Part 7

With a Green Eye on Gain, the other Rulers then buckled on their war boots and galloped into the muck to help the respective pugs and at the same time help themselves to anything lying around uncrated.

When they all got thoroughly started, Hell closed its doors and went out of business on account of the competition.

Each Ruler realizing that he himself couldn’t fight for fried fish, began to shake his little mad-made god before the eyes of the Deluded, and through poetry, prose and prayer got them to believe that it was deity’s own special wish that he should slaughter his neighbor. This worked like a kaffir charm and all hands went to the slaughter with a smile that reached from ear to ear and clear around to the back of the neck.

Every time a certain Divine Righter landed a good old jaw-breaker on the enemy he would say that it was god’s coaching that did it, and every time he got one in the abdominal area that doubled him up like a folding-bed, he would shake his finger at the victor and splutter out, “You wait! God will punish you yet!” They all had the very same god working for them and beseeched him to come down and wallow with them.

When the rough-house had progressed long enough to lay them all out squirming and moaning and praying like a lot of winded dervishes, the great God of Eternity—the God that forged the Universe of Universes and set countless worlds a’whirring in one grand harmony of Love and Service—leaned over the balcony of Heaven, and with the back of His mighty hand swept them all off the dinky, ball-shaped mass of matter like ants from a table top.

HOT SKETCH NO. 19

THE PASSING OF THE BUCK PASSERS

THERE was a man of Pep and Potential who owned a large and constantly stretching Business.

Originally it was the size of a pants button and consisted of one ratty Rolltop, two rubber-stamps and a nominal assortment of liabilities.

National Advertising had dredged the Business out of the dump of Dinkyism and tossed it upon the apex of Affluence.

The sudden and unexpected growth had sunk the Boss ear-deep in detail drudgery, and so he decided to surround himself with men who could balance some of the burden that rested upon his convex shoulders and caused forehead-furrows like a first-line trench.

Thereupon he hired for his Sales Manager a calm and collected caterpillar who had been doing high-class dental work at a leading Way Station and acting as professional pallbearer on off-days. Caterpill came Highly Recommended by a frowsy friend connected with an Advertising Agency that was hoeing in 15 per cent on all business placed.

The Boss next decided to graft onto the main trunk an expert Advertising Manager, and so he selected from the 70,000 agitated applicants a complacent party that knew as much about Advertising as a first-class dragoman.

Then said Doc Boss to himself, said he: Now that I have the Sales and Advertising ends of the works hemmed up, I must get me somebody with brains and ballast to do my buying; also a hot hound to superintend the plant and a sprightly spaniel to see that the stuff gets shipped during the same historical epoch in which orders are received.

So he sniffed about the town and soon had these pearly positions filled with a couple of polliwogs related to his wife’s uncle and his cousin’s chums, and they brought their letters of Hearty endorsement from the Pastor and the red-horned Congressman of the District.

Having surrounded himself with the afore enumerated eminent executives, Comrade Boss leaned back in his revolving Reposer and said: “At last I am going to cop a wee round of rest and recreation. No more work, worry, and wiscissitude for me.”

The last syllable had slid gracefully away on the serene, sweet morning air when the new Superintendent greased in to find out if there would be any objection to his putting a new hinge on the factory door.

On his way out, the Supe bumped into the Sales Manager on his way in to ask Governor Boss if he should go ahead and O. K. an Expense Account upon whose fair bosom rested a Bus Fare charge at Holbrook Hollow where the hotel leans leisurely up against the railroad station.

Mayor-general Boss smiled sweetly, said “No” (dam you) and turned away to wrestle with a few speckled doubts that began to creep up into his Thinkery and nibble at his Composure.

Before he had bottled his irritabiliousness, in flowed the serene Advertising Manager wanting to know whether he should change the copy in the Ads every decade or so, or let it stand until it fell down from sheer exhaustion.

