that to make a vast
success, something is requisite beyond enterprise and economy, and that
it is a very poor policy to screw your _employes_ down to the last cent,
and overwork them, and make business needlessly irksome, when they have
it in their power to very greatly advance your interests. I dwell on
this because it is a common error everywhere. I have in my mind a case
in which an employer, who lived "like a prince," boasted to me how little
he paid his men, and how in the long-run it turned out bitterly to his
loss in many ways. Those who had no principle robbed him, while the
honest, who would have made his interests their own, left him. I have
seen business after business broken up in this way. While the principal
is in vigour and life, he may succeed with mere servants who are poorly
paid; then, after a time, some younger partner, who has learned his
morals from the master, pushes him out, or he dies, and the business is
worthless, because there is not a soul in it who cares for it, or who has
grown up with any common sense of interest with the heirs.

I remember one day being obliged in New York to listen to a conversation
between two men of business. One owed the other a large sum, honestly
enough--of that there was no question between them; but he thought that
there was a legal way to escape payment, while the other differed from
him. So they argued away for a long time. There was not a word of
reproach; the creditor would have cheated the debtor in the same way if
he could; the only point of difference was whether it could be done. An
_employe_ who can remain in such surroundings and be honest must be
indeed a miracle of integrity, and, if he do not over-reach them in the
long-run, one of stupidity. I might have made "house and land" out of
the newspaper had I been so disposed.

Of all the men whom I met in those days in the way of business, Mr.
Barnum, the great American humbug, was by far the honestest and freest
from guile or deceit, or "ways that were dark, or tricks that were vain."
He was very kind-hearted and benevolent, and gifted with a sense of fun
which was even stronger than his desire for dollars. I have talked very
confidentially with him many times, for he was very fond of me, and
always observed that to engineer some grotesque and startling paradox
into tremendous notoriety, to make something _immensely_ puzzling with a
stupendous _sell_ as postscript, was more of a motive with h