II Choosing a Career

II CHOOSING A CAREER ,THE biggest problem that any family has to face is that of placing a young man in surroundings which will enable him to develop along his own lines and succeed in his own particular calling. This in most cases, although nine out of ten do not know it, is the rendering of satisfaction in some form or other to their fellow-creatures, or, in other words, finding self expression through service. I certainly began in a blind alley, with no definite duties except to do what I was told, with no training, and with few prospects except such as I could find for myself. There is a deal of nonsense talked about " blind alley occupations," and a quantity of money wasted in training-schemes which are inspired by this supposed evil. To me, indeed, it is pathetic to see the money and' effort that are spent upon training young people for work which, on arriving at years of discretion, they more often than not decline to' do. This mistake is part and parcel of the fundamental error of the times in looking at work the wrong way round. In regard ing the occupation as an end in itself, and considering only the convenience and the wishes of the worker, we to-day forget the very purposes of work. The con sumer hardly exists in our minds. We. have bandied and misused the word" service" until we have forCHOOSING A CAREER gotten its meaning. I am inclined to think that in the early 'nineties' we were a little nearer reality, and that the boys of that time did realise, though perhaps uncon sciously, that they could never hope to make a success of life if they could not find some way of serving their fellows, and that their success would be great, or small, in proportion to the satisfaction that they would be able to give to others.

I am strengthened in these very unorthodox views by the fact that to-day I am supported by quite a number of colleagues of whom exactly the same may be said. A valued member of my Board of Directors responded to a notice that I put into our office window in 1897 announcing the fact that a boy was wanted. He \vas working the copy-press in a solicitor's office for a few shillings a week and did not find the satis faction which his mind and soul were seeking in that process. It seemed to him that a boy's work in a pub lishing office might afford more scope, and his idea has proved right. A second colleague, who now occupies a very important position in the advertising world, was trained for the motor business, .and a third was earning a poor living as an artist in decorated leather when he was attracted by the opportunities that publishing seemed to offer. Definite training in some subjects is, of course, essen tialto the man who would follow one of the recognised professions. I am talking only of the preparation for what is to me the most delightful and most important ,of all the professions-the preparation fora business career.

My views are expressed by Mr. Selfridge in his book, The Romance of Commerce, when he says: People must be governed, and there must be those who govern. Laws must be made, and there must be those who study, and those who execlite these laws. People .must be taught, and there must be 26 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST teachers. All these, and the Church, the newspaper, the theatre, the fine arts,l are essentialto the completeness of the State, to the happiness and safety of its people; but Commerce is the main stem, or trunk, where they are all branches, supplied with the sap of its far-reaching wealth. It is as necessary to the existence of any nation as blood to the physical man. That country in which trade flourishes is accounted happy, while that in which Commerce droops provokes shaking of heads and prophecies.of downfall. It would be absurd to pretend that, at the age of sixteen when I entered business, I was conscious of the many ramifications of the problem of choosing a career, but there is much satisfaction at the age of fifty in feel ing that I did the right thing, and a complete absence of any regret at the decision which I then made. Mr.

A. G. Gardiner, in the delightful book which he has written on the life of my father, 2 has told of the posi tion of my family in. the early 'nineties, and disclosed quite .enough to show the need which existed for one of us to devote himself to business pursuits and to concentrate his attention on making money. I was, I think, as fully conscious of this need as a young boy could be, and it was that which weighed with me in pressing to be allowed to leave school and get to work. I had up to that time been receiving an education which in' these days would be regarded as altogether inadequate for any career. 1 was a pupil at the City Central .Foundation Schools in Cowper Street, City Road, in the days bef<?re education had been so thoroughly nationalised, and when that fine institu tion with its 1,500 boys was still a semi-private, semi charitable trust. My father being a ratepayer in the parish of St. Luke's, I was entitled to half fees, and the total cost of my education was covered by the sum of £5 a year. I did not do well at school. In all my years there I secured only one prize-a copy of King 1 I should be inclined to put the fine "arts on the border line of Commerce,and to regard the newspaper and theatre as Commerce pure and simple.

