S3Q6 
 <f8t a.
 
 UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA
 
 C Buttre BewTork
 
 ADDRESS 
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS, 
 
 DELIVERED BEFORE THE STUDENTS OF 
 
 PACKARD'S BRYANT & STRATTOH 
 
 / 
 
 f 
 
 HON. HORACE GREELEY, 
 
 a < 6- 
 
 i >: c 
 
 AT THE 
 
 ' 
 
 ^ LARGE jFlALL OF THE COOPER UNION, 
 
 fc * 
 
 2J 
 
 ^ IsTO'V. 11, 1867. 
 
 S. S. PACKARD, PUBLISHER, 
 937 BROADWAY, 
 
 tleiu l)orh.
 
 Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1867, by 
 
 S. S. PACKARD, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States, for the 
 Southern District of New. York. 
 
 KUSSKL.L/S American Steam Printing House, 
 if<, SO and 32 Centre Street, New York.
 
 CORRESPONDENCE. 
 
 (Packard's Bryant &* Stratton ^Business College, 
 037 Broadway, N. Y., Nov. 20, 1837. 
 
 Son. 
 
 (Dear Sir : 
 
 . When you first consented to speak to our 
 
 young men on (( Success in (Business" I did not fully 
 
 comprehend the interest which would attach to the sub" 
 
 ^ ject and the speaker, and presumed that our College 
 
 % Lecture feooms, capable of holding, comfortably, one 
 
 >- thousand persons, would accommodate your hearers. 
 
 I discovered my error an hour before the time set for 
 3 your address, when our rooms were crowded almost to 
 suffocation, and people not able to gain admission were 
 ^ going away in great numbers. 
 
 At the request of our students, who had given their 
 
 - places to friends and strangers, you consented to repeat 
 
 the address at the large hall of the Cooper Union, which 
 
 p will seat comfortably twenty=five hundred persons. I 
 
 x was almost as much deceived as before. Half an hour 
 
 8 before the time, every seat was taken, and finally, every 
 
 u inch of standing space, while hundreds went away who 
 
 H could not be accommodated. 
 
 Since that time, I have been continually solicited to 
 have the address published, that all who wish may 
 obtain it. Without asking your consent, I had employed 
 a verbatim reporter, who committed to paper what fell 
 from your lips thinking, at least, to possess the address 
 
 461447
 
 4 CORRESPONDENCE. 
 
 for my own perusal. This is as far as I have dared to 
 proceed, upon my own responsibility but, judging from 
 the liberality you have already shown, I have encour~ 
 aged my friends to hope that you would permit me to 
 put the address in an enduring form, that it may be 
 accessible to the large army of young men throughout 
 the country who desire nothing so much as that some 
 one f wise enough, shall point out to them a sure path to 
 tl Success in (Business" 
 
 In preferring this request, I desire, most heartily, to 
 thank you, on behalf of the earnest men of our specialty 
 who so thoroughly appreciate your character, and who 
 honor you from their hearts for the noble recognition 
 you have given to our labors. 
 
 If the representative men of the country would, like 
 yourself, occasionally turn aside from the grand 
 schemes of speculative philosophy, and put themselves 
 in more immediate contact with the busy world, the 
 more humble but not less earnest workers in the field of 
 human benefaction would be encouraged and inspired 
 to lines of duty and achievements worthy of the highest 
 recognition and many an honest effort, which now, 
 from lack of such encouragement, degenerates into weak 
 subterfuges for public favor, would be felt in the great 
 volume of human progress, which, in spite of narrow- 
 mindedness and corruption, in spite of calumny, detrac= 
 tion, and all manner of evil, will, in God's good time, 
 lead to the highest development and the greatest happi* 
 ness of our race. 
 
 With sincere regard, 
 
 I am triily yours, 
 
 & S. PACKARD.
 
 REPLY. 
 
 Office of " The Tribune;' 
 
 New York, Nov. SS, 186*7. 
 
 My (Dear Sir: 
 
 I very gladly complied with your first, and 
 also with your second invitation to speak to your stu=> 
 dents and their friends, because I felt that there was 
 something useful to be said, and I hoped that forty years 
 of rugged experience, most of it in this city, had quali= 
 fied me to try and say it. There are one million young 
 men in our country who need to know what I tried to 
 say. 
 
 If, then, you can do more good by printing it, I pray 
 you to do it, in your own way. 
 
 Yours, 
 
 HORACE QREELEY 
 i 
 
 8. S. (P^CKjlFiQ, Esq..
 
 ^^i'r 
 
 <* 
 
 /i""v / <i 
 
 C*
 
 ADDEESS. 
 
 LADIES AND GENTLEMEN : When our friend first in- 
 vited me to speak to his scholars, I very cheerfully ac- 
 cepted the invitation, because it seemed to me that 
 there were some popular misapprehensions likely to 
 arise, if they had not already arisen, with regard to the 
 utility of Business Colleges ; or rather to the direction 
 from which that utility might be anticipated. I had 
 heard so many young men speak as though they might 
 go to a Business College and acquire there what Was to 
 be learned, and thereupon be sure of employment of 
 being hired as clerks, or book-keepers, or in some such 
 capacity that I felt sad under a conviction that this 
 kind of anticipation could not, in the nature of things, 
 be always realized. However, of that I will speak 
 further on. I propose, then, being thus invited, to 
 speak mainly to such young men as may choose to 
 hear me, of Business, and of Success in Business; giving 
 them such homely hints with reference to the subject, 
 as my experience, not now brief, and my varied 
 fortunes, may enable me to afford. In these hints, I 
 shall not follow precisely the order, or use, of course, 
 precisely the illustrations, that I did in my former 
 lecture. But those who heard me before, and have
 
 8 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 done me the honor to come again, will bear witness 
 that the same general idea pervades what I say to you 
 to-night that governed or controlled my former address. 
 
