come
those employments that are immediately subservient to ownership and
financiering--such as banking and the law. Banking employments also
carry a suggestion of large ownership, and this fact is doubtless
accountable for a share of the prestige that attaches to the business.
The profession of the law does not imply large ownership; but since no
taint of usefulness, for other than the competitive purpose, attaches
to the lawyer's trade, it grades high in the conventional scheme. The
lawyer is exclusively occupied with the details of predatory fraud,
either in achieving or in checkmating chicanery, and success in the
profession is therefore accepted as marking a large endowment of that
barbarian astuteness which has always commanded men's respect and fear.
Mercantile pursuits are only half-way reputable, unless they involve a
large element of ownership and a small element of usefulness. They grade
high or low somewhat in proportion as they serve the higher or the lower
needs; so that the business of retailing the vulgar necessaries of
life descends to the level of the handicrafts and factory labor. Manual
labor, or even the work of directing mechanical processes, is of course
on a precarious footing as regards respectability. A qualification is
necessary as regards the discipline given by the pecuniary employments.
As the scale of industrial enterprise grows larger, pecuniary management
comes to bear less of the character of chicanery and shrewd competition
in detail. That is to say, for an ever-increasing proportion of the
persons who come in contact with this phase of economic life, business
reduces itself to a routine in which there is less immediate suggestion
of overreaching or exploiting a competitor. The consequent exemption
from predatory habits extends chiefly to subordinates employed in
business. The duties of ownership and administration are virtually
untouched by this qualification. The case is different as regards those
individuals or classes who are immediately occupied with the technique
and manual operations of production. Their daily life is not in the same
degree a course of habituation to the emulative and invidious motives
and maneuvers of the pecuniary side of industry. They are consistently
held to the apprehension and coordination of mechanical facts and
sequences, and to their appreciation and utilization for the purposes
of human life. So far as concerns this portion of the population, the
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