Now, what has all this to do with the moral standards that belong to the business career as distinguished from the professional life? My answer must be very clear and very direct if I am to justify so long an analysis of the ethical characteristics of the professions themselves. I have merely used the time-honored method of trying to lead you by way of familiar, admitted points of view to certain points of view that, if not wholly new, are at least less familiar and less widely recognized. The whole thesis that I wish to develop is simply this: that however it may have been in business life in times past and gone, there has been such a tremendous change in the organization and methods of the business world and also in the relative importance of the functions of the business man in the community, that the distinctions which have hitherto set apart the professional classes have become obsolete for all practical purposes in many branches and departments of the business world. At least, the work of the responsible leaders is no longer to be regarded as essentially a thing of private concern and free from public responsibility. If the business world is not characterized, first, by public spirit and a sense of public duty in general, and, second, by the special and technical sense of public obligation that pertains to particular kinds or departments of business activity, then it is falling short of its best opportunities and evading its providential tasks. It is for the modern business world to recognize the conditions that have in the fulness of time given it so great a power and so dominant a position; and it must not shirk the responsibilities that belong to it as fully and truly as they belong to any of the professions. I hold, then, that the young man of education and opportunity who proposes to go into a business career enters it not merely with a low and unworthy standard if his sole motive and object be to acquire wealth, but he also enters it in disregard of the ideas that fill the minds of the best modern business leaders. He shows a pitiable lack of appreciation of the elements that are to constitute real business success in the period within which his own career must fall.