special interest in knowing.

"What," we asked the manager of a bookshop which caters to a large
high-grade clientele, "do you find your greatest trouble?"

"Lack of imagination on the part of our customers," he answered
promptly, "a total inability to put themselves into our place, to
realize that we have our lives to live just as they have theirs. If we
haven't a book in stock they want to know why. If we don't drop
everything to attend to them they want to know why. If anything goes
wrong they want to know why, but they won't listen to explanations and
won't accept them when they do. They simply can't see our side of it.
And they make such unreasonable demands. Why, last year during the
Christmas rush when the shop was fairly jammed to the door and we were
all in a perfect frenzy trying to wait on them all, a man called up to
know if his wife was here!"

It is not always easy to see life, or even a small section of life,
from another person's point of view. A man very often thinks housework
practically no work at all (the drudgery of it he has never realized
because he has never had to do it) and a woman very often underestimates
the wear and tear and strain of working in an office and getting a
living out of it in competition with hundreds of other men. Marie
Antoinette had no conception of what it meant when the French people
cried for bread. It seemed impossible to her that a person could
actually be hungry. "Why, give them cake!" she exclaimed. It may be
pretty hard for a man who is making $10,000 a year to sympathize with
the stenographer he hires for $600 or $700 a year, or for her to see his
side of things. But it is not impossible.

Very few of us could honestly go as far as the novelist who recently
advocated the motto: "My neighbor is perfect" or the governor who set
aside a day for the people in his state to put it into practice. We
happen to know that our neighbors are, like ourselves, astonishing
compounds of vice and virtue in whom any number of improvements might be
made. It is not necessary to think them perfect, only to remember that
each one of us, each one of them, is entitled to life, liberty, and the
pursuit of happiness. In other words, that every man has a right to a
square deal.

In the ancient world there were four cardinal virtues: justice,
prudence, temperance, and discretion. In the modern world of business
there are only two. Others may follow, but these two must come first.
Justic