s no small return.

Courtesy pays in dollars and cents but its value goes far beyond that.
It is the chief element in building good will--we are speaking now of
courtesy as an outgrowth of character--and good will is to a firm what
honor is to a man. He can lose everything else but so long as he keeps
his honor he has something to build with. In the same way a business can
lose all its material assets and can replace them with insurance money
or something else, but if it loses its good will it will find in ninety
cases out of a hundred that it is gone forever and that the business
itself has become so weakened that there is nothing left but to
reorganize it completely and blot out the old institution altogether.

One must not make the mistake of believing that good will can be built
on courtesy alone. Courtesy must be backed up by something more solid.
An excellent comparison to show the relation that good manners bear to
uprightness and integrity of character was drawn a number of years ago
by a famous Italian prelate. We shall paraphrase the quaint English of
the original translator. "Just as men do commonly fear beasts that are
cruel and wild," he says, "and have no manner of fear of little ones
such as gnats and flies, and yet because of the continual nuisance which
they find them, complain more of these than they do of the other: so
most men hate the unmannerly and untaught as much as they do the wicked,
and more. There is no doubt that he who wishes to live, not in solitary
and desert places, like a hermit, but in fellowship with men, and in
populous cities, will find it a very necessary thing, to have skill to
put himself forth comely and seemly in his fashions, gestures, and
manners: the lack of which do make other virtues lame."

Granting dependability of character, courtesy is the next finest
business builder an organization can have. One of the largest trust
companies in the world was built up on this hypothesis. A good many
years ago the man who is responsible for its growth was cashier in a
"busted" bank in a small city. The situation was a desperate one, for
the bank could not do anything more for its customers than it was
already doing. It could not give them more interest on their money and
most of its other functions were mechanical. The young cashier began to
wonder why people went to one bank in preference to another and in his
own mind drew a comparison between the banking and the clothing
business