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twg_000000034200 | Emerson has defined Friendship. Let the lights and shadows of the thought of Carlyle and Emerson play upon these words, they are at once removed from mechanical definition, and we dimly perceive that each word is larger than the outreach of the thought of man. Another generation than ours shall define and refine them. In heaven, in some other aeon, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034201 | we shall find out what they really mean! Thus knowledge is not permanent. It reels. It proceeds, it changes, it is iridescent with new significance from day to day. What is true of a word, and what we make of it, is true of every phase of learning. The black-board is not all. Learning is not tied to it, or | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034202 | to any one person, demonstration, interpretation, event, or epoch. No wise man can keep his learning to himself, and yet he cannot, though he teach a thousand years, transmit his deeper learning to another. The atmosphere, the casual information, the spiritual magnetism of a great man, will teach better than the text-books, the lecture courses, and the formal resources of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034203 | academic halls. Thus Mark Hopkins is in himself a university, given a boy on the other end of the log on which he sits. It is the relativity of knowledge that dances before the eye, that bewilders, eludes, evades. Group-systems and electives seem like a makeshift for the real thing. We cannot tie a fact to a pupil, because to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034204 | the tail of the fact is tied history itself. Until a pupil gets a glimpse of that relation, that dependence of which we have just heard, with all that has yet happened in connection with it, he is not yet quite master of his fact. He recites glibly the date of Thermopylae, and does not know that all Greece is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034205 | trailing behind his desk. When, after subsequent research, he knows something of Greece, he discovers Greece to be dovetailed into Rome and Egypt, and they lay hold upon the plain of Shinar and Eden, and the immemorial, prehistoric years. Ah, no! We never really know. Every fact recedes from us, as might an ebbing wave, and leaves us stranded upon | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034206 | an unhorizoned beach, more despairing than before. Education does not solve the problems of life--it deepens the mystery. What, then, may the sage know? Are there no sages? And have we all been misinformed? A sage is one who knows what, in his position of life, is most necessary for him to know. The larger sage, the great Sage, is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034207 | the one who knows what is necessary for the race to know. It is a wrong idea of wisdom, that we must necessarily know what some one else knows. Wisdom is single-track for each man. There are in the world those who know how to build aqueducts, and to bake _charlotte russe_, and to sew trousers. Aqueducts and tailor work | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034208 | may be alike out of my individual and personal knowledge, yet I may not necessarily be an ignorant man. The primitive hunter stood in the forest. For him to be a hunting-sage, was to know the weather, traps, weapons, the times, and the lairs and ways of beasts. He knew lions and monkeys, the coiled serpent and the serpent that | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034209 | hissed by the ruined wall; the ways of the wolf, the jackal, and the kite; the manners of the bear and the black panther in the jungle-wilds. Kipling is the brother of that early man: he is a forest-sage, and would have held his own in other times. The sea-sage was the one who could toss upon the swan-road without | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034210 | fear. He knew the strength of oak and ash; the swing of oar, the curve of prow, the dash of wave, and the curling breaker's sweep. He knew the maelstroms and the aegir that swept into northern fiords; the thunder and wind and tempest; the coves, safe harbors and retreats. To-day, the sea-sage rules the fishing-boat, the ocean liner, the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034211 | coastwise steamers, and the lake-lines of the world. The fishing-sage knows the ways and haunts of fish. He is wise in the salmon, the perch, the trout, the tarpon, and the muscalonge. He says. To-day the bass will bite on dobsons, but to-morrow we must have frogs. No sagacity is universal, but the love of sagacity may be. The man | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034212 | who starts out to implant a new way of education has a noble task before him, but is it a final one, or even a more than tolerably practical one? Is there such a thing as a place for Truth at wholesale, even in an academy or college? Can a man receive an education outside of himself? He may be | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034213 | played upon by grammars and by loci-paper, by electrical machines, and parsing tables and Grecian accents, by the names of noted authors and statesmen, and the thrill of historic battles and decisions. He may be placed under a rain of ethical and philosophic ideas, and may be forced to put on a System of Thought, as men put on a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034214 | mackintosh. But his true education is what he makes of these things. If he hears of Theodoric with a yawn, we say--the college-folk--He must be imbecile. No, not imbecile! he may become a successful toreador, or snake-charmer, which things are