
that a mother gives this last little surprise party an amount of love
and tenderness not vouchsafed the rest.

Let the philosophers philosophize--we deal with facts, not theories, and
no one will deny that James Oliver was a very potent, human and stubborn
fact. He was Scotch.

His father was a shepherd on a landed estate, where the noses of the
sheep grew sharp that they might feed between the stones. The family was
very poor, but poverty in the Old World grows into a habit, and so the
Olivers did not suffer. They huddled close for warmth in their little
cottage and were grateful for parritch and shelter.

In Eighteen Hundred Thirty, the oldest boy, John, filled with the
spirit of unrest, tied up all of his earthly goods in a red handkerchief
and came to America.

He found work at a dollar a day, and wrote glowing letters home of a
country where no one picked up fagots for fires, but where forests were
actually in the way. He also said he ate at his employer's table, and
they had meat three times a week. Of course he had meat three times a
day, but he didn't want to run the risk of being placed in the Ananias
Club by telling the truth.

A little later, Andrew and Jane, the next in point of age, came too, and
slipped at once into money-making jobs, piling up wealth at the rate of
three dollars a week.

When three of a brood have gone from the home nest, they pull hard on
the heartstrings of the mother. Women, at the last, have more courage
than men--when they have.

Partnerships are very seldom equal partnerships--one takes the lead. In
this case the gray mare was the better horse, and James Oliver got his
initiative from his mother.

"We are all going to America," the mother would say.

And then the worthy shepherd-man would give a hundred and fifty reasons
why it was impossible.

He had become pot-bound. Fear and inertia had him by the foot. He was
too old to try to do anything but care for sheep, he pleaded.

And persistently, as she knitted furiously, the mother would repeat, "We
are all going to America!"

Little Jamie was eleven years old. He was a swart and sandy little Scot,
with freckles, a full-moon face and a head of tousled hair that defied
the comb.

"We are all going to America," echoed Jamie--"we are going to America to
make our fortunes."

John, Andrew and Jane had sent back real money--they must have earned
it. All the debts were cleaned up, and the things they had borrowed were
returned. The mother took charge and sold all the little surplus
belongings, and the day came when they locked the door of the old stone
cottage and took the key to the landlord in his big house and left it.

They rode away in a kind neighbor's cart, bound for the sea-coast.
Everybody cried but Jamie. It was glorious to go away--such wonderful
things could be seen all along the route.

They took passage in a sailing-ship crowded with emigrants. It was a
stormy trip. Everybody was sick. Several died, and there were burials at
sea, when the plank was tilted and the body slid into the yeasty deep.

Jamie got into trouble once by asking how the dead man could ever be
found when it came Judgment-Day. And also the captain got after him with
a rope's end because he scrambled upon the quarter-deck when the mate
went aft. The disposition to take charge was even then germinating; and
he asked more questions than ten men could answer.

Once when the hatches were battened down, and the angry waves washed
the deck, and the elder Oliver prophesied that all were soon going to
Davy Jones' locker, Jamie reported that the sailors on deck were
swearing, and all took courage.

The storm blew over, as storms usually do, and the friendly shores of
America came in sight.

There were prayer-meetings on deck, and songs of thanksgiving were sung
as the ship tacked slowly up the Narrows.

Some of our ancestors landed at Jamestown, some at Plymouth Rock, and
some at Castle Garden. If the last named had less to boast of in way of
ancestry, they had fewer follies to explain away than either of the
others. They may have fallen on their knees, but they did not fall on
the aborigines. They were for the most part friendly, kind and full of
the right spirit--the spirit of helpfulness.

At Castle Garden, one man gave Jamie an orange and another man gave him
a kick. He never forgot either, and would undoubtedly have paid both
parties back, if he had met them in later life.

There was a trip to Albany on a steamboat, the first our friends had
ever seen. It burned wood, and stopped every few miles for fuel. They
ate brown bread and oatmeal, and at New York bought some smoked bear's
meat and venison. At Albany an Indian sold them sassafras for tea, also
some dried blackberries--it was a regular feast.

At Albany there was a wonderful invention, a railroad. The coaches ran
up the hill without horses or an engine, and the father explained that
it wasn't a miracle either. A long rope ran around a big wheel at the
top of the hill, and there was a car that ran down the hill as another
one ran up.

The railroad extended to Schenectady--sixteen miles away--and the trip
was made in less than half a day if the weather was good. There they
transferred to a canal-boat. They had no money to pay for a stateroom,
and so camped on deck--it was lots of fun. Jamie then and there decided
that some day he would be the captain of a fast packet on a raging
canal. His fond hope was never realized.

After the cooped-up quarters on the ocean the smoothness and freedom of
the Erie Canal were heavenly. They saw birds and squirrels, and once
caught a glimpse of a wolf. At Montezuma they changed canal-boats,
because the craft they were on went through to Buffalo, and they wished
to go to Geneva, where John, Andrew and Jane were getting rich.

Two miles out of Geneva the boat slowed up, a plank was run out and all
went ashore. John worked for a farmer a mile away. They found him. And
in the dusty road another prayer-meeting was held when everybody kneeled
and thanked God that the long journey was ended. Paterfamilias had
predicted they would never arrive, but he was wrong.

The next day they saw Andrew and Jane, and tears of joy were rained down
everybody's back. Now for the first time they had plenty to eat--meat
every meal, potatoes, onions and corn on the ear. There is no corn in
Scotland, and Jamie thought that corn on the ear was merely a new way of
cooking beans. He cleaned off the cob and then sent the stick back to
have it refilled.

America was a wonderful country, and Brother John had not really told
half the truth about it. Jamie got a job at fifty cents a week with
board. Fifty cents was a great deal more than half a dollar--I guess so!
He would have been paid more only the farmer said he was a greenhorn and
couldn't speak English. Jamie inwardly resented and denied both
accusations, but kept silent for fear he might lose his job. His only
sorrow was that he could see his mother only once a week. His chief care
was as to what he should do with his money.

       *       *       *       *       *

In the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-six, there were several Scotch
families going from Geneva to the "Far West"--that is to say, Indiana.
The Oliver family was induced to go, too, because in Indiana the
Government was giving farms to any one who would live on them and hold
them down.

They settled first in Lagrange County, and later moved to Mishawaka,
Saint Joseph County, where Andrew Oliver had taken up his abode.
Mishawaka was a thriving little city, made so largely by the fact that
iron-ore--bog-iron--was being found thereabouts. The town was on the
Saint Joseph River, right on the line of transportation, and boats were
poled down and up, clear to Lake Michigan. It was much easier and
cheaper to pole a boat than to drive a wagon through the woods and
across the muddy prairies. Mishawaka was going to be a great
city--everybody said so.

There was a good log schoolhouse at Mishawaka, kept by a worthy man by
the name of Merrifield, who knew how to use the birch. Here James went
to school for just one Winter--that was his entire schooling, although
he was a student and a learner to the day of his death.

The elder Oliver fell sick of chills and fever. He sort of languished
for the hills of bonny Scotland. He could not adapt himself to pioneer
life, and in the Fall of Eighteen Hundred Thirty-seven, he died. This
was the end of a school education for James--he had to go to work
earning money. He became the little father of the family, which James J.
Hill says is the luckiest thing that can happen to a boy. He hired out
for six dollars a month, and at the end of every month took five dollars
home to his mother.

Jamie was fourteen, and could do a man's work at almost anything. "He
has a man's appetite at least," said the farmer's wife, for he took
dinner with the man he worked for. He soon proved he could do a man's
work, too. This man had a pole-boat on the river, and James was given a
chance to try his seamanship. He might have settled down for life as a
poleman, but he saw little chance for promotion, and he wanted to work
at something that would fit him for a better job. Then the worst about
life on the river was that each poleman was paid a portion of his wages
in whisky, and the rivermen seemed intent on drinking the stills dry.
James had not only a strong desire to be decent, but liked also to be
with decent people.

