It is from such illusions as this that we must free our ideals if we would do effective work for the world and for ourselves. There are real enemies enough without erecting imaginary windmills to tilt against. Frauds, depravities, tragedies surely await us, now as ever, but we shall be doubly armed against them if we look upon them as the exceptions and not the rule and if we draw strength from the great background of human virtue and honesty. And there is such a background, unchanging, resistant, resolute, even though the limelight of publicity be persistently directed upon the few sinister figures on the front of the stage. We cannot afford to lose our faith in human nature, we cannot afford to shut out the greater and the best part of life or to gaze so persistently upon the abnormal that we can no longer see the normal and the ordinary. Let us cultivate our sense of ethical values and of ethical perspective rather than to crouch behind a shrub until it looks like a forest. We are indebted to our commercialized newspapers and magazines for our distorted views of human life and for the cynicism that it is the momentary fashion to affect, but that is always disfiguring to the mind that harbors it. Certainly we can get no such views and no such cynicism from our own experience or from personal knowledge of the men and women who surround us. Honesty is a more familiar sight than dishonesty. All the common and familiar processes of our daily life are based upon an expectation of honesty, and if you will stop to consider for a moment you will see that those processes could not go on without that expectation. And how seldom is it falsified. Sometimes of course there comes the jar of disappointment, but the fact that there is a jar shows that it is the exception and not the rule. However much we may talk of guarantees and safeguards and securities, however much we may talk of a business method or instinct that takes nothing for granted, it remains a self-evident fact that we must take human honesty for granted, that we must assume that the man with whom we do business intends to do it rightly and honorably, that he is actuated by a settled principle of fair conduct that will work automatically, and that without this automatically working standard of behavior all our guarantees and safeguards and securities would really have very little value. It is the universal expectation of fair dealing that makes business possible and, in fact, it is this universal expectation of good behavior that makes its breach sufficiently novel to be reported in the newspapers. If fraud and chicanery and violence were the order of the day, they would have no value as news. After twenty-nine years of dealing with human nature in a business where it is seen at its extremes--at its best and at its worst--I believe that the great majority of men and women in business are honest and I am certain that if this were not so, it would be impossible to carry on business.