Of course, when the shopkeepers really saw that this was what the newspapers had been doing for them, they wanted to do what was right, and wanted to pay for it. One would have thought, looking at it theoretically, that the department stores in any city would have imagination enough to see, without practically having to shut their stores up for three weeks, what advertising was worth. But if great department stores do not have imagination to see what they would wish they had done in twenty years, in one year, or three weeks, and have to spell out the experience morning by morning and see what works, word by word, they do learn in the end that being right works, and that bullying does not. Gradually the level or standard of right in business is bound to rise, until people have generally come to take the Golden Rule with the literalness and seriousness that the best and biggest men are already taking it. Department stores that have the moral originality and imagination to guess what people would wish they had bought of them and what they would wish they had sold to them afterward are going to win. Department stores that deal with their customers three or four years ahead are the ones that win first. CHAPTER VI GOODNESS AS A CROWD-PROCESS The basis of successful business is imagination about other people. The best way to train one's imagination about other people is to try different ways of being of service to them. Trying different ways of merely getting money out of them does not train the imagination. It is too easy. Business is going to be before long among the noblest of the professions, because it takes the highest order of imagination to succeed in it. Goodness is no longer a Sunday school. The whole world, in a rough way, is its own Sunday school. To have the most brains render the most service--render services people had never dreamed of before. Why bother to tell people to be good? It bores us. It bores them. Presently we will tell them over our shoulders, as we go by, to use their brains. Goodness is a by-product of efficiency.