of private concern and free from public
responsibility. If the business world is not characterized, first, by
public spirit and a sense of public duty in general, and, second, by
the special and technical sense of public obligation that pertains to
particular kinds or departments of business activity, then it is
falling short of its best opportunities and evading its providential
tasks. It is for the modern business world to recognize the conditions
that have in the fulness of time given it so great a power and so
dominant a position; and it must not shirk the responsibilities that
belong to it as fully and truly as they belong to any of the
professions.

I hold, then, that the young man of education and opportunity who
proposes to go into a business career enters it not merely with a low
and unworthy standard if his sole motive and object be to acquire
wealth, but he also enters it in disregard of the ideas that fill the
minds of the best modern business leaders. He shows a pitiable lack of
appreciation of the elements that are to constitute real business
success in the period within which his own career must fall.

Let us consider, briefly, the evolution of our present-day economic or
business life, and then take note of the necessary place that
particular classes of business men must hold in the structure of our
society. I, for my part, look upon this last century of economic
progress,--under the sway of what is often called "capitalism" as a
term of reproach,--as an immeasurable boon to mankind. It began with
the practical utilization of several great inventions, notably that of
steam power, which broke up the old household and village industries,
gave us the modern factory system, and along with the development of
railroads gave us the modern industrial city. This new and
revolutionizing system of industry and business forced its way into a
world of poverty, of disease, of depraved public life, of low morals in
the main pervading the community,--a world for the most part of class
distinctions in which the lot even of the privileged few was not a very
noble or enviable one, while the state of the vast majority was little
better than that of serfs.

Many writers have sought to throw a charm and a glamour over that old
condition of economic life and society that followed the break-up of
feudalism and that preceded the creation of our new political and
industrial institutions. But with some mitigations it was for m