toward ourselves personally, but in advocating some of the schemes that
are now recommended to us by sensational politicians, newspapers, and
magazines we are making ourselves responsible for a dishonesty far
greater than the evils that we are trying to remedy. Let us by all means
reform whatever needs to be reformed, but let us do it with clean hands.
Now, I think that I have said enough to justify my belief that these
great problems of our social life are not of a kind to be settled
off-hand by violent or radical legislation. They are not to be settled
by any one scheme or by any one plan. The only way to approach them is
by careful and conscientious thought, a minute examination of the facts
at first hand and a rigid determination to act toward corporations and
business interests in general in the same spirit of unswerving honesty
that you would wish to display to a comrade or to a friend and that you
would wish to be displayed toward yourselves. You will find that honesty
is the royal road to success in commercial life, and it is also the
royal road to all reform in our communal life. Do not go out into the
world with any expectation that you will be required to surrender the
ideals that you have formed in your youth, or that you will be asked to
choose between honor and success. Those ideals will be the greatest
capital with which you can be endowed. They will attract to you
everything that makes life desirable and without them you can have
neither self-respect nor the respect of others.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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