14. Perils of business organism is much more complicated than the machinery of an automobile and is exposed to an almost infinite variety of perils and accidents. But these are nearly always preceded by symptoms which do not escape the eye and ear of the business man whose judgment has been sharpened by science as well as by experience.
Business is subject to recurring periods of activity and depression, of expanding and contracting credit, of active and depressed markets, Of rising and falling prices. How important it is that the business man should recognize the signs that forerun a change from one period to another, for not otherwise can he protect himself against unexpected losses or prepare himself in time to take advantage of better conditions and make larger* profits! There are quack advisers in business as there are quack doctors in medicine, and all these quacks seek the business man's patronage and money thru advertisements and circulars in which rhetoric gives to pseudoscience the lustre of real gold. No quack will deceive a business man who has grasped the fundamentals of economics. He will weigh care fully the opinions and conclusions of others, but his final judgment will be his own, and with, respect to his own business and its prospects will be nearer.the truth
than any opinion or judgment he could extract from an outsider.
Finall.f there is a national or patriotic reason why the business men of a country should understand the principles of economics. When it became evident that the United States would be drawn into the European war, Mr. Vanderlip, President of the National City Bank of New York, while discuss ing his country's state of unpreparedness called it "a nation of economic illiterates." 1 He meant that the business men of the United States were, as a rule, untrained in the science of economics and were, there fore, carrying on their affairs in haphazard fashion, very much as men cultivated the soil a thousand years ago. No nation can make the most of its resources and natural advantages, no government can secure for its people the greatest possible welfare and hap piness, unless its business men can wisely contiol, di rect and stimulate the production of wealth.