How They Got On In The World.

Brief Biographies of Successful Men Who Have Passed Through the Crucible of Small Beginnings and Won Out.

Compiled and edited for The Scrap Book.

"THE MORGAN OF JAPAN."

Farmer's Son Organized the First Japanese National Bank and Aided in Establishing His Country's Industries.

"Baron Shibuzawa," says Jihei Hashiguchi, "is called the J.P. Morgan of Japan. But he is more important to Japan's industry than Mr. Morgan is to that of the United States, for the industry of the United States can in a sense get along without J.P. Morgan. The industry of Japan cannot do without Baron Shibuzawa."

The man who has been the industrial and financial savior of Japan was born near Tokyo in 1840. His father was a farmer of slender resources, and supplemented the small earnings of the farm by the cultivation of silkworms and the manufacture of indigo. The boy was lazy—the laziest boy in the empire, he was called—and he spent most of his time in reading fiction, studying the history of his country and China, and familiarizing himself with the Japanese and Chinese classics. Fencing also was one of his diversions, and when he was fourteen years old he swore allegiance to one of the feudal lords at Kioto, the ancient capital of Japan.

In 1853 Commodore Matthew C. Perry visited Japan, and his visit paved the way for the opening up of the country to foreigners as well as for a revolution in the social and industrial conditions of the island empire.

Three years after Perry's visit, the Shogun, hereditary commander-in-chief of the Japanese armies and head of the powerful clan of Minamoto, assumed the title of Tycoon. At one time the Shogun rivaled and even surpassed the Mikado in power. But his influence was rapidly declining. Shibuzawa knew this, yet he entered the service of the Tycoon, and in 1867 he accompanied the brother of the latter on a political mission to France.

Up to that time Shibuzawa had been nothing more than an ordinary member of the Samurai. The contrast between conditions in Europe and in Japan affected him deeply.

Assumed European Dress.

The first thing he did was to have his topknot cut off, discard the Japanese dress and two swords, clothe himself in ordinary European costume and have his picture taken. He sent copies of the photographs home, and his family, friends, and official superiors were shocked at his apostasy. He knew that would be the effect, and to prepare himself for the storm that would greet him on returning he put in all his time studying European institutions, and in acquiring the rudiments of French and English.

When he arrived home in 1868 the revolution that ended forever the power of the Shogun, abolished the Samurai, and vastly curtailed the privileges of the nobility had begun. He remained true to the Shogun, but after the utter defeat of the latter before the walls of Kioto he entered the service of the Mikado, and his knowledge was of vast importance in the reorganization and rebuilding that came after the revolution had done its work.

In 1870 he was appointed assistant vice-minister of finance, and in that position he undertook to place the currency of the country on a firm basis. Japan was flooded with depreciated paper money, with a face value of so much rice. This was steadily called in and more stable money issued.

Helped Build First Railroad.

This same year the first railroad in Japan—the Tokyo-Yokohama, twenty miles long—was constructed, and Shibuzawa aided in the work to the full extent of his power. Higher political offices were open to him, but he decided he could be of more use to his country as a business man than as an official, so in 1873 he resigned office.

"I realized," he said, "that the real force of progress lay in actual business, not in politics, and that the business element was really the most influential for the advancement of the country. I soon came to the conclusion that the capital of an individual was not enough to accomplish very much, and I then became the means of introducing the company system into Japan. The idea was successful, and the government approved it. Since then, I may say, every industry in the country has increased—some twenty times, some ten times, and none less than five times."

His first act was to establish a national bank, modeled on the national banks of the United States, and two years later he organized the Tokyo Chamber of Commerce, modeled also on American chambers of commerce, and of this became president. The extension of railroads, the establishment of gas companies, pulp-mills, cotton-mills, iron-foundries, shipyards, and steamship lines next occupied his attention, and he was successful in all of them. The amount of money he made personally was not great, but he placed Japan on a sound, modern commercial basis.

The results of his work were seen first in the Chinese-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, and later in the war between Japan and Russia. Japan was ready, financially, for these conflicts. It was possible for the Japanese mills and factories to furnish much of the equipment for the Japanese armies.

The advice of Shibuzawa constantly had been:

"Get in line with progress. Be as modern in all things as the rest of the world."

He had to go against ancient prejudices, shatter ancient customs, and shock conservative people, as he did when he cut off his topknot and replaced his Japanese garb with modern European clothing. But his advice was good, and, it having been heeded, Japan profited not a little.

CRANE, MAN OF BUSINESS.

