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