much money, and using credit too freely. I made about fifteen hundred dollars the first year, and more than four thousand the second. Probably had I made four thousand the first year I should have failed the second or third year. I practiced a system of rigid economy, and never allowed myself to spend a fourpence for unnecessary objects until I had acquired it." Honest articles, sold only for what they were, and at only a fair profit, gave others confidence in the firm, and at length enabled them to reach a position to which few merchants attain. After more than thirty years of business life, Mr. Lawrence wrote, "I am not aware of ever desiring or acquiring any great amount by a single operation, or of taking any part of the property of any other man, and mingling it with my own, where I had the legal right to do so."

Up to the time of his death, December 31, 1852, no other man in this country had equaled him in the extent and amount of his individual benevolences, and while he does not give this as one of the reasons for his remarkable business success, it nevertheless was one, and by no means the least of them. While he exemplified the truth of the declaration of the Bible that "the hand of the diligent maketh rich," he was also another illustration of the truth of its statement that "he that hath pity upon the poor, lendeth unto the Lord, and that which he hath given will he pay him again." Three years before the close of his long business career, he wrote thus concerning his benevolence: "I adopted the practice ten years ago of spending my income. The more I give, the more I have," and thus he who had given seven hundred thousand dollars in charity to the poor had more than a million to leave for his relatives at his death.

A famous maxim declares that "honesty is the best policy," but if the mere getting of money be the object of life, the maxim is not true. A thief will beat an honest man in a trade, by very virtue of his being a thief, nine times out of ten. He will get more money in less time than any dozen honest men can get. If not, how comes it to pass in the United States that

less than thirty thousand men have possession of more than one-half of all the wealth of the country? Are none but them diligent? Are none but them economical? Are none but them intelligent? Are none but them honest? If "honesty is the best policy" for money getting, the above fact is a sad impeachment of the morals of the other sixty-five millions of the people of this country. They evidently have not pursued that particular "policy," for they have not that money. But, now, honesty is not a "policy." It should never be degraded to the mere level of a "management management" or a "motive" for getting money. Honesty is worth more to man than any amount of dollars, or stocks, or bonds, or lands, can be. Honesty is a man's honor in action. His manhood is a trade, and he should prize it as a woman guards her virtue; he should part with life rather than be despoiled of it. How low indeed is he who bargains it for gold, or sells it for place or power! Young man, honesty, like virtue, is ingrained in us by our birth, if our parents are good. It is part of the material that enters into the wonderful thing we call character, or selfhood. Character is not an accident. We are not born with one, but with the material to make one. Character is a thing of slow growth, of development, like the body. Now as virtue or chastity has the first place, and the best chances in the social life market, so honesty has always a first mortgage on success of any or all kinds that is worth the having. True, you can get much wealth-the laws allow itby parting with your honesty. So there are those who attain to much of ease and luxury (for a while) by forswearing virtue, but does it pay? Ask yourself that question when tempted by gold to dishonesty of act or word. Will it pay? Believe me there are better things, much higher, nobler things, than mere money getting. Howbeit, the very highest type of honesty, like virtue, is a help not a hindrance, to your getting on in the world, even in acquiring wealth.

David Maydole was a poor country blacksmith near Corning, N. Y., and was locally famous for his honest work, and for making, when the occasion required, an excellent hammer.

One day some carpenters from New York city came to the neighborhood to do a piece of work, and one of them needing a hammer had Mr. Maydole make it. His fellow workmen, pleased with its quality, bought some also, and, on their return, induced a dealer in New York to order a dozen, but the dealer found the price too high, and tried to induce Mr. Maydole to reduce it by using an inferior stock so that they might be sold in competition with those then on the market. He replied that he would not make a hammer unless he made it in the best manner, and of the best materials. The hammers the carpenters bought proved so superior to any others that they could get, that they asked for more. Gradually, as their quality became known, his trade increased in spite of the higher price, for the public soon learned that D. Maydole stamped on a hammer meant the best that David Maydole could make, and he came at length to have one of the largest manufactories in the country. His honesty did not hinder but helped him.

