Part 33

throw you off the front seat when the horse stopped, if you didn't look out. That is to say, he was a New England village boy, alive and alert to every phase of village life--strong, rapid, willing, helpful. The villager who knows too much gets "fresh" and falls a victim of arrested development. The boy in a village who works, and then gets out into a wider sphere at that critical period when the wanderlust strikes him, is in the line of evolution. George Peabody remained at Proctor's store until nine o'clock in the evening of the day that marked the close of his four years of apprenticeship. He was fifteen, and all tempting offers from Mr. Proctor to pay him wages thereafter in real money were turned aside. He had a new suit of clothes, five dollars in his pocket, and ambition in his heart. He was going to be a draper, and eliminate all "W. I. Goods." * * * * * Over at Newburyport, George had a brother, David Peabody, who ran a "draper's shop." That is to say, David Peabody was a drygoods merchant. This was a comparatively new thing in America, for a "store," at that time, usually kept everything that people wanted. The exclusive draper idea came from London. It seemed to work in Boston, and so Newburyport tried it. David and George had talked it over together, and a partnership was in mind. In the meantime George was only fifteen years old, and David thirty. "I am twice as old as you," once said David to George, with intent to make the lad know his proper place. "Yes, I know; but you will not be twice as old as I very long," replied George, who was up in mathematics. The brothers did not mix very well. They were tuned to a different vibration. One had speed: the other was built for the plow. And when the store caught fire and burned, and almost all of Newburyport was burned up, too, it was a good time for George to strike for pastures new. He walked down to Boston, and spent all his money for a passage on a coaster that was about to sail for Washington, in the District of Columbia. This was in the latter part of the year Eighteen Hundred Eleven. Washington was the capital of the country, and there was an idea then that it was also going to be the commercial metropolis--hence the desire to get in on the ground floor. Especially was the South to look to Washington for her supplies. George Peabody, aged sixteen, looked the ground over, and thought he saw opportunity nodding in his direction. He sat down and wrote to a wholesale drygoods-dealer by the name of Todd in Newburyport, ordering draperies to the amount of two thousand dollars. Blessed is that man who knows what he wants, and asks for it. Todd remembered the boy who had given him orders in Proctor's, and at once filled the order. In three months Todd got his money and an order for double the amount. In those days the plan of calling on the well-to-do planters, and showing them the wares of Autolycus, was in vogue. English dress-goods were a lure to the ladies. George Peabody made a pack as big as he could carry, tramped, smiled and sold the stuff. When he had emptied his pack, he came back to his room where his stock was stored and loaded up again. If there were remnants he sold them out to some crossroads store. The fact that the Jews know a few things in a worldly way, I trust will not be denied. George Peabody, the Yankee, adopted the methods of the Chosen People. And at that early date, it comes to us as a bit of a miracle that George Peabody said, "You can't afford to sell anybody anything which he does not need, nor can you afford to sell it at a price beyond what it is worth." Also this, "When I sell a woman draperies, I try to leave the transaction so I can go back next week and sell her more." Also this: "Credit is the sympathetic nerve of commerce. There are men who do not keep faith with those from whom they buy, and such last only a little while. Others do not keep faith with those to whom they sell, and such do not last long. To build on the rock one must keep his credit absolutely unsullied, and he must make a friend of each and all to whom he sells." The Judaic mental processes have been sharpened by migration. To carry a pack and peddle is better than to work for a Ph. D., save for the social usufruct and the eclat of the unthinking. We learn by indirection and not when we say: "Go to! Now watch us take a college course and enlarge our phrenological organs." Our knobs come from knocks, and not from the gentle massage of hired tutors. Selling subscription-books, maps, sewing-machines or Mason and Hamlin organs, has given thousands of strong men their initial impulse toward success. When you go from house to house to sell things you catch the household in their old clothes and the dog loose. To get your foot in the front door and thus avoid the slam, sweetening acerbity by asking the impatient housewife this question, "Is your mother at home?" and then making a sale, is an achievement. "The greatest study of mankind is man," said Pope, and for once he was right, although he might have said woman. From fifteen to nineteen is the formative period, when the cosmic cement sets, if ever. During those years George Peabody had emerged from a clerkship into a Businessman. What is a Businessman? A Businessman is one who gets the business, and completes the transaction. Book-keepers, correspondents, system men, janitors, scrub-women, stenographers, electricians, elevator-boys, cash-girls, are all good people and necessary and worthy of sincere respect, but they are not Businessmen, because they are on the side of expense and not income. When H. H. Rogers coupled the coalmines of West Virginia with tidewater, he proved himself a Businessman. When James J. Hill created an Empire in the Northwest, he proved his right to the title. The Businessman is a salesman. And