CHAPTER I

A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION

A BUSINESS MAN’S CIVILIZATION

I

As one grows older and, let us hope, wiser, one becomes more and more shy of easy generalizations and classifications. As one moves through one’s world, the old generalized types, for example, of fiction and youth, standing for an “artist,” a Frenchman, or an Englishman, break into the many and varying individual artists or Frenchmen or Englishmen of one’s acquaintance, much as a ray of white light is broken into a rainbow of colors through a prism. But age and experience would be but poor substitutes for youth and freshness if they resulted only in bringing chaos to our minds, a substitution of multitudinous individuals for species and genus. If the old crude stock-in-trade types compact of ignorance and too facile generalizing have to be submitted to the spectrum of experience, individuals we find, in spite of seemingly baffling variety, do somehow combine to form distinct group types, and in the national sphere characteristics emerge that set one nation off from another even though their millions of inhabitants may differ among themselves almost more than some of them differ from foreigners. For a traveler constantly passing from one country to another and now long past the stage of mere romantic interest in the exotic, there is no more fascinating task than to attempt to establish the genuine characteristics of a nation out of the welter of individual impressions.

It would be absurd to contend that America offers a simple problem to the observer. If the scene is less varied than in some other countries, nevertheless, to see about one only Babbitts means that one is not an acute observer. But as one comes back again and again from foreign countries, with fresh eyes and new standards of comparison, one comes to simplify our civilization in some respects, as a scientist does the continent. To the lover of scenery the Long Island beaches, the Big Smoky Mountains, the prairies, the Arizona desert, the golden coast of California, or the glaciers of Alaska offer variety in plenty; yet the geologist finds North America the simplest of all the great continents in the basic lines of its structure. In the same way, as we penetrate below the surface variety of its social life, we begin to see that its civilization is equally remarkable as that of the continent itself for its extreme structural simplicity. This simplicity lies in the fact that it has come to be almost wholly a _business man’s civilization_.

It may be asked why, in a modern industrial world in which everyone must have money to live, and in which most people are engaged in making it in one way or another, is America any more of a business man’s civilization than that of any other country? The answer is to be found in a wide variety of social, economic, historic, geographic, and other factors. Let us, for example, contrast it with England, the country which I know best outside of my own, and where I happen to be writing at the moment. England has always been a great commercial and, for the last century, a great manufacturing country, the “nation of shopkeepers” in the eyes of European continentals. Business and trade are foundation stones of England’s prosperity and power, yet English civilization, whatever it may one day become, is not as yet a business man’s civilization in the same sense as is America’s. The reason is that the influence of the business man here upon society has been limited by the presence of other and very powerful influences stemming from sources other than business and having nothing to do with it.

In the first place, there is that relic of feudalism, the aristocracy, including in its numbers, of course, many men and fortunes made by trade, but exerting its influence through a long tradition. It may be that “every Englishman loves a Lord”—though it is quite certain he does not worship him as do many American women—but it is true that the aristocracy exerts an influence upon the social manners and customs of the people at large which is incomparably greater than that exerted by the probably wealthier, but far less picturesque, untitled bankers, shipping merchants, iron manufacturers, and what not. In the country—still the best source of English life, though fast passing—aristocracy and landed gentry possess so great an influence that if a nouveau riche wishes to become somebody, he does not take a great house and give costly entertainments in London but buys an estate somewhere in the “counties” and painfully tries to make his way among families that may have but a fraction of his own wealth.

