Frank B. Anderson

“ It would be impossible for one now to indicate the direction in which reforms should lie, and there is of course nothing human to which reform is impossible. But it is perhaps suitable that I should indicate some of the ways that can end in nothing but calamity, however alluringly and speciously they may be advocated. For example, there is neither good sense nor honesty in penalizing a corporation because some of its officials have done wrong. Wherever wrong has been done, the guilt is with some individual and not with the corporation as a whole. ”

“ With this constant presentation of depravity, this incessant harping upon the one string of human dishonesty, what wonder that our visions should be distorted or that we should exclude from our horizon almost everything but the sinister features of modern life. What wonder that the young men and women should look at the career before them through an all-pervading fog of suspicion or that the days ahead [Pg. 6] of them should seem to be filled with the struggle against a universal dishonesty. ”

“ Do not imagine that America stands alone on this perilous path of reform. All the countries of civilization stand in the same place. All are confronted with the same conflict between new ideals and old methods, between the spirit of to-day and the mechanism of yesterday. The problems of other countries arise from their own peculiar conditions just as our problems arise from our conditions, but their essence, their purport, is the same. ”

“ There is no way to reconcile such a thing with common honesty, and it is in no way mitigated by the fact that it is done by a community and by means of a vote rather than by an individual and in the ordinary small affairs of life. We all know what we should say of the man who acted in this way toward ourselves personally, but in advocating some of the schemes that are now recommended to us by sensational politicians, newspapers, and magazines we are making ourselves responsible for a dishonesty far greater than the evils that we are trying to remedy. ”

“ The fact that these men have formed themselves into a corporation is no more significant of evil than a combination or a partnership among doctors or laborers. It is a part of the spirit of the age, an age that is called upon to do great things, to develop vast natural resources, to feed and clothe great centers of population, and to undertake a hundred other enterprises too large for the strength of the individual. ”

“ There is indeed no hope for us except by laborious study of conditions and by an infinitely cautious advance from point to point, so that there may be no injustice, no concessions to prejudice, no incitements of class feeling, no embittering of relations that should be cordial as between citizens of the same republic, whose differences are infinitely small as compared with the well-being of a great nation. ”

“ There is no difference between the corporate and the individual ways of doing business except a piece of stamped paper issued by the Secretary of State. The corporation is made up of individuals who have just the same ideas of honor as you have yourselves, who have just as much integrity, just as great a love of fair play. A man does not change his nature just because he turns his business into a corporation any more than he changes his nature because he moves from one street to another or from the first floor to the second. ”

“ It is from such illusions as this that we must free our ideals if we would do effective work for the world and for ourselves. There are real enemies enough without erecting imaginary windmills to tilt against. Frauds, depravities, tragedies surely await us, now as ever, but we shall be doubly armed against them if we look upon them as the exceptions and not the rule and if we draw strength from the great background of human virtue and honesty. ”

“ Go wherever you like, and you will find the same expectation, the same assumption of honesty. You will find that no business can be carried on without it. Whatever high and honorable ideals you may have formed you need have no apprehension that they will be scorned in the business world or that you will have to put them away to win success. It is in the business world that they will be valued, and even the mental equipment that you are now seeking will be less important to you, a lesser guarantee of success than your sense of honor and truth and probity. ”

“ We can satisfy ourselves that we have heard both sides and that enthusiasm has not deadened our ears to all appeals but the most noisy. We can see to it that our attitude is the judicial one and that our minds are so fixed upon the truth and upon the whole truth that there is no room for prejudice or for passion. All these things can be reared as a superstructure upon the groundwork of lofty ideals, for just as there can be no progress without ideals so there can come nothing but calamity from ideals that are not guided by reflection and by knowledge. ”

“ Day after day we hear of corporation tyranny, corporation lawlessness, or corporation greed, but what recognition do we give to corporations that obey the laws, whose operations are above censure and who add immeasurably to the wealth of the country and to the prosperity of every citizen in it? ”

“ When you reach the business world—and many of you perhaps will go into the great corporations that are now ceaselessly paraded before you as wolves and as public enemies—you will find there the same kind of human nature that you find here in college, the same estimation of probity and of fair dealing. ”

“ The character of the ideals has changed with changing needs, but not we ourselves. Our young men still see visions; they still fill the future with conflict and with struggle and prospectively live out their lives with the crown of achievement in the distance. It is well that it should be so. The ideals of our youth are the motive-power of our lives, and even those of us who have lived far into the eras of disappointment would not willingly wipe from our memories even the most extravagant day dreams from which we drew energy and hope and fortitude and self-reliance. ”

“ We cannot afford to lose our faith in human nature, we cannot afford to shut out the greater and the best part of life or to gaze so persistently upon the abnormal that we can no longer see the normal and the ordinary. ”

“ Every age had its own standards, and it would be absurd to argue that an act was wrong if it received the sanction of the whole community. It was the communal conscience that determined all problems of right or wrong, and it is still the communal conscience that gives us our definitions of morality and honesty. ”

