176 LIBERTY AND A LIVING. 



careful of himself, and he must think twice 

 about a morning call. Imagine him condemned 

 for eight hours a day to some uncongenial and 

 unmeaning business. He shrank from the very 

 look of the mechanical in life ; all should, if 

 possible, be sweetly spontaneous. Thus he 

 learned to make lead-pencils, and when he had 

 gained the highest certificate and his friends 

 began to congratulate him on his establishment 

 in life, he calmly announced that he should 

 never make another. " Why should I," said 

 he ; " I would not do again what I have done 

 once." Yet in after years, when it became 

 needful to support his family, he turned 

 patiently to this mechanical art. He tried 

 school-teaching. " As I did not teach for the 

 benefit of my fellow-men," he says, " but simply 

 for a livelihood, this was a failure." He tried 

 trade with the same results. As I have al- 

 ready said, his contempt for business and busi- 

 ness men was utter. He says: "If our mer- 

 diants did not most of them fail and the banks 

 too, my faith in the old rules of this world 

 would be staggered. The statement that ninety- 

 nine in a hundred doing such business surely 

 break down is perhaps the sweetest fact that 



