Morse, Marconi, Alexander Graham Bell, the Wright Brothers, and nearly all of our other great inventors have also been men whose habit was slender.  Alexander, Napoleon, Washington, Grant, Kitchener, and most of our other great soldiers, while robust, are of the raw-boned, muscular type.  They do not belong in the list of the fat men.  The same is true of our great railroad builders, of Stanley, Peary, Livingston, and other explorers, of De Palma, Oldfield, Anderson, Cooper, Resta, and our other automobile racing kings.  You look in vain among the aviators for a huge, rotund figure.  Spend a week in New York City looking over subway workers, structural iron workers, guards, brakemen, motormen, carpenters, bricklayers, truckmen, stevedores, and boatmen.  Go out into the country, look over the farm hands, the gardeners, the woodsmen, and all who work with their hands in the midst of nature, and in all the list you will find very few, if any, fat men.  Fat men are, therefore, doing neither the actual intellectual nor the actual physical work of the world.

THE FAT MAN’S MODERN THRONE

Study butchers, bakers, chefs, provision merchants, and others who deal in food products.  Among them you will find a good many corpulent figures.  They are interested in good things to eat.  They know how to handle them.  They know how to purchase them, and they know how to sell them.  They are able to tickle the palate of the lean and hungry scholar, of the robust and active soldier or worker, and, especially, of men as epicurean as themselves.  They are, therefore, successful in the handling of food products.  Go a little further—­study foremen, superintendents, managers, and presidents of corporations.  In many a large upholstered chair, which represents, in our modern life, the golden throne of the olden days, you will find a fat man.  Here, as of old, they are taking the ideas of the thinkers and the muscular powers of the workers, and combining the two to make profit for themselves.  At the same time, they are finding for the thinker a market for his ideas that he himself could never find.  Unless the fat man fed him, the lean man would become so lean that he would finally die of starvation.  The big fellow is also finding a market for the muscular power, energy, and skill of the worker; a market which the worker, by himself, could never find.

THE FAT MAN’S VALUABLE SERVICE

Recently we made a study of a large corporation.  Amongst other things, we found it required ten thousand dollars capital to provide the building, machinery, help, tools, advertising, selling, and other necessities of that business for every employee on the payroll.  It also required unusual organizing ability and unusual selling ability to gather together the means for manufacturing the product and getting it into the hands of the consumer.  It also required considerable genius to collect the money for the product and apply it to the needs of the workers in the form of payroll.  These services of the fat man are often forgotten by those who work under his direction.