the wives of our men work with them whenever the care of their families does not prevent. "Well, within five years, I had paid off my loan and bought out my partners. I felt that I had really earned the money with which I made that purchase and when a man really earns something, he really appreciates it. "T a HE most perfect merchandising will not flourish without men of the right kind. You may think that goods are the foundation of a business, but they are notmen are the foundation. Possibly the right kind of men may be hired, but a hired man is never so useful as man who has a sense of property. A substantial money interest in the result of his own effort brings out his real value. That man might, for various causes be a failure in his own businesslargely because could not avail himself of the economics of massed capital. Our scheme is to give to the man who proves that he has the ability, the tools of proprietorship and to admit him as an individual unit to the advantages of large organization. he comes to us can have is loyalty. It is the great. est asset of the business man-of any man in any walk of life for that matter-for it comprises every other asset. What is my idea of loyalty in business? Photograph by Pirie MacDonald, N. Y. J. C. PENNEY Founder and head of The J. C. Penney Company "We have no berths or soft snaps or easy jobs. And easy money is something we are always out of. Every man who comes to us must work for to-morrow and not for to-day. All we give is the opportunity to prove worthy. "N O man can be loyal who has not a sense of appreciation; no man can be loyal who is not able to project himself into the position of his fellow man. He must believe in the Golden Rule: 'Whatsoever ye would that Men should do to you, do ye even so unto them.' "In my business experience I have the opportunity of mingling much with men; and of our own organization I feel I can honestly and truthfully say, no more loyal men ever lived. The devotion these men have for those at the head of our organization is marvelous. In fact, it is so marked that outsiders fail to understand it. To this is due, to a large extent, the success we have achieved. But to us there is nothing strange about it, for we are careful in se lecting men. If we find after a thorough trial that a man lacks the partnership qualities that we demand, we do not allow him to remain longer in our employ. Loyalty is one of the indispensable qualities we look for. If a man is not loyal to the institution of which he is a part, he fails to be loyal to his fellow man; hence we consider him undesirable. "We do not want the whole trade anywhere; we want only that trade to which we can promise to give the largest value for the dollar." We do not offer money as a matter of fact, we try to make the starting salary so far below the market rate that the actual salary itself can be no inducement whatever. "Now, the greatest asset that any man who "Can you, then, not see why The J. C. Penney Company is composed of an unusual force of men? They are unselfishly giving their minds and strength to the building of an organization that in its scope has become nation-wide. Further, we have just begun to scratch the surface; it has taken all these years to lay a foundation that will be enduring; with a corps of loyal, unselfish men, there can be no limit to the possibilities of The J. C. Penney Company. TH as HE directors of our organization are just loyal to the men in their employ as the men are to them. Unless this were true, no cooperation would be possible. Loyalty is largely a result of faith and confidence. A man coming into our employ is at once impressed with the great degree of loyalty that is manifest among our store people. Few concerns that are doing business enjoy the loyalty of their employees as does The J. C. Penney Company. This spirit is in a large measure reflected by the customers of our stores, for it is no common thing to have them say: 'I have traded with your store in such and such a place, or, I have traded with this store ever since it opened.' Now unless we follow a fixed policy this would not be so. We insist in THEY are not reliable. every case that our customers be treated as we ourselves would like to be treated. After many years of experience, we know absolutely that the loyalty of a store's customers is its greatest asset. Therefore, we guard it jealously for upon it rests character and reputation. "It is not large profits we are after, but the establishment of a safe and sure foundation for a business that will be lasting. For that reason we have a host of loyal customers in every town where we have a store. This makes the name of The J. C. Penney Company synonymous with fair treatment to its patrons. This is naturally the result of years of hard work. When we open a store in a new locality, we know it will not be long until that store is doing a large business. "The same fair treatment is given our customers we accord to every man who joins our forces. That is why we allow him in time to become financially interested in the business. In this way his individuality is developed. "The young man should learn that loyalty to his associates, his work, and his ambition, unite to form a bond of well-being." Why They Do Not Get On Their minds are not on their work. They are careless and make mistakes. They think only of their salaries. They touch their work only with the tips of their fingers. They are superficial and do nothing well or thoroughly. They do not seize the opportunities for advancement that come to them. They squander their vital energy outside of business hours. They are lazy and will not take pains or put themselves out if they can possibly help it. They are not careful about their personal appearance, their dress or their manner. They are not honest or truthful and have lost the confidence of others. They are uncertain in their action because they are always subject to outside influence. They have no opinions of their own, but are the echo of the last man