When this genius of initiative had ebbed away, the Boss’s telephone she rang and he grabbed at the instrument like a straw grabs at a drowning man, thinking that some diversion in way of a date might be in prospect.

But he found it was the new Buyer wanting to know which of two quotations he should accept—the higher or the lower. Professor Boss replied that it was a knotty case to decide off-palm, but from a superficial cast-over there might be no grievous mistake in accepting the lower quotation; and the Buyer naturally said he thought the same way but didn’t feel justified in taking the responsibility of deciding all alone by hisself.

When Uncle Boss had hung up the receiver he found the bright-eyed Shipping Clerk standing at his tired side waiting to be wisdomed-up on whether he should ship 34,999 lbs. at the L. C. L. rate or pay for the extra lb. and get the C. L. rate.

Major Boss thought a long time but not about what the Shipping Clerkerino had whispered. He was just trying to make a choice between murder and suicide. He decided to do neither, but to just hold onto his Patience as a matter of self-discipline and try to get in his rest between Foolish Quesions.

For the first six months he seemed to be making considerable prog., often getting several moments to himself, during which aforesaid moments he fumbled with his cufflinkers and pulled his eyebrows to see if he could get one out at every pull.

But when the calendar year had begun to run down at the heel, the demands from the Department Heads became so insistent and insupperable that one day Cap Boss jumped up on his desk, gave one blood icing yell, swung his arms wildly in the crisp autumn ozone, and dove head-on into the cuspidor.

When he had been fished out and revived, he seemed strangely calm and collected. In a voice that had a weird, far-away-over-the-hills sound, but carrying in its depths an unmistakable quality of determination, he called in all his hefty, high-class helpers, told them to be seated, and spake as hereinafter recorded, to wit and to-wot:

“When I engaged you muskrats I had a feeling that this Business was slightly pied. I thought you could do the Necessary, and use such commonsense as you perhaps happened to have, in order to push the Enterprise to the pinnacle of Power.

“I now find that not a rum of you has the initiative of a set of false whiskers nor the judgment of a jelly-bean. As Buck Passers you’ve got everything this side of Congress pummeled to a pulp, and when it comes to stalling, you are all Class A-Super and no mistake.

“You will therefore please take a long jump into the jungles of Oblivion, and, as a little souvenir of my regard, I propose to present each man on his way out with a swift kick in the Kupps.”

When the last kanoop had cleared, Commodore Boss got a new outfit consisting of non-relatived men of EXPERIENCE and while the thought of the high salaries he had to pay them made him swallow like a cock eating corn-meal, he got over it when he found he could get off every afternoon for 18 holes and fish for a fortnight without fretting a fret.

HOT SKETCH NO. 20

THE EXECUTIVE WITH THE CLERK’S MIND

A ONE-LEGGED manufactory had a little round office boy.

He used to go down to the Post Office every morning on his roller skates and fetch up the mail in a leather sack.

We forget the exact dimensions of the sack, but the story can go on without them until such time as we may be able to call them up.

This office boy was a good office boy and did not carve his initials in his father’s wooden leg, nor hang around the streets watching a safe moving in.

The manufactory in which he hopped about and drew his Dollar and a Quarter a week, was not so big as Standard Oil, but it had a side-track and a time-clock and involved the activities of seventy-five men, two of which were old women—the Sales & Advertising Manager and the Proprietor.

Time scuffled on, and the War came, and with it came some new business.

At first the Proprietor and the Sales Manager were a little sore around the heart at this intrusion upon their days of peace and quiet, spent largely in cutting up old envelopes for scratch paper.

But gradually they got used to the upset and flurry, and when the monthly Balance Sheet began to smile and then to grin, it poked their Ambition in the ribs and the first thing they knew they were actually craning their shaved necks for business in the Domestic as well as in the Export arena.

Men think they push their own business to greatness, but they don’t. Nine out of ten have greatness thrust upon them by national advertising, but you never hear of them chasing the Agency that did it up the boulevard trying to catch and laurel it for pulling them out of the puddle of commercial provincialism.

