n pronounce, however righteous their indignation toward the offending
vessel. Sometimes politeness is better than justice.

Most of the causes of irritation during the course of a business day are
too petty to bother about. Many of them could be ignored and a good many
more could be laughed at. A sense of humor and a sense of proportion
would do away with ninety per cent of all the wrangling in the world.
Some one has said, and not without truth, that a highly developed sense
of humor would have prevented the World War. Too many people use
sledge-hammers when tack hammers would do just as well. They belong in
the same company with William Jay whose immortal epitaph bears these
words:

Here lies the body of William Jay
Who died maintaining his right of way.
He was right, dead right, as he sped along,
But he's just as dead as if he'd been wrong.

Courtesy is restful. A nervous frenzy of energy throughout the day
leaves one at sunset as exhausted as a punctured balloon. The fussy
little fellow who fancies himself rushed to death, who has no time to
talk with anybody, who cannot be polite to his stenographer and his
messenger boys because he is in such a terrible hurry, is dissipating
his energy into something that does not matter and using up the vitality
which should go into his work. He is very like the engine which
President Lincoln was so fond of telling about which used so much steam
in blowing its whistle that every time it did it it had to stop.

The Orientals manage things better than we do. "We tried hurrying two
thousand years ago," a banker in Constantinople said to a tired American
business man, "and found that it did not pay. So we gave it up." There
is always time to be polite, and though it sounds like a contradiction,
there will be more time to spare if one devotes a part of his day to
courtesy.

But there is danger in too much courtesy. Every virtue becomes a vice if
it is carried too far, and frank rudeness is better than servility or
hypocrisy. Commercial greed, there is no other name for it, leads a firm
to adopt some such idiotic motto as "the customer is always right." No
organization could ever live up to such a policy, and the principle back
of it is undemocratic, un-American, unsound and untrue. The customer is
not always right and the employer in a big (or little) concern who
places girls (department stores are the chief sinners in this) on the
front line of approach with any