they talked with. They have no enthusiasm and are powerless to generate it. If it is contagious in their neighborhood they catch it; but it soon evaporates. They talk a great deal, but say very little, because they do no thinking or studying. They look into everything but see nothing, because their brains are not developed. They have a hundred irons in the fire, but none of them is hot enough to be welded. They are always looking for "genteel" occupations with little or nothing to do. When told to do anything, they stand around and ask questions instead of going to work and using their intelligence. If called upon in an emergency, they tell you that this or that is the work of someone else that it is not their work. They are half-hearted and lacking in energy, originality, push, and perseverance. They have no ambition fires to melt the obstacles in their path and weld into one continuous chain the links of their efforts. They are always wishing their circumstances were different, bemoaning their "hard luck," or wailing because they have not been assigned to a more pleasant task. They show such evidence of doubts and disbelief in themselves that they frighten away success and invite failure. The Victor is he who can go it alone. TRANSMUTE YOUR KNOWLEDGE INTO POWER A Commencement Address to the Thousands of Young Men and Women Who Will A Be Graduated this Month By ORISON SWETT MARDEN CHAIN has been added to the United States army equipment which enables a soldier to lift enormous weights, with one hand, with the utmost ease. A man need only be able actually to lift eighty-two pounds in order, with the aid of this chain, to lift a ton; 180 pounds to lift twenty tons. A strong man can lift nearly fifty times as much with its help as fifty men could without it. The ponderous mass of tackle, blocks, skids, crowbars, rollers, and human muscle formerly employed in raising great weights are done away with by this simple mechanism. This is a good illustration of what an education should do-double, treble, quadruple one's power. to think at all. That is, they depend upon The greatest satisfaction that ever comes to a human being comes from the active exercise of his mental powers, the effort to express the ability which he feels. The educated man who A STUFFED memory does not make an He has found himself, who is in a position to It requires scores of unthinking men with picks and shovels to do the work of one machine, planned and made by an educated and skilled mind, which has applied itself to the problem of finding the best, wisest, and quickest way of doing things. "Facts are stupid things," said Agassiz, "unless brought into connection by some general law." Until intelligently applied to the affairs of life, they are of little use to the student. Their value lies in digesting and assimilating them, and mental assimilation is impossible without thinking, reflecting, and practically applying what we learn. This is the only way to make knowledge one's own, to make it a living part of oneself. Because they do not do this, many of our graduates from school and college are weak, and inefficient, practically failures outside of the study hall. They go through college and stand well, without ever learning has educated man. A really educated man a peculiar faculty of transforming knowledge into power. Such ability is the secret of success. "Know thyself," is the theoretical end of culture. "Use thyself,” is the practical end. "Some minds are so congested with the fuel of mere information that the fire of aim and practical purpose never becomes kindled within them," says Lilian Whiting. There are thousands of young men and young women in America, to-day, stepping out of our colleges, who are little more than mere granaries of knowledge, walking encyclopedias of stored-up information. They have great absorptive powers but their faculties are unable to give out what they absorb and to put it to practical use. THE purpose of school and college should be to aid youth in the voyage of selfdiscovery. True education is a system of self-revelation, a plan whereby one is assisted to take an inventory of one's self and of one's resources. The athlete does not carry the gymnasium away with him. The strength, the skill, the discipline he displays, the gymnasium has helped him to acquire. That which the graduate should take from his Alma Mater is the mental strength, the stamina which will make him an active force in the world, and not merely the great mass of facts by means of which, and through the study of which, he was supposed to acquire strength and staminapractical power. REAL education increases the grasp of the faculties, the grip of the mind, increases the powers for analyzing ideas, systematizes knowledge and teaches one how to apply it. How few college graduates are really practical? Very often these young men and women think they are educated above their job when they are not grounded in the fundamental principles of business. Is it any wonder that so many of our business men are prejudiced against employing them? How many think it is undignified for a man with a college diploma to begin at the bottom and work his way up! So they spurn the smaller opportunity and await the greater, for which they are unfitted, or which, perhaps, never comes. "I believe that my college diploma has been a hindrance rather than a help, because I expected too much from it," a college graduate said to me. "I have leaned upon it instead of upon myself. I have used it as a crutch. When I tried to get a position and told my prospective employers that I had several university degrees, they simply said, 'Your college degrees are all right, but what we want is a man who can do things, who can bring things to pass, who can market goods or handle men." LEA EADING your class in knowledge will mean little to your employer unless you can lead your fellow employees with mastership, in well-performed, efficient work. How you rank among the other employees — that is what will interest your