“ A corporation then is a combination of men that has been formed under the sanction of law to carry out certain projects that it would be difficult or even impossible to carry out in any other way. The men forming those corporations are just such men as we meet in daily life, no better and no worse, and therefore with all those normal inclinations toward honesty that we are conscious of possessing ourselves and that we are in the habit of finding in others. ”

“ Dishonesty is offered to us as the prevailing rule of life, and we are asked to believe that the spirit of commercial oppression has allied itself with the machinery of government for the oppression of a nation. ”

“ Two wrongs can never make a right, and wherever we find a so-called reform that is based upon injustice be assured that we are only substituting one evil for another and that our latter end shall be worse than the first. ”

“ I say unhesitatingly that it is dishonest to do these things, and I will go so far as to say—believing as I do in the good faith of the great majority—that most of those who noisily advocate such measures would be ashamed to do so if they would but face the facts and understand what it is that they are actually doing and the wrong that they are inflicting upon innocent men and women. ”

“ It is the steady presentation of one aspect of human life, and that the lowest, that slowly jaundices our view and that produces either a rank pessimism or else an indignation against evil so strong as to efface judgment and to paralyze reason. Day after day we see human nature presented in its worst aspects and only in its worst aspects. ”

“ I will ask you if it is honest to use all the machinery of the government, all the artifices of the politician to depreciate the value of those franchises, to threaten their holders with confiscation, to hamper and harass them by all the ways that are open to a democratically governed people? ”

“ And as a last word let me recommend you not to be carried away by those gusts of prejudice and passion that sweep periodically through the community. There is a contagion in these things that it is hard to resist, and so much that to-day passes for thought is not thought at all, but merely the automatic, unreflecting acceptance of wild theories that are enunciated with so much force that they seem to be almost axioms. ”

“ After twenty-nine years of dealing with human nature in a business where it is seen at its extremes—at its best and at its worst—I believe that the great majority of men and women in business are honest and I am certain that if this were not so, it would be impossible to carry on business. Take the statistics of the credit insurance business, a business that may be said to be based upon an assumption of human honesty ”

“ Honesty is a more familiar sight than dishonesty. All the common and familiar processes of our daily life are based upon an expectation of honesty, and if you will stop to consider for a moment you will see that those processes could not go on without that expectation. ”

“ It is the universal expectation of fair dealing that makes business possible and, in fact, it is this universal expectation of good behavior that makes its breach sufficiently novel to be reported in the newspapers. ”

“ They are not to be settled by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. ”

“ Ask any banker how much he relies upon human honesty as an indispensable background to the ordinary precautions and safeguards of his business. Ask him what is his attitude toward a client whom he detects in a lie or in sharp practice, and he will tell you that he has no use for such a man. He would rather be without his business and free from all contact with those whose natural and innate sense of honesty is lacking. ”

“ Now let me say a word about the corporations of which we hear so much in the newspapers and magazines and that are so persistently represented as enemies of the community and as vampires that are sucking the life-blood of the nation. ”

“ It is a public evil to have on the statute-books a law incapable of full enforcement, because both judges and juries realize that its full enforcement would destroy the business of the country; for the result is to make decent men violators of the law against their will and to put a premium on the behavior of the willful wrongdoers. ”

“ There is no department of ethics more disputed than the meaning of abstract right and wrong, and as I am not talking either on philosophy or ethics I will ask you to accept just such commonsense definitions as can be applied to the business world and that may be usefully employed as a working basis. Commercial morality and honesty are determined by each community for itself in the light of its own special needs and point of evolution. ”

“ What verdict would the historian of the future pass upon the civilization of to-day if he were restricted to the files of our newspapers for his material. It must be confessed that we of to-day, in the hurry and tension of modern life, are hardly in a better position. Whatever we may suppose to be our attitude toward the press, with whatever scorn we may regard its baser features, it has an effect upon our minds far greater than we suppose. ”

“ If lawbreaking is to be found in the business of some corporations, it is incumbent upon us to determine just in what way the law is being broken, why it is being broken, what sort of law it is that is being broken, and how much moral turpitude or public wrong is involved. ”

“ You may be sure that I am under no inclination to defend criminality or wrong-doing or to deny their existence wherever they are actually to be found. There are criminal corporations just as there are criminal doctors, and lawyers, and clergymen. Wherever men are gathered together there you will find a certain number who are disposed to seek their personal advantage in reprehensible ways, but because some doctors and some lawyers and some clergymen are criminals we do not attach an imputation to their respective professions. ”

“ If ideals have such a power over our lives, if they energize and direct our first entry into the world of affairs—as unquestionably they do—they must be counted among the real forces of the day and as such they are as much a matter for our scrutiny and control as educational development or physical perfection. Not, perhaps, in the same way, for our ideals belong to that private domain wherein we rightly resent either dictation or authority from the outside. ”

“ Day after day we read of the sensational divorce cases, but there is not one line of the tens of thousands of happy marriages upon which no cloud of discord ever falls. Day after day we read of the scandals of municipal government, but how often do we remember the great army of municipal officials who do their whole duty devotedly, courageously, unselfishly? ”