The Art of Public Speaking eBook

Stephen Lucas
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 590 pages of information about The Art of Public Speaking.

The Art of Public Speaking eBook

Stephen Lucas
This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 590 pages of information about The Art of Public Speaking.

Are you poor?  It is because you are not wanted and are left on your own hands.  There was the great lesson.  Apply it whichever way you will it comes to every single person’s life, young or old.  He did not know what people needed, and consequently bought something they didn’t want and had the goods left on his hands a dead loss.  A.T.  Stewart learned there the great lesson of his mercantile life and said, “I will never buy anything more until I first learn what the people want; then I’ll make the purchase.”  He went around to the doors and asked them what they did want, and when he found out what they wanted, he invested his sixty-two and a half cents and began to supply “a known demand.”  I care not what your profession or occupation in life may be; I care not whether you are a lawyer, a doctor, a housekeeper, teacher or whatever else, the principle is precisely the same.  We must know what the world needs first and then invest ourselves to supply that need, and success is almost certain.  A.T.  Stewart went on until he was worth forty millions.  “Well,” you will say, “a man can do that in New York, but cannot do it here in Philadelphia.”  The statistics very carefully gathered in New York in 1889 showed one hundred and seven millionaires in the city worth over ten millions apiece.  It was remarkable and people think they must go there to get rich.  Out of that one hundred and seven millionaires only seven of them made their money in New York, and the others moved to New York after their fortunes were made, and sixty-seven out of the remaining hundred made their fortunes in towns of less than six thousand people, and the richest man in the country at that time lived in a town of thirty-five hundred inhabitants, and always lived there and never moved away.  It is not so much where you are as what you are.  But at the same time if the largeness of the city comes into the problem, then remember it is the smaller city that furnishes the great opportunity to make the millions of money.  The best illustration that I can give is in reference to John Jacob Astor, who was a poor boy and who made all the money of the Astor family.  He made more than his successors have ever earned, and yet he once held a mortgage on a millinery store in New York, and because the people could not make enough money to pay the interest and the rent, he foreclosed the mortgage and took possession of the store and went into partnership with the man who had failed.  He kept the same stock, did not give them a dollar capital, and he left them alone and went out and sat down upon a bench in the park.  Out there on that bench in the park he had the most important, and to my mind, the pleasantest part of that partnership business.  He was watching the ladies as they went by; and where is the man that wouldn’t get rich at that business?  But when John Jacob Astor saw a lady pass, with her shoulders back and her head up, as if she did not care if the whole world looked on her, he studied her bonnet; and before that

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Project Gutenberg
The Art of Public Speaking from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.