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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
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