ew weeks of commercial life. It is the result of
years. It is not only the power within him, but also the experience
behind him, that makes a successful business man. The commercial world
is only a greater school than the one of slates and slate-pencils. No
boy, after attending school for five years, would consider himself
competent to teach. And surely five years of commercial apprenticeship
will not fit a young man to assume a position of trust, nor give him
the capacity to decide upon important business matters. In the first
five years, yes, the first ten years, of a young man's business life,
he is only in the primary department of the great commercial world. It
is for him, then, to study methods, to observe other men--in short, to
learn and not to hope to achieve. That will come later. Business,
simple as it may look to the young man, is, nevertheless, a very
intricate affair, and it is only by years of closest study that we
master an understanding of it.

The electric atmosphere of the American business world is all too apt
to make our young men impatient. They want to fly before they can even
walk well. Ambition is a splendid thing in any young man. But he must
not forget that, like fire and water, it makes a good servant but a
poor master. Getting along too fast is just as injurious as getting
along too slow. A young man between twenty and twenty-five must be
patient. I know patience is a difficult thing to cultivate, but it is
among the first lessons we must learn in business. A good stock of
patience, acquired in early life, will stand a man in good stead in
later years. It is a handy thing to have and draw upon, and makes a
splendid safety-valve. Because a young man, as he approaches
twenty-five, begins to see things more plainly than he did five years
before, he must not get the idea that he is a business man yet, and
entitled to a man's salary. If business questions, which he did not
understand five years before, now begin to look clearer to him, it is
because he is passing through the transitory state that separates the
immature judgment of the young man from the ripening penetration of the
man. He is simply beginning. Afterward he will grow, and his salary
will grow as he grows. But Rome wasn't built in a day, and a business
man isn't made in a night. As experience comes, the judgment will
become mature, and by the time the young man reaches thirty he will
begin to realize that he didn't know as much at t