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"Mr. Idiot," said the Poet one morning, as the waffles were served, "you are an inventive genius. Why don't you invent an easy way to make a fortune? The trouble with most methods of making money is that they involve too much labor."
"I have thought of that," said the Idiot. "And yet the great fortunes have been made in a way which involved very little labor, comparatively speaking. You, for instance, probably work harder over a yard of poetry that brings you in ten dollars than any of our great railroad magnates have over a mile of railroad which has brought them in a million."
"Which simply proves that it is ideas that count rather than labor," said the Poet.
"Not exactly," said the Idiot. "If you put a hundred ideas into a quatrain you will get less money for it than you would for a two-volume epic in which you have possibly only half an idea. It isn't idea so much as nerve that counts. The man who builds railroads doesn't advance any particular idea, but he shows lots of nerve, and it is nerve that makes wealth. I believe that if you literary men would show more nerve force and spare the public the infliction of what you call your ideas, you would make more money."
"How would you show nerve in writing?" queried the Bibliomaniac.
"If I knew I'd write and make my fortune," said the Idiot. "Unfortunately, I don't know how one can show nerve in writing, unless it be in taking hold of some particularly popular idiosyncrasy of mankind and treating it so contemptuously that every one would want to mob you. If you could get the public mad enough at you to want to mob you they'd read everything you'd write, simply to nourish their wrath, and you'd soon be cutting coupons for a living, and could then afford to take up more ideas—coupon-cutters can afford theories. For my own part, one reason why I do not myself take up literature for a profession is that I have neither the nerve nor the coupons. I'd probably run along in the rut like a majority of the writers of to-day, and wouldn't have the grit to strike out in a new line of my own. Men say, and perhaps very properly, this is the thing that has succeeded in the past. I'll do this. Something else that appears alluring enough in the abstract has never been done, and for that reason I won't do it. There have been clever men before me, men clever enough to think of this something that I fondly imagine is original, and they haven't done it. Doubtless they refrained from doing it for good and sufficient reasons, and I am not going to be fool enough to set my judgment up against theirs. In other words, I lack the nerve to go ahead and write as I feel. I prefer to study past successes, with the result that I am moderately successful only. It's the same way in every line of business. Precedent guides in all things, but where occasionally you find a man courageous enough to cast precedent to the winds, one of two things happens. Either fortune or ruin follows. Hence, the thing to do if you want to make a fortune is to eliminate the possibility of ruin as far as may be. You cannot ruin a man who has nothing. He is down on bed-rock, anyhow; so for a receipt for fortune I should say, start a pauper, show your nerve, and you'll make a pile, or you won't make a pile. If you make it you are fortunate. If you fail to make it you are no more unfortunate than you were before you started."
"For plausibility, Mr. Idiot," said Mr. Pedagog, "you are to me a perfect wonder. I do not think that any one can deny, with confidence born of certainty, the truth of your premises, and it must be admitted that your conclusions are based properly upon those premises, and yet your conclusions are almost invariably utterly absurd, if not absolutely grotesque. Here is a man who says, to make a fortune become a beggar!"
"Precisely," said the Idiot. "There is nothing like having a clean slate to work on. If you are not a beggar you have something, and having something promotes caution and tends to destroy nerve. As a beggar you have everything to gain and nothing to lose, so you can plunge. You can swim better in deep water than in the shallow."
"Well," said the Doctor, "enlighten us on this point. You may not know how to show nerve as a writer—in fact, you confess that you don't. How would you show nerve as a beggar? Would you strive to enforce your demands and degenerate into a common highwayman, or would you simply go in for big profits, and ask passers-by for ten dollars instead of ten cents?"
"He'd probably take a bag of dynamite into a millionaire's office and threaten to blow him to pieces if he didn't give him a house and lot," sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"Not at all," said the Idiot. "That's cowardice, not nerve. If I went into a millionaire's office and demanded a million—or a house and lot even—armed with a bag full of newspapers, pretending it held dynamite, it might be more like nerve; but my beggar would do nothing contrary to the law. He'd simply be nervy, that's all—cheeky, perhaps you'd call it. For instance, I believe that if I were to hire in the elevated cars one of those advertising spaces above the windows, and were to place in that space a placard saying that I was by nature too lazy to work, too fond of life to starve, too poor to live, and too honest to steal, and would be placed in affluence if every man and woman who saw that sign would send me ten cents a week in two-cent postage-stamps for five weeks running, I should receive enough money to enable me to live at the most expensive hotel in town during that period. By living at that hotel and paying my bills regularly I could get credit enough to set myself up in business, and with credit there is practically no limit to the possibilities of fortune. It is simply honest nerve that counts. The beggar who asks you on the street for five cents to keep his family from starving is rebuffed. You don't believe his story, and you know that five cents wouldn't keep a family from starving very long. But the fellow who accosts you frankly for a dime because he is thirsty, and hasn't had a drink for two hours, in nine cases out of ten properly selected ones will get a quarter for his nerve."
"You ought to write a Manual for Beggars ," said the Bibliomaniac. "I have no doubt that the Idiot Publishing Company would publish it."
"Yes," said Mr. Pedagog. "A sort of beggar's Don't , for instance. It would be a benefit to all men, as well as a boon to the beggars. That mendicancy is a profession to-day there is no denying, and anything which could make of it a polite calling would be of inestimable value."
