Suppose that two brothers go into business, one go ing to the city, the other preferring to remain in the home town. The one in the city has a fortune of a million dollars at the end of twenty years, while the country brother has accumulated only fifty thousand dollars. It would be unfair to conclude that one was twenty times more successful than the other. We must not forget that while money profit is the aim of business, yet men are influenced by many other mo tives when" they choose a business or its location. Money is the tangible reward of successful business, but money is not everything that is worth while in life. Doubtless thousands of merchants potentially as capable as the brilliant Marshall Field or A. T. Stewart, are conducting successful businesses in the small towns and cities of the United States. To many of these the larger pecuniary rewards of successful enterprise in great cities possess no charm or temp tation.
To judge wisely therefore of a man's success in business, we must know : First, has he accomplished what he himself set out to do? Second, has the vol ume of his business been as large as was warranted by its location? And, third, has its management been so sound that profits have been as large as could reason ably be expected? 13. Dignity and importance of peo ple who are not well read in history and fiction it might seem strange that an author should think • it necessary to prove that business is an important and worthy occupation. To them it will seem perfectly obvious that business is both important .and most worthy, yet only a generation ago if a boy chose to be a. lawyer or a doctor or a preacher his parents took pride in the fact, and viewed with more or less un conscious pity those friends whose sons had gone into business. In Europe fifty years ago business was thought something altogether too vulgar to engage the attention of the nobility, and two thousand years ago, when business was comparatively simple, espe cially among the Greeks and Romans, business mat ters were attended to either by slaves or by a class of citizens much despised. To devote one's life merely to the making of money was deemed ignoble and un worthy. How much finer to be an orator, a warrior, a poet, a painter or a sculptor! It would be 'a waste of time to make comparisons and try to determine whether one calling is finer or nobler than another. Men are born into the world with different capacities, and it should be the duty and ambition of each to do that work which he can do best, and to put all his soul into it, whether he write poetry, paint pictures, play the violin, or buy and sell groceries. Then each will deserve respect and honor.
This truth is now clearly recognized in Great Britain, many of whose great business men have been knighted, while in the United States our leading universities do honor to themselves by conferring honorary degrees upon men of disting,uislied service in trade or industry.
When we consider the fact that the rendering of services to humanity is an essential element of busi ness and that no business man can long be successful if Ile fail to render service, we must admit that a great business-man deserves honor and respect just as does a great lawyer or physician. The ad jective "com mercial" cannot be justly used to imply reproach or contempt. To be sure, business may be done in dis honorable fashion. There may be lying, cheating, misrepresentation. But these evils are also found in the professions. In the long run, both in the profes sions and in business, they work against great success. Business as a calling cannot be impaled because some crrocers use loaded scales or because now and tben a banker embezzles the funds .of his trusting depositors.
Criticism of business is usually' directed most vio lently against the trading classes. It is assumed that the merchant is a parasite producing nothing and liv ing off the necessities of the community. That this assumption is a fallacy is clearly shown in the Modern Business Text on "Economics of Business." Modern methods of distributing commodities are the product of competitive forces and are doubtless imperfect in many respects, yet the merchant who is doing his best to satisfy the wants of his customers and is doing it honestly, is performing a real service for so ciety and, as a rule, is not overpaid for it.
Business has made our civilization possible. If we should return to methods of trading in vogue a thou sand or more years ago, even tho the industrial world retained all of its machinery and processes, our na tional wealth would disappear in a few years. The farmers' great markets would vanish and production would come to a standstill. The debt society owes to business is so obvious and so great that there should be no excuse for an author to devote a page to a dis cussion of this sort. But there is an excuse. It is the ignorant and often vicious hostility to business frequently manifested, and the untrue assumption that our wealth is wholly the creation of farmers and factory hand-workers.