A LESSON FOR BUSINESS MEN
That which tends to make a good business man, in the popular mind, is the establishment of great industries and enterprises, coupled with accumulation of money by the individual.
A careful review of the history of business men who have made a success along these lines shows that the majority of them sacrificed their health and their lives to their business. In the last and final analysis, therefore, these were not good business men.
The best musician is he who can bring more sounds into harmony. The best artist is he who can best harmonize colors and reproduce nature. Likewise, the best business man is he who can best harmonize or balance the affairs under his control.
Health being entirely under and within his control, if he disregards it—gives it no thought—violates the laws that govern it, and finally wrecks it, he is not a good business man, as all business depends upon the power of the individual, and the powers of the individual depend upon his health.
Examples of poor business men
The man who, from a cheap tin store, founded "The Fair" in Chicago, and allowed the business to dethrone his reason, and to send him to his death before he was sixty, could hardly be considered a good business man. Measured on the same scale, Marshall Field, the merchant prince, was not a good business man. President Roberts, who arose from the ranks of a car-wheel molder, to the presidency of the Pennsylvania railroad, and died at the age of fifty, was not a good business man. J. P. Morgan, who accumulated many millions of dollars, and who died when he should have been in his prime, was not a good business man.
Wealth at the expense of health
The accumulation of money and the founding of great industries is only one requisite of the business man, and by no means the most important one. What profiteth a man to make a great fortune; to put in motion a million spindles; to chain continents together with cables; to flash his silent voice over oceans and continents on currents of common air; to make the ocean's billowed bosom a commercial highway; to transform the oxcart into a palace, and set it on wheels and hitch it to the lightning; to build sky-scraping structures of stone and steel; to transfix human figures and faces on sensitized glass; to direct the methods of burrowing in the earth for coal and gold until his name is known around the world, and his fortune is a power in the land?—what boots it, I say, to know all these things and to glide blindly into the shambles of unrest and dis-ease, or to furnish a fashionable funeral at forty?
The abnormal, or one-idea man
The religious fanatic who robes himself in sackcloth and eschews the razor; the food crank who cries out "back to nature," and takes to grass; the one-idea social reformer who preaches on the curb, and the business man who allows his business to become his absolute master and governor, are in reality all in the same class. The unfortunate thing is that the business man sits him down and weaves about himself the meshes of a prison. Every year puts in a new bar, every month a new bolt, and every day and hour a new stroke that rivets around him what he calls business, until he feels and really thinks he cannot escape.