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a great end; and the wise and liberal disposition he made of the largest share of his property, so that thereby other orphan boys should be able to acquire the instruction, the thorough education, which he, all his life long, had felt the need of, has well rebuked the calumnies, the harsh and unfounded judgments, which had for so long been silently borne by him. I doubt whether Philadelphia has had any other man, of any name or condition, who has done her so much practical, enduring good as this muchabused Stephen Girard.

New York, as we all know, has developed eminently rich men.

The late John Jacob Astor came here also an orphan, I believe at all events, a boy with nothing but a persistent determination to make his way. He began, early in life, as a fur merchant, and became-commencing with nothing the greatest fur merchant that the world had ever known. He exhausted the possibilities of the fur trade, and then turned from that the means that he had acquired into the purchase of out-lots of land on this island, which had not as yet, but would soon, become valuable, and thereby rolled up the largest fortune which had been known in his time, and died the richest man that America had ever produced.

Our next eminent man was Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was probably the most consummate master of the business of building and running steamboats that the world had ever yet seen. He commenced life first as the owner of a mere sail-boat, plying between New York and Staten Island, where he was born. His fortune developed itself with the origin and growth of steam navigation. He well acquired the title of Commodore, generally given to him (and might be called Admiral as well), by mastering the possibilities of steam as a power for moving vessels on the

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water. He kept abreast with the times — seeing what might be done, and doing it until he, too, had amassed a very large fortune, and, when he left the business, was the largest owner of steamboat and steamship property on the face of the globe.

What I wish our young men to understand, what it is important to say in this regard, is, that each of these men founded his fortune on what we may say was a new idea - certainly, a distinct idea. Men had been trading in every way from time immemorial; men had been employed in transferring property and persons, beyond any account we have; men had been dealing in dry-goods; but each of these was a man who, taking a distinct line of business, gave to that business a larger development than any one man, within my knowledge, had ever given it before. Neither of these was an imitator; neither of them took an idea from some one else, and followed it up; but each commenced in his own proper path we may say, hewed out and enlarged his own proper path in life—and followed it to fortune.

It is, in my judgment, a vulgar error, yet a very common one, to suppose that a man needs capital to go to work with. I do not mean to say that capital is not very convenient and very acceptable; but I do say that there is a prevalent mistake. If you were to ask the first hundred young men who should pass a given corner in Broadway to-morrow morning whether they would not like to borrow five thousand dollars or ten thousand dollars and go into business, I apprehend that ninety of them would answer, on the instant, "Yes, I would like it." And yet I predict that nine-tenths would fail if their wish were gratified. There are a hundred men who know how to get money where there is one who knows how to take good care of it. Our young men are continually reaching

out after the control of money, before learning, or seeking to learn, how to make that control safe to themselves. It is the capacity to use money safely and wisely that men need, and not the money. It is not so difficult to get possession of other men's money as it is to use it in such a manner as to be profitable to the lender and the

user.

What gives our

What we need is a many-sidedness. Yankee-born people the start of others is, that they have more adaptation, more varying capacities, than almost any other population. When, at the outset of our late Civil War, a vessel, the United States frigate Constitution, was aground in Annapolis Harbor, and the colonel of a Massachusetts regiment called out, "How many men are able to work that vessel off? Those who can, will step four paces to the front," at once forty men stepped out to take hold of the old ship and work her off. Now, that is what we want; men who do one thing, it may be, to-day, but who are prepared to do something else to-morrow, if something else is needed and that which they are doing is not. What we need is an education that teaches men to look in various directions, qualifying them for different pursuits, enabling them to do what they desire and choose, and fitting them to do something else, if that which they select shall not continue to be profitable or desirable.

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I close, then, with some suggestions as to what I consider the basis of a true business career those which give reasonable assurance of a true business success. place first among these integrity; because I believe that there is to-day a good deal of misapprehension on this point. There is now and then a case of brilliant rascality known among us; and we hear of this, and talk of it; we are inclined, some of us, to admire it; but, after all, there are no cases, except very exceptional cases, wherein

roguery has led to fortune. The rule is almost absolute, that our thrifty men have been exceptionally upright men. You will find few cases where the dishonest man has continuously flourished. There have been cases of his temporary, transient, meteoric success; but the rule is very uniform in its operation, that business success has been based on a broad platform of integrity.

Next to that, I would place frugality. And next, general capacity, I mean natural capacity. I venture to say that all our successful men in business have been men of strong, original minds. It is perfectly idle, the popular conception that fortune goes by luck, or that weak men make it. Weak men make money. They do so in very rare instances; and there are abundant cases where strong men, having other desires, other aspirations, have not sought wealth. The rule is very general, however, that the men who have succeeded have been men of very strong natural powers. Then comes training, general and special education and system, — and after that the energy of continuous application. There is nothing else wherein the rolling stone is so bare of moss as in business. The true business man must have the power of persistency in discouragement of keeping on continuously in a good track, sure that he will come to the right result at last.

WEALTH AND ITS USES1

BY ANDREW CARNEGIE

WILL assume for the moment that you were all fortunate enough to be born poor. Then the first question that presses upon

you is this: What shall I learn to do for the community which will bring me in exchange enough wealth to feed, clothe, lodge, and keep me independent of charitable aid from others? What shall I do for a living? And the young man may like, or think that he would like, to do one thing rather than another; to pursue one branch or another; to be a business man or craftsman of some kind, or minister, physician, electrician, architect, editor, or lawyer. I have no doubt, some of you in your flights aspire to be journalists. But it does not matter what the young man likes or dislikes, he always has to keep in view the main point: Can I attain such a measure of proficiency in the branch preferred as will certainly enable me to earn a livelihood by its practice?

The young man, therefore, who resolves to make himself useful to his kind, and therefore entitled to receive in return from a grateful community which he benefits the sum necessary for his support, sees clearly one of the highest duties of a young man. He meets the vital question immediately pressing upon him for decision, and decides it rightly.

So far, then, there is no difference about the acquisition

From "The Empire of Business," copyright, 1902, by Doubleday, Page and Company.

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