Twelve Men and Two

Dear friend,

The riddle first, as the tradition demands. Back in the old town, two maltsters were offered the same empty malthouse on the quay in the same week, and both sat down to take advice.

Two maltsters in one town, the same barley and the same kiln.
Both were offered the lease of the malthouse by the water.
One asked twelve men what he ought to do, and every one of them answered.
One asked two, and had to write a letter to find the second.
The man who asked twelve went in, and was out again by harvest.
Which of them took counsel, and which only took comfort?

Hold your answer. Story time.

The Story

Two maltsters, in a town I have never named. Both worked a single floor behind their houses, both steeped in the same soft water, and both could walk a couch of barley at midnight and tell by the smell of it whether the kiln wanted lighting at four or at six. Neither was a fool nor a rogue, which is the only sort of story worth telling. When the malthouse on the quay fell vacant, the agent walked it round both men inside four days.

The first maltster took the question seriously. His brother said a man must grow or go under. Three men at the inn were for it, one of them drawing the floor out in spilt beer on the table. His best customer, a brewer, was delighted, there being nothing in it for a brewer but more malt. The agent was warm and exact and answered every question put to him. Twelve men in nine days, eleven of them for it. He signed at Lady Day.

The second maltster asked two. One was a maltster eleven miles off who had taken a second floor six years before and kept it. The other had taken one and given it up, and did not advertise the fact, so finding him took a letter to a corn factor and a fortnight's wait.

Both told him the same thing, and neither mentioned growth or courage or the rent. Barley on two floors does not come ready on the same day, and the man who walks them both will be asleep in a chair by the second week of the season. What a second floor wants is a second pair of hands able to read a couch by feel, and such a pair takes two seasons to train and cannot be hired in March. The one who had kept his floor had trained a lad for two years before signing. The one who had given his up had not.

The second maltster let the lease go, took a boy that spring, and had him on the floor every night of the season. By the following summer he was walking the couch with his hands behind his back, saying nothing while the boy decided. Three years later a smaller malthouse came up on the back lane, and he took that one with a man ready for it. The first maltster made good malt on both floors for a season and poor malt on both the next, and was out of the quay by the harvest after.

The Lesson, Since You've Earned It

Advice is worth what the person giving it has actually done, and what it will cost them to have been wrong. On neither count do the people nearest to you qualify, which is precisely why their advice is so easy to get.

Notice that the first man was neither idle nor rash. He asked four times as many people as the second did and took the weight of opinion, which is sound for a question on which everybody has the same standing: whether a sign reads well from across a road, whether a letter sounds pompous, whether a shop smells of damp. On those the crowd is a decent instrument, though even there the useful question is what people did rather than what they think. A second floor is not that sort of question. It turns on a fact that cannot be reasoned out from the outside, and the fact here was a pair of hands and two seasons. His eleven men could not have produced it between them in a month of evenings. They were not lying. They were answering a question about courage, which is the one they heard, while he was asking one about labour, which is the one he had.

The test of consequence does the rest. Ask of anybody offering you counsel what happens to them if you follow it and it goes badly. The brother loses nothing. The men at the inn lose nothing and gain an evening. The best customer gains either way. The agent is paid for the signature and not for the season. None of them is dishonest and all of them are cheap, and counsel that costs the giver nothing is priced accordingly. The two maltsters had paid for their sentence in money and sleep, which is why neither wasted a word on encouragement.

Two cautions. The first is that the test cuts both ways, and a person with a great deal at stake in your decision is no better a witness than one with none. The agent had let a hundred malthouses and so passed the first test easily, and failed the second, his loss and yours not pointing the same way. You want somebody who has done the thing and would bear the same kind of harm you would. The second caution is that the disinterested are not useless, only badly used. The man who has never kept a floor is the right man to check your arithmetic, to tell you that you have talked an hour without once mentioning labour, and to ask the question you have been walking around. Use the near ones as a mirror and the practised ones as witnesses, never the other way about. A lease is also a decision that cannot be walked back, which is exactly where caution is worth spending.

Three questions, and the first you can answer before noon tomorrow:

1. Of the people I talked my last large decision over with, how many had done the thing themselves? Write the names down and mark them. Most of us find the answer is none, and that we mistook the number of conversations for the weight of one.
2. What does each of my advisers lose if I act and it fails? Not their good opinion of themselves: their money, their work or their year. Where the answer is nothing, keep the affection and discount the opinion.
3. Who has already done the exact thing I am weighing, and what would it cost me to reach them? Usually a letter, an hour and a little swallowed pride. The one who tried it and stopped knows most and says least, and will not be found at the inn.

The Answer to the Riddle

Which of them took counsel, and which only took comfort?

The first took comfort. Eleven agreements out of twelve, warmly given, by men who would none of them be awake at two in the morning in a season to come. The second took counsel, from two who had stood where he proposed to stand, one of whom had to be hunted down because he had nothing to boast of. He got one unwelcome fact for his trouble, and it outweighed the eleven agreements, being the only thing said to him that season that could have been wrong at somebody else's expense.

The verse:

The kind are many, and they cost you nought,
And nought is what they weigh.
Go find the two who tried the thing,
And hear what they will say.

Until next time. Go and write down the name of one person who has already done the thing you are deciding, and send them four lines today asking what it cost them that they had not expected.

P.S. The practised man is harder to reach than the opinionated one, and not because he guards his knowledge. It is that he does not know he holds any. The pair of hands and the two seasons were not wisdom to either maltster, only the shape of the work, too obvious to volunteer and too particular to arise in general conversation. So you will rarely be told the thing you need. You must ask a question narrow enough to force it out, and the best I know is this: what surprised you in the first year that nobody had mentioned beforehand.

Also in the archive: The Rent Already Paid, The Chair You Cannot Fill and The Last Thursday in September.