Part 21

ould carry him in his arms to a place of safety and bind up his wounds. Rightly approached his heart was as tender as a girl's. In business he paid to the last cent; and he expected others to pay, too. For clerks in a comatose state, and the shirker who would sell his labor and then connive to give short count, he had no pity; but for the stricken or the fallen, his heart and his purse were always open. He gloried in work and could not understand why others should not get their enjoyment out of it also. He kept farmers' hours throughout his life, going to bed at nine o'clock and getting up at five. He prized sleep--God's great gift of sleep--and used to quote Sancho Panza, "God bless the man who first invented sleep." Yet he slept only that he might arise and work. To be well and healthy and strong and joyous was to him not only a privilege but a duty. If he used tobacco it was never during business hours. For strong drink he had an abhorrence, simply because he thought it useless, save possibly as a medicine, and he believed that no man would need medicine if he lived rightly. Philip Armour foresaw the possibilities of the West and the Northwest, and in company with Alexander Mitchell, "Diamond Joe" Reynolds, Fred Layton, John Plankinton and others, took great personal pride in the upbuilding of the country. He was possessed of an active imagination. In a bigger, broader sense he was a dreamer. In his every action and thought he was a doer. He was very fond of children and would drop almost any work he had in hand to talk for a few minutes with a small boy or girl. He kept a stock of small Swiss watches in his desk to present to his junior callers. His great hobby was presenting his men with a suit of clothes should they suggest anything out of the ordinary or do anything which attracted his commendation. Nearly all of those close to him were presented with gold watches. It was in the late Seventies. Mr. Armour, with officials, was inspecting the Saint Paul Railway. A rumor was circulated that Armour and Company was in financial trouble, and Mr. Armour was so advised. His return was so prompt that it was suggested that he must have come down over the wire. He was very much incensed, and his first query was as to who had started the rumor. The president of a Chicago bank had loaned Armour and Company one hundred thousand dollars, note due in ninety days. For some reason known only to himself, he had made a demand on the cashier for the payment of this note some sixty days before it was due, and very naturally, in the absence of Mr. Armour, did not get his money. Everett Wilson at that time was a member of the Ogden Boat Club, and was quite friendly with a son of the president of the bank above referred to. This young man remarked to Mr. Wilson that he had never felt so sorry for a man in his life as he did for his father the day before. He said Phil Armour had come over to the bank--had bearded his father in his den, and had gone after him so fiercely--had gotten under him in so many ways--had lampooned him up dale and down hill, that there was nothing left of his father but a bunch of apologetic confusion, and that the interview had ended by Mr. Armour's throwing a hundred thousand dollars in currency in the gentleman's face. The young man said he never knew that a man could be so indignant and so voluble as Mr. Armour was, and that it had made a lasting impression on him. Philip Armour had very high business ideals. To sell an article at more than it was worth, or to deceive the buyer as to quality in any way, he would have regarded as a calamity. He delighted in the thought that the men with whom he traded were his friends. That his prosperity had been the prosperity of the producing West, and also to the advantage of the consuming East, were great sources of satisfaction. To personal criticism he very seldom made reply, feeling that a man's life should justify itself, and that explanation, excuse or apology is unworthy in a man who is doing his best to help himself by helping humanity. But in spite of his indifference to calumny his years were shortened by the stab of a pen--the thing which killed Keats--the tumult of wild talk concerning "embalmed beef," started by a Doctor William Daly (who shortly after committed suicide) and taken up to divert public attention from the unpreparedness of the country properly to take care of the health of its volunteer soldiery. Mr. Armour, as Father of the Packing-House Industry, was keenly sensitive to these slanders on the quality of the product and the honesty of the packers. The charges were thoroughly investigated by a board of army officers and declared by them to be without foundation. Scandal and defamation in war-time are imminent; the literary stinkpot rivals the lyddite of the enemy; fever, envy, malice and murderous tongues strike in the dark and retreat in a miasmic fog. Here were forces that Philip Armour, as unsullied and as honorable as Sir Philip Sidney, could not fight, because he could not locate them. About the same time came one Joseph Leiter, who tried to corner the wheat of the world. Chicago looked to Armour to punish the presumptuous one. And so Armour, already bowed with burdens, kept the Straits of Mackinaw open in midwinter, and delivered millions of bushels of real wheat for real money to meet the machinations of the bounding Leiter. Here, too, Armour was fighting for Chicago, to redeem, if possible, her good name in the eyes of the nations. And Armour won; but it was like that last shot of Brann's, sent after he, himself, had fallen. Philip Armour slipped down into the valley and passed out into the shadow, unafraid. Like Cyrano de Bergerac he said, "I am dying, but I am not defeated, nor am I dismayed!" And so they