The Warriors Part 10

We, they say, would wake the power In mountain and in mine; And transport, from sea to sea, The cedar, oak, and pine: Build the bridge, and plant the town, Enter every open mart; Make our nation's commerce flow,-- But this is not our heart!

Many a prayer uplifted springs O'er desk, and din, and roar; Many an humble knee is bent When the rushed day is o'er; Far within, where G.o.d may be, All exists His Throne to raise; Every triumph of our power Becomes a form of Praise!

G.o.d of nations, hear our cry, And keep us just and true; Lay Thy hand on all our lives, And bless the work we do: Then from every coast and clime Land and sea shall tribute bring; Gold and traffic, world-domain We offer to our King!_

ANNA ROBERTSON BROWN LINDSAY

We are all traders. Each of us is endowed with some faculty, ware, or possession which he is constantly exchanging for other things. We trade time, talent, service, goods, acres, produce, counsel, experience, ideals. The world is in reality a Bourse of Exchange. Each of us brings some day his special product to the common mart.

There are traders and traders--the just and the unjust--the man of honor and the rogue. We set values on thoughts and on transactions, on merchandise and on philanthropies, on ideas and on accounts; and there is a constant distribution of the affairs, as well as of the worldly goods of men.

But in a restricted sense, we think of trade as the exchange of produce which is material and mobile,--which may be touched, handled, weighed, transported, bought, and sold. The substance of the earth is constantly taking new shape before our eyes, being rearranged in kaleidoscopic combinations, and transported from port to port, from town to town, from sea to sea. One can look nowhere without seeing this ceaseless activity progressing. Everywhere there is a whir of wheels, a plash of waves, a din of a.s.sembly, as the new combinations take place.

There was a day when trade was a thing of here-and-there; a thing of sailing s.h.i.+ps and caravans, of merchants of Bagdad, Cairo, Venice, Alexandria, Jerusalem, Tyre, and Damascus. Ivory, gold, gems, precious stuffs, teak and cedar wood, Lebanon pine, apes, peac.o.c.ks, sandal-wood, camel's hair, goat's hair, frankincense, pearl, dyes, myrrh, ca.s.sia, cinnamon, Balm of Gilead, calamus, spikenard, corn, ebony, figs, fir, olives, olive-wood, wheat, amber, copper, lead, tin, and precious stones were the chief articles of exchange. A very little sufficed the poor; the rich were housed in palaces and panoplied in gems.

As time went on, the processional of traders became a processional led out, in turn, by the merchants of one city after another. It is a picturesque study, that of the trade-routes of the Middle Ages! There was the Mediterranean seaboard, and there were the Baltic towns and the Hanse towns; the Portuguese mariners and traders; the Venetian merchant princes. There was the Spanish colonial trade; the Dutch trade of the East Indies; the trade of Amsterdam and London. There were the Elizabethan sea-rovers. Then came the British trade in the East Indies, and the gradual growth of the trade of France, Germany, England, and the United States. This is a story of human wants reaching out as civilization advanced, and of the extending of the earth-exchange.

Everywhere there has been a correspondence between national prosperity and increasing trade.

To-day, each man demands more of the earth's products than ever before.

He reaches out a hand for comforts and luxuries, as well as for necessities. He grasps not only the produces of his own and his neighbor's field and vineyard, but demands what lies across continents and seas. Instead of the s.h.i.+p, the camel, and the a.s.s, we now have the ocean freighter or liner, and the flying train of cars: new forces, oil, steam, electricity, and water-power, do the carrying work of man. And hence trade has become Trade, and each trader is involved in the comfort, success, and prosperity of many others. A single commercial transaction to-day involves the lives of hundreds of thousands, competes for their toil and life-blood, carries the decision of their destiny.

A great merchant is the real Kris Kringle. He stands at the centre of exchange, distributes from the tropics and the arctic zones. He deals out fur and feathers, books, toys, clothing, engines; ribbons, laces, silks, perfumes; bread-stuffs, sugar, cotton, iron, ice, steel; wheat, flour, beef, stone; lumber, drugs, coal, leather. He scatters periodically the products of mills and looms, of shoe-shops and print-works, fields, factories, mines, and of art-workers. He thus becomes a social force of great power, a social law-giver, in fact.

Under his iron rule, the lives of the ma.s.ses are uplifted or cast down.

As large eras open, the ethical ideals become higher. We are beginning to inquire, as never before, into the basis of trade, the place of the trader, the right conduct of this vast problem of Distribution upon which hinges so much of human life and fate. All things look, not only to the integration of trade, but to its exaltation.

