Of the effect of a business man’s civilization on the manners of society I shall speak in a later chapter and need not here anticipate what I shall there say. We may note, however, in passing, its effect on taste and habits. As for taste, a business civilization has as its core the idea of a money profit and of a material standard of values. Business men devote their tireless energy to creating new wants which their factories can supply. But two points must be noticed. One is that these wants which they create and foster must be material or there is no manufacturing to supply them and no profit to the business man. If people wish to tramp about the countryside remote from motor cars, or read a book or go to an art museum or simply engage in intelligent conversation at home, the manufacturer is losing a possible profit. The constant endeavor of modern business is therefore to get people to fill up their leisure with things, things that can be made and sold. Another point with regard even to these things is, that the great profits being in mass-production, the wants so scientifically created by advertising are such as may be made to appeal to the masses. The spiritual or æsthetic value of the new wants is bound to be made subordinate to the possibility of their being filled in quantity. Some of the problems touched upon, as well as others, are world problems. Their special importance in America is due to the curiously lopsided development which American civilization has increasingly followed. With the unique position that the business man has here attained to impress himself upon the entire cultural life of the people, the dangers[Pg 29] of certain business tendencies are enormously increased as compared with other countries where the ideals and activities of the business man meet with checks from many other influences, contemporary or historic, in the civilization as a whole. Even if the American business man were alive to the enormous social responsibility of the position in which he finds himself, it is not likely that he could assume the rôles in civilization which have hitherto been taken by a dozen or so classes of other types, that he could include within himself all the springs to thought and action and all the checks and balances which a variety of social types have hitherto supplied. For one thing, the prime factor in business life, the need for making a profit, is at war with the spirit of all the arts and with what should be the spirit of the professions. Again, the training in taking short views, the ignoring of the future results of action beyond a reasonable period of profit, the subordinating to the thought of profit of all the larger social implications of action, are among the characteristics of business as business that do not augur well for placing the supreme control of the entire national civilization in business hands. The business man, moreover, is merely a