Delphi complete works of.., p.227
Delphi Complete Works of Stephen Leacock, page 227
Messrs. Touch & Goe
Warehouse & Storage Agents.
Dear Sirs:
I recommend to you the bearer of this letter for the position of night-watchman. His special qualification is that he has no watch and falls asleep so early that he never sees night. But he has a quick native intelligence, and all you have to do is to teach him to read and write and give him something to keep him awake. Then show him the planet Jupiter and tell him to keep his eye on it, and he’ll watch for you as long as you like. You need pay him nothing for the first ten years. He doesn’t need to eat.
Of course, I’ve only just explained the system in mere outline. But I really think that once I get it going it will revolutionize our industry — a thing that has to be done about once every six months to keep it going.
Easy Ways to Success A LETTER TO A PARLOR BOLSHEVIK JUST OUT OF COLLEGE
MY DEAR CLARENCE:
I gather from your letter that you have just come out of college and are about to launch yourself upon the world. You rightly feel that there is something coming to you after your brilliant success at the university. The high rank which you took in English Composition, in Salesmanship, and in Comparative Religion ought, as you say to yourself, to open for you an easy road to success.
You draw my attention to the “mediocre caliber” — the words are yours — of the men who succeed in this unjust world. What, you ask, do they really amount to? Exactly. They don’t. Their so-called success, as you put it, is merely due to the accident and injustice of the capitalistic bourgeoisistic system under which the mass of the proletariat are exploited by the privileged classes who fatten on the poor.
And you want some of it yourself.
Precisely so, and as I am most anxious to help you, perhaps you will allow me to give you a few directions for exploiting the proletariat. It is terribly simple. I give you one of the very easiest, the most elementary, first.
HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE IN REAL ESTATE
Select a piece of ground anywhere close to a large city, and lying in the direction in which the city is about to grow. Avoid land where the city is not going to grow. In buying the land, be careful to pay for it only a very small sum. Sometimes real estate of this sort is bought for a song; so you may, if you like, see what you can do by singing.
After buying your land, hold it for at least three days. It is this careful holding of the land which makes the money. After holding it three days, mark it out into squares and sell it for building apartments on. Sell it for an enormous price.
Then buy another piece of land, hold it for three days, and sell it.
It’s wonderfully simple, isn’t it? Clarence? — only there is just one thing that perhaps I ought to mention. Be just a little careful about the land you buy. With your wonderful education, you are sure to know all about it, but you might just happen to make a mistake. And that would be too bad.
In fact, Clarence, on second thought, I don’t believe I’ll put you into real estate. It’s too tricky. I think you had better go into the stock market. There, of course, you are bound to succeed. As you yourself say in your letter, most of the so-called magnates in the so-called money market who are heralded as so-called kings of finance are really men of no real insight whatever. They merely fatten on the poor.
So if you want to fatten on the poor yourself a little bit, the directions are very simple. Try this method.
HOW TO MAKE MONEY ON THE STOCK MARKET
Take any daily newspaper and turn to the stock exchange page. You will, after a little practice, easily recognize it by the fact that it is full of queer little figures. With your trained brain, you will soon learn to distinguish it from the cattle market page.
Having got the right page, look down the list of stocks and select one which is about to rise. When stocks rise slowly and gradually, others very sharply and suddenly. For your purpose, select a stock which is about to rise sharply. Estimate for yourself how much money you would like to make and divide this sum by the amount of increase which the stock is about to undergo. This calculation will give you the number of shares which you need to buy in order to obtain the amount of money which you need.
But stop, Clarence, I believe I am wrong again. I forgot that you haven’t got that $10,000 to start with; and you know how tight and selfish the so-called banks are with their so-called money.
Let’s try something else.
HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE IN A MERGER
Look carefully all around for two big enterprises that need merging and don’t know it. One good way is to get hold of two large railroads and join them into one small one. Another scheme is to go round and gather the whole of an industry into the hollow of your hand and then close it. And another is to lay pipe-lines to carry anything — any sort of product — to where it has never been carried and then open up the top end of the pipe-line.
All these things are so ridiculously and so selfishly simple that I share your feeling of indignation against the men who have made colossal fortunes (out of the poor) by doing them.
But I am afraid, Clarence, that we must try something else. All these things I have just named take such a lot of time; you’d be over thirty before you really got the world at your feet. We must find some quicker way of getting at the poor than that.
HOW TO SUCCEED ON A CHICKEN FARM
Have you ever been attracted, as I have, Clarence, at the idea of getting back to the land, leading a real life close to nature, and at the same time not far from a savings bank?
Perhaps you have thought of chickens. In New York alone, one million of eggs are eaten for breakfast, and eggs cost five cents; one chicken lays 200 eggs a year; shake it up well and it will do even better; and it only eats — I forget how little — but say next to nothing. The profit on the thing is obvious, isn’t it, and colossal?
But I am afraid that you may object — I am sure that you will object — that the farm life is too deadening to your soul, not sufficiently intellectual. If so, what do you say to art or literature? There is an attraction for any one who is naturally a good penman in making a fortune out of writing.
HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE BY WRITING
If then you decide to make your success by writing, I should recommend to you to write poetry. A good market price for poetry is twenty-five cents a word, and a rapid writer like yourself ought to be able to write thirty words a minute; everything, of course, depends upon speed, but I think you may rate yourself at thirty words, or $7.50 a minute.
This, as you remark, is not much, and I admit that Mr. Ford and Mr. Rockefeller and others most unfairly get more than this and yet write very slowly. Nevertheless, accept the figures as they are; you will see that poetry works out at, say $45 an hour.
Assuming that poets, not being under union rules, work ten hours a day; this will give you $450 per diem. You object, no doubt, that, after all, this means a very laborious life, involving not only constant work but constant observation of nature, accurate records of weather and scenery, and so forth.
THE HIGH PROFITS OF ART
This being so, you might be inclined, my dear Clarence, to consider some other branch of Art, equally exalted, but less laborious than writing poetry. What do you say to portrait-painting? After your first-year course in geometrical drawing and your diploma in advertising, I am sure you would find no trouble in painting a portrait.
A good portrait, with absolutely first-class colors, high-grade canvas, and a liberal coating of shellac on it, sells for $3,000. As against this, you must offset the cost of your canvas — at least $1; your paint — say three canfuls at fifty cents a gallon; your shellac, at fifty cents a pint; and your net return is cut down to $2,997.
BETTER WORK ON A FARM
In short, my dear Clarence, when I look around you, I find it very hard to give you any advice that can lift you out of your present perplexities. It seems that all the people who have succeeded in front of you have had some sort of advantage. Thomas Edison came along just when people began to need electric light; Henry Ford hit exactly the moment when motor cars were wanted.
Do you know, I think that perhaps, Clarence, the best thing for you to do is to try the old-fashioned plan of getting a job on a farm at $20 a month with your board, or starting as a schoolteacher at $40 a month? Has it ever occurred to you that that may be about your size? Your own city was advertising yesterday for twenty “good men on sewers.” Perhaps you would be a peach in a sewer. Go and try it. You’ll feel more contented anyway.
Fun as an Aid to Business IS A SENSE OF HUMOR A FINANCIAL ASSET?
IT IS VERY commonly supposed that to laugh in adversity, to joke over poverty and, if need be, to chuckle in the penitentiary, is the mark of a fortunate and superior mind. But the question still remains whether the man who possesses a sense of humor is better off financially for having it. Does it help or hinder?
We always talk of “getting down to cold business,” “cutting out the funny stuff,” and of “quitting monkeying,” as if all laughter and fun and monkeys were contrary to the spirit of business. Nor is it regarded as a compliment to tell a man that his proposition is a joke and that his offer makes us laugh. Is not a young man in an office warned not to “get too fresh” and not to “try to get gay”? Indeed, is it not the man who has lost his job or whose business has failed who is invited to console himself with his sense of humor?
On the other hand, in the new realm of activity that is called Salesmanship, there seems to be a persistent idea that if you get a man sufficiently amused, you can sell him anything. One laugh and he is lost.
Now, I know nothing about Salesmanship. I don’t think I could even sell a copy of the Harvard Classics to a retired banker in Iowa. Nevertheless, I am given to understand that amusement is supposed to work somewhat as follows:
The Salesman enters the Business Man’s office and says to him:
“It is my intention to sell you one thousand hanks of No. 6 thread manufactured by the company that I represent.”
The Business Man snorts.
“Oh, I don’t want you to buy any now,” answers the Salesman. “Wait till I’ve told you that one about the traveling man and the college professor.”
Five minutes later the Business Man, suffocating with laughter, signs an order for not one thousand, but for five thousand, hanks of thread.
On the strength of this ancient and worn-out fiction, many an unhappy young man wanders round the country as a commercial traveler trying to be funny, to pass himself off as a merry dog so full of humor that he couldn’t be dishonest if he tried.
I think the whole idea is wrong. I find that the men who can sell me encyclopedias are the men who suggest that there is some strange, mysterious purpose in their personality. Such a man looks at me with penetrating power and says in a voice that Forbes Robertson might envy, “I have here an encyclopedia,” — and when he says it that way I am sunk.
It is just the same idea as with the Ancient Mariner, when he stopped the stranger and held him back even on his way to a wedding feast.
“He holds him with his skinny hand,
“He holds him with his glittering eye.”
Now, that ancient mariner if he went “on the road” would be worth fifty dollars a day.
I remember once having had a personal experience of the same thing — of the convincing power of earnestness rather than levity. It was late at night on a dark street. I was met and accosted by a gigantic man, very evidently from his build and from the accent of his speech, A Highlander. Like all Highlanders, he used the personal pronouns in a way unknown to other nations.
He took me by the coat.
“She will be Dougall McDougall!” he said, “and she will want ten cents to buy a drink.”
“Yes,” I answered, “and she will get it too.” And she did.
On the other hand, if that man had said, as most of my friends who meet me say, “I heard a rather funny story the other day, I wonder if you’ve heard it,” are not the chances, shall we say, that I would already have heard it?
But in one way a sense of humor can be of real use in modern business life. It can serve as a corrective of bunk about “service” and “helpfulness” — all the “brother-brother” stuff that is spreading like an infection to-day.