Nor is the influence of these two great bodies of the aristocracy and gentry based solely on social position or snobbery. Of black sheep in both there have been plenty, but these two classes still retain the best element in the feudal system, the duty of service. The broad lands of the feudal lord, unlike the stocks and bonds of the modern business magnate, were not his solely for pleasure. Just as his men owed service to him, so he owed physical protection to them; and he was not likely to retain his lands and castles long if he could not give it. A considerable part of the wealth and power of England is still in the hands of these landowners, large and small, who still perform in more modern ways the duties that go with their wealth. The difference in the sense of responsibility toward the public felt by the descendants of historic families and the members of the new business magnates may be noted in one minor, but illuminating, particular. For the most part the treasures of art accumulated by the old families are regarded by them as a public trust, and the public, at least on certain days of the week are admitted to see them. The private galleries of Knole House, of Warwick Castle and of scores of others are as well known and as easily accessible to the public as are those of the national museums. On the other hand, the motto of the new business magnate is usually “what is mine is my own.” As a rule when a picture by a great master is carried through the doors of the palace of a water-power magnate, a meat packer or a banker in America it is lost to the public, save in rare cases as an exhibit in a temporary loan collection, until after long years sale or bequest may bring it into a public museum.

Again, there is the Church of England, dependent for its existence and support not upon the gifts of business men but upon local taxation, age-long endowments, and the support of the State. The leading universities, for similar reasons, are independent of business to an extent impossible in America. Politics, the army, navy, and the diplomatic and civil services offer life-careers for the ablest of men. The professions, such as law and medicine, are still uncommercialized. A young man of ability and ambition may choose, depending upon his particular tastes or opportunities, among a dozen careers, not one of which has anything to do with business, and any one of which offers him as a possible reward all the prizes that a man can wish, although from the pressure of democracy on the one hand and big business on the other this is becoming less true, perhaps temporarily, than it has been heretofore. However, the successful business man still finds himself only one among many factors influencing the manners, thought, and life of his time. His own contribution is absorbed into the varied and rich life of the nation made up of the ideals and outlook of many other types and classes in addition to his own.

In America from the beginning there has been an entirely different social scene, although in many respects it was more variegated in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries than it is to-day. Neither the best nor the worst of feudalism, however, was transplanted to the colonies. We fell short of developing an aristocracy or a permanent landed gentry. With the exception of a few colonial experiments, there has never been an established church. Politics, save in a few rare cases, have ceased to attract first-rate men as a career, and there is none either in diplomacy, which is usually only an episode, or in the civil service, which holds no position worth striving for. The rewards of a lifetime spent in the army or navy are negligible. On the other hand, we have the richest virgin continent in the world to exploit, and the prizes for a successful business career, measured in money and power, have been such as are undreamed of in European business. In Europe a “great fortune” is reckoned in millions; in America in hundreds of millions and now, in a few cases, even in billions. Generation after generation the opportunities, instead of becoming less, have become colossally greater. The result has been that most of the energy, ability, and ambition of the country has found its outlet, if not its satisfaction, in business.

Certain results have flowed from this fact. In the first place, human nature alters, perhaps, less than we wish it might. Two of its most persistent traits are love of distinction and the need to follow leaders. When in founding the nation we did away with all titles and badges, we opened the way in a fashion not anticipated to the social sway of the business man. We may note for example that the much-despised stars and ribbons of the old aristocratic order in Europe have been replaced in America, where they are unconstitutional, by the innumerable ornaments of the Mystic Shriners, the Order of Junior Mechanics, and other similar emblems. Theoretically, since the American and French Revolutions men have given lip-service to the doctrine of equality, but in reality everyone craves his own little share of social distinction, a something that will tend to set him somewhat above his neighbor. Founded if you like in vanity, it is, nevertheless, one of the most important elements in progress and conduct.

The great mass of men also tend to copy those above them, those who by common consent are the leaders of the nation, or occupy the most prominent and enviable positions in it. The youth of a savage and warlike tribe will emulate its great warriors and shape his life on theirs. In England, as we have seen, the genuine leaders of the aristocracy and gentry still exert a great influence upon the manners and outlook of those below them. In America these leaders have become the great business men. In their hands are the wealth and power of modern America. Their ideals, their manners, their ways of life, their standard of success are, therefore, those which the great mass of Americans, consciously or not, strive to make their own. In America, moreover, no Order of Merit, no Companionship of the Bath, no peerage is to be won as a symbol of a successful career. Most men, as we have said, crave some badge as a tangible evidence of their distinction if they have attained any. In America for those not content with being a Master of a Grand Lodge or the High Priest of something-or-other wealth is the sole badge of success. All other orders in society having been swept away, and a business career being the sole one that leads inevitably to power when successful, the business man’s standard of values has become that of our civilization at large.

