Part 31

his power. Some teachers want to "retire," others don't. Nature knows nothing of pensions. Let each man be paid for his labor and let him understand that economy of expenditure is the true and only insurance against want in old age. The pensioning of the youth is really more dangerous than to pension age. The youth should ask for nothing but opportunity. To make him immune from work and economy is to supply him a ticket--one way--to Matteawan. In order to educate a boy for life, we should not lift him out of life. The training for life should slide into life at an unknown and unrecognizable point. The boy born into poverty, who fetches in wood for his mother and goes after the cows, has already entered upon a career. His brown bare feet are carrying messages, and his hands are taking on the habit of helpfulness. He is getting under the burden; and such a one will never be a parasite on society. In East Aurora there used to live a noted horseman. He bred, raised, trained and drove several trotters that made world's records. Then behold another man comes on the scene--and a good man, too--and says, "Go to, I will raise and train horses that will go so fast that Pa Hamlin's horses will do only for the plow." So he built a covered and enclosed track, a mile around. It cost nearly a hundred thousand dollars. And here the wise one was to train his colts all Winter, while the other man's horses ran barefoot, and with long woolly coats plowed through snowdrifts waiting for Spring to come with chirrup of birds and good roads. Result--the man with the covered track had his horses "fit" in April, but in July and August, when the races begin, they had "gone past." Moreover, it was discovered that horses trained on a covered track could not be raced with safety on an open course. The roofed track had shut the horse in, giving him a feeling of protection and safety; but when he got on an open track, the sun, the sky, the crowds, the moving vehicles, sent him into a nervous dance. A bird flying overhead would stampede him. He lost his head and wore out his nerve. But the horses that had been woolly in February grew sleek in May, and being trained in the open grew used to the sights, and for them every day was a race-day. In August they were hard and cool and level-headed, and always had one link left when called upon at the home-stretch. The covered track was all right in theory, but false in practise. It ruined a thousand colts, and never produced a single trotter. Don't train either horses or children indoors, and out of season, and expect a world-beater. Next, make your teaching and training, life, not an indoor make-believe. The school that approximates life will be the school whose pupils make records. What is needed now is a line of colleges in the North that will do for white folks what Booker T. Washington does for the colored. And the reason we do not have such schools is because we have not yet evolved men big enough as teachers to couple business and books. The men who can make money can't teach, and those who can teach can't make money. The man of the future will do both. Tuskegee has no servants, no menials, and employs no laborers. The work of housing and feeding two thousand persons is all student labor. This is a great achievement. But the university that is to come will go beyond Tuskegee in this: it will supply commodities to supply to the world what the world wants. Three or four hours of manual labor a day will not harm either the body or the brain of a growing youth. On the other hand, such a course will give steadiness to life. This labor will be paid for, so the student will be independent of all outside help at all times. Thus will it make for manhood and self-reliance. * * * * * Mr. Carnegie's success, like that of every master businessman, has turned on his selection of men. He has always been on the lookout for young men who could carry the Message. His success proves his ability to judge humanity. Whenever he was sure he had the genuine article he would tender the young man an interest in the business, often a percentage on sales or output. This was the plan of Marshall Field. By this method he transformed a good man into a master, and bound the man to him in a way that no outside influence could lend a lure. The only disadvantage in this, Mr. Carnegie says, is that when the young man becomes a millionaire you may have him for a competitor, but even with this risk, it is much wiser than to try to carry all the burden yourself. A multimillionaire should raise a goodly brood of millionaires, and of necessity does. Wise is the man who sees to it that he has an understudy. Once upon a time, along in the Eighties, Mr. Carnegie got somewhat overworked and took a trip to Europe. Just before going, he went around and bade good-by to each of the Big Boys who ran the mills. One of these was Captain William Jones, more familiarly known to fame as plain Bill Jones. "Bill," said Mr. Carnegie, "I'm a bit weary and I feel I must get away, and the only place for me to go is Europe. I have to place an ocean between me and this mighty hum of industry before I can get rest. And do you know, Bill, no matter how oppressed I am, just as soon as I round Sandy Hook and get out of sight of land, I get perfect relief." And Bill answered, "And, O Lord, just think of the relief we all get," and everybody roared, Andy loudest of all. And the last thing that Andy did before sailing was to raise Bill's salary just ten thousand dollars a year. Mr. Carnegie has always liked men who are not afraid of him; and when one of his workers could convince him that he--the worker--knew more about some particular phase of the business than Mr. Carnegie, that man was richly rewarded. Mr. Carnegie has ever been on friendly terms with his men. And had he been in