no matter how great your invention, how sweet your song, how sublime your picture, how perfect your card-system, until you are able to convince the world that it needs the thing, and you get the money for it, you are not a Businessman. The Businessman is one who supplies something great and good to the world, and collects from the world for the goods. Taffy, guff and oxaline are all well and good in their way, but they have the great disadvantage of not being legal tender. * * * * * In migrating from New England to the District of Columbia, George Peabody had moved into a comparatively foreign country, and in the process had sloughed most of his provincialism. It is beautiful to be a New Englander, but to be nothing else is terrible. George had proved for himself the most valuable lesson in Self-Reliance--that he could make his way alone. He had kept his credit and strengthened it. He had served as a volunteer soldier in the War of Eighteen Hundred Twelve, and done patrol duty on the banks of the Potomac. And when the war was over, no one was quite so glad as he. Serving in the volunteer ranks with him was one Elisha Riggs, several years his senior, and also a draper. They had met before, but as competitors and on a cold business basis. Now they were comrades in arms, and friends. Riggs is today chiefly remembered to fame because he built what in its day was the most palatial hotel in Washington, just as John Jacob Astor was scarcely known outside of his bailiwick until he built that grand hostelry, the Astor House. Riggs had carried a pack among the Virginia plantations, but now he had established a wholesale drygoods house in Georgetown, and sold only to storekeepers. He had felt the competitive force of Peabody's pack, and would make friends with it. He proposed a partnership. Peabody explained that his years were but nineteen, and therefore he was not legally of age. Riggs argued that time would remedy the defect. Riggs was rich--he had five thousand dollars, while Peabody had one thousand six hundred fifty dollars and forty cents. I give the figures exact, as the inventory showed. But Peabody had one thing which will make any man or woman rich. It is something so sweetly beneficent that well can we call it the gift of the gods. The asset to which I refer is Charm of Manner. Its first requisite is glowing physical health. Its second ingredient is absolute honesty. Its third is good-will. Nothing taints the breath like a lie. The old parental plan of washing out the bad boy's mouth with soft soap had a scientific basis. Liars must possess good memories. They are fettered and gyved by what they have said and done. The honest man is free--his acts require neither explanation nor apology. He is in possession of all of his armament. The outdoor work of tramping Maryland and Virginia highways had put the glow of high health on the cheek of George Peabody. He was big in body, manly, intelligent and could meet men on a basis of equality. If I were president of a college, I would certainly have a Chair devoted to Psychic Mixability, or Charm of Manner. Ponderosity, profundity and insipidity may have their place, but the man with Charm of Manner keeps his capital active. His soul is fluid. I have never been in possession of enough of this Social Radium to analyze it, but I know it has the power of dissolving opposition, and melting human hearts. But so delicate and illusive is it that when used for a purely selfish purpose, it evaporates into thin air, and the erstwhile possessor is left with only the mask of beauty and the husk of a personality. George Peabody had Charm of Manner from his nineteenth year to the day of his death. Colonel Forney crossed the Atlantic with him when Peabody was in his seventy-first year, and here is what Forney says: "I sat on one side of the cabin and he on the other. He was reading from a book, which he finally merely held in his hands, as he sat idly dreaming. I was melted into tears by the sight of his Jove-like head framed against the window. His face and features beamed with high and noble intellect, and his eyes looked forth in divine love. If ever soul revealed itself in the face, it was here. He was the very King of Men, and I did not at all wonder that in the past people had worked the apotheosis of such as he." * * * * * The firm of Riggs and Peabody prospered. It outgrew its quarters in old "Congress Hall" in Georgetown, and ran over into a house next door, which it pre-empted. Moreover, it was apparent by this time that neither Georgetown nor Washington would ever be the commercial metropolis of America. The city of Baltimore had special harbor advantages that Washington did not have; the ships touched there according to natural law. And when Riggs and Peabody found themselves carting consignments to Baltimore in order to make shipment to Savannah and Charleston, they knew the die was cast. They packed up and moved to Baltimore. This was in the year Eighteen Hundred Fifteen. In order to do business you had better go where business is being done. Trade follows the lines of least resistance. The wholesale dealer saw the value of honesty as a business asset, long before the retailer made the same unique discovery. Doctor Algernon S. Crapsey says that truth is a brand-new virtue, and the clergy are not quite sure about it yet. To hold his trade the jobber found he had to be on the dead level: he had to consider himself the attorney for his client. Peabody was a merchant by instinct. He had good taste, and he had a prophetic instinct as to what the people wanted. Instead of buying his supplies in Newburyport, Boston and New York, he now established relations with London, direct. And London was then the Commercial Center of the world, the arbiter of fashion, the molder of form, the home of finance--f