I know that when we get together
at a commercial or financial dinner we talk as if great merchants and
great financiers were beneficent geniuses, who evoked the prosperity of
mankind by their schemes from the conditions that would otherwise have
remained barren. Well, very likely they are, but we must all confess that
they do not know it at the time. What they are consciously looking out for
then is the main chance. If general prosperity follows, all well and good;
they are willing to be given the credit for it. But, as I said, with
business as business, the 'education of a gentleman' has nothing to do.
That education is always putting the old Ciceronian question: whether the
fellow arriving at a starving city with a cargo of grain is bound to tell
the people before he squeezes them that there are half a dozen other
fellows with grain just below the horizon. As a gentleman he would have to
tell them, because he could not take advantage of their necessities; but,
as a business man, he would think it bad business to tell them, or no
business at all. The principle goes all through; I say, business is
business; and I am not going to pretend that business will ever be
anything else.
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