asking questions. Your thirst for information must fairly make your
tongue loll out. When you ask the head of the canning department what
we're netting for two-pound Corned Beef on the day's market for
canners, and he has to say, "Wait a minute and I'll figure it out," or
turn to one of his boys and ask, "Bill, what are twos netting us?" he
isn't sitting close enough to his job, and, perhaps, if Bill were in
his chair, he'd be holding it in his lap; or when you ask the chief
engineer how much coal we burned this month, as compared with last,
and why in thunder we burned it, if he has to hem and haw and say he
hasn't had time to figure it out yet, but he thinks they were running
both benches in the packing house most of the time, and he guesses
this and reckons that, he needs to get up a little more steam himself.
In short, whenever you find a fellow that ought to know every minute
where he's at, but who doesn't know what's what, he's pretty likely to
be _It_. When you're dealing with an animal like the American hog,
that carries all its profit in the tip of its tail, you want to make
sure that your men carry all the latest news about it on the tip of
the tongue.
It's not a bad plan, once in a while, to check up the facts and
figures that are given you. I remember one lightning calculator I had
working for me, who would catch my questions hot from the bat, and
fire back the answers before I could get into position to catch. Was a
mighty particular cuss. Always worked everything out to the sixth
decimal place. I had just about concluded he ought to have a wider
field for his talents, when I asked him one day how the hams of the
last week's run had been averaging in weight. Answered like a streak;
but it struck me that for hogs which had been running so light they
were giving up pretty generously. So I checked up his figures and
found 'em all wrong. Tried him with a different question every day for
a week. Always answered quick, and always answered wrong. Found that
he was a base-ball rooter and had been handing out the batting
averages of the Chicagos for his answers. Seems that when I used to
see him busy figuring with his pencil he was working out where Anson
stood on the list. He's not in Who's Who in the Stock Yards any more,
you bet.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
No. 12
From John Graham, at Magnolia Villa, on the Florida Coast, to his son,
Pierrepont, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago. The old man has started
back to Nature, but he hasn't gone quite far enough to lose sight of
his business altogether.
XII
MAGNOLIA VILLA, February 5, 1900.
_Dear Pierrepont_: Last week I started back to Nature, as you advised,
but at the Ocean High Roller House I found that I had to wear
knee-breeches, which was getting back too far, or creases in my
trousers, which wasn't far enough. So we've taken this little place,
where there's nothing between me and Nature but a blue shirt and an
old pair of pants, and I reckon that's near enough.
I'm getting a complexion and your ma's losing hers. Hadn't anything
with her but some bonnets, so just before we left the hotel she went
into a little branch store, which a New York milliner runs there, and
tried to buy a shade hat.
"How would this pretty little shepherdess effect do?" asked the girl
who was showing the goods, while she sized me up to see if the weight
of my pocketbook made my coat sag.
"How much is it?" asked your ma.
"Fifty dollars," said the girl, as bright and sassy as you please.
"I'm not such a simple little shepherdess as that," answered your ma,
just a little brighter and a little sassier, and she's going around
bareheaded. She's doing the cooking and making the beds, because the
white girls from the North aren't willing to do "both of them works,"
and the native niggers don't seem to care a great deal about doing any
work. And I'm splitting the wood for the kitchen stove, and an
occasional fish that has committed suicide. This morning, when I was
casting through the surf, a good-sized drum chased me up on shore, and
he's now the star performer in a chowder that your ma has billed for
dinner.
They call this place a villa, though it's really a villainy; and what
I pay for it rent, though it's actually a robbery. But they can have
the last bill in the roll if they'll leave me your ma, and my
appetite, and that tired feeling at night. It's the bulliest time
we've had since the spring we moved into our first little cottage back
in Missouri, and raised climbing-roses and our pet pig, Toby. It's
good to have money and the things that money will buy, but it's good,
too, to check up once in a while and make sure you haven't lost the
things that money won't buy. When a fellow's got what he set out for
in this world, he should go off into the woods for a few weeks now and
then to make sure that he's still a man, and not a plug-hat and a
frock-coat and a wad of bills.
