oney as mine. I thought the rich would
help me to get rich if I helped them to get richer. My idea of getting
capital was to go get it. I was a long time finding where there was
any.

"By and by I heard of an old wreck on the coast--a steamer had run
aground and the hull was abandoned after they took out what machinery
they could salvage. The hull stood up in the storms and the sand began
to bury it. It would have been 'dead capital' then for sure.

"The timbers were sound, though, and I found I could buy it cheap. I
put in all I had saved in all my life, eight thousand dollars, for the
hull. I got a man to risk something with me.

"We took the hull off the ground, refitted it, stepped in six masts,
and made a big schooner of her.

"She cost us sixty thousand dollars all told. Before she was ready to
sail we sold her for a hundred and twenty thousand. The buyers made
big money out of her. The schooner is carrying food now and giving
employment to sailors.

"Who got robbed on that transaction? Where did 'dead labor suck the
life out of living labor,' as Karl Marx says? You could do the same.
You could if you would. There's plenty of old hulls lying around on
the sands of the world."

Iddings had nothing in him to respond to the poetry of this.

"That's all very fine," he growled, "but where would I get my start? I
got no eight thousand or anybody to lend me ten dollars."

"The banks will lend to men who will make money make money. It's not
the guarantee they want so much as inspiration. Pierpont Morgan said
he lent on character, not on collateral."

"Morgan, humph!"

"The trouble isn't with Morgan, but with you. What do you do with your
nights? Study? study? beat your brains for ideas? No, you go home,
tired, play with the children, talk with the wife, smoke, go to bed.
It's a beautiful life, but it's not a money-making life. You can't
make money by working eight hours a day for another man's money.
You've got to get out and find it or dig it up.

"That business with the old hull put me on my feet, put dreams in my
head. I looked about for other chances, took some of them and wished I
hadn't. But I kept on trying. The war in Europe came. The world was
crazy for ships. They couldn't build 'em fast enough to keep ahead of
the submarines. On the Great Lakes there was a big steamer not doing
much work. I heard of her. I went up and saw her. The job was to get
her to the ocean. I managed it on borrowed money, bo