Morals in Trade and Commerce

Let me give an illustration of the so-called “reforms” that are recklessly urged upon us to-day and that are to be found in operation here and there throughout the country. I refer to the matter of street franchises. Now it may be true, it probably is true, that in many cases these franchises have become of great value and that they ought not to be granted without adequate return. But would it not be just to remember that when these franchises were originally granted they provided a service that was absolutely essential to the growth of the community and that those who obtained the franchises faced a serious risk to their capital and practically threw in their lot with the prospective welfare of the city? It is hard to realize how serious that risk sometimes was and how problematical were the returns. The shareholders in these street traction corporations are spread over the population and every class of the population is represented in them. They invested their money in good faith at a time when no question had ever been raised as to the propriety of these franchises and at a time when these franchises were considered to be for the public good and indubitably were for the public good. And I will ask you if it is honest to use all the machinery of the government, all the artifices of the politician to depreciate the value of those franchises, to threaten their holders with confiscation, to hamper and harass them by all the ways that are open to a democratically governed people? I say unhesitatingly that it is dishonest to do these things, and I will go so far as to say – believing as I do in the good faith of the great majority – that most of those who noisily advocate such measures would be ashamed to do so if they would but face the facts and understand what it is that they are actually doing and the wrong that they are inflicting upon innocent men and women. If mistakes have been made in granting franchises, then take care to avoid such mistakes in the future, but do not enter into a bargain that seemed advantageous to yourselves and then repudiate it when you find that it is not so advantageous as you thought. There is no way to reconcile such a thing with common honesty, and it is in no way mitigated by the fact that it is done by a community and by means of a vote rather than by an individual and in the ordinary small affairs of life. We all know what we should say of the man who acted in this way toward ourselves personally, but in advocating some of the schemes that are now recommended to us by sensational politicians, newspapers, and magazines we are making ourselves responsible for a dishonesty far greater than the evils that we are trying to remedy. Let us by all means reform whatever needs to be reformed, but let us do it with clean hands.

Now, I think that I have said enough to justify my belief that these great problems of our social life are not of a kind to be settled off-hand by violent or radical legislation. They are not to be settled by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. You will find that honesty is the royal road to success in commercial life, and it is also the royal road to all reform in our communal life. Do not go out into the world with any expectation that you will be required to surrender the ideals that you have formed in your youth, or that you will be asked to choose between honor and success. Those ideals will be the greatest capital with which you can be endowed. They will attract to you everything that makes life desirable and without them you can have neither self-respect nor the respect of others.

And as a last word let me recommend you not to be carried away by those gusts of prejudice and passion that sweep periodically through the community. There is a contagion in these things that it is hard to resist, and so much that to-day passes for thought is not thought at all, but merely the automatic, unreflecting acceptance of wild theories that are enunciated with so much force that they seem to be almost axioms. Your study of history will show you that the world has always been subject to these waves of emotion, that are sometimes religious, sometimes political, and seem for the time to carry everything before them. We are passing through such a period now, a period of intense unrest, of revolt against conditions that we ourselves made, against methods that we ourselves created and sanctioned. I advise you to look askance upon every movement that in the language of the day is called popular. Do not accept a theory or a doctrine because it is popular, but on the other hand do not reject it for that reason. Do not permit yourselves to be carried off your intellectual feet by indignation or by protest. Demand of every political theory that it stand and deliver its credentials, and before you allow it to pass into the realm of your adoption, see to it that you understand it in all its bearings and that you have traced its results so far as is possible to your foresight; let the final test be one of human justice and of honesty, and then with courage use your power to aid in the formation of public opinion, remembering that public opinion is after all the great controlling force.