Here let us state in calm, well modulated tones that we are not forgetting about the office boy, around whose life this little narrative is written, or wrotten. We are letting him alone until he grows into manhood.

The office boy is now grown and so is the business.

The boy is Alfred William Clerkmind, and he is the President of the whole outfit.

The old proprietor has long since been mounded and marked, and the Sales & Advertising Manager, of whom we spoke of, or rather, about whom we spoke about, is still reading Printers Ink and learning how they put it over.

Alfred William Clerkmind has been so busy growing up with the business that he has never had time to travel any farther from home than the one-lunged Country Club for nine holes on a Sunday morning.

His reading has been confined to his Trade Magazine, his home town daily, and his competitors’ catalogues.

The people he has met socially are the same earspreaders he used to know as boys and girls in the days when he was juggling up the mail in the leather sack, size 24″ x 36″.

The men he has met in a business way, all have come down to the bowlegged burg to sell him something, and so he has always had eager listeners whenever he talked from the chest out; so he has been denied the golden privilege of having men tell him to his cone-shaped face just what they thought of him and his Ideas.

In other phraseology, Alfred William Clerkmind, executive, is Alfred William Clerkmind, office boy, with different scenery. His arms and legs are longer, his body thicker, his head fatter than when he licked stamps, but his psychology and general outlook are the same.

He tells his New York Salesman that one can live for four dollars a week at the best boarding house in Skunkton with Neapolitan ice cream every Sunday, and therefore any man should be able to do the same in New York—or do better, because there’s a bigger choice in Noo Yoark.

Every time it comes to changing copy in the ads, they have to throw him and blindfold him to keep him from re-writing it himself and running in a lot of snappy, pungent stuff of the come-one-come-all, we-strive-to-please variety.

Alfred William doesn’t understand why a salesman should ride in a Pullman any more than why the Trade shouldn’t wiggle up on its abdomen and beg for the Goods.

And since he has not the time to travel, nor read, nor meet people who do, he has no way of getting at the facts of business.

He feels that he must personally ooze into every part of the works at all times. And, as a consequence, none of the department heads cares to assume the responsibility of sealing an envelope without getting Alfie’s “O. K.”

Sometimes Alfie tries to be a good fellow, and thereupon he slaps somebody a wooden slap on the back. But there’s something in his playfulness that makes the recip. feel like turning around and spreading his resentment all over Alfie’s respectable features.

When anybody is relating a humorsome narrative, Alfie sets a certain time and place to laugh regardless of the development of the story, and then there’s no telling how long the rafters are going to hold out. Then just as suddenly he gets back into his coffin and pulls down the lid.

At such times Alfie’s voice has about as much merriment in it as a sack of dried apples, but whenever he decides to burst forth, all the little office gnats have got to laugh too, for fear they will lose their Fifty Dollar jobs if they don’t.

Emerson says that every institution is the lengthened shadow of the kanoop that started it, and we are not mentioning this just to show how clubby we are with Ralph’s sayings, but to clear up any outstanding doubt that the institution of which Alfred William Clerkmind is the head and front, and coat, pants and collar-button, reflects in every detail the spirit of the big, broad, ruddycheeked Captain of Industry that steers it.

An idea might walk into that Works and hang around for six months, and not a man in the whole outfit would invite it to come in and sit down.

The most important business of the week that any of the inmates has on his mind is how to get the shirt back from the Chinaman’s in time for the Saturday night dance at the Commercial Ath-a-letic Club.

We started this story with the intention of showing how Alfred William Clerkmind finally made a trip to Kankakee and broadened out. But he can’t seem to make up his mind which train he will take, and in the meantime the space alloted to us for this story has run out.

So we can only say in closing that no business can expect to wax international when the Chief Executive is carrying around with him the same cow-licked sky-piece that he used when he was bowlegging up the street with the morning’s mail in a sack.

_Lesson for Today:_ As one grows older, the head should change inside as well as outside.