 WHAT IS BUSINESS? 
 
 I regretted, on a recent occasion, when I addressed 
 an audience smaller, but similar in kind to this, that the 
 friend who introduced me not in this city thought it 
 necessary to go into a warm and full eulogium on Com- 
 merce not undeserved, not out of place, except as 
 it might imply that Commerce was Business, and that 
 Traffic alone was included in the designation. My idea 
 is much more comprehensive, very decidedly different 
 from this. Doubtless, all Traffic is Business ; but there 
 is very much Business that is not Traffic. There is very 
 much to be studied and learned by those who aspire to 
 be business men ; and there are very large fields of use- 
 fulness probably of profit for young men, which are 
 truly Business, but are not Commerce. Therefore, I 
 would say to young men I would say earnestly Do 
 not judge of what may be taught you in Business Col- 
 leges, simply by its adaptation to make you traffickers 
 traders, merchants, clerks, book-keepers. These are 
 well ; these are important ; but they are not all. 
 
 THE TRUE BUSINESS MAN. 
 
 If I were asked to define a business man, I should 
 say he was one who knew how to set other people's 
 fingers at work possibly their heads, also to his own 
 profit and theirs.
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 9 
 
 This may be in trade, it may be in manufactures, it 
 may be in the mechanical arts, or in agriculture; but 
 wherever the man, who, stepping into a new and par- 
 tially employed community, knows how to set new 
 wheels running, axes plying, and reapers and mowers in 
 motion, and so of all the various machinery of produc- 
 tion, transformation and distribution, or any part of it 
 he who knows how to do this with advantage to the 
 community (as he can scarcely fail to do it), and with 
 reasonable profit also to himself, that man is a business 
 man, though he may not know how to read, even; though 
 he may have no money when he commences; though he 
 has simply the capacity -which some possess and more 
 men aspire to to make himself a sort of driving-wheel 
 to all that machinery. If he has this, he is a true busi- 
 ness man, although he may never have received any- 
 thing more than the rudest common-school education. 
 I have such men in my eye now; and they were not 
 capitalists, the men I think of. They ultimately became 
 so by means of business, but they did not become busi- 
 ness men by means of their capital. I will cite a few 
 instances to illustrate my meaning : 
 
 DR. SMITH. 
 
 In the little town of Westhaven, Vt., whereof I be- 
 came a resident in my tenth year, there had appeared, 
 some fifteen or twent} r years before that, an active, ener- 
 getic, resolute business man, named Dr. Smith. He had 
 failed in Connecticut, in the revulsions caused by em- 
 bargoes, and non-intercourse, and so on when many
 
 10 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 men, who were not incapable, failed; and, leaving that 
 State, came up into this little, new, rude community, 
 then the western half of the township of Fairhaven. 
 He was a man of immense energy of business capa- 
 city and courage. Finding himself, or rather locating 
 himself, in the midst of that rude, young community, 
 almost wilderness as it then was, he commenced at once 
 large operations. He became a purchaser of timber- 
 lands, and a cutter of timber, a manufacturer of boards 
 and plank, and so on; and thus he went on through the 
 twelve or fifteen years that followed, continually in- 
 creasing in wealth, and increasing the activity and 
 prosperity of the community around him, until he had 
 become wealthy, and had built a very large mansion, 
 and so had the whole township, almost, in a state of 
 industrial activity, depending substantially on that one 
 guiding, controlling, impelling brain. He died as men 
 must die and from that day the township has steadily 
 receded in population. There has been no such house 
 built since as was his; and that has become, to a great 
 extent, a ruin. There is no such amount of industry 
 and activity there has never been since as he intro- 
 duced there. And to-day that township has some hun- 
 dreds fewer people than it had the day that he died, 
 and his activity died with him. 
 
 Now, there are everywhere places where such men 
 are needed, streams running idly over rapids to the 
 sea, and timber waiting for the right men to cut and 
 manufacture it. And all over the world to-day, the 
 capacities, the possibilities of wealth, are running to
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 11 
 
 waste, for the want not so much of capital, though this 
 is desirable, as of the informing and directing mind, 
 to set business in motion. In other words, there is a 
 general need of business men. 
 
 "BILLY GRAY." 
 
 In the New England region wherein I was born, the 
 great man, fifty years ago, was William Gray, of 
 Boston, an East India and general merchant, who 
 had come up from a humble beginning to be the 
 richest man in New England, probably, at that 
 time, in the Union. He was worth a million of 
 dollars ; and in my boyhood that was equal to thirty 
 or forty millions now equal in the popular esti- 
 mate, and equal in effect. Mr. Gray had been known 
 to all Boston as having grown up among them from hu- 
 mility, from obscurity, from poverty, to wealth and con- 
 sideration. He was the same man still that he had 
 been at first neither ashamed of his origin nor proud 
 of it; simply a Boston merchant, a business man, unas- 
 suming and unpretending, going about his own affairs 
 and taking care of them, and neither greater nor less 
 than the man whom he met every day; so that it was 
 told of him that one day when another merchant, who 
 had started higher up the ladder than he, said to him, 
 in a fit of spleen of passion, " Billy Gray, I knew you 
 when you were only a drummer-boy !" " Certainly 
 you did," he responded; "didn't I drum well?" 
 That was the test of a true man. to him. What he 
 found in life to do, he did wett. One day, a smart young
 
