law, of five millions of dollars. A Swedish young woman, Jenny Lind, twenty-eight years of age, came to the United States with nothing but her voice, that her brain had cultured, and in ninety-eight nights she had sung out of the pockets of the American people seven hundred and twelve thousand dollars. Another Swede, Ole Bornemann Bull, so manipulated a violin as to draw out of the same American people in a single season more than a hundred thousand dollars; while an American-born lad of English ancestors, Edwin Booth, so used his brains while an actor, that in less than two months' time he had taken in from the people of San Francisco alone, over ninety-six thousand dollars. But why multiply instances in literature, art, oratory, music, the drama, all going to prove that your brain is your capital, and that all you need to do if you wish for money is to use it.

Brains, when combined with muscle, and used for mere money-getting, often yield fabulous fortunes. A German, John Jacob Astor, living in New York, so used his that in sixtythree years he had accumulated a fortune estimated at twenty million dollars. Two millions came from his trade in furs, teas, silks, and sandalwood, some millions from interest given him by the revenue laws, the balance coming from his real estate investments. He was born in the village of Waldorf, near Heidelberg, Germany, on July 17, 1763, and lived to be nearly eighty-five years old, dying in New York, March 29, 1848. His mother was a devout, hard-working peasant, of a close, if not penurious, disposition, whose soul was often vexed beyond all endurance by her shiftless, rollicking, beer-drinking husband (by trade a butcher, at which business John Jacob also worked when a lad). And so the home life, comfortless and stormy, early led John's three older brothers to go out into the world to earn their own livelihood. One of them, Henry, had settled in New York, and was also a butcher, and his letters telling of his thrift filled the lad with an unconquerable desire to go thither also. After his mother died, and the father remarried, the storms in the home waxed yet more furious and

continuous, so that poor John Jacob was often obliged to hie him to a neighbor's garret or outhouse, for refuge, and for a shelter for the night. He was poorly fed, and more poorly clad, and shrank from his boyhood companions for shame of his home and heritage.

When seventeen years old he succeeded in getting from his father a reluctant consent to join his brother in America, and the sturdy, well-built youth of iron frame, with two dollars in his pocket, set out to seek his fortune across the Atlantic ocean. Walking to the river Rhine, he hired as a raftsman and worked his way to the coast, and with the wages paid him went to London, where one of his brothers was living, and with whom he stayed two years, working like a galley slave, and living like a miser to save the money needed to carry him to the "New Land" of his dreams. When the Revolutionary War closed he bought a steerage passage to Baltimore, and with twenty-four dollars in his pockets, a small bundle of clothes, and seven flutes, hought as an investment, he sailed for the United States in November, 1783. On the ship a fellow German told him of his experience in America, how he had gone there penniless and friendless, and, beginning in a small way, had acquired quite a competence as a fur trader, and advised him to engage in the same business, giving him what knowledge he possessed as to the method of conducting it. They traveled together to New York, and, arriving at the brother's house, at once laid the plan before him; he advised. that John Jacob enter the service of a furrier, to learn the business thoroughly. The next morning the three sallied forth, and at length found a Mr. Robert Bowne, a furrier of long experience, who engaged John at two dollars a week, and board. Here he beat furs, and sought all possible knowledge concerning fur-bearing animals from nature, from traders, and from

savages.

He was soon made buyer for the establishment, and took long trips on foot with a pack of trinkets on his back, going north into Canada, and west to the frontiers, driving wonder

