Method is the soul of business. -- Old Saying.
I AM a business man. I am a methodical man. Method is the thing, after all. But there are
no people I more heartily despise than your eccentric fools who prate about method
without understanding it; attending strictly to its letter, and violating its spirit. These
fellows are always doing the most out-of-the-way things in what they call an orderly
manner. Now here, I conceive, is a positive paradox. True method appertains to the
ordinary and the obvious alone, and cannot be applied to the outre. What definite idea can
a body attach to such expressions as "methodical Jack o' Dandy," or "a systematical Will
o' the Wisp"?
My notions upon this head might not have been so clear as they are, but for a fortunate
accident which happened to me when I was a very little boy. A good-hearted old Irish
nurse (whom I shall not forget in my will) took me up one day by the heels, when I was
making more noise than was necessary, and swinging me round two or three times, d-----
d my eyes for "a skreeking little spalpin," and then knocked my head into a cocked hat
against the bedpost. This, I say, decided my fate, and made my fortune. A bump arose at
once on my sinciput, and turned out to be as pretty an organ of order as one shall see on a
summer's day. Hence that positive appetite for system and regularity which has made me
the distinguished man of business that I am.
If there is any thing on earth I hate, it is a genius. Your geniuses are all arrant asses ---
the greater the genius the greater the ass --- and to this rule there is no exception
whatever. Especially, you cannot make a man of business out of a genius, any more than
money out of a Jew, or the best nutmegs out of pine-knots. The creatures are always
going off at a tangent into some fantastic employment, or ridiculous speculation, entirely
at variance with the "fitness of things," and having no business whatever to be considered
as a business at all. Thus you may tell these characters immediately by the nature of their
occupations. If you ever perceive a man setting up as a merchant or a manufacturer, or
going into the cotton or tobacco trade, or any of those eccentric pursuits; or getting to be
a dry-goods dealer, or soap-boiler, or something of that kind; or pretending to be a
lawyer, or a blacksmith, or a physician --- any thing out of the usual way --- you may set
him down at once as a genius, and then, according to the rule-of-three, he's an ass.
Now I am not in any respect a genius, but a regular business man. My Day-book and
Ledger will evince this in a minute. They are well kept, though I say it myself; and, in my
general habits of accuracy and punctuality, I am not to be beat by a clock. Moreover, my
occupations have been always made to chime in with the ordinary habitudes of my
fellowmen. Not that I feel the least indebted, upon this score, to my exceedingly weak-
minded parents, who, beyond doubt, would have made an arrant genius of me at last, if
my guardian angel had not come, in good time, to the rescue. In biography the truth is
every thing, and in autobiography it is especially so --- yet I scarcely hope to be believed
when I state, however solemnly, that my poor father put me, when I was about fifteen