 12 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 lawyer, going to the market to buy some meat for his 
 dinner, and spying a very common, rusty looking man 
 of fifty years of age standing there, said to him : 
 " Would n't you like to carry home my meat for me !" 
 " Yes, sir," said he, "I shall be very glad to." So he 
 took it, and followed the lawyer home, and delivered 
 the meat to him, and received, with thanks, a shilling, 
 that the lawyer tendered him, saying, " If you ever 
 again have any little jobs to do, I wish you would give 
 me your custom. My name is Billy Gray; everybody 
 about the market knows me." The lawyer concluded 
 that, if Billy Gray could afford to carry home his meat 
 for a shilling, he could afford to carry it home himself 
 .after that ; and he did so. 
 
 STEPHEN G-IRARD. 
 
 I think one of the most remarkable men this country 
 has ever developed I cannot say produced was the 
 late Stephen Girard, of Philadelphia a poor German 
 boy, from somewhere, I believe, on the Rhine. He came 
 to Philadelphia orphaned and in poverty; and, sticking 
 his stake there, grew up resolutely, quietly, steadily, 
 into the wealthiest man, and probably the most influ- 
 ential, the most powerful man, that Philadelphia has 
 ever yet developed. He lived rudely, not to say 
 plainly. He had few associates hardly a friend ; not 
 happy, I think, in his family; at all events, not taking 
 any active part in his social surroundings; but in his 
 stern, rather reticent way, working out his own problem 
 in due time. He was a banker his the Bank of Stephen
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 13 
 
 Girard; and the old-fashioned bankers, who did things 
 in the old-fashioned way some of them did not un- 
 derstand him quite well. One of them, at any rate, un- 
 dertook to throw out his notes. This banker did not know 
 Mr. Girard's Bank there was no such bank chartered 
 according to law; and they simply rejected his notes 
 at their counter. He said nothing. They would not 
 take his notes;, they did not regard them as bank paper, 
 but simply as his individual notes. But, after a while, 
 when the right time came, he went to that bank, laid 
 down a few thousand dollars of its notes on the counter, 
 and asked for the specie. The cashier counted out the 
 specie. Then he laid down a few thousand more; and 
 the specie for these was counted out. He kept on lay- 
 ing down notes, and they kept on counting out the 
 specie, until finally they asked, " Have you any 
 more ?" He said, " Yes, I have a few more;" and they 
 then told him that they would give it up. They prob- 
 ably began to think that he could take all the specie 
 they had and a little more ; so they expressed them- 
 selves satisfied, and he was ; and after that it was 
 always fair weather between them. I hardly 
 think we have to-day, in all respects, quite the 
 equal of this stirring, strong man believing only in 
 Yoltaire, who believed in nothing and yet while every- 
 body said " That old miser, Girard," and all spoke of 
 him with opprobrium, as a man who had no thought but 
 simply to get money, when that man came to die he 
 had not answered any of these remarks ; in fact, any 
 man who becomes rich may better acquire the name of
 
 14 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 a miser ; for it is like the shell of the turtle, the only 
 protection he can have against the incessant beggary 
 and importunity of those who have nothing, and 
 do not mean to earn anything. When, I say, Mr. 
 G-irard came to die, his will was a noble rebuke to 
 all these sneers and flings. He had lived, after all, 
 to 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 much-abused Stephen G-irard. 
 
 New York, as we all know, has developed three emi- 
 nently rich men. Two of them still live : therefore, 
 I shall speak of them with reserve. 
 
 JOHN JACOB ASTOR. 
 
 The late John Jacob Astor came here also an orphan, 
 I believe at all events, a boy with nothing but a per- 
 sistent 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 in it into the purchase of out-lots of 
 land on this island, which had not yet, but would soon,
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 15 
 
 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. 
 
 CORNELIUS VANDERBILT. 
 
 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. I say he was, because he 
 has gone out of that business. But, be that as it may, 
 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 water. He kept abreast with the time 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. 
 
 A. T. STEWART. 
 
 Mr. A. T. Stewart, our third wealthy man, has de- 
 veloped a very large fortune out of the dry-goods busi- 
 ness ; has done probably all that one man can do with 
 that business, to make it a source of profit, of wealth, 
 of power. Of these three rich men, only one is a native 
 American. Another came to us from Germany; a third
 
 16 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 from thrifty Scotland. 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 imme- 
 morial ; men had been employed in transferring prop- 
 erty 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. Now, then, be 
 sure that this is the truth : that these men of ideas 
 if you please, each of them a man with a single idea 
 that each of these will be followed in the time to come 
 by other great men, who will develop other ideas, but 
 not theirs. There will be no new great fortune made 
 by following servilely in the track of either of these 
 men, but by bringing some new combination to bear 
 upon human wants; in other words, by learning how to 
 satisfy some decided want in a more convenient and 
 economical manner than it has been hitherto subserved. 
 
 INVENTORS AND INVENTIONS. 
 