out of our line! And a man may be an upright citizen, a good husband, and a sincerely religious man, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034215 | who has never heard of Francesca, nor Fra Angelico, nor named the name of Botticelli! The moment we set bounds to wisdom, we find that we have shut something out. Wisdom is the free, active life of a growing and attaching soul. We must not only attach information to ourselves, we must assimilate it. Else we are like a crab | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034216 | which should drag about Descartes, or as an ocean sucker which should hug a copy of Thucydides. Education is the taking to one's self, so far as one may in a lifetime, all that the race has learned through these six thousand years. Education is not a thing of books alone, or schools; it is a process of intellectual assimilation | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034217 | of what is about us, or what we put about ourselves. At every step we have a choice. This is the real difference between students at the same school or university. One puts away Greek, and the other lays up football and college societies. A third gets all three, being a little more swift and alert. One stows away insubordination--another, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034218 | order and obedience. One does quiet, original work of reading and research; the other stows away schemes for getting through recitations and examinations. No two students ever come out of the same school, college, or shop with the same education. Their training may have been measurably alike, but the result is immeasurably unlike. Education, in the last analysis, is getting | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034219 | the highest intellectual value out of one's environment and opportunities. There is a cow-boy philosopher, a kitchen-philosopher, as truly as there is a philosopher of the academic halls. Conduct is the _pons asinorum_ of life. Wise men somehow cross it, though stumblingly, and with tears. Fools, usurers, oppressors, and spendthrifts of life are left gaping and wrangling on the hellward | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034220 | side. Thinkers have always been climbing up on each other's shoulders to look over into the Beyond. What they have seen, they have told. Some men climb so high into the ethereal places of the Ideal, that they do not get down again. They are the impractical men. An impractical man is not necessarily the educated man; he is the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034221 | man at the top of some intellectual fence, who wishes to come down, but has absent-mindedly forgotten that he has legs. The legs are not absent, but his wit is. So with the impractical man in every sphere. Education has not really removed his common-sense, as some say, his power to connect passing events with their causes, and to act | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034222 | reasonably; but it has set his thought on some other thought for the time being, and the dinner-bell, we will say, does not detach him from his inquiry. His necktie rides up! He goes out into the street without a hat! Let him alone till he proves the worth of what he is about. The practical man, who hears the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034223 | dinner-bell and prides himself upon this fact, may not hear sounds far-off and clear, that ring in the impractical man's ear, and that may sometime tell him how to make a better dinner-bell, or provide a better dinner--a great social philosophy--for the race! The really impractical man is not he who reaches out to the intellectual and ideal aspects of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034224 | life; it is he who lives as if this life were all. There are women who make pets of their clothes, as men make pets of horse or dog. They have just time enough in life to dress themselves up. Looking back over their years, they can only say, I have had clothes! In the same number of years, with | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034225 | no greater advantages or opportunities, other women have become the queenly women of the race. Some women are girt with centuries, instead of gold or gems. Whenever they appear, the event becomes historic; what they do adds new lustre to life. We are all prodigals. We throw away time and strength, and years, and gold, and then weep that we | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034226 | are ignorant, and embeggared at the last. Who shall teach us wisdom, and in what manner may we be wise? What say the sages of the vast possibilities of the race? With one voice they say: Be brave! Do not cower, shrink, or whine. Throw out upon the world a free fearlessness of thought and word and deed. Courage, freedom, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034227 | heroism, faith, exactness, honor, justice, and mercy--these traits have been handed down as the traditional learning of the heart of man. Another ideal of the race is Law. We have given up a chaos-philosophy--the haphazard continuity of events--a cometary orbit, for the world. There are fixed relations everywhere existent: the succession of cycles is orderly and prearranged. Another ideal is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034228 | Progress. We are moving, not toward the bottom, but toward the top of possibility. We reject annihilation, because then there is nothing left. And there must always be something left--progress--a bigger something, a better something. Should annihilation be the truth of things, and all the race mortal, then some day there would be a Last Man. And after the Last | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034229 | Man, what? He would die, and then all that any of the other stars could view of the vast panorama of our earthly generations would be an unburied corpse, with not even a vulture hovering to pick it to freshness in the air! A Last Man? No. Instead, the seers have shown us a great multitude in a heavenly country, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034230 | praising God, and singing forth His Name forever. Immortality broods over the great thought of the race. All great minds look upward to it: it is the final consummation of our dreams. Another ideal is social adjustment, and social service. We must do something for some one, or we cast current sagacity behind the back. People crowd each other to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034231 | the wall. The weak of communities and nations are too often crushed. Redress is in the air. The longed-for wisdom of to-day shows a kaleidoscopic front, in which are turning the slum-dweller and the millionaire; the white man, the yellow, and the black; the town and the territorial possession. The slave-colony, garbage-laws, magistrates, and murderers are mixed in motley, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034232 | there are whirling vacant-lot schemes abroad, potato-patches, wood-yards, organized charity, Wayfarers' Lodges, resounding cries of municipal reform, and various other interests of the wisdom-scale. Hence, wisdom has not yet been arrived at: we are still on the run. This twentieth century will find new problems, new queries, new cranks, and new dismays! One thing, however, shines out clear: Wisdom is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034233 | being recognized as having a moral aspect, and men are looking for a Religion which shall sum up the learning of the sages, the information of the race. When we look down into the physical universe, the primary thing that we find there is gravitation. When we look into the moral universe, the primary thing that we find there is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034234 | also gravitation--a sinking to a Lower. This is sin--a contrariness of things--which makes the world an evil place to live in, instead of a good; which wrecks character and states, eats the hearts out of cultures and civilizations, destroys strong races, leaves a stain upon even the youngest child, and which is constantly drawing the race downward, instead of upward. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034235 | Sin, sin, sin! Everywhere the fact glares upon us, and cannot be hid, or put away. Sin is not an intellectual toy, for philosophers to play with or define as "a limitation of being." Sin is a reality, for men to feel, recoil from, and of which one must repent. Sin is energy deliberately misplaced: energy directed against the course | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034236 | of things, the infinite development, the will of God. Sin is corruption, and desolation, and decay. Death broods over the spirit of man, unless a Redeemer come. The unredeemed ages hang over history like a pall. In them there are monumental oppression, cruelties, and crimes. The breath of myriad millions went out in darkness, and there was none to save. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034237 | A plague swept over all the race. Hence, even scientifically considered, the final aim of thinking must be, to arrive at some thought which will take hold of this primary fact of sin and uproot it; which will show how the world may be purged of sin. Slowly but inevitably we are moving to this great Thought. It is summed | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034238 | up in one word: Redemption. The watchword of a century ago was gravitation. It explained the poise of the universe by a great and hitherto undiscovered law. The watchword of yesterday was evolution. It explains progressive change: the mounting-up of life "through spires of form." The forms of the universe are seen in a series which is in the main | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034239 | ascendant, and in which the survivor is supreme. The watchword of to-morrow is Redemption. The Thinker will some day live, who will make that great word Redemption stand out in all its vast majesty and significance. This, I take it, is the work of our new century. Redemption is the explanation of the existence of man, of his present progress, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034240 | and his future destiny. It is the great mystery of joy in which the race partakes; the spiritual culmination of all things earthly; the forecast of eternal things yet to be. Redemption is not a dogma; it is a life. Redemption is a perpetual and ascendant moral growth. It marks a world-balm, a world-change. It is in the spirit of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034241 | man that it works, and not in his outer condition, or external strivings. It is ultimately to root sin out of the world. Through stormy sorrows and perpetual desolations comes the race to God. Zion is the Whole of things--the encompassment of space, and time, and endless years,--an environment of immortality and peace. Virtue leads the race to Joy, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034242 | there is no byway to this height. The final aspect of the universe is joy. Joy is elemental--a vast vibration that sweeps through centuries as years! A day in His courts is as a thousand, and a thousand years are as one day, because they thrill with an immortal and imperishable emotion. The seraphim and cherubim, Sandalphon and Azrael, are | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034243 | angels of enduring joy. Joy is the soul's