“I should not call it hard. I believe in close application, of course, while laboring. Overwork is not necessary to success. Every man should have plenty of rest. I have.”
“You must rise early to be at your office at half-past seven?”
“Yes, but I go to bed early. I am not burning the candle at both ends.”
The enormous energy of this man, who was too modest to discuss it, was displayed in the most normal manner. Though he sat all day at a desk which had direct cable connection with London, Liverpool, Calcutta, and other great centers of trade, with which he was in constant connection; though he had at his hand long-distance telephone connection with New York, New Orleans and San Francisco, and direct wires from his room to almost all part of the world, conveying messages in short sentences upon subjects which involved the moving of vast amounts of stock and cereals, and the exchange of millions in money, he was not, seemingly, an overworked man. The great subjects to which he gave calm, undivided attention from early morning until evening were laid aside with the ease with which one doffs his raiment, and outside of his office the cares weighed upon him no more. His mind took up new and simpler things.
“What do you do,” I inquired, “after your hard day’s work—think about it?”
“Not at all. I drive, take up home subjects, and never think of the office until I return to it.”
“Your sleep is never disturbed?”
“Not at all.”
A BUSINESS KING.
And yet the business which this man could forget when he gathered children about him and moved in his simple home circle amounted, in 1897, to over $102,000,000 worth of food products, manufactured and distributed. The hogs killed were 1,750,000; the cattle were 1,080,000; the sheep, 625,000. Eleven thousand men were constantly employed, and the wages paid them were over $5,500,000; the railway cars owned and moving about all parts of the country, four thousand; the wagons of many kinds and of large number, drawn by 750 horses. The glue factory, employing 750 hands, made over twelve million pounds of glue! In his private office, it is he who took care of all the general affairs of this immense world of industry, and yet at half-past four he was done, and the whole subject was comfortably off his mind.