CHAPTER XII.

BUSINESS HABITS.

PLINY.

Usus efficacissimus rerum omnium magister.
"Habit at first is but a silken thread,
Fine as the light-winged gossamers that sway
In the warm sunbeams of a summer's day;
A shallow streamlet, rippling o'er its bed;

A tiny sapling, ere its roots are spread;

A yet unhardened thorn upon the spray;

A lion's whelp that hath not scented prey;

A little smiling child obedient led.

Beware! that thread may bind thee as a chain;

That streamlet gather to a fatal sea;

That sapling spread into a gnarled tree;

That thorn, grown hard, may wound and give thee pain;

That playful whelp his murderous fangs reveal;

That child, a giant, crush thee 'neath his heel."

"A man is not physically perfect who has lost his little finger. It is no answer to say that such a man can do many things as well as before his mutilation. Can he do every thing as well? So every bad habit cripples in kind, though not in degree."

Custom is a violent and treacherous schoolmistress. She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority, but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the aid of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage nor the power so much as to lift up our eyes. MONTAIGNE.

the ease and quiet of a common printing-press, it exerts a force equal to a thousand tons, whilst at every pressure of the "cam" large cubes are pressed out of the solid bar as easily as one can break earthenware or mould clay. It will push its hard steel finger through iron two inches thick, without the slightest jarring or failure in the regularity of its action. What is the secret of this prodigious and constant power? It is found in

the accumulated force of the balance-wheel, which, revolving one hundred and thirty times a minute, bears with overwhelming force upon the steel punch, and must either break the whole machine into fragments, or pierce through every obstacle.

In this ingenious piece of mechanism we have a striking illustration of the power of habit. Who has not seen, in hundreds of instances, a moral force accumulated by it as resistless as that of the balance-wheel? There are times of pressure in every man's life when he would utterly fail but for the help thus afforded; but, fortunately, at the crisis, by the force of principles that have gathered energy by long and persevering habit, he is carried over the dead-point, and then is able to rally his strength for new trials. The vast reserve power that lies in habit has often been noticed by moralists. Man, says Paley, is a bundle of habits; and habit, according to the proverb, is a second nature, which, we all know, is sometimes so powerful as to exterminate the first. Metastasio held so strong an opinion as to the power of repetition in thought and act, that he said: "All is habit in mankind, even virtue itself." Beginning with single acts, habit is formed slowly at first, and it is not till its spider's threads are woven into a thick cable that its existence is suspected. Then it is found that, beginning with cobwebs, it ends in chains. Gulliver was bound as fast by the Liliputians with multiplied threads as if they had used ropes. “Like flakes of snow that fall unperceived upon the earth," says Jeremy Bentham, "the seemingly unimportant events of life succeed one another. As the snow gathers together, so are our habits formed; no single flake that is added to the pile produces a sensible change; no single action creates, however it may exhibit, a man's character; but as the tempest hurls the avalanche down the mountain, and overwhelms the inhabitant and his habitation, so passion, acting upon the elements of mischief which pernicious habits have brought together by imperceptible accumulation, may overthrow the edifice of truth and virtue."

The force of this principle is strikingly illustrated in the

fact that it renders pleasant things which at first were intensely disagreeable or even painful. Walking upon the quarter-deck of a vessel, though felt at first to be intolerably confined, becomes by custom so agreeable to a sailor, that in his walk on shore he often hems himself within the same bounds. Lord Kames tells of a man who, having relinquished the sea for a country life, reared in the corner of his garden an artificial mount, with a level summit, resembling most accurately a quarter-deck, not only in shape, but in size, where he generally walked. When Franklin was superintending the erection of some forts on the frontier, as a defence against the Indians, he slept at night in a blanket on the hard floor, and, on his first return to civilized life, could hardly sleep in a bed. Captain Ross and his crew, having been accustomed during their polar wanderings to lie on the frozen snow or the bare rock, afterwards found the accommodations of a whaler too luxurious for them, and he was obliged to exchange his hammock for a chair. The same principle, in another form, is illustrated in the case of persons born blind, or deprived of sight, who, acquiring a habit. of nice observation through the sense of feeling, astonish us by their accurate descriptions of things which they have examined by means of their exquisitely delicate touch. So powerful is this effect of the constant repetition of actions, that men whose habits are fixed may be almost said to have lost their free agency. Their acts become of the nature of fate, and they are so bound by the chains which they have woven for themselves, that they do that which they have been accustomed to do, even when they know it can yield neither pleasure nor profit. Fielding has strikingly illustrated this in a scene in the "Life of Jonathan Wild," where that person is represented as playing at cards with the Count, a professed gambler: "Such was the power of habit over the minds of these illustrious persons, that Mr. Wild could not keep his hands out of the Count's pockets, though he knew they were empty; nor could the Count abstain from palming a card, though he was well aware Mr. Wild had no money to pay him."

