Take the statistics of the credit insurance business, a business that may be said to be based upon an assumption of human honesty; examine the statistics of the losses made in business and you will find that these are but a small fraction of the total amount involved and even this small proportion is chiefly due to errors of judgment or to causes in which dishonesty plays no part. Ask any banker how much he relies upon human honesty as an indispensable background to the ordinary precautions and safeguards of his business. Ask him what is his attitude toward a client whom he detects in a lie or in sharp practice, and he will tell you that he has no use for such a man. He would rather be without his business and free from all contact with those whose natural and innate sense of honesty is lacking. Go wherever you like, and you will find the same expectation, the same assumption of honesty. You will find that no business can be carried on without it. Whatever high and honorable ideals you may have formed you need have no apprehension that they will be scorned in the business world or that you will have to put them away to win success. It is in the business world that they will be valued, and even the mental equipment that you are now seeking will be less important to you, a lesser guarantee of success than your sense of honor and truth and probity. When you reach the business world--and many of you perhaps will go into the great corporations that are now ceaselessly paraded before you as wolves and as public enemies--you will find there the same kind of human nature that you find here in college, the same estimation of probity and of fair dealing. If you do mean or underhand things, you will find that they are branded in the same way there as here. You will find that manliness and integrity are the rule and not the exception, and I will venture upon the prediction that when the time comes for you to look back upon your career you will see that there has been a steady improvement all along the line, just as those who are already able to look backward find that there has been an improvement since their own college days. But that will rest with yourselves, for the future is in your own hands. It is for you, gentlemen, to see that moral and ethical progress is unbroken.