This fundamental preoccupation with making a profit has been much emphasized by the shift of business from the individual to the corporate form. A man may do what he likes with his own and if he chooses to be quixotic he can be; but in the new triple relationship of workmen, executives, and stockholders in the modern corporation there has ceased to be personality anywhere. The American is a great believer in the magical power of words. The bare facts of business are now being covered over by the new American gospel of “service”; but when we analyze this, does it not merely come down to the obvious facts that the business man performs a highly useful function in society and that, so far as he can, he should see that the public gets its full money’s worth? The fundamental need of profit remains. The professional classes—doctors, artists, scholars, scientists and others—may, as they often do, work for little or nothing at all, but, except in the rarest of personal instances, the business man is precluded from doing so. What stockbroker, manufacturing company, railway or electric light corporation with all their talk about service would ever consider running their business at a voluntary loss in order to render greater service or tide the public over a crisis? It cannot be done. It is profit first, and then, perhaps, as much service as is compatible with profit. Now this primary and essential preoccupation with making[Pg 19] a profit naturally tends to color a business man’s view of his entire world, and is what, in my opinion, mainly differentiates business from the professions. Nor do I speak as an impractical intellectual. Of the last thirty years I have spent about one-half in business and half in professional work, and I realize the great difference, having paid my monthly bills, between concentrating primarily on the work rather than the profit. Moreover, dealing inevitably with material things and with the satisfying of the world’s material wants, the business man tends to locate happiness in them rather than in the intellectual and spiritual unless he constantly refreshes his spirit away from business during his leisure. When the pressure of business on his time, or his concentration on it, becomes so great as to preclude his reasonable use of leisure for the development of his whole human personality, he is apt to become a complete materialist even if, as is now frequently not the case, he ever had it in him to become anything else. He may live in a palace, ride in the most luxurious cars and fill his rooms with old masters and the costliest manuscripts which his wealth can draw from under the hammer at Christie’s but if he cares more for riches, luxury, and power than for a humanely rounded life he is not civilized but what the Greeks properly called a “barbarian.”