Lesson eleven how I served my apprenticeship

Lesson eleven how I served my apprenticeship

It is a great pleasure to tell how I served my apprenticeship as a businessman. But there seems to be a question preceding this: why did I become a businessman? I am sure that I should never have selected a business career if I had been permitted to choose.

The eldest son of parents who were themselves poor, I had, fortunately, to begin to perform some useful work in the world while still very young in order to earn an living and therefore came to understand even in early boyhood that my duty was to assist my parents and become, as soon as possible, a breadwinner in the family. What I could get to do, not what I desired, was the question. When I was born my father was a well-to-do master weaver in Scoland. This was the days before the steam engines. He owned no fewer than four handlooms and employed apprentices. He wove cloth for a merchant who supplied the material.

When the steam engine came, handloom weaving natureally declined. The fist serious lesson of my life came to me one day when I was just about ten years old. My father took the last of his work to the merchant, and returned home greatly distressed because there was no more work for him to do. I resolved then that the wolf of poverty should be driven our door some day.

The question of starting for the Untied States was discussed from day to day in the family council. It was finally resolved that we would join relatives already in Pittsburgh. I well remember that both father and mother thought he decision was a great sacrifice for them, but that “it would be better for the two boys.”

On arriving, my father entered a cotton factory. I soon followed, and served as a “bobbin-boy,” and that was how I began my preparation for subsequent apprenticeship as a businessman. I cannot tell you how proud I was then I received my first week’s earnings – one dollar and twenty cents. It was given to me because I had been of some use in the world! And I became a contributing member of my family! I think this makes a man out of a boy sooner than almost anything else. It is everything to feel that you are useful.

I have had to deal with great sums. Many millions of dollars have since passed through my hands. But the genuine satisfaction I had from that one dollar and twenty cents outweighs any subsequent pleasure in money making. It was the direct reward of honest, manual labor; it represented a week of very hard work – so hard that it might have been described as slavery if it hadn’t been for its aim and end.

It was a terrible task for a lad of twelve to rise every morning, except Sunday, go to the factory while it was still dark, and not be released until after darkness came again in the evening, forty minutes’ break only bing allowed at noon.

But I was young and had my dreams, and something within always told me that this would not, could not, should not last – I should some day get into a better position. Aslo, I felt myself on longer a mere boy, but quite a little man, and this made me happy.

A change soon came, for a kind old Scotsman, who made bobbins, took me into his factory before I was thirteen. But here for a time it was even worse than in the cotton factory, because I was set to fire the boiler in the cellar and run the small steam engine which drove the machinery. The responsibility of keeping the water right and of running the engine, and the danger of my making a mistake and blowing the whole factory to pieces, caused too great a strain, and I often awoke and found myself sitting up in bed through the night, trying the steam- gauges. But I never told them at home about this. No ,no! everyting must be bright to them.

This was a point of honor, for every member of the family was working hard, and we were

tellling each other only the bright things. Besides, no man would complain and give up – he would die first.

There was no servant in our family, and my mother earned several dollars per week by binding shoes after her daily work was done! Father was also hard at work in the factory. And could I complain?

My kind employer soon relieved me of the strain, for he needed someone to make out bills and keep his accounts, and finding that I could write a plain schoolboy hand and could add up, he made me his only clerk. But still I had to work hard upstairs in the workshop for the clerking tool but little time.

You know how people grumble about poverty as a great evil, and it seems to be accepeted that if people had only plenty of money and were rich, they would be happy and more useful, and get more out of life.

As a rule, there is more genuine satisfaction from life in the humble cottages of the poor than in the palaces of the rich. I always pity the sons and daughters of rich men, who are attended by servants, and have a governess even at a later age. They do not know what they have missed. For the poor boy who has in his father his constant companion, tutor. And model, and in his mother his nurse, teacher, guardian angle, saint, all in one, has a richer, more procious fortune in life than any rich man’s son, and copmpared with which all other fortunes count for little.

It is because I know how sweet and happy and pure the home of honest poverty is, how free it is from perplexing care, from social envy and emulations, how loving and how united its members may be in the common interest of supporting the family, that I sympathize with the rich man’s boy and congratulate the poor man’s boy; and it is for these reasons that from the ranks of the poor so many strong, eminent, self-reliant men have always spung and always must spring,

If you will read the list of the immportals who “were not born to die,” you will find that most of them were born to the precious heritage of poverty.

It seems, nowadays, a matter of universal desire that poverty should be ablished. We should be quite willing to abolish would be to destory the soil upon which mankind produces the virtues which enable our race to reach a still higher civelization than it now possesses.

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