y on the
farmers. Often they spent the night--hotel accommodations were few and
houses were far apart--and entertained the family with lively tales of
life on the road. Next morning they gave the children trifling presents,
swindled the farmer out of several dollars and made themselves generally
agreeable. The farmer took it all in good part and looked forward with
pleasure to the next visit. The peddlers came in pairs then, like
snakes, but they were for the most part welcome and there was genuine
regret when they became things of the past like top-buggies and Prince
Albert coats.

After the peddler came the drummer, a rough, noisy chap, as his name
indicates, harmless enough, but economically not much more significant
than the peddler. He stayed in the business district where he was
tolerated with good-natured indulgence. He was less objectionable than
the man who followed him, the agent. He was (and is) a house-to-house
and office-to-office canvasser and a general nuisance. He sold
everything from books to life insurance, from patent potato peelers to
opera glasses. He still survives, but not in large numbers, for his
work, like that of the peddler and the drummer, has been swallowed up by
the salesman.

The rewards which modern salesmanship holds out to those who succeed at
it are so large that the field has attracted all kinds of men, highly
efficient ones who love the game for its own sake, grossly incompetent
ones who, having failed at something else, have decided to try this, and
adventurers who believe they see in it a chance to get rich quick. The
teachers of salesmanship tell us that we are all selling something,
even when there is no visible product. The worker, according to them, is
selling his services just as the salesman is selling goods. It may be
true, but we all could not (and it is a blessing) go out and sell things
in the ordinary sense in which we use the word. Some of us have to be
producers. But the salesman's work is important. We do not discredit it.

Salesmanship is built on faith. A man must believe in his product and
then must make other people believe in it as firmly as he does. So
devoted are some salesmen to their work that it is difficult to tell
whether they consider their calling a trade, a profession, a science, or
a religion. Sometimes it is all four. Sometimes it goes beyond them and
becomes a kind of mesmerism in which the salesman uses a sort of
hypnotic process (which is simpl