or Protection, he will only be justified in changing his mind
under the irresistible pressure of a change of circumstance. He will be
slow, and rightly, to change his standpoint until the evidence carries
absolute conviction.

In business consistency of mental attitude is a terrible vice, for a
simple and obvious reason. By an inevitable process like the swaying of
the solstice the business world alternates between periods of boom and
periods of depression. The wheel is always revolving, fast or slow,
round the full cycle of over-or under-production. It is clear that a
policy which is right in one stage of the process must necessarily be
wrong in the other. What would happen to a man who said, "I am
consistent. I always buy," or to one who replied, "No man can charge me
with lack of principle. I invariably sell"? Their stories would soon be
written in the _Gazette_.

This is the most obvious instance of the perils of consistency in the
world of business. But, quite apart from this, nothing but fluidity of
judgment can ever lead the man of affairs to success.

I once took the chairmanship of a bank which had passed into a state of
torpor threatening final decay. There was not a living fibre in it, and
my task was to try to galvanise the corpse. I sought here and there and
in every direction for an opening, like a boxer feeling for a weak point
in his opponent's guard. My fellow directors, who had served on the
board for many years, were shrewd business men, but if the bank had not
lost the capacity for either accepting or creating new situations it
would not have been in a state of decay. The board met once a week, and
the directors gathered together before the meeting at the
luncheon-table. "What surprise proposal are you going to spring on us
to-day?" they used to ask me. And the mere fact that the proposal was of
the nature of a surprise was almost invariably the only criticism
against it. I may have been wrong in surprising my colleagues by the
various projects that I put forward, but in the propositions themselves
I proved right.

The criticism was really based on the doctrine of consistency fatal to
all business enterprise.

Suppose an amalgamation was contemplated one day I would be a buyer of
another bank, and if by next week this plan had fallen through I would
be strongly in favour of selling to a bigger bank. "But you are
inconsistent," said my colleagues. My answer is that what the business
needed was l