To-day, each man demands more of the earth’s products than ever before.  He reaches out a hand for comforts and luxuries, as well as for necessities.  He grasps not only the produces of his own and his neighbor’s field and vineyard, but demands what lies across continents and seas.  Instead of the ship, the camel, and the ass, we now have the ocean freighter or liner, and the flying train of cars:  new forces, oil, steam, electricity, and water-power, do the carrying work of man.  And hence trade has become Trade, and each trader is involved in the comfort, success, and prosperity of many others.  A single commercial transaction to-day involves the lives of hundreds of thousands, competes for their toil and life-blood, carries the decision of their destiny.

A great merchant is the real Kris Kringle.  He stands at the centre of exchange, distributes from the tropics and the arctic zones.  He deals out fur and feathers, books, toys, clothing, engines; ribbons, laces, silks, perfumes; bread-stuffs, sugar, cotton, iron, ice, steel; wheat, flour, beef, stone; lumber, drugs, coal, leather.  He scatters periodically the products of mills and looms, of shoe-shops and print-works, fields, factories, mines, and of art-workers.  He thus becomes a social force of great power, a social law-giver, in fact.  Under his iron rule, the lives of the masses are uplifted or cast down.

As large eras open, the ethical ideals become higher.  We are beginning to inquire, as never before, into the basis of trade, the place of the trader, the right conduct of this vast problem of Distribution upon which hinges so much of human life and fate.  All things look, not only to the integration of trade, but to its exaltation.

Trade has ceased to be a thing of individual energy, talent, and commercial alertness.  It has risen to great proportions.  The large trader is in control of national conduit, as well as of national expense.  There is a great deal more in business than the art of making money.  Business is, at the roots, a way of making nations; of developing the resources of a country, of handling its industries, of protecting its commerce, of enlarging its institutions, of uplifting its training, aspirations, and ideals.  Traffic is educational.  Imports influence the national life.  We may import opium or Bibles, whiskey or bread-stuffs, locomotives or dancing pigs.

The sceptre held by Tyre and Venice is passing into our own hands.  But trade, to-day, is a matter of the imagination, as well as of the stock-book. 11 needs a great imagination to handle the present-day problems of business and finance.  The prosperity of a nation depends largely on the intelligence, integrity, and magnanimity of its business men.  To be narrow-minded in business, is not only intellectual astigmatism, it is poor commercial policy.  To make use of present opportunities to control present advantages needs a great education and a large human experience.  It is the man of insight, of sympathy, of economic ideals, who will lastingly control our national prosperity and advance our industrial wealth.