“No?” he answered.  “Not even Cyrus W. Field or Herbert Hoover?”

And all this time Edward Bok’s failure to be entirely Americanized was brought home to his consciousness.  After fifty years, he was still not an American!  He had deliberately planned, and then had carried out his plan, to retire while he still had the mental and physical capacity to enjoy the fruits of his years of labor!  For foreign to the American way of thinking it certainly was:  the protestations and arguments of his friends proved that to him.  After all, he was still Dutch; he had held on to the lesson which his people had learned years ago; that the people of other European countries had learned; that the English had discovered:  that the Great Adventure of Life was something more than material work, and that the time to go is while the going is good!

For it cannot be denied that the pathetic picture we so often see is found in American business life more frequently than in that of any other land:  men unable to let go—­not only for their own good, but to give the younger men behind them an opportunity.  Not that a man should stop work, for man was born to work, and in work he should find his greatest refreshment.  But so often it does not occur to the man in a pivotal position to question the possibility that at sixty or seventy he can keep steadily in touch with a generation whose ideas are controlled by men twenty years younger.  Unconsciously he hangs on beyond his greatest usefulness and efficiency:  he convinces himself that he is indispensable to his business, while, in scores of cases, the business would be distinctly benefited by his retirement and the consequent coming to the front of the younger blood.

Such a man in a position of importance seems often not to see that he has it within his power to advance the fortunes of younger men by stepping out when he has served his time, while by refusing to let go he often works dire injustice and even disaster to his younger associates.

The sad fact is that in all too many instances the average American business man is actually afraid to let go because he realizes that out of business he should not know what to do.  For years he has so excluded all other interests that at fifty or sixty or seventy he finds himself a slave to his business, with positively no inner resources.  Retirement from the one thing he does know would naturally leave such a man useless to himself and his family, and his community:  worse than useless, as a matter of fact, for he would become a burden to himself, a nuisance to his family, and, when he would begin to write “letters” to the newspapers, a bore to the community.

It is significant that a European or English business man rarely reaches middle age devoid of acquaintance with other matters; he always lets the breezes from other worlds of thought blow through his ideas, with the result that when he is ready to retire from business he has other interests to fall back upon.  Fortunately it is becoming less uncommon for American men to retire from business and devote themselves to other pursuits; and their number will undoubtedly increase as time goes on, and we learn the lessons of life with a richer background.  But one cannot help feeling regretful that the custom is not growing more rapidly.