CHAPTER XIX.

MERCANTILE FAILURES.

To succeed, one must sometimes be very bold and sometimes very prudent. - NAPOLEON.

I venture to point out to you what is the best temperament, namely, a combination of the desponding and resolute, or, as I had better express it, of the apprehensive and the resolute. Such is the temperament of great commanders. Secretly, they rely upon nothing and upon nobody. There is such a powerful element of failure in all human affairs, that a shrewd man is always saying to himself, "What shall I do, if that which I count upon does not come out as I expect?" This foresight dwarfs and crushes all but men of great resolution. ARTHUR HELPS.

Let your first efforts be, not for wealth, but independence. Whatever be your talents, whatever your prospects, never be tempted to speculate away, on the chance of a palace, that which you need as a provision against the workhouse.-E. L. BULWER.

A failure establishes only this, that our determination to succeed was not strong enough. - BOVEE.

ONE

NE of the bad features of our American life is the growing disposition of our young men to get their living by their wits, and to leave manual labor, agricultural or mechanical, to be monopolized by foreigners. Bodily toil, except of the lightest kind, is becoming to Young America more and more distasteful. The sons of our farmers, shoemakers, blacksmiths, and carpenters no sooner become their own masters than they straightway throw down the scythe, the awl, and the hammer, and rush to the city to engage in the nobler work of weighing sugar, selling tape, hawking books, soliciting insurance, or posting ledgers. And yet, if any fact has been demonstrated beyond the shadow of a doubt, it is the deceitfulness of the apparent facilities for getting rich in cities. The fact that while in other careers the mass of men are successful, ninetyfive at least out of every hundred who embark in commerce

either make shipwreck or retire sooner or later in disgust, without having secured a competence, has not only been verified again and again by statistics, but is a stereotyped observation which drops from the lips of business men daily.

Some years ago General A. H. S. Dearborn, of Boston, who had long been acquainted with the leading business men of that city, gave it as his opinion that only three men out of every hundred doing business there were successful. A gentleman who doubted the truth of this startling statement consulted an antiquarian friend who had known all the merchants doing business on Long Wharf from 1798 to 1840, and was informed that in the latter year only five out of a hundred remained. More striking still was the statement of a director of the Union Bank, which began its operations in 1798, that, of one thousand persons doing business with it, only six at the end of forty years remained; all the rest had failed or lost their property. "Bankruptcy," said the director, "is like death, and almost as certain; they fall single and alone, and are thus forgotten; but there is no escape from it, and he is a fortunate man who fails young." A person who looked through the Probate Office in the same city found that ninety per cent of, all the estates settled there were insolvent. Yet more discouraging to the commercial adventurer were the conclusions of Governor Briggs and Secretary Calhoun, who a few years ago gave it as their deliberate opinion, after diligent inquiry, that, out of every hundred young men who come from the country to seek their fortunes in the city, ninety-nine fail of success. To all these statements may be added the opinions of some of the shrewdest and most experienced business men of New York and Philadelphia, that not more than one per cent of the best class of merchants succeed without failing in the former city, and that not more than two per cent of the merchants of the latter retire on an independence, "after having submitted to the usual ordeal of failure." After the crash in 1858 it was stated by high authority that there had been annually, for some years previous, twenty-seven thousand failures in the United States, for the

T

gross sum of $50,000,000, of which enormous indebtedness only $10,000,000 was ever recovered by the creditors, an estimate probably below the truth. In short, for every man who thrives in trade, counting his acquisitions by thousands of dollars, we can find scores of men with whom each day is but a desperate struggle to keep their heads above water; and to every one who, after again and again trembling on the verge of bankruptcy, retires at last, with money enough to pass his closing days in ease and affluence, a hundred might be named who wind up the vicissitudes of a long life of toil in utter failure, and spend their last days in trying to keep the wolf from the door.