You can't do the biggest things in this world unless you can handle
men; and you can't handle men if you're not in sympathy with them; and
sympathy begins in humility. I don't mean the humility that crawls for
a nickel in the street and cringes for a thousand in the office; but
the humility that a man finds when he goes gunning in the woods for
the truth about himself. It's the sort of humility that makes a fellow
proud of a chance to work in the world, and want to be a square
merchant, or a good doctor, or an honest lawyer, before he's a rich
one. It makes him understand that while life is full of opportunities
for him, it's full of responsibilities toward the other fellow, too.
That doesn't mean that you ought to coddle idleness, or to be slack
with viciousness, or even to carry on the pay-roll well-meaning
incompetence. For a fellow who mixes business and charity soon finds
that he can't make any money to give to charity; and in the end,
instead of having helped others, he's only added himself to the burden
of others. The kind of sympathy I mean holds up men to the bull-ring
without forgetting in its own success the hardships and struggles and
temptations of the fellow who hasn't got there yet, but is honestly
trying to. There's more practical philanthropy in keeping close to
these men and speaking the word that they need, or giving them the
shove that they deserve, than in building an eighteen-hole golf course
around the Stock Yards for them. Your force can always find plenty of
reasons for striking, without your furnishing an extra one in the poor
quality of the golf-balls that you give them. So I make it a rule that
everything I hand out to my men shall come in the course of business,
and be given on a business basis. When profits are large, they get a
large bonus and a short explanation of the business reasons in the
office and the country that have helped them to earn it; when profits
are small, the bonus shrinks and the explanation expands. I sell the
men their meats and give them their meals in the house restaurant at
cost, but nothing changes hands between us except in exchange for work
or cash.
If you want a practical illustration of how giving something for
nothing works, pick out some one who has no real claim on you--an old
college friend who's too strong to work, or a sixteenth cousin who's
missed connections with the express to Fortune--and say: "You're a
pretty good fellow, and I want to help you; after this I'm going to
send you a hundred dollars the first of every month, until you've made
a new start." He'll fairly sicken you with his thanks for that first
hundred; he'll call you his generous benefactor over three or four
pages for the second; he'll send you a nice little half-page note of
thanks for the third; he'll write, "Yours of the first with inclosure
to hand--thanks," for the fourth; he'll forget to acknowledge the
fifth; and when the sixth doesn't come promptly, he'll wire collect:
"Why this delay in sending my check--mail at once." And all the time
he won't have stirred a step in the direction of work, because he'll
have reasoned, either consciously or unconsciously: "I can't get a job
that will pay me more than a hundred a month to start with; but I'm
already drawing a hundred without working; so what's the use?" But
when a fellow can't get a free pass, and he has any sort of stuff in
him, except what hoboes are made of, he'll usually hustle for his car
fare, rather than ride through life on the bumpers of a freight.
The only favor that a good man needs is an opportunity to do the best
work that's in him; and that's the only present you can make him once
a week that will be a help instead of a hindrance to him. It's been my
experience that every man has in him the possibility of doing well
some one thing, no matter how humble, and that there's some one, in
some place, who wants that special thing done. The difference between
a fellow who succeeds and one who fails is that the first gets out and
chases after the man who needs him, and the second sits around waiting
to be hunted up.
When I was a boy, we were brought up to believe that we were born
black with original sin, and that we bleached out a little under old
Doc Hoover's preaching. And in the church down Main Street they taught
that a lot of us were predestined to be damned, and a few of us to be
saved; and naturally we all had our favorite selections for the first
bunch. I used to accept the doctrine of predestination for a couple of
weeks every year, just before the Main Street church held its
Sunday-school picnic, and there are a few old rascals in the Stock
Yards that make me lean toward it sometimes now; but, in the main, I
believe that most people start out with a plenty of original goodness.
The more I deal in it, the surer I am that human nature is all off
the same critter, but that there's a heap of choice in the cuts. Even
then a bad cook will spoil a four-pound porterhouse, where a good one
will take a chuck steak, make a few passes over it with seasoning and
fixings, and serve something that will line your insides with
happiness. Circumstances don't make men, but they shape them, and you
want to see that those under you are furnished with the right set of
circumstances.
