The Jackson standard. [volume] (Jackson C.H., Ohio) 1847-1888, 1874-11-19
Kings of Business.
LECTURE BY JAMES PARTON.


The aristocracy of a country are they who
WELD its resources; in other words, the strong
men who possess and control. In all the tribes
and nations of which we have any knowledge,
we find the strong forming a class by them
selves; usually in the older countries, king
and nobility descended from the ancient strong g
who banded together to a-defend the State
against foreign foes and internal anarchy. But
in our modern world, war having become the
occasional instead of constant necessity of ma
| tions, the soldier.recedes, the man of business
comes to the front. Nobilities decay. The
great houses of a country are mercantile, not
feudal. If we by chance hear the names of
York and Lancaster, we do not think of white
rose and red or cracked crowns on bloody
fields; but ask, perhaps, whether they are in
cotton or in sugar, whether they are iron men
! or pork men. And this is not retrograde, as
! some would have think, but advance, signal
and glorious advance. In a country governed
| by law and devoted to the arts of peace men of
business are the natural chiefs of the commune
| ty. have visited more than once the from
tiers of the United States and observed the new
Settlements and the rising towns where every
hing arranges itself in the natural way. In
| the dense, magnificent forests of Wisconsin,
where timber is the staple commodity, what is
| it that the settlers want and must have and
can't get? A saw-mill. Who builds it? The
| the life and opportunity of the place, the town
gathers, as in the olden time the retainers
| nestled in the protecting shadow of the lord IS
| castle. But on the rolling prairies of Minneso-
ia, the need of the people is the steam elevator,
| which towers aloft, visible for many mile, the
center of the grain growing system. On a fine
| day in winter, as far as the eye can reach, you
see the sleighs heaped with sacks, and the farm
er in his overcoat and cap of buffalo skin, with
wife or daughter by his side, moving at gem
| tie trot towards this tower of refuge, which
sucks up the grain on one side and on the other
pours it out into the freight car, while inside is
the Office where the farmer gets his money, and
near by the stores in which his wife can
spend it. These giant structures belong to the
strong men of the prairie world, the successors
of the ancient mobiles. 1t is not the effeminate
idIers who have inherited the names and titles
of the old dukes and barons that their true
successors, but men who fill the place in the
modern world that dukes and barons did in the
ancient. In the corn counties of fertile Iowa
| something else is required. The farmers there
cannot send their corn to US to eat until it is
condensed. The leaders of the people there
erect those establishments, invented at Cincin-
natl, where at one end of the building the corn
goes in pig, and on the other comes out salt
pork. So in the region north of the Adirondack
| wilderness, where corn will not always ripen,
| the men of force have lined the frontier with
| huge factories where the bulky and heavy po-
| tato is converted into starch, which is sent to
the ends of the earth, and has enriched a line
| of country which otherwise would be scarcely
inhabited. Cross the frontier into Canada go
into the French villages, and you do not find
| such things. 1t is because their strong men be-
come priests, and spend the resources of the
country in monasteries and other huge eccIesi-
| astical edidces. The land groans under the
| weight of them, the country swarms with jo-
~, IA
tie work at home, stroll down every harvest
into Vermont and New Hampshire, in carts
drawn by one COW or half a horse.
| During the last so years men of business have
gained an ally that has prodigiously increased
| their power-the steam-engine-which to-day
has done about three times as much work as
the whole working population could have done
without its assistance. Hence the magnitude
of fortunes and the vast, far-reaching enter
prises conducted by individuals.
GAS rich as Croesus'' is proverb all over the
civilized world, and Croesus really appears to
have had a good deal of gold lying about in his
house. Herodotus, to whom he owes his i'm
mortality, records that he rewarded one of the
generals by letting him go into his treasury and
take away as much gold as he could carry away
on his own person. The general improved his
opportunity. Croesus, too, was gentleman
capable of propitiating Apollo with an Offering
of 5000 oxen, and solid golden lion as large as
life. But he was a king, who had 13 nations tc
plunder. The great fortunes of Rome, of which
Pliny speaks, were also the sports of conquered
provinoes-fortpnes accursed in the getting, the
holding, and the spending. In our happier
day, plain men of business WELD vaster resour-
ces and direct far-reaching enterprises, which
have no drawback of suffering or evil, but ben
eft every person affected by them. And a'
the Croesus with his heaps OF gold, there is 6
carman in New York, at the corner of BroaC
and Wall sts., who often in one day carries
three tons of gold on his cart but it'll not tC
Apollo's shrine that he takes this interesting
metal 1t is surprising how small matter
million dollars app ears in the midst of the i'm
mense operations of our day. The last time
was in Wall street heard a noted banker say
with great earnestness OF manner: "My ambi
tion is to be perfect banker. would rather
retire from business with only single million