Trade has ceased to be a thing of individual energy, talent, and commercial alertness. It has risen to great proportions. The large trader is in control of national conduit, as well as of national expense. There is a great deal more in business than the art of making money. Business is, at the roots, a way of making nations; of developing the resources of a country, of handling its industries, of protecting its commerce, of enlarging its inst.i.tutions, of uplifting its training, aspirations, and ideals. Traffic is educational. Imports influence the national life. We may import opium or Bibles, whiskey or bread-stuffs, locomotives or dancing pigs.

The sceptre held by Tyre and Venice is pa.s.sing into our own hands. But trade, to-day, is a matter of the imagination, as well as of the stock-book. 11 needs a great imagination to handle the present-day problems of business and finance. The prosperity of a nation depends largely on the intelligence, integrity, and magnanimity of its business men. To be narrow-minded in business, is not only intellectual astigmatism, it is poor commercial policy. To make use of present opportunities to control present advantages needs a great education and a large human experience. It is the man of insight, of sympathy, of economic ideals, who will lastingly control our national prosperity and advance our industrial wealth.

With all this demand, the business man still stands largely in a cla.s.s by himself, a cla.s.s apart from the great leaders of the world. He is not yet received into the spiritual circles of the race. He goes about the world, sits on boards and committees, fills directors.h.i.+ps and trustees.h.i.+ps, pays pew-rent, and runs towns. But when the spiritual conclaves of the world take place, when the things of life and death are inquired into, when words are said of the higher conduct of the life of man, if he draw near inquiringly or unguardedly to the sacred place, scholar and poet, priest, saint, and proud hand-worker alike rise up and say, Go away.

It wears upon the heart--this spiritual isolation of the business man.

Does not he often say sadly to himself, They only want my money?

Why must he go away? What has he done, that he must be waved down? If we discover why he must go away, we shall discover the meaning of that great caste-line which has long been drawn, and ought no longer to be drawn, between trade and letters, trade and the Church, trade and social prestige.

The reason he must go away is this: He has never ruled the higher history of man; he does not yet quite belong to the ideal-makers of the race. Understand, I am not now speaking of the new business man, the exceptional one, upright, cultured, altruistic, whom you and I may know; I am speaking of a broad cla.s.s-line, a cla.s.s distinction.

It is a strange concept that would bar the business man from the ideal; that would limit his life to an account-book, a ledger, a roll of stocks, rents, and possessions, instead of granting him the freedom of the universe, the privilege of ministering to the race. Singularly enough, the business cla.s.s is the last cla.s.s that Christianity has set free. Slaves have been given liberty; women, social companions.h.i.+p and intellectual equality; manual labor has been lifted to dignity and honor. But to break the shackles of the man of trade is the work of our era, or of an era yet to come. Thousands of young men are daily stepping into counting-houses, or behind sales-counters, or into independent stores, who will never lift their eyes from their goods and account-books, nor rise above the linen, hardware, groceries, or house-fixtures which they sell. Such a situation is suicidal of national prosperity, and blocks the high hopes of the world.

Lack of appreciation of the life of business is sinful and unjust. A high-principled businessman may be one of the n.o.blest leaders of mankind. The world needs great business men--men who will know how to use the resources of a country, how to plan for its industry, manufactures, and commerce: men who understand the principles of production and exchange; ways of transportation; systems of credit and banking: men who know the const.i.tution of the country, and the history of its development; its strength and weakness, its possibilities and needs: men who will deal honorably in business contracts, both with buyers and employees, and also with law-making bodies: men who will steadily try to advance international prosperity, as well as personal wealth.

But to understand business on this plane, and to conduct it in this large way, needs a fine education, an education built, first of all, on a practical basis, such as the education of our common schools. Then should follow a course in the ideals of the race, the cla.s.sic studies in language, literature, history, science, and philosophy. Then should come a technical course, graduate or undergraduate, such as the courses offered by the Universities of Pennsylvania, Chicago, Wisconsin, which include, in general, lectures and special studies in Public Law and Politics, Business Law and Practice, Political Economy, Statistics, Banking, Finance, and Sociology. In addition to this, there should be a thorough knowledge of the Bible and of Christian Ethics, with a deep heart-experience of religion.

Endowed with natural business talent, the young man who goes out into the world with such preparation as this knows a great deal more than just how to make money; he knows how to make it honorably and how to spend it, in his business, family, and social life, for the public good; he has in him the making of a statesman and a philanthropist, as well as a man of wealth.

