You’ll meet a lot of first-class idiots in this world, who regard business as low and common, because their low and common old grandpas made money enough so they don’t have to work.  And you’ll meet a lot of second-class fools who carry a line of something they call culture, which bears about the same relation to real education that canned corned beef does to porterhouse steak with mushrooms; and these fellows shudder a little at the mention of business, and moan over the mad race for wealth, and deplore the coarse commercialism of the age.  But while they may have no special use for a business man, they always have a particular use for his money.  You want to be ready to spring back while you’re talking to them, because when a fellow doesn’t think it’s refined to mention money, and calls it an honorarium, he’s getting ready to hit you for a little more than the market price.  I’ve had dealings with a good many of these shy, sensitive souls who shrink from mentioning the dollar, but when it came down to the point of settling the bill, they usually tried to charge a little extra for the shock to their refinement.

The fact of the matter is, that we’re all in trade when we’ve got anything, from poetry to pork, to sell; and it’s all foolishness to talk about one fellow’s goods being sweller than another’s.  The only way in which he can be different is by making them better.  But if we haven’t anything to sell, we ain’t doing anything to shove the world along; and we ought to make room on it for some coarse, commercial cuss with a sample-case.

I’ve met a heap of men who were idling through life because they’d made money or inherited it, and so far as I could see, about all that they could do was to read till they got the dry rot, or to booze till they got the wet rot.  All books and no business makes Jack a jack-in-the-box, with springs and wheels in his head; all play and no work makes Jack a jackass, with bosh in his skull.  The right prescription for him is play when he really needs it, and work whether he needs it or not; for that dose makes Jack a cracker-jack.

Like most fellows who haven’t any too much of it, I’ve a great deal of respect for education, and that’s why I’m sorry to see so many men who deal in it selling gold-bricks to young fellows who can’t afford to be buncoed.  It would be a mighty good thing if we could put a lot of the professors at work in the offices and shops, and give these canned-culture boys jobs in the glue and fertilizer factories until a little of their floss and foolishness had worn off.  For it looks to an old fellow, who’s taking a bird’s-eye view from the top of a packing house, as if some of the colleges were still running their plants with machinery that would have been sent to the scrap-heap, in any other business, a hundred years ago.  They turn out a pretty fair article as it is, but with improved machinery they could save a lot of waste and by-products and find a quicker market for their output.  But it’s