To be serious, no man of sense really believes that falsehood is necessary to success in business. The practices and customs of every trade and profession are those which commend themselves to approval of small men, men with an impediment in their thought. It is they who virtually conduct the affairs of the world, for there are too few of the other sort to count for much. These little fellows, therefore, “set the fashion,” determine the ethics and traditions in business, in law, in medicine, in politics, in religion, in journalism. The most conspicuous characteristic of this pigmy band is a predisposition to small deceits. The first word that rises to their lips is a lie; the last word that leaves them is a lie. Go into the first shop you find and ask for something not kept there, but which you know all about. Observe the salesman’s, or, alas, saleswoman’s, alacrity in telling you a lie to induce you to abandon your preference in favor of something that is kept there. Do you fancy it is different in dealing with those higher in the scale of commercial being? A wealthy and most respectable business man once told me that among the two or three scores of similar men with whom he daily dealt there was not one that he could believe; he had to try to discern their secret wishes and intentions through the fog of falsehood in which they sought to conceal them. He had himself a method quite as misleading; he deceived them by telling the truth. They couldn’t imagine a man doing a thing like that, so they disbelieved him and he got the better of them. That is his account of the matter. Perhaps it is true—he may have wanted me to think him a liar. Anyhow, the method of deceit that he professed has sometimes been successfully followed in large affairs, notably by the late Prince Bismarck. When he entered the field of diplomacy he found it such a nest of liars that for centuries no man in it had believed another. He could deceive only by being truthful, and for many years he fooled all the diplomats by his amazing and confusing candor in disclosing his desires and intentions. If he had lived a thousand years he would have revolutionized diplomacy and would then have reverted, with a special advantage to himself, to the senior practices of the trade. But he died and his method died with him.