There need be no fear, either, that most of the possibilities of business have been exhausted. The real world of commercial opportunity has hardly more than been entered. Our own country is still largely undeveloped in the use of many helpful products. There are backward communities to be informed and cultivated. Whoever undertakes this process is a positive factor in the making of civilization, for the need of these communities is the greater need concerned. It would be a blessing to them to have a demand for the tools of more efficient life and work created among them. Then there are all the vast spaces of the world as yet largely untouched by these more advanced methods of civilization. There are more people waiting to be taught the use of means to comfort and efficiency than there are to manufacture and deliver the products to these prospective purchasers. Business men should support every sort of civilizing influence as a means of creating a demand in far countries for what they have to sell. Should Prices Be Standardized? (1919) Thus far in the economic history of America the scale of prices has been as temporary and uncertain as the indications of the mercury in a thermometer. Prices have gone up and down for all kinds of reasons, and indeed they have often seemed to do so without any apparent reason. An increasing number of people feel that this is not as it should be. It is not easy to formulate an unfailing remedy, of course. Neither is it possible to say whether price fixing would prove a success or a failure. It does look reasonably sure, however, that prices should be stabilized in some just and proper manner. There are always those who are ready to tell us that it is not necessary to attempt to do anything about the price situation. They say that the scale of prices will automatically take care of itself according to the operation of the law of supply and demand. This sort of a situation might do very well if only it existed in some other world than that of fancy. There probably was a time in the earlier periods of the history of the market place when the law of supply and demand governed all prices. That time, however, seems to have passed. Tradesmen have learned methods by which they can so successfully juggle the situation as to supply and demand as to entirely reverse the action of the time-honored law so often invoked in defense of the profiteer. The cold storage method of preserving eggs, for instance, has been used to make them cost most during that season of the year when they are most plentiful, and to be cheapest during that portion of the year when the greatest number of hens are on a vacation.