When Orange Judd first began to issue his "Rural American," the enterprise received the hearty interest and support of Mr. Oliver and he subscribed for hundreds of copies.
He thought that farmers should be the most intelligent, the most healthy and the happiest people on earth—nothing was too good for a farmer. "Your businessmen are only middlemen—the farmer digs his wealth out of the ground," he used to say.
He quoted Brigham Young's advice to the Mormons: "Raise food-products and feed the miners and you will all get rich. But if you mine for gold and silver, a very few will get rich, and the most of you will die poor."
So there is the point: James Oliver was more interested in industrialism than in finance. His interest in humanity arose out of his desire to benefit humanity, and not for a wish to exploit it.
If that is not a great lesson for the young, as well as for the old, then write me down as a soused gurnet.
The gentle art of four-flushing was absolutely beyond his ken. He was like those South-Sea Islanders told of by Robert Louis Stevenson, who didn't know enough to lie until after the missionaries came, when they partially overcame the disability.
James Oliver didn't know enough to lie. He knew only one way to do business, and that was the simple, frank, honest and direct way. The shibboleth of that great New York politician, "Find your sucker, play your sucker, land your sucker, and then beat it," would have been to him hopeless Choctaw.
His ambition was to make a better plow than any other living man could make, and then sell it at a price the farmer could afford to pay. His own personal profit was a secondary matter. In fact, at board-meetings, when ways and means were under discussion, he would break in and display a moldboard, a colter or a new clevis, with a letter from Farmer John Johnson of Jones' Crossroads, as to its efficiency. Then when the board did not wax enthusiastic over his new toy, he would slide out and forget to come back. His heart was set on making a better tool at less expense to the consumer, than the world had ever seen. Thus would he lessen labor and increase production. So besides great talent he had a unique simplicity, which often supplied smiles for his friends.
James Oliver had a sort of warm feeling for every man who had ever held the handles of an Oliver Plow—he regarded such a one as belonging to the great family of Olivers. He believed that success depended upon supplying a commodity that made the buyer a friend; and heaven, to him, was a vast County Fair, largely attended by farmers, where exhibitions of plowing were important items on the program. Streets paved with gold were no lure for him.