Now, in Mishawaka there were some very fine folks--the family of Joseph
Doty, for instance. The Dotys lived in a two-story house and had a
picket fence. James had dug a ditch for Mr. Doty, and split out shingles
for a roof for the Doty barn. At such times he got his dinner at Doty's,
for it was the rule then that you always had to feed your help, no
matter who they were, just as you feed the threshers and harvesters and
silo-men now.

About this time, James began to put bear's grease on his unruly shock
of yellow hair, and tried to part it and bring it down in a nice smooth
pat on the side. That's a sure sign!

The few who noticed the change said it was all on account of Susan Doty.
Once when Susan passed the johnnycake to James, he emptied the whole
plate in his lap, to his eternal shame and the joy of the whole town,
which soon heard of it through a talkative hired man who was present and
laughed uproariously--as hired men are apt to do.

James once heard Susan say that she didn't like rivermen, and that is
probably the reason James quit the river, but he didn't tell her so--not
then at least.

He got a job in the iron-mill and learned to smelt iron, and he became a
pretty good molder, too. Then the hard times came on, and the iron-mill
shut down. But there was a cooper's shop in town, and James was already
very handy with a drawshave in getting out staves. Most of the men
worked by the day, but he asked to work by the piece. They humored him,
and he made over two dollars a day.

Joseph Doty was a subscriber to "Gleason's Pictorial" and "Godey's
Lady's Book." They also had bound copies of "Poor Richard's Almanac" and
"The Spectator," with nearly forty other books. James Oliver read them
all--with Susan's help.

Then something terrible happened! The young folks suddenly discovered
that they were very much in love with each other. The Doty family saw
it too, and disapproved.

The Dotys were English, but as the family had been in America for a
century, that made a big difference.

Susan was the handsomest and smartest girl in town--everybody said so.
She seemed much older than James Oliver, but the fact was they were of
the same age. The Doty family objected to the match, but Doty the Elder
one day dropped a hint that if that young Oliver owned a house to take
his wife to, he might consider the matter.

The news reached Oliver. He knew of a man who wanted to sell his house,
as he was going to move to a town called Fort Dearborn--now known as
Chicago--which had recently been incorporated and had nearly a thousand
inhabitants. The house was a well-built cottage--not very large, but big
enough for two. It was a slab house, with a mud chimney and a nice floor
of pounded blue clay. It had two rooms, a cupboard across the corner, a
loft to store things in, and forty wooden pegs to hang things on.

Oliver offered the man eighteen dollars for the mansion, cash down. The
offer was accepted, the money paid and the receipt was duly shown to
Joseph Doty, Esquire.

And so James and Susan were married, on May Thirtieth, Eighteen Hundred
Forty-four, and all Mishawaka gave them a "shower." To say that they
lived happily ever afterward would be trite, but also it would be true.

       *       *       *       *       *

James Oliver was thirty-two years old before he really struck his pace.
He had worked at the cooper's trade, at molding and at farming.

His eighteen-dollar house at Mishawaka had transformed itself into one
worth a thousand, fully paid for. The God's half-acre had become a
quarter-section.

His wife had beauty and competence--two things which do not always go
together. She was industrious, economical, intelligent and ambitious.
She was a helpmeet in all that the word implies. The man whose heart is
at rest is the only one who can win. Jealousy gnaws. Doubt disrupts. But
love and faith mean sanity, strength, usefulness and length of days. The
man who succeeds is the one who is helped by a good woman.

Two children had come to them. These were Joseph D. and Josephine.
Napoleon was always a hero to James Oliver--his courage, initiative and
welling sense of power, more than his actual deeds, were the attraction.
The Empress Josephine was a better woman than Napoleon was a man,
contended Susan. Susan was right and James acknowledged it, so the girl
baby was named Josephine. The boy was named Joseph, in honor of his
grandfather Doty, who had passed away, but who, before his passing, had
come to see that Nature was nearer right than he had been.

Children should exercise great care in the selection of their parents.
Very, very few children are ever dowered with a love that makes for
strength of head, hand and heart, as were these.

In Eighteen Hundred Fifty-five, James Oliver was over at South Bend, a
town that had started up a few miles down the river from Mishawaka, and
accidentally met a man who wanted to sell his one-fourth interest in a
foundry. He would sell at absolutely inventory value. They made an
inventory and the one-fourth came to just eighty-eight dollars and
ninety-six cents. Oliver had a hundred dollars in his pocket, and paid
the man at once.

Cast-iron plows formed one item of this little foundry's work. Oliver,
being a farmer, knew plows--and he knew that there was not a good plow
in the world. Where others saw and accepted, he rebelled. He insisted
that an approximately perfect plow could be made. He realized that a
good plow should stay in the ground without wearing out the man at the
handles.

The man who hasn't been jerked up astride of the plow-handles or been
flung into the furrow by a balky plow has never had his vocabulary
tested.

Oliver had a theory that the plow should be as light in weight as was
consistent with endurance and good work, and that a moldboard should
scour, so as to turn the soil with a singing sound; then the share, or
cutting edge, must be made separate from the moldboard, so as to be
easily and cheaply replaced. A plow could be made that needn't be fought
to keep it furrow-wise.

Without tiring the reader with mechanical details, let the fact be
stated that after twelve years of experimenting--planning, dreaming,
thinking, working, striving, often perplexed, disappointed and
ridiculed--James Oliver perfected his Chilled Plow. He had a moldboard
nearly as bright as a diamond and about as hard, one that "sang" at its
work. Instead of a dead pull, "it sort of sails through the soil," a
surprised farmer said. To be exact, it reduced the draft on the team
from twenty per cent to one-half, depending upon the nature of the soil.
It was the difference between pulling a low-wheeled lumber-wagon and
riding in a buggy.

From this on, the business grew slowly, steadily, surely. James Oliver
anticipated that other plow-wise Scot, Andrew Carnegie, who said, "Young
man, put all of your eggs in one basket and then watch the basket." On
this policy has the Oliver Chilled-Plow Works been built up and
maintained, until the plant now covers seventy-five acres, with a floor
space of over thirty acres and a capacity of more than half a million
plows a year. The enterprise supplies bread and butter to more than
twenty thousand mouths, and is without a serious rival in its chosen
field.

If the horse tribe could speak, it would arise and whinny pćans to the
name of Oliver, joining in the chorus of farmers. For a moldboard that
always scours gives a peace to a farmer like unto that given to a prima
donna by a dress that fits in the back.

       *       *       *       *       *

While James Oliver was not a distinctively religious man, yet many
passages of Scripture that he had learned at his mother's knee clung to
him through his long life and leaped easily to his tongue. One of his
favorite and oft-quoted verses was this from Isaiah, "And they shall
beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning-hooks:
nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn
war any more."

The Big Idea of chilled metal for the moldboard of a plow, probably had
its germ in the mind of James Oliver from this very passage of
Scripture.

"When Cincinnatus left his plow in the field to go in defense of his
country, his excuse was the only one that could pardon such a breach,"
he once said.

Oliver hated war. His bent was for the peaceful arts; for that which
would give fruits and flowers and better homes for the people; for love,
joy and all that makes for the good of women and children and those who
have lived long. James Oliver loved old people and he loved children. He
realized that the awful burdens and woes of war fall on the innocent and
the helpless. And so the business of converting sword metal into plow
metal made an appeal to him. Being a metal-worker and knowing much of
the history of the metals, he knew of the "Toledo blade"--that secret
and marvelous invention with its tremendous strength, keen cutting edge
and lightness. To make a moldboard as finely tempered in its way as a
"Toledo blade" was his ambition.