When that famous English merchant, Samuel Budgett, refused longer to adulterate his pepper, according to the universal custom of the trade of his time, with something that resembled pepper dust, but was not, and rolled out his casks of "P.D." and stove them to pieces, scattering their contents in the stone quarry, his bank account did not suffer loss, but it added immensely to his wealth of character. The inevitable tendency of all vice is to bring one down to its own low level, and when he refused longer to follow the lead of dishonesty by adulterating his goods, even with such a so-called innocent and harmless thing as "P.D.," and selling them for pure, instinctively men recognized it as a tribute to, and triumph of, the nobler elements of his character. For these little lapses from honesty are as fatal to character as are the little lapses from virtue. Said the poet, Dr. Young, "An honest man's the noblest work of God," and if you accept the reports of the health commissioner as to the extent of the adulteration now practiced in food products, he must be one of the rarest.

Not Above Your Business

B

REV. JAMES W. COLE, B.D.

Y a law of nature, the faults indulged in our childhood
become the vices of our mature years.
The little pur-

the extravagance, frivolAll the life of the oak lies sins and crimes of after

loinings and peccadillos of the lad become the embezzlements and rascalities of the man. The carelessness, vanity, and pertness of the maid develop into ity, and shrewishness of the woman. hidden in the tiny acorn; and the years lie hidden in the faults of the child. All human experience has shown that it is far easier to prevent an evil than to remedy it. A child can destroy many acorns in a brief time, but the strength of many men is required for many days to uproot the forest of oaks, when those acorns are fully grown. All the men of violence and bloody crimes were once innocent children, and their deeds of atrocity that shock the world are the natural growth of evils nourished in childhood and youth. The boy who, as a child and lad, took huge delight in pulling the wings from flies and beetles, and impaling them on sharp splints, naturally grew into that Nero, who, as emperor, ordered the Christians of Rome to be wrapped in flax and pitch, and tied to stakes in his royal gardens, and then burned them as candles wherewith to illuminate the feasts at which he and his lecherous crew were wont to recline and shout and revel, the while his human, shrieking torches were slowly burning to their miserable sockets. If those childish evils had but been repressed, what a foul blot on civilized humanity would have been prevented.

Experience has amply proved that parents are responsible

almost wholly for the faults of the child, either transmitting them to him by heredity, or else cultivating them in him by indulgence, or by unwise teaching. In the first case, we become but the reproduction of our ancestors, and have, at times, to confess sorrowfully to ourselves, at least, that we inherit their vices, even if we are not heirs to their virtues. In the second instance, we are our parents repeated, plus the faults they developed in us. Our children of to-day are to be the parents of to-morrow, and whatever of faults we allow or plant in them, whatever of wrong ideas we give them, will inevitably bear fruit after its kind to trammel them later in their efforts for success in life, and it may be to work their ruin. Or should they win success in defiance of such faults, as some have nobly done, nevertheless those faults in some form and degree will be handed down to the coming generation, for no man ever yet has escaped from this law of heredity.

The seeds of evil, like the seeds of plants, always produce after their kind. It is with the hope of aiding you to avoid an evil already too extensive that this reference is again made to the great primal law of nature, heredity. Plant faults, and you will reap vices. Plant evils, and you will reap crimes. The future is in your keeping. You are to be the future men and women of honor, or of shame. You are to be distinguished for noble deeds, perchance for heroic daring, or you are to be the slaves of sensuality, and the purveyors, if not the creators, of vice. And which of these you become will be almost wholly determined before you are twenty years old. If, in those forming years, you are vain, inconstant, untruthful, and vicious, you will be likely to continue so to old age. On the other hand, should you have formed correct habits of life ere then, success is sure to come to you. This evil but just referred to is the growing disposition among the young to despise manual labor, and seek for a genteel living. In some homes, indeed, the young are taught by precept and by example the folly that only professional, or mercantile, or office work is respectable; that if one were to hold a plow, or drive a plane, or run a lathe