290 The Psychology of the Business Man 



of search for excitement to the customary enslavement to office 

 hours and desks, accomplished gradually by business habits. 

 An instructive example of an extremely exclusive and artificial 

 business criterion of happiness, tho highly idealized by Dick- 

 en's genial humor, has been given in Nicholas Nickleby's old 

 clerk friend, Tim Linkinwater, who judges even the reported 

 climate, flowers, and landscapes of the whole outside world, 

 unknown to him, by the happy habit standards of his contented 

 [.on don office with its dark and barren prospect. 



It sometimes happens, too, that a young lawyer, preacher 

 or professor of college philosophy, whom chance or necessity 

 has diverted from his original youthful ideals into some unex- 

 pected business scheme, becomes, through habit, so contracted 

 in his business activity as to quite forget his "trailing clouds of 

 glory." If he has time at all to look back from his pursuing 

 and pursued real estate deals, it is to smile at his boyish illu- 

 sions of helping the world, — "That was all very pretty; but 

 I've had to get down to the business of pot-boiling, and that's 

 now good enough for me." 



Not seldom a pure example of mere business activity can 

 be seen on the streets; as a whole-souled contractor who 

 seems always hustling about on his wheel and yet is still the 

 petty contractor of thirty years ago ; or a business property 

 owner, who has worn out a whole stable of horses and car- 

 riages in his enormous share of building up a western city, but 

 has only a little country homestead left in which to end his 

 worn-out days. Yet this fearfully strenuous business worker 

 for everybody but himself is satisfied with his life's work, 

 while his optimistic cheer thru all his business sunshine and 

 shadows has been an untold blessing to his community 



Allied to genius is the activity of the big-scheme man 

 whose sole existence is the generation and execution of the 

 original real estate auction, the first public park, a city market, 

 glass works, a cemetery, or a fancy stock farm, a co-operation 

 colony, etc., etc. His absorbing interest is in the discovery 

 and initiation of the idea ; while its execution he leaves, to- 

 gether with its business profits, if it finally has anv, to smaller 

 but more practical business parasites. Such business original- 

 ity, with its disregard or neglect of its pecuniary advantage^, 

 is quite the opposite of the professional promoter of schemes 

 whose executive energy and often unprincipled persuasive 



