The University of Hard Knocks Part 15

Immediately all the prominent "suckers" crowded around the buggy.

"Gentlemen, I am introducing this new medicinal soap that cures all diseases humanity is heir to. Now just to introduce and advertise, I am putting these cakes of Wonder Soap in my hat. You see I am wrapping a ten-dollar bill around one cake and throwing it into the hat. Now who will give me five dollars for the privilege of taking a cake of this wonderful soap from my hat--any cake you want, gentlemen!"

And right on top of the pile was the cake with the ten wrapped around it! I jumped over the rest to shove my five (two weeks' farm work) in his hands and grab that bill cake. But the bill disappeared. I never knew where it went. The man whipped up his horse and also disappeared.

I never knew where he went.

My "Fool Drawer"

I grew older and people began to notice that I was naturally bright and therefore good picking. They began to let me in on the ground floor.

Did anybody ever let you in on the ground floor? I never could stick.

Whenever anybody let me in on the ground floor it seemed like I would always slide on thru and land in the cellar.

I used to have a drawer in my desk I called my "fool drawer." I kept my investments in it. I mean, the investments I did not have to lock up.

You get the pathos of that--the investments n.o.body wanted to steal. And whenever I would get unduly inflated I would open that drawer and "view the remains."

I had in that drawer the deed to my Oklahoma corner-lots. Those lots were going to double next week. But they did not double I doubled. They still exist on the blueprint and the Oklahoma metropolis on paper is yet a wide place in the road.

I had in that drawer my deed to my rubber plantation. Did you ever hear of a rubber plantation in Central America? That was mine. I had there my oil propositions. What a difference, I have learned, between an oil proposition and an oil well! The learning has been very expensive.

I used to wonder how I ever could spend my income. I do not wonder now.

I wonder how I will make it.

I had in that drawer my "Everglade" farm. Did you ever hear of the "Everglades"? I have an alligator ranch there. It is below the frost-line, also below the water-line. I will sell it by the gallon.

I had also a bale of mining stock. I had stock in gold mines and silver mines. n.o.body knows how much mining stock I have owned. n.o.body could know while I kept that drawer shut. As I looked over my gold and silver mine stock, I often noticed that it was printed in green. I used to wonder why they printed it in green--wonder if they wanted it to harmonize with me! And I would realize I had so much to live for--the dividends. I have been so near the dividends I could smell them. Only one more a.s.sessment, then we will cut the melon! I have heard that all my life and never got a piece of the rind.

Getting "Selected"

Why go farther? I am not half done confessing. Each b.u.mp only increased my faith that the next s.h.i.+p would be mine. Good, honest, retired ministers would come periodically and sell me stock in some new enterprise that had millions in it--in its prospectus. I would buy because I knew the minister was honest and believed in it. He was selling it on his reputation. Favorite dodge of the promoter to get the ministers to sell his shares.

I was also greatly interested in companies where I put in one dollar and got back a dollar or two of bonds and a dollar or two of stock.

That was doubling and trebling my money over night. An old banker once said to me, "Why don't you invest in something that will pay you five or six per cent. and get it?"

I pitied his lack of vision. Bankers were such "tightwads." They had no imagination! Nothing interested me that did not offer fifty or a hundred per cent.--then. Give me the five per cent. now!

By the time I was thirty-four I was a rich man in worthless paper. It would have been better for me if I had thrown about all my savings into the bottom of the sea.

Then I got a confidential letter from a friend of our family I had never met. His name was Thomas A. Cleage, and he was in the Rialto Building, St. Louis, Missouri. He wrote me in extreme confidence, "You have been selected."

Were you ever selected? If you were, then you know the thrill that rent my manly bosom as I read that letter from this man who said he was a friend of our family. "You have been selected because you are a prominent citizen and have a large influence in your community. You are a natural leader and everybody looks up to you."

He knew me! He was the only man who did know me. So I took the cork clear under.

