as it meant “the way out.”  He did not pick and choose; he took what came, and did it in the best way he knew how; and when he did not like what he was doing he still did it as well as he could while he was doing it, but always with an eye single to the purpose not to do it any longer than was strictly necessary.  He used every rung in the ladder as a rung to the one above.  He always gave more than his particular position or salary asked for.  He never worked by the clock; always by the job; and saw that it was well done regardless of the time it took to do it.  This meant effort, of course, untiring, ceaseless, unsparing; and it meant work, hard as nails.

He was particularly careful never to live up to his income; and as his income increased he increased not the percentage of expenditure but the percentage of saving.  Thrift was, of course, inborn with him as a Dutchman, but the necessity for it as a prime factor in life was burned into him by his experience with poverty.  But he interpreted thrift not as a trait of niggardliness, but as Theodore Roosevelt interpreted it:  common sense applied to spending.

At forty, therefore, he felt he had learned the first essential to carrying out his idea of retirement at fifty.

The second essential—­varied interests outside of his business upon which he could rely on relinquishing his duties—­he had not cultivated.  He had quite naturally, in line with his belief that concentration means success, immersed himself in his business to the exclusion of almost everything else.  He felt that he could now spare a certain percentage of his time to follow Theodore Roosevelt’s ideas and let the breezes of other worlds blow over him.  In that way he could do as Roosevelt suggested and as Bok now firmly believed was right:  he could develop himself along broader lines, albeit the lines of his daily work were broadening in and of themselves, and he could so develop a new set of inner resources upon which he could draw when the time came to relinquish his editorial position.

He saw, on every side, the pathetic figures of men who could not let go after their greatest usefulness was past; of other men who dropped before they realized their arrival at the end of the road; and, most pathetic of all, of men who having retired, but because of lack of inner resources did not know what to do with themselves, had become a trial to themselves, their families, and their communities.

Bok decided that, given health and mental freshness, he would say good-by to his public before his public might decide to say good-by to him.  So, at forty, he candidly faced the facts of life and began to prepare himself for his retirement at fifty under circumstances that would be of his own making and not those of others.

And thereby Edward Bok proved that he was still, by instinct, a Dutchman, and had not in his thirty-four years of residence in the United States become so thoroughly Americanized as he believed.