MEN WHO DO THINGS When a young man gets the idea that success is a hard thing to acquire he should look about him and size up the men who have steadily risen to places of trust, asking himself what has made them successful? There is but one answer to the question and that is "work"-brain work, long hours, deep thinking and constant reading on the subject which they are endeavoring to master. I have in mind a young man, Mr. E. K. Heilway, now general manager of J. Floresheim & Company, wholesale jewelers, Chicago. Mr. Heilway began his business career in the small town of Charlotte, Mich., on a salary of $11 per week as a shoe clerk. He took stock of himself one day and found that to make something out of himself, something worth while, he must know more than the other fellow. Immediately he began to prepare himself; he studied evenings, gave his spare time to fitting himself for a higher position and when the opportunity presented itself he was master of the situation, having entered the employe of The J. Floreshiem Co. several years ago as advertising manager. He is today enjoying the lucrative position of general manager. His forethought as a shoe clerk certainly must have been worth while, as he has succeeded in making himself invaluable to this large and growing house through a knowledge of advertising. The average man of today does not expect to remain in the eight o'clock crowd at a weekly. earning of twelve, fifteen or eighteen dollars all his life. He harbors a vague dream of some dav enjoying all the good things of life through some mysterious agency, but day after day goes by; month after month and vear after vear passes, and the only evident change that marks the fleeting of time is the appearance of a few gray hairs. He is still hopeful, however, hopeful to the grave, that through some miraculous source he will yet win the smile of Dame Fortune. The exceptional man of today is just like the average man in all his plans and ambitions, but there is one additional quality-the determination to do something to turn the hope of a larger salary into a reality. When the vear closes you find him ready to fill the place of a better paid. man. No better example of the advancement of men of action as well as ambition can be found than the record of Charles B. Drake, the present advertising manager of Practical Druggist, one of the most influential drug journals in the country. He was working in a collar and cuff factory in Trov, N. Y., while preparing himself for an advertising career. The man who sits and babbles over his plans for future success is sure to be side-tracked. His good intentions are as ineffective of actual results as the ignorant stubbornness of the man who refuses to better his condition. Intention, desires and hopes mean nothing unless they are followed by action, prompt and decisive. No one cares for your story of how near you came to getting a big position. The question is, did you get it and have you got it now? Vernon H. Peck is another young man with foresight who is doing himself proud in the city of Los Angeles, Cal., getting out some strikingly clever booklets and catalogues for Wm. H. Hoegee Co., manufacturers of awnings, tents, sails and banners. Mr. Peck anticipated an opportunity that was surely in store for the man who prepared for it and he immediately began the study of advertising. He was formerly a stenographer, but is now on the smooth road to success. This is another substantial evidence of the fact that advertisement writers earn from $25 to $100 per week and save themselves many years of drudgery. One Dollar a Week To all the men who work for wages or on salaries their only hope for a peaceful old age and for a life free from racking money cares is to provide beforehand for the future. They should take no risk. When they speculate they stake their family's future and their own peace of mind against a few dollars. Even were the chances equal-and in the case of a small man the odds are always against him-the risk which he takes is vastly disproportionate to any possible gain. Few men ever heard of progressive compound interest and still fewer know what it does. One dollar deposited in a savings bank which pays four per cent will amount to $2.19 in 20 years. This is simple compound interest. But how many men know that if they deposit $1 every year, the value in 20 years will not be $2.19 but $30.97? Any man or woman who is earning wages at all can save $1 a week. That money deposited in a savings bank for 20 years will amount to $1,612. A deposit of $4 a week will amount to over $8.000. The annual interest on this at 4 per cent would be $320. Thus the man who deposits $5 a week in a savings bank can, after 20 years, draw out $6 a week and still leave to his wife and children at his death all the money that he deposited and more than half as much more. There is no para dox or catch in this. It is a plain, simple mathcmatical statement of what any saving bank will do. Every wife should read these figures and go over them for herself. They are accurate. The only necessity is to make the deposits regularly. If, instead of discontinuing the weekly deposits at 20 years, they are continued for 10 years more, every dollar a week will have become $58.83, and the $52 a year will have become over $3,000. For every dollar which had been deposited $2 a week can be drawn out without impairing the principal, which has doubled. It takes time to make money this way, but the result is certain. There is no secret about it, no mystery, no allurement, no dazzling speculation. All that it requires is industry and a little self-denial every week. It pays better than any gold or copper mine, than any pool room or bucket shop.