HOT SKETCH NO. 21

THE WAR WINNING PATRIOTEER

HE WAS paunchy and broad-beamed and looked like one of Artist Young’s skippers of industry.

The top of his dome was mercerized but there was a sturdy little hedge of auburn stubble running west of a line drawn parallel with the top of his right listener.

This served as a dam to catch the honest perspiration from running down on his Henry Clay collar.

It also gave him something semi-tangible to comb in the mornings.

His full-orbed jowls were decorated with auburn fenders, parted in the middle and severely orthodox in their general behavior.

Naturally, with this trimming, he was long on civic righteousness, religious rallies and other pillar activities.

He was one of those opulent American industrial successes that point with their thumbs, believe that woman’s place is the home, and go in and out of an elevator square across, regardless of wedged-in humanity.

Perhaps the most dominant of his virtues was his high-pressure patriotism. When it came to patriotic oratory he had Patrick Henry looking like a gaping neutral.

It was only logical, therefore, that he should have become a most fearless and forensic advocate of Preparedness as soon as the word was coined. And he did become that same, as hereinbefore itemized.

In 1916, when California decided to elect President Wilson, this popular pusher for Preparedness was wild with indignation, and tore out his luxurious side whiskers by the fistful, and jumped up and down on his little malleable derby.

Everyone with whom he came in contact was assured by him that the country was heading for helldom on high.

It also gave him a bit of relief to vent his vituperation on Comrade President for not rushing into War on the day that Kaiser Bill began to shoot up the high seas like a bar braggart on a busy Saturday night.

Almost any hour you passed his office you could hear him over the transom telling somebody about the folly of Watchful Waiting, conciliatory notes and other presidential piffle.

He said that nothing could be nobler than for young Americans to offer up their lives in defense of flag and country.

And just to show how doggone deep his Nationalism went, he trotted out and bought a great big American flag for cash and nailed it up back of his desk.

When Uncle Sam finally decided to throw the little felt kelly into the international ring, he turned back the lapel of his coat and threw out his patriotic chest as if he had scored some big personal victory against the determined resistance of a hundred million Americans.

One day, shortly after the events of which we speak, our War Hero was found sitting at his Mahogany, with knitted brows and knotted physiog, steeped in painful, ponderous thought.

Nobody knew just what had struck him until he called his stenographer and dictated a very private but trenchant letter to the Congressman of his District and another to his favorite Senator with the wooden Prince Al, adjuring them to fight against the clause in the War Tax Bill that threatened to assail his profits.

Having landed a munitions contract in the early days of the war that netted him a cold, clammy four million in profits, and having drawn a beautiful mental picture of just how he was going to invest that million so as to bring a modest return of 100 percent, he was naturally given over to the ravages of righteous indig when he learned that the Government proposed to put its large horny fist into his profit bag and extract a fairly girthful percentage of those profits for use in helping clothe and feed the young Americans whom he so highly honored for their Patriotism.

Also he went up in the air ’way beyond anti-aircraft range when he found that the draft bill contemplated calling into active service young men between the ages of 20 and 30.

He loudly proclaimed it a ridiculous and preposterous piece of flumdubble to call upon such young men when every sane man knew that the Flower of American virility was between the ages of 31 and 41.

His son was 24 and he was 54.

When the first Liberty Bond issue was floated he got sort of backed into an uncomfortable corner and spent several tortuous nights and difficult days wondering how he was going to hurdle this issue without barking his patriotic shins.

At last, after looking up Uncle Sam in Bradstreets, and convincing himself that Uncle S. would not go bust right away, he made up his mind to plunge, irrespective of his own future comfort.

So he went down to his bank and bought a nice One Hundred Dollar Bond which he offered to sell to any of his employes who might not have a chance to get to the polls before they closed.

The next day he took steps to have his son exempted from the draft on the grounds that he was the sole support of his motor car—but of course assured the Board of the young patriot’s eagerness to trek for the trenches.

