“You have made me look at the subject from a new point of view,” he said. “I confess I was rather ashamed of the soliciting part of the work at first – felt a good deal like a cripple selling pencils to support a sick wife.”
“And very likely you acted like it,” remarked Murray, “in which case the people you approached would so class you. It isn’t necessary to have the ‘iron nerve,’ so long identified with that branch of the work; it isn’t even helpful, for it makes a man unpopular, and the most successful men are the most popular ones. You’ve lost ground when you have reached a point where any man you know is not glad to see you enter his office. At the same time,” – musingly, – “nerve and persistence become forethought and wisdom when time proves you were right. I have known of cases where a man afterward thanked the solicitor who had once made life a burden to him; but it is always better to change a man’s mind without his knowledge.”
“Rather difficult,” laughed Ross.
“But it has been done,” said Murray. “As a matter of fact, you are working to save men and women from their own selfishness or heedlessness. If you think of that, you will be more convincing and will raise your work to the dignity of a profession; if you think only of the commissions, you will put yourself on the level of the shyster lawyer whose interest centers wholly in the fees he is able to get rather than in the cases he is to try. There are pot-boilers in every business and every profession, but success is not for them: they can’t see beyond the needs of the stomach, and the man who works only for his belly never amounts to much. He will stoop to small things to gain a temporary advantage, never seeing the future harm he is doing; he is the kind of man who hopes to rise by pulling others down. Remember, my boy, that insinuations as to the instability of a rival company invariably make a man suspicious of all: when you have convinced him that the rival’s proposition and methods are not based on sound financial and business principles, you have more than half convinced him that yours aren’t, either, and that very likely there is something radically wrong with the whole blame system.”
“I’m glad you spoke of that,” said Ross. “There have been cases where insinuations have been made against our company, and I have been tempted to fight back the same way. A man is at a disadvantage when he is put on the defensive and is called upon to produce evidence of what ought to be a self-evident proposition.”
“Never do it, unless the question is put to you directly,” advised Murray. “You must defend yourself when attacked, but, in every other case, go on the assumption that your company is all right, and that everybody knows it is all right. The late John J. Ingalls once said, ‘When you have to offer evidence that an egg is good, that egg is doubtful, and a doubtful egg is always bad.’ It’s worth remembering. Many a man is made doubtful of a good proposition by ill-advised efforts to prove it is good.”
“If that is invariably true,” – with a troubled scowl, – “I fear I have made some mistakes.”
“The man who thinks he makes no mistakes seldom makes anything else.”
Ross brightened perceptibly at this.
“You’ve made them yourself?” he asked.
“Lots of them,” replied Murray, and then he added whimsically: “Once I placed a risk that meant a two-hundred-dollar commission for me, and my wife and I went right out and ordered two hundred dollars’ worth of furniture and clothes. The risk was refused, and I never got the commission.”
Ross laughed.
“I’m beginning to develop enthusiasm and pride in the business – I mean profession.”
“Oh, call it a business,” returned Murray, “but think of it as a profession. It’s the way you regard it yourself that counts, and you can’t go far astray in that if you stop to think what is required of a good insurance man. Sterling integrity, for one thing, and tact and judgment. A man who brings in a good ten-thousand-dollar risk is more valuable than the man who brings in one hundred thousand dollars that is turned down by the physicians or at the home office. And the first requisite for advancement is absolute trustworthiness. There are temptations, even for a solicitor – commission rebates to the insured that are contrary to the ethics of the business – and there are greater temptations higher up. You will learn, as in no other line, that a man wants what he can’t get, even if he didn’t want it when he could get it, and he will pay a high price for what he wants. Collusion in a local office might give it to him, in spite of all precautions taken; such collusion might be worth ten thousand dollars to a man who had no record of refusal by other companies against him, and ten thousand dollars could be split up very nicely between the local agent and the company’s physician. So integrity, unswerving integrity, is rated exceptionally high, and the least suspicion of trickery or underhand dealing may keep a capable man on the lowest rung of the ladder for all time, even if it doesn’t put him out of the business entirely. You are paid to protect your company, so far as lies in your power, and to get business by all honorable means; if you resort to dishonorable means, even in your company’s interests, there is always the suspicion that you will use the same methods against its interests whenever that may be to your personal advantage.”
Owen Ross pondered this deeply on his way home. It gave a new dignity to his occupation. He had taken up insurance because it happened to be the only available opening at a time when he was out of employment. He had been a clerk for a big corporation that had recently combined two branch offices, thus materially reducing its office force, and Ross had been one of those to suffer. His father, a prosperous merchant, had expressed himself, when consulted, in this way:
“I will give you a place here whenever that is necessary to enable you to live, but I prefer that you should complete your preliminary business training under some one else. No boy can consider himself a success until he has proved his independence, and no boy can be sure he has proved that until he has made a secure place for himself outside the family circle.”
So Ross, being wise enough to see the reason and justice of this, endeavored to show his independence by securing a position with Murray. And, although fairly successful from the start, he was only just beginning to take a real interest in his work. Murray liked him and encouraged him: there was, he thought, the making of a good and successful man in him, and he frequently went to considerable trouble to explain the theory and practice of insurance. Then, too, he knew that Ross had married just before he lost his other position, and that he was living in a modest little flat on his own earnings, in spite of the fact that he had a father who would be much more ready to assist him financially than he was to take him into his own office at that particular time. In fact, the elder Ross was quite willing that his son and his son’s wife should live with him, holding only that the family influence should not extend to his first business connections, but Owen deemed the flat a necessary evidence of his independence.
“I’ll get that sanctimonious optimist to-morrow,” he mused as he walked along. “He can’t answer those arguments that Murray gave me. He is content because the Lord will provide, but why may not I be the human instrument through which the Lord makes provision? That sounds presumptuous, but why not? Hasn’t He provided for others in just this way? Hasn’t many a man, convinced against his will, protected the future of those he loved barely in time?” He laughed quietly at a thought that occurred to him. “If this man should be insured to-morrow and die the next day,” he went on, “he would think the Lord had provided, but if he has to pay the premiums for twenty years, he’ll think it all very human. I’m beginning to understand him.”
He was still smiling at this quaint conceit when he entered his flat and was informed by his wife that Mrs. Becker had been there to see him. Mrs. Becker was a woman who did washing and occasional cleaning for them.
“To see me!” he exclaimed. “Why, her dealings are all with you.”
“It has something to do with insurance,” his wife explained. “She knows you’re in that business, of course, and she is in deep distress. She was crying when she was here this afternoon, but I couldn’t understand what the trouble was. She said she’d come back this evening.”
Ross