The announcement of Edward Bok's retirement came as a great surprise to his friends.Save for one here and there, who had a clearer vision, the feeling was general that he had made a mistake.He was fifty-six, in the prime of life, never in better health, with "success lying easily upon him"--said one; "at the very summit of his career," said another--and all agreed it was "queer," "strange,"--unless, they argued, he was really ill.Even the most acute students of human affairs among his friends wondered.It seemed incomprehensible that any man should want to give up before he was, for some reason, compelled to do so.A man should go on until he "dropped in the harness," they argued.
Bok agreed that any man had a perfect right to work until he did "drop in the harness." But, he argued, if he conceded this right to others, why should they not concede to him the privilege of dropping with the blinders off?
"But," continued the argument, "a man degenerates when he retires from active affairs." And then, instances were pointed out as notable examples."A year of retirement and he was through," was the picture given of one retired man."In two years, he was glad to come back," and so the examples ran on."No big man ever retired from active business and did great work afterwards," Bok was told.
"No?" he answered."Not even Cyrus W.Field or Herbert Hoover?"And all this time Edward Bok's failure to be entirely Americanized was brought home to his consciousness.After fifty years, he was still not an American! He had deliberately planned, and then had carried out his plan, to retire while he still had the mental and physical capacity to enjoy the fruits of his years of labor! For foreign to the American way of thinking it certainly was: the protestations and arguments of his friends proved that to him.After all, he was still Dutch; he had held on to the lesson which his people had learned years ago; that the people of other European countries had learned; that the English had discovered: that the Great Adventure of Life was something more than material work, and that the time to go is while the going is good!
For it cannot be denied that the pathetic picture we so often see is found in American business life more frequently than in that of any other land: men unable to let go--not only for their own good, but to give the younger men behind them an opportunity.Not that a man should stop work, for man was born to work, and in work he should find his greatest refreshment.But so often it does not occur to the man in a pivotal position to question the possibility that at sixty or seventy he can keep steadily in touch with a generation whose ideas are controlled by men twenty years younger.Unconsciously he hangs on beyond his greatest usefulness and efficiency: he convinces himself that he is indispensable to his business, while, in scores of cases, the business would be distinctly benefited by his retirement and the consequent coming to the front of the younger blood.
Such a man in a position of importance seems often not to see that he has it within his power to advance the fortunes of younger men by stepping out when he has served his time, while by refusing to let go he often works dire injustice and even disaster to his younger associates.
The sad fact is that in all too many instances the average American business man is actually afraid to let go because he realizes that out of business he should not know what to do.For years he has so excluded all other interests that at fifty or sixty or seventy he finds himself a slave to his business, with positively no inner resources.Retirement from the one thing he does know would naturally leave such a man useless to himself and his family, and his community: worse than useless, as a matter of fact, for he would become a burden to himself, a nuisance to his family, and, when he would begin to write "letters" to the newspapers, a bore to the community.
It is significant that a European or English business man rarely reaches middle age devoid of acquaintance with other matters; he always lets the breezes from other worlds of thought blow through his ideas, with the result that when he is ready to retire from business he has other interests to fall back upon.Fortunately it is becoming less uncommon for American men to retire from business and devote themselves to other pursuits; and their number will undoubtedly increase as time goes on, and we learn the lessons of life with a richer background.But one cannot help feeling regretful that the custom is not growing more rapidly.
A man must unquestionably prepare years ahead for his retirement, not alone financially, but mentally as well.Bok noticed as a curious fact that nearly every business man who told him he had made a mistake in his retirement, and that the proper life for a man is to stick to the game and see it through--"hold her nozzle agin the bank" as Jim Bludso would say--was a man with no resources outside his business.Naturally, a retirement is a mistake in the eyes of such a man; but oh, the pathos of such a position: that in a world of so much interest, in an age so fascinatingly full of things worth doing, a man should have allowed himself to become a slave to his business, and should imagine no other man happy without the same claims!
It is this lesson that the American business man has still to learn:
that no man can be wholly efficient in his life, that he is not living a four-squared existence, if he concentrates every waking thought on his material affairs.He has still to learn that man cannot live by bread alone.The making of money, the accumulation of material power, is not all there is to living.Life is something more than these, and the man who misses this truth misses the greatest joy and satisfaction that can come into his life-service for others.
Some men argue that they can give this service and be in business, too.
