standards of business ethics. This holds true not only of "big business" but even of the obscure and conventional members of the business community. For the average man the successful entrepreneur possesses something of the glamour with which every age surrounds its dominant group. The captains of industry" once occupied a place in the popular imagination similar to that enjoyed by the Knights of the Round Table in the Arthurian legends. They were the uncrowned kings of a new order and being kings they could do no wrong.

Notwithstanding the favored and influential position once occupied by the entrepreneur in the business world there is evidence that he has not met his responsibilities and as a result is losing the confidence and sympathy of the public. Steeped in the operations of trading which have cultivated an entirely different attitude of mind from that induced by the tangible and definite operations of manufacturing and production, the man engaged in commerce has displayed little understanding of the viewpoint of these other departments, and has found it impossible either to sympathize with or appreciate the fundamental changes which have taken place therein " The commercial man is keenly alert to new methods or machinery that may increase profits. He is, however, singularly ignorant in other ways. He fails to see that the work of the efficiency expert in the mill, the spread of education among the workers, the extension of the unions, the increase of knowledge and social self-consciousness among the masses of men have created a subtle transformation of public sentiment that is opposed in many ways to all those principles and practices that are dear to the heart of the old "captain of industry." As these forces begin to crystallize into opinions and laws, he feels in a vague, uneasy way that things are not as they once were; without trying to understand what it all means he is inclined to utter a vigorous howl of protest and to brand all who differ with him as radicals. This reactionary attitude but encourages the growing distrust, especially among the 1 H. Tipper, The New Business, p. 365.

workers and the proletariat. They feel that the commercial trader has deprived the workers, those who perform the actual labor of production, of the legitimate rewards of their toil. They imagine that concealed behind the mysteries of the market the trader forces both worker and consumer to pay through their economies for unjust gains. The enterpreneur is coming to be identified with the profiteer.

For this unfortunate position the entrepreneur has only himself to blame. Secure in his position of power and of priviilege and supported by law and the business traditions of freedom of enterprise and inviolable rights of contract and of property, he has treated this change of sentiment with indifference or scorn. He has not sought to educate the public as to the social significance of his place in the economic order. On the other hand, he has shrouded himself and all his doings in mystery; he has strenuously opposed investigations; he has held the public and even the government at arm's length. Too often he has prosecuted the game of business with the cunning and secrecy of the hunter who snares his victims or has boldly applied the tactics of war. The public is slowly coming to realize that in business, as in other matters of vital concern, society is best served when the game goes forward openly with all the cards on the table.

There is evidence, furthermore, that this traditional attitude of the entrepreneur is no longer possible. The rise of the corporation, the concentration of many business units under one head involving thousands of employees and stockholders and requiring exact tests of ability and carefully thought-out plans of development with corresponding exactitude in the apportionment of rewards, necessitates a type of business manager entirely different from the old individualistic, often anti-social "captain of industry." The entrepreneur of the future will be less and less a plunger, a Napoleon of high finance, and more and more a responsible and highly trained scientific manager with delegated authority. He must provide himself with efficiency experts who are masters of the physical sciences, with improved systems of cost account

ing, with a knowledge of the psychological problems involved in the handling of the human material. The old careless, unrestricted days of the financial buccaneer are gone. The new industrial leadership must be actuated by a genuine spirit of social service.

Meanwhile those canons of success made famous by the "captains of industry" of the old type still remain with us. Their business philosophy has become ingrained in the very thought and life and traditions of the business world. The very fact that they were to all intents and purposes a law unto themselves has lent to their records a fascination and authoritativeness that only genius is able to inspire. Notwithstanding the beginnings of a new order that we can detect, the ethics of business enterprise still reflects the standards of an earlier individualistic age. It is still true that in business the pecuniary obligation is final, the pecuniary measure of values fundamental; the incentive of business enterprise still remains the desire for profits; the orthodox method of business procedure is still free competition, a principle opposed for the most part to the coöperation so basic in a democracy; the principle of unrestricted economic self-assertion is still invoked in irrational fashion with no thought-out goal of social welfare.

