es must
have our American temperament.

* * * * *

If an American employer were to insist on butting his American
temperament into his industrial machine, what would his industrial
machine, when it is well at work at last, show an American employer's
temperament to be like?

The first thing that would show in his machine, I think, would be its
courage, its acting with boldness and initiative, originality and
freedom, without being cluttered up by precedents or running and asking
Mama, its clear-headedness in what it wants, its short-cut in getting to
it, and above all a kind of ruthless faith in human nature, in the
American people, in its goods and in itself.

The typical American business man of the highest class--the man who is
expressing his American temperament best in his business--is the one who
is expressing in it the most courage for himself and for others and for
his government. He has big beliefs every few minutes a day, and he acts
on them with nonchalance.

If he is running a trust--our most characteristic, recklessly difficult
American invention for a man to show through, and if he tries to get his
American temperament to show through in it, tries to make his trust like
a vast portrait, like a kind of countenance on a country, of what a big
American business is like, what will he do?

He will take a little axiom like this and act as if it were so.

_If in any given case the producers by collusion and combination can be
efficient in lowering wages to employees and raising prices and cheating
the public, this same combination or collusion would be efficient in
raising the wages of employees, lowering prices and serving the public._

He will then, being an American, turn to his government and say "I am a
certain sort of man. If I am allowed to be an exception and to combine
in this matter, I can prove that I can raise wages, lower prices for a
whole nation in these things that I make. I am a certain sort of man. Do
you think I am, or do you think that I am not? I want to know."

The government looks noncommittally at him. It says it cannot
discriminate.

He says nothing for a time, but he thinks in his heart that it is
incompetent and cowardly to run a great government of a great nation as
a vast national sweep or flourish of getting out of brains and of
evading vision. It seems to him lazy and effeminate in a government to
treat all combinations and all monopolies a