 
 
 The world is always reaching out after new economies 
 the civilized world. It is always devising or rather
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 17 
 
 original men devise, and the world readily adopts 
 some new "short-cut," to achieve for the masses of 
 mankind something that they need, at a smaller ex- 
 pense than that it has hitherto involved. And so, I 
 presume, the wealth-gatherers of our time, the men 
 who are to-day making, or have recently made, fortunes 
 are mainly inventors, or the owners of inventions. 
 We may instance Howe and the Sewing-Machine as one 
 development, whereby not one fortune merely, but many 
 fortunes, have been made, while signally benefiting man- 
 kind. And so of Bigelow, and his new mode of carpet- 
 weaving, and the labor-saving machines in that field; so 
 McCormick, and other inventors of reaping and mowing 
 machinery, are persons who, in our day, are clearly 
 and palpably on the road to wealth each of them 
 either the projector or the welcomer of some grand 
 new idea. They are men who have taught the world 
 how to effect more of some desirable thing at a less 
 cost of money or of effort than was previously required; 
 and of such men the world is always in need. It is 
 always prepared, when it understands them, to welcome 
 and reward them. 
 
 THE BENEFICENCE OF LABOR-SAVING- INVENTIONS. 
 
 There is, if not an ever-increasing need, an ever-in- 
 creasing consciousness of need, of labor-saving inventions 
 and machinery. And, if those inventions should render 
 labor twenty times as productive as it is to-day should 
 make this a general rule, that all human labor shall 
 produce twenty times as much as it does to-day there 
 
 2
 
 18 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 would be no glut of products, as so many mistakenly 
 apprehend. There would only be a very much fuller 
 and broader satisfaction of human needs. Our wants are 
 infinite. They expand and dilate on every side, 
 according to our means often very much in advance of 
 our means of satisfying them. If labor shall become 
 as I doubt not it will become at an early day far more 
 productive, far more effective, than it is now, we shall 
 hear nothing like a complaint that there are no more 
 wants to be satisfied, but the contrary. And yet, we 
 know the fact is deplorably true, that the time is 
 scarcely yet remote when the laboring class, distinc- 
 tively so called, set its face resolutely against new inven- 
 tions set to work deliberately to destroy labor-saving 
 machinery, and so to act as to more and more throw 
 labor back into the barbaric period when probably 
 every yard of cloth cost a day's labor, as did every 
 bushel of grain. England herself, it is computed, now 
 does the work, by means of steam and machinery, of eight 
 hundred millions of men. And yet English wants are no 
 more satisfied to-day than they were a thousand years 
 ago. I do not say they are altogether unsatisfied; but 
 I say that the consciousness of want the demand for 
 products is just as keen to-day; and I have not a doubt 
 that, if inventions could be introduced into China, 
 whereby the labor of her people should be rendered 
 fifty times as effective as it is to-day, you would find, 
 not a dearth of employment as a consequence, but 
 rather an increase of activity and an increased demand 
 for labor. To-day, British capital and British talent
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 19 
 
 are fairly grid-ironing the ancient plains and slopes of 
 Hindostan with British canals, irrigating canals, and 
 railroads. It is their gold, they say ; but it is not 
 British capital, so much as British genius and British 
 confidence, that are required. There is wealth enough 
 in India more gold, and silver, and gems, probably 
 to-day than in Europe for the precious metals always 
 flow thither, and they very seldom flow thence. 
 
 ENERGY AND CONFIDENCE. 
 
 But what is wanted is that cast of mind, that reaching 
 forward, which says "Though we spend a hundred 
 millions to build a railroad here, we are very certain 
 that the return will be ample and speedy." If the 
 Asiatics could comprehend and believe this, there 
 would be no lack of capital there. And I have no 
 doubt that, when India shall be covered with railroads 
 and canals, it will be found that she can liberally sub^ 
 sist a very much larger population, and employ a 
 larger number of laborers, than she has ever yet done. 
 In other words, genius will give scope, and space, and 
 opportunity, for many more millions of men; because 
 that genius will incite works of creation and construe^ 
 tion. 
 
 FRENCH ECONOMY. 
 
 I was standing in the French Exhibition in Paris 
 twelve years ago, when my eye was arrested by a French 
 scythe, which seemed to me about a foot shorter per- 
 haps not quite so much than the American scythe.
 
 20 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 Said. I to a French friend, "We use a much longer 
 scythe in my country, and are thereby enabled to cut 
 more grass in a day than you can." " Yes," said he, 
 " I know it; but, do you see, we have not enough labor 
 for all our people, and therefore we can not afford to 
 use such effective machinery as you do." "Ah," said 
 I, " you have not labor enough now ?" " No," said my 
 friend, "not enough." "Then," said I r "why not cut 
 down your scythe from three feet to two, so as to have 
 enough ? If that is the object, you certainly do not 
 effect it." My friend was a little perplexed, and 
 changed the subject. 
 
 UNEMPLOYED RESOURCES OF AMERICA, 
 
 I have travelled across the great American Desert 
 which divides the Pacific from the Atlantic slope of this 
 Continent. I have seen there vast stretches of really 
 waste land I should judge, mainly the result of con- 
 tinual drought, of a deficiency of water or of moisture, 
 which is probably due to the great elevation of a region 
 which rises from four to ten thousand feet, not counting 
 the mountain peaks, above the level of the ocean. But 
 very much is due to the extreme aridity of the climate. 
 And yet, on that vast, sterile plain, I, who noted 
 hurriedly its capacities, saw places not one, but sev- 
 eral where a skilful engineer could build a dam, for 
 purposes of manufacturing and irrigation combined, at 
 a cost of $10,000, which would create $100,000 worth 
 of property would make a very considerable district 
 fruitful and fertile, and as productive as the Mormons
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 21 
 
 have made the region which they first settled, around 
 the north shore of Salt Lake. I have seen places where 
 simple genius was wanted, and capital backing genius, 
 to create cities hives of population far away from 
 any place where civilized man has lived, yet where 
 barely one inventive and adaptive brain, one wise and 
 skilful man, was needed to create new centers of popu- 
 lation and industrial activity, and thus to call into ex- 
 istence thrifty and progressive communities. 
 