"I have had it in mind for some time," said the Idiot, blandly. "I intended to call it Mendicancy Made Easy , or the Beggar's Don't: With Two Chapters on Etiquette for Tramps ."
"The chief trouble with such a book I should think," said the Poet, "would be that your beggars and tramps could not afford to buy it."
"That wouldn't interfere with its circulation," returned the Idiot. "It's a poor tramp who can't steal. Every suburban resident in creation would buy a copy of the book out of sheer curiosity. I'd get my royalties from them; the tramps could get the books by helping themselves to the suburbanites' copies as they do to chickens, fire-wood, and pies put out to cool. As for the beggars, I'd have it put into their hands by the people they beg from. When a man comes up to a wayfarer, for instance, and says, 'Excuse me, sir, but could you spare a nickel to a hungry man?' I'd have the wayfarer say, 'Excuse me , sir, but unfortunately I have left my nickels in my other vest; but here is a copy of the Idiot's Mendicancy Made Easy, or the Beggar's Don't .'"
"And you think the beggar would read it, do you?" asked the Bibliomaniac.
"I don't know whether he would or not. He'd probably either read it or pawn it," the Idiot answered. "In either event he would be better off, and I would have got my ten per cent. royalty on the book. After the Beggars' Manual I should continue my good work if I found the class for whom it was written had benefited by my first effort. I should compile as my contribution to the literature of mendicancy for the following season what I should call The Beggar's Élite Directory . This would enlarge my sphere a trifle. It would contain as complete lists as could be obtained of persons who give to street beggars, with their addresses, so that the beggars, instead of infesting the streets at night might go to the houses of these people and collect their incomes in a more business-like and less undignified fashion. Added to this would be two lists, one for tramps, stating what families in the suburbs kept dogs, what families gave, whether what they gave was digestible or not, rounding up with a list of those who do not give, and who have telephone connection with the police station. This would enable them to avoid dogs and rebuffs, would save the tramp the time he expends on futile efforts to find work he doesn't want, and as for the people who have to keep the dogs to ward off the tramps, they, too, would be benefited, because the tramps would begin to avoid them, and in a short while they would be able to dispense with the dogs. The other list would be for organ-grinders, who are, after all, only beggars of a different type. This list would comprise the names of persons who are musical and who would rather pay a quarter than listen to a hand-organ. By a judicious arrangement with these people, carried on by correspondence, the organ-grinder would be able to collect a large revenue without venturing out, except occasionally to play before the house of a delinquent subscriber in order to remind him that he had let his contract expire. So, by slow degrees, we should find beggars doing their work privately and not publicly, tramps circulating only among those whose sympathies they have aroused, and organ-grinding only a memory."
"The last, I think, would not come about," said Mr. Pedagog. "For there are people who like the music of hand-organs."
"True—I'm one of 'em. I'd hire a hansom to follow a piano-organ about the city if I could afford it, but as a rule the hand-organ lovers are of the one-cent class," returned the Idiot. "The quarter class are people who would rather not hear the hand-organ, and it is to them that a grinder of business capacity would naturally address himself. It is far pleasanter to stay at home and be paid large money for doing nothing than to undertake a weary march through the city to receive small sums for doing something. That's human nature, Mr. Pedagog."
"I presume it is," said Mr. Pedagog; "but I don't think your scheme is. Human nature works, but your plan wouldn't."
"Well, of course," said the Idiot, "you never can tell about ideals. The fact that an ideal is ideal is the chief argument against its amounting to much. But I am confident that if my Beggar's Don't and Élite Directory fail, my other book will go."
"You appear to have the writing of a library in mind," sneered the Bibliomaniac.
"I have," said the Idiot. "If I write all the books I have in mind, the public library will be a small affair beside mine."
"And your other book is to be what?" queried Mr. Whitechoker.
" Plausible Tales for Beggars to Tell ," said the Idiot. "If the beggar could only tell an interesting story he'd be surer of an ear in which to whisper it. The usual beggar's tale is commonplace. There's no art in it. There are no complications of absorbing interest. There is not a soul in creation, I venture to say, but would be willing to have a beggar stop right in the middle of his story. The tales I'd write for them would be so interesting that the attention of the wayfarer would be arrested at once. His mind would be riveted on the situation at once, and, instead of hurrying along and trying to leave the beggar behind, he would stop, button-hole him, and ask him to sit down on a convenient doorstep and continue. If a beggar could have such a story to tell as would enable him in the midst of one of its most exciting episodes to whisper hoarsely into the ear of the man whose nickel he was seeking, 'The rest of this interesting story I will tell you in Central Park at nine o'clock to-morrow night,' in such a manner as would impel the listener to meet him in the Park the following evening, his fortune would be made. Such a book I hope some day to write."
"I have no doubt," said Mr. Whitechoker, "that it will be an entertaining addition to fiction."
"Nor have I," said the Idiot. "It will make the writers of to-day green with envy, and, as for the beggars, if it is not generally known that it is I and not they who are responsible for the work, the beggars will shortly find themselves in demand as writers of fiction for the magazines."
"And you?" suggested the Poet.
"I shall be content. Mere gratitude will force the beggars to send me the magazine orders, and I'll write their articles and be glad of the opportunity, giving them ten per cent. of the profits. I know a man who makes fifty dollars a year at magazine work, and one of my ambitions is to rival the Banker-Poets and Dry Goods Essayists by achieving fame as the Boarding-house Dickens."