I don’t know who started this. I suppose in a sense we are all brothers. So are the monkeys. But the plain truth is that when a man is doing business, he is not trying to be a brother to anybody — except to himself.
Here are one or two samples of what I mean. I admit that I made them up because I found it a little quicker than looking up actual examples. I admit too that they may be a little exaggerated — though I doubt it — for to a considerable extent, the kind of thing that appears in all the advertising pages of the magazines is of this sort.
SAMPLE NO. 1
Letter from a Firm of Calciminers and House Painters Soliciting Business — or no, I beg their pardon — Offering Help.
MR. FELLOW CITIZEN:
“Is your Home a little dark and gloomy? Do you sometimes look at the blank walls in front of you? If so, let us help you. All we ask is to serve. We know your troubles so well, and feel that we can be of use. Have you ever thought of the effect of a sunset pink in your living-room? And your kitchen? Would you like us to tell you how a coating of thin sky blue — our own cobalt blue — brought happiness to one Home? We wonder if you would care to see our little booklet PAINT AND PUNK? We should so love to send it to you. May we? We only want to help lift a little bit of the burden?”
SAMPLE NO. 2
Here is another.
Letter from a firm of Patent Ice-Box Manufacturers offering to send up “their Mr. Smith” to my House.
DEAR MR. HOUSEOWNER:
“What about a new ice-box? The old one not working very well, eh? Well, then, suppose you let us send up our Mr. Smith to the House. Down here we call him ‘The man who knows about ice.’ Just remember that. He knows — and he wants to tell you.
“Won’t you let him come to you? Won’t you perhaps let him fetch along a sample of our new iceless ice-box and give a demonstration? Why not bring in the kiddies and let them see it all too? They’ll love our Mr. Smith. And he won’t try to rush you into buying anything, either. He’ll just tell you all you want to know in his own chatty, cheerful way.
“Your home will seem all the brighter when he comes. Service — that’s all he stands for, and, as he says himself, ‘an ice that will give to the consumer 100 per cent of satisfaction for a minimum of cost.’ That’s the way he talks. Just as clever as that.”
Now this kind of thing would be all right if it were sent out by the Life Boat Mission of the Salvation Army. But as addressed by one ordinary business person to another, it is heart-rending!
And yet, after all, it seems that the world likes a little bit of kindliness, the “touch of nature that makes the whole world kin”; and likes, by force of association, the person or the thing with which the kindliness is connected. Indeed, if a “sense of humor” means, as it should, something genial and kindly, something “human” in the best and largest sense, then perhaps it is, after all, one of the best “business assets” that a man can have.
In other words, the beginning part of this essay is all wrong.
The Stamp-Album World THE HABITABLE GLOBE AS SEEN THROUGH THE EYES OF THE JUVENILE COLLECTOR
THE EARTH OR Globe, on which we collect stamps, is organized by the International Postal Union, which divides it up into countries. The Postal Union turns on its axis every twenty-four hours, thus creating day and night.
The principal countries of the world are Cochin-China, the Gilbert Islands, Somali Land, the Gaboon, the Cameroons, Nankipu, Johore, and Whango-Whango. Alongside of these great stamp areas are others of less importance, whose stamps are seldom if ever worth more than four cents, such as the United States, Great Britain, Canada, France, etc.
Some of these countries, however, are of importance as exercising a control over the stamps of places of the first rank. Thus, England comes into prominence as having been recognized by the Postal Union as controlling Sarawak, Uganda, Inhambane, Irac, and other great centers. Similarly, the Philippine Islands, after centuries of misgovernment were transferred by the Postal Union to the United States and Portugal. The Portuguese, of no account in themselves, they are known, all over the world, as issuing stamps of Lorenço Marques.
The Stamp Book can teach us, among other things, the reason and origin of government and how it comes into being. Whenever a part of the earth contains a sufficient number of people to need stamps, the people all get together and join in forming a government the purpose of which is to issue stamps.
If the stamps are to have a man’s head as the design, the country is placed under a king, the person selected for the king having the kind of features needed for a stamp. The British Royal family makes such excellent stamps that it is thought that they will be kept at the head of Great Britain for a long time to come. On the other hand, the Emperor of Brazil had to be deposed in 1889, his whiskers being too large to go through the Post.
In other countries, it is decided that the Goddess of Liberty has a more beautiful face than a king, and so these countries are called republics and they elect a new stamp every few years. Sometimes, when a face design is wanted, a competition is held. Years ago the Goddess of Liberty came from Cedar Rapids High School, Iowa, and last year one was got from Bangor, Maine. But generally speaking, the Goddess of Liberty does not exist, but is just made up.
Any boy who is fortunate enough to possess a stamp album takes a new interest in geography and must often wish he could take a trip around the world. No doubt in his mind he often imagines such a voyage.
Sailing, let us say, from the harbor of New York (which is of no importance, as it issues no stamps), he passes after a few days’ sail the great islands Trinidad and Tobago, which issued their first stamps in 1881, and catches a glimpse of the coast of Dutch Guiana, which issues a half-gulden orange stamp of great beauty.
