OF JVEW YORK CITY.                         101
 

CHAPTER X.

I write about clerks, to give my experience. Fathers
are generally willing that their sons or connections
should do without salary for three or four years to have
them acquire a knowledge of business. Almost all of
the great merchants prefer to take boys from out of the
street or from the country — New England boys espe¬
cially — and give them f 50 or $76 the first year. The
merchants want aid — they prefer a boy without any
friends or rich relatives. The reason is obvious : a boy
from the country will work like a hero — do anything
he is told to do — acquire a thorough knowledge of
business — become a confidential clerk, a partner, and
never have alliances outside of the great house that has
brought him up. A man like the late Gardner G. How¬
land, doing a business of millions, when he gives a
check to one of the boys in the office to go to the bank
and get the money for it, or his coat to take to the tail
or's to be mended, has no time to argue the matter with
tlie boy, that the one is a legitimate order to a clerk and
that the other is a servant's duty, as he would be told
by an aristocratic city boy. The country boy would
do what he is told, if it were to black his employer's
boots, and never think of such a thing as doing what he
ought not.    Such a series of years of faithful obedience