e of the term. An honourable
and prosperous career may, indeed, lie before him, but he will never
reach the heights. He will just go on from year to year, making rather
more or rather less money, by a toil to which only death or old age will
put a term. And I have not written this book for the middle-aged, but
for the young. To them my advice would be, "Succeed young, and retire
as young as you can."

The fate of the successful who hold on long after they have amassed a
great, or at least an adequate, fortune, is written broad across the
face of financial history. The young man who has arrived has formed the
habit and acquired the technique of business. The habit has become part
of his being. How hard it is to give it up! His technique has become
almost universally successful. If he has made L50,000 by it, why not go
on and make half a million; if he has made a million, why not go on and
make three? All that you have to do, says the subtle tempter, is to
reproduce the process of success indefinitely. The riches and the powers
of the world are to be had in increasing abundance by the mere exercise
of qualities which, though they have been painfully acquired, have now
become the very habit of pleasure. How dull life would seem if the
process of making money was abandoned; how impossible for a man of ripe
experience to fail where the mere stripling had succeeded? The
temptation is subtle, but the logic is wrong. Success is not a process
which can reproduce itself indefinitely in the same field. The dominant
mind loses its elasticity: it fails to appreciate real values under
changed conditions. Victory has become to it not so much a struggle as a
habit. Then follows the decline. The judgment begins to waver or go
astray out of a kind of self-worship, which makes the satisfaction of
self, and not the realisation of what is possible, the dominant object
in every transaction. There will be plenty of money to back this
delusion for a time, and plenty of flatterers and sycophants to play up
to and encourage the delusion. The history of Napoleon has not been
written in vain. Here we see a first-class intellect going through this
process of mental corruption, which leads from overwhelming success in
early youth, to absolute disaster in middle-age. The only hope for the
Napoleon of Finance is to retire before his delusions overtake him.

But what is the man who retires early from business to do? Some form of
activity must fill the