The Ways of Business.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XL, Issue 4, 25 January 1908, Page 26

The Ways of Business.

A painfully large proportion of my acquaintance is divided between those who believe that modern business is carried on mostly by rogues, ami those who believe that it is a simple and childlike affair, in which the rogue is conspicuous by his rarity. Amid so many doctors, I do not choose to try to decide. I believe modern business is unclean enough to surprise those who have had tae good fortune to steer clear of it, and afterwards are unlucky enough to be obliged to penetrate some of its uglier mysteries; but I should hardly incline to agree with those cynical gentlemen who virtually imply—without undue modesty—that they themselves are quite peculiar in their high standard of honesty and honour. There is something naive and prettily childlike about such an assumption, but it seems to me a little too sweeping. When you come to think of it, there is a great deal of harm done by the doctrine that successful business, is mostly roguery—and more still when it is virtually implied that a man must be a little of a rogue to keep afloat. People who enunciate such a doctrine are not merely stating what they take to be a faet, what is far mole dangerous, they are quite unconsciously advocating a principle. How much there may be: of fact in it I don't pretend to know—although I think it might very well be remembered that one discovered act of dishonesty makes more noise in the world than one thousand acts of positive honesty, involving a per se loss to the honest man. The honest act is taken for granted, the victim of the dishonest man roars in his rage, and plans vengeance day and night. After all, there is still a good number of people brought up in that splendid

school in which a man was a CAD—a word that meant a world of obloquy—if he took an unfair advantage of another’! ignorance or misfortune. To thousands of us, I am sure, it would be sheerly impossible to sleep on any mean trick; to thousands of us the -low trickster is rather more repulsive than the murderer, who may have the excuse of passion for his crime; to thousands of us death would be preferable to forsaking out early ideals of manliness and honour. That the majority of these thousands keep out of modern business may be true; but it is probable that a considerable number of them also enter it, and help to keep it clean. For even business cannot always spoil a really decent man. The real danger, of course, lies in the doctrine itself. To proclaim the dictum that a man can only'get on by being a rogue is virtually to urge him to become a rogue—which he may do quickly enough without any outside aid. And to preach it to some of these shrewd-faced youngsters one sees about is nearly as clever as to apprentice them to a pickpocket, or to advise them to help themselves to everything they like. It is making a war in order that they may learn to defend themselves. As a matter of fact, I believe the worst of these rogues are people with a “kink.” Certainly so the proprietors of those rich firms which, on several occasions to my knowledge, and that of their staffs, have committed relatively petty rogueries (which nevertheless were a little over the borderline of the law) in order to swell an already heavy pile. Such a man is as certainly a lunatic as the ex-King of Annam, who, you will remember, was deposed, owing to his habit of boiling his wives, for fun. Society can only be kept decently honest by its own insistence on decent honesty; and a low opinion of current business methods can only have the effect of lowering the current business standard. Thus if you cry out from the house-tops that there is war to the knife, although it is a war conducted with treachery and low cunning—you will merely increase the number of people running (Rapid walking always appeals to me more than a saunter ora slouch). It is something special and characteristic, amok with the resolute intention of drawing first blood. There is eventually no fun in anarchy—even its polar opposite, socialism;’ might in the end be preferable; and the anarchy of business people at the throats of others and of one another so far as it has been foreshadowed, would not be a much better form than the old-fashioned bomb and dagger. But really the dishonesty of modern business is not by any means the -most striking feature about it — even where it exists. Its hardness, its meanness, and its mechanical pedantry, if less offensive, are equally irritating. The business walk is an insult to every nonbusiness man. It is not merely rapid, something anti-intellectual, anti-artistic, anti-human, which nobody who is not a business man can possibly put in his gait. Then the business man is apt to be rude, supercilious (in his own cherished and inexplicable way), narrow in his utter failure to perceive the limitations of money, insufferably snobbish on the worst of possible grounds, or ridiculously cringing on the best of grounds. It is no truer to say that these things are the characteristics of all business men, than to say it of dishonesty, but they are, to my mind, far commoner. The business man, outside of your “captains of industry,” and the real embodied brains of a business, has largely the mechanical work of a navvy without Its health-giving advantages and its opportunities for uninterrupted thought. He is the really pitiable product of our modern world—more pitiable to my mind than anyone (not actually starving) who can think his own'thoughts and develop his personality away from the deadening, soulless routine of an office. Probably our grandchildren will think it the strangest of things that people should have preferred to be business drudges while there was a vacant carpenter’s bench. But there comes business snobbery again. No: the business man cannot afford to be dishonest. He has chosen such an unsatisfactory career in every other respect that honesty must be his redeeming feature. He is like the plain lady (if it is true, that there ever was one); he must make up for his other deficiencies by the ' attractions of virtue. Whether he looks at things in such *

modest light himself I eannot say. If he does not there may be some truth in the allegations as to his widespread corruption. And certainly he is the father of Plutocracy—a thing immeasurably inferior to either Aristocracy or Democracy. He has, indeed, many sins, and ha owes it to us to be honest. “Pierrot,” in “Auckland Star.”