Owing in large measure to this, to the emphasis placed in America by our universities on equipment and plant, and to their constant need of money for endowments and upkeep, they also have come under the sway of the successful business men to an extent undreamed of in Europe. If the equipment of European universities seems meager and poor in comparison with America, no one can claim that the work being done in them is inferior; and partly due to the smaller demands for money for constant building and expense, and partly to the presence in the European social system of important classes other than business men, the universities there are far more independent of business domination and ideals than they are with us. The entire religious system of our country, also, is in the same relation of dependence upon the business man. In the absence of any establishment of large endowments from the past, the churches of every denomination are dependent upon the richer members of their congregation for support. As for politics, the relations between parties, legislatures, and the business interests are too notorious to call for specific comment. The present disgraceful struggling of private interest against private interest, with no consideration for the interest of the public or the nation, exhibited in the Tariff controversy in Congress is merely one phase of what we have come to consider a normal relation of American business to American government. The dominant economic and social power of any country is bound to be the dominant political one. If agriculture, for example, is now the Cinderella of American prosperity and government interest, the cause is in part to be found in the fact that the number of men engaged in agriculture has dropped from 90 per cent of the total in 1790 to 36 per cent in 1910 and 29 per cent in 1920. The professions, as we shall note later, are also rapidly coming under the domination of the business man’s type of civilization.

Thus, unlike Europe, the business man with us finds himself the dominant power in the life of the nation and almost alone in his control over the direction of its entire life, economic, social, intellectual, religious, and political. It is a situation that, so far as I know, is unique in history and well worth analyzing.

II

First let us analyze the business man himself. Is there such a thing as a business “type”? Thinking of all the variations among those one knows, much as one thinks of one’s varied French friends, one may think it impossible to classify them under one head; but just, as contrasting one’s French friends with English or Russian, a French type does emerge, so contrasting a man who is in business all his life with those engaged in other pursuits, a business type does also take form. Apart from initial tastes and nature, a man is bound to be molded by the aims, ideas, ideals, and whole nature of the career to which he devotes practically his entire energies and time. It is obvious that a poet or musician will react to the facts of existence differently from the way a steel manufacturer, an admiral, a high ecclesiastic, a politician, or a Supreme Court judge would do. All of them naturally have to provide themselves with a living, but the fundamental facts that regulate their reactions to the world about them are different.

For a business man that fundamental fact is, and is bound to be, _profit_. Having made money, the business man may be, as he often is, more generous and careless with it than an aristocrat or a churchman; but that does not alter the fact that the main function of his work, his main preoccupation, and the point from which he views everything connected with his work is that of a profit. For one thing, all men, whether they be poets, soldiers, diplomats, or department-store owners, crave, as we have said, success and recognition in their chosen field. The hallmark of success in business is the extent of profit a man gets out of it. An artist may find no public for his wares but, if he is doing great work, he will be supported by the opinion of his peers. A doctor may struggle in a country village with nothing but a pittance but he has the satisfaction of a noble work nobly done. A man like Asquith may spend his whole life in the service of his country and yet retire as prime minister with the income of a bank clerk. But a man who spends his life in business and ends no wealthier than he began is voted a failure by all his fellows, even though he may have personal qualities that endear him to his friends.

This fundamental preoccupation with making a profit has been much emphasized by the shift of business from the individual to the corporate form. A man may do what he likes with his own and if he chooses to be quixotic he can be; but in the new triple relationship of workmen, executives, and stockholders in the modern corporation there has ceased to be personality anywhere. The American is a great believer in the magical power of words. The bare facts of business are now being covered over by the new American gospel of “service”; but when we analyze this, does it not merely come down to the obvious facts that the business man performs a highly useful function in society and that, so far as he can, he should see that the public gets its full money’s worth? The fundamental need of profit remains. The professional classes—doctors, artists, scholars, scientists and others—may, as they often do, work for little or nothing at all, but, except in the rarest of personal instances, the business man is precluded from doing so. What stockbroker, manufacturing company, railway or electric light corporation with all their talk about service would ever consider running their business at a voluntary loss in order to render greater service or tide the public over a crisis? It cannot be done. It is profit first, and then, perhaps, as much service as is compatible with profit.