He used to declare that the secret of the sword-makers of old Toledo in
Spain was his secret, too. Whether this was absolutely true is not for
us to question; perhaps a little egotism in a man of this character
should be allowable.

Cast-iron plows, as well as the steel plows of that date, were very
heavy, wore out rapidly--the metal being soft--and didn't "scour,"
except in the purer sands and gravels. The share and moldboard quickly
accumulated soil, increased the "draft," forced the plow out of the
ground, destroyed the regularity of the furrows, killed the horses, and
ruined the temper of the farmer. Every few minutes the plowman had to
scrape off the soil from the moldboard with his boot-heel or stick or
paddle.

When a local rival fitted out a plow with a leather pocket tacked on to
his plow-beam, and offered to give a paddle with every plow, James
Oliver laughed aloud. "I give no paddles, because I do not believe in
them, either for punishment or plow use--my plows and my children do not
need paddles," was his remark.

The one particular thing--the Big Idea--in the Oliver Plow was the
chilled moldboard. Chilling the iron, by having a compartment of water
adjoining the casting-clay, gives a temper to the metal that can be
attained in no other way. To produce a chilled moldboard was the one
particular achievement of James Oliver. Others had tried it, but the
sudden cooling of the metal had caused the moldboard to warp and lose
its shape, and all good plowmen know that a moldboard has to have a form
as exact in its way as the back of a violin, otherwise it simply pushes
its way through the ground, gathering soil and rubbish in front of it,
until horses, lines, lash and cuss words drop in despair, and give it
up. The desirable and necessary thing was to preserve the exact and
delicate shape of the moldboard so that it would scour as bright as a
new silver dollar in any soil, rolling and tossing the dirt from it.

An Oliver moldboard has little checkerboard lines across it. These come
from marks in the mold, made to allow the gas to escape when the metal
is chilled, and thus all warping and twisting is prevented.

Morse, in inventing the telegraph-key, worked out his miracle of dot and
dash in a single night. The thought came to him that electricity flowed
in a continuous current, and that by breaking or intercepting this
current, a flash of light could be made or a lever moved. Then these
breaks in the current could stand for letters or words. It was a very
simple proposition, so simple that men marveled that no one had ever
thought of it before.

Watt's discovery of the expansive power of steam was made in watching
the cover of his mother's teakettle vibrate.

Gutenberg's invention of printing from movable type, Arkwright with his
spinning-jenny, and Eli Whitney with his cotton-gin, worked on
mechanical principles that were very simple--after they were explained.
Exactly so!

Oliver's invention was a simple one, but tremendously effective. When we
consider that one-half of our population is farmers, and that sixty per
cent of the annual wealth of the world is the production of men who
follow the fresh furrow, we see how mighty and far-reaching is an
invention that lightens labor, as this most efficient tool certainly
does.

Accidentally, I found an interesting item on page two hundred
seventy-six of the Senate Report of the Forty-fifth Congress. Mr.
Coffin, statistician, was testifying as an expert on the value of
patents to the people. Mr. Coffin says, "My estimate is that for a
single year, if all of the farmers in the United States had used the
Oliver Chilled Plows, instead of the regular steel or iron plow, the
saving in labor would have totaled the sum of forty-five million
dollars."

When the papers announced the passing of James Oliver some of them
stated that he was "probably the richest man in Indiana." This fact, of
itself, would not make him worthy of the world's special attention.
There are two things we want to know about a very rich man: First, how
did he get his wealth? Second, what is he doing with it? But the fact
that wealth was not the end or aim of this man, that riches came to him
merely as an incident of human service, and that his wealth was used in
giving employment to a vast army of workmen, makes the name of Oliver
one that merits our remembrance.

James Oliver worked for one thing and got another. We lose that for
which we clutch. The hot attempt to secure a thing sets in motion an
opposition which defeats us. All the beautiful rewards of life come by
indirection, and are the incidental results of simply doing our work up
to our highest and best. The striker, with a lust for more money and
shorter hours, the party who wears the face off the clock, and the man
with a continual eye on the pay-envelope, all have their reward--and it
is mighty small. Nemesis with her barrel-stave lies in wait for them
around the corner. They get what is coming to them.

       *       *       *       *       *

The Oliver fortune is founded on reciprocity. James Oliver was a
farmer--in fact, it was the joke of his friends to say that he took as
much pride in his farming as in his manufacturing. Mr. Oliver considered
himself a farmer, and regarded every farmer as a brother or partner to
himself. "I am a partner of the farmer, and the farmer is a partner of
Nature," he used to say. He always looked forward to the time when he
would go back to the farm and earn his living by tilling the soil.

He studied the wants of the farmer, knew the value of good roads, of
fertilizers and drainage, and would argue long and vigorously as to the
saving in plowing with three horses instead of two, or on the use of
mules versus horses. He had positive views as to the value of
Clydesdales compared with Percherons.

So did he love the Clydes that for many years he drove a half-breed,
shaggy-legged and flat-tailed plow-horse to a buggy, and used to declare
that all a good Clyde really needed was patience in training to make him
a racehorse. He used to declare the horse he drove could trot very
fast--"if I would let him out." Unhappily he never let him out, but the
suspicion was that the speed-limit of the honest nag was about six miles
an hour, with the driver working his passage.

Ayrshire cattle always caught his eye, and he would stop farmers in the
field and interrogate them as to their success in cattle-breeding. When
told that his love for Ayrshire cattle was only a prejudice on account
of his love for Robert Burns, who was born at Ayr, he would say, "A
mon's a mon for a' that."

He declared that great men and great animals always came from the same
soil, and where you could produce good horses and cattle you could grow
great men.

Mr. Oliver loved trees, and liked to plant them himself and encouraged
boys to plant them.

For music he cared little, yet during the Seventies and the Eighties he
had a way of buying "Mason and Hamlin" organs, and sending them as
Christmas presents to some of his farmer friends where there were
growing girls. "A sewing-machine, a Mason and Hamlin organ, and an
Oliver Plow form a trinity of necessities for a farmer," he once said.

When Orange Judd first began to issue his "Rural American," the
enterprise received the hearty interest and support of Mr. Oliver and he
subscribed for hundreds of copies.

He thought that farmers should be the most intelligent, the most healthy
and the happiest people on earth--nothing was too good for a farmer.
"Your businessmen are only middlemen--the farmer digs his wealth out of
the ground," he used to say.

He quoted Brigham Young's advice to the Mormons: "Raise food-products
and feed the miners and you will all get rich. But if you mine for gold
and silver, a very few will get rich, and the most of you will die
poor."

       *       *       *       *       *

So there is the point: James Oliver was more interested in industrialism
than in finance. His interest in humanity arose out of his desire to
benefit humanity, and not for a wish to exploit it.

If that is not a great lesson for the young, as well as for the old,
then write me down as a soused gurnet.

The gentle art of four-flushing was absolutely beyond his ken. He was
like those South-Sea Islanders told of by Robert Louis Stevenson, who
didn't know enough to lie until after the missionaries came, when they
partially overcame the disability.

James Oliver didn't know enough to lie. He knew only one way to do
business, and that was the simple, frank, honest and direct way. The
shibboleth of that great New York politician, "Find your sucker, play
your sucker, land your sucker, and then beat it," would have been to him
hopeless Choctaw.

His ambition was to make a better plow than any other living man could
make, and then sell it at a price the farmer could afford to pay. His
own personal profit was a secondary matter. In fact, at board-meetings,
when ways and means were under discussion, he would break in and display
a moldboard, a colter or a new clevis, with a letter from Farmer John
Johnson of Jones' Crossroads, as to its efficiency. Then when the board
did not wax enthusiastic over his new toy, he would slide out and forget
to come back. His heart was set on making a better tool at less expense
to the consumer, than the world had ever seen. Thus would he lessen
labor and increase production. So besides great talent he had a unique
simplicity, which often supplied smiles for his friends.

