Tell your boys, and the boys you meet, that if ever they become millionaires in dollars as in whiskers, the chances are it will be because they conserve. John J. Blair, the pioneer railroad builder west of the Mississippi River, once told Senator Allison that the wife of Commodore Vanderbilt had many times cooked for him a five o’clock breakfast, for which she charged twenty cents. The seed from which all great fortunes have been grown was hand picked. In the war between the states more than a million men enlisted on either side, and at the end of four and one-half years there were fifty or one hundred multi-millionaires in military achievement and military glory and ten thousand in unmarked graves. Socialists do not object to these inequalities. While they seem to welcome millionaires in art, in music, and in athletics they all point to millionaires in business as an unanswerable indictment of America’s political system. They rejoice that it can produce an Edison, but mourn that it can also produce a Rockefeller. Yet the success of these two wizards is traceable alike to extraordinary aptitude in their respective fields of achievement, plus extraordinary application. Neither of these men ever robbed me of a penny. On the contrary each has contributed to my comfort, thus adding to the worth of living, and each has cheapened for me the cost of high living. But for Mr. Edison, or someone of a different name to do what he has done, I would be deprived of electric light and many other comforts. But for Mr. Rockefeller, or some one of a different name to do what Mr. Rockefeller has done, every owner of an oil well would be pumping his product into barrels in the olden way, hauling it to town and selling on a manipulated market, while I would be deprived of a hundred by-products of petroleum, be still paying twenty-five cents per gallon for poor kerosene, and there would be no such thing known in all the world as gasoline. CHAPTER XV POPULAR DISSATISFACTION It is as logical that dissatisfaction should develop because of inequality of results in “money making,” as it is that inequality in results shall follow inequality of aptitude and effort. This dissatisfaction has tended strongly to develop socialistic thought and teaching. A century and a quarter, during which representatives were chosen because of actual or supposed aptitude, and retained in office during long periods—frequently for life—when nearly every industry was fostered, and none fathered, developed a people, the best paid, the best fed, the best clothed, the best housed, the best educated, enjoying more of the comforts of life, far more of its luxuries, enduring less hardships and privations, than any other in all history; but it is an even guess if, at the same time, we did not become more restless, discontented and unhappy.