fully sharp bargains with Indians and trappers to the enriching of his employer and himself. As soon as he had learned the routes and the business, he set up for himself, and began in 1786 to accumulate his immense fortune on this wise; after a few trips he took a small store in Water street, which he furnished with toy cakes and notions for Indians, who at that date brought in furs to New York. Anon, with his pack of trinkets on his back, he would leave the store in charge of the wife whom he early married, and would take long tramps on foot throughout northern, central, and western New York, buying his skins from settlers, trappers, savages, wherever he could find them, giving a dollar's worth of trash for a beaver's skin, which he would ship to London, where it readily sold for six dollars. With the six dollars he would buy goods that he could easily sell in New York for twelve. Soon he was able to employ agents, and multiplied his routes. Then he bought a ship to convey his goods to and from London. Shortly after he began to ship furs to China, then the best market in the world for them, and brought back cargoes of teas, and silks, and spices, frequently doubling his money. Accidentally he learned of the enormous value of sandalwood in China, and, loading tons of it at the Sandwich Islands for a mere pittance, he soon had a monopoly of the trade in that wood, and for many months fairly coined money. Often his profits on a voyage of each of his fleet of ships that he came to own amounted to seventy thousand dollars for each one.

During the War of 1812, and for many years, the United States tariff on tea was twice its cost in China, but the government gave a credit to importers on the duties due it of from nine to eighteen months, so that he could get two and three cargoes from China and sell them at enormous profits before he had to pay the duty on the first cargo. And for eighteen or twenty years, John Jacob Astor had what was actually a freeof-interest loan from the government of over five millions of dollars, a condition of things that admitted of getting rich very rapidly. As fast as his gains from his business came in, he

invested them in real estate by purchase in fee simple where he could, and where the owners would not sell, he got, if possible, long period leases of valuable property in what was soon the heart of the city. He bought Richmond Hill, Aaron Burr's estate of one hundred and sixty acres, for one thousand dollars per acre. Twelve years later, it was valued at one thousand five hundred dollars a single lot. Learning that certain lands in Putnam county were held by a defective title, he bought up what was then the worldly possessions and homes of seven hundred families, for one hundred thousand dollars, and then he compelled the state of New York to pay him five hundred thousand dollars for this land, to rescue the victims of the defective deeds from his grasp, and save to them their homes.

During most of his long life, his brain and body were simply a great and wonderful money-getting machine. He seems to have never known what real generosity was either in his business or out of it, and left his money at the end very unwillingly, and simply because he was obliged to do so. The love of it grew with his growth, but it never waned with his departing strength, and at the last dominated and ruled him with a relentless tyranny that was not only grotesque, but contemptible, because the victim delighted in it, and called it glory. He had a mind capable of far better things, and, while he was what the world reckons a thoroughly upright and honest business man, truth compels it to be said that he was not an admirable model, nor a safe one for you and me to follow. The one thing that keeps his name and memory green is his gift by will of four hundred thousand dollars to establish the Astor Library in the city of New York. His immense estate was left to his children and has been since continued in the family, and, like those of the Bedfords and Westminsters of England, consists to a very large extent in real estate, over a thousand valuable properties being now owned by them.

High School of Experience.

M

JOHN BASCOM, D.D., LL.D., of Williams College.

Y friend, Professor Perry, recently remarked to me: "Nothing is perfect in the world except the world itself as a school of discipline."

A knowledge of the world-that which the world teaches us-is the substance of all knowledge. No matter what ideas we entertain, or how we have come by them, they all need illustration and confirmation by experience. The world is many sided in its lessons, and these lessons, if rightly learned, all sustain and complete each other. Our most exact knowledge, which we designate as science; our daily gleanings of truth, which we term observations; our widest hopes of the future, which we call faith,—are all bound up in one volume, and that volume is the world. If the world, wisely rendered, gives us no warrant for our beliefs, our beliefs are null.

Moreover, it is not the world at rest but the world in motion that we are called on to understand, that is impressing upon us the greatest variety of convictions. We study the locomotive, even when it is standing still, in reference to its ease, velocity, strength, and safety of movement. It is a thing to be comprehended by virtue of its power to press forward with its loaded train. The world is to be understood in its progress and in reference to its progress. Leave it to stand still, study it as standing still, and we shall no more catch its true idea than we should the purpose of an engine, never having seen it speed along the track.

We all meet in the school of experience; and it is the school in which most of our acquisitions are made, and in which they