Now this primary and essential preoccupation with making a profit naturally tends to color a business man’s view of his entire world, and is what, in my opinion, mainly differentiates business from the professions. Nor do I speak as an impractical intellectual. Of the last thirty years I have spent about one-half in business and half in professional work, and I realize the great difference, having paid my monthly bills, between concentrating primarily on the work rather than the profit.

Moreover, dealing inevitably with material things and with the satisfying of the world’s material wants, the business man tends to locate happiness in _them_ rather than in the intellectual and spiritual unless he constantly refreshes his spirit away from business during his leisure. When the pressure of business on his time, or his concentration on it, becomes so great as to preclude his reasonable use of leisure for the development of his whole human personality, he is apt to become a complete materialist even if, as is now frequently not the case, he ever had it in him to become anything else. He may live in a palace, ride in the most luxurious cars and fill his rooms with old masters and the costliest manuscripts which his wealth can draw from under the hammer at Christie’s but if he cares more for riches, luxury, and power than for a humanely rounded life he is not civilized but what the Greeks properly called a “barbarian.”

Aside from narrowness of interests, the business man, from the nature of his major occupation, is apt to have short views and to distrust all others. It was once said, as superlative praise, of the late J. P. Morgan, one of the most public spirited and far-sighted business men we have had, that he “thought in ten-year periods.” Most business men think—and do well to do so as business men—in one or two-year periods; the business man cares nothing for the tendency of what he is doing. This has been emphasized in the American business man by the vast extent of the natural resources with which he has had to deal and the recuperative powers of an active people in a half-settled continent. If, as he did in the northern Mississippi Valley, he can make his personal profit by ripping the forests off the face of half a dozen states in a decade, he is content to let those who come later look after themselves.

Nor is he any more solicitous about the social results of his activities. Obviously, what interests the business man as a business man is a free hand to gather wealth as quickly as may be, combined with a guarantee that society shall protect him in that wealth once he has gathered it. He may steal the water resources of a dozen states but, once they are stolen, he is a defender of the Constitution and the sanctity of contract. It is not hard to understand why the United States is the most radical country in the world in its business methods and the most conservative in its political!

Preoccupation with profit, again, tends to make a business man, as business man, blind to the æsthetic quality in life. A beautiful bit of scenery, such as Montauk Point, is for him merely a good site for a real-estate development; a waterfall is merely water-power. America’s most successful business man, Mr. Ford, while rolling up millions by the hundreds in profits, was content to turn out what was, perhaps, the ugliest car on the market. It was only when his profits were threatened that he turned to the consideration of beauty, and he would not have done so had it not promised profit. No sane business man in charge of a large business would do so. It is much the same with the cultivation of the business man’s mind. Time is money, and anything which takes time and does not give business results is waste. But if you tell him that if he shows an interest in Keats he can probably land Smith’s account—Smith being a queer, moony guy—or that if he will go to hear the “Rheingold” he can make a hit with that chap he has long been after, the effect will be magical. Innumerable advertisements of books or teaching of foreign languages will easily illustrate what I mean.

These and other qualities of the business man are his qualities _as_ a business man. They are qualities that are bred in him by his occupation. Plenty of business men are much more than business men and outside of their offices and business hours have other qualities and other interests. But there is this to be said. Society at large, including the business man himself, owes its opportunity for a fully rounded life mainly to those who have not been business men. What will be the effect on all of us of the growing dominance of the business type and of the hold which the business man and business ideals have attained upon our civilization?

