Steam was coming in, and the factories were starving out the
roycrofters. It is hard to change--in order to change your mind, you
must change your environment.

The merchants used to buy their materials and take them to the weaver,
and tell him how they wanted the cloth made. The weaver never thought
that he could get up a new pattern, buy materials and devise a scheme
whereby one man could tend four looms--or fourteen--and advertise his
product so the consumer would demand it, and thus force the merchant to
buy.

Aye, and if that didn't work, the whole blooming bunch of middlemen who
batten and fatten between the factory and the family could be
eliminated, and the arrogant retailer, wholesaler, factor and agent be
placed on the retired list through the Mail-Order Plan. Or, aye again,
the consumers' wants could be anticipated as they are by The Standard
Oil Company, and the gentlemanly salesman, psychic in his instincts,
would be at the door in answer to your sincere desire, uttered or
unexpressed.

When the times changed, Carnegie the Elder was undone. A few years later
and his son Andy could have shown him fifty-seven ways by which the
consumer could be reached. Andy would have known only one defeat, and
that would have come when all the consumers were dead and ceased to
consume. When Carnegie the Elder quit the loom, the consumers were using
more cloth than ever, but the goods were being made in a new way.
"Hunger is the first incentive to migration," says Adam Smith.

Hunger and danger in right proportion are good things. It is a great
idea for a woman who would give to the world superior sons, to marry a
man without too much ambition. If too much is done for a woman she will
never do much for herself. This proves that she is a human being,
whether she can vote or not.

Hunger, hardship, deprivation breed big virtues. Before deeds are born
they are merely thoughts or aspirations. The desire to better her
condition, and the struggle with unkind fate on behalf of her children,
often is the heritage of mother to son. The mother endows the child
with a tendency--a great moral tendency--a reaching out towards a
success which she has never seen, as planet responds to the attraction
of planet. And the things she dreamed, her child grown to manhood makes
come true. Temperance fanatics are often the offspring of drunken
parents. Shiftless fathers breed financiers. We are taught by
antithesis.

Andrew Carnegie is the