Massachusetts Senator, Though Neither an Orator Nor an Author, Is a Highly Successful Statesman.

Winthrop Murray Crane, who succeeded George Frisbie Hoar as United States Senator from Massachusetts, is not an author, orator, or scholar, but Massachusetts is as proud of him as of the other distinguished Senators she has furnished. Senator Crane was born in Dalton, Massachusetts, in 1853. His grandfather had started a small paper-mill in a valley among the Berkshire hills, more than fifty years before that date, and Crane's father, in turn, had taken up the business and continued it. Still, while it gave a fair living, it did little more, and was of no greater consequence than hundreds of other little industries in the State.

Young Crane was educated at Williston Academy, Easthampton. He showed no fondness for books and study, and made no attempt to get a college education. At seventeen he left school, put on overalls and started in to learn the paper-making business in his father's mill. Methods were still crude and the production of the mill was small.

When Crane had learned all the mill could teach him he began to look beyond it for improved methods, for a greater outlet for the product, and for increased capacity. He speedily found ways to reach all three, and the little mill began to take on importance.

In 1879 he learned of a new method of running silk threads through paper, and he was convinced that this was an important advantage in the making of paper for currency, as it would render counterfeiting more difficult. He made up some samples of the new paper and took them to Washington. Those whom he saw were not at first impressed, and he was referred from one official to another, back and around the whole line, spending several weeks in fruitless endeavor.

The case of the red-threaded paper seemed hopeless, but he stuck persistently to the task, and brought the paper so often to the notice of the authorities that at last they consented to look at it. Then its advantages were evident, and the Crane Brothers' paper-mills got a contract to furnish a lot of bond-paper for the printing of government notes. They have held the contract ever since, and all the paper on which United States money is printed comes from the paper-mills in Dalton.

Crane First Enters Politics.

Crane made his first appearance in politics in 1892 as a delegate to the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, when Harrison was renominated, and later, in 1896, he was a delegate to the St. Louis convention where McKinley was nominated. It was in 1896, too, that he ran for office for the first time and was elected Lieutenant-Governor of his State. He made no speeches and issued no political documents during this time, nor did he when he ran on two subsequent occasions for Lieutenant-Governor, nor in 1899 when he ran for Governor.

The earliest document to bear his signature was his first message as Governor of Massachusetts. It was the shortest ever submitted at the opening of the Great and General Court, but its terse, straightforward, businesslike statements, utterly devoid of rhetoric, fully acquainted the members with the views of the Governor and outlined the work necessary to be done.

The messages he subsequently sent were of the same nature, and, besides being simple, they were short and to the point. They were unique also in the fact that each recommendation they contained was afterward enacted into law. The great work of his administration was the freeing of the State from the expense and inefficiency of a multitude of boards and committees. Such action was businesslike and pleased the people, but it made the politicians shudder.

Besides the paper-making business, Crane is interested in various other big enterprises. Crane Brothers hold the largest block of stock in the American Bell Telephone Company, for they were among the first to recognize the importance of the new invention, and they went in at a time when the company was struggling for life.

Senator Hoar died in 1904, and former Governor Crane was the only man suggested as his successor. Governor Bates made the appointment and Mr. Crane reluctantly left business again and took up his duties at the national capital. There is little probability of his making any speeches, or of writing any literature while he is a member, but his work will be felt in legislation as forcefully as it was while he was Governor of Massachusetts.

A LABOR LEADER'S RISE.

Son of a Washerwoman Determinedly Trod Thorny Paths Until He Became a British Cabinet Minister.

John Burns, president of the Local Government Board in the Liberal Cabinet of Premier Campbell-Bannerman, has been for many years the principal representative of labor unionism in the British House of Commons. In that capacity he received no compensation from the government. His salary now amounts to ten thousand dollars a year, and the administration expenses of the department of which he is the head amounts to one million two hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year.

Many years ago, one bitterly cold winter night, or morning, for it was then nearly one o'clock, a puny boy of eight was helping his mother carry a big basket full of washing. At the bottom of the basket there was a lot of broken food that had been given to her by persons who knew the cruel struggle she had to support not only the little boy with her, but his several brothers.

The thought of the food and the feast he would have strengthened him to the heavy task for a while, but at last it proved too much for him and he staggered so that the basket had to be put down on the sidewalk, and he sat on it to rest. They were then near the houses of Parliament, and the boy choked back a sob as he shivered, looking up at the building.

"Mother," he said at last, "if ever I have the health and strength, no mother will have to work as you do; and no child shall do what I have to do."

