The mice are not neutrals, and if enough employes in a business house are neutrals, the whole concern will eventually come tumbling about their ears.

I like that order of Field-Marshal Oyama:  “Give every honorable neutral that you find in our lines the honorable jiu-jitsu hikerino.”

Reflections on Progress

Renan has said that truth is always rejected when it comes to a man for the first time, its evolution being as follows: 

First, we say the thing is rank heresy, and contrary to the Bible.

Second, we say the matter really amounts to nothing, anyway.

Third, we declare that we always believed it.

Two hundred years ago partnerships in business were very rare.  A man in business simply made things and sold them—­and all the manufacturing was done by himself and his immediate family.  Soon we find instances of brothers continuing the work the father had begun, as in the case of the Elzevirs and the Plantins, the great bookmakers of Holland.  To meet this competition, four printers, in 1640, formed a partnership and pooled their efforts.  A local writer by the name of Van Krugen denounced these four men, and made savage attacks on partnerships in general as wicked and illegal, and opposed to the best interests of the people.  This view seems to have been quite general, for there was a law in Amsterdam forbidding all partnerships in business that were not licensed by the state.  The legislature of the State of Missouri has recently made war on the department store in the same way, using the ancient Van Krugen argument as a reason, for there is no copyright on stupidity.

In London in the seventeenth century men who were found guilty of pooling their efforts and dividing profits, were convicted by law and punished for “contumacy, contravention and connivance,” and were given a taste of the stocks in the public square.

When corporations were formed for the first time, only a few years ago, there was a fine burst of disapproval.  The corporation was declared a scheme of oppression, a hungry octopus, a grinder of the individual.  And to prove the case various instances of hardship were cited; and no doubt there was much suffering, for many people are never able to adjust themselves to new conditions without experiencing pain and regret.

But we now believe that corporations came because they were required.  Certain things the times demanded, and no one man, or two or three men could perform these tasks alone—­hence the corporation.  The rise of England as a manufacturing nation began with the plan of the stock company.

The aggregation known as the joint-stock company, everybody is willing now to admit, was absolutely necessary in order to secure the machinery, that is to say, the tools, the raw stock, the buildings, and to provide for the permanence of the venture.

The railroad system of America has built up this country—­on this thing of joint-stock companies and transportation, our prosperity has hinged.  “Commerce, consists in carrying things from where they are plentiful to where they are needed,” says Emerson.