Idleness is doomed as a vocation. Of that I am perfectly certain. Even in the social world it is becoming unfashionable. Not so very long ago, in the fashionable world of New York, it was considered bad taste, in fact, it was a decided breach of etiquette, to inquire amongst the men of your acquaintance what anybody did for a living. Within the past five years there has been a very decided change in this respect, and I constantly hear that very question asked, without rebuke, in the most fashionable clubs of the city. A man whom I know pretty well, himself a member of the highest social order, but a man of indefatigable energy, recently put very neatly this fact that many of the quondam idle class are now engaging themselves in useful pursuits. On the street one day he met a young man, a confirmed idler of long standing. He exchanged the time of day with him, and was told that he was about to go to Europe to join in the social season of London. He congratulated him and said he thought it was a good thing to do. A few nights later, talking to me about him, he said: “I feel sorry for Charlie. He seems so lonely. He can’t find any one to play with him!” In a measure, that is true. The confirmed idler of the social world is slowly coming to be despised instead of envied. He still infests a few of the up-town clubs, but even here he is more and more relegated to the bottom of the social list. It is harder and harder every social year to fill up the ranks for social entertainment. A dinner or an early reception can be managed very well, for the young men who work will go to such functions, perhaps as freely as they ever went. It is far different with the late dance or the late reception. If you could go down into Wall Street and call the roll of the bond houses, it would astound you to discover how many young men of the highest social class are working very hard right at the bottom of the ladder of industry learning the financial business. A friend of mine, a fairly well-to-do man of a small city in the Middle West, sent his son to me a year or so ago with a letter asking me to introduce him in Wall Street with a view to his learning the bond business. He had chosen that as his vocation in life, and he had taken a special course in college as a preparation for it. I sent him, with personal letters, to half a dozen friends of mine, partners in various houses. I told him simply to look around, at first, and to talk freely and frankly to these gentlemen about the chances for a young man in that line of business.