Besides being father of the Packing-House industry, Philip D. Armour was a manufacturer of and a dealer in Portable Wisdom. His teeming brain took in raw suggestions and threw off the completed product in the form of epigrams, phrases, orphics, symbols. To have caught these crumbs of truth that fell from the rich man's table might have placed many a penny-a-liner beyond the reach of mental avarice. One man, indeed, swept up the crumbs into a book that is not half crumby. The man is George Horace Lorimer, and his book is called, "Letters of a Self-Made Merchant to His Son." Lorimer was a department-manager for Armour and busied himself, it seems, a good deal of the time, in taking down disjecta, or the by-product of business. Armour was always sincere, but seldom serious. There is a lot of quiet fun yet among the Armour folks. When the Big Boys dine daily together, they always pass the persiflage. Lorimer showed me a bushel of notes—with which he proposes some day to Boswellize his former Chief. Incidentally, he requested me never to mention it, but secrets being to give away, I state the fact here, in order to help along a virtuous and hard-working young man, the son of the Reverend Doctor George C. Lorimer, a worthy Baptist preacher.
"Keep at it—do not be discouraged, Melville—a preacher's son is usually an improvement on the sire," said Philip D. Armour to Melville Stone, who was born at Hudson, McLean County, Illinois, the son of a Presiding Elder.
"I'm not worrying," replied the genealogical Stone. "You and I were both born in log houses, which puts us straight in line for the Presidency." "Right you are, Melville, for a log house is built on the earth, and not in the clouds." Then this came to Armour, and he could not resist the temptation to fire it: "Boys, all buildings that really endure are built from the ground up, never from the clouds down."
No living man ever handed out more gratuitous advice than Philip Armour. He was the greatest preacher in Chicago. With every transaction, he passed out a premium in way of palaver. He loved the bustle of business, but into the business he butted a lot of talk—helpful, good-natured, kindly, paternal talk, and often there was a suspicion that he talked for the same reason that prizefighters spar for time. "Here, Robbins, get off this telegram, and remember that if the rolling stone gathers no moss, it at least acquires a bit of polish."
"Say, Urion, if you make a success as my lawyer you have got to get into the rings of Orion; be there yourself, the same as the man that's to be hanged. You can't send a substitute."
To Comes—now Secretary of Armour and Company—"I suppose if I told you to jump into the lake you'd do it. Use your head, young man—use your skypiece!" And he did. This preaching habit was never pedantic, stiff or formal—it gushed out as the waters gushed forth from the rock after Moses had given it a few stiff raps with his staff. Armour called people by their first names as if they all belonged to his family, as they really did, for all mankind to him were one. He thought in millions, where other big men thought in hundreds of thousands, or average men thought in dozens.
"Hiram," he once said to the Reverend Hiram W. Thomas—for when he met you, you imagined he had been looking for you to tell you something—"Hiram, I like to hear you preach, for you are so deliberate that as you speak I am laying bets with myself as to which of a dozen things you are going to say. You supply me lots of fun. I can travel around the world before you get to your firstly."
For all preachers he had a great attraction, and it wasn't solely because he was a rich man. He supplied texts, and he supplied voltage. Most men put on a pious manner and become hypocritically proper when a preacher joins a group, but not so Philip Armour. If he used a strong word, or a simile uncurried, it was then. They liked it.
"Mr. Armour, you might use a little of your language for fertilizer, if times were hard," once said Robert Collyer. He answered, "Robert, I'm fertilizing a few of your fallow acres now, as any one who goes to hear you preach next Sunday will find out, if they know me."