Take the case of a specially helpful and paying book.  The author receives a royalty, and has an income.  The publisher receives his profits, and makes a living.  The public gains inspiration and ideals.  Who is loser?  This is sheer business, yet it means loving service for all concerned.

To illustrate further:  A physician has a frail child, with which the ordinary milk in the market does not agree.  To build up its health, he buys a country place and a good cow.  The child thrives.  In his practice, he sees many other frail children, and it occurs to him that they, too, can be benefited by the same kind of care and watchfulness that he is giving his own child.  He buys more cows, has them scientifically cared for, and his agents sell the milk.  He finds himself, in the course of time, the owner of a dairy farm, and a man of increasing income.  But his trade is not trade for the sake of money! it is trade to make sick children strong and well.  He exchanges professional knowledge, executive ability, and human sympathy, for money; in return for which, children receive health, parents joy, and the race a more athletic set of men and women.  This is an instance of the inner spirit of the true trade:  the spirit which may rule all trade, deny it, or discount it, or scorn it, as you will.

Price is a value set on material, on labor, on interest, on scarcity, on excellence, on commercial risks; it is the approximate measure of the cost of production.  The ethical price of a commodity is the price which would enable its producer to produce it under healthful and happy conditions—­which would insure his having what Dr. Patten calls his “economic rights.”

This joyous exertion is not harmful; it is tonic.  Excellence is an inspiration, an intoxication.  Let excellence, not Will-it-pass? be the standard of exchange.  From the very endeavor after excellence comes a certain exaltation of spirit, which ennobles the least fragment of daily toil.  When the producer brings forth somewhat for sale, let him say:  There!  That is the best that I can do!  It is not what I tried to make of it—­the thing of my dreams—­but it is the very best which, under the given conditions, I could produce.  Then the shoddy side of trade will disappear.

The Law of Equity is the final law of trade.  But in whose hands is equity?  Who appraises value?  Who sets price?  In whose hand is the final price of the necessaries of life—­wheat, rice, sugar, soap, cotton, wool, coal, milk, iron, lumber, ice?  The man who puts a price on an article, as buyer or seller, enters an arena which is not only commercial—­it is judicial and ethical:  he declares for what amount a man’s life-blood shall be used.