the money. He said, ‘I will lend it to you and leave you to pay it at your convenience,’ I asked him what security he required, and he answered, ‘None at all, not even a note.’ He knew that I did not give notes, but paid cash for my purchases.[1] I issued this important work in cloth, half bound, for $3.50. It was said that the scholar’s millennium had now come, when the work which had sold for $12 was reduced to $3.50.”
One of the peculiarities of Mr. Carter’s business life was this of giving no notes. Neither would he go security for any one. When he took his brothers into partnership with him, he and they signed a written paper pledging themselves never to go security. This made it easy for them to refuse all requests of that kind. They could respond that they were pledged never to enter into any such arrangement. Another point upon which he was very decided was that he would never engage in a lawsuit. He preferred to suffer wrong rather than violate his peace loving principles. Again and again he was placed where other men would have gone to law, but he held to his principle, and was never a loser by it in the end, and sometimes he was a great gainer.
But the most marked feature of Mr. Carter’s business life was his earnest resolve that his business should be a direct means of serving God and doing good to his fellow men. He did not pursue it merely as a means of gaining a fortune, or even a livelihood, and it has been truthfully said of him, “No book ever issued from his press that did not contain some seed of divine truth.” He published
“No line which, dying, he could wish to blot.”
- ↑ In less than six months this money was returned, and no small proportion of it from the earnings of the book itself.
