that out
of business he should not know what to do. For years he has so
excluded all other interests that at fifty or sixty or seventy he finds
himself a slave to his business, with positively no inner resources.
Retirement from the one thing he does know would naturally leave such a
man useless to himself and his family, and his community: worse than
useless, as a matter of fact, for he would become a burden to himself,
a nuisance to his family, and, when he would begin to write "letters"
to the newspapers, a bore to the community.

It is significant that a European or English business man rarely
reaches middle age devoid of acquaintance with other matters; he always
lets the breezes from other worlds of thought blow through his ideas,
with the result that when he is ready to retire from business he has
other interests to fall back upon. Fortunately it is becoming less
uncommon for American men to retire from business and devote themselves
to other pursuits; and their number will undoubtedly increase as time
goes on, and we learn the lessons of life with a richer background.
But one cannot help feeling regretful that the custom is not growing
more rapidly.

A man must unquestionably prepare years ahead for his retirement, not
alone financially, but mentally as well. Bok noticed as a curious fact
that nearly every business man who told him he had made a mistake in
his retirement, and that the proper life for a man is to stick to the
game and see it through--"hold her nozzle agin the bank" as Jim Bludso
would say--was a man with no resources outside his business.
Naturally, a retirement is a mistake in the eyes of such a man; but oh,
the pathos of such a position: that in a world of so much interest, in
an age so fascinatingly full of things worth doing, a man should have
allowed himself to become a slave to his business, and should imagine
no other man happy without the same claims!

It is this lesson that the American business man has still to learn;
that no man can be wholly efficient in his life, that he is not living
a four-squared existence, if he concentrates every waking thought on
his material affairs. He has still to learn that man cannot live by
bread alone. The making of money, the accumulation of material power,
is not all there is to living. Life is something more than these, and
the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction
that can come into his life--service for others.