James Oliver had a sort of warm feeling for every man who had ever held
the handles of an Oliver Plow--he regarded such a one as belonging to
the great family of Olivers. He believed that success depended upon
supplying a commodity that made the buyer a friend; and heaven, to him,
was a vast County Fair, largely attended by farmers, where exhibitions
of plowing were important items on the program. Streets paved with gold
were no lure for him.

In various ways he resembled William Morris, who, when asked what was
his greatest ambition, answered, "I hope to make a perfect blue," and
the dye on his hands attested his endeavors in this line.

Both were workingmen and delighted in the society of toilers. They lived
like poor men, and wore the garb of mechanics. Neither had any use for
the cards, curds and custards of what is called polite society. They
hated hypocrisy, sham, pretense, and scorned the soft, the warm, the
pleasant, the luxurious. They liked stormy weather, the sweep of the
wind, the splash of the rain and the creak of cordage. They gloried in
difficulties, reveled in the opposition of things, and smiled at the tug
of inertia. In their natures was a granitic outcrop that defied
failure. It was the Anglo-Saxon, with a goodly cross of the Norse, that
gave them this disdain of danger, and made levitation in their natures
the supreme thing--not gravitation.

The stubbornness of the Scot is an inheritance from his Norse forebears,
who discovered America five hundred years before Columbus turned the
trick. These men were well called the "Wolves of the Sea." About the
year One Thousand, a troop of them sailed up the Seine in their rude but
staunch ships. The people on the shore, seeing these strange giants,
their yellow hair flying in the wind, called to them, "Where are you
from, and who are your masters?"

And the defiant answer rang back over the waters, "We are from the round
world, and we call no man master."

James Oliver called no man master. Yet with him, the violent had given
way to the psychic and mental. His battleground was the world of ideas.
The love of freedom he imbibed with his mother's milk. It was the thing
that prompted their leaving Scotland.

James Oliver had the defect of his qualities. He was essentially
Cromwellian. He too would have said, "Take away that bauble!" He did not
look outside of himself for help. Emerson's essay on "Self-Reliance"
made small impression upon him, because he had the thing of which
Emerson wrote. His strength came from within, not from without. And it
was this dominant note of self-reliance which made him seem indifferent
to the strong men of his own town and vicinity. It was not a contempt
for strong men: it was only the natural indifference of one who called
no man master.

He was a big body himself, big in brain, big in initiative, big in
self-sufficiency.

He could do without men; and there lies the paradox--if you would have
friends you must be able to do without them.

James Oliver had a host of personal friends, and he also had a goodly
list of enemies, for a man of his temperament does not trim ship. He was
a good hater. He hugged his enemies to his heart with hoops of steel,
and at times they inspired him as soft and mawkish concession never
could. And well could he say, "A little more grape, Captain Bragg."

Also, "We love him for the enemies he made." He had a beautiful disdain
for society--society in its Smart-Set sense. He used to say, "In order
to get into heaven you have to be good and you have to be dead, but in
order to get into society you do not have to be either."

Exclusion and caste were abhorrent to him.

Oliver gave all, and doing so he won all in the way of fame and fortune
that the world has to offer. His was a full, free, happy and useful
life.

Across the sky in letters of light I would write these words of James
Oliver: TO BENEFIT YOURSELF, YOU MUST BENEFIT HUMANITY.

       *       *       *       *       *

Zangwill has written it down in fadeless ink that Scotland has produced
three bad things: Scotch humor, Scotch religion and Scotch whisky. James
Oliver had use for only one of the commodities just named--and that was
humor.

Through his cosmos ran a silver thread of quiet chuckle that added light
to his life and endeared him to thousands. Laughter is the solvent for
most of our ills! All of his own personal religion--and he had a deal of
it--was never saved up for Sunday; he used it in his business. But James
Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological
nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his
passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak
North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive
voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the
stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer,
and with the word "Amen" sank back upon his pillow to arise no more.

For the occasional drunken workman, he had terms of pity and sentences
of scorn in alternation. At such times the Scotch bur would come to his
lips, and the blood of his ancestors would tangle his tongue. One of his
clerks once said to me, "As long as Mr. James talks United States, I am
not alarmed, but when he begins to roll it out with a bur on his tongue,
as if his mouth were full of hot mush, I am scared to death."

       *       *       *       *       *

In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, James Oliver spent several months at
the Chicago Exposition. He was one of the World's-Fair Commissioners.

Hundreds of people shook hands with him daily. He was a commanding
figure, with personality plus. No one ever asked him, any more than they
did old Doctor Johnson, "Sir, are you anybody in particular?" He was
somebody in particular, all over and all of the time.

That story about how the stevedores on the docks in Liverpool turned and
looked at Daniel Webster and said, "There goes the King of America," has
been related of James Oliver. He was a commanding figure, with the face
and front of a man in whom there was no parley. He was a good man to
agree with. In any emergency, even up to his eightieth year, he would
have at once taken charge of affairs by divine right. His voice was the
voice of command.

So there at Chicago he was always the center of an admiring group. He
was Exhibit A of the Oliver Plow Works Exhibition and yet he never
realized it. One day, when he was in a particularly happy mood, and the
Scotch bur was delightfully apparent, as it was when he was either very
angry or very happy, an elderly woman pushed her way through the throng
and seizing the hand that ruled the Oliver Plow Works in both of her
own, said in ecstatic tones: "Oh! it is such a joy to see you again.
Twenty years ago I used to hear you preach every Sunday!"

For once James Oliver was undone. He hesitated, stammered and then
exclaimed in flat contradiction, "Madam, you never heard me preach!"

"Why, aren't you Robert Collyer--the Reverend Robert Collyer?"

"Not I, madam. My name is Oliver, and I make plows," was the proud
reply.

That night Oliver asked his trusted helper, Captain Nicar, this
question: "I say, Nicar, who is this man Collyer--that woman was the
third person within a week who mistook me for that preacher. I don't
look like a dominie, do I, Captain?"

And then Captain Nicar explained what Mr. Oliver had known, but which
had temporarily slipped his mind--that Robert Collyer was a very great
preacher, a Unitarian who had graduated out of orthodoxy, and who in his
youth had been a blacksmith.

"Why didn't he stay a blacksmith, if he was a good one, and let it go at
that?"

But this Nicar couldn't answer. However, the very next day Robert
Collyer came along, piloted by Marshall Field, and Oliver had an
opportunity to put the question to the man himself.

Robert Collyer was much impressed by Mr. Oliver, and Mr. Oliver declared
that Mr. Collyer was not to blame for his looks. And so they shook
hands.

Collyer was at Chicago to attend the Parliament of Religions. This
department of the great Exposition had not before especially appealed to
Oliver--machinery was his bent. But now he forgot plows long enough to
go and hear Robert Collyer speak on "Why I Am a Unitarian."

After the address Mr. Oliver said to Mr. Collyer, "Almost thou
persuadest me to be a Unitarian."

"Had you taken to the pulpit, you would have made a great preacher, Mr.
Oliver," said Mr. Collyer. "And if you had stuck to your bellows and
forge, you might have been a great plow-maker," replied Mr. Oliver--"and
it's lucky for me you didn't."

"Which is no pleasantry," replied Mr. Collyer, "for if I had made plows
I should, like you, have made only the best."

The Oliver Exhibit at the great Fair was a kind of meeting-place for a
group of such choice spirits as Philip D. Armour, Sam Allerton, Clark E.
Carr and Joseph Medill; and then David Swing, Robert Collyer, Doctor
Frank Gunsaulus and 'Gene Field were added to the coterie. 'Gene Field's
column of "Sharps and Flats" used to get the benefit of the persiflage.