I John Benn and the Progressive Movement~ CHOOSING A CAREER Solomon's Mines, awarded tome for" diligence." My father had given a free sketching entertainment to a literary society of which my form master was the honorary secretary. That set up an obligation which had to be balanced somehow and, there being no possibility of recognising my ability in any subject, " diligence" was made the excuse for including me in the prize list. My career at Cowper Street was interrupted in the spring of I 889, just before I was fourteen years old, by eighteen months in France. The family income was not substantial enough to allow a normal period of education in a foreign country, but my father rightly held that a stay abroad was a thing to be desired, and, when the opportunity occurred to exchange my brother and me for two French girls without financial obliga tion on either side, he very wisely took advantage of it.

My brother and I, he being twelve and I nearly four teen, therefore found ourselves members of a bourgeois Parisian family named Bodson, who kept a small com mercial hotel in the rue Caumartin, close to the Madeleine. My father, whose fortunes were founded upon his pencil, was determined that we should both have a grounding in artistic matters, and particularly that we should become acquainted with the various styles in architecture and furniture. To this end we were enrolled at the art school of the Vlllme Arrondisse ment of Paris. We attended this school every evening, and there I really did win a prize which I valued. It not only seemed to point to some promise of ability in draughtsmanship in myself, but it also impressed me as a remarkable example of liberality in educational ideas on the part of the Parisian ratepayer, who was willing not only to provide a member of the French Academy to instruct an alien visitor, but even to award 28 THE CONFESSIONS OF A .CAPITALIST him prizes. After my stay in Paris I returned to Cow per Street. and made an attempt to pass the J-.Jondon Matriculation, but without success. I failed in three out of the necessary five subjects. Judged, therefore, by any accepted standard in educational matters', I was a complete failure, and at Christmas, 189 I, when I was sixteen and a half, I entered n1Y father's office. I started to work as the junior office boy and served for a year under the senior office boy.

I was then put into the studio as a learner, my father still entertaining the idea with which he sent me abroad and hoping that I might develop into a draughts man and designer. But a couple of years of pushing the pencil was enough for me. I don't think I succeeded very well, although my superiors were encouraging. My salary was ss. a week, of which I saved 2S. 6d., living at home, within walking distance of my work. My total expenses were five dinners each week, which I took at the" Apple Tree" vegetarian restaurant -in London Wall, where it was then possible to enjoy three courses for 6d. I mention this saving of half my income hecause, as I shall explain at length in a later chapter, that is a fundamental part of my s~heme of things. Ever since those 5s. days I have seldom permitted myself to spend more than half my earnings. In those early days I used to think that I was worked fairly hard. At all events, hours were long. My father had then become Parliamentary candidate for St.

George's-in-the-East, and I undertook the·double duty of office work and assistant private secretary in politi cal and public matters. Spending my days in Fil?-sbury Square, I devoted my evenings to St. George's, return ing regularly to our flat in Victoria Street by the 1 1.35 p.m. train from Shadwell to Westminster. That was the steady practice from 1892 to 1895. It will, thereCHOOSING A CAREER fore, be seen that every hour of the day was devoted to work, an arrangement which would be regarded, in the light of modern thought, as unhealthy and oppres": sive. But although the hours were long, we had not in those far-off times acquired the sense of speed and efficiency which is characteristic of the shorter hours of to-day. Office routine, for example, included a regular game of chess over the morning coffee. , After three years as office boy and assistant political agent, at the age of nineteen I was allowed to go off on the road as a traveller, selling advertisement space in my father's newspaper,The Cabinet Maker. In that capacity I worked hard and happily for the next six years. As a traveller I achieved some success and can claim to have a fairly intimate acquaintance ¥Lith the business habits of most of the leading firms of the country in the years from 1895 to 1900. It was, per haps, while on the road that I first felt the great advan tage of being the son of my father. As Mr. Gardiner has explained, my father was himself for many years a commercial traveller in the service of a I~ondon firm of furniture makers.