III

Before we discuss this let me gladly admit that the business man’s search for a profit has in many ways been of great cultural, as well as material, benefit to the community at large. I am by no means decrying business. If the business man has not, culturally, been a creator, he has done marvellous work as a middleman. In the phonograph and the radio, for example, the business man has brought the work of the scientist on the one hand and the musician on the other together in such a way that the lonely resident of a country village can listen to the symphony orchestra of perhaps a half-dozen cities. The business man, indeed, does not care a rap whether Jones listens to a symphony or a prize fight, but he has given him an opportunity. Yet that opportunity could not come to Jones unless both the abstract scientist, reaching the business man through the medium of the inventor, and the musical composer had existed and done their work in a spirit quite remote from business. In a world entirely made up of business men (with the qualities of business men only) it is doubtful if either pure science or music would have existed.

Taking this cultural aspect of a possible business man’s civilization worked out to its final result, we may note several things. If modern business is not a profession—and I certainly do not believe it is—it, nevertheless, has become an intensely absorbing occupation. Moreover, like science and most of modern life, it has become highly specialized, both for workmen and for executives. At no time before in the history of the world have the occupations of all men tended to render them so lopsided. Never before have leisure and a wise use of it been so necessary. The functions of the lawyer and doctor, even of the thinker and the artist, have become narrowed to only a small part of the field formerly covered by them. Compare for example a modern scientist in any branch with a Bacon, or a modern painter with men like Michelangelo or da Vinci,—easel painters, mural decorators, poets, architects, sculptors, military engineers, and other things by turns. The narrowing of the field of work for all men has greatly intensified the need of their finding opportunity for the development of other sides of their personalities in pursuits other than their major ones. This is most true of the business man because of the effect upon him of his work as contrasted with the professions and other careers. The danger lurks in exactly that situation; for the one who most needs, but least realizes, the value of leisure and culture, of a fully rounded personality, of what we may call humanism, is the one who has become the controller of the destinies of all.

In the remainder of this article we can but glance briefly at some of the effects, already becoming visible, of the dominance of business ideals. Let us take first the question of that leisure so essential from the standpoint of a humane civilization. In an economic civilization in which efficiency is the one great good, leisure will be considered as waste save in so far as it promotes the individual’s productive capacity in his next stint of work. Having little use for sanely occupied leisure themselves, our business spokesmen try either to confuse it in the public mind with idleness or to make people utilize it for the satisfaction of more material wants. Thus in his _American Omen_, which we may take as an ultra-expression of the new business ideal, Garrett says, speaking of leisure, that the American “does not know what to do with idleness. He does not understand it. Generally it kills him.” Again, speaking of adult education, he adds that “in England the intent of adult education is to give the wage earner a cultural interest to fill up his leisure time—nature study, astronomy, the physics and chemistry of everyday life, literature, perhaps. In Germany the intent is technical. In Denmark it is to stimulate the mind generally. In France there is not much of any kind. But,” he adds triumphantly, “the American idea of adult education is to enable a man to find greater self-expression in his job.” Certainly from the standpoint of humanism, of a fully rounded human existence, no comment on this business ideal is needed.

If it be claimed that Garrett does not speak responsibly for business, let us turn to another spokesman. Harvard University has taken the lead in giving its scholastic benediction to business, which it proclaims in stone over the entrance to its Business School, given to it by one of the richest business men in America, to be “the oldest of the arts, the newest of the professions.” Doctor Carver, professor of economics at Harvard, writes that in America “we may take a certain genuine satisfaction in the fact that we have no leisure class and are never likely to have one ... though we do fall behind in those arts that are commonly cultivated by a leisure class ... and must therefore content ourselves with such arts and graces as can be cultivated by busy people.”

