“whatever you do, do it with all your might,” are some of the mottoes Barnum offered his listeners as substantial, and they listened as to a man with a message. It does not profit a man to be too visionary, Barnum warned, and he cited the instance from a London newspaper of a “philosophic pauper who was kicked out of a cheap boarding-house because he could not pay his bill, but he had a roll of papers sticking out of his coat pocket, which, upon examination, proved to be his plan for paying off the national debt of England without the aid of a penny.” Luck, in Barnum’s opinion, was for all practical purposes non-existent: “There never was a man who could go out in the morning and find a purse full of gold in the street to-day, and another to-morrow, and so on, day after day. He may do so once in his life; but so far as mere luck is concerned, he is as liable to lose it as find it.” He also hazarded the revolutionary belief that Providence was not absolutely dependable; he urged people to remember Cromwell’s, “Not only trust in Providence, but keep the powder dry,” and he added a story of Mahomet and a faithful follower, who remarked in the desert one night, “I will loose my camel, and trust it to God.” “No, no, not so,” said the prophet in consternation, “tie thy camel, and trust it to God.” And above all, Barnum urged, Advertise: “But I say if a man has got goods for sale, and he don’t advertise them in some way, the chances are that some day the sheriff will do it for him.” To a man who told him that he had advertised three times and received no good, Barnum said he replied: “Sir, advertising is like learning--‘a little is a dangerous thing.’” He claimed that there was only one liquid a man could use in excessive quantities without being swallowed up by it, and that was printer’s ink.