He also stopped long enough in his work of figuring out a 100% increase in the selling price of his wares to get an assortment of little allied flags and stick them on the hood of his Packard.

In addition, he bought a Red Cross button and put it in the aperature of his coat lapel.

Further, he allowed one of his clerks to spend several hours on the Firm’s time to collect a fund for the Red Cross from the other employes, and he himself led off the list with a Dollar which nobody had the nerve to collect from him after he wrote down his influential name.

In fact, patriotism and practical helpfulness to the Nation ran rampant through his whole family.

His wife started to knit an army sweater at the outbreak of the War, and as we go to press she is still knitting it. She has got as far as casting off the neck.

His daughter also started in energetically to make Red Cross bandages, and every week or so she went down to Headquarters for an hour to get in out of the cold while waiting for some friend for tea.

When final victory perched upon the banner of the Allied Cause and The Boys came dragging home to a jobless civic life, this patriotic pillar of Preparedness whose unselfish service to his country in time of national need had so greatly lightened the nation’s burden, threw the whole tonnage of his influence against The Soldiers’ Bonus Bill and other Paternalistic Notions, declaring them pernicious and Economically Unsound.

He also wrote a book entitled “How We Won The War” and dedicated it to his son and daughter.

_Lesson for Today:_ Sherman was right.

HOT SKETCH NO. 22

TYPICAL AMERICAN AND CRITICAL AMERICAN

THERE was once a comfortable piece of suet who considered himself a Typical American and oozed oleaginous sentiments of Lofty Patriotism through a three-dimensional Mid Western brogue every time he saw a good opening.

He loved America so much that he used to spend six months out of every year Abroad with his big cigars and his fat wife. He liked to get up on a barrel in every port he backed into, and tell the natives a few things about Our great liberty-loving America where every man was free to spit on the sidewalk if he wanted to.

He took a Keen Delight in roasting everything that was non-American and making himself miserable every time he turned a foreign corner. He used to grease down three 18-inch collars every day pointing out to his billow-chinned Helpmeet how senseless These Here Foreigners were for doing things this way instead of doing them that way. Any time he overlooked anything for condemnation, the Little One (Ton) would heave-to and remind him of it in a whistling nasaletto that made you instinctively hang onto your hat.

From two to four hours were put in each day of the calender month grousing about the cold rooms, cold hotels, cold shops, cold theatres, cold everything. It made them both hot to think of the cold. During these protest meetings, Typical American would tread the floor heavily and work his cigar angrysomely from one side of his gasser to the other and then back again, and take a solemn oath before his Maker that if he ever got back home without cracking he would turn on the steam-heat until the walls began to run like sap.

Another thing that always added to the merriment of their foreign philandering was the Customs. Every time an inspector requested Typ. Am. or his Better Half Ton to open up a piece of luggage, Typ would bring down upon the inquisitive little inspectorial head a torrent of biting injective that would have made it crawl under the culvert in shame had it been able to get next to the linguistic delivery.

For the inconveniences and jarring out-of-dateness of Foreign Travel were but a mild rash when it came to the question of power to annoy. It was the systematic pillaging of Typ and Mrs. Typ that proved to be the big aching carbuncle.

Every time Typ went to pay a taxi fare, they tried to flam him out of two or three cents and he used to have to use up about seven dollars’ worth of American energy arguing the hold-up with the robber at the wheel and trying to prove to him in excited expletives that the legal Scale of Rates showed 20 cents for two miles instead of 22 cents.

When Typ would register at a hotel he always had to get into the ring for ten rounds with the Swiss Cheese in the long prince albert before he could get anything like the rate and the room he wanted. What he didn’t tell the Concierge down stairs about his old hotel he would tell the porters up stairs when they were juggling in the baggage.

Meanwhile Mrs. Typ would be examining the curtains and things, and giving the pirates a piece of her mind for charging Four Dollars a day for one double room and bath when they should have had the whole floor for that price.