Page:The achievements of Luther Trant - Balmer and MacHarg - 1910.djvu/158

132 typewriters about you refers to money, and their shift keys are pushed most often to make the dollar mark. The bundles of money around you are not marked in secret writing or symbols, but plainly with the amount, five hundred dollars or ten thousand dollars written on the wrapper. Behind the combination of the safe lies a fortune always. Yet money must of necessity become to you—psychologically—a mere commodity; and the majority of the acts which its transfer and safekeeping demand must grow to be almost mechanical with you; for the mechanical serves you in two ways: First, in the routine of your business, as, for instance, with a promissory note, which to you means a definite interval—perhaps sixty days—so that you know automatically without looking at your calendars that such a note drawn on September 29th would be due to-day. And second, by enabling you to run through these piles of bills with no more emotion than if you were looking for scraps in a waste-basket, it protects you from temptation, and is the reason why an institution such as this can run for forty years without ever finding it necessary to arrest a thief. I need not tell you that both these mental attitudes are of keen interest to psychologists. Now, if you will write—"

Watch in hand, Trant read slowly, at regular intervals, the words on his list:

A stifled exclamation made him lift his eyes, and he