Collyer and Oliver were born the same year--Eighteen Hundred
Twenty-three. Both had the same magnificent health, the same high hope
and courage that never falters, and either would have succeeded in
anything into which he might have turned his energies.

Chance made Oliver a mechanic and an inventor. He evolved the
industrial side of his nature. Chance also lifted Collyer out of a
blacksmith-shop and tossed him into the pulpit.

Collyer was born in Yorkshire, but his ancestors were Scotch. Oliver's
mother's name was Irving, and the Irvings appear in the Collyer
pedigree, tracing to Edward Irving, that strong and earnest preacher who
played such a part in influencing Tammas the Titan, of Ecclefechan.
Whether Oliver and Collyer ever followed up their spiritual relationship
to see whether it was a blood-tie, I do not know: probably not, since
both, like all superbly strong men, have a beautiful indifference to
climbing genealogical trees.

I once heard Robert Collyer speak in a sermon of James Oliver as "a
transplanted thistle evolved into a beautiful flower," and "the man of
many manly virtues."

Seemingly Mr. Collyer was unconscious of the fact that, in describing
Mr. Oliver, he was picturing himself. Industry, economy, the love of
fresh air, the enjoyment of the early morning, the hatred of laziness,
shiftlessness, sharp practise and all that savors of graft, grab and
get-by-any-means--these characteristics were strong in both. And surely
Robert Collyer was right: if the world ever produces a race of noble
men, that race will be founded on the simple virtues, upon which there
is neither caveat nor copyright--the virtues possessed by James Oliver
in such a rare degree.

       *       *       *       *       *

George H. Daniels, of the New York Central Railroad, and James Oliver
were close personal friends. Both were graduates of the University of
Hard Knocks; both loved their Alma Mater.

When Daniels printed that literary trifle, "A Message to Garcia," he
sent five thousand copies to Oliver, who gave one to every man in his
factory.

Daniels was one of the Illini, and had held the handles of an Oliver
Plow. He had seen the great business of the Olivers at South Bend
evolve. Oliver admired Daniels, as he did any man who could do big
things in a big way. Daniels had an exhibition of locomotives and
passenger-cars at the Chicago Exposition, and personally spent much time
there. Among the very interesting items in the New York Central's
exhibit was the locomotive that once ran from Albany to Schenectady,
when that streak of scrap-iron rust, sixteen miles long, constituted the
whole of the New York Central Railroad; and this locomotive, the "De
Witt Clinton," had been the entire motor equipment, save two good mules
used for switching purposes.

It was during the Exposition that Oliver incidentally told Daniels about
how he had been mistaken for the Reverend Robert Collyer.

"I can sympathize with you," said Daniels; "for the plague of my life is
a preacher who looks like me. Only last week I was stopped on the street
by a man who wanted me to go to his house and perform a
marriage-ceremony."

"And you punched his ticket?" asked Oliver.

"No, I accepted, and sent for the sky-pilot to do the job, and the happy
couple never knew of the break."

The man who so closely resembled Daniels was the Reverend Doctor Thomas
R. Slicer of Buffalo, an eminent clergyman now in New York City. Besides
other points of resemblance, the one thing that marked them as twins was
a beautiful red chin-whisker, about the color of an Irish setter. Once
Daniels challenged the reverend gentleman to toss up to see who should
sacrifice the lilacs. Doctor Slicer got tails, but lost his nerve before
he reached the barber's, and so still clings to his beauty-mark.

Doctor Slicer was once going through the Grand Central Station when he
was approached by a man who struck him for a pass to Niagara Falls.

"I regret," said the preacher, "that I can not issue you a pass to
Niagara Falls; all I can do is to give you a pass to Paradise."

"Which," said Mr. Oliver, when Mr. Daniels told him the story, "which
was only a preacher's way of telling the man to go to hades. You and I,
George, express ourselves much more simply."

       *       *       *       *       *

It will not do to make James Oliver out a religious man in a sectarian
sense. He did, however, have a great abiding faith in the Supreme
Intelligence in which we are bathed and of which we are a part. He saw
the wisdom and goodness of the Creator on every hand. He loved
Nature--the birds in the hedgerows and the flowers in the field. He
gloried in the sunrise, and probably saw the sun rise more times than
any other man in Indiana.

"The morning is full of perfume," he used to say. And so it is, but most
of us need to be so informed.

He believed most of all in his own mission and in his own divinity.
Therefore he prized good health, and looked upon sickness and sick
people with a touch of scorn. He reverenced the laws of health as God's
laws, and so he would not put an enemy in his mouth to steal away his
brains. He used no tobacco, was wedded to the daily cold bath, and was a
regular amphibian for splashing. He had a system of calisthenics which
he followed as religiously as the Mohammedan prays to the East. The
pasteboard proclivity was not one of his accomplishments.

But a few months before his death he was missed one day at the works.
His son thought he would drive out to his farm and see if he were there.
He was there all right, and had just one hundred twenty-seven men, by
actual count, digging a ditch and laying out a road.

James Oliver wasn't a man given to explanations, apologies or excuses.
His working motto usually was that of the Reverend Doctor Jowett of
Baliol, "Never explain, never apologize--get the thing done, and let
them howl!"

But on this occasion, anticipating a gentle reproach from his son for
his extravagance, he said: "All right, Joe, all right. You see I've been
postponing this tarnashun job for twenty years, and I thought I'd just
take hold and clean it up, because I knew you never would!"

He was let off with a warning, but Joseph had to go behind the barn and
laugh.

One thing that was as much gratification to Mr. Oliver as making the
road was the sense of motion, action, bustle and doing things. He
delighted in looking after a rush job, and often took charge of "the
boys" personally.

For the men who made the plows, his regard was as great as for those who
used them. He moved among the men as one of them, and while his
discipline never relaxed, he was always approachable and ready to advise
even with the most lowly. His sense of justice and his consideration are
shown in the fact that in all the long years that the Oliver Plow Works
existed, it has never once been defendant in a lawsuit in its home
county, damage or otherwise.

Thousands of men have been employed and accidents have occasionally
happened, but the unfortunate man and his family have always been cared
for. Indeed, the Olivers carry a pension-roll for the benefit of
widows, orphans and old people, the extent of which is known only to the
confidential cashier. They do not proclaim their charities with a brass
band.

James Oliver thought that a man should live so as to be useful all of
his days. Getting old was to him a bad habit. He did not believe in
retiring from business, either to have a good time or because you were
old and bughouse. "Use your faculties and you will keep them," he used
to repeat again and again. He agreed with Herbert Spencer that men have
softening of the brain because they have failed to use that organ.

And certainly he proved his theories, for he, himself, was sane and
sensible to the day of his death. Yet when certain of his helpers, bowed
beneath the weight of years and life's vicissitudes, would become weak
and needful of care, he would say, "Well, old John has done us good
work, and we must look after him." And he did.

He would have denied that he was either charitable or philanthropic; but
the fact was that the Golden Rule was a part of his business policy, and
beneath his brusk outside, there beat a very warm and generous heart.

When the financial panic of Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three struck the
country, and dealers were canceling their orders and everybody was
shortening sail, the Olivers kept right along manufacturing, and stored
their product.

Never have they laid off labor on account of hard times. Never have
they even shortened hours or pay. This is a record, I believe, equaled
by no big manufacturing concern in America.

In October, Nineteen Hundred Seven, when workmen were being laid off on
every hand, the Olivers simply started in and increased their area for
the storage of surplus product. They had faith that the tide would turn,
and this faith was founded on the experience of forty years and more in
business. Said James Oliver, "Man's first business was to till the soil;
his last business will be to till the soil; I help the farmer to do his
work, and for my product there will always be a demand."

