H. H. Rogers - Page 2

an encounter, save with weakness, greed and stupidity. He met every difficulty, every obstacle, unafraid and unabashed. Even death to him was only a passing event--death for him had no sting, nor the grave a victory. He prepared for his passing, looking after every detail, as he had planned trips to Europe. Jauntily, jokingly, bravely, tremendously busy, keenly alive to beauty and friendship, deciding great issues offhand, facing friend or foe, the moments of relaxation chinked in with religious emotion and a glowing love for humanity--so he lived, and so he died.

An executive has been described as a man who decides quickly, and is sometimes right. H. H. Rogers was the ideal executive. He did not decide until the evidence was all in; he listened, weighed, sifted, sorted and then decided. And when his decision was made the case was closed.

Big men, who are doing big things that have never been done before, act on this basis, otherwise they would be ironed out to the average, and their dreams would evaporate like the morning mist. The one thing about the dreams of H. H. Rogers is that he made them come true.

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"Give me neither poverty nor riches," said the philosopher. The parents of H. H. Rogers were neither rich nor poor. They had enough, but there was never a surfeit. They were of straight New England stock. Of his four great-grandfathers, three fought in the Revolutionary War.

According to Thomas Carlyle, respectable people were those who kept a gig. In some towns the credential is that the family shall employ a "hired girl." In Fairhaven the condition was that you should have a washerwoman one day in the week. The soapy wash-water was saved for scrubbing purposes--this was in Massachusetts--and if the man of the house occasionally smoked a pipe he was requested to blow the smoke on the plants in the south windows, so as to kill the vermin. Nothing was wasted.

The child born into such a family where industry and economy are prized, unless he is a mental defective and a physical cripple, will be sure to thrive.

The father had made one trip in a whaler. He was gone three years and got a one-hundred-and-forty-seventh part of the catch. The oil market was on a slump, and so the net result for the father of a millionaire-to-be was ninety-five dollars and twenty cents. This happy father was a grocer, and later a clerk to a broker in whale-oil. Pater had the New England virtues to such a degree that they kept him poor. He was cautious, plus.

To make, you have to spend; to grow a crop, you have to plant the seed. Here's where you plunge--it is a gamble, a bet on the seed versus the eternal cussedness of things. It's you against the chances of a crop. If the drought comes, or the flood, or the chinch-bug, or the brown-tailed moth, you may find yourself floundering in the mulligatawney.

Aside from that one cruise to the