"Because of your tremendous influence you have been selected to go in with us in the inner circle and get a thousand per cent. dividends."

Did you get that? I hope you did. I did not! But I took a night train for St. Louis. I was afraid somebody might beat me there if I waited till next day. I sat up all night in a day coach to save money for Tom, the friend of our family. But I see now I need not have hurried so.

They would have waited a month with the sheep-shears ready. Lambie, lambie, lambie, come to St. Louis!

I don't get any sympathy from this crowd. You laugh at me. You respect not my feelings. I am not going to tell you a thing that happened in St. Louis. It is none of your business!

O, I am so glad I went to St. Louis. Being naturally bright, I could not learn it at home, back in Ohio. I had to go clear down to St. Louis to Tom Cleage's bucket-shop and pay him eleven hundred dollars to corner the wheat market of the world. That is all I paid him. I could not borrow any more. I joined what he called a "pool." I think it must have been a pool, for I know I fell in and got soaked!

That b.u.mp set me to thinking. My fever began to reduce. I got the thirty-third degree in financial suckerdom for only eleven hundred dollars.

I have always regarded Tom as one of my great school teachers. I have always regarded the eleven hundred as the finest investment I had made up to that time, for I got the most out of it. I do not feel hard toward goldbrick men and "blue sky" venders. I sometimes feel that we should endow them. How else can we save a sucker? You cannot tell him anything, because he is naturally bright and knows better. You simply have to trim him till he bleeds.

I Am Cured

It is worth eleven hundred dollars every day to know that one sentence, You cannot get something for nothing. Life just begins to get juicy when you know it. Today when I open a newspaper and see a big ad, "Grasp a Fortune Now!" I will not do it! I stop my subscription to that paper. I simply will not take a paper with that ad in it, for I have graduated from that cla.s.s.

I will not grasp a fortune now. Try me, I dare you! Bring a fortune right up on this platform and put it down there on the floor. I will not grasp it. Come away, it is a coffee-pot!

Today when somebody offers me much more than the legal rate of interest I know he is no friend of our family.

If he offers me a hundred per cent. I call for the police!

Today when I get a confidential letter that starts out, "You have been selected--" I never read farther than the word "selected." Meeting is adjourned. I select the waste-basket. Here, get in there just as quick as you can. I was selected!

O, Absalom, Absalom, my son, my son! Learn it early in life. The law of compensation is never suspended. You only own what you earn. You can't get something for nothing. If you do not learn it, you will have to be "selected." There is no other way for you, because you are naturally bright. When you get a letter, "You have been selected to receive a thousand per cent. dividends," it means you have been selected to receive this bunch of blisters because you look like the biggest sucker on the local landscape.

The other night in a little town of perhaps a thousand, a banker took me up into his office after the lecture in which I had related some of the above experiences. "The audience laughed with you and thought it very funny," said he. "I couldn't laugh. It was too pathetic. It was a picture of what is going on in our own little community year after year. I wish you could see what I have to see. I wish you could see the thousands of hard-earned dollars that go out of our community every year into just such wildcat enterprises as you described. The saddest part of it is that the money nearly always goes out of the pockets of the people who can least afford to lose it."

Absalom, wake up! This is bargain night for you. I paid eleven hundred dollars to tell you this one thing, and you get it for a dollar or two.

This is no cheap lecture. It cost blood.

Learn that the gambler never owns his winnings. The man who acc.u.mulates by sharp practices or by undue profits never owns it. Even the young person who has large fortune given him does not own it. We only own what we have rendered definite service to bound. The owning is in the understanding of values.

This is true physically, mentally, morally. You only own what you have earned and stored in your life, not merely in your pocket, stomach or mind.

I often think if it takes me thirty-four years to begin to learn one sentence, I see the need of an eternity.

To me that is one of the great arguments for eternal life--how slowly I learn, and how much there is to learn. It will take an eternity!

Those Commencement Orations