 TRUE SPHERE OF BUSINESS COLLEGES. 
 
 And so the world waits not in one sphere, not in 
 one place alone, but in the old countries and the new, 
 inviting crowded hives of population to people solitary 
 regions waits for business men men of capacity 1 men 
 of power men of creative thought who shall know 
 how to redeem its waste places, and to render idle popu-z- 
 lations industrious and thrifty. And here it is, in my 
 judgment, that Business Colleges will find their greatest 
 sphere of utility : that is, not in special training for 
 special pursuits, as too many believe to-day, but in 
 developing a larger capacity to apprehend and to seize 
 the opportunities that so abundantly exist on every side, 
 for giving new activity and new power to the creation 
 of material wealth. 
 
 AN ITALIAN IN IRELAND. 
 
 Some sixty years ago, I think, a young Italian, by the 
 name of Bianconi, was driven by some accident, I know 
 not what, to the shores of Ireland. Ireland is a forbid-
 
 22 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 ding country to-day for the immigrant ; but she was very 
 far more uninviting then savage, full of destitution and 
 discontent of every kind, and probably the most unat- 
 tractive spot for a new man, who had a new idea in his 
 head, on the face of the earth. But this man Bianconi, 
 this Italian, saw that one of the great needs of Ireland 
 was better facilities for travel, for intercourse between 
 the remoter counties and the metropolis; and he com- 
 menced, in a humble way, establishing lines of stage 
 and mail coaches; and, so fast as one became profitable, 
 using the profit to establish another. So he went on, 
 until finally his stage-coaches ran almost all over Ire- 
 land, causing roads to be built where none existed, and 
 roads to be improved where roads had been bad; and so 
 proceeding, until, when I saw him in Dublin, in the j'ear 
 1851, he was a hale, old man, with ample fortune, and 
 now, at last, with ample leisure; but a man who had 
 built up that great fortune out of a very humble begin- 
 ning, by observing not only that a want existed which 
 had existed for five or six centuries in that island, but 
 that the people would pay for satisfying that want, if 
 the right man would provide in the right way for its 
 satisfaction. He became rich and honored, in an enter- 
 prise which any man with a like brain, with like capacity, 
 might probably have anticipated two centuries before. 
 And so, if men who know how to strike out new paths, 
 not to follow in other men's tracks, but to see where 
 something is needed to be done that has not yet been 
 done often, perhaps, where men of deficient capa- 
 city have failed if there were a million such young men
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 23 
 
 coming on the scene, there is room and work for them 
 all, and reward for them all. 
 
 PROFESSOR MAPES. 
 
 It is something like fifteen or twenty years since our 
 old friend, now departed (Professor Mapes), failed in 
 this city, and perhaps in Philadelphia also. He had 
 done a large business, and made a great failure, and 
 went out of our city as bankrupt a man, probably, as 
 had ever left here. He was a great chemist. He was 
 only that. And, on the strength of his chemical knowl- 
 edge, he took a little piece of land, and commenced 
 farming a man fifty years of age, beginning to farm, 
 when he probably had never before in his life paid 
 attention to agriculture. But he was a man of genius. 
 I do not care what his faults were and he had faults- 
 he was really a man of observation and ideas. And 
 he went to work there, and made for himself a good, 
 though not a large farm, and from that farm realized a 
 profit of five thousand dollars per annum for a number 
 of years I believe for nearly all the years after he 
 obtained full control of it. Other men all around him, 
 on the same kind of land, had been working, without 
 success, for two hundred years. He made it productive 
 and profitable beyond what any predecessor had ever 
 done, or what any neighbor had done, to my knowl- 
 ledge ; and I speak from knowledge. 
 
 LIEBIG-. 
 
 So our great genius, Professor Liebig I do not 
 care if he has made mistakes I know he has made
 
 24 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 mistakes, and people talk of them. But, after all, 
 I believe that Professor Liebig has stimulated the 
 agricultural mind of Christendom beyond any other 
 man. I believe that the world is richer by millions to- 
 day for Professor Liebig's writings; and, whatever his 
 mistakes have been, he has made agriculture a more 
 liberal pursuit, and a better paid pursuit among liberal 
 men better rewarded, than it ever was before. 
 
 WANT OF CAPITAL. 
 
 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 $5,000 or $10,000 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
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 25 
 
 such a manner as to be profitable to the lender and 
 the user. 
 
 OFFICE SEEKING -WORK ENOUGH. 
 
 I have been somewhat tried in other times, when 
 I was supposed to have some influence with the dis- 
 pensers of political patronage, by that endless pro- 
 cession of young men coming from the east and from 
 the west to ascertain whether there was not some 
 way by which they might be cork-screwed into some 
 place in the Custom House, some employment on the 
 police, or some other of the ten thousand shiftless ways 
 whereby men seek to protect themselves against the 
 obligation to use their minds as well as their bodies to 
 get a living. It is indolence rather indolence than 
 avarice; indolence of mind, more than of body that 
 makes the world so greedy in our day for place, and 
 for political office. I think this moment of a young 
 man an old friend and playmate in boyhood who 
 came to me in 1841, and said " I must have a place 
 in the Custom House." "Why 'must 7 ?" "Well," 
 said he, " I am a broken merchant. I have been sell- 
 ing dry-goods, and have failed utterly, and I cannot go 
 into business again. I have a wife and five children, and 
 I must live. You must get me into the Custom House." 
 Well, it was a very ungracious task ; but I went down 
 and tried very hard (for my friends were then for a 
 few days in power), but I could not succeed. I told him 
 I could not. He thought he was utterly ruined. But 
 that man went out a few miles and bought, on credit, for
 
