According to Professor Veblen, honesty is no longer the best _policy_. What an incredible misreading of the very sign-board of our time! Under the old régime of priest or soldier or prince, honesty was distinctly not the best policy. Strategy, dexterity, chicane, finesse, sophistry, cozening--these were the sure, the only ways to preferment. For, under those régimes preferment meant securing the right to live without work upon the toil of others. And, to confine ourselves to the mercantile classes, was not the successful business man he who got from prince or priest or tyrant the right to rob the people, he who got a monopoly or a license or a concession? How is it under the new régime, the democratic, the “vulgarizing” régime of the business man? Our chief troubles come from survivals into the present of the tenacious roots of the past’s methods to success, come from the persistence of the idea that by wit and not by wisdom and justice does the truly strong man truly prevail. But slowly--and surely!--the “vulgar” régime is enforcing the laws and sanctions of “vulgar” morality. Even our robber barons demand honesty, strict honesty, among themselves in their conspiracies to monopolize to their own profit the benefits intended for all. When they violate the law of honesty, they do it in secrecy and make haste to deny their crime and to return to their allegiance to the law. Honesty is the very ground upon which a commercial civilization must rest. That our business men are, as a class, and with rare exceptions, honest, keeping their bargains, giving and receiving the value agreed upon, is proved beyond question by the fact that we as a nation prosper, that our abject poverty is almost confined to newly arrived immigrants and to our only recently emancipated negroes. Where a prince is armed with power arbitrarily to suspend the natural laws governing the intercourse of human beings, lies and dishonesty may, for a time, prosper; but not where the sole basis of intercourse is the voluntary belief of men in each other’s integrity. And more than ninety per cent. of our business is done upon credit! Under the old order, the very laws and customs, the very morality taught by the church, was grounded upon the justice of the unjust distribution of the products of labor; under the new régime, under “business enterprise,” law and custom and religion teach only value for value received.