It is obvious, except to our “practical” business men, that there are many kinds of work, not only like the arts, needful for humanism, but like pure science, needful for business itself, that can be the fruit only of free time and of the absence of the need to turn the results into immediate cash. Yet here again we run counter to the new business ideals as promulgated by Professor Carver. “Generally with some exceptions,” he writes, “the more useful the person the more he is paid,” adding that “if a pupil shows a special aptitude for a kind of work which is being overdone and poorly paid, to train the pupil for that work would be to condemn him to poverty, and no conscientious educator would care to do that. He must, in fact, train the pupil for a kind of work which is reasonably well paid.” We need not add the recent dictum of another professor that the best standard of value of a piece of literary work is, after all, what it will fetch in the market, to see how the new leaven of the business ideals of profits and “service” are working in our academic minds. “The greater the service rendered, the greater is the personal income” (we may thus syllogize this idea), “therefore, we can estimate the service in terms of income, and (with no selfish philosophy, of course, only idealism) we must train our boys to make the largest incomes possible so that they may be sure they are rendering the greatest service to society.” Q.E.D. Naturally the business men, whose badge of success is income, applaud such a theory, for it establishes indubitably that the owner of a cigar-store chain is infinitely more valuable to humanity than a Keats, even though from every past civilization the only things which remain of value to humanity are the creative works of those who were not business men. The business men of those days are as forgotten and indistinguishable as the leaves of yesteryears in Vallombrosa. Nothing could bring out more clearly than this barbarous syllogism and philosophy the difference between a humanistic and an economic civilization.

We may also note the changes occurring in the spirit of the professions as they conform themselves to the dominant note of a business man’s civilization. That civilization, as we have said, cloaks its crudity under the name of service, yet even in the medical profession, perhaps as yet the least tainted, what is the service rendered as compared with a generation ago? Many articles in our magazines have dealt with the seriousness of the crisis which is overtaking whole countrysides where no physician can now be found to labor for little pay, and the difficulties of finding medical service even in the cities at low cost or at moments inconvenient for the doctor, such as night calls. But if social service can be calculated in income, why not? If the theory is true, is it not a doctor’s duty to leave a whole countryside to struggle without medical care if it can pay him only three or four thousand a year when in a city he can make twenty thousand if he gets in with the right people?

The same applies even more to the legal profession. The great prizes in this are for the most part now to be won only from the great business men and their corporations. A man may struggle in private practice for twenty years and not make in all that time what a more fortunate fellow may get as a retainer from a railroad or a water-power trust in one year. The business-civilization ideal of wealth as distinction would be a powerful influence tending to make the lawyer turn to business in any case, but now the new business philosophy of service measured by income makes that turning a social duty and salves the professional conscience.

Another profession, architecture, is beginning to feel the influence of the dominance of business. We have good architects in America—none better—but business does not give them their chance. Buildings are built to sell, and, being built on borrowed money on speculation, must be sold as quickly as possible. No chances can be taken on not pleasing the taste of the public. Moreover, in buildings every inch of space must be made to bring in rent. In every direction the architect’s hands are tied. In many cases, partly from the spread of the business ideal of life and partly perhaps from despair, the architect has come to adopt the attitude expressed by one of the well-known ones recently. “As an architect,” he writes, “I am really just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space, and my job, as I see it, is to make as attractive a package as is physically or æsthetically possible for me in view of all the conditions imposed.” The consequence is that in architectural experiment America is falling so rapidly behind countries like Denmark, Holland, Germany, Austria, and even Russia, that after studying the new buildings, particularly the private houses in those countries, returning to America is almost like going back to the early Victorian age. I have not been to Russia, but the noted French architect Le Corbusier has recently gone there to investigate the new buildings and he reports of the Muscovites that “their works are a splendid outburst of lyrical poetry. They are poets in steel and glass.” The picture of the new “Palace of Industry” at Charkov certainly goes far to confirm this opinion. Much of the new architecture I have seen and the marvellously interesting new bloom everywhere in the countries which I have named makes the American revamping of the English, Colonial, and Spanish types seem to belong to a past world. Plagiarism is a confession of sterility. Of all the new movement and the new method of living it entails, the American public is almost totally ignorant. The business man with an eye solely to an immediate profit, and the architect who considers himself a business man, “just a manufacturer of a commodity known as building space,” are not likely to carry America far on any new road.

