successful
only. It's the same way in every line of business. Precedent guides in
all things, but where occasionally you find a man courageous enough to
cast precedent to the winds, one of two things happens. Either fortune
or ruin follows. Hence, the thing to do if you want to make a fortune is
to eliminate the possibility of ruin as far as may be. You cannot ruin a
man who has nothing. He is down on bed-rock, anyhow; so for a receipt
for fortune I should say, start a pauper, show your nerve, and you'll
make a pile, or you won't make a pile. If you make it you are fortunate.
If you fail to make it you are no more unfortunate than you were before
you started."

"For plausibility, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, "you are to me a
perfect wonder. I do not think that any one can deny, with confidence
born of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted
that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet
your conclusions are almost invariably utterly absurd, if not absolutely
grotesque. Here is a man who says, to make a fortune become a beggar!"

"Precisely," said the Idiot. "There is nothing like having a clean slate
to work on. If you are not a beggar you have something, and having
something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you
have everything to gain and nothing to lose, so you can plunge. You can
swim better in deep water than in the shallow."

"Well," said the Doctor, "enlighten us on this point. You may not know
how to show nerve as a writer--in fact, you confess that you don't. How
would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your
demands and degenerate into a common highwayman, or would you simply go
in for big profits, and ask passers-by for ten dollars instead of ten
cents?"

"He'd probably take a bag of dynamite into a millionaire's office and
threaten to blow him to pieces if he didn't give him a house and lot,"
sneered the Bibliomaniac.

"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That's cowardice, not nerve. If I went
into a millionaire's office and demanded a million--or a house and lot
even--armed with a bag full of newspapers, pretending it held dynamite,
it might be more like nerve; but my beggar would do nothing contrary to
the law. He'd simply be nervy, that's all--cheeky, perhaps you'd call
it. For instance, I believe that if I were to hire in the elevated cars
one of those advertising spaces above the windows, and were to place in
that