CHAPTER XIVAMERICAN FORTUNES NOT LARGE, CONSIDERING
A country of such resources could not be developed as America has been without great fortunes resulting. Inequality of results in every field of human endeavor, except the acquisition of property, is welcomed and approved by everyone.
I am not surprised at the fortunes that have been made in this country. On the contrary, even greater fortunes might have been reasonably expected. As I look over the matchless resources of America, the surface of which as yet has been only scratched, and the matchless resourcefulness of our people, I marvel that even greater accumulations have not been made. I have been frequently surprised that I did not make more myself. But I can account for it, so far as I am concerned. I heard of a man who said he could write as good poetry as Shakespeare, “if he had a mind to.” His friends assured him he had discovered his handicap. That was my difficulty. I had the disposition, and I have had the opportunity. As I look back over the years of my mature life I recognizethat I have failed to heed opportunities where I might have made more money than any man has made. But I did not have the vision; I did not have the courage; I did not have the “mind to.”
I can construct a highway so the worst old scrub of a horse, with his mane and tail full of cockleburrs, can keep up with a thoroughbred. Yes, I can. But the mud must needs be very deep and quite thick. When the mud is sufficiently heavy, one horse can keep up with another. But when the track is improved, the horse with aptitude for speed will soon distance the old cockleburred scrub, who would, if he could talk, very likely insist there is something wrong with our civilization, and become a socialist.
We all demand good roads, though we all know that if we have good roads we will have to take someone’s dust. The only way, my friend, to protect yourself from the other man’s dust is to have the roads so bad he cannot pass you.
A PARABLE
During the free silver campaign of 1896, a man with a full unkempt beard and shaggy hair, after several times interrupting the speaker, finallyasked in squeaky voice: “Mr. Speaker, how do you account for the unequal distribution of wealth?” The answer came with promptness. “How do you account for the unequal distribution of whiskers?” When the audience had quieted down, the speaker might have said: “My friend, I did not make that remark to cause merriment at your expense. I made it to illustrate a great truth. I was born with equal opportunity and equal aptitude for whiskers with yourself. But I have dissipated mine. Whenever I have found myself in possession of any perceptible amount of whiskers, I have dissipated them. Had I conserved my whiskers, as you evidently have, I, too, would be a millionaire in whiskers.”
Tell your boys, and the boys you meet, that if ever they become millionaires in dollars as in whiskers, the chances are it will be because they conserve. John J. Blair, the pioneer railroad builder west of the Mississippi River, once told Senator Allison that the wife of Commodore Vanderbilt had many times cooked for him a five o’clock breakfast, for which she charged twenty cents. The seed from which all great fortunes have been grown was hand picked.
In the war between the states more than a million men enlisted on either side, and at theend of four and one-half years there were fifty or one hundred multi-millionaires in military achievement and military glory and ten thousand in unmarked graves. Socialists do not object to these inequalities. While they seem to welcome millionaires in art, in music, and in athletics they all point to millionaires in business as an unanswerable indictment of America’s political system. They rejoice that it can produce an Edison, but mourn that it can also produce a Rockefeller. Yet the success of these two wizards is traceable alike to extraordinary aptitude in their respective fields of achievement, plus extraordinary application. Neither of these men ever robbed me of a penny. On the contrary each has contributed to my comfort, thus adding to the worth of living, and each has cheapened for me the cost of high living. But for Mr. Edison, or someone of a different name to do what he has done, I would be deprived of electric light and many other comforts. But for Mr. Rockefeller, or some one of a different name to do what Mr. Rockefeller has done, every owner of an oil well would be pumping his product into barrels in the olden way, hauling it to town and selling on a manipulated market, while I would be deprived of a hundred by-products of petroleum, be still paying twenty-fivecents per gallon for poor kerosene, and there would be no such thing known in all the world as gasoline.