Many of our modern business betterments seem to have had their rise in the restless, prophetic brain of Richard Cobden. He of all men sought to make commerce a science, and business a fine art. The world moves slowly. It is only a few years ago that we in America thought to have in our President's Cabinet a Secretary of Commerce and Labor. Listen to what Cobden wrote in Eighteen Hundred Forty-three: In the close council of every king, or president, or prince, should be a man of affairs whose life is devoted to commerce and labor, and the needs and requirements of peace. His work is of far greater moment than that of men-of-war. Battleships ever form a suggestion for their use, and as long as we have armies, men will kill, fight and destroy. Soldiers who do not want to fight are not of this earth. Prepare for war and war will come. When government gives to the arts of peace the same thought and attention that it gives to the arts of war, we will have peace on earth and good-will among men. But so long as the soldier takes precedence of the businessman in the political courts of the world, famine, death, disease and want will crouch at our doors. Commerce is production, war is destruction. The laws of production and distribution must and will be made a science; and then and not until then will happiness come to mankind and this earth serve as a pattern for the paradise of another life, instead of being a pandemonium. * * * * * Emerson defines commerce as carrying things from where they are plentiful to where they are needed. Business is that field of human endeavor which undertakes to supply the materials to humanity that life demands. The clergy are our spiritual advisers, preparing us for a pleasant and easy place in another world. The lawyers advise us on legal themes-- showing us how to obey the law, or else evade it, and they protect us from lawyers. The doctors look after us when disease attacks our bodies--or when we think it does. We used to talk about "The Three Learned Professions"; if we use the phrase now, it is only in a Pickwickian sense, for we realize that there are at present fifty-seven varieties of learned men. The greatest and most important of all the professions is that of Commerce, or Business. Medicine and law have their specialties--a dozen each--but business has ten thousand specialties, or divisions. So important do we now recognize business, or this ministering to the material wants of humanity, that theology has shifted its ground, and within a few years has declared that to eat rightly, dress rightly, and work rightly are the fittest preparation for a life to come.