It Is Not My Business

Review and Herald Publishing Association · Washington, D. C. · Oct 26, 1905

“It Is Not My Business”

A WEALTHY man in St. Louis was asked to aid in a series of temperance meetings, but he scornfully refused. Being pressed, he said: “Gentlemen, it is not my business.”

A few days later his wife and two daughters were coming home on the limited express. In his grand carriage with liveried attendants he rode to the depot, thinking of his splendid business and planning for the morrow. Hark! Did some one say “Accident”? There are fifteen railroads centering in St. Louis. If there has been an accident, it is not likely to have occurred on the — and Mississippi Railroad. Yet it troubles him. It is his business now. The horses are stopped on the instant, and on inquiry he finds that the accident has occurred twenty-five miles distant on the — and Mississippi. He telegraphs to the superintendent:—

“I will give you five hundred dollars for an engine.”

The answer flashed back, “No.”

“I will give you one thousand dollars for an engine!”

“A train with surgeons and nurses has already gone forward, and we have no others.”

With white face and anxious brow, the man paced the station to and fro. In a half-hour, perhaps, which seemed to him a half century, the train arrived. He hurried toward it, and in the tender found the mangled bodies and lifeless forms of his wife and one of his daughters. In the car following lay the other daughter with her dainty ribs crushed in, and her precious life oozing slowly away.

A quart of whisky, which was drunk fifty miles away by a railroad employee, was the cause of the catastrophe.

Who dare say of this tremendous question, “It is not my business?”— Selected.