 26 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 $200, a news-stand, where periodicals were sold, and 
 commenced work. In ten years from that time, he was 
 worth $10,000, and he is now worth $150,000. If he 
 had got into the Custom House for want of which he 
 thought he was ruined he would never have had 
 $1,000 at once in the course of his life. A young 
 man came down to me in other days, when it was 
 different in the Custom House, and said to me, " I must 
 have a place." ' Why ' must' ? You are a stout, hearty 
 young man why ' must' ?" "I have nothing to do with, 
 and cannot do." " No, sir," I said, " that is no reason. 
 Have you a decent reputation ? Are you believed in 
 by those who know you " " Well, I suppose I am." 
 " Then, I say to you, you do n't want a Custom House 
 place; you want to go to work." Said he, "I have 
 nothing to work with." I said, "You go right out to 
 the first farmer you know living near a railroad, and 
 buy from him the right to cut timber on his forest 
 land, payable as you get your pay from the railroad. 
 He certainly can afford to trust you, knowing that you 
 will pay him so soon as you get your money. Then 
 hire some men to cut the wood, buy a team to haul it 
 to the railroad, and go to work. In that way, you will 
 in five years find yourself worth more money than any 
 man in the Custom House who has been there twenty 
 years." My friend did not see it, and went away 
 sorry. But I venture to say that every man who has 
 failed of getting a place in the Custom House is better 
 off to-day than those who have succeeded in getting 
 places. There is scope to do, and work enough every-
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 27 
 
 where for men who simply have the reputation for 
 energy. There is always enough to do, so that every 
 man may set himself at work profitably. I do not say 
 that it is necessary for every man to dig ditches, 
 although I do believe that a man ought to dig ditches 
 rather than stand idle. I hold that every educated 
 man can find better work, that will pay better, and be 
 less disagreeable, than that. There is no need of seek- 
 ing these Custom House places, or places in the Post 
 Office, or the Internal Revenue, if men have only the 
 pluck. 
 
 PRACTICAL EDUCATION COLLEGES. 
 
 The objection has been made to our old-fashioned col- 
 leges, that they are not practical. I do not think that is 
 an accurate statement of the objection. What I would 
 say is, that they are practical with reference to two or 
 three pursuits, but that the demands of the time re- 
 quire nine-tenths of our young men in other pursuits 
 than those; and they are not practical with reference 
 to these. If a young man seeks to be an engineer 
 in the control of steam, or a builder of machinery, 
 or a director of workmen, or wishes to qualify for one 
 of the ten thousand pursuits which are opening on every 
 side, I could not say to him that a college course would 
 be his best his most economical preparation for that 
 life. This has often saddened me. In this great hive 
 of population, there are indolent men, and needy men, 
 and idle men, in every sphere. But I say there is not 
 one stout, temperate spadesman not one man who
 
 28 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 comes here able to dig ditches, or to mine coal, or to 
 do any kind of rude labor who need stand idle and 
 starve, if he will only go on his feet where the work is 
 to be found. He need not go far. But, while such is 
 the fact with regard to mere laboring men, whilst 
 every laboring man, who is not a drunkard, who comes 
 to this country with no evil passion to gratify, can 
 surely get on while such men amount to three 
 hundred thousand comers a year, and are so much 
 addition to our productive wealth I know there are 
 to-day one thousand college graduates some of them 
 having graduated with honor at German universities 
 who are walking the stony streets of this New York, 
 a,pd know not how to earn a living. That is a condem- 
 ^/nation of our university system. As a preparation for 
 professional life I should rather say, for certain pur- 
 suits in life it may be very well : but when I see, as I 
 do see, so many men whose education has cost so much, 
 find themselves totally unable, with all that, to earn a 
 living; not immoral men, nor drinking men, but men, 
 simply, who cannot find places adapted to their capa- 
 cities: when I see this, I am moved to protest against 
 a system of education which seems to me so narrow and 
 so partial. 
 
 USE OF BUSINESS COLLEGES. 
 
 I believe the Business Colleges of our time are des- 
 tined to rectify this mistake. If these Colleges are 
 not exactly what they should be, experience and sug- 
 gestions from every side will tend to modify them; so
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 29 
 
 that the time will come when our young men, going to 
 these Colleges, will come out, if they do not now, better 
 prepared for the battle of life than they were before. 
 
 What we need is a many-sided-ness. What gives 
 our 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 U. S. frigate Constitu- 
 tion, 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 di- 
 rections, 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. 
 
 I should say, then, that our education, as it has been 
 our classical education is not sufficiently comprehen- 
 sive, at any rate not all-comprehending; and, when our 
 young men, having finished their education, as they 
 say, come down to the city, and vainty look for some- 
 thing to do still more, when, after years of struggle to 
 establish themselves as lawyers, as clergymen, or as 
 physicians, they give up and seek something else, and
 
 30 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 still find that their college preparation does not recom- 
 mend them I feel that there is here a great defect 
 which needs to be corrected. It is true, and happily 
 true, that to-day the rush into the professions is not 
 so eager as it was. The time was when every college 
 graduate expected to find his pursuit, his sphere of ef- 
 fort and his living, in one of the professions; but now 
 the graduates are so many that this is utterly impossi- 
 ble; while, on the other hand, business, in all its various 
 manifestations or developments, multiplies and extends 
 itself on every t hand, and calls for new brains and new 
 minds on every side. This, then, the Business College 
 aims to meet this larger and more varied demand. It 
 is a new preparation, a new adaptation to a newly felt 
 necessity a necessity for the great mass of tolerably 
 instructed young men each to qualify himself for a 
 sphere in life, perhaps something better, something 
 more attractive, than that of the mere day-laborer. 
 Nine-tenths of our young men cannot afford either 
 the time or the means required for a college course. 
 They have relatives dependent upon them; they have 
 demands on their time; they have limited means which 
 forbid the acquirement of a classical education: still, 
 they need and seek instruction beyond that afforded 
 by common schools. 
 