-N. Y. World. Three Times as Much Timber Used Each Year as the Forest Grows Every person in the United States is using over six times as much wood as he would use if he were in Europe. The country as a whole consumes every year between three and four times more wood than all of the forests of the United States grow in the meantime. The average acre of forest lays up a store of only 10 cubic feet annually, whereas it ought to be laying up at least 30 cubic feet in order to furnish the products taken out of it. Since 1880 more than 700,000,000,000 feet of timber have been cut for lumber alone, including 80 000,000,000 feet of coniferous timber in excess of the total coniferous stumpage estimate of the census in 1880. A study of these conditions must lead directly to the conclusion that the rate at which forest products in the United States have been and are being consumed is far too lavish, and that only one result can follow unless steps are promptly taken to prevent waste in use and to increase the growth rate of every acre of forest in the United States. This result is a timber famine. This country is today in the same position with regard to forest resources as was Germany 150 years ago. During this period of 150 years such German states as Saxony and Prussia, particularly the latter, have applied a policy of government control and regulation which has immensely increased the productivity of their forests. The same policy will achieve even better results in the United States, because we have the advantage of all the lessons which Europe has learned and paid for in the course of a century of theory and practice. Lest it might be assumed that the rapid and gaining depletion of American forest resources is sufficiently accounted for by the increase of population, it is pointed out in the circular that the increase in population since 1880 is barely more than half the increase in lumber cut in the same period. Two areas supplying timber have already reached and passed their maximum production-the northeastern states in 1870 and the lake states in 1890. Today the southern states, which cut yellow pine amounting to one-third the total annual lumber cut of the country, are undoubtedly near their maximum. The Pacific states will soon take the ascendency. The state of Washington within a few years has come to the front and now ranks first of all individual states in volume of cut. At present but one-fifth of the total forest area of the United States is embraced in national forests. The remaining four-fifths have already passed or are most likely to pass into private hands. The average age of the trees felled for lumber this year is not less than 150 years. In other words, if he is to secure a second crop of trees of the same size the lumberman or private forest owner must wait, say, at least one hundred years for the second crop to grow. As a rule, such long-time investments as this waiting would involve do not commend themselves to Fusiness men who are accustomed to quick returns. But the states and the nation can look much farther ahead. The larger, then, the area of national and state control over woodlands, the greater is the likelihood that the forests of the country will be kept permanently productive. Catch Phrases Take it and test it. "Horse sense" about horse goods. HOW TO HANDLE KICKS Probably every mail order advertiser gets more or less "kicks," no matter what his line or how careful he is in handling inquiries and orders. In some cases he may be at fault and in other instances the customer or inquirer may be wrong. There is the customer, for instance, who writes in that he sent a money order or a registered letter on a certain date, for which he holds a receipt, and if his order is not filled by return mail or the money refunded him he will take the matter up with the post-office department. This. is just a sample of the kind of complaints that most mail order men receive off and on. Of course, it would be better policy for the customer before writing such a letter to first inquire whether the order and remittance had been received, and why the goods had not been sent. Through the carelessness of a clerk the dealer's package may have been misdirected, or the customer may have failed to sign a name to the letter ordering the goods, or to give an address, which happens not infrequently. Whatever the reason, however, the mail order dealer should take human nature as it exists and not as we would like to have it. There is nothing to be gained at all by his taking offence at the nature of such complaints, no matter who is at fault. He should bear in mind that in a large percentage of cases those who order of him have no knowledge at all of the manner of conducting such a business or of the numerous details connected with the same and of the many possibilities for the occurrence of errors. We ought to be able to look at such a matter from the standpoint of the customer. The latter can only see, in most cases, simply that he sent in an order a week or so ago, which has not been filled, and he or she does not stop to reason out the whys or wherefores, or to take time to make an inuiry concerning the matter before putting in a kick. It is certainly annoying sometimes for the mail order dealer to get an offensive letter from a customer, especially when the latter is entirely at fault himself, but, anyway, how does it profit the advertiser himself to write back in an offensive manner? It is much better and more profitable for him to swallow his feelings on reading such a complaint and to write back in a conciliatory way, making the necessary explanations, whoever is in error. This will make a customer feel better and probably hold his patronage. As a matter of fact, in very many cases where complaints are handled in the manner I suggest, the complainants, at least if they themselves were at fault, will become better customers than ever of the concern, buying more frequently or in larger quantities, or by getting friends to buy of the same house. This, too, is a trait which those well acquainted with human nature must appreciate.