Every fellow is really two men--what he is and what he might be; and
you're never absolutely sure which you're going to bury till he's
dead. But a man in your position can do a whole lot toward furnishing
the officiating clergyman with beautiful examples, instead of horrible
warnings. The great secret of good management is to be more alert to
prevent a man's going wrong than eager to punish him for it. That's
why I centre authority and distribute checks upon it. That's why I've
never had any Honest Old Toms, or Good Old Dicks, or Faithful Old
Harrys handling my good money week-days and presiding over the
Sabbath-school Sundays for twenty years, and leaving the old man short
a hundred thousand, and the little ones short a superintendent, during
the twenty-first year.
It's right to punish these fellows, but a suit for damages ought to
lie against their employers. Criminal carelessness is a bad thing, but
the carelessness that makes criminals is worse. The chances are that,
to start with, Tom and Dick were honest and good at the office and
sincere at the Sunday-school, and that, given the right circumstances,
they would have stayed so. It was their employers' business to see
that they were surrounded by the right circumstances at the office and
to find out whether they surrounded themselves with them at home.
A man who's fundamentally honest is relieved instead of aggrieved by
having proper checks on his handling of funds. And the bigger the
man's position and the amount that he handles, the more important this
is. A minor employee can take only minor sums, and the principal harm
done is to himself; but when a big fellow gets into you, it's for
something big, and more is hurt than his morals and your feelings.
I dwell a little on these matters, because I want to fix it firmly in
your mind that the man who pays the wages must put more in the weekly
envelope than money, if he wants to get his full money's worth. I've
said a good deal about the importance of little things to a boss;
don't forget their importance to your men. A thousand-dollar clerk
doesn't think with a ten-thousand-dollar head; a fellow whose view is
shut in by a set of ledgers can't see very far, and so stampedes
easier than one whose range is the whole shop; a brain that can't
originate big things can't forget trifles so quick as one in which the
new ideas keep crowding out the old annoyances. Ten thousand a year
will sweeten a multitude of things that don't taste pleasant, but
there's not so much sugar in a thousand to help them down. The sting
of some little word or action that wouldn't get under your skin at
all, is apt to swell up one of these fellows' bump of self-esteem as
big as an egg-plant, and make it sore all over.
It's always been my policy to give a little extra courtesy and
consideration to the men who hold the places that don't draw the extra
good salaries. It's just as important to the house that they should
feel happy and satisfied as the big fellows. And no man who's doing
his work well is too small for a friendly word and a pat on the back,
and no fellow who's doing his work poorly is too big for a jolt that
will knock the nonsense out of him.
You can't afford to give your men a real grievance, no matter how
small it is; for a man who's got nothing to occupy thin but his work
can accomplish twice as much as one who's busy with his work and a
grievance. The average man will leave terrapin and champagne in a
minute to chew over the luxury of feeling abused. Even when a man
isn't satisfied with the supply of real grievances which life affords,
and goes off hunting up imaginary ones, like a blame old gormandizing
French hog that leaves a full trough to root through the woods for
truffles, you still want to be polite; for when you fire a man there's
no good reason for doing it with a yell.
Noise isn't authority, and there's no sense in ripping and roaring and
cussing around the office when things don't please you. For when a
fellow's given to that, his men secretly won't care a cuss whether
he's pleased or not. They'll jump when he speaks, because they value
their heads, not his good opinion. Indiscriminate blame is as bad as
undiscriminating praise--it only makes a man tired.
I learned this, like most of the sense I've got--hard; and it was only
a few years ago that I took my last lesson in it. I came down one
morning with my breakfast digesting pretty easy, and found the orders
fairly heavy and the kicks rather light, so I told the young man who
was reading the mail to me, and who, of course, hadn't had anything
special to do with the run of orders, to buy himself a suit of clothes
and send the bill to the old man.
Well, when the afternoon mail came in, I dipped into that, too, but
I'd eaten a pretty tony luncheon, and it got to finding fault with its
surroundings, and the letters were as full of kicks as a drove of
Missouri mules. So I began taking it out on the fellow who happened to
be handiest, the same clerk to whom I had given the suit of clothes in
the morning. Of course, he hadn't had anything to do with the run of
kicks either, but he never put up a hand to defend himself till I was
all through, and then he only asked:
"Say, Mr. Graham, don't you want that suit of clothes back?"