If anything could ever induce me to consent to any form of legislative rule and regulation in commercial matters, I would decree that no one should be per mitted to express an opinion upon the conduct of industry, upon employers and employed, upon capital, labour, or any of the questions affecting our industrial life, until he had completed a period of at least twelve mon ths as a traveller on the road. The commercial traveller is singularly well placed for observing both sides of the question, and is thus able to 'understand and appreciate that sense of balance which is the essence of the industrial problem. He knows, from his own experience and not from mere hearsay, that there are ·producers and consumers, for 30 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST it is his business day by day to listen to, to weig4 up, and to balance the contending' claims of both these parties. He must represent to his customers the point of view of those who make the article he is endeavour ing to sell, and he must spend his evenings in repre senting to his employers, with speed and accuracy and insight, the opinions, often none too complimentary, of the customers who are to use the goods and services he offers. l.,eft under no misapprehension regarding the essential nature of industry, he realises the folly and irrelevance of most public discussions on these matters.

But there are other thiags to be learnt on the road. Accessibility, the habit of listening, ,consideration for others and, most important of all, the art of self discipU1:).e. The commercial traveller does not have to sign on or clock off. He is not under the eye of the foreman; his time is his own, and he can, if he will, waste it. He has indeed many a temptation to do so. It requires a great deal of courage and d.,etermination to induce a man, who has already done five or six hours' work, to start out on a mile walk along a country lane in the wet, on the off-chance that another man will be in and may be willing to talk to him. It is so much easier to stay in the hotel and explain that you had called the month before and, having regard to the views which your customer then expressed, you did not think it worth while to risk another call to-day. I solved this difficulty in my case in the following manner. It was my custom to reckon my commission by the hour. I was working a sixty-hour week, and if I earned £3 I would then be earning a shilling an hour. I was impressed with this fact, and I made it my endeavour to earn at least that amount in every hour, determining to increase my hourly rate of pay as rapidly as I could. This so-much-an-hour idea became firmly fixed in my mind and did, I think, CHOOSING A CAREER enable me to persevere at one of the most difficult of all pursuits-commercial travelling-right through the wotking hours of the day and thus to make a success of it.

But the real foundations of my position as a business man were laid in December 1899, when Hazell, Watson and Viney, who were then owning and pub lishing The Hardware Trade Journal, decided that they would sell it, and offered it to my father; and here comes in a little personal family history to which Mr. Gardiner has referred, and which I can perhaps emphasise. If my father had acted as I imagine most fathers would have done, he would have bought The Hardware Trade Journal, added it to his own business, and reaped for himself the benefit of any profit that might be made, keeping the son, as so many are kept, in a subordinate position, as a salaried manager, to wait, as it were, for dead men's shoes. That is the usual method of procedure. My father, as Mr. Gardiner has shown, was built of different material. Moreover, as the public knows, his interests were not really in business. He used business as a means for providing the small income that he required to enable him to carryon his public work. I was, at the time to which I refer, manager of The Cabinet Maker-an unqualified success-and manager of The House-an equally unqualified failure, both enterprises being con ducted on my father's account.

When the offer of The Hardware Trade Journal came our way, Sir John, with a wisdom for which I have reason to be devoutly grateful, saw an opportunity to allow the son to develop on his own account. He therefore offered me the chance of running this new concern, while at the same time allowing me to retain the management of the old. The Hardware Trade Journal in those days was a very small affair. It was 32 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST published monthly, and its total revenues from sales, subscriptions and advertising amounted to some £1,800-a year, sufficient only to cover the produc~ tion costs and to leave a very small margin. My father had not much in. the way of surplus funds, and I, of course, had very little money. The story of how that part of the problem was solved will be told in a later chapter. But the establishment of The Hard ware Trade Journal as a business by me at the. age of twenty-four marked the end of my period of appren ticeship as a publisher and the beginning of my real life's work.

In this way I was definitely committ'ed to business, and I have never ceased to be sincerely thankful that, in spite of other opportunities and offers, I followed what must have been an inherent inclination. The business man is born and not made, bllt he must find tha~ fact out for himself. Business ability would ,seem to depend on a sense of balance, oris, perhaps, equivalent to a right frame of mind about business things. Some time ago it was thought that Mr. Henry Ford would be a candidate for the Presidency of the United States of America. About that time' I had a conversation with a leading American who was an enthusiastic supporter of Ford. I protested that Ford could surely never be President, for the simple reason that he was known to have had no education, that he was, in· fact, almost illiterate. The reply was interest ing. It reflected in a sort of way much that I am trying to say in this chapter.

