the business man's_ FIRST REQUIREMENT.

* * * * *

There is a firm in Chicago, with a most interesting bit of inside
history. It is not a large firm. Ten years ago it consisted of one
man. Today there are some three hundred employees, but it is still a
one-man business. It has never employed a salesman on the road; the
head of the firm has never been out to call on any of his customers.

But here is a singular thing: you may drop in to see a business man
in Syracuse or San Francisco, in Jacksonville or Walla Walla, and
should you casually mention this man's name, the chances are the
other will reply: "Oh, yes. I know him very well. That is, I've had
several letters from him and I feel as though I know him."

Sitting alone in his little office, this man was one of the first to
foresee, ten years ago, the real possibilities of the letter. He saw
that if he could write a man a thousand miles away the right kind of
a letter he could do business with him as well as he could with the
man in the next block.

So he began _talking_ by mail to men whom he thought might buy his
goods--talking to them in sane, human, you-and-me English. Through
those letters he sold goods. Nor did he stop there. In the same
human way he collected the money for them. He adjusted any
complaints that arose. He did everything that any business man could
do with customers. In five years he was talking not to a thousand
men but to a million. And today, though not fifty men in the million
have ever met him, this man's personality has swept like a tidal