The growing recognition of the group principle in the business world is particularly interesting to us. The present development of business methods shows us that the old argument about coöperation and competition is not fruitful. Coöperation and competition are being taken up into a larger synthesis. We are just entering on an era of collective living. “Cut-throat” competition is beginning to go out of fashion. What the world needs to-day is a coöperative mind. The business world is never again to be directed by individual intelligences, but by intelligences interacting and ceaselessly influencing one another. Every mental act of the big business man is entirely different from the mental acts of the man of the last century managing his own competitive business. There is of course competition between our large firms, but the coöperation between them is coming to occupy a larger and larger place relatively. We see this in the arrangement between most of our large printers in Boston not to outbid one another, in those trades which join to establish apprentice schools, in the coöperative credit system, worked out so carefully in some of the western cities as almost to eliminate bad debts, in the regular conferences between the business managers of the large department stores, in our new Employment Managers’ associations in Boston and elsewhere, in the whole spirit of our progressive Chambers of Commerce. When our large stores “compete” to give the highest class goods and best quality service, and meet in conference to make this “competition” effective, then competition itself becomes a kind of coöperation! There are now between thirty and forty associations in this country organized on the open-price plan. The Leather Belting Exchange, an excellent example of “coöperative competition,” was organized in 1915. Some of its avowed objects are: standardization of grades of leather, promotion of use of leather belting by scientific investigation of its possible uses, uniform contract system, uniform system of cost accounting, daily charts of sales, monthly statistical reports, collection and distribution of information relative to cost of raw material and to methods and cost of manufacturing and distribution.[40] How vastly different a spirit from that which used to animate the business world!