§ 3. THE DOMINANCE OF THE PECUNIARY STANDARD

If anyone doubts the pervasive influence of the philosophy of business in American life let him investigate the extent to which pecuniary valuation prevails. Money is the one measure of value acknowledged by all Americans irrespective of social position, creed, race, or culture. In America as in no other land perhaps, thanks to the discipline of business enterprise, does the unsophisticated common sense of the masses yield such an unqualified assent to the pecuniary obligation. It is possible in America as in few other lands to discharge in a pecuniary way those varied duties that devolve upon the individual as a member of the social order. For the masses of Americans there is no spiritual or moral leader, no literary

or plastic artist, no scholar, scientist, or public official whose status in the community is not most speedily and intelligently determined in terms of money.

The machine process has played a most important rôle in the accentuation of money in American life. The machine has multiplied indefinitely the various ways in which human energies may find employment. Men work now not for food or clothing or shelter. The efforts of men are turned to the making of money rather than of the goods needed to sustain life, for once in the possession of money these goods can easily be obtained. The problem of the individual or of the family is not a matter of special skill or knowledge but a matter of the extent to which they have made themselves master of money-income. The fluctuations of the crops, the cycles of full and lean years in business, lack of employment or what not do not affect the status of the individual or the group who is in possession of an income. Work is done, goods are produced, service is performed, not because of their cultural or moral value but solely to assure through their production an adequate money-income. Natural wealth is left undeveloped, crops are neglected, and goods necessary for life are not produced if they do not bring income. Hence we get a curious situation in which "the elaborate cooperative process by which a nation's myriad workers provide for the meeting of each other's needs is thus brought into precarious dependence upon factors which have but a remote connection with the material conditions of well being-factors which determine the prospects of making money ".1

The dollar as the measure of values is still further strengthened by the dearth of social traditions and the other means of evaluation to be found in older and more stable societies with a more varied social organization. It is a familiar fact that in older sections even of American society, protected from the disintegrating effects of change, other standards such as birth, creed, culture, politics or character outweigh money. But these things go down before the great tide of industrialism. 1 Mitchell, Business Cycles, pp. 21, 22.

The rapid transition from agricultural to industrial life, the sudden transformation of village into rambling manufacturing town, the herding of people in great urban centers where all home ties are lost, and withal the Wanderleben so characteristic of Americans disrupt all traditional standards and throw men back upon the dollar as the sole, universal and intelligible measure of values. "The identification of the individual with industrial establishment, with community, and with peculiar schemes of thinking and living has nothing in common save the blue sky above and the pecuniary income ahead. In view of the necessity of forming judgments within this chaotic society, it is inevitable that the dollar should become the arbiter of values ".1

On the face of things this impersonal democracy of the dollar seems to strip society of all those warm and personal contacts through which characters are shaped, sympathies cultivated and all "the burden of the mystery of an unintelligible world" made tolerable. But this very impersonality of the money economy is not without its possible benefits. For by reducing relations to the objective, impersonal, pecuniary bond men gain greater possibilities of personal liberty. The property, for example, which under certain conditions may become restricting to individual freedom, can be condensed into money. The individual gains thereby freedom of movement; the income from rented property may enable him to live in a distant city or devote himself to scientific or scholarly pursuits. The very impersonality of the pecuniary standard permits of a vast variety of relations with the increased possibilities for the expansion of character. It requires, to be sure, great power of social imagination to see in this impersonal pecuniary freedom increased social responsibility or solidarity. But in reality the impersonal pecuniary tie should make for greater individualization together with an enlarged sense of social capacites and duties. For it is through the impersonal moneyeconomy that socialization may take place in more compre

1 Hamilton, "The Price System and Social Policy", The Journal of Political Economy, Vol. XXVI, p. 52.