The Business Man

Method is the soul of business.-- OLD SAYING.

I AM a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing,
after all. But there are no people I more heartily despise than your
eccentric fools who prate about method without understanding it;
attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit. These
fellows are always doing the most out-of-the-way things in what they
call an orderly manner. Now here, I conceive, is a positive paradox.
True method appertains to the ordinary and the obvious alone, and
cannot be applied to the outre. What definite idea can a body attach
to such expressions as "methodical Jack o' Dandy," or "a systematical
Will o' the Wisp"?

My notions upon this head might not have been so clear as they are,
but for a fortunate accident which happened to me when I was a very
little boy. A good-hearted old Irish nurse (whom I shall not forget
in my will) took me up one day by the heels, when I was making more
noise than was necessary, and swinging me round two or knocked my
head into a cocked hat against the bedpost. This, I say, decided my
fate, and made my fortune. A bump arose at once on my sinciput, and
turned out to be as pretty an organ of order as one shall see on a
summer's day. Hence that positive appetite for system and regularity
which has made me the distinguished man of business that I am.

If there is any thing on earth I hate, it is a genius. Your geniuses
are all arrant asses -- the greater the genius the greater the ass --
and to this rule there is no exception whatever. Especially, you
cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than money
out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots. The creatures
are always going off at a tangent into some fantastic employment, or
ridiculous speculation, entirely at variance with the "fitness of
things," and having no business whatever to be considered as a
business at all. Thus you may tell these characters immediately by
the nature of their occupations. If you ever perceive a man setting
up as a merchant or a manufacturer, or going into the cotton or
tobacco trade, or any of those eccentric pursuits; or getting to be a
drygoods dealer, or soap-boiler, or something of that kind; or
pretending to be a lawyer, or a blacksmith, or a physician -- any
thing out of the usual way -- you may set him down at once as a
genius, and then, according to the rule-of-three, he's an ass.

Now I am not in any respect a genius, but a regular business man. My
Day-book and Ledger will evince this in a minute. They are well kept,
though I say it myself; and, in my general habits of accuracy and
punctuality, I am not to be beat by a clock. Moreover, my occupations
have been