d Emerson by
saying, "Commerce consists in making things for people who need them,
and carrying them from where they are plentiful to where they are
wanted."

Every economist should be a humanitarian; and every humanitarian should
be an economist. Charles Dickens, writing in Eighteen Hundred Sixty,
puts forth Scrooge, Carker and Bumball as economists. When Dickens
wanted to picture ideal businessmen, he gave us the Cheeryble
brothers--men with soft hearts, giving pennies to all beggars, shillings
to poor widows, and coal and loaves of bread to families living in
rickety tenements. The Dickens idea of betterment was the priestly plan
of dole. Dickens did not know that indiscriminate almsgiving pauperizes
humanity, and never did he supply the world a glimpse of a man like
Robert Owen, whose charity was something more than palliation.

Robert Owen was born in decent poverty, of parents who knew the simple,
beautiful and necessary virtues of industry, sobriety and economy. Where
this son got his hunger for books and his restless desire for
achievement we do not know. He was a business genius, and from genius of
any kind no hovel is immune.

He was sent to London at the age of ten, to learn the saddler's trade;
at twelve he graduated from making wax-ends, blacking leather and
greasing harness and took a position as salesman in the same business.

From this he was induced to become a salesman for a haberdasher. He had
charm of manner--fluidity, sympathy and health. At seventeen he asked to
be paid a commission on sales instead of a salary, and on this basis he
saved a hundred pounds in a year.

At eighteen a customer told him of a wonderful invention--a machine
that was run by steam--for spinning cotton into yarn. Robert was
familiar with the old process of making woolen yarn on a spinning-wheel
by hand--his mother did it and had taught him and his brothers and
sisters how.

Cotton was just coming in, since the close of "George Washington's
Rebellion." Watt had watched his mother's teakettle to a good purpose.
Here were two big things destined to revolutionize trade: the use of
cotton in place of flax or wool, and steam-power instead of human
muscle. Robert Owen resigned his clerkship and invested all of his
earnings in three mule spinning-machines. Then he bought cotton on
credit.

He learned the business, and the first year made three hundred pounds.

Seeing an advertisement in the paper for an experienced superin