-Mail Order Journal of Chicago, Ill. Honesty is Never a Drawback There are some clerical positions that honest men can't hold. An honest man can't be a gambler's assistant, a swindler's confidential agent, an employe of a liquor house, wholesale or retail, or the private secretary of a corrupt politician; for he will be required, in any one of these positions to use his talent in furthering a dishonest enterprise. But, in the main, when a discharged employe of an ordinary mercantile house turns up with a cock and bull story about being discharged because he was unwilling to do dishonest things, it's a wise thing to begin to look around for the Limburger. There's something rotten elsewhere, When a clerk is conspicuously successful in his work; when he goes at it like the left halfback making a tackle in an open field; when he comes into the office and leaps to his desk like a Bengal tiger; when his eyes sparkle and his face lights up with joy at a new piece of work; why, bless you, the most dishonest employer outside of the penitentiary won't fire him for being square. He will find some other employe to do the dirty work. Any good business man knows that the man who will steal for him will steal from him; and even dishonest men, who keep such human offal about, are mighty careful to select men of the other sort for places of high responsibility in their employ. A thief can sometimes get employment from a thief-but not in any important capacity. Of course there are exceptions, but, in the main, sterling honesty does not cause men to lose their positions. Once show your employer that you are surprisingly and remarkably successful in your work, and a rival firm can't pry you loose from your job with a board, unless you prefer to leave it.-Business Monthly Magazine. An exceptional offer-COMMON SENSE Magazine for one year (12 numbers) and Correct English-"How to Speak and Write It," by F. L. Johnson, beautifully bound in cloth, both for $1.25. FACTS WORTH KNOWING Without the aid of a glass, an Australian is said to have written 10,061 words on a postal card. A diet of brown bread and fruit cures obesity. From the hawksbill turtle of the Carribean Sea comes the tortoise shell of commerce. Crime increases and diminishes with the rise and fall in the price of bread. The aggregate of wealth buried with Turkey's sultans would pay Russia's national debt. Roquefort cheese is made of sheep's milk. The floor area of St. Peter's, Rome, is 227,069 square feet, being the greatest of any cathedral in the world. In the schools of Bohemia the study of music is compulsory. On the Tombigbee river, Alabama, is enough limestone to supply a cement plant for 100 years. Widowers remarry more frequently than widows. The railway commissioners of New South Wales are adopting a system of electrically synchronized clocks. The perfume of the nutmeg flower intoxicates small birds. At Rheims, France, portable bathtubs filled with hot water are delivered to order. A Japanese of Tokio, in a letter to the Japan Times, says that the Japanese regard themselves as physically inferior to Americans, and says that Japanese even should marry American women so as to have larger children. The average brick house lasts 100 years. The value of the output of precious and semiprecious stones in the United States for 1905 amounted to $326,350. Sapphires were valued at $125,000; turquoise $65,000; tourmalines $50,000, down to fossil coral at $250. The amount of air breathed depends upon the action of the body. The average man lying down breathes 480 cubic inches of air each minute; running he breathes 3,260 cubic inches in the same time. Torpedoes were first used in warfare by the Americans in the revolution. The so-called cold-blooded animals vary from the warm-blooded in the particular that their blood changes temperature in accordance with their surroundings. The temperature of a fish will be almost exactly the same as that of the water around it, possibly one or two degrees higher. A snake's temperature is higher in summer than in winter, the average being 82 degrees. A bird's average temperature is 107; the average temperature of the mammals is 101 degrees. How mosquitos exist, within the arctic circle, without a blood diet, is a mystery. The Tehuantepec railroad is 190 miles in length, the air-line distance from its Atlantic to the Pacific terminal being 125 miles. The distance from New York to San Francisco by Panama is 6,107 miles; by Tehuantepec, 4,925 miles, a difference of 1,182 miles. To swim with the fingers close together prevents cramps. A foreign-born minor on reaching the age of eighteen may take out his first papers. At the age of twenty-one, if he has been five years in the United States, he may claim his final papers. Digging is said to be the wholesomest exercise known. Buddha, who reformed the Hindu religion more than 500 years before Christ, established for men six essentials of perfection-1, knowledge, used to distinguish the true from the false; 2, energy, which is used to fight against the evils of the flesh; 3, purity; 4, patience; 5, charity (i. e., loving-kindness); 6, almsgiving. The prosaic wastepaper basket is the source of many wonderful scraps of ancient manuscript. Professor Petrie first discovered that the ancient undertakers in packing mummies used waste paper to fill the empty spaces, precisely as is done with packages today. Thousands of such fragments have been dug up lately, among them the famous Logia, the sayings of Christ. Within the year part of a lost gospel has been recovered. A good ostrich is worth $300. It is a most regretful fact that an average of three men are killed out of each thousand employed in the bituminous mines of Pennsylvania. Last year thirty-five miners were killed outside the workings, four hundred and forty-four inside, or for every two hundred and nine thousand tons of coal produced a life is sacrificed, the total output of bituminous coal for the year being one hundred and nineteen million, three hundred sixty-one thousand five hundred fourteen tons. Prussic acid is the most rapid poison a human being can take. A twelve-inch gun, which is the principal weapon in every navy, can be fired on an average of once a minute. In 1905 a moving target was hit by one of the gunners of a six-inch gun on the battleship Drake eleven times in one minute. Diamonds have been found in meteorites. The longest distance a wireless telegram has been sent in the United States is 2,400 miles this being the air line distance between Washington, D. C., and Point Loma, San Francisco. |