business, and those who have had the privilege of meeting a good many business men know how rare an admirable man of business is. He was a worker. While he loved ease and luxury, he was capable of enormous labor, did not shirk long hours or cumbrous documents, went right at a job and finished it. He would remain at his desk, when necessary, from eight o'clock one morning till one or two the next. He would work Sundays and holidays. And he did this without fatigue, complaint, or murmur, always cheerfully and easily, and as if he enjoyed it.
Mere industry does not go far, however, or not the whole way. Benjamin had what is worth far more than industry, system. When he went into the War Office, he was no soldier and could not please soldiers. But he was an administrator, and if he had stuck to that phase, I imagine he would have been useful. He began right away to bring order out of hopeless confusion, organized, systematized, docketed. "Having had charge of the War Department but a few days," he writes, "my first effort was to master our situation, to understand thoroughly what we had and in what our deficiencies consisted, but I have been completely foiled at all points by the absence of systematic returns." 24 And again, "Without them [returns] we cannot, of course, administer the service; can make no calculations, no combinations, can provide in advance wath no approximation to certainty, and cannot know how to supply deficiencies." 25 A systematizer
