I don’t mind owning up to you, though, that I don’t hang on because I’m indispensable to the business, but because business is indispensable to me.  I don’t take much stock in this indispensable man idea, anyway.  I’ve never had one working for me, and if I had I’d fire him, because a fellow who’s as smart as that ought to be in business for himself; and if he doesn’t get a chance to start a new one, he’s just naturally going to eat up yours.  Any man can feel reasonably well satisfied if he’s sure that there’s going to be a hole to look at when he’s pulled up by the roots.

I started business in a shanty, and I’ve expanded it into half a mile of factories; I began with ten men working for me, and I’ll quit with 10,000; I found the American hog in a mud-puddle, without a beauty spot on him except the curl in his tail, and I’m leaving him nicely packed in fancy cans and cases, with gold medals hung all over him.  But after I’ve gone some other fellow will come along and add a post-graduate course in pork packing, and make what I’ve done look like a country school just after the teacher’s been licked.  And I want you to be that fellow.  For the present, I shall report at the office as usual, because I don’t know any other place where I can get ten hours’ fun a day, year in and year out.

After forty years of close acquaintance with it, I’ve found that work is kind to its friends and harsh to its enemies.  It pays the fellow who dislikes it his exact wages, and they’re generally pretty small; but it gives the man who shines up to it all the money he wants and throws in a heap of fun and satisfaction for good measure.

A broad-gauged merchant is a good deal like our friend Doc Graver, who’d cut out the washerwoman’s appendix for five dollars, but would charge a thousand for showing me mine—­he wants all the money that’s coming to him, but he really doesn’t give a cuss how much it is, just so he gets the appendix.

I’ve never taken any special stock in this modern theory that no fellow over forty should be given a job, or no man over sixty allowed to keep one.  Of course, there’s a dead-line in business, just as there is in preaching, and fifty’s a good, convenient age at which to draw it; but it’s been my experience that there are a lot of dead ones on both sides of it.  When a man starts out to be a fool, and keeps on working steady at his trade, he usually isn’t going to be any Solomon at sixty.  But just because you see a lot of bald-headed sinners lined up in the front row at the show, you don’t want to get humorous with every bald-headed man you meet, because the first one you tackle may be a deacon.  And because a fellow has failed once or twice, or a dozen times, you don’t want to set him down as a failure—­unless he takes failing too easy.  No man’s a failure till he’s dead or loses his courage, and that’s the same thing.  Sometimes a fellow that’s been batted all over the ring for nineteen rounds lands on the solar plexus of the proposition he’s tackling in the twentieth.  But you can have a regiment of good business qualities, and still fail without courage, because he’s the colonel, and he won’t stand for any weakening at a critical time.