 REFORM IN TRADE. 
 
 I have said that the public is all the time blindly, 
 unconsciously seeking new economies seeking to have 
 its buying and selling done by fewer hands or at a
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 31 
 
 smaller expense. Thus, we have seen in our day that, 
 though the number of traders increases, yet the increase 
 bears no proportion to the development of trade itself. 
 The dry-goods store, which was a box a little more 
 than a hundred years ago, has become a palace; and 
 the merchant, the wholesale merchant, who does less 
 than a million of dollars a year of trade, is counted a 
 small affair, where a hundred thousand would have/ 
 been large a few years ago. Now, we have in our grain 
 elevators and all the machinery of commerce, new and 
 gigantic appliances adapted to the new demand, or 
 new consciousness of demand. Yet, this process of con- 
 centration is barely begun. I heard the other day 
 that a young man had a new thought with regard to 
 the flour trade. He has determined to send to every 
 mechanic's, or every laboring man's, or every man's 
 door a barrel of flour at wholesale prices, that is to say: 
 to bring himself into a relation with the producers and 
 the consumers of flour, which shall cut off a platoon of 
 middle men, and, while giving him but a very small 
 profit on each barrel of flour, giving him a large profit 
 on the annual sale of 100,000 barrels of flour. And 
 this is one of the ideas which, in some hands, will yet 
 be rendered fruitful. 
 
 I have no doubt the time will come when cooked meals 
 will be sold, and always accessible, in this city, at a 
 smaller cost than any single buyer must pay for the raw 
 materials, bought at our groceries and meat-shops, out 
 of which those meals are produced. And so with this 
 great area of garden cultivation surrounding us, clamor-
 
 32 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 ing all the time for new facilities of reaching its custom- 
 ers : The gardener, fifty miles from New York, receives 
 for his produce less than half that the New York con- 
 sumer pays for it, and the balance goes to support a* host 
 of hucksters and middle men of various kinds, who are 
 necessary only because that branch of trade is so clumsy. 
 Whenever the right man shall appear, all this will be 
 reduced to system and order. The purchaser in New 
 York will buy for perhaps five per cent, profit or ten 
 per cent, profit on the cost of the article to the pro- 
 ducer, adding the cost of wholesale transportation. From 
 every side, such economies solicit us. They demand 
 the men they demand those who know how to make 
 these improvements. I have suggested two or three 
 ways wherein, doubtless, a dozen gigantic fortunes can 
 be made; but the makers will be men who work the 
 machinery themselves who know what to do and how 
 to do it who, with their own brains, surveying the 
 whole field, know how to create or combine the ma- 
 chinery whereby that field may be profitably occupied. 
 
 ECONOMY IN TRIFLES. 
 
 One point wherein the American people are exceed- 
 ingly deficient is that of method. We are energetic ; 
 we are audacious ; we are confident in our own ca- 
 pacities and in our national destiny; but we are not 
 a systematic, a frugal, economical people. Whoever 
 has looked through a London street, a business street, 
 and seen how carefully every piece of paper, every 
 wrapper, every newspaper, is gathered up and saved,
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 33 
 
 perhaps by the man who is making ten thousand or 
 twenty thousand pounds a year, while here we hustle 
 everything into the street care for nothing but to 
 get rid of it as easily as possible must be aware that 
 the difference between our people and the Europeans 
 are immense. We lose in trifles what would be for the 
 collector a competence. I was one day gratified, when 
 travelling down the Rhine, to see a G-erman family, 
 evidently of the better class an educated, cultivated 
 family, taking their excursion on the steamboat draw 
 together on one corner of the boat, take out their din- 
 ner, which they had brought with them, and sit down 
 to enjoy a frugal but substantial meal. I have no 
 doubt they fared much better than we did at the steam- 
 boat table, and at a quarter of the cost. There is no 
 American family of position that would venture to do 
 that on a great public steamboat. We are an ostenta- 
 tious people. We think too much of what others may 
 say of us, and too little of what is essentially right. 
 
 PERSONAL ACCOUNT-KEEPING. 
 
 I think every young man should begin forthwith 
 to keep debit and credit with himself and with the 
 world. If every man would resolve to know just 
 where all the money that passes through his hands 
 goes to, and would keep that account carefully setting 
 down every item at the close of each week I venture 
 to say there would be economies in his next year's ac- 
 count that were overlooked in the past. I hope these 
 
 3
 
 34 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 colleges are destined to teach us method and order 
 in our business and in our industry. There are 
 500,000 farmers, probably, in the State of New York 
 to-day, who, if you were to ask each of then! how 
 much per bushel his corn had cost him to grow for 
 the last twenty years, I doubt if fifty of the 500,000 
 could tell you. And this is but one instance out of ten 
 thousand. Now, every grower of agricultural pro- 
 ducts should inquire and ascertain, year after year, 
 " What does this cost me? What does it bring me? 
 Am I growing wheat at a profit, corn at a profit, and 
 grass at a profit ? Which among my products are 
 profitable to me ? On which do I realize a loss ?" All 
 business should be done with that constant regard 
 to method; but how seldom do we find this or anything 
 like it ? I venture to say that the young man who has 
 commenced to keep an account of his time to charge 
 himself with wasted hours, with neglected opportuni- 
 ties, and with squandered means will find himself 
 very soon resolving on wholesome retrenchments and 
 reforms. 
 