IV

Of the effect of a business man’s civilization on the manners of society I shall speak in a later chapter and need not here anticipate what I shall there say. We may note, however, in passing, its effect on taste and habits. As for taste, a business civilization has as its core the idea of a money profit and of a material standard of values. Business men devote their tireless energy to creating new wants which their factories can supply. But two points must be noticed. One is that these wants which they create and foster must be material or there is no manufacturing to supply them and no profit to the business man. If people wish to tramp about the countryside remote from motor cars, or read a book or go to an art museum or simply engage in intelligent conversation at home, the manufacturer is losing a possible profit. The constant endeavor of modern business is therefore to get people to fill up their leisure with _things_, things that can be made and sold. Another point with regard even to these things is, that the great profits being in mass-production, the wants so scientifically created by advertising are such as may be made to appeal to the masses. The spiritual or æsthetic value of the new wants is bound to be made subordinate to the possibility of their being filled in quantity.

Some of the problems touched upon, as well as others, are world problems. Their special importance in America is due to the curiously lopsided development which American civilization has increasingly followed. With the unique position that the business man has here attained to impress himself upon the entire cultural life of the people, the dangers of certain business tendencies are enormously increased as compared with other countries where the ideals and activities of the business man meet with checks from many other influences, contemporary or historic, in the civilization as a whole. Even if the American business man were alive to the enormous social responsibility of the position in which he finds himself, it is not likely that he could assume the rôles in civilization which have hitherto been taken by a dozen or so classes of other types, that he could include within himself all the springs to thought and action and all the checks and balances which a variety of social types have hitherto supplied. For one thing, the prime factor in business life, the need for making a profit, is at war with the spirit of all the arts and with what should be the spirit of the professions. Again, the training in taking short views, the ignoring of the future results of action beyond a reasonable period of profit, the subordinating to the thought of profit of all the larger social implications of action, are among the characteristics of business as business that do not augur well for placing the supreme control of the entire national civilization in business hands. The business man, moreover, is merely a purveyor and not a creator of the real values of a civilization. If under his dominance the business philosophy indicated above takes—as it seems to be doing—increasing hold upon the universities, the churches, the professions, and the people at large, it may be asked how long shall we have any creators?

If the fundamental idea underlying our civilization, its _primum mobile_, is to become that of a business profit, it is inevitable that we shall decline in the scale of what has hitherto been considered civilization as contrasted with barbarism in the Greek sense. The Harvard professor may dismiss lightly the loss of the “arts and graces,” but if his doctrine of the valuation of social service in terms of income is to become established, is it not much more likely to be lost than the “arts and graces”? What becomes of the artistic spirit, of the professional spirit, of the pure scientific spirit? The American is apt to think of his own country as in the van of at least everything material and of Europe as negligible; but even in the things considered distinctly American we are falling behind. That we have recently lost the speed record both on land and water with that special darling of America, the gasoline engine, may not be important, but it will surprise most Americans to know that both the fastest and the average speed of all trains in England and some parts of the Continent are higher than in America. In aerial passenger routes America, in spite of the efforts to make it appear otherwise, is far behind Europe, where the whole continent is covered with a network of aerial routes used as readily as we use trains at home.

I have touched at some length on architecture because it was not many years ago that we were hoping for a genuine renaissance that should have its beginning in America, and because we have, as I said, some absolutely first-class architects. The present renaissance, however, has come wholly in Europe from men like Le Corbusier in France, Gropius in Germany, or Oud in Holland, with their enthusiastic followers. We have had so little to do with it and are sharing so little in it that the most recent pronouncement on the new movement there dismisses the United States in three lines as offering nothing of theoretical value.

Civilizations rest fundamentally upon ideas. These ideas to be effective must be those of the dominant classes in the civilization. In making the business men the dominant and sole class in America, that country is making the experiment of resting her civilization on the ideas of business men. The other classes, dominated by the business one, are rapidly conforming in their philosophy of life to it. The business man, in so far as he is more than a business type, in so far as he is a fully rounded personality (as, I repeat, many of them now are), owes that development of himself outside his work to the work of other classes in the past or present. If those classes become merged in his own, whither can even he himself look for his extra-occupational development? If the leaders are not humanely rounded personalities, civilized rather than barbarian, what shall be expected of the mass which patterns itself upon them? In a word, can a great civilization be built up or maintained upon the philosophy of the counting-house and the sole basic idea of a profit?