It has been truly said that even happiness itself may become habitual. One may acquire the habit of looking upon the sunny side of things, and he may also acquire the habit of looking upon the gloomy side. He may accustom himself by a happy alchemy to transmute the darkest events into materials for hope, or he may indulge in the practice of croaking till, like the malevolent being of the poet,

Vix tenet lacrymas quia nil lacrymabile cernit.

Hume, the historian, said that the habit of looking at the bright side of things was better than an income of a thousand a year. It was said of Cromwell that hope shone like a fiery pillar in him when it had gone out in all others.

Such being the power of habit, can any one doubt that upon the early formation of good habits hinges the question of success in life? Above all, can we doubt that habits of patient and accurate observation, such as we have said the blind man evinces, would be of incalculable value, if brought to bear upon the thousand and one details of business life? Or is there a question that the opposite habits of negligence and inattention must lead to disaster or ruin?

Hazlitt seems to have regarded a business life as so much a matter of habit, of mere routine, as to be adapted only to plodders. In one of his brilliant essays he represents business men as mere machines. They are put in a go-cart, and are harnessed to a profession, yoked to fortune's wheel. All they have to do, he says, is to let things take their course, and not go out of the beaten road. "The great requisite for the prosperous management of business is the want of imagination, or of any ideas but those of custom and interest on the narrowest scale." Take what you can get, he adds, and keep what you have got; seize eagerly every opportunity that offers for promoting your own interest, and make the most of the advantages you have already obtained, and by plodding, persevering industry, you will become a first-class merchant.

This is a favorite doctrine of some literary men, but nothing

can be more untrue. No doubt there are narrow-minded men of business, who measure everything by yard or tape-measure; who believe in nothing which, as Burke says, "they cannot measure with a two-foot rule, - which they cannot count with their ten fingers"; and whose lives run in a groove from which they never escape. But are there no lawyers, doctors, or theologians who are plodders; and do literary men never echo the old commonplaces, instead of delighting us by their breadth and originality of thought? Great men in every profession must necessarily be few. The legal boasts but few Marshalls, Pinckneys, and Websters; the medical but few Coopers, Brodies, Velpeaus, and Warrens; the clerical but few Barrows, Edwardses, Masons, and Channings. The names of our great statesmen may almost be counted on the fingers. A small business demands but a small mind; but that business when conducted on a large scale does not give scope for the display of the very highest powers of the mind, it is not easy to believe. In past ages, before the invention of the steam-engine and the electric telegraph, when commerce had a narrow range, but few faculties of the mind were called into play by business; but to-day, when submarine cables are making of the whole world a whispering gallery, and the fluctuations of one market are felt in every other, when so varied a knowledge and so constant a watchfulness are necessary to success, it cannot be doubted that application to work, absorption in affairs, contact with men, and all the stress which business imposes, give a most efficient training to the intellect, and the highest scope for the discipline of character. When we consider what mental powers are demanded to conduct a colossal trade, or to push through any great commercial scheme, that it demands sound judgment, precise adaptation of means to ends, great energy, promptness of decision and action in emergencies, skill in organizing and tact in managing men in large numbers, as well as many minor qualities, Iwe shall conclude that consummate men of business are as rare almost as great poets, orators, or painters.