ess would be defined as that quality which makes the
grocer good and respectable when he resists temptation and does not put
sand in the sugar. The smug maxim that honesty is the best policy,
while doubtless true enough as a verdict of human experience under
normal conditions, is not fitted to arouse much enthusiasm as a
statement of ultimate ethical aims and ideals.

If it were admitted that the sole or guiding motive in a business
career must needs be the accumulation of money, I should certainly not
think it worth while, in the name of trade morals, to urge young men
who are to enter business life that they play the game according to
safe and well-recognized rules. I would not take the trouble to advise
them to study the penal code and to familiarize themselves with the
legal definitions of grand and petit larceny, of embezzlement, or
fraud, or arson, in order that they might escape certain hazards that
beset a too narrow kind of devotion to business success. It is true,
doubtless, that a business career affords peculiar opportunities, and
is therefore subject to its own characteristic temptations, as respects
the purely private and personal standards of conduct.

The magnitude of our economic movement, the very splendor of the
opportunities that the swift development of a vast young country like
ours affords, must inevitably in some cases upset at once the sober
business judgment of men, and in some cases the standard of personal
honor and good faith, in the temptation to get rich quickly; so that
wrong is done thereby to a man's associates or to those whose interests
are in his hands, while still greater wrong is done to his own
character.

But, even against this dangerous greed for wealth and the
unscrupulousness and ruthlessness which it engenders, it is no part of
my present object to warn any young man. I take it that the negative
standards of private conduct are usually not much affected by a man's
choice of a pursuit in life. If any man's honor could be filched from
him by a merely pecuniary reward, whether greater or less, I should not
think it likely that he would be much safer in the long run if he chose
the clerical profession, for example, than if he went into business.

Sooner or later his character would disclose itself. It is not, then,
of the private and negative standards of conduct that I wish to
speak,--except by way of such allusions as these. And even these
allusions are only for the sake of