[Illustration: "Say, Mr. Graham, don't you want that suit of clothes
back?"]
Of course, I could have fired him on the spot for impudence, but I
made it a suit and an overcoat instead. I don't expect to get my
experience on free passes. And I had my money's worth, too, because it
taught me that it's a good rule to make sure the other fellow's wrong
before you go ahead. When you jump on the man who didn't do it, you
make sore spots all over him; and it takes the spring out of your leap
for the fellow who did it.
One of the first things a boss must lose is his temper--and it must
stay lost. There's about as much sense in getting yourself worked up
into a rage when a clerk makes a mistake as there is in going into the
barn and touching off a keg of gunpowder under the terrier because he
got mixed up in the dark and blundered into a chicken-coop instead of
a rat-hole. Fido may be an all-right ratter, in spite of the fact that
his foot slips occasionally, and a cut now and then with a switch
enough to keep him in order; but if his taste for chicken develops
faster than his nose for rats, it's easier to give him to one of the
neighbors than to blow him off the premises.
Where a few words, quick, sharp, and decisive, aren't enough for a
man, a cussing out is too much. It proves that he's unfit for his
work, and it unfits you for yours. The world is full of fellows who
could take the energy which they put into useless cussing of their
men, and double their business with it.
Your affectionate father,
JOHN GRAHAM.
No. 13
From John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards, Chicago, to his son,
Pierrepont, care of Graham & Company, Denver. The young man has been
offered a large interest in a big thing at a small price, and he has
written asking the old man to lend him the price.
XIII
CHICAGO, June 4, 1900.
_Dear Pierrepont_: Judging from what you say about the Highfaluting
Lulu, it must be a wonder, and the owner's reason for selling--that
his lungs are getting too strong to stand the climate--sounds
perfectly good. You can have the money at 5 per cent, as soon as
you've finally made up your mind that you want it, but before you
plant it in the mine for keeps, I think you should tie a wet towel
around your head, while you consider for a few minutes the bare
possibility of having to pay me back out of your salary, instead of
the profits from the mine. You can't throw a stone anywhere in this
world without hitting a man, with a spade over his shoulder, who's
just said the last sad good-byes to his bank account and is starting
out for the cemetery where defunct flyers are buried.
While you've only asked me for money, and not for advice, I may say
that, should you put a question on some general topic like, "What are
the wild waves saying, father?" I should answer, "Keep out of watered
stocks, my son, and wade into your own business a little deeper."
Though, when you come to think of it, these continuous-performance
companies, that let you in for ten, twenty, and thirty cents a share,
ought to be a mighty good thing for investors after they've developed
their oil and gold properties, because a lot of them can afford to pay
10 per cent. before they've developed anything but suckers.
So long as gold-mining with a pen and a little fancy paper continues to
be such a profitable industry, a lot of fellows who write a pretty fair
hand won't see any good reason for swinging a pick. They'll simply pass
the pick over to the fellow who invests, and start a new prospectus.
While the road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they're something
after all; but the walls along the short cuts to Fortune are papered
with only the prospectuses of good intentions--intentions to do the
other fellow good and plenty.
I don't want to question your ability or the purity of your friends'
intentions, but are you sure you know their business as well as they
do? Denver is a lovely city, with a surplus of climate and scenery,
and a lot of people there go home from work every night pushing a
wheelbarrow full of gold in front of them, but at the same time there
is no surplus of _that_ commodity, and most of the fellows who find it
have cut their wisdom teeth on quartz. It isn't reasonable to expect
that you're going to buy gold at fifty cents on the dollar, just
because it hasn't been run through the mint yet.
I simply mention these things in a general way. There are two branches
in the study of riches--getting the money and keeping it from getting
away. When a fellow has saved a thousand dollars, and every nickel
represents a walk home, instead of a ride on a trolley; and every
dollar stands for cigars he didn't smoke and for shows he didn't
see--it naturally seems as if that money, when it's invested, ought to
declare dividends every thirty days. But almost any scheme which
advertises that it will make small investors rich quick is like one of
these Yellowstone geysers that spouts up straight from Hades with a
boom and a roar--it's bound to return to its native brimstone sooner
or later, leaving nothing behind it but a little smoke, and a smell of
burned money--your money.