The boy was John Burns.

Mother Died Too Soon.

Between the time he helped carry home the washing and his elevation to the cabinet there intervened years of the hardest kind of work, and his mother did not live to see his triumph in the end. Almost as soon as he could walk young Burns began to help with such work as could be done at home. At the age of ten he went to work in a candle-factory and received seventy-five cents a week for his labor. That was followed by a short term as pot-boy in an inn and as a "boy in buttons."

Such work did not suit him, and he went as rivet-boy in the Vauxhall Ironworks, and when he was fourteen he became apprentice to an engineer. He had had little schooling, and before he began his apprenticeship he had begun to educate himself.

While he was an apprentice he taught himself French, and laid the foundation of a good reading knowledge of German. He also began public speaking at out-of-door meetings, and it was at these meetings, with their constantly shifting crowds, with innumerable interruptions, and almost continual opposition, that he developed readiness in debate and coolness while under a hot fire of questions.

At nineteen his apprenticeship was finished and he went to South Africa as foreman-engineer on some work being done at the delta of the Niger. Burns, alone of all the white men there, passed through the year the work lasted without a day of serious sickness.

"That's because I don't smoke and don't drink," he said. "I found I couldn't do such things and continue work."

It was while employed in South Africa that Burns unearthed a copy of Adam Smith's "Wealth of Nations," from beneath a pile of sand and rubbish where it had been thrown by some predecessor on the work. This was the only book he had for several weeks of his stay, and he read it and studied it until he practically committed it to memory.

Noted for Physical Courage.

The battered old copy of "The Wealth of Nations" found there in South Africa forms one of the treasures of Burns's library, and there are in England few private libraries that can equal his in the department of economics and sociology.

The courage Burns subsequently displayed in political fights was shown in a physical way during his South African period. On one occasion a sick man fell into a river swarming with water-snakes and crocodiles. Burns, without an instant's hesitation, jumped in and rescued him.

On another occasion the propeller blades of the steam-launch which the men were using worked loose and sunk to the muddy bottom of the river. The water was thick and filthy with rank, decaying vegetable matter, and there was an added source of danger in the venomous creatures that might be lurking there.

The skipper of the launch was preparing to dive for the blades when Burns stopped him:

"Don't try it," he said. "You're married and I'm not, so there won't be so much at stake if I do it."

He dived in the reeking water for an hour and in the end fished up the blades.

Becomes Labor Leader.

He returned to Europe with a few pounds, and he used all of this in taking a six months' tour of the Continent, devoting his whole attention to the study of social conditions. Burns's real work as an agitator began on his return to England. He had settled down to work as an engineer, but he gave all his spare time to organizing the working people, both into trade-unions and into a new political party. The result was that he lost his job, and for seven weeks he tramped through the country looking for another one.

Shortly after this he was arrested for the part he took in the unemployed agitation, but he conducted his case with such skill that he went free.

The following year, 1887, he was arrested again because of his work during the demonstration of the unemployed, and was sentenced, together with Cunninghame Graham, to six weeks' imprisonment for rioting in Trafalgar Square.

In 1889 the great dock strike occurred, and the part Burns took in it made him known on both sides of the Atlantic. During January of that year he was elected to the London County Council, and two years later he entered Parliament.

Burns's whole work in Parliament was devoted to those subjects with which he was thoroughly acquainted, and his readiness in debate and his willingness to force the issue jarred the dignity of some of the older members.

"The honorable member is not in the London County Council now," suggested a well-known horse-owner and racing enthusiast who had been worsted in argument. "Nor is the right honorable gentleman on Newmarket Heath," replied Burns.

After that the right honorable race-track patron let him alone.

Burns Enters the Cabinet.

At the last election the Liberal and Labor parties swept everything before them, and Burns was selected from among the Laborites for a place in the cabinet. He had said on one occasion, while a member of the London County Council:

"No man is worth more than five hundred pounds a year." His salary as president of the Local Government Board is two thousand pounds.

"What about that 'ere salary of two thousand pounds?" one of his Battersea constituents asked.

"That is the recognized trade-union rate for the job," Burns answered. "If I took less I would be a blackleg."

"What are you going to do with the fifteen hundred too much?" persisted the questioner.

"Well," answered Burns, "for details about that you'll have to ask the missus."

The coming of Burns into office shook things up considerably. The Local Government Board has to deal with the Poor Law administration, public health, and the general control of the authorities established by the Local Government Act. There were several purely ornamental posts, at good salaries, on the board, and there were plenty of inefficients holding office. The first day of Burns's tenure he called his private secretary, a man holding office from the previous administration, and started to dictate letters.