Ford an illiterate! Well! Thank God for it. See what education has done for the world hi developing this abuse of government. Henry Ford possesses from Heaven above the economic sense which is something outside education and which, if put into the White House, would· make things go, make things balance, sweep away all this sophisticated nonsense of the present time, and you would have no more unemployment, no more want and no more wars.

CHOOSING A CAREER 33 ,Thus spoke in characteristic fashion an enthusiastic Yankee with a bee in his bonnet. He was suffering, as I am perhaps suffering, from a keen sense of all that trouble that is brought upon the world by the failure to appreciate the supreme service of the business man, and the absolute necessity for encouraging and developing the qualities which he possesses. , In my view, it is to the business man that we owe almost everything we possess in the material way, and, as I see it, the only hope of securing better. conditions ora higher standard of living,. not only for the workers, but for the people as a whole, is in the increase and encouragement of a competent class of business men working for the common good on conlpetitive and individualistic lines. Far too much importance is given by thinkers on industrial questions to the making of things and far too little to exchange and distribution. It can be argued that the making of things is comparatively easy, but that successfully and economically to' nego tiate the transfer of goods from producer to consumer constitutes the more difficult and more vital part of the, complete transaction. Justice has never been done to the all-important share of business as business in the economic scheme of things.

, Of the few technical qualifications which are essential to the business man, one is that he must have what may perhaps be described as· the book-keeping mind. It is not necessary that a business man should be a book-keeper, but he must' understand the principles upon which accounts are kept. He must have the ability to judge a transaction by its effect upon the ledgers. The annual balance-sheet must be always in his mind; which is only another way of saying that he must recognise the essential truth that any work to be successful in this world must bring satisfaction to c 34 THE CONFESSIONS OF A CAPITALIST both buy~r and seller-to the consumer. as well 'as . to the producer; only thus can a true estimate of worth and expedience be formed. There is much more money lost than is made on estimates. The world is full of people prepared with arguments and figures to prove how profitable this or that transaction should be, and it is the part of the real business man to be such a master of H final figures" as to judge correctly whether these arguments are sound. Most estimates, certainly most public estimates, contain little more than half the expense that will be incurred in connection with an undertaking, and no man can judge such estimates wisely unless he is able to see not only the beginning but the end of the account.

Second in importance to what may be described as the book-keeping mind I would place, as a necessary qualification for a business man, the time sense. The saying is that " time is the essence of the contract.". Everyone is familiar with the phrase, but very few really understand it, and a still smaller number act upon it. The most profitable piece of business in existence may be turned into a loss if only sufficient tiine is taken in carrying it through to completion. If the theory of exchange is properly understood, the necessity. of insistence upon the time factor becomes obvious. You cannot afford to spend more time upon a. piece of work than the equivalent of the time which the consumer is prepared to give up to the acquisition of whatever benefits he derives from that same piece of work. If you do, the ~alance is upset, and the work is uneconomic. The money-maker must there fore be a. stickler for time. He must work to a time table and keep himself and everybody else strictly to it. Lack of appreciation of the time factor is one of the most fatal weaknesses of the Labour Movement.

The bureaucrat, from the. nature of his calling, can CHOOSING A CAREER 35 know nothing of it; and there is only one lawyer in a thousand who knows what time means. Twenty five years ago I had the good luck to find such a -" one. Business, thoughtfully and economically conducted, carries with it a satisfaction which cannot be surpassed, so far as I am aware, in any other branch of activity. Only those who are in it can realise its com plications and its charms. For instance, I buy a load of paper, a simple transaction in which one man under takes to deliver to me so many tons of material, and I undertake at a given date to pay so much money. That is not business. That is the most elementary introduction to a business transaction. I have then the all-engrossing pleasure, the exhilarating anxiety of devising ways and means of covering both sides of every sheet of paper with something which, when each sheet is folded and transformed into a newspaper, will induce many thousands of my fellow-beings of their own free-will and inclination to put down the money to buy those sheets. That money must then be col lected by me from thousands of different sources, must be divided by me among authors, artists, printers, block-makers, and many other newspaper workers, and there should be enough left over to meet my obliga tions to the paper-maker and provide me with a living.

