Not My Business

Pacific Press Publishing Association · Mountain View, California · Oct 22, 1912

FromSigns of the Times, Vol. 39, No. 41.

A WEALTHY man in St. Louis was asked to aid in a series of temperance meetings, but he scornfully refused. After being further pressed, he said:

"Gentlemen, it is not my business."

A few days later, his wife and two daughters were coming home in the lightning express. In his grand carriage, with liveried attendants, he rode to the station, thinking of his splendid business, and planning for the morrow. Hark! did some one say "Accident"?

There are twenty-five railroads entering St. Louis. If there has been an accident, it is not likely it has happened on the — Mississippi Railroad. Yet it troubled him. It is his business now. The horses are stopped on the instant; and upon inquiring, he finds it has occurred twenty-five miles distant, on the — Mississippi. He telegraphed to the superintendent:

"I will give you five hundred dollars for an extra engine."

The answer flashes 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 other."

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

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

Who dares say of this tremendous question, "It is none of my business"? — Selected.