share of the life of God. Thus when the world has breathed to us the holy name of Christ, it has told us the highest that it knows. The March of Sages is toward a Redeemer! The banner of Wisdom is furled about the Cross! IV. THE WORLD-MARCH: OF TRADERS [AMSTERDAM] _Lo, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034244 | my soul, look forth abroad And mark the busy stir: Wouldst thou say, in pride and scorn, Our God is not in her! Nay, the bonds, the wares, the coin,-- These, in truth, are passing things; Other treasures thrill the life Of earth's great merchant kings! We, they say, would wake the power In mountain and in mine; And transport, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034245 | from sea to sea, The cedar, oak, and pine: Build the bridge, and plant the town, Enter every open mart; Make our nation's commerce flow,-- But this is not our heart! Many a prayer uplifted springs O'er desk, and din, and roar; Many an humble knee is bent When the rushed day is o'er; Far within, where God may be, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034246 | All exists His Throne to raise; Every triumph of our power Becomes a form of Praise! God of nations, hear our cry, And keep us just and true; Lay Thy hand on all our lives, And bless the work we do: Then from every coast and clime Land and sea shall tribute bring; Gold and traffic, world-domain We offer to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034247 | our King!_ ANNA ROBERTSON BROWN LINDSAY We are all traders. Each of us is endowed with some faculty, ware, or possession which he is constantly exchanging for other things. We trade time, talent, service, goods, acres, produce, counsel, experience, ideals. The world is in reality a Bourse of Exchange. Each of us brings some day his special product to the | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034248 | common mart. There are traders and traders--the just and the unjust--the man of honor and the rogue. We set values on thoughts and on transactions, on merchandise and on philanthropies, on ideas and on accounts; and there is a constant distribution of the affairs, as well as of the worldly goods of men. But in a restricted sense, we think | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034249 | of trade as the exchange of produce which is material and mobile,--which may be touched, handled, weighed, transported, bought, and sold. The substance of the earth is constantly taking new shape before our eyes, being rearranged in kaleidoscopic combinations, and transported from port to port, from town to town, from sea to sea. One can look nowhere without seeing this | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034250 | ceaseless activity progressing. Everywhere there is a whir of wheels, a plash of waves, a din of assembly, as the new combinations take place. There was a day when trade was a thing of here-and-there; a thing of sailing ships and caravans, of merchants of Bagdad, Cairo, Venice, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Damascus. Ivory, gold, gems, precious stuffs, teak and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034251 | cedar wood, Lebanon pine, apes, peacocks, sandal-wood, camel's hair, goat's hair, frankincense, pearl, dyes, myrrh, cassia, cinnamon, Balm of Gilead, calamus, spikenard, corn, ebony, figs, fir, olives, olive-wood, wheat, amber, copper, lead, tin, and precious stones were the chief articles of exchange. A very little sufficed the poor; the rich were housed in palaces and panoplied in gems. As time | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034252 | went on, the processional of traders became a processional led out, in turn, by the merchants of one city after another. It is a picturesque study, that of the trade-routes of the Middle Ages! There was the Mediterranean seaboard, and there were the Baltic towns and the Hanse towns; the Portuguese mariners and traders; the Venetian merchant princes. There was | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034253 | the Spanish colonial trade; the Dutch trade of the East Indies; the trade of Amsterdam and London. There were the Elizabethan sea-rovers. Then came the British trade in the East Indies, and the gradual growth of the trade of France, Germany, England, and the United States. This is a story of human wants reaching out as civilization advanced, and of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034254 | the extending of the earth-exchange. Everywhere there has been a correspondence between national prosperity and increasing trade. To-day, each man demands more of the earth's products than ever before. He reaches out a hand for comforts and luxuries, as well as for necessities. He grasps not only the produces of his own and his neighbor's field and vineyard, but demands | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034255 | what lies across continents and seas. Instead of the ship, the camel, and the ass, we now have the ocean freighter or liner, and the flying train of cars: new forces, oil, steam, electricity, and water-power, do the carrying work of man. And hence trade has become Trade, and each trader is involved in the comfort, success, and prosperity of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034256 | many others. A single commercial transaction to-day involves the lives of hundreds of thousands, competes for their toil and life-blood, carries the decision of their destiny. A great merchant is the real Kris Kringle. He stands at the centre of exchange, distributes from the tropics and the arctic zones. He deals out fur and feathers, books, toys, clothing, engines; ribbons, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034257 | laces, silks, perfumes; bread-stuffs, sugar, cotton, iron, ice, steel; wheat, flour, beef, stone; lumber, drugs, coal, leather. He scatters periodically the products of mills and looms, of shoe-shops and print-works, fields, factories, mines, and of art-workers. He thus becomes a social force of great power, a social law-giver, in fact. Under his iron rule, the lives of the masses are | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034258 | uplifted or cast down. As large eras open, the ethical ideals become higher. We are beginning to inquire, as never before, into the basis of trade, the place of the trader, the right conduct of this vast problem of Distribution upon which hinges so much of human life and fate. All things look, not only to the integration of trade, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034259 | but to its exaltation. Trade has ceased to be a thing of individual energy, talent, and commercial alertness. It has risen to great proportions. The large trader is in control of national conduit, as well as of national expense. There is a great deal more in business than the art of making money. Business is, at the roots, a way | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034260 | of making nations; of developing the resources of a country, of handling its industries, of protecting its commerce, of enlarging its institutions, of uplifting its training, aspirations, and ideals. Traffic is educational. Imports influence the national life. We may import opium or Bibles, whiskey or bread-stuffs, locomotives or dancing pigs. The sceptre held by Tyre and Venice is passing into | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034261 | our own hands. But trade, to-day, is a matter of the imagination, as well as of the stock-book. needs a great imagination to handle the present-day problems of business and finance. The prosperity of a nation depends largely on the intelligence, integrity, and magnanimity of its business men. To be narrow-minded in business, is not only intellectual astigmatism, it is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034262 | poor commercial policy. To make use of present opportunities to control present advantages needs a great education and a large human experience. It is the man of insight, of sympathy, of economic ideals, who will lastingly control our national prosperity and advance our industrial wealth. With all this demand, the business man still stands largely in a class by himself, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034263 | a class apart from the great leaders of the world. He is not yet received into the spiritual circles of the race. He goes about the world, sits on boards and committees, fills directorships and trusteeships, pays pew-rent, and runs towns. But when the spiritual conclaves of the world take place, when the things of life and death are inquired | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034264 | into, when words are said of the higher conduct of the life of man, if he draw near inquiringly or unguardedly to the sacred place, scholar and poet, priest, saint, and proud hand-worker alike rise up and say, Go away. It wears upon the heart--this spiritual isolation of the business man. Does not he often say sadly to himself, They | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034265 | only want my money? Why must he go away? What has he done, that he must be waved down? If we discover why he must go away, we shall discover the meaning of that great caste-line which has long been drawn, and ought no longer to be drawn, between trade and letters, trade and the Church, trade and social prestige. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034266 | The reason he must go away is this: He has never ruled the higher history of man; he does not yet quite belong to the ideal-makers of the race. Understand, I am not now speaking of the new business man, the exceptional one, upright, cultured, altruistic, whom you and I may know; I am speaking of a broad class-line, a | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034267 | class distinction. It is a strange concept that would bar the business man from the ideal; that would limit his life to an account-book, a ledger, a roll of stocks, rents, and possessions, instead of granting him the freedom of the universe, the privilege of ministering to the race. Singularly enough, the business class is the last class that Christianity | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034268 | has set free. Slaves have been given liberty; women, social companionship and intellectual equality; manual labor has been lifted to dignity and honor. But to break the shackles of the man of trade is the work of our era, or of an era yet to come. Thousands of young men are daily stepping into counting-houses, or behind sales-counters, or into | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034269 | independent stores, who will never lift their eyes from their goods and account-books, nor rise above the linen, hardware, groceries, or house-fixtures which they sell. Such a situation is suicidal of national prosperity, and blocks the high hopes of the world. Lack of appreciation of the life of business is sinful and unjust. A high-principled businessman may be one of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034270 | the noblest leaders of mankind. The world needs great business men--men who will know how to use the resources of a country, how to plan for its industry, manufactures, and commerce: men who understand the principles of production and exchange; ways of transportation; systems of credit and banking: men who know the constitution of the country, and the history of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034271 | its development; its strength and