If a fellow would stop to think, he would understand that when money
comes in so hard, it isn't reasonable to expect that it can go out and
find more easy. But the great trouble is that a good many small
investors don't stop to think, or else let plausible strangers do
their thinking for them. That's why most young men have tucked away
with their college diploma and the picture of their first girl, an
impressive deed to a lot in Nowhere-on-the-Nothingness, or a beautiful
certificate of stock in the Gushing Girlie Oil Well, that has never
gushed anything but lies and promises, or a lovely receipt for money
invested in one of these discretionary pools that are formed for the
higher education of indiscreet fools. While I reckon that every fellow
has one of these certificates of membership in The Great Society of
Suckers, I had hoped that you would buy yours for a little less than
the Highfaluting Lulu is going to cost you. Young men are told that
the first thousand dollars comes hard and that after that it comes
easier. So it does--just a thousand dollars plus interest easier; and
easier through all the increased efficiency that self-denial and
self-control have given you, and the larger salary they've made you
worth.
It doesn't seem like much when you take your savings' bank book around
at the end of the year and get a little thirty or forty dollars
interest added, or when you cash in the coupon on the bond that you've
bought; yet your bank book and your bond are still true to you. But if
you'd had your thousand in one of these 50 per cent. bleached blonde
schemes, it would have lit out long ago with a fellow whose ways were
more coaxing, leaving you the laugh and a mighty small lock of
peroxide gold hair. If you think that saving your first thousand
dollars is hard, you'll find that saving the second, after you've lost
the first, is hell and repeat.
You can't too soon make it a rule to invest only on your own _know_
and never on somebody else's say so. You may lose some profits by this
policy, but you're bound to miss a lot of losses. Often the best
reason for keeping out of a thing is that everybody else is going into
it. A crowd's always dangerous; it first pushes prices up beyond
reason and then down below common sense. The time to buy is before the
crowd comes in or after it gets out. It'll always come back to a good
thing when it's been pushed up again to the point where it's a bad
thing.
It's better to go slow and lose a good bargain occasionally than to go
fast and never get a bargain. It's all right to take a long chance now
and then, when you've got a long bank account, but it's been my
experience that most of the long chances are taken by the fellows with
short bank accounts.
You'll meet a lot of men in Chicago who'll point out the corner of State
and Madison and tell you that when they first came to the city they were
offered that lot for a hundred dollars, and that it's been the crowning
regret of their lives that they didn't buy it. But for every genuine case
of crowning regret because a fellow didn't buy, there are a thousand
because he did. Don't let it make you feverish the next time you see
one of those Won't-you-come-in-quick-and-get-rich-sudden ads. Freeze
up and on to your thousand, and by and by you'll get a chance to buy a
little stock in the concern for which you're working and which you
know something about; or to take that thousand and one or two more
like it, and buy an interest in a nice little business of the breed
that you've been grooming and currying for some other fellow. But if
your money's tied up in the sudden--millionaire business, you'll have
to keep right on clerking.
A man's fortune should grow like a tree, in rings around the parent
trunk. It'll be slow work at first, but every ring will be a little
wider and a little thicker than the last one, and by and by you'll be
big enough and strong enough to shed a few acorns within easy reaching
distance, and so start a nice little nursery of your own from which
you can saw wood some day. Whenever you hear of a man's jumping
suddenly into prominence and fortune, look behind the popular
explanation of a lucky chance. You'll usually find that these men
manufactured their own luck right on the premises by years of slow
preparation, and are simply realizing on hard work.
Speaking of manufacturing luck on the premises, naturally calls to
mind the story of old Jim Jackson, "dealer in mining properties," and
of young Thornley Harding, graduate of Princeton and citizen of New
York.
Thorn wasn't a bad young fellow, but he'd been brought up by a nice,
hard-working, fond and foolish old papa, in the fond belief that his
job in life was to spend the income of a million. But one week papa
failed, and the next week he died, and the next Thorn found he had to
go to work. He lasted out the next week on a high stool, and then he
decided that the top, where there was plenty of room for a bright
young man, was somewhere out West.