"Not exactly."
"You're going into Wall Street," said Crocker, "like a great many young men, who've been having an easy, luxurious time at college and who want to go on with it. You're going there as a gambler, hoping to get the inside track through some influence and make a hundred thousand dollars of other people's money in a lucky year."
"That's rather a hard way to put it, sir."
"You don't pretend to be able to earn a hundred thousand dollars in one year or in five, do you, Tom?"
"Let me put it in another way," said Bojo after a moment's indecision. "What you have made and what you have been able to give me have put me in the way of acquiring friends that others can't make, and friends are assets. The higher up you go in society the easier it is to make money; isn't it so? Opportunities are assets also. If I have the opportunity to make a lot of money in a short time, what is the sense of turning my back on the easiest way and taking up the hardest?"
"Tom, do you young fellows ever stop to think that there is such a thing as your own country, and that if you've got advantages you've also got responsibilities?" said Crocker, senior, shaking his head. "You want money like all the rest. What good do you want to do in return? What usefulness do you accomplish in the scheme of things here? You talk of opportunity—you don't know what a real opportunity and a privilege is. Now let me say my say."
Richardson came sliding into the room at this moment and he paused to deny the card, with a curt order against further interruptions. When he resumed it was on a quieter note, with a touch of sadness.
"The trouble is, our points of view are too far apart for us to come together at present. You want something that isn't going to satisfy you and I know isn't going to satisfy you. But I can't make you see it, there's the pity of it. You've got to get your hard knocks yourself. You've got real ambition in you. Now let me tell you something about the mills and you think it over. There's some bigger things in this world than you think, and the biggest is to create something, something useful to the community; to make a monument of it and to pass it down for your son to carry on—family pride. You think there's only drudgery in it. Did you ever think there were thousands and thousands of people depending on how you run your business? Do you realize that every great business to-day means the protection of those thousands; that you've got to study out how to protect them at every point in order to make them efficient; that there's nothing unimportant? You've got to watch over their health and their happiness, see that they get amusement, relaxation; that they're encouraged to buy homes and taught to save money. You've got to see that they get education to keep them out of the hands of ignorant agitators. You've got to make them self-respecting and able intelligently to understand your own business, so that they'll perceive they're getting their just share. Add to that the other side, the competition, the watching of every new invention, the calculating to the last cent, the study of local and foreign conditions of supply and demand, the habits and tastes of different communities. Add also the biggest thing that you've got, a mixed population, that's got to be turned into intelligent, useful American citizens, and you've got as big an opportunity and responsibility as you can place before any young fellow I know. What do you say?"
Bojo had nothing to say—not that he had surrendered, but that his own arguments seemed petty besides these.
The father rose and laid his hands on his son's shoulders.