Stimulants ... are the greatest enemies of mankind; there is no middle ground which anyone can safely tread, only that of total and most uncompromising abstinence.
The other is from a sermon of Dr. Channing on “Self-Denial.”
Young man, remember that the only test of goodness is moral strength, self-decrying energy.... Do you subject to your moral and religious convictions the love of pleasure, the appetites, the passions, which form the great trials of youthful virtue? No man who has made any observation of life but will tell you how often he has seen the promise of youth blasted ... honorable feeling, kind affection overpowered and almost extinguished ... through a tame yielding to pleasure and the passions.
I took these warnings very seriously.
How the state of mind engendered by these forces affected me in a purely material way, we shall soon see. From the outset of my business career, when an errand boy in Kurzman’s office, I found myself surrounded by employees, not perhaps more vicious than most, but certainly sharing the vices of the majority. They gave, at best, only what they were paid for, and not an ounce of energy or a minute of time beyond.
I shrank from the possibility of becoming a mere clock clerk and gave all of my best self and held back nothing. I made mistakes, I had my failures from the standard that I had set; but my purpose held fast and I cheerfully pursued the rugged uphill road to success.
CHAPTER III
APPRENTICED TO THE LAW
WHEN I left City College, my father wanted me to become a civil engineer, but a brief experience in an engineer’s office convinced me that I lacked the requisite mathematical foundation, so I gave it up and accepted a position as assistant bookkeeper and errand boy at $6 a week in the uptown branch of the Phœnix Fire Insurance Company.
In September, 1871, I improved myself by securing a $10 position with Bloomingdale & Company, who were then in the wholesale “corset and fancy-goods” business on Grand Street near Broadway. I kept the books and also helped to pack hoop-skirts, bustles, and corsets until the firm’s financial difficulties gave me an excuse for turning my ambition again to the law. I returned to Kurzman’s office, January 16, 1872.
Though Kurzman’s perspicacity could pierce directly through the intricacies of any tangled case, his accounts were shamefully neglected. His check book was his only book of entry—he trusted his memory to keep track of what his clients owed him—so I voluntarily and without informing him arranged a regular system of accounts, and shall never forget his surprise and appreciation when, at the end of the year, I showed him what he had earned and the sources and also the amounts still due him.