       *       *       *       *       *

James Oliver had no fear of death. He had an abiding faith that the
Power that cared for him here would never desert him there. He looked
upon death as being as natural as life and probably just as good. For
the quibbles of theology he had small patience. "Live right here--wait,
and we shall know," he used to say.

When his wife died, in Nineteen Hundred Two, he bore the blow like a
Spartan. Fifty-eight years had they journeyed together. She was a woman
of great good sense, and a very handsome woman, even in her old age. Her
husband had always depended on her, telling her his plans and thus
clarifying them in his own mind. They were companions, friends, chums,
lovers--man and wife. After her death he redoubled his activities, and
fought valiantly to keep from depressing the household with the grief
that was gnawing at his heart.

A year passed, and one day he said to his son, "Joe, I do miss your
mother awfully--but then, I'll not have to endure this loneliness
forever!"

And this was as near a sign of weakness as he ever showed.

James Oliver was a successful man, but it was not always smooth sailing.
In the early days, the Plow Plant caught fire at night and was
absolutely consumed. Returning home at three o'clock in the morning,
exhausted, and with clothing wet and frozen in a sheet of ice, this man,
sorely kicked by an unkind Fate, turned a chair over on the floor before
the fireplace, and reclining on it there with eyes closed, endeavored
to forget the trying scenes of the night.

Mrs. Oliver had made coffee and prepared a simple breakfast for the
tired man. But rest was never for her or her family when there was
pressing work demanding attention. "James, why are you wasting time?
Drink this coffee, put on these dry clothes and go at once before
daylight and order lumber and brick so the men can begin at seven
o'clock to rebuild. We have orders to fill!" And the man arousing
himself obeyed the command. At seven o'clock the lumber was on the
ground and the men were at work preparing to rebuild.

James Oliver was a man of courage, but his patience, persistency and
unfaltering faith were largely the reflection of his wife's soul and
brain. When seventy years of age, a neighbor once dropped in for a
little visit, and in conversation referred to Mr. Oliver's being a rich
man.

"Yes," said this kindly old Spartan, "yes, they say I am rich, but if I
didn't have a dollar, I would still be rich--with a wife like that!" and
he pointed to his partner of nearly half a century.

Mrs. Oliver smiled and said chidingly, "Now, James!"

But he continued, "I say, mother, if we did not have a dollar, we could
still earn our living with our hands at just plain hard work, couldn't
we?"

And the old lady (who really was never old) replied, "Yes, James, we
could still earn our living with our hands, and we would not be
miserable over it, either." Near the close of his wonderful career,
Pericles said, "I have caused no one to wear crape." The Honorable
Marvin Campbell, in a speech at South Bend, once quoted this remark of
the man who built the City of Athens and added, "Not only can we pay
James Oliver the compliment of saying that he never caused any one to
wear crape, but no one ever lost money by investing in either his goods
or his enterprises, and moreover no one ever associated with him who did
not prosper and grow wiser and better through the association."

A few weeks before his passing, some one told him this little story of
Tolstoy's: A priest, seeing a peasant plowing, approached him and said,
"If you knew you were to die tonight, how would you spend the rest of
the day?"

And the peasant promptly answered, "I would plow."

It seems the priest thought the man would answer, "In confession," or
"In prayer," or "At church." The priest heard the answer in surprise. He
thought a moment, and then replied, "My friend, you have given the
wisest answer a man can possibly make, for to plow is to pray, since the
prayer of honest labor is always answered."

The story impressed Mr. Oliver. He told it to several people, and then
made a personal application of it, thus, "If I knew I were to die
tonight, I would make plows today."




STEPHEN GIRARD


     I do not value fortune. The love of labor is my sheet-anchor. I
     work that I may forget, and forgetting, I am happy.

                                                --_Stephen Girard_

[Illustration: STEPHEN GIRARD]


When we make a census of the sensible, and count the competent, we can
not leave out the name of William Penn. He was the founder of the City
of Philadelphia, and of the great Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, and gave
name and fame to both.

In this respect of being founded by an individual, Philadelphia, the
City of Brotherly Love, and the State of Pennsylvania, are unique and
peculiar in all the annals of American history.

Yet Philadelphia has no monument to Penn, save the hazy figure of a
dumpy nobody surmounted by an enormous hat, all lost in the incense of
commerce upon the topmost pinnacle of the City Hall.

If Philadelphia has been sky-piloted by her orthodox Witherspoons and
Albertsons, by her Converses and Conwells, and if they have taught her
to love her enemies and then hold balances true by hating her friends,
let Clio so record, for history is no longer a lie agreed upon. In her
magnificent park and in her public squares Philadelphia has done honor
in bronze and marble to Columbus, Humboldt, Schubert, Goethe, Schiller,
Garibaldi and Joan of Arc. But "Mad Anthony Wayne," and that fearless
fighting youth, Decatur, are absolutely forgotten. Doctor Benjamin
Rush, patriot, the near and dear friend of Franklin, and the man who
welcomed Thomas Paine to Pennsylvania and gave him a desk where he might
ply his pen and write the pamphlet, "Common Sense," sleeps in an unknown
grave. You will look in vain for effigies of Edgar Allan Poe, who was
once a Philadelphia editor; of Edwin Forrest, who, lionlike, trod her
boards; of Rittenhouse, mapping the stars; of Doctor Kane, facing Arctic
ice and Northern night; of Doctor Evans, who filed and filled the teeth
of royalty and made dentists popular; of Bartram, Gross, or Leidy.
Fulton lived here, yet only the searcher in dusty, musty tomes knows it.

Benjamin West, who founded England's Academy of Painting, is honored in
Westminster Abbey; but Harrisburg, too busy in her great game of grab
and graft, knows not his name. Robert Morris, who was rewarded for his
life of patriotic service by two years in a debtors' jail, is still in a
cell, the key of which is lost--and Sully, Peale, Taylor, Walter and
Fitch mingle their dust with his.

Yet all this might be forgiven on the plea that where so many names of
the strong and powerful bid for recognition, a good way to avoid
jealousies, is to ignore them all. So speaks proud and pious
Philadelphia--snug, smug, prosperous, priggish and pedantic
Philadelphia. But how about these five supremely great names--William
Penn, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Paine, Stephen Girard and Walt Whitman!

Oh! ye Friends, innocent of friendship, will ye forever try to smother
these by your silence, simply because they failed to do theological
goose-step on your order, as your bum-beadles marked time with their
staves?

Oh! ye cities and nations, cherish, I pray you, the names of your heroes
in business, art, finance and poetry, for only by them and through them
shall the future know you. Have a care, ye cities! for the treatment
that ye accord to these, living, and to their memories, dead, is but the
telltale record of your own heart and brain!

       *       *       *       *       *

Benjamin Franklin founded the Philadelphia Public Library, the
Philadelphia Hospital, the Philadelphia Orphan Asylum and the University
of Pennsylvania.

Franklin was also much interested in good roads, the building of
canals--steam-railroads were then, of course, a dream unguessed.

Girard got his philanthropic impetus from Franklin. Girard had watched
the progress of the University of Pennsylvania, and he had become
convinced that it fell short of doing the good it might do. It shot too
high.

Franklin had a beautiful contempt for Harvard. He called it a social
promotion plan, and thereby got the lasting enmity of John Adams and his
son, John Quincy Adams, and also of John Hancock.

Franklin had hoped to make the University of Pennsylvania a different
school. But after his death it followed in exactly the Harvard lines. It
fitted prosperous youth for the professions, but it left the orphan and
the outcast to struggle with the demons of darkness, discarded and
forgotten. Girard founded his college with the idea of helping the
helpless. Thomas Jefferson, also, had impressed Girard greatly. Girard
once made a trip to Monticello; and he spent two days at the University
of Virginia. This was really remarkable, for time with Girard was a very
precious commodity.