Doing business is doing real things. Things done in business carry with them a satisfaction which does not always attach to things done in the professions, politics, or other walks of life. In that everybody must be satisfied there is absolute and unqualified freedom on every hand. No one is subjected to any form of pressure or coercion. It is no good trying to impose your ideas upon others. You must secure complete agreement all round. You must devote 36 THE CONFEssloNS OF A CAPITALIS~ yourself entirely and whole-heartedly to the task of giving satisfaction to both producers and consumers, between whom you stand, or you cannot continue in business. . And then there is'"the clean air, the honest atmosphere of commerce; an atmosphere cleaner, brighter, and more honest than any other atmosphere I know. It is almost the only department of human activity in which you can get a' really clear issue, in which everything that is done is done for its own sake without ulterior motive. Such singleness of purpose is seldom possible, for example, in politics., The "yes" or "no" of commerce, simple, straight, understandable, and honest, is hard to find in any other walk of life.

I am, however, far from pretending that business is all happiness. The business life, indeed, has perhaps more than its due proportion of disappointment and failure, but disappointment and failure are not incom patible with happiness. In a general way, perhaps, the nearest analogy to the' life of the business man is that of the gardener. Both need to be philosophers . .The best-laid plans, like the best-worked gardens, do not always yield the desired results.. Just as the gardener is at the mercy of the weather, so is the business man at the mercy of the public whim; .but I am not at all sure that in either case greater happiness would result if things were different. There is certainly not so much happiness in business as when I first started. Half such brain power as one possesses is now devoted to scheming rather than to working. Energies that were at one time concen trated whole-heartedly upon the comfort of the cus tomer or consumer are now' dissipated in the intricate task of picking one's way through the maze of legis lation, regulation, and restriction which twenty-five $. years of Socialist tendency in government have created.

CHOOSING A CAREER 37 , All the same there is probably as much happiness to be found in business, as great a sense of satisfaction for services rendered, as much joy in accomplishment as is to be discovered in any other walk of life. A very successful friend of mine told me many years ago that he attributed most of his fortune to his failures. Paradoxical as it may sound, I believe that to be literally true. I learnt more about the publishing business from 1897 to 190 I than I have ever learnt before or since, in connection with a disastrous failure, which was largely ~esponsible for keeping my father on a very modest Income. Having scored a great success as a furniture trade journalist, he became obsessed with the idea. that the public were interested in furniture and decoration. He was twenty years before his time. He argued that there were a dozen popular journals devoting themselves to the dressing and decoration of the body and, that being so, there should surely be room for one .. which would deal exclusively with the dress and decoration of the home. On this theory he started a monthly journal which was called The House. It came out with a strong appeal to the women of the country, in the hope of securing their interest in furnishing matters. I was advertisement manager and publisher of the paper. It ran for three or four years, lost a large sum of money, and came to an end. It failed not only because it was before its time, but also, and chiefly, because of our inadequate knowledge concerning the technicalities of catering' for the general reader and the machinery to be employed in marketing for the public. But the experience was invaluable to me..Through it I learnt to recognise our limitations, and it has kept me ever since, with one other fatal departure, from any attempt to go outside the class of business which I think I understand-catering as a publisher always for special 38 THE CONFESSIONS OF ··A CAPITALIST interests and special trades and particular classes of readers.

Looking back at this distance of time over the road one has travelled I freely confess that I have not achieved the commercial success that might have been mine. I have been diverted, especially in later years, by an absorbing interest in social questions. I am sometimes called an economist, which is a fatal desig nation for a .business man. I have never been able to give the whole of my mind to the single purpose of carrying on my business and making money. When I hear Socialists talk· about the " Capitalist System" I am prone to examine my own position, and I am now wasting my time in writing a book about it, all of which is doing no particular good to rny business. Like Mr. Baldwin, " I have never yet known a good workman who could talk, and I have never known a good talker who was a good workman." I am not particularly good at work or at talk, but I make the mistake of doing a little of both.