T

HE attitude of the National and State Governments, the Press, and the Public toward Business is becoming of vital and startling importance.

Business sadly needs some constructive advocates.

The false and the stupid prejudice against success is responsible for much of our trouble. Why should this prejudice be allowed to exist?

The actual dollar is simply the measure or yard stick and worthless in itself.

Created wealth in order to remain wealth must produce something net. The more created wealth in America, the more work and the more business must be done to maintain that wealth in existence at all. The great created wealth of the country is the asset of the whole people, and the basis and measure of our prosperity.

The attitude of the Government toward industrial evolution of recent years has brought about conditions which require our most serious consideration.

The United States has led the world in rapid stages of humanizing development in many ways. Our republican ideas of self government have made our whole nation a forum for debate on ways and means to curb the strong and protect the weak.

Railroads at first free to make money as private enterprises have grown into corporations of such public interest and affecting so universally the public welfare that they are practically directed by the National Government, but operated and owned privately.

What was for upwards of half a century praised as successful enterprise in railroad building and management came to the point of breaking down by reason of what we now know as unfair competition.

The heads of railroad companies after periods of vicious warfare, when their treas uries became depleted, and with failure and ruin staring them in the face, repeatedly got together and restored by agreements rates of transportation to high levels in an effort to recoup themselves for the losses of the battles which had raged.

These rate agreements could not be maintained. One railroad would soon again cut rates by private concessions to special shippeis. Then others would follow as the perfidy became exposed. And another period of ruthless rate wars would recur and the destruction of the nation's wealth was incalculable.

Finally to mitigate these evils, so fatally affecting general business as well as the railroads themselves, the National Government, as the result of popular will, educated by the press, provided that rates should be the same to all, that rebates, free passes, cut-rates and special privileges should be things of the past.

We eliminated the evils of private ownership of railroads without adopting the equally or more objectionable plan of government ownership.

Then the next stage of industrial evolution

came.

As railroad facilities improved, transportation quickened, towns, cities, states and nations were brought marvelously closer together. The growth of the telephone service was a revolution.

A condition was thus brought about in manufacturing industries as had been the case with the railroads where the same unfair competition brought also the stage of mutual agreements between manufacturers to maintain prices exactly as railroads had tried to do without success. Gentlemen's agreements would be broken. Unfair competition to destroy each other would again become rampant. and untold countless millions of constructed wealth would melt away.

Then in utter self preservation, companies that had fought and suffered as the bitterest trade enemies only can, were brought together by friendly mediation, and consolidations were accomplished in a small way. The advantages and possibilities became recognized. So-called trusts came on the scene.

Prices became more stable, and the business of all our people could be conducted with greater safety and certainty.

Dealings in securities were however carried on on a colossal scale, and the popular mind could not differentiate between the good which

the so-called trusts have yielded and the harm

and discredit which was reflected on them by the manipulation of their securities.

The "rules of the game" have been changed -are being changed.

The benefits are rising to the surface and becoming apparent to all who will examine and study..

We have come to know that mere bigness is no crime. We have come to know that stable prices, even though made by so-called trusts, are a vast benefit compared to the feverish variations and uncertainties of the cut-throat competition days.

Now, let us look with clear, unprejudiced eyes at to-day's conditions. Let us keep the good. Let not prejudice blind us. Let us act wisely in modifying and mitigating existing evils that remain. These evils are not as bad as class-prejudice-fomenting publications and some politicians would have us believe.

Private rebates, cut prices, special concessions, have been much mitigated. The conditions today are better, to an almost infinite extent than before the consolidations trust era.

of the

It is true, also I believe beyond a doubt, that there is vastly more unfair competition and price cutting practiced by smaller businesses and smaller corporations today than by the so-called trusts.

Personally I do not like to buy anything except from a one-price house, with the price marked on the goods.

There is not an article that I personally may want to buy but that the dealer in it is expert and keen as to its real value. The average layman in the very nature of things cannot know these values. He is not an expert. It is not his special business.

Every single individual consumer practically is in my exact position. Who, let me ask, is the one likely to get stuck in a horse trade? Will it be the horse dealer or the average purchaser?

Business men are more and more "putting themselves in their customers' places" and trying to treat them as they would like themselves to be treated, were conditions reversed. That is the Golden Rule of Business.

But, you truthfully reply, that that rule cannot always in all business be maintained and then only by the stronger concerns, because the unscrupulous advertiser, the sharp dealer and price-cutter will get your business away from you, and you must meet unfair com

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petitive methods with unfair competitive

methods.

Let us analyze this situation.

In the first place, it is true in the main. As a general proposition, unfair competition will tend to drag the idealist in business to the level of the unfairest practices in the fight for self preservation in the last analysis.

Except only for one thing: namely, that business men be permitted to form associations for the amelioration of these "unfair" conditions.

Schemes proposing unfair competition do not sound well when discussed in open meetings of business competitors.

But it is argued, in the fashionable phrase ology of the day, such methods would be monopolistic and conspiracies in restraint of trade and unlawful.

Such methods actually would be in promotion of honest trade and tending to the protection of the consumer, and the retailer as well.

Even

The public press and public opinion have enabled the railroads, through the medium of the Interstate Commerce laws, to do what they could not do for themselves by mutual agreements namely, prevent wealth destroying rate wars and maintain published and stable rates for the equal benefit of all. now they are only able to do it by means of their railroad traffic associations which are actually conspiracies contrary to the law if anything is, but the business of railroads can be carried on in no other way, and these eminently proper methods go on unquestioned and completely sanctioned by governmental authority.

Does the consumer wish to restore the piratical days of the black flag and skull and cross-bones flying at the mastheads of the conflicting railroad interests? No, not one! Not a single one.

Why not then !et the business men of America be allowed, through associations local and national, to try and eliminate or minimize "unfair competition?"

Business men thoroughly understanding the intricacies of their respective businesses can surely accomplish the largest beneficial results with the least harm.

Let us broaden our present prejudiced vision a little, and allow-yes, even encourage, business men to organize into associations, such as yours is, gentlemen, but with broader erties, to improve their own business rela