 I lay this down as a general rule, that any young 
 man who, at the close of his first year of responsible, 
 independent life, has saved something, and knows 
 where to find it, will go on to competence; whereas, the 
 young man who at the close of his first year has made 
 nothing, and has saved nothing I do not say in money, 
 but who has made himself no better off will almost 
 certainly die a poor man. and, if he lives in this city, 
 he will probably be buried at the public cost.
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 35 
 
 WHAT BUSINESS COLLEGES MAY DO. 
 
 What I hope, then, from our Business Colleges is, that 
 they shall educate and send out a class of young men 
 qualified to direct the various processes of industry, 
 whether it be to mine coal, or to manufacture fuel from 
 peat, or to make iron, or whatever it may be, even to 
 the least hopeful of all, the digging of gold and silver- 
 that whatsoever of these are to be done, they shall be 
 done with a regular, careful, methodical account of 
 profit and loss; and that, thus making each year an im- 
 provement on the last, we shall come at no distant day 
 to have a very much more productive and effective 
 national industry than we have to-day pursuing, per- 
 haps, a larger variety of employments, but pursuing all 
 these to profit cutting off the defective, the unprofit- 
 able employments and extending those that are advan- 
 tageous until the national industry shall be employed 
 very much more profitably than it is to-day. 
 
 THE ACQUIREMENT OF WEALTH. 
 
 If I have been understood in this to give an undue 
 prominence to the acquirement of wealth, I need only 
 say that I have never considered the acquisition of 
 an immense fortune desirable; but this I do hold, that 
 thrift, within reasonable limits, is the moral obligation 
 of every man ; that he should endeavor and aspire to 
 be a little better off at the close of each year. I never 
 could sympathize with a large class who are fond of 
 saying, " I am proud of being a poor man." Doubtless,
 
 36 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 misfortune, calamity, sickness, heavy burdens, may 
 justify men in being poor to the last days of their 
 lives ; but, after all, this universe is not bankrupt 
 we are not sent into it to fight a losing battle. It is 
 possible, nay, it is feasible, for every man to be thrifty 
 if he will be frugal, not only in his expenditures, 
 but in the use of his time. If his time and means are 
 profitably employed, I say there is no need of his being 
 poor and needy to the end of life. 
 
 ELEMENTS OF BUSINESS SUCCESS. 
 
 I close, then, with some suggestions as to what I con- 
 sider the bases of a true business career those which 
 give reasonable assurance of a true business success. 
 I 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 excep- 
 tional cases, wherein roguery has led to fortune. The 
 rule is almost absolute, that our thrifty men have been 
 essentially 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, on which I have said as much as I mean 
 to say. And next, general capacity I mean natural
 
 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 37 
 
 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 for- 
 tune goes by luck, or that weak men make it. Weak 
 men make money. They do so in very rare in- 
 stances ; and there are abundant cases where strong 
 men, having other desires, other aspirations, have 
 not sought wealth. The rule is very general, how- 
 ever, that the men who have succeeded have been 
 men of very strong natural powers. Then comes train- 
 ing 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 keep- 
 ing on continuously in a good track, sure that he will 
 come to the right result at last. 
 
 BORROWING AND LENDING. 
 
 If I could make my protest as strongly as I wished 
 against the ruinous habits of borrowing and lend- 
 ing, which are entirely too common among young 
 men, I would like to be felt on that subject. There 
 are in the same boarding-house half a dozen young 
 men ; half of them are frugal, careful and economical ; 
 the other half, reckless, extravagant and ostentatious; 
 and the thrifty half are continually beset by the other 
 half, to lend, to lend, to lend. I should like to have it 
 laid down as a stern, inflexible rule by the young man 
 who means to succeed, that he will neither borrow nor
 
 38 SUCCESS IN BUSINESS. 
 
 lend. I do not mean to say, there are no exceptions 
 to this ; but I do mean to say, Let each man take care 
 of his own money; if he don't, it will not be taken care 
 of. It is a very common remark that one-half of the 
 world does not know how the other half lives. I think 
 it does, for one-half lives on the other; and the thrifty 
 half of the population of New York are taxed twenty 
 millions every year in borrowings and endorsements 
 by the unthrifty half; and it is high time that this tax 
 was repealed. 
 
 CONCLUSION. 
 
 Young men, I would have you believe that success 
 in life is within the reach of every one who will truly 
 and nobly seek it that there is scope for all that the 
 universe is not bankrupt that there is abundance of 
 work for those who are wise enough to look for it 
 where it is and that, with sound morality and a care- 
 ful adaptation of means to ends, there is in this land of 
 ours larger opportunities, more just and well grounded 
 hopes, than in any other land whereon the sun ever 
 shone. There te work for all ; and this great country, 
 whereof we are citizens, is destined, in spite of her tem- 
 porary embarrassments, to bound forward on a career 
 of prosperous activity such as the world has not known. 
 That you may be a part of that movement that you 
 may help to inspire it is my hope; and I trust that 
 the few hints I have given you to-night may be of some 
 value in guiding you in the right course.
 
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