It was necessary, he said, to keep the nicest balance between candor and brutality. What you wanted was to destroy conceit without injuring self-respect. He added proudly that all the people whom he had fired remained his firm friends.
I asked him how he knew this, and I refused to believe it a proof of friendliness that these victims had never yet waylaid and assaulted him. He said, however, that he could always tell—that no one could deceive him. I denied that any man could know he had never been deceived. Such a negative statement was impossible to prove.
He brushed all this aside, and continued to explain his technique.
“I never tell a man that we’re laying him off because business is bad,” he said. “I try to show him what defects in himself make him the kind of man who’s always laid off as soon as business drops. And as for those printed slips in a pay envelope—‘Your services will not be required after such and such a date’—inhuman, I call that. No, sir! I’ll call the fellow, or the girl, as the case may be, into my office, and I’ll say something like this:
“‘Now see here, So-and-So,’ I’ll say, ‘I’m going to give you the gate; and if you’ll listen to me fair-mindedly, it’ll be the gate to something a whole lot better.’”
“Always?” I asked.
“Why, yes,” said he.
“Of course,” I continued, “you’ve kept a record of the subsequent careers of all the poor devils you’ve fired, so that you know exactly how much they’ve benefited by your valediction?”
“Well,” said Graves; “well—”
“Of course,” I went on, “you keep a card index? You write down the fault for which you discharge the fellow, and you keep track of the length of time it takes him to overcome that fault?”