laid his tired, overburdened body in the windowless house of rest. JOHN J. ASTOR The man who makes it the habit of his life to go to bed at nine o'clock, usually gets rich and is always reliable. Of course, going to bed does not make him rich--I merely mean that such a man will in all probability be up early in the morning and do a big day's work, so his weary bones put him to bed early. Rogues do their work at night. Honest men work by day. It's all a matter of habit, and good habits in America make any man rich. Wealth is largely a result of habit. --_John Jacob Astor_ [Illustration: JOHN JACOB ASTOR] It was Victor Hugo who said, "When you open a school, you close a prison." This seems to require a little explanation. Victor Hugo did not have in mind a theological school, nor yet a young-ladies' seminary, nor an English boarding-school, nor a military academy, and least of all a parochial institute. What he was thinking of was a school where people--young and old--were taught to be self-respecting, self-reliant and efficient--to care for themselves, to help bear the burdens of the world, to assist themselves by adding to the happiness of others. Victor Hugo fully realized that the only education which serves is the one that increases human efficiency, not the one that retards it. An education for honors, ease, medals, degrees, titles, position--immunity--may tend to exalt the individual ego, but it weakens the race, and its gain on the whole is nil. Men are rich only as they give. He who gives service gets great returns. Action and reaction are equal, and the radiatory power of the planets balances their attraction. The love you keep is the love you give away. A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and a cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware-store and remarked, "Lemme see your razors." The clerk smiled pleasantly and asked, "Do you want a razor to shave with?" "Naw," said the colored person; "for social purposes." An education for social purposes isn't of any more use than a razor purchased for a like use. An education which merely fits a person to prey on society, and occasionally slash it up, is a predatory preparation for a life of uselessness, and closes no prison. Rather it opens a prison and takes captive at least one man. The only education that makes free is the one that tends to human efficiency. Teach children to work, play, laugh, fletcherize, study, think, and yet again, work, and we will raze every prison. There is only one prison, and its name is Inefficiency. Amid the bastions of this bastile of the brain the guards are Pride, Pretense, Greed, Gluttony, Selfishness. Increase human efficiency and you set the captives free. "The Teutonic tribes have captured the world because of their efficiency," says Lecky the historian. He then adds that he himself is a Celt. The two statements taken together reveal Lecky to be a man without prejudice. When the Irish tell the truth about the Dutch the millennium approaches. Should the quibbler arise and say that the Dutch are not Germans, I will reply, true, but the Germans are Dutch--at least they are of Dutch descent. The Germans are great simply because they have the homely and indispensable virtues of prudence, patience and industry. There is no copyright on these qualities. God can do many things, but so far, He has never been able to make a strong race of people and leave these ingredients out of the formula. As a nation, Holland first developed them so that they became characteristic of the whole people. It was the slow, steady stream of Hollanders pushing southward that civilized Germany. Music as a science was born in Holland. The grandfather of Beethoven was a Dutchman. Gutenberg's forebears were from Holland. And when the Hollanders had gone clear through Germany, and then traversed Italy, and came back home by way of Venice, they struck the rock of spiritual resources and the waters gushed forth. Since Rembrandt carried portraiture to the point of perfection, two hundred fifty years ago, Holland has been a land of artists--and it is so even unto this day. John Jacob Astor was born of a Dutch family that had migrated down to Heidelberg from Antwerp. Through some strange freak of atavism the father of the boy bred back, and was more or less of a Stone-Age cave-dweller. He was a butcher by trade, in the little town of Waldorf, a few miles from Heidelberg. A butcher's business then was to travel around and kill the pet pig, or sheep, or cow that the tender-hearted owners dare not harm. The butcher was a pariah, a sort of unofficial, industrial hangman. At the same time he was more or less of a genius, for he climbed steeples, dug wells, and did all kinds of disagreeable jobs that needed to be done, and from which cautious men shrank like unwashed wool. One such man--a German, too--lives in East Aurora. I joined him in walking along a country road, the other day. He carried a big basket on his arm, and was peacefully smoking a big Dutch pipe. We talked of music and he was regretting the decline of a taste for Bach, when he happened to shift the basket to the other arm. "What have you there?" I asked. And here is the answer: "Oh, noddings--noddings but dynamite. I vas going up on der hill to blow me some stumps oud." And I suddenly bethought me of an engagement at the village. * * * * * John Jacob Astor was the youngest of four sons, and as many daughters. The brothers ran away early in life, and went to sea or joined the army. One of these boys came to America, and followed his father's trade of butcher. Jacob Astor, the happy father of John Jacob, used to take the boy with him on his pig-killing expeditions--this for two reasons: one, so the lad would learn a trade, and the other to make sure that the