without them), is superior in
character to the business men of other times in other countries. This
without boasting. It would be a great pity if he were not.

Without trying to settle the question as to whether he is good or bad
(and he really can be pigeon-holed no better than any one else) we have
to accept this: He is the biggest factor in the American commonwealth
to-day. It follows then, naturally, that what he thinks and feels will
color and probably dominate the ideas and the ideals of the rest of the
country. Numbers of our magazines--and they are as good an index as we
have to the feeling of the general public--are given over completely to
the service or the entertainment of business men (the T. B. M.) and an
astonishing amount of space is devoted to them in most of the others.

It may be, and as a matter of fact constantly is, debated whether all
this is good for the country or not. We shall not go into that. It has
certainly been good for business, and in considering the men who have
developed our industries we have to take them, and maybe it is just as
well, as they are and not as we think they ought to be.

There was a time when the farmer was the principal citizen. And the
politician ingratiated himself with the people by declaring that he too
had split rails and followed the plow, had harvested grain and had
suffered from wet spells and dry spells, low prices, dull seasons,
hunger and hardship. This is still a pretty sure way to win out, but
there are others. If he can refer feelingly to the days when he worked
and sweated in a coal mine, in a printing shop, a cotton, wool, or silk
mill, steel or motor plant, he can hold his own with the ex-farmer's
boy. We have become a nation of business men. Even the "dirt" farmer has
become a business man--he has learned that he not only has to produce,
he must find a market for his product.

In comparing the business man of the present with the business man of
the past we must remember that he is living in a more difficult world.
Life was comparatively simple when men dressed in skins and ate roots
and had their homes in scattered caves. They felt no need for a code of
conduct because they felt no need for one another. They depended not on
humanity but on nature, and perhaps human brotherhood would never have
come to have a meaning if nature had not proved treacherous. She gave
them berries and bananas, sunshine and soft breezes, but she gave them
trouble also in