looking over by some one else.
Hundreds of clerks and book-keepers are getting small salaries in poor
positions today because they have never learned to do things absolutely
right.

A prominent business man says that the carelessness, inaccuracy, and
blundering of employees cost Chicago one million dollars a day. The
manager of a large house in that city, says that he has to station
pickets here and there throughout the establishment in order to
neutralize the evils of inaccuracy and the blundering habit. One of
John Wanamaker's partners says that unnecessary blunders and mistakes
cost that firm twenty-five thousand dollars a year. The dead letter
department of the Post Office in Washington received in one year seven
million pieces of undelivered mail. Of these more than eighty thousand
bore no address whatever. A great many of them were from business
houses. Are the clerks who are responsible for this carelessness
likely to win promotion?

Many an employee who would be shocked at the thought of telling his
employer a lie with his lips is lying every day in the quality of his
work, in his dishonest service, in the rotten hours he is slipping into
it, in shirking, in his indifference to his employer's interests. It
is just as dishonest to express deception in poor work, in shirking, as
to express it with the lips, yet I have known office-boys, who could
not be induced to tell their employer a direct lie, to steal his time
when on an errand, to hide away during working hours to smoke a
cigarette or take a nap, not realizing, perhaps, that lies can be acted
as well as told and that acting a lie may be even worse than telling
one.

The man who botches his work, who lies or cheats in the goods he sells
or manufactures, is dishonest with himself as well as with his fellow
men, and must pay the price in loss of self-respect, loss of character,
of standing in his community.

Yet on every side we see all sorts of things selling for a song because
the maker put no character, no thought into them. Articles of clothing
that look stylish and attractive when first worn, very quickly get out
of shape, and hang and look like old, much-worn garments. Buttons fly
off, seams give way at the slightest strain, dropped stitches are
everywhere in evidence, and often the entire article goes to pieces
before it is worn half a dozen times.

Everywhere we see furniture which looks all right, but which in reality
is full of blemis