Article July 6, 1912 Issue

FROM OUR EXCHANGES

with contributions from F. C. Aldinger

[Christian Register.]

This is not an egotist's world, but a social world. There is hardly anything beyond the barest personal belongings that a man really holds as his own. He is always living and working and spending and enjoying in society. He is, therefore, a sharer with others in all that he does, a sharer in his thoughts and his plans, which no single individual ever originated, a sharer by good right in every item upon which he pays taxes, since a whole group of neighbors and workmen, and, more remotely, the labor and invention of the world for ages have gone into the making of what he calls his business and his property. There is not a man living who, if a strict inquest were made, searching out where his money came from, could dare to claim that it is all his own and gathered by his enterprise alone. There is not a business which, if it could have the benefit of careful investigation, would prove to be merely the concern of the man or men at the head of it. It is the concern of the clerks and porters also; it is the concern of all its customers; it is even the concern of the wives and children of the men in command. Is it not a wife's or a child's concern whether or not any taint of fraud or dishonor or meanness comes into the house with the monthly allowance? The great corporation exists for the good of society. It is no private monopoly: it is a marvelous social responsibility. But so likewise is every business which may rightfully be carried on.

Why should not every business man rejoice that this is so? Why should he not see that he can do the service of a philanthropist, not merely by incidental kindnesses and gifts to charity, but much more by the singleness of aim, the integrity and scrupulousness, the humanity and democracy, with which he helps to carry on his business as his part of the vast industrial mechanism of civilization? At any rate, this is religion, and, as sure as this is a universe, and especially a divine or spiritual universe, this must be so. It is slowly and surely coming into general sight.

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FROM OUR EXCHANGES

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