papers had been doing for them, they wanted to do what was right,
and wanted to pay for it. One would have thought, looking at it
theoretically, that the department stores in any city would have
imagination enough to see, without practically having to shut their
stores up for three weeks, what advertising was worth. But if great
department stores do not have imagination to see what they would wish
they had done in twenty years, in one year, or three weeks, and have to
spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by
word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying
does not. Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound
to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with
the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are
already taking it. Department stores that have the moral originality and
imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and
what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are going to win.
Department stores that deal with their customers three or four years
ahead are the ones that win first.

CHAPTER VI

GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS

The basis of successful business is imagination about other people. The
best way to train one's imagination about other people is to try
different ways of being of service to them. Trying different ways of
merely getting money out of them does not train the imagination. It is
too easy.

Business is going to be before long among the noblest of the
professions, because it takes the highest order of imagination to
succeed in it. Goodness is no longer a Sunday school. The whole world,
in a rough way, is its own Sunday school.

To have the most brains render the most service--render services people
had never dreamed of before.

Why bother to tell people to be good? It bores us. It bores them.
Presently we will tell them over our shoulders, as we go by, to use
their brains. Goodness is a by-product of efficiency.

Being good every day in business stands in no need of being stood up
for, or apologized for, or even helped. All of these things may be
expedient and human and natural, because one cannot help being
interested in particular people and in a particular generation; but they
are not really necessary to goodness. It is only when we are tired, or
when we only half believe in it, that we feel to-day that goodness needs
to be stood up for. I