Looking now at Atkinson’s career with the eyes of a literary man, it seems clear to me that no college training could possibly have added to his power of accumulating knowledge or his wealth in the expression of it. But the academic tradition might have best added to these general statements in each case some simple address or essay which would bring out clearly to the minds of an untrained audience the essential points of each single theme. Almost everything he left is the talk of a specially trained man to a limited audience, also well trained,—at least in the particular department to which he addresses himself. The men to whom he talks may not know how to read or write, but they are all practically versed in the subjects of which he treats. He talks as a miner to miners, a farmer to farmers, a cook to cooks; but among all of his papers which I have examined, that in which he appears to the greatest advantage to the general reader is his “Address before the Alumni of Andover Theological Seminary” on June 9, 1886. Here he speaks as one representing a wholly different pursuit from that of his auditors; a layman to clergymen, or those aiming to become so. He says to them frankly at the outset, “I have often thought [at church] that if a member of the congregation could sometimes occupy the pulpit while the minister took his place in the pew, it might be a benefit to both. The duty has been assigned to me to-day to trace out the connection between morality and a true system of political or industrial economy.” He goes on to remind them that the book which is said to rank next to the Bible toward the benefit of the human race is Adam Smith’s “Wealth of Nations,” and that the same Adam Smith wrote a book on moral philosophy, which is now but little read. He therefore takes the former of Smith’s books, not the latter, as his theme, and thus proceeds:— “I wonder how many among your number ever recall the fact that it has been the richest manufacturers who have clothed the naked at the least cost to them; that it is the great bonanza farmer who now feeds the hungry at the lowest price; that Vanderbilt achieved his great fortune by reducing the cost of moving a barrel of flour a thousand miles,—from three dollars and fifty cents to less than seventy cents. This was the great work assigned to him, whether he knew it or not. His fortune was but an incident,—the main object, doubtless, to himself, but a trifling incident compared to what he saved others.”[18] He then goes on to show that whatever may be the tricks or wrongs of commerce, they lie on the surface, and that every great success is based upon very simple facts.