fortune which reduces my gains to insignificance. The consequence is that professional men and civil servants, when they are not incurable old-fashioned snobs who regard trade as beneath the dignity of their family, and when their sons have no overwhelming aptitude for one or other of the professions, advise them strongly to go in for business. The man of business may not have much chance of a public statue unless he pays for it and presents it to his native town with a spacious public park attached; and his occupation may be a dry one in itself, however exciting the prospect of pocketing more and more money may make it. But he can make profits not only out of his work, like the surgeon or painter, but out of the work of thousands of others as well. And his work is not necessarily dry: modern businesses tend to become more interesting and important, and even more scientific, than average professional work. Their activities are much more varied: in fact modern commercial magnates, when they control a dozen different businesses, become better informed and better developed mentally than the rank and file of the professions. What is more, they are learning to snap up the ablest university scholars and civil servants, and take them into partnership not as office managers but as thinkers, diplomatists, and commercial scientists. It is in industrially undeveloped countries that professional men rank as an aristocracy of learning and intellect: in European centres today commercial society is a more effective reserve of culture than professional society. When the professional man or the public servant tells his son that a berth in the civil service is a blind alley, or doctoring at the call of the night bell a dog’s life, contrasting them with the unlimited prospects and the infinite scope for personal initiative in business, he is recommending the young man to improve on his father’s condition instead of starting him on the downward path socially. And what is business in the lump? It is hiring land from landlords and spare money from capitalists, and employing the hungry to make enough money out of them day by day to pay the wages for their keep and bring in a profit as well. Astonishing fortunes can be made in this way by men and women with the necessary ability and decision who have the particular sort of pecuniary keenness and pertinacity that business requires. Even more staggering profits are made sometimes by accident, the business man hitting by chance on something new that the public happens to fancy. Millions are made by medicines which injure people’s health instead of improving it (read Tono-Bungay), and hair restorers that leave the buyer as bald as before. Articles that nobody needs, and sham pleasures that give only fatigue and boredom at extravagant prices, are advertized and advertized until people are beglamored into thinking they cannot do without them.