weakness, its possibilities and needs: men who will deal honorably in business contracts, both with buyers and employees, and also with law-making bodies: men who will steadily try to advance international prosperity, as well as personal wealth. But to understand business on this plane, and to conduct it in this large way, needs a fine | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034272 | education, an education built, first of all, on a practical basis, such as the education of our common schools. Then should follow a course in the ideals of the race, the classic studies in language, literature, history, science, and philosophy. Then should come a technical course, graduate or undergraduate, such as the courses offered by the Universities of Pennsylvania, Chicago, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034273 | Wisconsin, which include, in general, lectures and special studies in Public Law and Politics, Business Law and Practice, Political Economy, Statistics, Banking, Finance, and Sociology. In addition to this, there should be a thorough knowledge of the Bible and of Christian Ethics, with a deep heart-experience of religion. Endowed with natural business talent, the young man who goes out into | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034274 | the world with such preparation as this knows a great deal more than just how to make money; he knows how to make it honorably and how to spend it, in his business, family, and social life, for the public good; he has in him the making of a statesman and a philanthropist, as well as a man of wealth. | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034275 | Two things take one into the inner circle of the ideal-makers of the race--imagination and sympathy. Ideals cannot be bought with gold. The ideal is always founded on integrity, progress, and common-sense. It is preminently practical, as well: the thing that inevitably must be, now or hereafter, however men laugh it to scorn to-day. Imagination is the faculty of perceiving | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034276 | the higher and final relations of life, the relation of one's work to the progress of the world, and of one's conduct: to spiritual history. What the ideal-maker tries to do is to set holy standards that shall not pass away: to do abiding work, in thought, deed, word; work philosophically planned, and perseveringly carried out; work which he shall | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034277 | do regardless of the outer circumstances of his life--poverty or wealth, of threats, misunderstanding, or hoots of scorn. He is unmoved, both by the rage of the populace and by its most tumultuous applause. He lives for truth, not for personal advance; for progress, not for wealth or honor. What he lays down as a precept, that he tries to | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034278 | live up to, in the way that shall win the approval of the eternal years. Sordidness in commercial life is not necessary: greed is not foreordained. Christianity establishes a new system of trading-philosophy, and a new basis of commercial ethics. There is a god-like way of trade--Christ might Himself have bought and sold--else Christianity fails of its full mission, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034279 | there remains a class of the socially lost, of the ethically unsaved. One reason why it is so hard to get business men into the Church, or to interest them religiously in any way, is that ministers, in general, do not understand or appreciate business men. In one of the most stirring sermons I ever heard, occurred this unjust sentence: | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034280 | "Our country has been built up by the martyr, and not by the millionaire." No! Our country has been built up by _both_ the martyr and the millionaire! Christianity projects into the world new ideals of Trade, of Gain, of Competition, Value, and Return for Toil. What is Trade? Is it merely a way of making money? Then there is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034281 | no ethical basis for it. "The amount of money which is needed for a good life," says Aristotle, "is not unlimited." One concept is: Trade is something which belongs to me. It is that part of the world's exchange which I can get under my personal control. It is the balance between human industries and human needs which I hold | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034282 | for my part of the world, and which others are continually trying to wrest from me, and which I must keep by all means, fair or foul. Competition is the battle of the strongest, the quickest, the meanest! I must know tricks. I must get in with people, get hold of some sort of pull, learn to dissemble, to flatter, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034283 | manipulate, hedge, dodge. Success is a matter of being sly. Anything is allowable which comes out ahead, which adds to the dollar-pile, or which makes the loudest advertising noise! To buy at the least, and sell at the most, regardless of the conditions under which least and most are attained--the man who enters life with this idea of trade in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034284 | his mind might just as well be born a shark and live to prey. Every free dollar in the world will tease and fret him, until he sees it on its way to his own pocket. If this is all there is in trade, the noble-minded will let it alone: it gives no human outlook. It not only undermines personal | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034285 | character, it is the root of national ignominy and dishonor. What has Christianity to do with this shark-instinct? with the rapacity which