employer, not what your record was in college. The college graduate should give to the world an example of a highly trained man or woman, a man or woman fitted for effectiveness in any line of endeavor in which he or she might engage. Instead of that, I have talked with many college graduates who have not betrayed any evidence of an especially highly trained mentality. We meet them everywhere; college graduates as conductors and motormen on street cars; perpetual clerks, with meager chance of promotion; writers of occasional squibs for the newspapers; or hangers-on in society, who have no strength to rise in the world, because they have not digested and assimilated the knowledge they have gained. THE HE absorption of knowledge may become as much of a dissipation as any other bad habit. "The end of education," said Lord Kelvin, "is to help a man to earn his living, and then to make life worth living." We should be educated for life. Book learning alone makes weaklings. What the student absorbs in books and lectures is nothing compared with what he gives out in thinking and self-expression. The weakness of scholarship is that it sometimes lessens the courage and selfconfidence as it broadens the outlook. It pushes the horizon further away, but it often shows up more obstacles, more difficulties in the path. The further a scholar gets, the vaster the great unfathomed sea of knowledge looms, and this makes him feel small, ignorant and comparatively helpless. The more he learns, the more he finds he does not know. WE see many examples of totally uneducated men who jump into things which an educated man, with a broader horizon, with infinitely greater culture, would hesitate to undertake. In addition to timidity the regulation education develops an overcaution, a fear of undertaking things, and thus paralyzes initiative. The graduate's initiative is often inuch weaker and less developed than when he entered college, because he has been withdrawn from the world of thought, from the world of realities to a world of theories. It is doing things, assuming responsibility that develops initiative, self-reliance and power. Absorbing knowledge is more or less of a passive mental operation. Self-reliance, one of the principal strands in the success cable, is developed but very little in an ordinary college education There is too much absorbing, taking in of things from the outside, too much dependence on the accumulation of facts and theories in our educational system and too little evolution of our own internal forces. To learn self-reliance is to learn the secret of life and of happiness; for without it we are the victims of every wind that blows, the victim of chance, of others who would use us, who would exploit us for their own ends. THE HERE is nothing which will make one develop so strongly along the entire line of one's ability as absolute self-reliance, confidence in one's own judgment, one's thoughts, and ideas. The college graduate should bear this in mind as he enters the world of business affairs. The man who stands alone, who does not hesitate before obstacles, the man who believes in his own inherent power to do things, and goes in to do them, is the man who wins. Power is the goal of every worthy ambition, and only weakness comes from limitation or de not cultivate their courage, their selfrespect, their fearlessness, that their timidity, their self-depreciation, their cowardice might ruin their careers? If I could give the youth of the country but one word of advice, I think it would be this: "Don't expect anything from anybody but yourself." The watch does not get any assistance outside its case. The secret of its success is right inside of it; the force which keeps all the machinery in operation is in its mainspring. Whatever is done for us is a false help. It does not do what it claims to do. Props, helps, and crutches, merely discourage the development of initiative and discourage self-reliance and self-help. Whatever does this is a curse, no matter how well intended it may be. pendence upon others. We must stand NO human being who is made of the alone or bury our ambition. It is a regrettable fact that the average school or college graduate really knows very little about his own mental equipment, upon which his whole future hangs! How many have been told that if they do not cultivate their power of initiative, their self-reliance, their independence, no matter how much they might know, they would never make a success of life, could never be achievers in things worth while? How seldom are they told that if they do right stuff will lean upon others, depend upon them, wait for letters of recommendation, for good openings, favorable opportunities. Self-help is the secret of all achievement. Without it nothing is ever accomplished that is worth while. What people do for us, influence, pulls, do not count so far as our personal success in concerned. Without self-help, without self-reliance, the best part of you will never come into evidence. It will be latent. I Highest Essential to Human Happiness From a Speech by Warren G. Harding, President of the United States DECLINE to recognize any conflict of interest among the participants in industry. The destruction of one is the ruin of the other, the suspicion or rebellion of one unavoidably involves the other. In conflict is disaster, in understanding there is triumph. But the insistent call is for labor, management and capital to reach understanding. The human element comes first, and I want the employers in industry to understand the aspirations, the convictions, the yearnings of the millions of American wage-earners, and I want the wage-earners to understand the problems, the anxieties, the obligations of management and capital, and all of them understand their relationship to the people and their obligations to the Republic. Out of this will come the unanimous committal to economic justice, and in economic justice, lies that social justice which is the highest essential to human happiness. |