Thomas Jefferson was the man who introduced classic architecture into
America. All of those great white pillars that front the mansions of
Virginia, and in fact of the whole South, had their germ in the brain of
Jefferson, who reveled in all that was Greek. Jefferson was a composite
of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, and if Socrates was not the first
Jeffersonian Democrat, then who was?

Socrates dwelt on the rights and virtues of the "demos"--the Common
People. Jefferson uses the expression again and again, and was the one
man to popularize the word "Democrat." When Jefferson, wearing his suit
of butternut homespun, rode horseback up to the Washington Capitol and
tied his horse and walked over to the office of the Chief Justice and
took the oath of office as President of the United States his action was
essentially Socratic.

Girard got his ideals both of architecture and of education from
Jefferson.

Girard was too busy to do much original investigating, for he was a very
rich man--so he did the next best thing, and the thing that all wise,
busy men do: he picked a few authors and banked on them.

Girard loved Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson and Thomas Paine. And
one reason why he was drawn to them was because they all spoke French,
and he had a high regard for the French people. Franklin and Jefferson
were each sent on various important diplomatic missions to France. Paine
was a member of the French Assembly, and Girard never ceased to regret
that Paine was saved from the guillotine by that happy accident of the
death-messenger chalking the inside of his cell-door instead of the
outside. "If they had only cut off his head, he then would have been
recorded in American schoolbooks as the Honorable Thomas Paine,
assistant savior of his country, instead of being execrated as Tom
Paine, the infidel," said Girard.

In the time of Girard, the names of Franklin, Jefferson and Paine were
reviled, renounced and denounced by good society; and it was in
defending these men that Girard brought down upon himself the contumely
that endures--in attenuation, at least--even unto this day.

Let these facts stand: Franklin taught Girard the philosophy of business
and fixed in his mind the philanthropic bias.

Jefferson taught Girard the excellence of the "demos," and at the same
time gave him an unforgetable glimpse of Greek architecture.

Paine taught Girard the iniquity and folly of a dogmatic religion: the
religion that was so sure it was right, and so certain that all others
were wrong, that it would, if it could, force humanity at point of the
sword to accept its standards.

Franklin and Paine were citizens of Philadelphia, and Jefferson spent
many months there. The pavements that had echoed to their tread were
daily pressed by the feet of Girard. Their thoughts were his. And when
pestilence settled on the city like a shadow, and death had marked the
doorposts of more than half the homes in the city with the sign of
silence, Girard did not absolve himself by drawing a check and sending
it to a committee by mail. Not he! He asked himself, "What would
Franklin have done under these conditions?" And he answered the question
by going to the pesthouse, doing for the stricken, the dying and the
dead what the pitying Christ would have done had He been on earth.

Girard believed in humanity; he believed in men as did Franklin,
Jefferson and Paine, and as did that other great citizen of Philadelphia
who, too, was willing to give his life in the hospitals that men might
live--Walt Whitman.

No one ever called Walt Whitman a financier. Some have said that Stephen
Girard was nothing else. In any event, Girard and Whitman, between them,
hold averages true. And they both believed in and loved humanity. And
here is a fact: when we make up the composite man--the perfect
man--taking our human material from American history, we can not omit
from our formula Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine,
Stephen Girard and Walt Whitman.

       *       *       *       *       *

Stephen Girard was born at Bordeaux, France, in Seventeen Hundred Fifty.
He died at Philadelphia in Eighteen Hundred Thirty-one.

Immediately after his death there was printed a book which purported to
be his biography. It was the work of a bank-clerk who had been
discharged by Girard. This man had been close enough to his employer to
lend plausibility to much that he had to say, and as the author called
himself Girard's private secretary, people with prejudices plus pointed
to the printed page as authority. The volume served to fill the popular
demand for pishmince. It was written with exactly the same intent that
Cheetham, who wrote his "Life of Thomas Paine," brought to bear. The
desire was to damn the subject for all time. Besides that, it was a
great business stroke--calumny was made to pay dividends. To libel the
dead is not, in the eyes of the law, a crime.

No such book as this "Life of Girard" could ever have been circulated
about a living man. "Once upon a time an ass kicked a lion, but the lion
was dead."

Yet this libelous production was reprinted as late as Eighteen Hundred
Ninety. Cheetham's book was quoted as an authority on Thomas Paine until
the year Nineteen Hundred, when Moncure D. Conway's exhaustive "Life"
made the pious prevaricators absurd.

From being a bitter "infidel," a hater of humanity, grossly ignorant and
wholly indifferent to the decencies, we now view Girard as a lonely and
pathetic figure, living out his long life in untiring industry, always
honest, direct, frank, handicapped by physical defects, wistful in his
longing for love, helpless to express what he felt, with a heart that
went out to children in a great welling desire to give them what Fate
had withheld from him.

Stephen Girard's parents were lowly and obscure people. They were
Catholics. His father was a sailor and fisherman. Fear, hate,
superstition, ignorance, ruled the household. When the father had money
it went for strong drink, or to the priest. Probably it would have been
as well if the priest had gotten it all. The mother went out as servant
and worked by the day for her more fortunate neighbors. The children
cared for one another, if the word "care" can be used to express a
condition of neglect and indifference.

It might be pleasant to show, if possible, that the mother of Stephen
Girard had certain tender, womanly qualities, but the fact is that no
such qualities were ever manifested. If there was ever any soft
sentiment in her character, the fond father of his flock had kicked it
out of her. That she was usually able to hold her own in fair fight was
the one redeeming memory that the son held concerning her.

Stephen was the eldest of the brood. He attended the parochial school
and learned to read. His playmates called him by a French term
meaning "Twisted." He was eight years of age before he realized that
the names his mother called him by, were of contempt and not of
endearment--"Wall-Eye" and "Mud-Sucker"--literally the vocabulary of a
fishwife. Then he knew for the first time that his eyes were not like
those of other children--that one eye had a bluish cast in it and turned
inward. That night he cried himself to sleep thinking over his dire
misfortune.

At school when he read he closed one eye, and this made the children
laugh. So much did their taunts prey upon him that he ran away from
school to escape their gibes.

One of the Friars Gray caught him; whipped him before the whole school;
put a dunce-cap on his head, and stood him on a high chair. Then his
humiliation seemed complete. He prayed for death. At home when he tried
to tell his mother about his trouble she laughed, and boxed his ears for
being a "cry-baby brat."

Back in this boy's ancestry, somewhere, there must have been a stream of
gentle blood. He was a song-bird in a cuckoo's nest. When the military
band played, his spirit was so moved that he shed tears. But when his
mother died, and her body was placed in a new board coffin made by a
neighbor who worked in the shipyard, he admired the coffin, but could
not cry even when the priest pinched him and called him hard-hearted. He
could not cry, even with his twisted eye. His mother, as a lovable
being, had gone out of his life, even before she died. He could only
think what a beautiful coffin she had and what a great man it was who
made it. And this man who made the coffin gave him a penny--perhaps
because the boy so appreciated his handiwork.

Stephen, unconsciously, won him on the side of art.

It's a terrible thing to kill love in the heart of a child. That popular
belief that we are "born in sin and conceived in iniquity," Girard once
said was true in his case, at least.

Yet so wondrous are the works of God, the hate and brutality visited
upon their child went into the making of his strong and self-reliant
character. He never said, "My mother's religion is good enough for me."
He despised her religion, and that of the Friars Gray who punished boys
to make them good. His mind turned inward--he became silent, secretive,
self-centered, and his repulsive exterior served him well as a tough
husk to hide his finer emotions.

