Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Businessmen

LITTLE JOURNEYS TO THE
HOMES OF GREAT BUSINESS
MEN
BY ELBERT HUBBARD

JOHN J. ASTOR

The man who makes it the habit of his life to go to bed at nine o'clock,
usually gets rich and is always reliable. Of course, going to bed does
not make him rich--I merely mean that such a man will in all
probability be up early in the morning and do a big day's work, so his
weary bones put him to bed early. Rogues do their work at night.
Honest men work by day. It's all a matter of habit, and good habits in
America make any man rich. Wealth is a result of habit. --JOHN
JACOB ASTOR
LITTLE JOURNEYS
Victor Hugo says, ``When you open a school, you close a prison.''
This seems to require a little explanation. Victor Hugo did not have in
mind a theological school, nor yet a young ladies' seminary, nor an
English boarding-school, nor a military academy, and least of all a
parochial institute. What he was thinking of was a school where
people--young and old-- were taught to be self-respecting, self-reliant
and efficient--to care for themselves, to help bear the burdens of the
world, to assist themselves by adding to the happiness of others.

Victor Hugo fully realized that the only education that serves is the one
that increases human efficiency, not the one that retards it. An
education for honors, ease, medals, degrees, titles,
position--immunity--may tend to exalt the individual ego, but it
weakens the race and its gain on the whole is nil.
Men are rich only as they give. He who gives great service, gets great
returns. Action and reaction are equal, and the radiatory power of the
planets balances their attraction. The love you keep is the love you give
away.
A bumptious colored person wearing a derby tipped over one eye, and a
cigar in his mouth pointing to the northwest, walked into a hardware
store and remarked, ``Lemme see your razors.''
The clerk smiled pleasantly and asked, ``Do you want a razor to shave
with?''
``Naw,'' said the colored person, ``--for social purposes.''
An education for social purposes is n't of any more use than a razor
purchased for a like use. An education which merely fits a person to
prey on society, and occasionally slash it up, is a predatory preparation
for a life of uselessness, and closes no prison. Rather it opens a prison
and takes captive at least one man. The only education that makes free
is the one that tends to human efficiency. Teach children to work, play,
laugh, fletcherize, study, think, and yet again--work, and we will raze
every prison.
There is only one prison, and its name is Inefficiency. Amid the
bastions of this bastile of the brain the guards are Pride, Pretense,
Greed, Gluttony, Selfishness.
Increase human efficiency and you set the captives free.
``The Teutonic tribes have captured the world because of their
efficiency,'' says Lecky the historian.

He then adds that he himself is a Celt.
The two statements taken together reveal Lecky to be a man without
prejudice. When the Irish tell the truth about the Dutch the millennium
approaches.
Should the quibbler arise and say that the Dutch are not Germans, I will
reply, true, but the Germans are Dutch-- at least they are of Dutch
descent.
The Germans are great simply because they have the homely and
indispensable virtues of prudence, patience and industry.
There is no copyright on these qualities. God can do many things, but
so far, He has never been able to make a strong race of people and
leave these ingredients out of the formula.
As a nation, Holland first developed them so that they became the
characteristic of the whole people.
It was the slow, steady stream of Hollanders pushing southward that
civilized Germany.
Music as a science was born in Holland. The grandfather of Beethoven
was a Dutchman.
Gutenberg's forebears were from Holland.
And when the Hollanders had gone clear through Germany, and then
traversed Italy, and came back home by way of Venice, they struck the
rock of spiritual resources and the waters gushed forth.
Since Rembrandt carried portraiture to the point of perfection, two
hundred and fifty years ago, Holland has been a land of artists--and it is
so even unto this day.
John Jacob Astor was born of a Dutch family that had migrated down
to Heidelberg from Antwerp. Through some strange freak of atavism
the father of the boy bred back, and was more or less of a stone-age

cave-dweller. He was a butcher by trade, in the little town of Waldorf, a
few miles from Heidelberg. A butcher's business then was to travel
around and kill the pet pig, or sheep, or cow that the tender- hearted
owners