Page 206 - Napoleon Hill Think and Grow Rich Full Book | Success Learned

There must be many of them, but their despair is not apparent. Maybe they kill
themselves.

"When a man is down and out he has time on his hands for brooding. He may
travel miles to see a man about a job and discover that the job is filled or that it
is one of those jobs with no base pay but only a commission on the sale of some
useless knick-knack which nobody would buy, except out of pity. Turning that
down, he finds himself back on the street with nowhere to go but just anywhere.
So he walks and walks. He gazes into store windows at luxuries which are not for
him, and feels inferior and gives way to people who stop to look with an active
interest. He wanders into the railroad station or puts himself down in the library
to ease his legs and soak up a little heat, but that isn't looking for a job, so he gets
going again. He may not know it, but his aimlessness would give him away even
if the very lines of his figure did not. He may be well dressed in the clothes left
over from the days when he had a steady job, but the clothes cannot disguise the
droop.

"MONEY MAKES DIFFERENCE.

"He sees thousands of other people, bookkeepers or clerks or chemists or wagon
hands, busy at their work and envies them from the bottom of his soul. They have
their independence, their self-respect and manhood, and he simply cannot con-
vince himself that he is a good man, too, though he argue it out and arrive at a
favorable verdict hour after hour.

"It is just money which makes this difference in him. With a little money he would
be himself again.

"Some employers take the most shocking advantage of people who are down and
out. The agencies hang out little colored cards offering miserable wages to busted
men-$i2 a week, $15 a week.

An $18 a week job is a plum, and anyone with $25 a week to offer does not hang
the job in front of an agency on a colored card. I have a want ad clipped from a
local paper demanding a clerk, a good, clean penman, to take telephone orders
for a sandwich shop from 11 A.M. to 2 P.M. for $8 a month-not $8 a week but $8
a month.

The ad says also, v State religion.' Can you imagine the brutal effrontery of anyone
who demands a good, clean penman for 11 cents an hour inquiring into the vic-
tim's religion? But that is what busted people are offered."

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NAPOLEON HILL THINK AND GROW RICH