The facts we have stated will seem incredible to those who have never weighed or investigated the subject; and yet the proofs are open to every man who has his eyes upon and witnesses the changes going on around him. Go into any city or large town with which you were acquainted ten years ago, and you will be startled to see how many signs that once greeted the eye on stores and warehouses have been exchanged for new ones; how many names, once familiar as "household words," have been blotted from the Business Directory. Indeed, so few are the prizes and so numerous the blanks in this seeming lottery, that some persons have been inclined to regard luck as everything in trade, experience, sagacity, energy, and enterprise as nothing, if linked to an unlucky star. As we have already observed in the chapter on "Good and Bad Luck," some of the shrewdest men, with indefatigable industry and the closest economy, fail to make money; others, with apparently none of the qualities that insure success, are continually blundering into profitable speculations, and, Midas-like, touch nothing but it turns to gold. The great Chicago fire, which beggared hundreds of merchants, mechanics, and professional men, and made a hundred thousand men, women, and children homeless, doubled and trebled the fortunes of other men, who were never insured and never burnt out. But while it must be admitted that there is such a thing as luck, meaning by it

the occasional operations of causes over which one has no control, it would be absurd to ascribe to it the mass of failures. Bitterly as the broken merchant may bemoan some mishap that has blasted all his schemes and hopes, it is evident that, if there are nine shipwrecks to one safe voyage over the sea of business, there is some higher law than chance governing the matter; and what this law is—in other words, what are the chief causes of bankruptcy—we shall now try to show.

What, then, are the causes of those failures of business men which are so numerous as to make success seem like the drawing of a prize in a lottery? We answer, the first and most If there is any

obvious cause is the lack of business talents. fact demonstrated by experience, it is that no man can succeed in a calling for which Providence did not intend him. Of course, it is easy to exaggerate this doctrine. There are some men who, though they succeed best in a particular sphere, yet have a marvellous flexibility, versatility, and power of adaptation, which enables them to thrive in almost any pursuit they may choose. It has been even said that "the most unhandy person is a sort of Robinson Crusoe; plant him in a desolate island, and he would sprout a twenty-bladed penknife." But, in spite of exceptional cases, it may be affirmed that there is a work to which each person is fitted, to which he is called by his talents and endowments. As Emerson says: "He is like a ship in a river; he runs against obstructions on every side but one; on that side all obstruction is taken away, and he sweeps serenely over a deepening channel into an infinite sea.' This easy thing with some men is making money in trade; but there are others to whom it is as difficult as for a man with no mathematical talent to calculate an eclipse, or a person with no eye for color to paint "The Descent from the Cross." Who can wonder that such weaklings soon go to the wall; that in the sharp competitions of modern trade they are outwitted and overreached by men born for the business, and who have learned its crooks and turns by a long apprenticeship; and that, after stumbling on a few years, committing blunder after blunder

through ignorance and lack of sagacity, they are shipwrecked by the first financial hurricane that sweeps over the land?

But it is needless to dwell on this topic, as we have already discussed it at length in the chapter on "The Choice of a Profession."

ence.

The next cause of bankruptcies which we shall mention, and a very prolific one, is an excessive haste to be rich. Americans are always in a hurry when they have an object to accomplish; but if there is any vocation or pursuit in which gradual, slowcoach processes are scouted with peculiar detestation, it is that of acquiring riches. Especially is this true at the present day, when fortunes are continually changing hands, and men are so often, by a lucky turn of the wheel, lifted from the lowest depths of poverty to the loftiest pinnacle of wealth and affluExceptional persons there are, who are content with slow gains, willing to accumulate riches by adding penny to penny, dollar to dollar; but the mass of business men are too apt to despise such a tedious, laborious ascent of the steep of fortune, and to rush headlong into schemes for the sudden acquisition of wealth. Hence honorable labor is too often despised; a man of parts is expected to be above hard work; and he is considered the shrewdest fellow who can throw double-sixes oftenest in the lottery of speculation. Thus we go, racing on like a high-pressure Mississippi steamer in the pursuit of fortune, pitching rosin into the furnace to get along faster, and piling weights upon the safety valves, until finally the boilers burst, hundreds are killed or crippled, and we are compelled to stop for a while, until we can get over the fright of the explosion. Pretty soon the repairs are made, the steam is up again, we are buoyant with confidence, "Hope enchanting smiles, and waves her golden hair," again we are "going it" at a fearful pace, and in due time another crash occurs. The warnings of the past are lost upon us; cautious men are voted old fogies, and their advice and admonitions clogs on the wheels of enterprise. Americans must be Americans, and blow up as a necessity of their existence.