America when the Homestead labor trouble arose, there would have been no strike. He is firm when he should be, but he is always friendly. He is wise enough and big enough to give in a point. Like Lincoln, he likes to let people have their own way. He manages them, if need be, by indirection, rather than by formal edict, order and injunction. * * * * * Barbaric folk prize gold and make much use of silver. But the consumption of iron is the badge of civilization. Iron rails, iron steamboats, iron buildings! And who was there thirty years ago who foresaw the modern sky-scraper, any more than a hundred years ago men foretold the iron steamship! The business of Andrew Carnegie has been to couple the iron-mines of Lake Superior with the coal-fields of Pennsylvania. And to load the ore at Duluth and transport it to Pittsburgh, a thousand miles away, and transform it into steel rails, was a matter of ten days. When the Carnegie Steel Company was reconstructed in Nineteen Hundred, it was with no intention of selling out. It was the biggest, best-organized business concern in America, with possibly one exception. Its capital was one hundred million dollars. It owned the Homestead, the Edgar Thomson and the Duquesne Mills. Besides these, it owned seven other smaller mills. It owned thousands of acres of ore-land in the Lake Superior country. It owned a line of iron steamships that carried the ore to the Pittsburgh railroad connections. It owned the railroads that brought the ore from the mines to the docks, and it owned the docks. It owned vast coalmines in Pennsylvania, and it owned a controlling interest in the Connellville coke-ovens, whence five miles of freight-cars, in fair times, were daily sent to the mills, loaded with coke. These properties were practically owned by Mr. Carnegie personally, and his was the controlling hand. He had a daily report from every mill, which in a few lines told just what the concern was doing. There was also a daily report from each branch office, and a report from the head cashier, where one line of figures presaged the financial weather. When "the billion-dollar trust"--the United States Steel Corporation--was formed, Mr. Carnegie sold his interests in the Carnegie plants to the new concern for two hundred fifty million dollars, and took his pay in five-per-cent bonds. It was the biggest and cleanest clean-up ever consummated in the business world. As a financial get-away it has no rival in history. There were many wise ones who said, "Oh, he will foreclose and have the works back in a few years." But not so--the United States Steel Corporation has made money and is making money, because it is being managed by men who, for the most part, were trained by Carnegie in the financial way they should go. As far as money is concerned, Mr. Carnegie could have made much more by staying in business than by selling out, but Andrew Carnegie quit one job to take up a harder one. "To die a millionaire will yet be a disgrace," he said. To give away money is easy, but to give it away wisely, so it will benefit the world for generations to come--that is a most difficult and exacting task. The quarter of a thousand million in Steel Bonds did not constitute Mr. Carnegie's whole wealth. He had several little investments outside of that. In fact, that clever saying, "Put all your eggs in one basket," is exoteric, not esoteric. What Mr. Carnegie really meant was, if you are only big enough to watch one basket, to have two were folly. Mr. Carnegie himself has always had his eggs in a dozen or so baskets, but he never has had any more baskets than he could watch. His baskets were usually coupled together like the "grasshopper," which pumps several oil-wells with one engine. Wealth is good for those who can use it; power the same; but when you cease to manage a thing and the thing begins to manage you, it may eat you up. In East Aurora there used to be a good friend of mine who had a peanut-stand at the station. The business flourished and some one advised my friend that he should put in popcorn as a sideline. He did so, and got nervous prostration. You see, he was a peanut man, and when he got outside of his specialty he was lost. One realizes the herculean task of dying poor which confronts Mr. Carnegie, when you think that he is worth, say, five hundred million dollars. This is invested so that it brings an income of five per cent, or twenty-five million dollars a year. So far, Mr. Carnegie has been barely able to give away his income, to say nothing of the principal. His total benefactions up to the present time amount to about two hundred millions. He has nearly worked the territory with libraries. You can't give two libraries to a town, except in the big cities--people protest and will not have them. There is a limit to pipe-organs. Heroes are so plentiful that it is more or less absurd to distinguish them with medals. Dunfermline is almost done for by a liberality that would damn any American town. To give faster than people grow is to run the grave risk of arresting development. A benefaction must bestow a benefit. Give to most people and they will quit work and get a job with George Arliss, for the devil still finds mischief for idle hands to do. To relieve the average man from work would simply increase the trade in cigarettes, cocaine, bromide and strong drink, and supply candidates for Sing Sing. To make a vast fortune and then lose the tailboard out of your hearse and dump your wealth on a lazy world merely causes the growler to circulate rapidly. And so we sympathize with Andrew Carnegie in his endeavor to live up to his dictum to die poor, and yet not pauperize the world by his wealth. But let us not despond. The man is only seventy-eight. His eyes are bright; his teeth are firm; his form is erect; his limbs are agile; and