"You're going much too fast," the man protested, "I really can't keep up with you."

"How many words do you write a minute?" Burns asked.

"Words a minute?" echoed the man in a puzzled voice. "Really, I never counted."

"You don't mean to say you're not a stenographer!"

The man was shocked to think that he should be looked upon as a stenographer. He was private secretary to the president of the Local Government Board, and nothing else.

"See here," said Burns, "this office has work to do, and you won't be of much use to me unless you know shorthand. I'll give you every afternoon off to learn it. I expect that it will take you three months. Till then I suppose I'll have to put up with slower methods."

BELL AND THE TELEPHONE.

Scottish-American Inventor Had Hard Work to Convince Them the Telephone Was Anything More than a Toy.

Alexander Graham Bell, whose discoveries contributed largely to the commercial success of the telephone, had been known only as a teacher of deaf-mutes previous to the time he took out his telephone patents. He had been a teacher in Scotland, his native country, and when he emigrated to America it was with the intention of continuing to teach here. The system he used was one of his own, and from the first he got good results from the most difficult cases.

Important as this work was, he could earn nothing more than a scanty living. Soon even this income was threatened, for he began to devote more and more time to the study of sound-transmission, and in order to make a living at all by teaching it was necessary to devote his entire time to it.

At the Centennial Exhibition, in Philadelphia, he showed a crude model of a telephone, but it attracted only passing notice from capitalists, though eminent scientists predicted a future for it. The results were not what Bell looked for, but he took up the work again, made some improvements, and took out patents covering the principal features of the telephone as it is to-day.

Three hours after he filed his application Elisha Gray filed a caveat for his telephone.

On February 1, 1877, Bell went to Salem, Massachusetts, and gave his first public exhibition and lecture. It aroused some curiosity, but drew no financial backing. On May 10 he lectured before the Boston Academy, and there, apparently, the results were little more encouraging than they had been at Salem.

Thought Telephone a Toy.

The general opinion expressed was that the telephone was a remarkably clever toy, but that it was nothing more. Investors took this view of it, and Bell, who had been reduced to poverty by the expenses of his experiments, went from one financier to another offering stock in the company he had formed, but everywhere he met with rebuffs. Financiers did not care to have anything to do with a machine designed to accomplish the impossible feat of making audible the voice of a person many miles away.

The reception he met with did not in the least shake Bell's faith in his work, but he was sorely in need of money. He resolved on a desperate move, and he went to Chauncey M. Depew and offered him a one-sixth interest in the company if he would loan ten thousand dollars to put the company on its feet. Depew took a week to consider the proposition. At the end of the week he wrote back that the incident might be considered closed. The telephone was a clever idea, but it was utterly lacking in commercial possibilities, and ten thousand dollars was far too big a sum to risk in marketing an instrument that at best could never be more than a plaything.

Thus Depew let slip an opportunity to acquire for ten thousand dollars an interest that to-day could not be bought for less than twenty-five millions.

Bell was being hard pushed, and he determined to make a last offer. Don Cameron, of Pennsylvania, was then one of the leading figures in the United States Senate, and his influence throughout the country was very great. Bell went to him and offered him, for nothing, one-half interest in the invention if he would endeavor to have it introduced to the public.

Cameron would not even consider the proposition, and gave orders "that Bell and his fool talking-machine be thrown out" if he again attempted to get an interview.

While Bell was ineffectually struggling in this direction, a few men in Boston, who had been interested by the exhibition before the Boston Academy, determined to give the telephone a thorough test. A line three miles long was built from Boston to Somerville, and this proved so unequivocally the utility of the telephone that there could no longer be any question of its success.

The pioneer line, three miles long, cost a few hundred dollars. In less than thirty years the number of miles of wire has increased to nearly four million, and thirty thousand persons are regularly employed by the telephone companies.

Soon after the Somerville demonstration, the tide turned in Bell's favor. Capital, which had previously fought shy of the talking-machine, rushed boldly in, and the inventor who had been turned away from office-doors and denied access to the presence of politicians was offered fabulous prices for part interest in his company.

Small investors clamored to get their money down, and big capitalists fought for control of the invention that promised such great things. Within a few weeks Bell, who couldn't give a half interest in his invention to Don Cameron, and who couldn't raise a ten-thousand-dollar loan from Depew, was in a position to turn millions of money away, and there was no more begging for a few dollars to give the telephone a try-out.