2g2 The Psychology of the Business Man 



merchant, Uiml)€rman, miller, governor, to a highly honored 

 public benefactor. While in the uncertainties of life and bil- 

 lion dollar deals an irrepressible railway maker, who used to 

 eat his tin pail dinner in the shadow of levee w^arehouses, 

 ])ointcd to his railway crossing half the map of America and 

 said of this life's success, — "There, anyway, I've left a life 

 mark that will stand.'' 



Almost pure cases of the mental element of pleasure in 

 success are seen, on the one hand, in the pitiful disappointment 

 and sham€, and in the premature ageing of an active business 

 life, which finally encounters failure or bankruptcy. It is not 

 the cessation of activity or the loss of the accumulated prop- 

 erty, or the fear for the remaining necessities of life, which 

 break the man : it is the pain of failure. On the other hand, 

 there are the cases wdiere the stress of business competition 

 has so concentrated the Avorker's aim on success as to blind 

 him to the living uses of the money he succeeds in getting. 

 While the old fashioned miser, who secretly gains, hoards, and 

 loves his gold for its own sake, is almost gone, his place has 

 been taken a thousand fold by the modern competition — devel- 

 oped extreme business man who lives to win. He has devel- 

 oped the trust combinations and monopolies as means of beat- 

 ing by crushing out competition. The spirit of the modern 

 extreme of business success is anything to beat, i. e., anything 

 this side of a damaging public notoriety or the certainty of 

 state's prison. The rational and normal business element of 

 success, when it is so overwhelmingly present in the business 

 mind, thus becomes irrational and pathological. Not that the 

 beating-addicted hustler is always or largely planning and plot- 

 ting to do up his competitors with deliberate and conscious 

 malice. The rather does a vast deal of his mental perceptions 

 and reasonings go on below the clear level of consciousness, 

 down in the more or less dark regions of his subconsciousness. 

 These considerable mental workings in so blind and mysteri- 

 ous a way, — which are being found to constitute a far larger 

 part of all mental life than has ever been supposed, — all this 

 extreme beatin-bind to the ways of genius again. Thus the 

 "great captains of industry" are not usually by any means the 

 frightful gorgons that they are often pictured, and ought even 

 to be acquitted of much of the moral responsibility which is 

 justly charged up against deliberate and conscious ill-doing to 



