Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son. George Horace Lorimer

a few months on the other side will sort of put a polish on you. I don’t want to seem pessimistic, but I have seen hundreds of boys graduate from college and go over with the same idea, and they didn’t bring back a great deal except a few trunks of badly fitting clothes. Seeing the world is like charity—it covers a multitude of sins, and, like charity, it ought to begin at home.

      Culture is not a matter of a change of climate. You’ll hear more about Browning to the square foot in the Mississippi Valley than you will in England. And there’s as much Art talk on the Lake front as in the Latin Quarter. It may be a little different, but it’s there.

      I went to Europe once myself. I was pretty raw when I left Chicago, and I was pretty sore when I got back. Coming and going I was simply sick. In London, for the first time in my life, I was taken for an easy thing. Every time I went into a store there was a bull movement. The clerks all knocked off their regular work and started in to mark up prices.

      They used to tell me that they didn’t have any gold-brick men over there. So they don’t. They deal in pictures—old masters, they call them. I bought two—you know the ones—those hanging in the waiting-room at the stock yards; and when I got back I found out that they had been painted by a measly little fellow who went to Paris to study art, after Bill Harris had found out that he was no good as a settling clerk. I keep ’em to remind myself that there’s no fool like an old American fool when he gets this picture paresis.

      The fellow who tried to fit me out with a coat-of-arms didn’t find me so easy. I picked mine when I first went into business for myself—a charging steer—and it’s registered at Washington. It’s my trade-mark, of course, and that’s the only coat-of-arms an American merchant has any business with. It’s penetrated to every quarter of the globe in the last twenty years, and every soldier in the world has carried it—in his knapsack.

      I take just as much pride in it as the fellow who inherits his and can’t find any place to put it, except on his carriage door and his letter-head—and it’s a heap more profitable. It’s got so now that every jobber in the trade knows that it stands for good quality, and that’s all any Englishman’s coat-of-arms can stand for. Of course, an American’s can’t stand for anything much—generally it’s the burned-in-the-skin brand of a snob.

      After the way some of the descendants of the old New York Dutchmen with the hoe and the English general storekeepers have turned out, I sometimes feel a little uneasy about what my great-grandchildren may do, but we’ll just stick to the trade-mark and try to live up to it while the old man’s in the saddle.

      I simply mention these things in a general way. I have no fears for you after you’ve been at work for a few years, and have struck an average between the packing-house and Harvard; then if you want to graze over a wider range it can’t hurt you. But for the present you will find yourself pretty busy trying to get into the winning class.

      Your affectionate father,

      JOHN GRAHAM.

      No. 5

      From John Graham, head of the house of Graham & Co., at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont Graham, at Lake Moosgatchemawamuc, in the Maine woods. Mr. Pierrepont has written to his father withdrawing his suggestion.

      V

      JULY 7, 189—

      Dear Pierrepont: Yours of the fourth has the right ring, and it says more to the number of words used than any letter that I have ever received from you. I remember reading once that some fellows use language to conceal thought; but it’s been my experience that a good many more use it instead of thought.

      A business man’s conversation should be regulated by fewer and simpler rules than any other function of the human animal. They are:

      Have something to say.

      Say it.

      Stop talking.

      Beginning before you know what you want to say and keeping on after you have said it lands a merchant in a lawsuit or the poorhouse, and the first is a short cut to the second. I maintain a legal department here, and it costs a lot of money, but it’s to keep me from going to law.

      It’s all right when you are calling on a girl or talking with friends after dinner to run a conversation like a Sunday-school excursion, with stops to pick flowers; but in the office your sentences should be the shortest distance possible between periods. Cut out the introduction and the peroration, and stop before you get to secondly. You’ve got to preach short sermons to catch sinners; and deacons won’t believe they need long ones themselves. Give fools the first and women the last word. The meat’s always in the middle of the sandwich. Of course, a little butter on either side of it doesn’t do any harm if it’s intended for a man who likes butter.

      Remember, too, that it’s easier to look wise than to talk wisdom. Say less than the other fellow and listen more than you talk; for when a man’s listening he isn’t telling on himself and he’s flattering the fellow who is. Give most men a good listener and most women enough note-paper and they’ll tell all they know. Money talks—but not unless its owner has a loose tongue, and then its remarks are always offensive. Poverty talks, too, but nobody wants to hear what it has to say.

      I simply mention these things in passing because I’m afraid you’re apt to be the fellow who’s doing the talking; just as I’m a little afraid that you’re sometimes like the hungry drummer at the dollar-a-day house—inclined to kill your appetite by eating the cake in the centre of the table before the soup comes on.

      Of course, I’m glad to see you swing into line and show the proper spirit about coming on here and going to work; but you mustn’t get yourself all “het up” before you take the plunge, because you’re bound to find the water pretty cold at first. I’ve seen a good many young fellows pass through and out of this office. The first week a lot of them go to work they’re in a sweat for fear they’ll be fired; and the second week for fear they won’t be. By the third, a boy that’s no good has learned just how little work he can do and keep his job; while the fellow who’s got the right stuff in him is holding down his own place with one hand and beginning to reach for the job just ahead of him with the other. I don’t mean that he’s neglecting his work; but he’s beginning to take notice, and that’s a mighty hopeful sign in either a young clerk or a young widow.

      You’ve got to handle the first year of your business life about the way you would a trotting horse. Warm up a little before going to the post—not enough to be in a sweat, but just enough to be limber and eager. Never start off at a gait that you can’t improve on, but move along strong and well in hand to the quarter. Let out a notch there, but take it calm enough up to the half not to break, and hard enough not to fall back into the ruck. At the three-quarters you ought to be going fast enough to poke your nose out of the other fellow’s dust, and running like the Limited in the stretch. Keep your eyes to the front all the time, and you won’t be so apt to shy at the little things by the side of the track. Head up, tail over the dashboard—that’s the way the winners look in the old pictures of Maud S. and Dexter and Jay-Eye-See. And that’s the way I want to see you swing by the old man at the end of the year, when we hoist the numbers of the fellows who are good enough to promote and pick out the salaries which need a little sweetening.

      I’ve always taken a good deal of stock in what you call “Blood-will-tell” if you’re a Methodist, or “Heredity” if you’re a Unitarian; and I don’t want you to come along at this late day and disturb my religious beliefs. A man’s love for his children and his pride are pretty badly snarled up in this world, and he can’t always pick them apart. I think a heap of you and a heap of the house, and I want to see you get along well together. To do that you must start right. It’s just as necessary to make a good first impression in business as in courting. You’ll read a good deal about “love at first sight” in novels, and there may be something in it for all I know; but I’m dead certain there’s no such thing as love at first sight in business. A man’s got to keep company a long time,