V

MONEY

Many serious letters and a half-humorous criticism in Punch suggest that I am to be regarded as the apostle of a pure materialism.  That is not so.  I quite recognise the existence of other ambitions in the walks of Art, Religion, or Literature.  But at the very outset I confined the scope of my advice to those who wish to triumph in practical affairs.  I am talking to the young men who want to succeed in business and to build up a new nation.  Criticism based on any other conception of my purpose is a spent shaft.

Money—­the word has a magical sound.  It conjures up before the vision some kind of enchanted paradise where to wish is to have—­Aladdin’s lamp brought down to earth.

Yet in reality money carries with it only two qualities of value:  the character it creates in the making; the self-expression of the individuality in the use of it, when once it has been made.  The art of making money implies all those qualities—­resolution, concentration, economy, self-control—­which make for success and happiness.  The power of using it makes a man who has become the captain of his own soul in the process of its acquirement also the master of the circumstances which surround him.  He can shape his immediate world to his own liking.  Apart from these two faculties, character in acquirement, power in use, money has little value, and is just as likely to be a curse as a blessing.  For this reason the money master will care little for leaving vast wealth to his descendants.  He knows that they would be better men for going down stripped into the struggle, with no inheritance but that of brains and character.  Wealth without either the wish, the brains, or the power to use it is too often the medium through which men pamper the flesh with good living, and the mind with inanity, until death, operating through the liver, hurries the fortunate youth into an early grave.  The inheritance tax should have no terrors for the millionaire.

The value of money is, therefore, first in the striving for it and then in the use of it.  The ambition itself is a fine one—­but how is it to be achieved?

I would lay down certain definite rules for the guidance of the young man who, starting with small things, is determined to go on to great ones:—­

1.  The first key which opens the door of success is the trading instinct, the knowledge and sense of the real value of any article.  Without it a man need not trouble to enter business at all, but if he possesses it even in a rudimentary form he can cultivate it in the early days when the mind is still plastic, until it develops beyond all recognition.  When I was a boy I knew the value in exchange of every marble in my village, and this practice of valuing became a subconscious habit until, so long as I remained in business, I always had an intuitive perception of the real and not the face value of any article.

    The young man who will walk through life developing the capacity for
    determining values, and then correcting his judgments by his
    information, is the man who will succeed in business.