Two things take one into the inner circle of the ideal-makers of the race--imagination and sympathy. Ideals cannot be bought with gold. The ideal is always founded on integrity, progress, and common-sense. It is preeminently practical, as well: the thing that inevitably must be, now or hereafter, however men laugh it to scorn to-day.

Imagination is the faculty of perceiving the higher and final relations of life, the relation of one's work to the progress of the world, and of one's conduct: to spiritual history. What the ideal-maker tries to do is to set holy standards that shall not pa.s.s away: to do abiding work, in thought, deed, word; work philosophically planned, and perseveringly carried out; work which he shall do regardless of the outer circ.u.mstances of his life--poverty or wealth, of threats, misunderstanding, or hoots of scorn. He is unmoved, both by the rage of the populace and by its most tumultuous applause. He lives for truth, not for personal advance; for progress, not for wealth or honor. What he lays down as a precept, that he tries to live up to, in the way that shall win the approval of the eternal years.

Sordidness in commercial life is not necessary: greed is not foreordained. Christianity establishes a new system of trading-philosophy, and a new basis of commercial ethics. There is a G.o.d-like way of trade--Christ might Himself have bought and sold--else Christianity fails of its full mission, and there remains a cla.s.s of the socially lost, of the ethically unsaved. One reason why it is so hard to get business men into the Church, or to interest them religiously in any way, is that ministers, in general, do not understand or appreciate business men. In one of the most stirring sermons I ever heard, occurred this unjust sentence: "Our country has been built up by the martyr, and not by the millionaire." No! Our country has been built up by _both_ the martyr and the millionaire!

Christianity projects into the world new ideals of Trade, of Gain, of Compet.i.tion, Value, and Return for Toil.

What is Trade? Is it merely a way of making money? Then there is no ethical basis for it. "The amount of money which is needed for a good life," says Aristotle, "is not unlimited."

One concept is: Trade is something which belongs to me. It is that part of the world's exchange which I can get under my personal control. It is the balance between human industries and human needs which I hold for my part of the world, and which others are continually trying to wrest from me, and which I must keep by all means, fair or foul.

Compet.i.tion is the battle of the strongest, the quickest, the meanest! I must know tricks. I must get in with people, get hold of some sort of pull, learn to dissemble, to flatter, manipulate, hedge, dodge. Success is a matter of being sly. Anything is allowable which comes out ahead, which adds to the dollar-pile, or which makes the loudest advertising noise!

To buy at the least, and sell at the most, regardless of the conditions under which least and most are attained--the man who enters life with this idea of trade in his mind might just as well be born a shark and live to prey. Every free dollar in the world will tease and fret him, until he sees it on its way to his own pocket. If this is all there is in trade, the n.o.ble-minded will let it alone: it gives no human outlook.

It not only undermines personal character, it is the root of national ignominy and dishonor.

What has Christianity to do with this shark-instinct? with the rapacity which looks on the world as a vast grabbing-ground, and upon all natural resources as mere commercial prey? The value of Christianity lies in its reasonable and intellectual appeal. It does not spring upon one like a highwayman and say, Hands up! Give me your purse! It says gently, Son, give me thy heart. It then proceeds to refas.h.i.+on that heart, to fill it with new principles and with world-dreams.

Trade is a just exchange of what one man has for what another man needs.

It may take place individually between man and man, in which transaction a horse, an ox, or a tool may change hands. Or one man may a.s.sume a responsibility for a number of people, and say: I will give this whole town shoes, in return for which you may give me a house, market-produce, clothing, and an education for my children. The thing will come out even, if you and I are honest. Or a climate, a civilization, may give to another that which the other lacks. We send school-books and machinery to China; she sends us tea, matting, and bamboo. The whole right theory of trade is a give-and-take between men and nations, based on a just price, and with a deep law of Value, not yet wholly formulated, underlying each transaction.

Bargains should not be one-sided. Trade, in a large sense, is a way of exchange in which each party to the trade receives an advantage. Not only this, it is a process of distribution, by which each one receives the greatest possible advantage. Money-making is a secondary result: in true trade it is not the final benefit.

Take the case of a specially helpful and paying book. The author receives a royalty, and has an income. The publisher receives his profits, and makes a living. The public gains inspiration and ideals.

Who is loser? This is sheer business, yet it means loving service for all concerned.

