hogs. Trade follows the line of least resistance; and
the natural thing is for the local butcher to slaughter, and supply his
neighborhood. There is only one reason why the people in East Aurora
should buy meat of Armour, as they occasionally do, and that is because
Armour supplies better meat at a lower price than we can produce it. If
Armour is higher in price than our local butcher, we buy of the local
man. The local butcher fixes the price, not Armour, and the local farmer
fixes the price for the local butcher. Armour always and forever has to
face this local competition.

"I am in partnership with the farmer," Philip Armour used to say. "Their
interests are mine and their confidence and good-will I must merit, or
over goes my calabash."

The success of capital lies in ministering to the people, not in taking
advantage of them. And every successful business house is built on the
bed-rock of reciprocity, mutuality and co-operation. That legal Latin
maxim, "Let the buyer beware," is a legal fiction. It should read, "Let
the seller beware," for he who is intent on selling the people a
different article from what they want, or at a price beyond its value,
will stay in trade about as long as that famous snowball will last in
Biloxi.

* * * * *

Besides being father of the Packing-House industry, Philip D. Armour was
a manufacturer of and a dealer in Portable Wisdom. His teeming brain
took in raw suggestions and threw off the completed product in the form
of epigrams, phrases, orphics, symbols. To have caught these crumbs of
truth that fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a
penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept
up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby. The man is George
Horace Lorimer, and his book is called, "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant
to His Son." Lorimer was a department-manager for Armour and busied
himself, it seems, a good deal of the time, in taking down disjecta, or
the by-product of business. Armour was always sincere, but seldom
serious. There is a lot of quiet fun yet among the Armour folks. When
the Big Boys dine daily together, they always pass the persiflage.
Lorimer showed me a bushel of notes--with which he proposes some day to
Boswellize his former Chief. Incidentally, he requested me never to
mention it, but secrets being to give away, I state the fact here, in
order to help along a virtuous and hard-work