boy of sixteen had obtained his first job in a produce commission
office on a dock in Cleveland. As the curtain rises on the career
of John D. Rockefeller, we see him perched upon a high stool,
adding up figures and casting accounts, faithfully doing every
odd office job that came his way, earning his employer's respect
for his industry, his sobriety, and his unmistakable talents for
business. Nor does this picture inadequately visualize
Rockefeller's whole after-life, and explain the business
qualities that made possible his unexampled success. It is,
indeed, the scene to which Mr. Rockefeller himself most
frequently reverts when, in his famous autobiographical
discourses to his Cleveland Sunday School, he calls our attention
to the rules that inevitably lead to industrial prosperity.
"Thrift, thrift, Horatio," is the one idea upon which the great
captain of the oil business has always insisted. Many have
detected in these habits of mind only the cheese-paring
activities of a naturally narrow spirit. Rockefeller's old
Cleveland associates remember him as the greatest bargainer they
had ever known, as a man who had an eye for infinite details and
an unquenchable patience and resource in making economies. Yet
Rockefeller was clearly more than a pertinacious haggler over
trifles. Certainly such a diagnosis does not explain a man who
has built up one of the world's greatest organizations and
accumulated the largest fortune which has ever been placed at the
disposal of one man. Indeed, Rockefeller displayed unusual
business ability even before he entered the oil business. A young
man who, at the age of nineteen, could start a commission house
and do a business of nearly five hundred thousand the first year
must have had commercial capacity to an extraordinary degree.