justed through our efforts.

This was due to perfect candor in talking. Honest opinions were honestly
set forth. Both sides took confidence in each other, and both sides
accepted my suggestions, believing them sincere and fair. And so I say
to the young men that honesty is the best policy because it is the only
policy that wins. The communists tell the young that honesty is not the
best policy. They say that the rich man teaches the poor to be honest so
that the rich can do all the stealing. They say that the moral code is
"dope" given by the strong to paralyze the weak and keep them down.
It is not so. Honesty is the power that lifts men and nations up to
greatness. It is a law of nature just as surely as gravity is a natural
law. But one is physical nature and the other moral nature. A fool can
see that physical laws are eternal and unbreakable. The wise can see
that the moral law is just as powerful and as everlasting.

Had I not won the people's confidence while I was city clerk of Elwood,
Indiana, my public career would have ended there. But after four years
in that office I aspired to be county recorder. The employers who once
had feared that I would be unfair, now said, "Davis is the man for the
job," and so I got their vote as well as the vote of the workers, and I
was elected to that higher office by a great majority.

CHAPTER XLIII. FROM TIN WORKER TO SMALL CAPITALIST

During my term as county recorder at Anderson, Indiana, I saved money. I
was unmarried and had no dissipations but books, and books cost little.
I had lent money to several fellows who wanted to get a business
education. By the year 1906, or ten years after I quit the mill, the
money I had lent to men for their education in business colleges had
all come back to me with interest. All my brothers had grown up and left
home, and mother wrote that I ought not to send so much money to her
as she had no use for it. Although unmarried, I had bought a house, and
still had several thousand dollars of capital. So from time to time when
some friend saw an opportunity to start a business in a small way, I
backed him with a thousand dollars. My security in these cases was my
knowledge of the man's character. Some of these ventures were in oil
leases in which my chance of profits was good and they ranged from
novelty manufacture down to weekly newspapers in which no great profit
was possible. So many of the ventures thrived, that by the time I
was f