hardship. They rather enjoyed roughing it, and took delight in privation.
Therefore, they also were a comparatively easy burden on the hands of the
fat man; who was thus enabled to sit upon a golden throne, in a
comfortable palace, surrounded by all the beauties and luxuries gathered
from the four winds, and enjoy himself while directing the work of both
the intellectual giant and the physical giant.
THE SLENDER SCHOLAR AND THE RUGGED SOLDIER
Kant, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Spencer, Emerson, and Bergson were
philosophers, and were all lean and slender men. Lord Kelvin, Lister,
Darwin, Curie, Francis Bacon, Michelson, Loeb, Burbank, and most of our
other scientists are also of the thin, lean type. Shakespeare, Longfellow,
Holmes, Ruskin, Tindall, Huxley, and a long list of other intellectual and
spiritual writers were men who never put on much flesh. James Watt, Robert
Fulton, Elias Howe, Eli Whitney, S.F.B. Morse, Marconi, Alexander Graham
Bell, the Wright Brothers, and nearly all of our other great inventors
have also been men whose habit was slender. Alexander, Napoleon,
Washington, Grant, Kitchener, and most of our other great soldiers, while
robust, are of the raw-boned, muscular type. They do not belong in the
list of the fat men. The same is true of our great railroad builders, of
Stanley, Peary, Livingston, and other explorers, of De Palma, Oldfield,
Anderson, Cooper, Resta, and our other automobile racing kings. You look
in vain among the aviators for a huge, rotund figure. Spend a week in New
York City looking over subway workers, structural iron workers, guards,
brakemen, motormen, carpenters, bricklayers, truckmen, stevedores, and
boatmen. Go out into the country, look over the farm hands, the gardeners,
the woodsmen, and all who work with their hands in the midst of nature,
and in all the list you will find very few, if any, fat men. Fat men are,
therefore, doing neither the actual intellectual nor the actual physical
work of the world.
THE FAT MAN'S MODERN THRONE
Study butchers, bakers, chefs, provision merchants, and others who deal in
food products. Among them you will find a good many corpulent figures.
They are interested in good things to eat. They know how to handle them.
They know how to purchase them, and they know how to sell them. They are
able to tickle the palate of the lean and hungry scholar, of the robust
and active soldier or worker, and, especially, of men as epicurean as
themselves. They are, therefore, successful in the handling of food
products. Go a little further--study foremen, superintendents, managers,
and presidents of corporations. In many a large upholstered chair, which
represents, in our modern life, the golden throne of the olden days, you
will find a fat man. Here, as of old, they are taking the ideas of the
thinkers and the muscular powers of the workers, and combining the two to
make profit for themselves. At the same time, they are finding for the
thinker a market for his ideas that he himself could never find. Unless
the fat man fed him, the lean man would become so lean that he would
finally die of starvation. The big fellow is also finding a market for the
muscular power, energy, and skill of the worker; a market which the
worker, by himself, could never find.
THE FAT MAN'S VALUABLE SERVICE
Recently we made a study of a large corporation. Amongst other things, we
found it required ten thousand dollars capital to provide the building,
machinery, help, tools, advertising, selling, and other necessities of