Sonnie-Boys People | Page 8

Welkie--a great engineer, say, if he was started right. But, of course, you'll be in a position by and by to see that he gets the start."
"Started right? What does he want when he has health and brains and a heart?"
"All fine, but he'll need more than that these days."
"Are these days so different?"
"Different, man! Why, the older a country is, the more civilized it is, the more education means, the more social position counts, the more money counts."
"How much more?"
"A heap more. Listen. Your father on twenty-five hundred a year, say, could put his children through college, couldn't he? On twenty-five hundred a year to-day a man with a family has to battle to keep out of the tenement districts. A dozen years from now, if you're getting no more money than you're getting now, you'll be wondering if you won't have to take that boy out of school and put him to work. Isn't that so?"
Welkie made no answer.
"All right. But before I go any farther, let me say that I want you, Mr. Welkie, for our new job."
"What's wrong with the man you've got?"
"He won't do. You're the one man we want, and if there's money enough in our strong box, we're going to get you. And now that I've got that off, let me show you where it is for your higher--I say your higher, not alone your moneyed--interests to come with us, Mr. Welkie. There's that boy of yours--you'd surely like to see him a great man?"
"I surely wouldn't dislike it."
"Good. Then give him a chance. Get rid first of the notion that a poor boy has as good a chance as another. He hasn't. I know that all our old school-books told us different--along with some other queer things. No wonder. Nine times out of ten they were got up by men born poor and intended for children born poor. It is a fine old myth in this country that only the poor boy ever gets anywhere. As a matter of fact, the poor boys outnumber the comfortably born boys ten to one, yet run behind in actual success. Even history'll tell you that. Alexander--son of a king. C?sar? Frederick the Great? Oh, loads of 'em! You don't seem to think much of that?"
"Not a great deal," smiled Welkie. "If you're going to call the long roll of history, it looks to me like it's a mistake to name only three, or twenty-three, or thirty-three men. You cast your eye along that little book-shelf there and----"
"Oh, I've been looking them over--Dante and Michael Angelo and Homer and Shakespeare and that knight-errant Spaniard and the rest of 'em. But I'm not talking of poets and philosophers and the like. I'm talking of the men who bossed the job when they were alive."
"But how about those who bossed it after they were dead?"
"But, damn it, Welkie, I'm talking of men of action."
"Men of action or--ditch-diggers?"
"What!"
"That's what I call most of 'em, Necker--ditch-diggers. If your man of action hasn't himself thought out what he's doing, that's what he looks like to me--a ditch-digger, or at best a foreman of ditch-diggers. And a ditch-digger, a good ditch-digger, ought to be respected--until he thinks he's the whole works. Those kings of yours may have bossed the world, Necker, but, so long's we're arguing it, who bossed them?"
"You mean that the man who bosses the world for thirty or forty years isn't quite a man?"
"Surely he's quite a man; but the man who bosses men's minds a thousand years after he's dead--he's the real one. And that kind of a man, so far's I know things, Necker, never lived too comfortably on earth. He can't. I tell you, Necker, you can't be born into a fat life without being born into a fat soul, too."
"You're not stinting yourself in the expectation of running things after you're dead, Welkie?"
Welkie noted the half-ironical smile, but he answered simply, evenly: "It's not in me; but I'd live even a sparer life than I do, if I thought anybody after me had a chance."
"You're a hard man to argue with, Welkie, and I'm not going to argue with you--not on things dead and gone. You're too well posted for me. But suppose it was that way once, is it that way to-day? I'll bring it right home to you. Here's the overpowering figure in public life, Roosevelt, a man you think a lot of probably--was he born in poverty?"
"No, but I notice he cut away from his comfortable quarters about as soon as his upbringing'd let him."
"Wait. In finance who? Morgan? All right. Son of a millionaire financier, wasn't he?"
"But if you're going to bring in money----"
"I know. What of the Carnegies and the Rockefellers? you're going to say. There's where you think you've