“It is as good as any,” answered Sir William thoughtfully, “if a young man is content to work for a salary all his life. But he should not be content with this. The salary habit is a bad one, very easy to acquire, and very hard to shake off. The man with his stipend every week is apt to settle into a groove. He adjusts his mode of life to his Saturday envelope. It gets to be about the most important thing in his existence. He becomes tied up to it, and is afraid to make a move that will disturb this pleasant union. Always acting under the direction of somebody higher up, he loses his power of initial effort, and never develops to the full extent of his possibilities. He is likely to be a dependent all his life. If after long years of service he loses his place, as often happens, he is nearly helpless.
“I should say to the young man, strike out for yourself as soon as you can. Don’t be afraid to take a chance. Most of the interest of life lies in its uncertainties. You will have your tumbles, of course, but the exercise of standing on your own legs will give you strength to get up again and push on. One of the drawbacks about a salaried place is that a man is apt to lose keen interest in his work, and interest is at the foundation of energy, of concentration of inspiration, even, of all the elements, in brief, that go to make up an adequate performance.
“If you are interested, you will be working with vigor long after most other men have knocked off, tired out, as they imagine. I don’t care to talk about myself, but I will say that whatever my efforts have amounted to they have been impelled by strong interest. The man who feels no enthusiasm for his work will never accomplish anything worth while. Work that is interesting does more than all the doctors to keep men alive and young. I endorse what Russell Sage says about vacations. I don’t believe in them. When a man who has worked hard for many years decides that he has earned a long vacation, and retires from business, it almost invariably means the beginning of the end for him.
“There is nothing strange in this. He has suddenly cut off the interests of a lifetime, and no longer has momentum to carry him along the road of life. On the other hand, look at the old men who have not retired. Russell Sage himself is an excellent illustration; but in his city, New York, where the business pace is supposed to be very swift and wearing, there are many others—patriarchs to whom the allotted span of threescore years and ten is beginning to look like comparative youth, and yet who still are handling great interests. If they had stopped work when they had made fortunes, most of them would have been long since dead.
“Several years ago a London physician of Lord Strathcona informed him that he was in a bad way; that his friends would be mourning his loss in a week unless he permitted himself to relax. In less than a month the death of the doctor made it impossible to withdraw his injunction, so Lord Strathcona has been on the go ever since. He is over eighty now, and is so vigorous that he thinks nothing of taking little business trips from London across the Atlantic and the continent of North America to Vancouver.
“I believe in recreation of course, but I think it should be of a kind that involves activity of the brain. My own mental rest I find in painting pictures. I am very fond of doing landscapes. This takes my mind into a sphere rather remote from railway earnings and expenditures, and is refreshing.”
Sir William showed me a number of his paintings. Some were hung on his walls among those of well-known landscape artists, and in the comparison they suffered not a particle. I commented upon this fact.
“You can’t be much of a judge of art,” he answered with a smile. In this matter, however, many good judges are agreed. It is remarkable that a rough and ready man of affairs, a captain of industry in the true sense, should be able to paint pictures of a quality that many a professional artist might well envy. But Sir William has even wider interests than railroad building and painting. He is largely identified with financial enterprises of great magnitude in the United States, and at present is much absorbed in developing the resources of Cuba, upon which island he believes there are opportunities among the finest in the world for men of either large or small capital.
In addition to these pursuits he is a botanist and geologist of wide and accurate knowledge, and has for years been a close student of the civilization and art of the Orient. Nothing delights him more than a conversation on the art products of China, and he takes great pleasure in showing his friends beautiful specimens in his large collection of Oriental pottery and pictures. Supplement to these interests those of the practical farmer and you will have a partial idea of the range of accomplishments of a man who was making his living at the age of thirteen, and is self-taught.