Exclusion and caste were abhorrent to him.
Oliver gave all, and doing so he won all in the way of fame and fortune that the world has to offer. His was a full, free, happy and useful life.
Across the sky in letters of light I would write these words of James Oliver: TO BENEFIT YOURSELF, YOU MUST BENEFIT HUMANITY.
Zangwill has written it down in fadeless ink that Scotland has produced three bad things: Scotch humor, Scotch religion and Scotch whisky. James Oliver had use for only one of the commodities just named—and that was humor.
Through his cosmos ran a silver thread of quiet chuckle that added light to his life and endeared him to thousands. Laughter is the solvent for most of our ills! All of his own personal religion—and he had a deal of it—was never saved up for Sunday; he used it in his business. But James Oliver was a Scotchman, and this being so, the fires of his theological nature were merely banked. When Death was at the door an hour before his passing, this hardy son of heath and heather, of bog and fen and bleak North Wind, roused himself from stupor, and in his deep, impressive voice, soon to be stilled forever, startled the attendants with the stern order, "Let us pray!" Then he repeated slowly the Lord's Prayer, and with the word "Amen" sank back upon his pillow to arise no more.
For the occasional drunken workman, he had terms of pity and sentences of scorn in alternation. At such times the Scotch bur would come to his lips, and the blood of his ancestors would tangle his tongue. One of his clerks once said to me, "As long as Mr. James talks United States, I am not alarmed, but when he begins to roll it out with a bur on his tongue, as if his mouth were full of hot mush, I am scared to death."
In Eighteen Hundred Ninety-three, James Oliver spent several months at the Chicago Exposition. He was one of the World's-Fair Commissioners.
Hundreds of people shook hands with him daily. He was a commanding figure, with personality plus. No one ever asked him, any more than they did old Doctor Johnson, "Sir, are you anybody in particular?" He was somebody in particular, all over and all of the time.