looks on the world as a vast grabbing-ground, and upon all natural resources as mere commercial prey? The value of Christianity lies in its reasonable and intellectual appeal. It does not spring upon one like a highwayman and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034286 | say, Hands up! Give me your purse! It says gently, Son, give me thy heart. It then proceeds to refashion that heart, to fill it with new principles and with world-dreams. Trade is a just exchange of what one man has for what another man needs. It may take place individually between man and man, in which transaction a horse, | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034287 | an ox, or a tool may change hands. Or one man may assume a responsibility for a number of people, and say: I will give this whole town shoes, in return for which you may give me a house, market-produce, clothing, and an education for my children. The thing will come out even, if you and I are honest. Or | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034288 | a climate, a civilization, may give to another that which the other lacks. We send school-books and machinery to China; she sends us tea, matting, and bamboo. The whole right theory of trade is a give-and-take between men and nations, based on a just price, and with a deep law of Value, not yet wholly formulated, underlying each transaction. Bargains | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034289 | should not be one-sided. Trade, in a large sense, is a way of exchange in which each party to the trade receives an advantage. Not only this, it is a process of distribution, by which each one receives the greatest possible advantage. Money-making is a secondary result: in true trade it is not the final benefit. Take the case of | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034290 | a specially helpful and paying book. The author receives a royalty, and has an income. The publisher receives his profits, and makes a living. The public gains inspiration and ideals. Who is loser? This is sheer business, yet it means loving service for all concerned. To illustrate further: A physician has a frail child, with which the ordinary milk in | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034291 | the market does not agree. To build up its health, he buys a country place and a good cow. The child thrives. In his practice, he sees many other frail children, and it occurs to him that they, too, can be benefited by the same kind of care and watchfulness that he is giving his own child. He buys more | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034292 | cows, has them scientifically cared for, and his agents sell the milk. He finds himself, in the course of time, the owner of a dairy farm, and a man of increasing income. But his trade is not trade for the sake of money! it is trade to make sick children strong and well. He exchanges professional knowledge, executive ability, and | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034293 | human sympathy, for money; in return for which, children receive health, parents joy, and the race a more athletic set of men and women. This is an instance of the inner spirit of the true trade: the spirit which may rule all trade, deny it, or discount it, or scorn it, as you will. Price is a value set on | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034294 | material, on labor, on interest, on scarcity, on excellence, on commercial risks; it is the approximate measure of the cost of production. The ethical price of a commodity is the price which would enable its producer to produce it under healthful and happy conditions--which would insure his having what Dr. Patten calls his "economic rights." This joyous exertion is not | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034295 | harmful; it is tonic. Excellence is an inspiration, an intoxication. Let excellence, not Will-it-pass? be the standard of exchange. From the very endeavor after excellence comes a certain exaltation of spirit, which ennobles the least fragment of daily toil. When the producer brings forth somewhat for sale, let him say: There! That is the best that I can do! It | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034296 | is not what I tried to make of it--the thing of my dreams--but it is the very best which, under the given conditions, I could produce. Then the shoddy side of trade will disappear. The Law of Equity is the final law of trade. But in whose hands is equity? Who appraises value? Who sets price? In whose hand is | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034297 | the final price of the necessaries of life--wheat, rice, sugar, soap, cotton, wool, coal, milk, iron, lumber, ice? The man who puts a price on an article, as buyer or seller, enters an arena which is not only commercial--it is judicial and ethical: he declares for what amount a man's life-blood shall be used. No one absolutely sets price. It | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034298 | is determined by far-reaching industrial conditions, and by economic law. War, weather, famine, stocks, strikes, elections, all have a say. Yet, to a certain degree, there are those who rule price. As a representative of the ideal, as executors of social trust, how shall each one use his Power of Price? The man who has control of a price--a price | 60 | gutenberg |
twg_000000034299 | for a day's labor, for wages, for a cargo, or for any kind of product--has control of the living conditions of the one who works for him. The question is not: How shall I grind down price to the lowest? It is: What price will be an ethical return to this man for his social toil?--just to me for my | 60 | gutenberg |
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