In a few months--or was it a few weeks--after his mother's death, the
father married again. The stepmother was no improvement on the mother.
She had lofty ideas of discipline and being "minded." No doubt that
little Stephen, crooked in eyes, crooked in body, short and swart, with
brown, bare legs, was stubborn and wilful. He looked the part all right.
His brown, bare legs were a temptation for the stepmother's willow
switch. He decided to relieve everybody of the temptation to switch his
legs by running away to sea and taking his brown, bare legs with him.
There was a ship at the docks about to sail for the West Indies. He
could secrete himself among the bales and barrels, and once the ship was
out of port he would come out and take chances on being accepted as
cabin-boy. They could do no more than throw him overboard, anyway!

He told his little sisters of his intention. They cried, but he didn't.
He hadn't cried since he was eight years old, and his cheerful
biographer says he never shed a tear afterward, and I guess that is so.

At two o'clock in the morning, he whispered good-by to his little
sleeping sisters. He did not kiss them--he never kissed anybody in his
whole life, his biographer says, and I guess that may be so, too. He
stole downstairs and out into the moonlight. The dock was only a quarter
of a mile away. The ship was to sail at daylight, on the turn of the
tide. There was much commotion going on around the boat, battening down
hatches and doing the last few necessary things before braving the
reeling deep.

Little Stephen was watching his chance to get aboard. He was going as a
stowaway. A man came up to him. It was the captain, and before the lad
could escape the man said, "Here, I want a cabin-boy--will you go?"

The boy thanked God that it was night, so the captain could not see his
crooked eye, and gasped, "Yes--yes!"

The cook was making coffee in the galley for the stevedores, who had
just finished loading the ship. The captain took the boy by the hand and
leading him up the plank to the galley told the cook to give him a cup
of coffee and a biscuit.

The ship pushed off and hoisted sail just at daylight, on the turn of
the tide.

The tide, too, had turned for Stephen Girard.

       *       *       *       *       *

A very little observation will show that physical defects, when backed
up by mental worth, transform themselves into "beauty-spots." To be
sure, no one was ever so bold as to speak of Girard's blemishes as
beauty-spots, but the fact is that his homely face and ungraceful body
were strong factors in making him a favorite of fortune. Handsome is
that handsome does. Disadvantages are often advantages--they serve as
stimulus and bring out the best.

Young Girard had long arms and short legs, and could climb fast and
high. And he could see more with his one eye than most men could with
two. He expected no favor on account of his family or his good looks,
and so made himself necessary to the captain of the craft as a matter of
self-preservation.

Not all sea-captains are brutal, nor do all sailors talk in a hoarse
guttural, shift their quids, hitch their trousers, and preface their
remarks with, "Shiver my timbers."

That first captain with whom Stephen Girard sailed was
young--twenty-six, a mere youth, with a first mate twice his years. He
was mild-mannered, gentle-voiced and owned a copy of Voltaire's
"Philosophical Dictionary." His name is lost to us; even the name of his
ship has foundered in the fog; but that he was young, gentle, and read
Voltaire, are facts recorded in the crooked and twisted handwriting of
Stephen Girard, facts which even his blackguard biographer admitted.

The new cabin-boy was astonished that one so young could be captain of a
ship; he was also astonished that a person who gave orders in a gentle
voice could have them executed. Later, he learned that the men whose
orders are always obeyed do not talk loudly nor in guttural. This first
boyish captain taught Girard a splendid lesson--to moderate both manner
and voice and be effective.

Of that first voyage, about all we know is that the boy slept on a pile
of gunny-sacks; that the captain let him read from the "Philosophical
Dictionary"; that he polished the bright work until it served as a
mirror; that the captain smiled his approval, and that the boy, short
and swart, with bullet head, followed him with one eye and worshiped him
as deity.

Men do not succeed by chance. Chance may toss you into a position of
power, but if you do not possess capacity, you can never hold the place.

Young Girard gravitated from the position of cabin-boy to clerk.

From this to mate came by easy stages, and so much as a matter of course
that it isn't worth while to mention how.

By the law of France no man under twenty-five could be captain of a
ship, but when Girard was twenty-two we find a shipowner falsifying the
record and putting the boy down as twenty-five, on the obliging oath of
the boy's father, who we hope was duly paid for his pains.

At twenty-four, Captain Stephen Girard sailed his sloop, "L'Amiable
Louise," around Sandy Hook and up New York Bay. Ship-captains then were
merchants, with power to sell, trade and buy.

The venture was a success, and young Girard took the liberty of picking
up a cargo and sailing for New Orleans--his knowledge of French being a
valuable asset for that particular destination.

Matters were prosperous, and Girard was twenty-six, just the age of that
heroic captain under whose care he first set sail, and the age of the
Corsican when he conquered Italy.

Girard had ceased to wonder about boys braving waves and going upon the
stormy sea in ships.

It was in July, Seventeen Hundred Seventy-six,--call it July
Fourth--that Captain Stephen Girard was skirting the coast of the
Atlantic, feeling his way through a fog toward New York. He was not sure
of his course and was sailing by dead-reckoning.

Suddenly the fog lifted. The sun stood out, a great golden ball in the
sky. The young captain swung his glass along the horizon and with his
one good eye saw a sail--it was bearing down upon him.

It was coming closer.

In an hour it was a mile away. He realized that he was the objective
point.

It was a British cruiser, and he realized that he was to be forced upon
the beach or captured.

Girard was not a praying man, but he prayed now for a friendly cove or
bay, or the mouth of a river. The fog rolled away to the west, the
shore-line showed sharp and clear--and there a half-mile away was the
inviting mouth of Chesapeake Bay. At least Girard thought it was, but it
proved to be the mouth of the Delaware. Girard crowded on all sail--the
cruiser did the same.

Night settled down.

Before morning Girard's little craft was safe under the frowning forts
of the Delaware, and the cruiser had turned back seeking fresh prey.

       *       *       *       *       *

On one of his trips to the West Indies, the ship of which Stephen Girard
was mate stopped at the Isle of Martinique.

The captain and mate went ashore, and were invited to dine at the house
of a merchant and planter up on the hillside overlooking the sea. The
sugar with which the ship was loaded belonged to this planter, hence the
courtesies to the seafaring men. Of that seemingly uneventful day one
incident stood out in the mind of Girard to the day of his death. It
seems the merchant and planter had a niece who lived in his household.
This girl sat at the table next to Girard. She was only a child, about
twelve years of age. But women mature young in that climate, and her
presence caused the little first mate to lose all appetite. However,
nothing worse happened than the spilling of a dish of soup in his lap
when the girl tried to pass the plate to him, which was surely more
polite than to spill it in hers.

After dinner the young lady accompanied the party to the wharf. Going
down the hill she talked a good deal, but Girard could only say it was a
fine day and looked as if there was going to be a storm.

The girl was tall, angular and strong. She climbed the rigging to the
lookout, and then was scolded by her uncle, who was really proud of her
and chuckled at her performance. Her features were rather coarse, but
her lustrous eyes and bubbling vitality caused the one sound peeper of
Girard to follow her in awe and reverence.

She came into the cabin and looked at his books; this pleased Girard. He
asked her if she could read, and she loftily wrote her name for him,
thus: Marie Josephine Rose Tascher de la Pagerie. She handed him the
slip of paper and remarked, "You could never remember my name, so I
write it out for you like this."

In a few minutes the order was given, "All ashore who are going ashore!"

Girard kept that slip of paper, and a few years afterward, in a generous
mood, sent the girl a present of a blue shawl. She wrote in
acknowledgment, and incidentally said she was soon to sail for France
"to get an education."

Girard was surprised that any woman would want an education, and still
more amazed at the probability that she could acquire one. In fact, when
the girl had written her name for him, he kept the slip of paper more as
a curiosity than anything else--it was the handwriting of a woman!
Girard never received but that one letter from the young lady, but from
his shipping agent in Martinique word came that Marie J