To ill.u.s.trate further: A physician has a frail child, with which the ordinary milk in the market does not agree. To build up its health, he buys a country place and a good cow. The child thrives. In his practice, he sees many other frail children, and it occurs to him that they, too, can be benefited by the same kind of care and watchfulness that he is giving his own child. He buys more cows, has them scientifically cared for, and his agents sell the milk. He finds himself, in the course of time, the owner of a dairy farm, and a man of increasing income. But his trade is not trade for the sake of money! it is trade to make sick children strong and well. He exchanges professional knowledge, executive ability, and human sympathy, for money; in return for which, children receive health, parents joy, and the race a more athletic set of men and women. This is an instance of the inner spirit of the true trade: the spirit which may rule all trade, deny it, or discount it, or scorn it, as you will.

Price is a value set on material, on labor, on interest, on scarcity, on excellence, on commercial risks; it is the approximate measure of the cost of production. The ethical price of a commodity is the price which would enable its producer to produce it under healthful and happy conditions--which would insure his having what Dr. Patten calls his "economic rights."

This joyous exertion is not harmful; it is tonic. Excellence is an inspiration, an intoxication. Let excellence, not Will-it-pa.s.s? be the standard of exchange. From the very endeavor after excellence comes a certain exaltation of spirit, which enn.o.bles the least fragment of daily toil. When the producer brings forth somewhat for sale, let him say: There! That is the best that I can do! It is not what I tried to make of it--the thing of my dreams--but it is the very best which, under the given conditions, I could produce. Then the shoddy side of trade will disappear.

The Law of Equity is the final law of trade. But in whose hands is equity? Who appraises value? Who sets price? In whose hand is the final price of the necessaries of life--wheat, rice, sugar, soap, cotton, wool, coal, milk, iron, lumber, ice? The man who puts a price on an article, as buyer or seller, enters an arena which is not only commercial--it is judicial and ethical: he declares for what amount a man's life-blood shall be used.

No one absolutely sets price. It is determined by far-reaching industrial conditions, and by economic law. War, weather, famine, stocks, strikes, elections, all have a say. Yet, to a certain degree, there are those who rule price. As a representative of the ideal, as executors of social trust, how shall each one use his Power of Price?

The man who has control of a price--a price for a day's labor, for wages, for a cargo, or for any kind of product--has control of the living conditions of the one who works for him. The question is not: How shall I grind down price to the lowest? It is: What price will be an ethical return to this man for his social toil?--just to me for my brains, my capital, my energy, my distributing power,--just to him for his brains, his time, his skill, his artistic perceptions, his fidelity and honor? Each buyer must henceforth not only resolve: I will buy only what I can pay for, but, what I can pay for at a just rate. So far as lies in my power, I will make an adequate return to society for this personal benefit.

Some one says: Do you realize that you are making a moral laughing-stock of much of our system of trade? that you are setting an axe to that system, more cutting than the axe of any Socialist, Nihilist, or Anarchist in the world? Oh, no. I have simply set myself to answer the question: How can the business man stand among the ideal-makers of the world, so that he shall no more, in spiritual a.s.semblies, be told to go away?

Woman is the real economic distributer. The millionaire manufacturer imagines that he himself runs his business. Oh, no. It is run by farmers' wives. When they do not care for yarn or calico, his looms stand idle for a year; the vast machinery of the world turns on woman's little word: _I want_. Hence the education of women should include this factor: the desire to want the right things. Extravagance is not a part of woman's make-up; it is extraneous.

_Gain is that which permanently enriches the life._ By every act of charity, or justice, or insight, or right barter, the soul is made more grand. True trade everywhere may be made a new method of inspiration, growth, and power.

Money is a makes.h.i.+ft of the race. G.o.d is the only real appraiser, and we never get back a money-value for our soul's toil. Whether we pa.s.s wampum, or nickels, or taels, or bank-checks, we are not yet paid for our trade.

The higher value of money is its spiritual capacity. Not what it will bring me is primarily important, but what I can buy with it for the race. Sometimes the question comes over me: What am I trading for money?

My time? My energy? My ideals? Part of my soul is pa.s.sing from me: do dollars ever repay? Hence it comes about that all money transactions are fragmentary and symbolic.

Money may lead to poverty, or to spiritual wealth. The gift of trade is a gift of G.o.d, as much as the gift of prophecy or song. In a right way, we should all love gain. We are not born to go out of the world as poor as when we came into it. We should gain stature, wisdom, strength, influence, ideals. If our latent business capacity were more fully aroused, we should get much more out of life. We would refuse to barter a spiritual heritage for carnal things.

We trade thoughts and feelings. But it is very hard to trade fine impulses with those who are intrinsically vulgar. Their treasury is empty of spiritual coin, and their storehouse contains no world-thoughts. We can send a caravan across the desert, a s.h.i.+p across the sea, but we cannot send a Thought into a flaccid or a pompous brain.